Tod Bolsinger

Just the folks We Want to Welcome

Amanda Witt offers an interesting post about people who are using their kids to surreptiously seek for a God they are too embarrassed to admit they are looking for. 

"God reaches out to us wherever we are, in the midst of our conniving, in the midst of our concern for our children, even, it appears, in the midst of pretend worship."

These folks seem to be just the kind of adventurers and seekers that makes all these posts on believing and belonging so relevant. 

Belonging and Believing: So, what?

Here is my quick and dirty pastoral list of "applications."

1.  You can belong to a church without believing, but you can't be a member without being part of the body of Christ (member literally, means "body part").  When someone asks me if they can become a member of SCPC without being a believer, I don't say "no". I tell them that it's impossible.  Believers are "members" and members are "believers."  That is like asking if something can become an "arm" without becoming a "body part".

2.  We offer hospitality to people who come and who make themselves at home within our churches, but their must be a moment of discipleship where we join with the other believers and commit to the Lordship of Christ. This is the sine qua non of "joining" our church.  People can experience the church as psychologically where they "belong" (and we hope they will), but joining the church is committing to Christ and each other. 

3.  In my church (a PCUSA church) this comes at membership.  But membership gives us no privileges, just more responsibilities.  The members commit to financially support the church, to elect and serve as leaders, to raise and nurture new believers and children in the  Lord. 

4. While many today believe without belonging, this is the most pervasive mistake of the day. Indeed, I got word that the speaker at our Junior High camp told the kids that church wasn't important only faith was.  Fortunately our Junior highers saw through that and challenged the notion.   

Final, so what:  The pervasive issue in all of this is how Christianity which is a personal and communal faith deals with the pervasive, enduring, almost unquestioned heresy of the past three hundred years.  Stay tuned on Monday.

Tomorrow, a great link for your weekend reading.

Posts for the President

On Inauguration day...

Show respect for everyone. Love your Christian brothers and sisters. Fear God. Show respect for the king. (1 Peter 2:17, NLT)

I urge you, first of all, to pray for all people. As you make your requests, plead for God’s mercy upon them, and give thanks. Pray this way for kings and all others who are in authority, so that we can live in peace and quietness, in godliness and dignity. (1 Tim 2:1-2, NLT)

Obey the government, for God is the one who put it there. All governments have been placed in power by God. (Ro 13:1, NLT)

More Caught than Taught

I have always believed that Christian faith is more caught than taught.  That the community of believers are supposed to be a witness through our lips and our lives of the truth of faith and that that winsome witness is contagious to those who come in contact with us. 

For the better part of a week now, I have been blogging on the dual conviction that all believers not be part of a local church and that local churches need to do a better job of welcoming struggling believers.  I have supported the idea that the first priority of a church is to offer welcome and hospitality.  But, I have also said, belonging is the first, not final priority.  Belonging alone is not enough.  As we seek to be faithful to Jesus Christ, we cannot be building bridges of friendship that we are afraid to cross with the demands and calling of discipleship.

We need to make sure that people “catch” our faith. 

Hospitality is so important in the ministry of Jesus that he welcomes and eats with sinner, tax collectors, and “known women of ill repute.” (It just felt kind of fun to write that phrase for some reason.)  When we see the extraordinary lengths to which Jesus welcomed the outcast, it is easy to think that the gospel is nothing more than a word of welcome. 

This is often the mistake that my more liberal friends make.  In the name of hospitality, we abandon beliefs and convictions.  We welcome anyone in the name of Christ, even into leadership for the cause of Christ, even if their beliefs and lifestyles betray the word of Christ.  We tell people to come as they are and then insist that they can stay as they were. 

We also saw, this, ironically enough, in the early seeker church movement.  We wanted people to be so comfortable, to feel so welcome, that we got rid of churchy things like crosses and vestments and even prayers of confession and such.  Again seekers were told that they didn’t have to do anything that made them uncomfortable, with the great temptation that we do nothing but affirm each persons’ complacency.  (See Rob Asghars’ posts on this topic.)

But this is not the hospitality of the New Testament, nor I believe the hospitality that is meant today by emergent churches, seeker churches and even—gasp—Presbyterian churches like mine.  To say that belonging is enough is to miss what the church is: A community of disciples of Jesus.  The Body of Christ. 

Belonging is first, but belonging is not the goal.  Belonging and believing is the goal.  Both must be present.  We must have, in the words of George Gallup’s most recent material, congregational engagement and spiritual commitment.

