Waking Up the Dead

The joyful message of Easter is, “He is risen!” Yet, we become so caught up in the joy of that message that we miss another important detail of the story. When you read Luke’s account of the resurrection, when the women come to the tomb, the angels say, “He is risen!” But before that, they ask the women a question, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”

That question is a challenge to all of us. “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”

When we hear those voices that tell us that, as a church we need to accommodate, compromise, and surrender to the world, it is a sign that we, as a church, have become comfortable with living among the dead. If we have no message of hope, no message of mercy, no message of forgiveness and grace, then we have nothing to offer the world but a eulogy.

Yet, there’s more to the resurrection story. In Matthew and Mark, the women are told that Jesus “is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him.” When the disciples do see Jesus in Galilee, he gives them a job to do: “Go into all the world and make disciples of all nations.” In other words, “Go out there and wake up the dead! Go out there and tell them that there’s a new life available to them. Tell them that they don’t have to remain dead in their sins, but they can live again.”

Jesus Christ has opened the door to a new life. Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen. And he has gone before you into Galilee. Go, catch up with him. Go and see him. Listen to his voice. He is calling us, not to become comfortable among the dead, but to wake up the dead. Wake up the dead with the message of resurrection, of forgiveness, of love and joy and peace.

What do we say to the voices that would have us abandon our message of forgiveness and mercy for a message of accommodation and compromise? To them, we say this: Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd, laid down his life for those who are lost and hurting and suffering, in bondage to sin. He has entrusted to the church the only message that will bring those lost, hurting souls new life; and that message begins with the gracious invitation, “Repent and believe.”

If the church has lost its passion for that message, then the church has ceased to be the church. May it never be! May we never lose our passion for speaking the language of the Shepherd: the language of forgiveness, the language of hope, the language of grace, and, most importantly, the language of uncompromised and unconditional love.

Taking Church to the People

With 130 million lost souls in need of redemption, America is now the largest mission field in the English-speaking world. This may come as a shock to the many regular church-goers who have always thought of America as the beacon of (Christian) hope for the rest of the world. Their ignorance of and apathy toward a popular culture that is coming apart at the seams is painful evidence that the church in America is in no better shape than the culture itself.

The decline of "Christian America" presents the church with a truly historic opportunity to transform the culture it has failed to preserve. But if the people in the pews and the pulpits wish to seize this opportunity and usher in a new era of spiritual vitality and robust disciple-making, they are going to have to let go of their sentimental attachment to ornate buildings and throw off the shackles of enslaving bureaucracies and suffocating infrastructures. Continuity, versatility, and portability are the watchwords for the church in the still dawning 21st century.

Continuity links the church of the present with the church of the past and the future. The unbroken line of Apostolic Tradition is the tie that binds the church in the power of the Holy Spirit from age to age as it experiences and bears witness to the Risen Christ in its midst, drawing believers to himself and sending them forth to transform a broken, fallen world.

Versatility allows the church to frame its message in a manner which will reach diverse audiences through diverse means while maintaining the essential unity of the message itself. There is only one Lord, only one Savior, only one truth which sets all people free. But there are as many ways to communicate this one truth as there are gifts of the Spirit distributed to equip the saints for this very purpose.

Portability means the church must be willing to think of itself in terms of the well-traveled Tabernacle, rather than the permanently fixed Temple. In the days of the Tabernacle, God's presence was never confined to one location, as the Temple seemed to suggest. His place was among his people. A careful reading of Scripture from beginning to end reveals that this was and still is God's intention. Revelation 21:3 says, "Behold, the tabernacle of God is with man." He longs to be "Emmanuel," God with us, always and everywhere.

The Church is not a building, nor is it a bureaucracy, nor an infrastructure. It is a community of believers under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, called out of the world yet sent into the world to transform the fallen order with the saving message of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. For too long, the Church has thrown its spiritual and financial resources into buildings, bureaucracies, and infrastructures. Its members have sat back in their comfortable padded pews and waited for the people to come to them. "Our hearts, our minds, our doors are always open," we have told the people of the world. Yet the people have not come through our doors, no matter how open our hearts and minds may be. Now, there are more outside our doors than inside.

Jesus said, "Go into all the world." He did not say, "Wait for all the world to come to you." The Great Commission is a command to take church to the people, not simply to invite people to come to church.

Developing a Missional Hermeneutic

The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative by Christopher J.H. Wright (IVP Academic) is a long read (535 pages). I have barely finished the first 100 pages, but his initial premise is quite intriguing. Wright argues for a missional hermeneutic, that is, a method of reading the Bible as the product of mission, as having emerged within the context of mission, and (as its title suggests) as the grand narrative of the mission of God. More important than the biblical basis for mission (something seminaries have embedded in the minds of students for over a century) is the missional basis for the Bible.

"A missional hermeneutic of the Bible," says Wright, "begins with the Bible's very existence. For those who affirm some relationship (however articulated) between these texts and the self-revelation of our Creator God, the whole canon of Scripture is a missional phenomenon in the sense that it witnesses to the self-giving movement of this God toward his creation and us, human beings in God's own image, but wayward and wanton. The writings that now comprise our Bible are themselves the product of and witness to the ultimate mission of God" (p. 48).

