Category Archives: Jesus

Embracing our post-Christendom future

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by Jeff Gissing | @jeffgissing

We are living in a post-Christendom era–a time in which the influence of the Christian church has become significantly diminished. Post-Christendom is not post-Christian. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is as powerful as it ever was, but it’s transformative work will take place despite resistance rather than with the support of society.

Opinions differ on where we are in the process of decline, but most agree that the age of a “Christian America” has come and gone. To the extent that America is Christian that Christian faith is increasingly more akin to moral therapeutic deism described by sociologist Christian Smith.

I recently read two articles that are worthy of your time:

  • On The Telegraph blog Tim Stanley argues: “…It’s perfectly possible to be a Christian within a society that regulates or proscribes religious practices. The Christians in classical Rome or the Catholics in communist Poland proved that.” However, removing the influence of Christianity from a culture creates an undesirable alternative: “A society that has no moral point of reference beyond the reason of the individual (and who, in their right mind, would trust that?), or the ever shifting law of the land, is bound towards selfishness and tyranny.”
  • Timothy Tennent of Asbury Theological Seminary notes that we have a huge opportunity afforded by this post-Christendom period. That is the chance to recover a robust Christianity “finally set free from the domesticating influence of Christendom.” We’re not there yet. Tennent describes our depressing current reality: “We have retreated so far from biblical Christianity you can almost hear the Christian oxygen being sucked out of the culture at every turn.  The church has become one of the most vacuous spaces of all.”

It’s an exciting and alarming time to be a Christian, especially a Christian in ministry leadership. While I do not know what the future holds, I know the God who holds the future.

Don’t forget the Ascension

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Christian discipleship has a lot to do with locating yourself in the story of God. One of the ways that the Church has done this is through the Church calendar–taking time to place ourselves in the narrative of God’s redemptive work in Christ. There are other stories of which we are a part, but none is deeper or more important than the story of God’s reconciling the world to himself.

For low church evangelical protestants the temptation is to reduce this redemptive story to two movements, or even one as we’re pressured by the culture in which we live to mark time according to a different calendar–one where some of the holidays have the same name, but have very different meanings poured into them.

The Christian calendar (outside of strictly liturgical churches) often gets reduced to Christmas and Easter. If we’re honest, Christmas edges Easter out. Easter itself is often reduced to Maundy Thursday (if you’re lucky) and Easter Sunday, rather than the Triduum that the Church has historically celebrated (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday). True reflection on the work of Christ on the cross seems quite difficult absent three days to consider in community.

We rarely pause moreover to consider the significance of the Ascension to the story of God. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples that unless He leaves them the “comforter” (“counselor,” “advocate”) cannot come to them. He is speaking, of course, of the Holy Spirit.

Were it not for the Ascension, we would be without help and without a deep and living connection to the Godhead through the Holy Spirit.

Christine Sine offers a reflection on the Ascension by guiding us through the words of several liturgies used to celebrate this important day in the life of the faith.

Consider preparing for Ascension Day by reading and reflecting on the word of God.

From the Acts of the Apostles (9.11f., Phillips):

When he had said these words he was lifted up before their eyes till a cloud hid him from their sight. While they were still gazing up into the sky as he went, suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them and said, “Men of Galilee, why are you standing here looking up into the sky? This very Jesus who has been taken up from you into Heaven will come back in just the same way as you have seen him go.

And Jesus’ own words in the Gospel of John (16.7):

Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send Him to you.

Consider this liturgy from the Reformed tradition:

Our God goes up with shouts of joy!

Our Lord ascends to the sound of trumpets!
All: Sing praises to our God, sing praises!
Sing praises, sing praises to our King!
The Almighty rides in triumph.
The Almighty leads captivity captive.
Who shouts for joy? Who blows the trumpet?
The hosts of heaven sing the honor of his name;
they praise him with an endless alleluia.

-David Diephouse, Calvin College

Thanks be to God! Amen.

Recovering Biblical hospitality

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Brad Brisco over at The Missional Church blog offers some reflections on Biblical hospitality.

To be honest, hospitality is not something that comes naturally to me. I find it stressful to host people in my home–that stress often precludes real hospitality from taking place.

I’d like to get better at offering my home and my life as a place of welcome not least because Scripture places a high value on table fellowship and this may be one of the place where today’s church can offer a true alternative to the prevalent culture.

What about you? Are you gifted in hospitality? Who modeled it for you?

Can you create community?

