Ben Sternke

Field notes on life and mission with God in post-Christendom

Thoughts

Church participation as suffering

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Here’s part of a Karl Barth quote from The Epistle to the Romans that Alan Jacobs put on his blog recently (emphases mine):

We must not, because we are fully aware of the internal opposition between the Gospel and the Church, hold ourselves aloof from the Church or break up its solidarity; but rather, participating in its responsibility, and sharing the guilt of its inevitable failure, we should accept it and cling to it. — I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing witness with me in the Holy Ghost, that I have great sorrow and unceasing pain in my heart. This is the attitude to the Church engendered by the Gospel. He who hears the gospel and proclaims it does not observe the Church from outside. He neither misunderstands it and rejects it, nor understands it and – sympathizes with it. He belongs personally within the Church. But he knows also that the Church means suffering and not triumph.

I know this temptation to separate the Gospel and the Church. To think that I can somehow fly above the “tainted” expression of the imperfect churches and believe the “pure” Gospel. In my twenties, after I came home from a discipleship school with a missions organization, I rejected the church for a season because they weren’t serious enough for me. They didn’t “get it” like I did, and I didn’t want to associate myself with a compromised church.

This impulse is rooted in the instinct to avoid suffering. In an effort distance ourselves from those who would taint our reputation as a certain kind of Christian (not one of “those”), we don’t fully identify with the Church. We try to maintain a level of “purity,” trying to be Christian without the Church.

But Barth is right – to receive the Gospel is to receive the Church, with all her imperfections. To believe the Gospel is to become part of the Church, and so we identify with her and participate in her life, for good or ill. It is a form of suffering to be part of the Church, with all its warts.

And the only way to be part of the Church is to participate in the life of a church. The only way to live out the Gospel is to involve ourselves in the life of a local church community. And it’s like family: you can’t opt out just because you disagree with something Uncle Fred said about immigrants.

Even in a church plant like ours, where we have a strong “front-end filter” that weeds out a lot of the people I’d be embarrassed to claim, we’ve had people say explicitly racist things to first-time visitors, and we have a lot of relational dysfunction we are constantly helping people wade through. There is a suffering inherent in claiming all of these people as my brothers and sisters in Christ (just as I’m sure there’s a suffering inherent in them claiming me).

Of course, this embracing of suffering is rooted in the Incarnation. In Christ, God identifies fully with his sinful and broken people, enduring the suffering of being associated with creatures who are in every way “beneath” him. And this is the only reason we are saved from the devastating consequences of our sinful choices. Thanks be to God!

Athanasius on the Incarnation

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Athansius of AlexandriaI’m reading through Athanasius’ On the Incarnation right now for a church fathers discussion group I’m part of, and (this may not surprise anyone) it’s just fantastic. A few observations from just the first few pages:

God’s love and goodness are at the core of the incarnation.

“[The world’s] re-creation was accomplished by the Word who created it in the beginning… by the love for humankind and the goodness of the Father… he appeared to us in a human body.” There is no equivocation here: the Word created the world out of love, and the Word becomes flesh for our salvation out of love.

Athanasius works “backward” from Christ, rather than “forward” from supposed “universal principles.”

The creator of the world is “the Father of Christ,” which brings a specificity to God’s identity by inextricably identifying him with the Incarnate One.

It isn’t that we know something about Christ because he “comes from God,” it’s that we only know God because we’ve seen Christ. This is a distinctly Christian way of doing theology that we need to reclaim.

Death is a natural consequence, not a punishment.

The Fall is about humans succumbing to the “natural” consequences of corruption and death, it’s not an explicit “punishment” that God doles out to law-breakers.

We were created to “share in the power of the Word,” but our sin cuts us off from this sharing, and thus humans must “endure the corruption of death according to nature.” Death is not a divine punishment for immoral behavior, it’s the natural consequence of disconnecting from divine life.

Rejecting God results in “non-being,” not eternal punishment.

The assumed end of those who want no part of sharing in the power of the Word is “non-being,” not eternal punishment.

Get ready for a longer quote here:

For if, having a nature that did not once exist, they were called into existence by the Word’s advent and love for human beings, it followed that when human beings were bereft of the knowledge of God and had turned to things which exist not–evil is non-being, the good is being, since it has come into being from the existing God–then they were bereft also of eternal being.

Since we only live and move and have our being “in him,” it follows that those who extricate themselves from divine life will eventually succumb to non-being.

And that’s only the first few pages! Looking forward to continuing to dive into this ancient classic.

Lifetime value and the slow drip of planting a church with integrity

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Here’s Seth Godin on how we underestimate “lifetime value” (by a lot):

If an Apple upgrade breaks your phone and you switch to Android, it costs Apple more than $10,000.

If you switch supermarkets because a clerk was snide with you, it removes $50,000 from the store’s ongoing revenue.

If a kid has a lousy first grade teacher or is bullied throughout middle school, it might decrease his productivity for the rest of us by a million dollars.

Torrents are made of drips.

The short-term impact (plus or minus) of our work or our errors is dwarfed by the long-term effects. Compounded over time, little things become big things.

This got me thinking about church planting, especially the way we’re doing it:

  • Focused first on investing in people’s discipleship and growth over the long haul rather than trying to fill up a room as quickly as possible,
  • Embracing truly formational worship and community practices (even if some people leave because they don’t want to be bothered), rather than keeping everything on a que sera, sera level,
  • A strong “front door filter” that lays our most “controversial” cards on the table right away (check our the “Culture” section of our theological influences page, for example), rather than a shallow and wide front door that eventually turns into a bait-and-switch later.

