UnLearning Church. Mike Slaughter

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of doubt and frustration; unLearning leaders step out of the boat anyway.

      Frighteningly and Radically Called

      I remember one of my first encounters with God. It seemed God was chasing me. It was the summer of 1967, and I was at a real low point in my life. Two of my friends had just been busted for drugs. My mom and dad were frustrated with me. They decided to send me down south to visit relatives I had never met. They wanted to "keep me in touch with my roots," they said.

      During that time, I would lie, cheat, or do anything to get what I wanted. I even had some help at breaking the rules. A few days before graduation from high school, one teacher changed an F to a D so I could graduate. In another class, I copied off of someone else's exam so I could pass. I had no interest in doing what pleased God.

      Yet God was chasing me, and these God-whispers would pop up everywhere I went. In fact, all these God-whispers troubled me so much that I remember calling my girlfriend long-distance to talk about it. God had never bothered me like this before. God even went ahead of me into the restroom of a two-pump gas station in the backwaters of rural Arkansas. There, scrawled on the wall above the urinal, were these words: "Jesus saves all who want him."

      The outcome of this experience and others in the ensuing months was life changing. I truly encountered the resurrected Jesus Christ, which ultimately changed everything. Jesus saved me, and I wanted him. My encounter with God in my late teens was revolutionary. From that time forward, I knew I wanted to reach a target population that has been turned off or out by the established church. This group represents a huge number of people. On any given weekend, up to three-quarters of Americans²— and an even higher number of Canadians³—are not in church. Those are the people I want to reach. I'm thankful for congregations that nurture the already churched, but I'm interested in finding ways to speak to the unchurched.

      Jesus moved into my life, changing my priorities, my values, and my relationships. He transformed everything in my life." Christ in me" is the source of resurrection power. It comes only through my being dead, buried, and out of the way. When we say "yes" to Jesus, we are "buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life" (Romans 6:4).

      I want to invest my life in those who want to pursue radical Christianity. The emerging leader is not enamored with the latest religion of self-actualization. The religion of talk-show television is a rudderless spirituality. Jesus calls us to self-expenditure, not self-infatuation. He says, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it" (Luke 9:23-24).

      I don't want to lead a megachurch of people who come together to be inspired to live status-quo lives peppered with Judeo-Christian values. I want to empower radical followers of Jesus.

      Transformation, Not Information

      People today, both inside and outside the church, have an apathetic attitude toward organized religion. Most will tell you that it's not working. Perhaps their lack of interest is because we institutional church people have been more skilled at building walls of dogma and exclusivity than at rediscovering ancient paths of life-transformation.

      Our society is marked by increased spiritual hunger and activity, yet overall attendance in churches has decreased. The number of people in attendance weekly in United Methodist churches has been declining for years—dramatically so. The same is true in most other mainline denominations. This decline seems to accompany a lack of spiritual power in churches today. As I look around many churches, the situation seems like the movie Night of the Living Dead. Many churches have died, and someone just needs to tell them they're dead. The churches that are still alive are asking, like the prophet Elijah, "Am I the only one left? Is there anyone out there who is being faithful to the purpose of God on planet Earth?" (See 1 Kings 19:1-10.)

      Remember the guy who burst into a Baptist church in Texas? If angry people with guns are going to storm into church gatherings and shoot folks for their faith relationship with Jesus Christ, then I want to get shot for being a part of the right thing. I don't want the church I serve to sacrifice lives to something that is not world-changing.

      For the earliest Christians, the gospel wasn't about information, but about a revolutionary encounter with God—"what we have heard . . . seen with our eyes . . . and touched with our hands . . . the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us" (1 John 1:1b-2). After his resurrection, Jesus warned his followers not to go out alone, but to "wait there for the promise of the Father" when they would be "baptized with the Holy Spirit" (Acts 1:4-5). Think about the implications of that order. Jesus' followers had been with him for three years. (That's a whole lot better than attending a weeklong church growth conference.) Didn't they learn enough about Jesus by watching and copying his work? Apparently not. Jesus was telling his followers, in effect, that information and imitation were not enough.

      UnLearning Moment

       What do you need to unLearn in order to make your church a place of transformation and not just information?

      As a child in Sunday school, I received information about the man named Jesus. My teacher gave me a little picture of Jesus to carry around in my wallet. It was about the size of a baseball card. You've probably seen this picture, found in many Protestant church buildings in the 1950s and 1960s—the wavy hair, the aura of light around his head. I came to think about Jesus as a player featured on the baseball cards I collected.(Unfortunately, this little picture wasn't worth as much as a baseball card!) I often wonder what would have happened if I had said to my baseball-card-collecting buddies, "I have a '58 Jesus in mint condition; what will you give me for it?" It seemed that faith was measured by the ability to quote facts and memorize trivia about a historical

      player. It was just like memorizing the statistics about a baseball legend, based on information on the back of the card.

      You probably remember the WWJD fad of the late 1990s and early 2000s. People wore bracelets and displayed bumper stickers all designed to help us ask ourselves, "What would Jesus do?" The idea is to try to determine what Jesus would do in a situation and then to imitate Jesus' response. But knowledge and imitation of Jesus' behavior and are not enough. First John 4:9 says, "God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him." The purpose is that we might live through him, not that we might merely believe in him. Living for God is not about imitation or information—it requires transformation. The Spirit of God must live in us.

      Vessels of the Spirit

      In Old Testament times, fire often signified God's presence. When Moses led the Israelites through the desert, God was as close as a cloud during the day and a pillar of fire during the night. When the people saw the fire, they remembered God's promise of daily provision, protection, and power for living. When God moved, they moved. When God stopped, they stopped, even for months at a time. The idea was to place themselves at the heart of God's leadership and direction.

      At the time the fire of God's Holy Spirit was limited to one place, usually above the tent where they met for worship. The Spirit would sometimes come upon Moses, and sometimes others. When Jesus was on planet Earth, the Holy Spirit in him was limited to one physical body. Jesus could be in only one place at a time; but when Jesus ascended to heaven and sent the Holy Spirit СКАЧАТЬ