Month: October 2023

As I reflect on my time in the church and Christian higher education, I’m struck that I used to believe that the institution we call the church, the community we call the church, and what Jesus referred to as the Kingdom of God were so closely related that distinction was only sometimes necessary or appropriate.  I suppose part of me still believes it should work this way, but the truth is that it doesn’t.  Where I used to see one sort of amorphous mass, I now see three fairly distinct entities.   

Let me start with the institution of the church.  Ideally, I believe this institution should simply be the organizational structure that communities choose to extend the Kingdom of God into their specific contexts.  We all know that this isn’t what most churches actually do.  Most churches are primarily concerned with their own growth and survival.  The good ones are concerned with facilitating worship, paying staff and impacting a community.  The bad ones are concerned with taking bigger offerings, shiny buildings, radio spots, and reputation (for God’s sake of course!).  When they start to feel financial strain or face an institutional crisis, almost all churches prioritize their own organizational survival over all else.

I’ve taken enough classes aimed at training pastors to know that this primary focus is justified by the ridiculous belief that churches can’t do any good for God unless they themselves avoid institutional death.  This stands in stark contradiction to the teaching of our crucified Messiah who invites us to take up our crosses and join him in death.  Of course, he institutions we call churches are largely run by a class of professional ministers concerned with their own income and careers.  Oh… most of them couch this in language of “ministry” and “growing the Kingdom,” but the reality is that most of them instinctively avoid the Kingdom call to the cross in their professional lives.

(If you want to make a room of struggling pastors angry, suggest that churches have a life cycle and that a good number that are on life support now should be allowed to die. I don’t believe they actually disagree with this, they just know that one of few ways they can remain in ministry is to be the life support for one of these churches. Letting churches die just might cost them their career and many of them are not ready to face that reality.)

At this point I might also point out that the position of “pastor” is nowhere to be found in the New Testament.  There are those called to be shepherds and elders and deacons, but none called to leading the efforts to see to both the institutional and spiritual care needs of a community.  Of course, these two tasks often oppose one another.  When we wed the work of soul care to the work of CEO, we create tensions within individuals that ruthlessly expose immaturities and threaten to unravel even secure and reasonably well-developed individuals.  Most pastors I have talked to have suggested that the answer is a sort of super-spirituality where they overcome these structural shortcomings through prayer.  I suggest that the better answer is far simpler—stop asking people to fill both these roles at once!  

Hire people to run the institutions we call churches—some of them do a great deal of good.  Just don’t ask them to take the lead on caring for individuals.  Hire people to care for the community.  Just don’t ask them to run their organizations and put them in the position of making decisions that pit the needs of those they are hired to care for against one another. 

Of course, the reality is that a great many churches don’t have enough income for someone to be full time even if they take on both these roles.  Taking my suggestion would result in the rapid shrinking of the class of professional ministers that I talked about earlier and would put more of the responsibility for churches on volunteers or staff working low hours as a second or third job. Of course, this isn’t necessarily a drawback, simply a different approach to running a church.

Once we accept that the institutions we call churches serve themselves first, we can separate them from the community “called out” of the ways sin warps our humanity to be the church.  This community is the fellowship of those who have heard and accepted the call to take up the cross.  They bear the weight of the myriad ways that sin warps this world out a love that flows from their deep connection to Christ.  Some of them attend the institutional gatherings we call Sunday church.  Some do not. 

To be clear, this is not first and foremost the community that receives salvation.  It is the community that stands with Jesus and becomes the body through which His work is carried forward in the world.  Nor is salvation something experienced by individual souls who say yes to Jesus.  Instead, salvation is the setting-right work of God that extends into this sin ravaged world.  Today, it happens in small, provisional ways—one heart and family and neighborhood at a time.  Someday it may happen on a larger scale. 

