You Cannot Look at Your Eye

To say that lately I have been thinking about this concept which I will try to define as a ‘misdirection of revolution’ would mostly be a lie. This concept has been fluttering about my head and heart for some time now but not until recently was I able to pin it to the wall long enough to get a look at it and have the ability to give it a name. I could make a choice to take a detour here and have an exploration of how an idea grows inside of me completely independent of my understanding, but I won’t. It would be interesting and full of humorous analogies but it would simply be a very beautiful and colourful distraction.

Much of what I read today about the church of Christ, or hear from others in how they understand the changes that God is catalyzing all over the world is a conversation about the restructuring of the way church ‘is done’, and I think that much of it is under this Misdirection of Revolution. In Houses That Change the World, Wolfgang Simpson champions that a House Church model is the biblical blueprint for the structure of the Body of Christ. He writes about Luther and Calvin, saying that ‘They reformed the content but not the form of Christianity. They “could not decide to break from the sociological forms of church since the time of Constantine.” [Visser’t Hoft] ‘

This is not a problem we face today, there is no lack of books, articles, blogs, and podcasts about a revolution of ecclesiology (the form and function of church). We are engaged in a public trial and execution of the religious institutions and ‘christian culture’ of the modern evangelical church and many times it is an ugly affair where elder men and women who have devoted the majority of their life to serving Christ are trampled underfoot by a mob frothing at the mouth with an anti-establishment fervor. Now, I am not denouncing the current reformation of the church which is desperately seeking ways to live in a non-dualistic christian lifestyle and kindle new leadership models for the church that truly releases and equips people. I participate in these discussions of the structural reformation of church because I fully believe that God is stirring up creative chaos and breathing new life and inspiration all over the world to generations of christians who are serious about their faith. I think that as we continue to travel in the wake of God’s momentum that we will be called to tear down false idols in our culture, philosophy, belief and lifestyle but I think that in the exhilaration of movement we stand in danger of losing our direction and the destination to which we are being called to by God. I am reminded of a conversation I once had with a friend who asked me if I thought change was a good or bad thing. After thinking for a moment, I answered him by saying ‘I suppose that depends what you are changing into.’

Nearly everything I have read or heard that discusses a new ecclesiology for the new generation of church has a stance that lays a heavy critique on the common form of evangelical christendom which has been dominant since the time of Constantine. I do think that it is the Spirit of God moving amoung us which initiates the feelings of dissatisfaction and sparks these conversations but I notice two things that crop up in the movement of the ecclesiological revolution that cripples the process of what we all hope is a transformation of the Church to the living and active presence of the Kingdom of God—the dynamic force of Christ on earth which the gates of hell shall never prevail against.

The first of these is an immediate wound, which is a division in the Church which forms when the revolutionaries break relationships with the elders in the faith due to a reaction against the form of church which the elders embody to them. The focus of this blog is on the second but I cannot pass this up. For all the faults and the mistakes of the church throughout history, it is still the Church and therefore to the cherished for what it is, the Body of Christ. I can promise you that the vast majority of people who make up what we call the ‘western evangelical church’ did not make a conscious and malicious choice to reject the word of God and pursue instead a religious institutional idol. My own father knows nothing but that structure of church that we critique so harshly but I can tell you in all honesty that the integrity of his character is strong and he is honestly able to meet the requirements of an elder or deacon laid out in I Timothy 3, which is more than I can say for myself and many others who are the loudest in proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom of the Emergent Church. I don’t mean to be overly harsh but I get angry when I see people adopt an attitude towards the church which functions to spit on the Bride of Christ in the name of progress because the fashion of her dress is no longer fashionable. We must honour our fathers and mothers in the faith, even if we think the decor of their house is absolutely horrid.

The second potential danger I see in the ecclesiological reformation is the Misdirection I have already mentioned. Picture it as though in our attempts to sew the new wineskin for the new wine we simply have taken apart the old wineskin and re-sewn it together in a different shape. I think that I can start to explain this potential danger with more clarity by referencing one of my favorite pieces from C.S.Lewis in Surprised By Joy.

‘ I read in Alexander’s Space Time and Deity his theory of “Enjoyment” and “Contemplation.” These are technical terms in Alexander’s philosophy; “Enjoyment” has nothing to do with pleasure, not “Contemplation” with the contemplative life. When you see a table you “enjoy” the act of seeing and “contemplate’ the table... In bereavement you contemplate the beloved and the beloved’s death and, in Alexander’s sense, “enjoy” the loneliness and grief; but a psychologist, if he were considering you as a case of melancholia, would be contemplating your grief and enjoying philosophy. ‘

...It seemed to me self-evident that one essential property of love, hate, fear, hope, or desire was attention to their object. To cease thinking about or attending to the woman is, so far, to cease loving; to cease thinking about or attending to the dreaded thing is, so far, to cease being afraid... In other words the enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible. You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself. Of course the two activities can and do alternate with great rapidity; but they are distinct and incompatible. ‘

Like Lewis, since I first grasped this concept I ‘have regarded it as an indispensable tool of thought’ and think that it voices a concern I have that—at least in my own life—ought not to be ignored in the arena of learning what it is to be the Church. The danger here is that as we reinvent the form of church that we can idolize our methodology and images of the ways the church ought to gather. One of the common things that is often championed in new church initiatives is the idea of community; small, local gatherings, eating together, and sharing patterns of life with an intimate group of friends. Highly valuable things to be sure, precious times that ought to be fought for in ones life but the vision of a christian community is not community itself, ‘community’ is a descriptive noun for the local collection of people who have a common unity in valuing Christ. Referring to the quoted text from Lewis, you could say that as a group of people contemplate Christ together, they enjoy the community of the Church. If you contemplate community, what you enjoy is not unity of the Body of Christ, but sociology of christian culture. It is entirely possible to have a luxurious car and impeccable driving habits but be driving the wrong way. This consideration is a warning against the idolization of an idea or a word where the concept of church itself becomes what we value and ceases to be a revelation gleaned from attendance to the teachings and being of Christ.