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“Community will start again when people begin to do necessary things for each other again.” – Wendell Berry (Morris Allen Grubbs, ed. Conversations with Wendell Berry, 75).

I’ve been reflecting on what seems like an innocuous little quote. Institutions like churches and universities spend a great deal of money in the name of “creating community.” Initiatives and programs are started and funded with the purpose of bringing into being that utopian idea of “community.” Berry’s simply (and profound) observation undermines what is often an overly consumerist approach to creating community.

Some reflections:

    1. Community is not a thing to be created; it is shared activity. Community occurs when we give our shared attention and effort to something outside of ourselves.

    2. Community arises most deeply in shared “necessary things.” Healthy community implies that we rely upon our neighbors. It’s almost impossible to really rely on someone in the context of leisure or luxury. This isn’t to say that leisure or luxury are always bad only that they are limited and, of course, to some extent (especially luxury) they are optional.

    3. Community impllies reciprocity or mutuality. We need and are needed. Community cannot be uni-directional.

These values bring to mind my recent trip to Quarryville, PA. At the 2000 census the population of Quarrville was 1,994 (it occupies 1.3 sq miles of land). That means that the borough of Quarryville is about the same size as InterVarsity as a national movement and less than half the size of the university where I do collegiate ministry.

If you spend much time around the town, you’ll notice that agriculture is the primary means of sustaining a family. There are lots of farm-owners and other farmworkers around. There seem to be some dairy herds as well as land that’s producing crops.

You get the sense that there is a great degree of community in that place. It’s not the sentimental sort of community that I often fall prey to. Rather, it’s a robust form of community that for a suburban person might even feel at times gossipy, exclusive, or even provincial. However, it is real community marked principally by what Berry notes above: doing necessary things for one another.

We long to find community, but our modern consumer values mitigate against it. Consumerism makes community difficult because we come to believe that we ought to be able to buy our way out of needing other people (by purchasing a tool, hiring a handman, etc). It makes community feel burdensome. It also belittles necessary things. Who wants to spend their lives doing chores? I certainly do not, but it is entirely possible that our aversion to things mundane is detrmental to the development of our souls in a Godward direction. After all–spiritual formation is, as Eugene Peterson has written, “a long obedience in the same direction.” Mile 26 of a marathon might be a high, but most of the preceding 25 are fairly gruelling (or so I imagine).

We desire nothing so much as “to be named and placed” (Craig Goodwin, Year of Plenty, 80). And there’s no better way to experience this than to get down and dirty and do some necessary things, together.

Neuhaus on the church

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It’s always a pleasure to read something (a book, article, blog post) that gives words to thoughts I’ve been having or an idea I’ve been wrestling with. At one and the same time it assures me that I’m not alone and that there is some hope of finding a way forward in the midst of a struggle. The person who recommends such a resource is an invaluable friend to whom a great debt it owed.

Recently Allan Poole (Pastor of Blacknall Memorial Presbyterian Church) recommended the late Richard John Neuhaus’s Freedom for Ministry.

I’m less than a fourth of the way through the book so I’ll refrain from a sweeping endorsement. However, I will tell you that the first chapter of the book is a gem. In “The Thus and So-Ness of the Church,” Neuhaus reflects on the tension we ministers experience when we hold together the “church of faith” with the “church of fact.” There is a gulf between the Church as it is and as it ought to be.

Ministry takes place firmly in the church as it is. Recognizing this is one of the keys, I am sure, to faithful ministry over the long haul. Writes Neuhaus, “But, you say, you cannot love the real church [the church of fact] because it is so unspeakably unlovable [petty, self-absorbed, sometimes heretical, etc.]. But what is the “real” Church? It is a great error, I believe, to think that only what now exists is real. To view the Church in terms of possibility and promise is not to depart from reality but to encompass the greater reality” (14).

What a breath of fresh air like for an idealist like me! The church is rent asunder and distressed by heresies. It can be petty, tyrannical, apathetic, and cruel. It is an institution, an organization, and prone to all the problems that beset such as this. However, it is also the bride of Christ:

What is the Church of which we are called to be ministers and for which we are to have love unbounded? It is the Church that “Christ loved…[he] gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Eph. 5:25-27). That is the real Church. And that real Church is in continuity with, inseparable from, this empirical, existing Church with which we are so deeply and so rightly satisfied. (15)

Neuhaus powerfully names the tension I have been living. He continues: “To love the Church, then, is to help it become what it is” (15). The central element of the pastoral calling, then, is to help the church live into its identity as the bride of Christ and to do this in the way of love. What a calling!