Collision of Collusion

This weekend was what I might call eventful. It was one of those weekends that left Natalie and me drained and exhausted, fighting to stay awake until we hit the bed at 9:00 p.m. Sunday night. (The interlocking chairs we use for pews never looked so comfortable!) The best place to start will be the end…

Sunday night. Garth was out of town (Saturday night his basketball team from Rochester College won the USCAA national championship), so I was given the green light to lead our congregation. Now, that is an interesting thing on a Sunday night. We tend to get a pretty poor return on our Sunday morning investment, usually pulling back only about 15% of the a.m. attendance. (This is important as we continue our backwards journey!)

I dove into exilic Isaiah, exploring the hopelessness of life in captivity, the despair that comes when God seems to be absent, and the desperate need to hear a word of ‘good news’ when horrifying headlines are all that can be found in the Israelite Exilic Daily.

It is our story, really. We live in a world that is a lot like that. We live in a society that is caught in captivity and that is really searching for something, some answer to the questions of life, some hope in the midst of darkness. When you sit at coffee shops, you can overhear conversations in which people are searching for something. When you listen to the radio, you can hear the lyrics of artists who are crying out with real and tough questions about life and faith and hope. When you watch movies and television, you can see the same…

We then broke out into a discussion of what it means to deliver a word of ‘good news’ into our postmodern, post-Christian context. Traditional methods of evangelism do not work. We must learn to listen so that we can speak the evangel, the good news, into their situation. As Christians, we must believe that faith, the foundation of our lives, speaks ‘good news’ into daily existence. If not, it is a weak, shaky, and fractured foundation.

Sunday morning. Garth was out of town (see above!), David Fleer brought us the Word. Fleer opened up to Acts 17 and used Paul’s dialogue on faith with the Athenians as a challenging model for how we can engage our post-Christian culture with the message of God. It was a powerful and provocative message for our fairly sheltered little church family. It spoke right to the heart of the question that I have been trying to encourage us to struggle with lately, “What does it mean to be the body of Christ, the church in north Oakland County today? How do we live transformed lives and call those around us who are not yet Christian to transformation in a post-Christian age?”

At the end of our service, one of our teens put on Christ in baptism. He made the decision to fulfill the commitment his family made to raise him into faith when they had him baptized as an infant. He had first voiced his decision to take this step in his journey of faith when we were in Gatlinburg, TN for Winterfest. This last week we chatted about his decision and the implications of the step on his journey from this point on. Sunday he went into the waters and wrote his story into the great narratives of the faith. He joined the children of Israel as they placed their feet on dry ground, walking into freedom across a water-walled path where a sea once stood (1 Cor. 10). He joined Noah’s family in a Gopher wood ark (1 Pet. 3). He was ‘hidden in Christ with God’ (Col 1). His life’s story became the story of Christ as we was buried and raised with him, to live new life, the resurrected life (Rom. 6). He was reshaped as clay in the new creative work of God (2 Cor. 5). He took off of the old self and clothed himself with the new clothes of Christ (Eph. 4). Sunday morning after his baptism, he put on a new outfit that he and his mom bought this week for the first time, reminding him of how he has put on the clothes of Christ in a new way. After the final benediction, our teens moved chairs and transformed the auditorium into a dining room, so that we could have a celebration feast.

Saturday night. Most of the past week was spent in anticipation of this event. To be honest, I lost a great deal of sleep and had several nightmares about this forum. Saturday we had the first of an ongoing series of dialogues with the Lake Orion family about what it means to be the church here and how we can rethink our times of meeting together to better answer the calling of God to engage God in worship, to live transformed lives, and to embody a more missional existence here in the community to which we have been called.

My anxiety was not unwarranted. For many, this conversation is scary at best, heretical at worst. It all stems from the foundational differences in the ways in which members of family view the world, the Scriptures, and the life of faith. We are a diverse bunch here, and pride ourselves on being so, but this is really the first time this diversity has been put to the test in a dialogue.

For the most part, the meeting went well. My nightmares of people throwing stale Sam’s Choice tortilla chips or slightly oxidized celery across the room never came to fruition. No one stood up and screamed at anyone else for their ‘liberal’ or ‘legalistic’ ideas. I only had two people trying to tie me to the stake. Luckily we were in the Fellowship Hall, so Natalie used the sink sprayer to put out the flames!

There were some heated moments, some people just really struggled to understand the point of the conversation and do not support it continuing. They felt that the meeting was a collision in collusion. That I, along with some others, was working as a change agent to introduce foreign things into the church. Of course, most people embraced the discussion, even those who are more traditional or who loathe the thought of change.

For the most part, our people desperately want to be challenged to walk the road of authenticity, to engage the journey of discipleship, and to answer the call of the incarnation to step into the world and help people see what it means to live the out the gospel today.

So, in reality my weekend story comes back around full circle. Sunday evening and Sunday morning only served to challenge our family to think more intentionally, to think outside the box, to think more passionately about the ways in which we can live out the call of God to be a church family that was sent to north Oakland County to be a missional people. We have a long road ahead, and I have discovered many other things about this church family, about ministry, and about myself this weekend, but those will have to wait for another time.

God, continue to challenge us to step out of our safety bubbles, out of our “safe” and “comfortable” church services and buildings, out of our “safe” circles of friends, so that we can listen to the world and discover how your gospel speaks hope and life and new creation into their brokenness and need. Amen.