World Remade is officially published and available for purchase here.  I want to extend my thanks to the team at Wipf and Stock that did their work on this project so well and so quickly!

As I’ve released World Remade to the publishing professionals, I’ve found that much has been rewritten in me.  My anger toward the church remains, but it has been less intense over the past couple months.  Some of this might have to do with how I’ve gained some distance from a particular situation where my family and I were pushed out of a church. Long story short, I did not back a plan to try to improve the churches failing finances by starting a business catering to the relatively wealthy at the expense of a ministry to the poor.   This was further complicated by church leadership breaking their word, making threats, and refusing to address the issues I was raising as the relationship fell apart.  (Obviously, even if my anger has subsided somewhat, I’m still working through this!)

As I’ve stepped away from the process of putting together World Remade and gained distance from that experience, I’ve discovered that I have lost my sense of connection to the church.  For the moment the compulsion that has led me to try to stand against injustice and unhealthiness in the church has subsided.  I’m beginning to conclude that my relationship with the church will never be the same.  They say that when you don’t fight anymore it’s a sign of the end of a relationship…

This realization fills me with a sort of lethargic sadness.  I want to be connected enough to the church to want to continue to fight and try to move it toward something healthier than the abuse of people’s religious experience and a sense of belonging that turns these good impulses into the raw material to construct human kingdoms.  In my experience, even as churches use spirituality to financially support leaders, sustain homogenous religious communities, and perpetuate pet theologies, they seldom entertains the thought that God might be inviting them into His story in ways that reveal how insignificant those leaders, communities, and theologies are.  But today I do not care.  The church can keep its caricatures of community and circular justifications of hellish power dynamics.  I’m no longer participating.

This decision may cost me more than my sense of connection to this community. My belief in what Scripture calls the Kingdom of God has long been deeply connected to the church.  After all, doesn’t Scripture tell us that God breathed life into the church precisely to bear witness to the work of Jesus and extend it into the world?  Yet, the church today is no better than anyone else when it comes to living out what Jesus taught about love or power, money or faith or hope.  In many cases it is a good deal worse than what is available elsewhere. 

I do hope that somehow a new relationship with the Kingdom of God will emerge from the ashes of this relationship.  But I will not pretend I can grasp that Kingdom today.  If I remain a part of what God is doing, it is because He holds me and not because I have any hold on what God is doing (much less God Godself!). 

No, today I will let the reflex I inherited from my spiritual forebears to somehow place myself on God’s side of this story slip from my fingers with all else that has been burned away.  Today I will sit in the ashes and weep for all that I’ve lost. 

If you haven’t yet, check out World Remade.  I think it’s worth a read—but I might be biased…