Blogging Ottinger (tim)

If I were to re-title this book, it would be “Christians: Are We Playing The Right Game?” Telford Work is tearing down and rebuilding the church right before my very eyes.

I have long had a cognitive dissonance about the church (the little-c church on earth, as opposed to the Church with a capital C), especially how it seems to be continually pulled into the ways and means of the world. It is not that I understood it well enough to cast it in words, but there was something nibbling at the corner of my consciousness in church participation and church business.

In the first half of his book, Work spent time dissecting the creeping Constantinianism in the church, and his words resonated with my experience.

Today, in a chapter titled The Mercy of God I find this interesting bit:

Wherever the Messiah journeys, things around him simply cannot go on as before. […] Hostility inevitably results, from both the “good” who respect our world’s consructed boundaries and the “wicked” who violate them.

It struck me (finally, after all Telford W’s hard work) that they’re both playing the wrong game. They’re both caught up in the rules, on one side or another. Suddenly Romans 8 (which we’re also exploring in morning worship and also adult Sunday school) is visible in sharper resolution.

Again, I’m reminded that perhaps we’re playing the wrong game. We shouldn’t necessarily be growing through marketing and media blitz and measuring ourselves on attendance and building programs and seeker-friendly social clubs. While we need to be seen, and we need to be friendly, and we need to be social, and we need a certain amount of income to maintain the physical manifestation of the church, these are not the things that matter. They aren’t the things that the Christ taught, and they’re not the things he did.

This is a different world, a different game, and a different end-game. Our power plays are from Micah 6:8, not from popular business models. Our is to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. Ours is not to counter the culture, nor to own it, nor to invest in it. Our tools are mercy and grace, for “where there is bitter envy and selfish ambition, there is disorder and every evil practice” (James 6:8). We’re not about competition, coercion, or assimilation. We’re not about accrual of income, land, membership, or influence. Ultimately, we need to be about good news for the broken people all around us, and including ourselves.

Not that we’re not to do well. I also remember Wesley’s words to “Make all you can, save all you can, and give all you can.” It’s okay for us to be participants in the world’s systems, but we need to remember that ultimately that is a means to an end, and not an end. We don’t want our church to grow so that it will be bigger and have more money. The little-c church is a means to an end also. It is a means for fellowship, instruction, aid, kindness, and support: primarily to give them, but also to receive. Somehow, I don’t think the question we’ll answer at judgement is “how many square feet in your sanctuary?” but rather we’ll give an account for our faith and character, who we were and what we did for those who needed us in our lifetimes.

I have a lot to think about. Perhaps we need to quit winning (or losing) the wrong game.