Community: Problem solving or problem sharing? Or solidarity?

In my last post I cited some great points made by Tim Gombis. Gombis says that sometimes churches don't quite live as communities of the cross: "They imagine that the problem is the problem.  After all, churches aren’t supposed to have problems or challenges, just as individual Christians are supposed to have perfect lives.  If there’s something wrong, then there’s something wrong!"

I have some further thoughts on this.

Because of my work and ministry I have been involved in quite a few Christian communities and churches. I am concerned when the more vulnerable members of those communities are hurt or going through a difficult time. For others, these vulnerable members are the ones who have “problems”. Often sincere and committed Christians try to help them by their "problem-solving" skills, as if there are always formulas to tackle the “problems” in people’s lives. Sometimes this works. But I would prefer problem-sharing rather than problem-solving (if we insist on using the term “problem”). If we stand in solidarity with those who are hurting and those going through hard times, and if the first thing we do is to listen and share their pain, then we are on a journey together to deal with the issues that causes the hurt and pain.

I think that’s what Jesus did when he was on earth. He walked life’s journeys with his fellow human beings. He showed us what it means to be truly human – that is, someone who is willing to share the pain, suffering and injustice in this world. Yes, he taught us how to live wisely. Yes, he taught us to pray. Yes, he spoke of God's judgment and God’s love. And so should we teach others. But his message is about God’s upside-down kingdom (or right-way-up kingdom, from his perspective). It is about “those who are first will be last, and those who are last will be first”. It is about self-giving and solidarity with the poor and oppressed. I think this is where the apostle Paul gets it right – God’s wisdom is found in the crucified Christ. And it is in the crucified Christ and risen Lord that we see God's power manifest.

Let the gospel overwhelm and transform - Tim Gombis

Here are some excerpts from Tim Gombis's recent post in his blog. I think they are excellent.

"It seems to me that the New Testament assumes the constant rehearsal of the story of Scripture in order to shape the identity of God’s people.  We get to know God and his ways with his people as we have our imaginations shaped by the narrative of Scripture.  That’s the resurrection-powered world we inhabit, with all its possibilities, its dynamics, and its causes and effects."

"God works in power only through communities of the cross.  God unleashes resurrection power only among cruciform communities of humility and weakness.  God’s people, therefore, can adopt postures of humility toward one another and call out to God for wisdom to find a way forward through any challenge.  They then put their heads together and commit to the hard work of discussing and listening to one another in order to creatively come up with a way to deal with whatever challenge they face."

"It seems to me that here is where churches sometimes fail.  They imagine that the problem is the problem.  After all, churches aren’t supposed to have problems or challenges, just as individual Christians are supposed to have perfect lives.  If there’s something wrong, then there’s something wrong!"

"I hate Christian clichés, but I’ve never forgotten this one: “the end is the process.”"

"The goal is not simply to get rid of the problem or to get past the obstacle as quickly as possible.  The goal is to go through the hard work of discussing and listening in order to strengthen the bonds of community through that whole messy process.  Get people involved, let people give advice and counsel.  Cultivate openness, honesty, and vulnerability.  Giving people opportunities just might allow them to discover their gifts and capacities to contribute to a community.  It will allow a church to actually do the “one-anothers” of church life."

"[Y]ou only lose when you try to win.  God has already pledged his allegiance to us in Jesus, so we can’t lose.  We’re already loved by God despite our failures, sins, and shameful pasts, so there’s no way we can fail.  If working through a difficulty as a community takes more time than we thought, that’s okay.  If we think we’re going to miss out on great opportunities because we’re doing the hard work of making sure everyone is unified, that’s okay, too.  Like I said, the whole point is the process, and we win when we remain unified and grow in love for one another."

Click here to read the full blog post.

Some thoughts on mission (especially cross-cultural mission) - Part 1

Recently I have been thinking about my own view of mission. There are many who know much more than I, and so I don't think the following is new. But I feel that I need to formulate my view on mission in light of the Scripture and experience. Here are some initial thoughts.

Scripture
Much can be said here. But I will only mention the fact that Paul - the Jewish Christian - is an apostle to the Gentiles. In Romans we find that Paul envisions a Jew-Gentile love-centred community that seeks to follow Jesus. This community is in Christ through Jesus' atoning sacrifice, and seeks to embody Christ's self-giving life through the indwelling Holy Spirit. Paul sees this as God's saving purpose and his role is to proclaim this good news ("good news" is of course the meaning of the Greek word for "gospel") - first to the Jews, then to the Gentiles.