Quite often, the biblical "text in itself is a product of mission in action." Wright sees this coming through clearly in the writings of Paul and Luke (p. 49).

This is easily demonstrated in the case of the New Testament. Most of Paul's letters were written in the heat of his missionary efforts: wrestling with the theological basis of the inclusion of the Gentiles, affirming the need for Jew and Gentile to accept one another in Christ and in the church, tackling the baffling range of new problems that assailed young churches as the gospel took root in the world of Greek polytheism, confronting incipient heresies with clear affirmations of the supremacy and sufficiency of Jesus Christ, and so on.

And why were the Gospels so called? Because they were written to explain the significance of the evangel--the good news about Jesus of Nazareth, especially his death and resurrection. Confidence in these things was essential to the missionary task of the expanding church. And the person to whom we owe the largest quantity of the New Testament, Luke, shapes his two-volume work in such a way that the missionary mandate to the disciples to be Christ's witnesses to the nations comes as the climax to volume one and the introduction to volume two.

But the Old Testament, also, should be seen as the product of mission, as "many of these texts emerged out of the engagement of Israel the surrounding world, in the light of the God they knew in their history and in covenental relationship. People produced texts in relation to what they believed God had done, was doing, or would do in their world" (p. 50)

Read in such a way, as the grand narrative of the mission of God, Scripture becomes not merely a mandate for mission, but a witness to mission. Mission is thus understood not as a human, but as a divine, initiative. "In short," says Wright, "a missional hermeneutic proceeds from the assumption that the whole Bible renders to us the story of God's mission through God's people in their engagement with God's world for the sake of the whole of God's creation" (p. 51).

What I find interesting about this definition of a missional hermeneutic is how closely it resonates with M. Robert Mulholland's definition of spiritual formation: the process of being conformed to the image of Christ for the sake of others. As a means of spiritual formation, the Bible is not only inspired of God, but also inspiring to the people of God, equipping and empowering them for participation in the mission of God for the redemption of the whole creation.

Missional vs. Emergent: The Real Thing vs. The Counterfeit

A hundred years from now, church historians will likely acknowledge the present phenomenon of the "Missional Church" as a movement of great significance at the beginning of the twenty first century. Missional theologians such as Alan Hirsch, David Fitch, Alan Roxburgh, Fred Romanuk, and Thomas Rainer will be remembered as important figures in the shaping of a missional theology which helped the church rediscover its roots in fulfilling the Great Commission. A footnote to any such historical analysis might make mention of a parallel movement known as the "Emergent Church," which appeared on the scene at roughly the same point in history and so eagerly latched on to the "Missional" label that, for a time, it was difficult to discern the difference between the two. But Emergent and Missional are two different animals, and no amount of protestation from the gurus of Emergent is going to change what, for them, is a most inconvenient fact.

Emergent wishes to be Missional. It co-opts much of the language of Missional. The sleeve designs on its publications resemble those of the publications of Missional. But, when all is said and done, Emergent is but a counterfeit of Missional, sustained in contemporary evangelical circles only by the boisterous bluster of its leading proponents who have proven quite adept at shutting down the "conversation" at the first sign of criticism.

Missional literature is doctrinally sound and theologically rich. Emergent literature is doctrinally indifferent and theologically irresponsible. A case in point is Emergent guru Tony Jones's recent presentation on the relationship between patristic literature and the present-day church at the 2007 Wheaton Theology Conference. An upcoming book on the conference will not include Jones's paper and he lamented on his blog about the reasons for its rejection.

Ultimately, I was told, I did not treat the Fathers and the Councils as normative to the life of the church today. I argued that we're in conversation with the Fathers today, just as they were in conversation with one another in their day. I also posited that the victory of one theological position over another was as much a matter of politics and context as a matter of divine providence. Finally, the lack of marginalized voices in all of the ancient (and medieval and modern)theological debates should give us all pause.

Does that mean that the Councils and creeds and Fathers lack authority today? I hope not. But I hope that they will have a more credible authority if we understand all of the vicissitudes of their times. As in our day, they had pressures on them from all sides, and, while I in no way think this precludes God's Spirit from guiding the process, it was not a unanimous and clean decision on, say, the dual-nature of Christ.

After reading the first half of the presentation, it is rather apparent why it would be rejected by an institution as theologically careful about its image as Wheaton. But, even given the wider latitude of the wider Christian community, Jones's argument does not pass muster. If you're going to challenge the classical definition of orthodoxy ("what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all"), speak out on behalf of "marginalized voices" with all the revisionist passion of a feminist in search of a lost goddess, and suggest that a doctrine as essential to the Christian understanding of salvation as "say, the dual-nature of Christ" needs to be re-examined or "deconstructed," you had better be prepared to answer some tough questions about the implications of your arguments. Apparently, Jones was not so prepared. Moreover, his lament exhibits an all-too-typical trait of the Emergents. When challenged on substance, they become defensive and thin-skinned to the point of annoyance. It is a sign of maturity to accept criticism with grace and dignity. In this area, the Emergents are decidedly lacking.