Of course, saying yes to this setting-right work also means that people themselves are set right and this set-rightness entails a break from the way sin mars our souls.  In this sense, the church does become a community of the “saved.”  However, the point of the church is joining with Christ in His expression of love for the world, not being set right ourselves.  The two cannot be separated, but when we lead with our own set-rightness instead of with joining Jesus’ Kingdom work, a great many other things are thrown out of balance. We begin to split the world between the right (us) and the wrong (them) instead of seeing the whole—ourselves included—as the broken, wounded, and scarred in need of setting-right. 

And so, the Kingdom of God is anywhere that set-rightness begins to sprout between the cracks of the intertwined, codependent sin complex that blankets this fallen world.   One need not be a Christian to participate in the Kingdom of God because the God of all creation speaks to and cares for all His creatures.  Of course, the community we call the church should extend God’s Kingdom and spend themselves in its service in the knowledge that death with Christ is met by resurrection.  Similarly, the institutions we call churches should gather and support those Christians in their journeys with Christ as they work to make God’s Kingdom present in our fallen world. 

However, neither the institution nor the community can be confused with the Kingdom of God itself.  That would be to give them an outsized significance that inhibits their ability to fill their intended roles.  When we try to be more than we are, we often find ourselves losing track of the things God actually calls us to. 

In most of my circles, we assume that reality is something solid.  We can get our arms around it and sink our teeth into it—you pick the metaphor.  We believe there are hard realities that we must accept and there are bits of reality that we can change with enough effort, but at bottom it is accessible.  There’s something to be said about this—reality doesn’t seem to respond well to our whims.  When we approach reality, we approach something we can reach, touch, and hold.

I don’t think any of you will be surprised to know that I’ve also wrestled with the idea reality is not nearly as accessible as most of my communities assume.  Some point to the ways that our talk about reality affects one another and conclude that our descriptions of reality are more about manipulating others (or ourselves) than about any actually real.  A few would go so far as to suggest that there isn’t anything “real” out there, but I suspect they’ve gotten a little to wrapped up in their own thinking and simply lost touch with anything outside themselves.  That said, there’s definitely something to be said for the idea that our descriptions of reality are more about the speaker than the thing we talk about—more about power and projection than the reality that cares not for what we think or believe.  (Yes, it seems to me that this is true even within scientific circles…)  Here, when we approach “reality” we are really grappling with our own filters. 

Lately, I’ve found myself relating to the idea of reality differently.  At bottom, I do not believe that capital “R” Reality lies within my reach.  It lays beyond my limited ability to grasp and my pre-conscious filters veil it from my perception.  That said, I want reality.  I desire it with an instinctual thirst I struggle to express.  I don’t desire to grasp, manipulate, or know it—I desire to take my place within it.  Somehow, at 36, I don’t sense that I’ve emerged into Reality.  I may have taken a breath of its air from time to time, but always I’ve retreated back into safe stories about what is real or only half unconscious self-deceptions.  I’ve accepted something less than what is real not because of cowardice or fear, because somehow I was not yet formed enough to emerge from the narratives and beliefs I had been given without simply substituting some other formative narrative or belief structure that would equally keep me from what Really Is. 

I suspect to a great many of you, this makes very little sense.  I am trying to speak of something that I don’t really know and that overfills the expressive capacity of the language and stories I use to communicate.  I’m trying to communicate about something that cannot be shrunk down to fit into the limitations of human speech—something that I cannot hope to grasp or understand.  And yet it calls me and I have no wish to deny it although I sense it contains horrors beyond my imagination and will shatter many of the little cherished thoughts and beliefs that I consider beautiful today.  Let them all be dashed to pieces and thrown to the chaos waters if only I may find myself standing in the midst of what Is.  Let even my inner self be broken open if only I might breathe air untinged by self-deception and the power mongering of little would-be beneficent tyrants (very few people think they want power for its own sake) and fools masquerading as learned demagogues (the sagacious know that wisdom does not play well to a crowd). 