Christ's identification with humanity
The New Testament speaks of a God who sent his Son to our world. It talks about Christ's participation in frail humanity and suffered death as an atoning sacrifice for our sins (not least in Romans 8:3-4). There is a strong sense in which the followers of Jesus are to follow his way of self-giving life. The mission of God consists in him sending his Son to our world to accomplish his saving purpose. The vocation of his followers is to participate in his saving purpose by embodying Christ's way of life. In the context of cross-cultural mission, the messengers of the good news will do well if they enter the culture of their audience, live among them and remain there long-term, learn their language and participate in their sorrow and joy. Through this participatory approach, God's heralds of the gospel reflect God's character and love through their deeds and words. Through God's Spirit the gospel is proclaimed through his Presence in the Christ-followers.

Not everyone is called to engage in long-term cross-cultural mission. But we are all called to participate in God's saving purpose by embodying Christ's self-giving way of life in our own contexts and through our solidarity with those who engage in long-term cross-cultural mission.

(Click here for Part 2 on my thoughts on mission)

Timothy Gombis on "God's Missional Sustenance for God's people"

Timothy Gombis has posted something really nice in his blog. It's his reflection after a number of posts on John 4. It ends with Gombis' own experience in his church. For years I have been thinking about what the Christian community should be like, and I am really glad to find that Gombis is saying something very similar to what I have in mind (and he articulates it so much better). Here are some excerpts from his blog post.

"I’ve been thinking about this in relation to divine election as the identity of the people of God.  So often we shrink back from this notion because it seems to imply an “insiders only” mentality.  “We’re God’s elect and they aren’t.”  We may have seen a doctrine of election put to use to endorse a lack of redemptive involvement in the wider culture."

"Jesus indicates, however, that it is only when the church encounters outsiders in open-ended relationships that we are sustained."

"First, we do not encounter the other—or, the world—with a posture of condescension, arrogance, or even in order to set anyone right.  Just as Jesus asked the woman for a drink, taking on a posture of mutuality and even need, we ought to cultivate friendships and relationships of mutuality with others."

"There are countless ways that churches can relate to outsiders and to surrounding culture(s) that follow the pattern of Jesus, but so many of these are unexplored.  We tend only to imagine manipulative relationships, ones that will “get results.”"

"Churches can offer to clean up local neighborhoods, care for town parks, staff after-school services for kids from low-income homes,... And we can serve the world in these ways with no interest in “the bottom line,” but simply with hopes of faithfully embodying our identity as followers of Jesus."

"We tend to imagine that we need to have all the right tools, get all the right teaching, and only then do we go out and get involved in our communities.  I wonder if we think this way because we want to have some sort of guarantee that we’ll get results.  Or, maybe to pacify our fear of failure."

"About a year into our urban missional church experience, I was walking with my friend John Mortensen in our church’s local neighborhood.  We had imagined that God was going to do amazing things through our church.  After all, we were sent there as their salvation.  Or so we imagined."

"The on-the-ground realities slowly dissolved our romantic notions and our big dreams.  Rather than seeing lots of change in the neighborhood, we began seeing changes in ourselves.  That conversation made all of this make sense to me.  John and I came to the realization that we weren’t the salvation of that neighborhood.  God had us there in that neighborhood to save us."

"God was sustaining us and giving us life as we enjoyed conversations with people over a meal, as we shared about our lives and listened to their stories, and as we developed friendships of giving and receiving."

Click here for the original blog post.

Church, community, being counter-cultural

I found the following from Scot McKnight's blog. Is the church about community? Does it have the courage to be counter-cultural?

(Click here for the post.)

"[The] church is and will remain at the epicenter of Christian community, it is the community, essential for worship, for sacrament, for fellowship, but the work of the church, the work of the pastor, is not to lead or cast vision or draw people in, but to equip, disciple, and send Christians out."

"We need to be counter cultural in approach to the church as committed community and as the body of Christ."

What do you think?

New Creation and New Community (Newbiggin)

Here is something Newbiggin wrote about the new creation and the new community. Definitely worth reading. (I found this from the blog Euangelion. Click here for the link.)

This presence of a new reality, the presence in the shared life of the Church of the Spirit who is the arrabōn of the kingdom, has become possible because of what Jesus has done, because of his incarnation, his ministry as the obedient child of his Father, his suffering and death, his resurrection, his ascension into heaven, and his session at the right hand of God. When the apostles are asked to explain the new reality, the new power to find joy in tribulation, healing in sickness, freedom in bondage, life in death, this is the explanation they give. It follows that the visible embodiment of this new reality is not a movement that will take control of history and shape the future according to its own vision, not a new imperialism, not a victorious crusade. Its visible embodiment will be a community that lives by this story, a community whose existence is visibly defined in the regular rehearsing and reenactment of this story which has given it birth, the story of the self-emptying of God in the ministry, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Its visible centre as a continuing social entity is that weekly repeated event in which believers share bread and wine as Jesus commanded, as his pledge to them and their pledge to him that they are one with him in his passion and one with him in his victory. Instead of the celebration of the sabbath as the end of God’s old creation, they celebrate the first day of the week, the Lord’s Day, as the beginning of the new creation. In this they find enacted and affirmed the meaning and goal of their lives as part of the life of the cosmos, their stories part of the universal story. This story does indeed lead to a glorious end and is therefore filled with meaning, but the end is not some far distant date in terrestrial history. The end is the day when Jesus shall come again, when his hidden rule will become manifest and all things will be seen as they truly are. That is why we repeat at each celebration of the Lord’s Supper the words which encapsulate the whole mystery of the faith: “Christ has died, Christ has risen: Christ shall come again.”

