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- Author: John F. Alexander and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
- Full Title: Being Church
- Category: #books
- That
- That’s our mission, our great commission, our vision. Love one another. Be at peace with one another. That’s what church is. That’s how we have to revision ourselves.
- One characteristic of a pressure cooker is haste. They cook faster than a regular pan. Likewise in life together. We’re usually in a hurry. If there’s a conflict, we want to get through it fast. That’s understandable, often praiseworthy, but I gave up on that some years ago. That was when the leadership of a community I was close to knocked on a couple’s door at 11:00 PM and told them they wanted to get things settled before any of them went to sleep. Around 2:00 AM, the couple decided to leave the community. No amount of mediation helped. My reading was that if they’d all gone to sleep at 10:00, by morning the conflict would have been half over. But by 2:00 AM, it was too late.
- Grace, after all, is the central doctrine of us evangelicals. Yet somehow we often convey judgment and condemnation. We say grace is central, but we aren’t known for our deep sense of being loved by a God of grace, nor are we especially known for that love overflowing from us onto those around us. We’re more likely to overflow disapproval and our need to fix others.
- As that changes we will become a reconciled people—accepting each other, not fixing each other. Not making the other person acceptable first, and then accepting them. Not confronting them till they get it, not waiting for the other person to repent before accepting them.
- Of course, people get panicky at the mere suggestion of not fixing each other. Won’t you lose control of people if you do that? (Well, it feels that way, doesn’t it? But when was the last time you controlled anyone anyhow?) Won’t they take advantage of you? (Sometimes. Pretty often in fact.) You mean you’re just going to let people sin? (As if you can do anything else.)
- White evangelicals just can’t stand the idea of not fixing African Americans. I thought this was just white racism, part of the disease of us white people, that we have a deep need to fix everybody and everything. And then without thinking, I made the parallel point to some African Americans: They shouldn’t expect to change us white people; they need to accept us as we are. You think white people need to fix black people? Let me tell you, apparently the feeling is mutual. After I said that, I thought for a minute I was going to get lynched. But the folks I said it to were nice, and so they just writhed on the floor.
- As I have come to understand grace a little, I have become more honest. Less apologetic as I speak hard truth. And as Antioch came to understand grace a little, they became blunter with each other. They talked about things that they didn’t dare mention before.
- in a context of grace truth seems less offensive and more important. If you love someone, you can’t bear not to tell them how they’re messing up their lives. (Which is a different dynamic from telling someone to straighten up because they aren’t living up to your high standards.)
- Chris Rice has written about his relationship with Spencer Perkins and the lessons they learned from John and Judy Alexander in Grace Matters: A True Story of Race, Friendship, and Faith in the Heart of the South.
- That is the human predicament. The will to power. Covetousness. Unbelief. The desire to be above others. Lack of contentment no matter how good things are.
- It’s not exactly that I want to be God. I just want what I want when I want it. I don’t want to be limited. Nor do I want to be crossed. “Don’t tread on me,” as the rattlesnake said on the first American flag. So I get intense when people don’t see things the way I do. I tend to mow them down. To dominate them—or try to. For some reason, crises seem to follow me around. Shalom is rare. At least, where I am. As is unity. (At least, that’s who I am when I let myself go.)
- It’s hilarious when other people do it. Invisible when I do it. Invisible to me, that is. And it makes unity impossible. Along with love. It’s hard for me to love people while blaming and resenting them. Especially for what I did myself. And hard for them to love me.
- But we have to stop rebelling, blaming, resenting, dominating, and trying to get more. Only as we turn away from those things will we have love and unity.
- Close to the heart of the human predicament is our failure to take responsibility for our lives. We rebel and then we shift the blame, which makes growth almost impossible. It also makes those being blamed angry. And they rebel, too. Especially when the blame is justified. The cycle begins.
- Jesus’ solution is simple. Take the blame. Whether it’s yours or not. That’s the cross.
- But in Jesus’ story and only in Jesus’ story, peace and unity become possible. Among a people where blaming has stopped and responsibility is accepted.
- I was present recently when an older woman told the story of a long marriage to a miserable, promiscuous, mean man. It was clear that she had carried on with her own life before God and done rather well at it. Afterwards another woman said to her, “You must have been terribly angry.” She replied simply, “No, it wasn’t worth it.”
- Bad things happen to us. Many of them imaginary, but enough of them real. We rebel and ruin the rest of our lives. We do that ourselves. What we need to do is forgive and be content with the life God has given us. Resentment and blaming are poison. Poison for us. They aren’t worth it.
- One of the plagues of live-in churches has been leaders who require blind obedience.
- This sort of submission is especially serious since such leaders inevitably get distracted by something trivial, like by the details of eschatology or by some sexual addiction. Even though such leaders don’t normally do anything dramatic like Jim Jones, they lead people to nowhere.
- in my experience, submission is more like rejoicing that you have other people to listen to. It’s more like listening in an attitude of openheartedness, supported by a spirit of servanthood.
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- Note: “submit to one another” … recognize that there are people other than you, some of whom might know more than you, all of whom would be blessed by you putting their needs before your own … taking direction from them, by their wisdom or by their needs, can relieve you of the burden of deciding what to do
- So submission doesn’t mean blind obedience; it doesn’t mean believing your church if they tell you a red sofa is blue or that Jews or capitalists or women cause your problems. But it does mean knowing you don’t know everything. It means knowing that the people of God gathered know more than you do by yourself. It means being willing to listen with an open heart when the body has the audacity to differ with your views. It means being willing pretty often to try out others’ views for awhile to see if maybe you’re the one that’s confused.