As we do this, I’m always tempted to measure our short-term “success” and feel discouraged. It’s not an efficient way to gather a crowd, for sure.

But torrents are made of drips, and we’re banking on the long-term effects of our work taking deep roots in people’s lives and in the neighborhoods and communities we’re part of. We’re counting on the fact that “compounded over time, little things become big things,” in Godin’s language.

Or, in Jesus’ language, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”

This is the unseen dynamic of God’s kingdom that we are counting on by planting this way. As we gather for worship, fellowship, and discipleship, we are participating in divine life, steadily being transformed into the likeness of Christ as a community.

And we’re trusting that these small participations will become transformations that compound over time to create something larger and more substantial that can stand the test of time and provide spiritual food and shelter for hundreds of years.

Defending vs witness-bearing

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Wesley Hill recently wrote on his desire to stay in the Episcopal Church despite the fact that he is in the minority when it comes to his view of same-sex marriage (he affirms a traditional Christian view of marriage and sexuality).

In the piece, he makes an excellent distinction between defending something you believe in and witnessing to something you believe in:

If I were to leave the Episcopal Church because I disagree with the majority of my fellow Episcopalians about the moral (and indeed ontological) status of same-sex marriage, the implication would seem to be that I think my view is a kind of “private” conviction, and I simply need to find the best niche market for it, in light of its rejection in my church.

But that’s not the way I think about the traditional Christian view of marriage. It’s not a “private judgment,” applicable only to those already convinced of its truth. Rather, traditional marriage is a divine given, part of the fabric of creation and of the redeemed order in Christ. It shall not be revised but renewed in the kingdom of God — when the earthly parable or mystery yields to its heavenly consummation (Mark 10:1-12; Eph. 5:21-33; Rev. 19:9).

What this means is that while traditional marriage can be lamented, rejected, or rebelled against, it cannot be undone. And therefore, my calling in the Episcopal Church, as I understand it, is not to defend traditional marriage so much as it is to bear witness to it — to point to it, to remind my brothers and sisters of its givenness and permanency, to highlight its scriptural contours and its ultimate destiny (Matt. 22:30), to hold it in trust until its truth and beauty can be seen again for what it is.

Notice: he does not need to defend traditional marriage, because he has confidence that it is a theological given, and therefore cannot be undone.

It seems to me that whenever we talk about defending a belief or conviction, we betray our lack of confidence in its truth and reality. We are treating whatever belief we are defending as a fragile, “private” conviction that must be guarded lest it disappear.

So when we’re talking about “defending” religious liberty, or biblical authority, or the traditional Christian view of marriage, we’re actually betraying our lack of belief in those realities! We’re revealing that we don’t think they come from God at all, but are rather fragile human ideas that need to be propped up by legislation and coercion.

But if something is truly a theological given, something created and ordained by God, something permanent, something really true, it doesn’t need to be defended. But you can bear witness to it, even if no one listens or cares, because you’re confident that you’re bearing witness to something that is real, something substantial. Something that can’t be undone.

This is how the early church spoke of the resurrection of Jesus: not as an idea to defend, but a reality to bear witness to. When they were arrested and threatened and told not to speak in Jesus’ name anymore, their response was “We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20).

As St. Augustine said, “The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.”

So if you feel a knee-jerk reaction to defend a theological idea against attack, maybe stop and reflect on how firm that conviction really is for you. The stronger the instinct to defend, the weaker the actual belief. What’s at stake for you in this? What do you stand to lose? What are you afraid of?

But if something is truly real, you merely need to bear witness to it (and then be willing to suffer the consequences of your witness – like Jesus and the early church).

Stephen witnessed to the reality of the resurrection, and paid for it with his life. This is one of the essential differences between defending and witness-bearing: defenders are concerned with staying in power, but witness-bearers are willing to lay their lives down, bearing the consequences of their witness when it is not received.

This is because if you really believe in the resurrection, you’ve got nothing to fear, because ultimately no one can take anything away from you.

Here’s to less defending and more witness-bearing!

I re-installed Instagram because vacation

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I’m on vacation, and I decided to re-install Instagram.

I deleted Instagram off my phone awhile back, because my mind felt too cluttered by social media accounts. I think it was during Lent. I also deleted my Twitter and Facebook apps so that I needed to use a normal web browser to get on Twitter and Facebook.

I need to post to Twitter and Facebook for work, but during Lent I decided to fast from browsing any social media.

And an interesting thing happened: a ton of mental space opened up for me, and even after Lent was over, I didn’t really go back to browsing/scrolling social media. I used to religiously check my carefully curated Twitter timeline, but now I don’t. Something broke free for me in Lent that I’m grateful for.

Anyway, I’m on vacation in Minnesota right now, and because taking photos is kind of therapeutic for me, and I find that it’s really nice to look at my friend’s photos, etc, so I know what’s going on in their lives.

My sister-in-law said she likes Instagram better than Facebook because it’s just pictures! No politics, no fighting. That’s what pushed me over the edge. I re-installed Instagram and took a few photos. Here they are:

Sunset on a Minnesota lake
Old dog / Minnesota farm life
Watching the World Cup at a local bar
Nephew running