Lesslie J. Newbiggin, The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 120-21.

Reflection: The kids in my son's school

My son goes to a small Christian school. It's a great community and I have met some wonderful Christian families there. I am very grateful to God for that.

Here is an encouraging story about some students at the school. A group of them were on a school trip to Canberra. On their way back they had lunch in a country town. As they had lunch someone was watching how they behaved and afterwards he commented on their good behaviour and maturity. He is right, I think. The school is a good school. Most of the parents are Christians. They provide a stable and secure home environment, and know how to teach their children to behave.

But my thoughts go to the kids in other schools, schools in the low socioeconomic suburbs of Melbourne. I hear stories of a Christian school teacher who worked for many years in one of those schools. She found herself spending most of her time dealing with the issues that children from dyfuncational families faced. The fact is that it is not the fault of these children that their behaviour is not-so-good. They just happened to have born into families that were less fortunate. For some of them, their parents were migrants from poor countries. They came to Melbourne to flee from poverty and oppression, and found themselves struggling with the language and the culture. They just happened to be born in a country where life was not at all as easy as Australia.

My heart goes out to those children, whose prospects of life will not be the same as children in my son's school. My heart goes to them because they are in fact in our own "backyard", and I suspect that Jesus would have gone to them if he were here today.

Closing the Gap

This is a good clip from OMF about serving the urban poor.

(More OMF video clips can be found on OMF Media.)

My reflection: This morning at our Sunday service

This morning in our little Christian community we heard two inspirational stories.

We prayed for a man who was taking up a job in a place near Alice Springs. He will be working in some kind of youth at risk program. There are both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Then there was a long-term member of the church asking prayer for her new job. She has been a teacher in a socio-econ0mically poor suburb for many years, helping and teaching kids from dysfunctional backgrounds. Now she is taking on a new job in a special school, where the children suffer from intellectual disability. She says that she is looking after eight children, all of them have great needs. It's been very challenging to say the least.

They are people who want to serve some of the most vulnerable people in Australia, and I am really inspired from them.

Last Sunday we had a lovely lunch with some old friends. I commented that this little church would not grow. One of our friends - who, I think, is capable of making some of the most insightful comments - said that growth is not measured by numbers. (Well, that's my interpretation of what she said.) It is precisely women and men like the above that make our little church such an amazing community. I would say they truly have something close to the heart of Jesus, and they willingly (and sacrificially) use their gifts to serve the people whom God loves.

Living out the gospel as a community

I just came back from a leadership meeting in a Christian community that I belong to. I am so blessed to be part of the community. Here are some reflections from the meeting.

We talked about our building project, and part of the planning permit application is that we want the redevelopment to include provisions for affordable housing for the disadvantaged people in the area. Isn't it great that a building project is not so much about how we can benefit from it, but about how we can walk with the vulnerable and marginalised?

We discussed the challenges we faced in providing accommodation and pastoral care for asylum seekers and refugees. We talked about providing facilities for a local toy library and playgroup. Two members of the leadership team talked about their involvement in the recent Kinglake bush fire relief effort. In case you think that we are a big church with a lot of human and financial resources, we are in fact a very small community with around 50 people in the Sunday service! As a relatively new member of the community I am amazed by the amount of work we do with the community.

In the absence of a full-time minister, we discussed how we might share the load for one another. We want to make sure that no-one is taken for granted. We want to ensure that no-one feels that they have to do everything - ie. everyone should feel that they can say no when asked to do things for the community.

I am learning heaps from this little group of people.

Looking for a good book to read?

Here are two books I read last year.

(1) The Kite Runner by Khald Hosseini

The Kite Runner is a tale of friendship, betrayal and redemption. It is about human’s struggles with sin and family traditions. It is about personal and cultural honour and shame. It will also help us understand the lives of Afghan migrants in the West. Read my book review for more info about this book.

(2) The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical by Shane Claiborne

In this book we see what an authentic Christian community looks like. We read stories of Christians living among the ghettos in America. We find followers of Jesus dressing the wounds of lepers in Asia. We see Christian communities in impoverished neighbourhoods. We find Christ’s love shine in the “abandoned places of the empire” (as Claiborne puts it), where there are oppression and economic hardships. Have a look at my book review to find out more about this book.