Holy Fool

In many ways the simple answer is, because I always have.  As a child church was not optional for me.  That is not to in anyway say that I did not enjoy going to church, although there were times I really wanted to be playing outside.  As I grew up I came to love the friendships and connections I built within the context of church.  However I also had many friends outside of my church as well.

When I went to college, I for the first time had a choice.  I could sleep in, as my freshman year roommate consistently did, or I could choose to go out.  The freedom in being able to go, or not go, and if I went to choose where I would go was something new to me.  Needless to say I chose to continue going to a church, and after around 5 or 6 months of trying a few options I landed on a church.  I stayed in that church through college and for the first 6 years of my marriage.

At the end of 6 years, after the church changed pastors, I was presented with an opportunity to help start Trinity Family as a core family.  Alicia and I had been looking to purchase a house in the same community that Trinity Family was going to launch in, it seemed like God had it worked out, so we leapt and here we are.

If you notice there is a progression to this story;  I had to,  I chose to, I was called to.

For those of you who never ‘had to’, there is an element of disciplining yourself into a church community.  Not a ‘bad boy’ discipline, but a marathon discipline.  Fortunately I developed this early and have stuck with it.  I guarantee that whether you are 5 or 32 and have not developed this discipline it is hard; especially as an adult that can choose.

For those that ‘chose to’ come to Trinity Family and do so consistently they have found a sense of community and connectedness with others that share their hunger for knowing God and serving him.

Finally, the point.  There are those of us that feel a special calling from God for our participation.  I consider myself part of that.  The church for me has become integral to who I am as an individual.  Without my church, I loose a part of my own identity.  I would say, somewhat ironically, that I don’t go to church anymore.  We are the church, those of us that participate in the lifeblood and ministry of the church and have embraced God’s mission in our communities.  The church for me is as essential as my heart, my hands, my neck, or my eyes.

In our culture it is easy to objectify church, to turn it into a commodity, a segmented part of our lives.  I urge you to challenge culture, and to dive in and embrace church as not just a place for spiritual enrichment, but let it integrate you into it’s identity.  We are all part of the body of Christ.  The body does not exist for the finger, but the finger for the body.

As the t-shirt says; don’t go to church, be the church.

I can write a computer program. I can proceed to fill a screen with symbols, words, and formulas that can outline a program which will complete a specified task. However it is just code in a file, it can't do anything itself and is simply a representation, an icon of the intended outcome. I need a compiler that can take that code out of the abstract and into the world as a functioning program, however even then it is still a program that operates within parameters that I have specified, within the box I have allowed it to exist in. The code will not change or adapt or learn beyond where and how I have allowed it to.

There is a holy grail in computer programming which is artificial intelligence. A program that can define it's own parameters and move beyond it's original code. We however have not achieved it. We can create incredibly complex programs that react in thousands of ways to stimuli, but not one program has every operated outside of it's given parameters.

However God has given in each human being his image, a small piece of his 'compiler' that can take data and create whole new outcomes, a divine spark. We are limited in many ways. In programs you might often see a version that is a lite version with limited features and scope, and a more robust full version. There are things the lite version can't accomplish or interpret in it's limited form. While we have the divine spark our capacity is diminished, our feature set is limited. The lite program points to a fuller and richer set of capabilities found in the real deal, and while it can approximate those realities it can't conceive or achieve them itself. As well It's features are only existent in that the full version of the program has them. We only have goodness, righteousness, holiness, kindness, gentleness, patience, peacefulness, etc. because they flow out of God and are essential to his nature. While the lite version contains a bit of the code of the full version it doesn't contain the full code. The full version however contains all of what makes the lite version.

I am not quite sure where I am going with this imperfect analogy, but the basic analogy is this. We are an inspired subset, not the whole. We operate within limited functional parameters. Without a compiler we would just be an arbitrary bit of code, a thought, an insinuation and not an instantiation. While we can describe some of the attributes of the full version, and mimic some of it's functionality, we can never approximate or grasp it's full scope or purposes.

This is a response to Donnie’s post, regarding a post-Christendom methodology for doing church.

The core dilemma I think we are wrestling with as a church is this; is missions a program employed by the church in which the world is brought into the arms of Christ, or does the mission flow directly out of God and into the world, making us partners and pursuers of that mission.  How we answer that question dramatically affects our understanding of ecclesiology, our missiology, and I would even say our Christology.

The effects of modernity have left us with a compartmentalized life style.  We have a prayer life, a devotional life, a church life, a work life, a family life, etc.  All of these lives are stratified, prioritized, and isolated into digestible life-experience-nuggets through which we interact with the world.  This dis-integrated existence has been applied to the church as well where we have separated the purpose of the church into various ministries, and groups which all act in autonomous isolation of the other.  We have allowed our missiology to become one out of many things the church does.  It is something done by subset of people over there, not as something we all do right here.

We must fight for a return of integrated identities; not just our individual lives, but our life-together as well.  It is only from an integrated identity that we can begin to understand the pervasive nature of God’s mission.  Rather than being a commodity to be acquired and dispensed, a tool that is learned and implemented, missions is an incarnational reality.  We don’t ‘do’ missions, to borrow from Hauerwas we ‘are’ missions.  We are invited to put-on the character of Christ, as Dallas Willard notes, “Indeed, the only hope for humanity lies in the fact that, as our spiritual dimension has been formed, so it also can be transformed.”  This is the core of missionality, to find ourselves and our world transformed under the power of Christ.