I cannot help but wonder if what I’m experiencing has something to do with what Jesus called being “born again.”  It seems to me that we have domesticated this image in a way that does violence to its violence.  Birth is not a gentle process.  It is as full of tearing and terror as it is of beauty and hope.  Do we really believe that being born of the One Who says “I AM” is accomplished with a couple magic words and produces the fruit of cozy, fleeting feelings of belovedness or an emptiness the we must push down with a commitment called “faith?”

I want to self-consciously take my place in Reality in a way that I haven’t to this point in my life.  From where I stand today, I recognize that I can’t even say exactly what that would look like and yet the hunger remains.  I want to breath air untainted by deceptions, whether they be the lies of power crazed politicians, the paternalistic tales of the well-meaning, or the self-deceptions of a still only partially formed man.  There is no worldview—no ideology, no teaching, no religion, no theory—untouched by these deceptions.   My soul has been formed into patterns shaped by those deceptions and, lately, those patterns chafe.  So, I choose to embrace ignorance.  I choose to embrace the risk of confronting the unknown.  I choose to embrace the trust that somewhere beyond the protective veil I call “understanding” there waits something worthy of that trust. 

But, even if I’m wrong, I want to breathe the free, unfiltered air.  It calls me.

Once upon a time, I was convinced that the church was the natural place for the Kingdom of God to be present.  My thinking started with the belief that the Kingdom of God fundamentally concerns humans and, since humans are social creatures, the Kingdom of God must be known in community.  I then assumed that the community that responded to the invitation of God to be forgiven and remade would be the place God would be known as king. 

I still believe we humans are communal creatures, but I’m not sure I can take the next step to believe that churches are where God becomes king.  Some of this has to do with the faithlessness of the church.  At least in America, churches are extremely divided by economics and race.  Throw in theological differences that have led to splits through the years and it seems that the communities gathered in most of our churches are more odd, backward sects than representative of the whole of the Kingdom of God. 

If you want to argue that God starts by calling a small group of people into His story and goes from there, I’ll concede the point.  It just seems to me that the churches I know are becoming smaller and more homogenous, not less.  If the church is where God is King, then the realm God rules is getting ever smaller because our churches keep pushing people who make them uncomfortable out. 

When Jesus told us what His ministry was about, He pointed to Isaiah 61—freedom for the slaves, liberty for the captives, sight for the blind, and good news for the poor.  Of course, Isaiah isn’t just picking a few random examples.  This vision evokes the idea of Jubilee.  According to Torah, every 50 years debts are to be cancelled, slaves freed, and land returned to owners (every Hebrew family had a plot of land they had inherited from their forebears.  According to Torah, this land could never be sold—it was the birthright of the family).  This institution ensures that society remains in balance—the poor are never without hope and the rich are never without need to be wise in their dealings.  Imagine how difficult it would be to establish generational wealth in an agricultural community governed by these principles. 

Jubilee puts a significant ethical demand on the wealthy.  They must voluntarily give up the foundation of their wealth—excess land and free labor.  According to Torah, they must also continue to lend money as Jubilee approaches even though they know they are unlikely to be repaid.   They must give up their excess to create the conditions necessary for the possibility—not the certainty, but the possibility—of the flourishing of their neighbors. 

Jubilee makes demands on the poor as well.  For those who fall victim to their own mismanagement or simply to bad luck in year one, Jubilee suggests bearing the weight of servitude as the excess of one’s labor and one’s family land creates wealth for another until the next Jubilee.  Fifty years is a long time–for many, this would mean the remainder of their lives.  This is palpably unfair (particularly in cases of misfortune). And yet, the creation of a date at which this servitude would end would make revolt slower to foment.  Of course, should the wealthy choose to ignore Jubilee, they would be wise to expect the slaves and the landless to demand their right to a new start!

The message Jesus taught is that God has kept His obligation to Jubilee.  He has set us free from sin.  Not just the punishment for sin, but from investment in the ways that sin warps our society.  He has set the wealthy free from their constant appetite for more and from the illusion that they must collect power and resources to enact solutions to our shared challenges.  In short, God sets the wealthy free from the ways that wealth twists their humanity.  In return, he expects them to create the conditions for their own ongoing freedom by setting free those who provide the economic foundation for their wealth by earning lower wages and not owning property.  This is done by cancelling debts and by returning property.  (Remember, in the society called into existence by Torah, everyone had a familial inheritance of land.)