Gallup’s material shows that most religious people today separate these two crucial elements.  Congregational engagement and spiritual commitment do not necessarily go together.  Congregational engagement is a more “psychological” experience.  It is when someone can say, “This is my church.  I belong here.  I am myself here.  My best friends are here.  I can use my talents and resources here.” 

Spiritual commitment is when a person’s lifestyle reflects a deep commitment to a faith.  When their lips and lives say, “I believe this is true.  This faith re-orders my values and decisions.  I invest in growing in this faith daily.  I am even willing to suffer some consequences to live by my convictions.” 

I believe that true discipleship of Jesus demands both.  And that when we speak of offering belonging, we are speaking of encouraging and creating the environment for what Gallup calls is congregational engagement.  And here’s the kicker—Gallup’s data shows that while spiritual commitment does not lead to congregational engagement. The reverse is true.  IF, (big, big, “if” here) those who are deeply engaged in the congregation are spiritually committed people. 

In other words, the best way for someone to become both a belonger and a believer is by first belonging to a community of believers.  (Spiritually committed believers.) 

So, what does that mean for me as a pastor?  Tomorrow a list of “so, whats?”.  But in the meantime consider this: If faith is more caught that taught, is your congregation both “contagious” enough and “close” enough to unbelievers and wayward Christian seekers for them to “catch” anything?

Birthing Christians

When Cyprian wrote in the third century "He cannot have God as his Father who does not have the church as his mother,"  he was asserting church authority.  And like Tim Stafford points out in his article, "The Church Why Bother," the reformers were not interested in weakening that stand.  But I want to offer it as more than a statement of church authority, but also as a spiritual reality.  True Christian belief is "birthed" through Christian community.

This is just a spiritual fact: there is no true believing without belonging.  True believers belong to Christ and to other believers.  They are “engrafted” into his body as “members of one another.” (Romans 12:15). 

But that true believing often starts, appropriately I might add, by “hanging out” with Christ and the believers.  By “belonging” first.  Christian personhood, like human personhood always comes to us through other believers.

Miroslav Volf reminds us (in a passage from After our Likeness, p.183 which I cite in It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian: How the Community of God Transforms Lives), “Without other human beings, even God cannot create a human being.”

Volf also says, “Christ’s presence is promised not to the believing individual directly, but rather to the entire congregation, and only through the latter to the individual.  This is why no one can come to faith alone and live in faith alone” (Volf, After Our Likeness, 162, emphasis mine). 

This is not only a challenge to unchurched believers, but also a reminder to us that when we invite someone into our fellowship, we are extending to them the good news that we both proclaim and demonstrate with our lives. 

For the gospel messages to transform they must be far more than just content communicated, even the content of the Divine love of the Father in Jesus, but also include the personal and experiential way in which that content is communicated. 

Think of the stories at bedside and the radiance of a face reflecting the love of Christ, words of admonition and the silent holding of the hand of a person in pain, eating and drinking the bread and wine, worship of the one true God, holiness and failure, manipulation and sword, the blood of the martyrs, the lives of the saints, hypocrisy and lust for power among church dignitaries and the rest of us, and economic interests and political machinations. (Volf, “Theology, Meaning and Power,” 57.) 

It seems beyond doubt that a person becomes a human being not only by learning her mother’s language but also by feeling her mother’s touch and hearing the sound of her voice. Similarly we become Christians not only by learning the language of faith but also by being “touched” by other Christians and ultimately by God on a nonsemiotic level. 

When Jesus called the disciples to follow him, it wasn’t as a bunch of individuals who were disconnected to each other.  It was within the context of a rabbinic relationship where they would be together be deeply bonded to him and each other. 

And of course, they didn’t understand exactly what they were getting themselves into when they chose to follow him.  They had to learn on the go.  They listened to his teaching and enjoyed his touch.  They partnered with him in the ministry and they ate and drank together.  They were a “band of brothers” who had no small degree of sibling rivalry and even at the very end of Jesus’ life, they still didn’t really get it.  (See Acts 1 for an amazing excerpt of how even after resurrection, the disciples still missed the point.)

In fact, until the Spirit came upon them at Pentecost, we could call the disciples followers who were not believers.  They “belong” to Jesus, but they still didn’t “get” Jesus.  In many ways, this is the state of a lot of the church today.  (What one friend insists—rightly so—on calling the “visible church”, as opposed to the “invisible church” of true believers.).  But once they did believe, then their bond to the fellowship deepened and became the primary social relationship in their lives.

