Part 2 of the story of our missional community (a Christianity more than beer and opium)
So here is the second half of our story at The Hill community at SMU:
Francis Chan ruined my life. I was at a conference in the Dallas area where Chan was speaking on leadership. He said something to the crowd that I will never forgive him for. Commenting on his journey the past few years, Francis Chan discussed his realization about the state of the type of ministry he was building. He said that if Jesus moved into his town and started a church, Chan could outgrow him…and one day he will have to give an account for that. This statement wreaked havoc on my heart. This started me taking a sobering look in the mirror and my surroundings. I felt like scales fell off my eyes as I began to read some writings by Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Marx.
In Attack upon Christendom, Kierkegaard gives a sobering account of the state of Christianity in Denmark and surrounding areas. He says that New Testament Christianity is marked by being salt and light, sacrificing and denying one’s self, all for the sole benefit of bringing glory to God with their lives. However, the Christianity he was experiencing was marked by a people who sought to pleasure themselves. They have already figured out and secured their eternity, so now they are free to pursue earthly pleasures that would rival the common day pagan. Self denial, in the eyes or Kierkegaard, would be a joke to Denmark Christianity. Yet no one would laugh. He illustrates this by telling the story of an innkeeper who sells his beer one cent cheaper than it costs him. So he is losing money, yet sold 100,000 bottles. He gets confused with a number that large and thinks that this is a good thing. If it were just ten bottles, the innkeeper would be clear that this is a loss to his business. But at 100,000 it gets cloudy. Kierkegaard says this is Christianity in Denmark. For a Christian nation, the individual units are not Christian, at least not as the New Testament defined a Christian. Yet the sheer number of those who claim to be Christian is confusing everyone. They claim it a victory because the numbers suggest so. But, as stated above, these people do not embody New Testament Christianity. They claim the title, but do not fulfill its requirements. Kierkegaard is eager to separate himself from that Christianity, as well as New Testament Christianity. He is just a poet who is observing a sad state of events.
Karl Marx makes another observation about Religion in general. Karl Marx believed that everything revolves around class struggle. Man makes religion; religion does not make man. The real struggle is class; religion only distracts and enforces the struggle. Religion is the opium of the people. Opium makes people feel better when they shouldn’t; it takes the suck out of life.
To sum it up, Christianity should be more than beer and opium. Kierkegaard taught me that numbers can sometimes confuse us about how successful something really is. Marx taught me that, in some ways, Evangelicalism has reinforced his idea as religion as the opium of the people. How is evangelicalism enforcing this? We communicate Christianity as “this will make your life better, no matter how much it stinks now.” Our worship today is therapeutic, to make people feel better about themselves, basically, to take the suck out of life.
The problem with this is that it does not reflect the gospel Jesus communicated. I realized that I wanted to participate with God in creating a community that embodied the gospel of self-sacrifice, joining in on God’s mission of breaking in his reign on earth as it is in heaven. So, for a time, we discontinued worship and all the glitz to focus purely on the gospel and how it is a subversive script to the culture around us, painting a new picture of what human flourishing looks like. We have created a missional community that seeks to be Incarnational, being in and a part of the injured cultural context we found ourselves in with the heart of the humble, servant Jesus. We have created a missional community that seeks to join God in renewing all things through our redemptive attitudes, actions, behaviors, relationships, and (to an extent) society. The gospel does more than just take the suck out of life. It transforms humanity at its very core by challenging the status quo with its message of Jesus as the world’s true Lord. But it is this hard-to-swallow reality that makes possible a new way of life that brings about ultimate human flourishing.
So, in short, this is where we are now as a community: joining God in the in-breaking of his reign, joining him in the renewal of all things.