Similarly, he set the poor free from the ways that they turn the injustices done against them upon another.  When the wealthy accept God’s invitation to Jubilee, the poor are set free from their poverty.  When the wealthy refuse to do this, Jubilee can sometimes sets even the poor free to live lives of generosity and mutuality so that relatively little can provide for the flourishing of many even in the midst of poverty.  

Neither of us are so naïve or paternalistic to believe that this always happens.  Sometimes when the wealthy use their excess continue to accumulate wealth instead of to enrich their neighbors, the poor are left exposed to misfortune, mistreatment, and the elements.  (Sometimes this happens for other reasons as well–I’m focusing on the accumulation of wealth because of how it fits into the theme of Jubilee.) To our great shame, not everyone has enough.  Far too many die as a result of our resource hoarding.  Perhaps this is why Jesus suggested that those who ignore the hungry, thirst, naked, and prisoner have no place in His Kingdom… (Matt. 25) If we accept that the invitation God offers is to Jubilee, than we must also accept that we have a responsibility to give of our excess so that others may not just survive, but have access to wealth producing properties (land or a suitable equivalent in our modern economies.)

You see, if we take Jubilee seriously we find that our obligations flow backwards from our normal ways of thinking about society.  Typically, most of us think about obligation flowing toward the rich and powerful.  I’m obligated to my landlord, my employer, etc…  However, at Jubilee our obligations are to tenants and employees.  Those at the “bottom” of our socio-economic ladder are not obligated to anyone.  For them Jubilee is pure gift.  (Their only “obligation” is to learn to live as landowners and freed-persons.)

Of course, there are significant issues that come with translating this institution from an agricultural economy to our current techno/knowledge/consumer/still agricultural economy.   Even apart from this, in a society without the concept of familial rights to land/wealth creating resources, the question of who reconceptualizes what belongs to each person and their progeny becomes more difficult.  Who determines what is a sufficient inheritance?  How do we grapple with the legacies of millennia of conquest and colonialism that so densely populate our histories.  We are no longer a wholly patriarchal society.  Nor are we matriarchal.  How would property be passed from generation to generation?  I’m sure you don’t need me to continue drawing the difficulties out…

Still, Jubilee suggests a couple principles that we might use to begin to imagine something better.

1. Everyone should have the right to an inheritance that allows them to create wealth both for sustenance and for the enrichment of their life and family.  This wealth-creating inheritance should create the possibility of setting one’s own economic agenda under normal circumstances. 
2. Reality is hard.  Sometimes people may need to sell their labor and their wealth creating resources to survive.  Others may choose to sell their labor/wealth creating resources because they prefer a life with fewer responsibilities.  These possibilities should be provided for structurally. 
3. No individual or group should be able to indefinitely accumulate resources or power.  There should be a mechanism to periodically transfer wealth creating resources back to those who sold them under the conditions listed in number two.  This transfer must be free to those who have their inheritance returned to them.
4. Participation in this system must be voluntary.  The creation of any power to enforce Jubilee would in effect create a class of enforcers who would be entrusted with power over the system and thus the power to bend the system to their benefit.
   • That said, we might expect the disinherited to gather together to consider ways of getting their inheritance back should the wealthy ignore Jubilee. 
5. This is not just economic.  Forgiveness of our own sin and for sins against us also follow Jubilee principles.  If God decrees that all things are set right, who are we to hold on to our right to retribution against another? (See Matt. 18) Historically the church has preached forgiveness but divorced the principle from economics in a way that I believe weakens and distorts the gospel… The Kingdom of God must include the economic as well as the spiritual.

Of course, I’m letting my idealism lead here for a moment.  I’m curious what y’all think.  First, do you see Jubilee in the background of what Jesus taught/announced when He talked about the Kingdom of God?  Are there any ways you see Him adding to and taking away from the ideas I’ve sketched here? 