Another danger is not when the idea or word is taken, idolized, and set apart as something valuable but when a word becomes a buzzword and creates a false sense of growth in ideology which comes from simply using new language but the concepts described remain unchanged. ‘A rose by any other name....’ so to speak. A recent experience I had illustrates this very well. I was listening to a new teaching from a church fellowship which focused on the idea of ‘Story’, living in the christian story as opposed to the many stories of the world. The word ‘story’ is quickly becoming a massive buzzword in new church language, and I am one of those whose pulse quickens at the very mention of the word—the fact that the word ‘story’ was in the title of the sermon is perhaps the sole reason why I listened to it. But as I listened I realized that the speaker was using the word is a horribly wrong way, it was as if I met a man who called his small dog a cat because they were both mammals of roughly the same size. A story is a progression of actions over time in a relationship, whether between men, a man and an object, or even a man and his own mind. It is a series of interactions and therefore describes movements and changes, the coming and going of things through a space, it is dynamic and historic in the sense of there is a past to be related to us. But this is not the way that the speaker I listened to used the word; there was no sense of narrative, no movement. He used the word ‘story’ to describe a social attitude of a group of people, a cultural psychology which drove the population to act in a certain manner. Certainly that psychology determined the path of the story but the story and the force which authors the progression of the story are not interchangeable things. A business plan laid out on a billboard and an operating business is not the same thing. One is a static concept which required no attention to in order to exist; the other is a reality which demands and is defined by a commitment to the activities and tasks that achieve financial gain and the very existence of the business depends upon those daily acts.

Within that teaching on ‘story’, this speaker described the various stories of the world and their destructive tendencies in how they make people react and then proclaimed we must live in the story of Jesus, a beautiful saying which I give a hearty ‘amen’ to but as I attempted to learn from this speaker I realized all he was proposing was to accept a different spiritual psychology about our attitudes. Here I saw a man who in one breath chided the church for ‘living in the world’s story’, and in the next sentence preaching the gospel of mental agreement towards a conceptual ideal in the exact same manner than the Church is often berated for—producing only a way to think, yet not a way to live. When I saw this, I simply had to laugh and appreciate the irony of the situation.

Yet, for all the humour I gained from that teaching I think it clearly illustrates a danger realized. It is utterly possible that come years from now that after hundreds of more books have been written and christian fellowships across the globe have adopted new structural concepts and missional models that we will simply have created a new christian language and institutionalized house church community models in the exact same manner that we so are eager to leave behind us. It is entirely possible that we simply become a new denomination, a demonination not in the manner of the large, top-heavy hierarchical religious machine but one of local division of identity based upon what house you 'share the communion meal' in, a personal and custom-fitted religious anarchy and institutional paranoia. In order to save time and extraneous repetition I will state this as plainly as I can: Jesus Christ is not calling us to a new social construct of church, He is calling us to Himself. In a fantastic article of Ben Pasley’s podcast Church.Think he talks about the distinction between the Church and the Kingdom of God and that we are not called to preach and advertise the church but to proclaim that the Kingdom of God is at hand; to be ambassadors of Christ, revealing to all men the new order is which creation is remade.

I am reminded of an insight a friend of mine once had relating to the image of the new wine and wineskins. Why do you have a wineskin? You have to have something to hold the Wine in. It is as simple as that. The Church exists so that the wine of communion which Jesus offered to all at the Last Supper would not be spilled out on dry ground but received by men to the Glory of Christ. The Church exists for and belongs to Jesus. It is not God’s testing site on how social groups and cultural identities ought to behave but the home to which all men are called to come into and be discipled in the culture of the Kingdom and find their identity in Christ.

Now to come back again to Alexander’s Enjoyment and Contemplation: it is only in ‘contemplating’ Christ, and Christ alone that the Church will ‘enjoy’ the identity and state of being in which it is intended to live. This therefore becomes the true story of the Church; the ‘enjoyment’ of our identity tied to our right relation to Christ which is the force which authors daily commitments of obedient and faithful responses to the active word of God. And the moment that we as the Church of Christ cease to attend our love and trust in Christ we cease to continually receive the identity we share between one another as brother and sisters in Christ—please note this is not a statement on the spiritual condition of salvation, that is a separate line of thought. It is simply saying that the Church of Christ is not a spiritual perpetual motion machine, Jesus did not set the church in motion 2000 years ago and expect that it would simply work itself out. He said “I will build my Church”, a future active tense; it is an ongoing activity that Jesus is ceaselessly at work in us and through us to proclaim the Kingdom of God at hand.

I have one last perspective to explain this. Do not try to look at your eye, it is impossible. Your eye is not something to be seen, if you are able to see your eye it means that it is not where it is supposed to be—in the eye socket, and therefore it is destroyed and cut off from the source of it's life; there is only one way to cast your sight upon your eye and it is through the aid of a mirror. But even in this matter you are not casting your sight on your eye, you are looking upon the mirror; the fact that the mirror has the ability to reflect back to us the image of ourselves is the power of the mirror not the power of your vision. So it is with Christ, Christ alone holds the power to reveal to us what our identity appears like and therefore we ought to commit ourselves fully to casting our vision upon Him who holds the power to reveal to us the remade and beloved identity of all things.