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- Note: But why should this only apply to the body? Why shouldn’t you take this same stance toward all people, believer or unbeliever? What distinguishes those two groups in this circumstance? I.e. is it OK to reject the idea that unbelievers (or an unbelieving group) know more than you? Or to be unwilling to listen with an open heart when unbelievers differ with you? Or to be unwilling to try out the views of unbelievers for awhile in order to test and understand them?
Also, the Peirce/James idea that knowledge/wisdom is a group thing, not an individual thing.
- Maybe submission is occasionally betting that other people know a little something, too. Not turning off your brain, but living out what they suggest until and unless you see it doing harm. Then you stop obeying, preferably calmly and kindly; but in any case, you stop.
- “You almost persuade me that I don’t understand Wittgenstein, but I feel confident that if you came to understand him, you’d be a much wiser young man than you are.”
- And that’s all submission is. Rejoicing that someone is wiser than us, that there are others whom we can respect. That frees us to rejoice that we don’t have to know everything ourselves—betting that others know something, too. It’s a spirit, an attitude. Out of which grow unity and wisdom.
- One of the tragedies of postmodernity is that no one is left to respect.
- Here’s one of the great things about the body of Christ. We have an agreed-on hero to whom we can apprentice ourselves. A huge book we can study for hundreds of years without completion. Then there are the millions of others who have tried to follow our master and understand our book. We can study them for many lifetimes. And we have a local body that can encourage us and against whom we can sharpen ourselves and who will tell us when we’re being fools.
- Be clear: blind following of leaders is a terrible thing. But so is blind rejection of leaders. Passive acceptance of the way things are destroys, and so does aggressive destruction of everything established. It’s a question of spirit. A spirit of passivity destroys as does a spirit of rejection. Maybe the only thing as deadly as conventional thinking is the need to debunk.
- In my experience, more people have a need to debunk and complain than have a need to follow blindly. I know lots of complaining rebels, few blind followers. In my experience, a lot of people in our culture know how to question authority. Not so many know how to cooperate on a deep level. Not many know how to watch and listen till they know what’s going on before they start rejecting and fighting.
- Note: Although complaining debunkers can end up blind followers of the thing they set in opposition to what they’re debunking and complaining about.
- In any case, blind following and blind rejecting isn’t the full range of options. And I don’t mean some moderating position between the two. On another continuum altogether is active, hopeful listening, where you aren’t blaming and debunking but cheerfully cooperating while still asking friendly, pointed questions.
- Cooperation. I suspect that’s a fair modern translation for submission.
- But as the futility of trying to talk our way to consensus on vision became more and more obvious, I began to say that maybe the only thing worse than strong leadership is weak leadership. Maybe communities are healthy only in that brief period between when we acknowledge the need for authority and when the leaders we acknowledge go bad.
- Any group of people whose lives are deeply interconnected needs a person or three who have experienced so much grace that they exude it onto others. We need people who accept sinners and screw-ups with a minimum of annoyance and judgment. That doesn’t mean they put up with sinful behavior; it means they tell the person about it directly and kindly, without making the person feel rejected. The more people we have who are full of grace and gentle truth the better, but we must have one or two, or we will burn.
- Now, I know I’m not exactly exegeting Jesus’ reply to who would be the most important. In his reply, Jesus wasn’t focusing on leaders as people who speak the truth in grace and love, or who keep pointing back to him. He was focusing on the importance of being the one who gets up from the table to get more butter.
- Which wasn’t who the disciples wanted to be. They wanted the opposite. They wanted to be the ones for whom others got up to get the butter. They wanted to be admired—or maybe to have status and power. When Jesus took his proper place on the throne of Israel, they each wanted to be his chief of staff. Or maybe his secretary of defense. With lots of people at their beck and call. No popping up for butter for them.
- But Jesus means more than that. He means that serving is about all leadership is. There’s only one job in church. It’s being a servant. So naturally those who do it best, we make our leaders.
- So it’s no surprise that when Paul gives the qualifications for elders and overseers, he doesn’t even mention gifts (1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1). He talks only about the spiritual state of potential leaders. What keeps people from being overseers is rarely lack of ability to lead or even lack of ability to see the whole picture. The thing that keeps us from
- So it’s no surprise that the Bible often calls overseers “elders.” It takes time to learn to distinguish between your own will and God’s. Maybe you have to get old and be bored with yourself before you have much hope of telling the difference. It’s alarming, but at fifty-seven I’m only just beginning to ask myself some of the questions necessary for sorting out whether I have a word from the Lord or am projecting my own ego calculations.
- Another important characteristic of elders is a sort of learned focusedness. A clarity of intention where other things get stripped away—the need for approval, for getting rich, for having my own way. Ideally everything gets stripped away—everything except the Word of the Lord and the growth of his people. We need a biblical overview combined with biblical tunnel vision that excludes everything else.
- We don’t need to subject ourselves to their wisdom, to the wonder of the classics. Just listen to our hearts and express ourselves. You’re as good as any of them. All we need is discussion groups, and even if the topic is Goethe, all we really discuss is ourselves.
- When I was first involved in community, I had an extended conversation with some folks from the Bruderhof. I asked a thousand questions. They made a conscientious effort to answer me, but they didn’t seem too interested. They punctuated the conversation with remarks to the effect that they didn’t know how to do community. Community was a gift of God. Some things needed to be done and others avoided, but still sometimes community happened and sometimes it didn’t. They didn’t know why. Or rather they did: it was the Holy Spirit. Over whom we have no control. The Bruderhof might end tomorrow, and that would be fine.
- A pastor was recently telling me of the agony of a man who had confessed to severe sexual addiction. He said that he wasn’t too worried about the man because he seemed to have come to the end of himself and was finally experiencing the greatness of God. The pastor said he was more concerned about an elder in his church who wanted nothing to do with the addict; he’d messed up too badly. And the pastor wondered whether his elder had come to the end of himself enough to realize who God is.