Hoping for a New World

Yesterday we drove up to Rockledge to visit some family and get the kids out of the house for a while.  The drive takes about an hour and a half on I-95 along the east coast of Florida.  Since I grew up near Rockledge, I know the drive and countryside well.  If you have ever traveled in central and southern Florida, you probably noticed the prevalence of a bushy foliage that dominates much of the landscape.  It is called the Brazilian pepper-tree and it is not native to Florida.  Settlers brought it to the state in the mid-1800’s as an ornamental plant.  However, the Brazilian pepper has been a destroyer of Florida’s native habitats ever since.

The image to the right is so familiar to me as a Floridian.  But as I was driving yesterday, my mind began to wander.  What did this landscape look like before the Brazilian pepper invaded?  Better yet, what did central and south Florida look like before interstates, suburban sprawl, and massive condominiums?  Every lifetime resident of a place has an automatic bias towards that place’s beauty, but Florida 500 years ago must have been a paradise.  There are still out-of-the-way corners of the state where you can witness this natural splendor, but they are fading fast.  What will my children know of Florida?  Roads, developments, shopping centers…the sameness of Anywhere, America?  Or will there still be places they can go to appreciate the Creator’s handprints on this little subtropical peninsula?

These questions got me thinking about God’s Story and the Restoration of All Things.  When God brings his Kingdom into fulfillment, I wonder if we’ll be surprised at how familiar that life will be.  Heaven is not a far-off, other-worldly place we go when we die for which we have no context.  Heaven is simply the realm in which God works and governs, and he is bringing heaven to earth.  When the Jewish people in the time of Jesus thought of God’s future Kingdom, they expected it to be real and tangible.  Jesus challenged their political motives and how that Kingdom would come, but he did not discredit the concrete nature of their hopes.  God’s Kingdom is flesh-and-blood real.  The New Jerusalem that John describes in Revelation is not some fantasy land; an artificial façade like something you would see at Disney World.  It is our world, totally renewed and restored to God’s original intent for humankind.

So I wonder if one day I will get to see what Florida looked like 500 years ago.  In the meantime, I get the sense that God wants us to get used to the idea of living as if that renewed world were already here.  If we got a fresh start today, would we do things differently?  Would we live lighter?  How much of our technology is really necessary to live a full life?  Would we spend so much time working just to get things to make us happy?  Or would we spend more time receiving and enjoying the gifts God has already given?

Creator God,
Praise you for your creation,
the beauty you have made with your own hands.
Although we disgrace it with our selfishness and greed,
You have not turned away from your redemptive plan.
Praise you for your artistry.
There is no craftsman that compares with you.
We wait in anticipation for the splendor you are preparing.
Let your Kingdom come.

What the Church Needs Now

First of all, thank you to everyone who emailed after my last post. Each email has fit together to create a composite of encouragement and admonition. If I didn't respond to your email directly, it was probably because we've been very busy getting ready to move into a new house (we close next Thursday).

One thing has been perfectly clear to me since writing that post...I could never give this up. By "this" I mean the road we have been traveling on the past five years as a community and as an individual follower of Jesus. There is too much at stake to allow frustration to win. That doesn't mean everything is hunky-dory all the sudden and I'm bursting with energy. I'm still dang tired (and moving doesn't help). I've just been reminded how the changes going on right now have extremely long-term implications and typically don't garner many tangible "results". Over the past week or so, I've been letting that reality sink in to a new level. And, I'm becoming okay with it, very okay in fact.

What the Church Needs Now is kind of a bold title for a post, but it carries with it a bit of irony. There is a bunch I think the church in America needs; join the club, right? I'll get to one specific item in a few sentences, but here's a thought before I get there. What if the church doesn't need anything now. Maybe that's part of the problem. We are always looking for solutions to fix the church's problems right now. We go through a period of disillusionment with the status quo, leave and begin looking for greener pastures, and almost immediately reorganize into something with basically the same values and culture as the place we left. The model might be tweaked a bit, but the fundamental patterns of church life remain.

I used to recommend that people leaving church staff or other leadership positions take at least 6 months to a year to detox from ingrown, destructive patterns before setting out to start something new. Now I wonder if that time frame needs to be more like five to ten years. The Apostle Paul immersed himself in life with Jesus for 14 years before his real ministry began. For someone who was forcefully upholding the Jewish way of life, it probably took that long for him to learn how to minister to people the way Jesus did. If our ministries have had their foundation in numbers, programs, and mechanisms of success achievement, then perhaps we need the same retraining.

What the church needs is people - leaders - willing to be retrained in the way of Jesus. This training will not come from a seminar or book or by copying some famous Christian celebrity. The first step, bluntly, is to die to the American way of getting things done. This transition will not happen efficiently or autonomously. This is old school ancient, eastern, Mr. Miyagi kind of training. You can't buy your way through it faster and you can't get it done alone. If you try to short-circuit the training and get through it quicker (and I'm speaking from experience here), you go backwards and everything gets longer. If you go into it looking for inspiration, or as Peterson says in the Message, "homeowner improvements to your standard of living," you'll get your ass handed to you. I've had mine handed to me so many times I'm wondering how my pants stay up. If you doubt me in any of this, go read an old saint of your choice. The older the better. (Now you know why so many old men have no ass:)

We need people who live in spite of questions and fear, fail regularly, get frustrated, pour their souls out to those precious few around them, and then stubbornly return to the One who is overseeing every aspect of the process. On Sunday, we took the Lord's Supper with our church family. Amber spent some time talking with the kids about the nature of communion and asking questions. One question she asked was, "What do think happens to God's people when they take communion?" Our oldest who is five, Jackson, responded, "I think God gives us courage." Courage. What if what we need is courageous people to lead the church, and that courage only comes as a gift of God through an act of worship and obedience? Maybe in God's economy, gifting doesn't mean a damn thing when it comes to leadership. Maybe skills don't matter. Education. Experience. Previous success. Makes no difference.

Things are beginning to get much simpler for me...and more difficult. The choices are clearer...and more scary. God doesn't want a repackaged, band-aided American church culture anymore and he is sick and tired of poster-boy leaders who gloss over the stark realities of becoming a disciple of Jesus. I just received Dallas Willard's new book in the mail today, The Great Omission, and a line immediately stuck out to me from the jacket blurb: "Willard boldly challenges the thought that we can be Christians without being disciples, or call ourselves Christians without applying this understanding of life in the Kingdom of God to every aspect of life on earth." To address this claim, which I think is accurate, a new kind of leader is required. That is the challenge being offered to all of us.