Compassion proclaims...

I constantly run across blogs pointing fingers at emergents decrying their attempt to do works of compassion without verbally proclaiming Jesus. Here is a comment by a minister on one such post to illustrate my point. “I’m troubled by the tendency in our churches to send groups of young people to build houses somewhere and call it a ‘mission trip.’ At one time, missions referred to evangelistic efforts. When everything is considered to be missions, nothing will be missions. We can become so missional that we lose our mission.”

To this I ask what is indeed our mission? When Paul said, in 1 Cor. 2:22, “For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” by knowing did he mean that accepting the fact was all there was too it. Is our mission simply to convince people to mentally ascend to accepting said conclusion about Jesus? Maybe that is what it has become and maybe that is why we face so many selfish battles in our churches today. As we convince people to believe in who Jesus was and what Jesus did my question is to what end? Is the goal to get them to go to church and hang out with other “believers” in order to reinforce their conclusions about Jesus, sing songs about their conclusions and put their money together so they can have a place to teach their children about said conclusions and if they have enough money, they can employ educated people to teach classes for all ages, lead great songs and grow the number of believers who affirm said conclusion? Is the goal to bask in our conclusions and from time to time convince others to do the same?

You may say no, but the current state of so many of our churches says otherwise. Leaderships are so frustrated with self absorbed members that they are pushing back telling them “church” is not a place to be fed as much as it is a place to come work. Yet, more often than not we are asking people to “go to work” by becoming members of our self perpetuating organizations that engage people in “worship services”, Bible classes and the like hoping that doing so will in the long run benefit their life and that maybe they can get others to join in along the way. Again I ask what is indeed the mission?

So many of us marinate in this Christian sub-culture only occasionally peeking our heads out the door or more often just sending a mass e-mail to rail against smut on television, ungodly politicians, or homeowner’s associations that won’t allow someone to fly an American flag. Listen, those H.O.A.’s annoy me too, but I am convinced that we are known more for what we are against than for the Good News we claim to have. With that, the way that we so often frame this Good News has left a decent amount of “outsiders” saying “If that is the Good News, I don’t want to hear the bad.”

But, week after week, I run across a blog accusing the emergents of making Jesus into a hippie that just loves everyone or of thinking that building a house is enough. The radical love of Jesus is undeniable, but no He wasn’t always happy or found sheepishly asking why we can’t all just get along. But, don’t we realize that the times he was the most confrontational, the most in your face were when he was dealing with the religious of His day. Yet we act like if Jesus were here he would march right over to Hollywood and give those wretched wretches a piece of His mind. When maybe, just maybe, he would walk right into our churches and shove His fingers right in our chests and say “get behind me. You have taken this way of redemption and made it a burden on people’s backs, you have made this Way of living that I gave you so complicated it is seemingly impossible to untangle.”

Maybe He would tell us that this Good News is dynamic with many layers and that we are poor story tellers. Maybe he would say that we talk endlessly, but we have little action. Maybe he would say that he meant it in Matthew 25 about the food, cup of water, and the clothes thing and that it wasn’t just some spiritual anecdote that really meant He just wanted us to preach more sermons. Maybe he would say redemption, grace, mercy and love have many forms and they all point back to the nature of God whether we connect the dots or not. Maybe he would say that we can’t separate compassion from proclamation because compassion proclaims.

I don’t know any emergent that just wants to feed people and never ever talk about Jesus and his way. But I know plenty of people including myself that have talked hundreds of times more than we have fed. The mission isn’t just to rally around the event of Jesus’s death and resurrection and convince others to do the same. The mission is to be that death and resurrection. There is no end to the ways in which we can indeed be that to the world.