Let me end with one more excerpt from my book:

The early church understood and taught that to be baptized as a Christian meant to undergo an “extraordinary thoroughgoing resocialization” so that the Community of believers “would become virtually the primary group for its members supplanting all other loyalties.” ( Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The social world of the Apostle Paul, 78.)  Through this relational restructuring of the Spirit, the believer progresses in depth of faith (relationship to God) and in transformation into the likeness of God (understood in relational terms and expressed in relationships with other believers—see 2 Corinthians 3:17-18; John 13:14-15).  Indeed, as the “fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22-26) attest, relational maturity is virtually indistinguishable from spiritual maturity and the spirituality of a Community is defined by the quality of the relationships formed.

When we as churches focus on offering belonging first (but not finally) we are offering both welcome and a challenge.  Our hospitality itself is evangelism, an offer of the good news we want adventurers to find in our midst, affirm in faith and demonstrate by joining with us. And for belonging to turn into true believing, what truly gets left behind is the goal to go it alone.

Showtime at Wittingshire

Jonathon and Amanda Witt have posted a nice review for Showtime. It is all the more meaningful because it comes from such thoughtful folks. 

If you haven't done so, already, please use this opportunity to find their fine blog.

I’ll Get By With a Little Help From My Friends.

So, I went to a Dave Wilcox concert Sunday night at a jam packed but friendly Coachhouse in San Juan Capistrano.  To tell you how good Wilcox is, I saw at least three other relatively well-known musicians at the show.

Twas a delightful evening. A good time listening to good music with good friends.  But, the best moments of the night were in the middle of what would usually be called Wilcox’s mistakes.  Twice, he forgot the words to his own songs.  Now, this wasn’t some kind of drug-induced meltdown ala Jim Morrison and the Doors.  He just simply forgot them. 

Now, if that had been me, I would have been horrified and embarrassed.  If nothing else, I would have faked it and let the audience think that I was just doing a cool “re-mix” of my won stuff.  Not Wilcox.  He just kept playing and asked the audience, “Anybody know how this goes here?” And sure enough someone did.  Not once but twice.  And both times, he reacted with such delight and genuine gratitude that it only endeared us to him all the more.  Then, to cap it off, not once, but twice, he invited the fan who knew the words to come up on stage and duet with him. 

Both times the audience roared approval.  We were both taken by Wilcox’s humility, ease in his own skin and graciousness, as well as the honor and thrill it was for a tried and true fan—who knows the words so well—to sing a duet with the author.

For the last two days, I have thought about this scene as a metaphor for our spiritual lives in Christ.  We are not called to sing perfect solos, to impress each other and the audience (the world?) with our precision and command, but instead to do our best and when we need it, ask others to join with us and help us sing the song of our lives. 

The church as a community of friends who sing alongside each other, who invite each other to be duets and trios and choirs of faithfulness as we together sing the songs of praise, live lives of beauty and point to the God of grace and friendship. 

Would that I could preach and live with such comfort in my own skin, such confidence in my friends’ abilities to know the words that I forget and to still accept me when I flounder.  The Christian life is not meant to be a solo striving for sanctity and salvation, but a journey of humility, friendship, mutual dependence and good-natured ribbing, laughter and warmth that points to another way of living, by grace under the reign of the real Author and King of all.

I know, this post is a bit mushy. But it really was a sweet moment.

Next post. Back to Cyprian, Bono, and other more serious stuff on the same page.

Steve's in the house

Please welcome a new blogger and old friend to the blogosphere.  Steve Norris is the same "Steve" that I saluted in my book, Showtime.   Here is an excerpt from p. 86:

When I think of people who demonstrate endurance, who show up for Christ everyday and put up with others, I think of my friend, Steve.  Steve is a faithful husband, father of two girls, an elder in the church, and a real estate appraiser.  He cares for his aging parents, he generously gives to the work of Christ and he can tell a great joke. 

He does nothing that anyone would consider spectacular.  He’ll never receive a standing ovation and his hometown will probably never have “Steve Day” in his honor.  But everyday, he eats his oatmeal, reads his Bible, does honest work, plays with his daughters, sends email to friends, hugs his wife and says his prayers before he goes to sleep.  When others left his church during the hard times, he stepped into leadership.  When others compromised their ethics to get ahead financially, he stayed true.  When colleagues sacrificed family in order to get promoted, he scaled back preferring more time with his daughters than more stuff in his garage.  When others are cynical, Steve is hopeful. When friends are in trouble, Steve is there with a kindly smile, a helping hand and an open wallet. 
He is a solid, dependable, caring man whom I could count on in any situation from raising my children to walking my dog. 

