18 Aug 05 An Invitation

In preparation for the Zoe conference, as recommended by Mike Cope, I’m reading StormFront: The Good News of God (Brownson, Dietterich, Harvey and West). This book, actually a series of papers, is written to challenge a North American view of Christianity which they contend has become a “consumerist menu of personal spiritual care products intended to assure eternal life at minimal cost to the customer.”

Some interesting ideas are suggested in this book about the incorrect way churches “market” themselves to appeal and reach a consumer oriented society. The result of this effort is a misunderstanding regarding salvation.

In the final analysis, the biblical understanding of salvation is not merely that our lives will be set right again at last. The biblical understanding of salvation is that our lives become swept up into something larger and greater than ourselves, into God’s purposes for the world. In other words, the receiving of salvation and the call to mission are not to be conceived sequentially, as if one followed the other (first salvation, then grateful obedience in mission). Rather, to receive salvation is to be called into something larger and greater than we are, to be invited to participate in God’s saving purpose and plan for the world. That is why the gospel is primarily about God, and only secondarily about us.

How would our way of doing “church” be impacted where we to adopt the view of an invitation to participate in God’s saving purpose and plan for the world?

We’ve got our purposes and our plans for our communities. We seem to charge ahead and expect God to bless something we have invited him to instead of allowing him to invite us into his work. Our numbers shrink so we automatically think it is because we are not doing whatever the church down the road is doing. So we reinvent, recast and rebrand news which has longed ceased to be good.

But our culture is relentless in its tendency to twist the biblical, missional understanding of the gospel into a consumerist one. This tragic result has been the proliferation in America of passively oriented churches, preoccupied with their own survival and the care of their own members and struggling to discover a sense of transcendence and the presence of God.

And that quote, unfortunately, has found its mark within my own church experiences.

By contrast, the gospel calls into existence churches whose fundamental identity is that of a people called to participate in God’s mission, caught up into a reality greater than themselves, invited to bear witness to the world of a new way of being human in God’s presence.

And that quote, fortunately, shows how to escape the status quo of survival. It reveals the path from passive to passion. It closes the window on struggling and successfully opens the door to the throne room of God.