Healthy, Connected, and…Frail?

“A healthy church is one in which we seek to stay connected with God by seeking to connect others to God, one in which we 'win God' by converting one another, and convert one another by our truthful awareness of frailty.”

Rowan Williams, Where God Happens, 27.

Another snippet from a book on the Desert Fathers by Archbishop Rowan Williams has triggered another round of obsessing about the "Jesus Creed" of loving God and neighbor:  “Have I got this all backwards… again?”  Williams definition of a “healthy church” has the requisite “love God” and "love neighbor" that certainly squares with the core teaching of Jesus. 

But he offers a most challenging twist on the usual order.  Most of us say, “I’ll first love God and then look out to my neighbor.”  That is, that after I am “prayed up”, “spiritually centered”, have a great "experience" of worship, feel "inspired" and "connected" to God and have had my fill of the Lord’s Supper or the latest praise band, I will then take my spiritually-sated self out into the world and see what I can do.

But Archbishop Williams turns the statement on its head.  And then offers a most unexpected action step.

First, the “turn.” 
“A healthy church is one in which we seek to stay connected with God by seeking to connect others to God, one in which we “win God” by converting one another.”  In a church world that has been driven by creating environments where people can “connect with God”, the Desert Fathers, Williams said, realized that we find God primarily by connecting others to God.  That as we seek to reach out to others, share the presence of God with others and by our efforts bring God to others, we discover (or maybe better "recognize")  that God is already deeply present with us.  As we join the Spirit’s efforts to glorify (another word for “reveal” or “show”) God to those who have lost connection with God, we find, to our great amazement that we who are doing the connecting are experiencing the most undeniable sense of  God’s presence at work in and through our lives.  We “win God” by focusing on “winning the neighbor” to God.  (Now  doesn’t that feel all backward and out of order?)

Then, the unexpected action step. 

We “convert one another by our truthful awareness of frailty.”  Most of us think that if we are going to “convert” or “win” others to God then it will only come as we are “convincing”, “winning”, “attractive” and “strong” in faith and belief.  But Williams tells us that as the Desert Fathers fled to solitude, they discovered the depths of their own sin, their own immeasurable need for God, their own weakness, frailty and inability to truly love their neighbors (why else would they become recluses, no?).  And as they developed and shared a “truthful awareness of frailty”, they revealed the God they had found. 

This is a far cry from the way most of us go about “doing church”, “arguing for the faith”, “converting” or “convincing” others.  I thought about this last week with the passing of Jerry Falwell.  How much more “moral” would our country had become if there was a group of Christians who freely admitted that we are the “Immoral Majority”.  That is, that we are sinners, we are scared, we are prone to fight and bicker and judge and pull away and live alienated from each other and so we need desperately to pray for spiritual and political leaders who will--because they live with “truthful awareness of frailty”--do everything they can to work for a just, compassion and moral society.

As I sit with more and more people who are feeling disconnected from church and disconnected from God, I am a beginning to wonder if we have the whole thing backward. Maybe we’ll find God and a healthy church the more we “we seek to stay connected with God by seeking to connect others to God” through truthful awareness of frailty both in ourselves and in our world.

Comments

[Bill]

Wow, this was an awesome post. We have been knee deep in this stuff for the past couple of months at our church. We always struggle with a body that connects with one another. But recently I have come to the realization that when we try to build community for "community sake", it falls flat and misses the point. But when people are on "mission together", community develops. When people are reaching outside of themselves to others, connecting happen among themselves. Your post was good food for thought and a fresh way of processing all this stuff.

[Bill Smith]

Todd, I havn't read the whole book so obviously I am speaking from a limited perspective but it seems that worship/connection begins with what God has done not with what we do. It seems that Williams language could easily lead to an overemphasis on what we do. I would ask Williams about what or who it is that we taking to others. In my readings it seems that many people are focusing on concepts or practices that are devoid of specifics of gospel centered faith for a spirituality that centers on ideas of humility, openness, love, etc. Historical Christianity is a response to the God who has demonstrated his love in Christ.