I love this guy and you'll love his blog.  Go by his site and tell him his old roommate sent you.

Can’t Have One Without the Other

Cue Music: The theme song from Married with Children, “Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage…..Can’t have one without the other”…Trust readers get the sarcasm…

I want to thank the folks who have commented on previous posts for “carrying the ball” on this conversation about the kind of church we need to be for the “Christian seekers” who have been disillusioned with the church and have gone searching for a better way of living the faith.  I have been calling it “Bono, Neo and GK:  Welcoming the Adventurers”

We have been considering two friendly and familiar friends as foils for our conversation.  The rock star Bono, whose edgy faith, prophetic exhortations about the African AIDS and lack of church attendance makes him practically the poster child for an iconoclastic evangelicalism and Neo the hero of Brian McClaren’s “New Kind of Christian” novels who embodies the “emergent” approach to a “post-modern faith” that is questioning many of the assumptions of church life, tradition and in some cases, belief statements, as a way of re-discovering Christian faith in and for a more pluralistic world. 

So far, I have put forth the notion that the first strategy for welcoming these “adventurers” who arrive in our churches “armed to the teeth and talking by signs” (as G. K. Chesterton characterizes all such seekers looking for new worlds but sadly arriving back where they started from) is for those of us who are leaders and members of churches to emphasize belonging before believing.  Our first priority is to offer welcome, not conversion, hospitality not orthodoxy. 

Please hear me loud and clear.  This is the FIRST priority, not the FINAL.  This is the first strategy, not the only one.  Indeed, the goal is nothing less than all of our churches being communities of discipleship of Jesus Christ.  The goal is deep, committed communities of genuine, life transforming belief that witness to the renewing presence of God in the world restoring all of creation. 

But, that goal is what is so often debated.  Most of us tend to think that the goal of salvation is “going to heaven” or “getting saved”.  We put forward faith as a “personal decision” of a “personal relationship” with my “personal savior” Jesus Christ.  That focus on individual souls (specifically MY individual soul) leads us to then miss the significance and sine qua non quality of the church.  And then make us think that we can divorce believing from belonging. 

So, in order to lay my cards on the table about this “belonging first” thing, let me demonstrate the end I have in mind, by offering up this excerpt from my book, It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian: How the Community of God Transforms Lives.

For most Christians, both new guest and church leaders, the local church is usually regarded as a benign reality.  We honor the Church and may even use the traditional language in declaring it a "means of grace."  But most often we think of the Church as a "strategy" or a "system" for local evangelistic efforts, social change, or a dispenser of resources to help the individual on his or her Christian journey.  Churches are offered like different shops are offered at a mall. Indeed, the largest churches offer themselves as a kind of spiritual mall in itself, bidding the seeker: Come here and choose from our wide array of Christian classes, teachings, activities, that which you need to live out your individual Christian life. 
In this model the church is a repository of spiritual goods that assist the individual Christian. It is a vendor of religious services.  It is The Home Depot for the spiritual do-it-yourselfer who wants to build a Christian home. 

But that is not the Church of the first century.  The Church of the first century is “a people.”  And the transformed and transforming quality of “the people” serving as the flesh and blood witness to a life-transforming God is the point. As 1 Peter 2:9-10 says:

"You are a chosen people. You are a kingdom of priests, God's holy nation, his very own possession. This is so you can show others the goodness of God, for he called you out of the darkness into his wonderful life. 
        Once you were not a people;
        now you are the people of God.
        Once you received none of God's mercy;
        now you have received mercy."  (NLT)

This is what I want to remind us: The Church is God's incarnation today.  The Church is Jesus' body on earth.  The Church is the temple of the Spirit. The Church is not a helpful thing for my individual spiritual journey.  The Church is the journey.  The Church is not a collection of “soul-winners” all seeking to tell unbelievers “the Way” to God.  The Church is the Way.  To be part of the Church is to be part of God—to be part of God’s Communion and to be part of God’s ministry.  To belong to the people of God is to enjoy relationship with God and live out the purposes of God.  The Church is God’s present day word and witness to an unbelieving world.   And, most importantly, the Church is the only true means to be transformed to into the likeness of God.

The starting point of felt needs, cultural factors, contemporary relevance cannot and should not be ignored, but neither should the final vision for which we are elected, saved and toward which we must journey.  The Church is Christ’s body, the dwelling place or temple of God, and a reflection of God on earth.