Second, are there any other principles you would add to my little list at the end of this post?  (I threw mine together off the top of my head, so I’m sure I missed something important.)  Is this something that could ever work in an “real life” human society?  Are there elements of this that could be implemented within our current governmental structures without requiring a complete rewrite of our economic and legal systems?   

I suppose I said some things that some will disagree with regarding the church and the Kingdom of God as well—feel free to respond to that too.  My thoughts here were primed by reading Donald Kraybill’s The Upside Down Kingdom—particularly chapter 5.  As ever, thanks for reading.  I appreciate y’all. 

I’m in the process of writing a book. It’s working title is World Remade and its being published by Resource Publications through Wipf and Stock.

When you write a book, you’re supposed to start a blog. Actually, you’re supposed to start a blog, a YouTube channel, be active on Facebook, post on Instagram, tweet on what I still call Twitter but we’re apparently supposed to call X, and write your next book. If you’re really committed, you’ll maintain a half dozen other social media profiles all while you find a way to hold down whatever job you have to actually make money.

I’m not that committed. I’m writing a blog and I’m continuing my work with families involved with Child and Family Services here in Montana. I will not be joining Facebook, Instagram, X, or any other social media site to promote my book (don’t tell my publisher!). Maybe someday I’ll play with posting something on YouTube, but I don’t recommend holding your breath.

I’ve never published a book through a publisher before, so there’s a lot about the experience that’s new to me–contract negotiations, marketing questionnaires, and actual writing deadlines to name a few. I’ve only submitted my first manuscript to this point, so I’m sure there will be a couple more surprises to come. Thus far, I’ve found that the idea of marketing a book is by far the most stressful–something in me recoils from the idea of self-promotion.

Self-promotion say, “look at me” and assumes the value of one’s contribution. But my opinion of the value of my work does not seem to me to be a particularly helpful measure of its actual value–plenty of people think they’ve written a good book, but relatively few actually have. I can’t know the value of my own work until it is tested by my communities and yet, to even have our work assessed, we have to call attention to ourselves. The reality of our current economic system is that we must assess our own creative endeavors as worth attention and put significant effort into promoting them before our communities have the opportunity to evaluate if they have value.

This (despite my feelings on the matter) is reality–creatives that want external validation before taking the risk of putting their work out there are highly unlikely to receive what they seek. Creativity is an inherently vulnerable process. I just need to get used to this bit…

But today the rabbit hole goes a bit deeper. In today’s world where algorithms ever more drive attention (and with it potential income), the skill of capturing eyeballs begins to outweigh the ability to create beauty or speak meaningfully to important issues. Of course, an algorithm’s goal is to drive viewership and ultimately ad revenue, not promote valuable content. As it turns out, people like to read things they agree with, so our algorithms have learned to create echo chambers where our current ideas are reinforced over and over. Effective self-promotion becomes an exercise in telling people what they want to hear (or simply getting your message out to the folks that already agree with you).

This algorithm driven approach to community building seems to me to stand contrary to something at the core of Christianity–the belief that God’s creation is full of diversity–deserts, jungles, plains, oceans and mountains each with their own inhabitants and ways of experiencing the world. Each ecosystem causes people to view reality differently and yet they are all held together in one creation. (I’m focusing on eco-systems here, but I could just as easily focus on personality, formative experiences, or economics…) It is my Christian conviction that we need to be in conversation with people we disagree with.

And so, my sincere hope is that this blog can somehow defy the forces of the internet and become something different–a place where people can listen to one another, speak honestly and thoughtfully, and honor the positive intent of people who don’t share their opinions. Along the way, I hope to be challenged and changed by my conversations with y’all.

So, as I post here I encourage you to comment. Tell me what resonates. Tell me what you disagree with. Tell me when your experience doesn’t line up with my thinking. As it turns out, some of my thoughts are better than others!

I’m looking forward to the journey of blogging here with y’all. I hope you find something meaningful here.