considering arrogance and pride...

Last week, I was attempting to convey that because our worship to God is about how we live and not primarily about singing songs to Him and listening to sermons, there is a need to take our “worship services” out of the center of our paradigm. But, this paradigm is deep-seated, to say the least, and making a shift as big as pulling out the very core of it is not only difficult, but truly impossible in many circles. Again, don’t get me wrong about the value of gathering together in a place of peace and inspiration, meditating, expressing, encouraging, and engaging in being shaped spiritually through this type of medium. I am simply saying that it is not the only way or the exclusively most important way to be spiritually formed. Furthermore, so many churches aren’t creating a place of peace, inspiration and etcetera as I just described anyway, but rather places of stuffiness, formality and often shallow tradition or the other end of the spectrum which consists of hype and major production. Tradition is not inherently shallow, by the way. It can be rich and full of deep meaning. But, a lot of what I have observed is far from that.

Some of our current paradigm comes from not only our understanding of what worship is all about, but also about what it is that God wants from us or what God is indeed doing. Last week I wrote, “We are so focused on our own personal piousness and securing our own personal salvation (usually motivated by “an unpredictable grace” theology) it is no wonder we have isolated ourselves in Bible classes and worship services feeding off the sound of our own voices week after week.” This topic has been written about extensively and thoroughly. The basic premise is that our view of this earth as a sinking ship in a cesspool of sin that we are just trying to escape while hoping to stay pure until we die or Jesus returns has a lot of problems within it and it has created a lot of unhealthiness among us. First, there is a lot of room to wrestle with the eschatological conclusions that have produced such a view. Maybe the way we think things are going to go down are based on some faulty understanding of certain passages. Furthermore, throw in what I call (and maybe I stole it from someone else – I’m not sure) “unpredictable grace” theology and it gets messy. It is a theology that never wants you to be too sure of your salvation. It may even ask you “Are you sure you’re sure?” It is usually focused on a being a good boy, going to church, doing church things, and not laughing at dirty jokes or saying cusswords as opposed to any kind of injustice rectifying. This approach is based on me going to heaven based on my on moral uprightness (combined with Jesus and the stuff He did, of course).

With that, it causes us to care less about what happens here. After all “this world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through.” We sing that kind of like an uninterested tourist driving through a desolate African village full of hungry kids on our way to an evening of safari hunting and wine tasting. In addition, it has created in us this Pharisaical attitude that looks around and blames all the other sinners for the state of things. If they would only come to church and be like us than this world would be a better place, we think. So, with our unpredictable grace, a grace we can never be too sure of, we do churchy things to keep our lives clean and neat and hope, often with great fear, that we or our kids don’t “stumble” and can hold on to this sinking ship until we are saved from this God forsaken planet. That is simplistic of course, but in short, that mindset motivates our church subculture paradigm centered around worship services and bible classes that feed me what I need to stay in grace until that day.

In order for us to really shift our paradigm in any effective way, it will take conviction and repentance. Here is what I mean. I started my first fulltime ministry job at the age of twenty-three. My wife and I were about a year out of college and we moved to CA to work with a group of teens that have truly become some of the most extraordinary people I currently know. Then, I was 23 and they were anywhere from 14-18. It is hard to believe, but that beginning was almost 10 years ago. We are all so different now. That is the way life is. It is needless to say that I would do things very differently now than I did then. I would teach different things and I would rearrange the priorities of the ministry. It is not that I regret anything, it is just that hopefully with time and experience your priorities and understanding adjusts and moves in an even more positive direction than it is now. I give myself some grace being 23 at the time. But, what if I did regret something? It would probably be good for me. Maybe regrets are necessary. Not that we have to wallow in them or constantly feel guilty, but maybe owning up to shortcomings that are usually honest mistakes or understandable shallowness is part of the process. What if I am convicted now of ways I missed the point then?

Being unemployed for about 6 months as a result of a combination of life just happening and undoubtedly bad decisions I have made along the way has surely made me look at those who face hard times even as a result of their own ignorance completely differently than I used to. In my own head I constantly ridiculed the unkemptness of the lower class people I ran across in Wal-Mart as I walked by in my clean clothes with 4 different ways in my pocket to pay for whatever I needed. That is, until I found myself depressed and un-showered walking through that same store angry and without a lot of hope. It was during that time I began to give up on a lot of Christian clichés, but that is another post entirely. With that, I started to give up on formulaic Christianity that looked like this: know right + do (choose) right = God’s blessing and good life. It is not that simplistic or linear. That is another post as well.

My Christian pristine-ness had failed me, and beyond our shallow clichés, I began to abandon this view point that was centered on my own morality as the ticket to my own salvation from all the sin and sinners here. In Isaiah 58, God calls His people out for thinking that what He really wanted from them was some religious observance. The kind of fasting He wanted was not to just bow one’s head or humble one’s self for a day. What He wanted them to do was to “share their food with the hungry, clothe the naked, stop exploiting their workers, loose the chains of injustice and set the oppressed free.” The kind of worship He wants from us is not to just sing songs on a Sunday in a room with pews. It is to feed, love, clothe, release, free and rebuild.

This shift won’t happen without conviction and repentance. Unless we have been hungry, unloved, exploited, chained or unless we are willing to form relationships with those who have, we will lack the sufficient conviction to truly turn away from our current paradigm and search for a new one. The Pharisees in John 9 thought they could see clearly. They weren’t willing to rethink anything but instead worked to force everything else to make sense within their current world-view. It turned out that a blind beggar with no education nor redeeming quality was the one with better vision (ahh, what a great church/business word, vision – I can see God mocking us now). In that story, one would have learned more down on the street than in the synagogue-church. Times haven’t changed much and in so many ways, neither have we. I hope we can. But, it will take open hearts embracing conviction and willing to do the hard work of turning-it-around-repentance. Sometimes it seems like hardly anyone is asking themselves or their congregation hard questions. Unfortunately, it usually takes a lot of pain to get us there.
* I want to acknowledge that the concluding thrust of this post (repentance –conviction) is directly inspired by an e-mail exchange with a friend earlier this month. He said it differently but it was a great point I used here.