I’ll admit it – I spend a lot of time whining about what’s wrong with church these days, often cynically filing everything I don’t like under the catch-all of “20th Century American Evangelicalism." Also, a lot of my ideas for where the church needs to go are based on my critiques of the crass contours of how many Americans express the Christian faith today. I limit my reimagining to a response.
For example, imagine seeing a car missing an essential part, like a gas pedal. We’d all scoff at the idea of a car without something so essential as a gas pedal, right? Now imagine becoming so fixated on that deficiency (and so also the critical need for a gas pedal) that when it comes time for you to design a car, all you design is a gas pedal. All you could think about was that deficiency, and so build your car around that one thing. Not the best solution, is it? Rather, a better way to design that car would have been to go back to the drawing board and sincerely consider the role and function of a car, and consider every bit of what makes a car. From there, you can build a better car.
In the same way, I and others in my generation see a hole in the church status quo (shallow fellowship, contentiousness, legalism, no social justice, limited values sets, etc.) and then redefine the entire faith around that one missing part. So we get overreactions. It becomes all about community. All about ending legalism. Then, we’ve just done the “car-as-gas-pedal†fallacy. We’ve mistaken diagnosis for prescription.
Now, don’t mistake me about this – the solution to the car-pedal confusion is not to just fill in the patches with what the church or the faith needs. Fill-in-the-blank won’t cut it. I think Christianity is in such real disrepair these days, a car in need of so many parts, that we really should just rebuild and fundamentally reconsider what it means to be followers of Jesus Christ.
So, as we “do church†we need to not define our direction by deficiencies, but by divine revelation. We’ll need to remain centered on Christ.
Although it is okay and good to critique and be aware of the shortfalls of other practitioners of Christianity, the emerging generation cannot form itself purely in response to what came immediately before. A plant’s growth is not just in response to the quality of its heritage, the soil, but grows ever toward what gives it true life – the sun. Likewise, my generation’s growth should be defined partly by our imperfect heritage and most fully by what gives us true life, the Son.
It feels almost stupid to say, but the hermeneutic for how to be a follower of Jesus should always be, well, the Jesus of the New Testament! Instead, much of church history has been us defining ourselves in response to others in Christ (Baptists, Anabaptists, etc.).
This is a step beyond being solution-oriented. This attitude insists that solutions must always be prophetically Christward rather than prescriptively responsive. So as our journeys unfold, my goal is to always keep my eyes on the destination ahead of us – Jesus Christ – and stop being so distracted by the dangerous edges of the road.
Will you join me?
