“Are we there yet?” My three year old daughter is already following in the footsteps of generations of kids stuck in the back seat on long car trips. It’s an impatient question, and one that can be applied to lots of situations.
Speaking personally, I’ve spent much of my life in a state of impatience. I couldn’t wait to turn 16 so I could undergo my learner driver’s test. I couldn’t wait to turn 17 to get my provisional license. I couldn’t wait to finish school and start university. I couldn’t wait to finish university and start work. When Heather and I were engaged, I couldn’t wait to get married. I’ve not been very good at waiting.
When it comes to Christian life, we’re all on a relationship journey – we’re getting to know more about God, understand Jesus’ impact in our lives, and respond to the leading, prompting and comforting of the Holy Spirit each day. There are times when I can’t wait to know what God’s got in mind for the next day or chapter of my life. There are also times when I’m trying to escape from what I believe He has in mind for me, but that’s another story.
Church denominations are a bit like this too. As discreet parts of the wider church body, each denomination like the Anglicans, Pentecostals, Baptists, Catholics, Churches of Christ etc are all striving to discover and fulfill their destiny as churches. Some are asking “What part will we play in a revival in the Great South Land of the Holy Spirit?” And when is the revival coming? Again, another story.
I spent a lot of time growing up as a member of the Uniting Church. And one of the things that bugged me about the Uniting Church was this “are we there yet?” question. The denomination was formed by the combination of Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational churches. It was in the process of “uniting” and by implication felt as though it wasn’t yet “united.”
I’ve just been reading through some of my notes from my first semester at Tabor and there’s a quote I wrote down from college principal Peter Carblis: “We don’t have to achieve unity, we just have to recognise that anything else is not possible.” There’s so much freedom in that statement.
You see, we already are the body of Christ. Jesus, the head of the church, only sees one church (the people, not the buildings). We are unified by our respect and love for each other, inclusive of our differences. Our administrative and theological differences are, to some extent, man-made and largely irrelevant from Christ’s perspective.
So to answer the question, we are already there. We just don’t realise that we’ve already arrived – it’s a question of readjusting our hearts, minds and attitudes to reflect the reality that Christ sees.
June 18, 2007 at 2:46 am
Wating is such a hard thing to do trying to guess what God has in mind for us and running off and doing things that are not for us…
yes another story. I have been thinking about the church as the body of Christ Jesus and ahve had a few goes at creating a cross with images of people making the cross. We are the body.
1 Corinthians 1:1-16. We have to open our eyes and look around at our brothers and sisters and help each other to become united. Just an idea. Love your work Mark
July 22, 2007 at 7:07 pm
Hi Mark,
First up, you’ve got some really interesting stuff to say on your blog. I’d like to check it out regularly, however I’m likely to forget, so i looked for a subscription link (rss or atom) but couldn’t find one. Do you have one? or could you add one?
Second, this comment ended up way longer than i first intended. I’m not theologically trained, but I like to think about stuff like this and sometimes I get carried away.
You said each denomination is striving to discover their destiny. What do you mean by destiny? It certainly gives the implication that there is a place to end up, which does lead to the “Are we there yet?” question. I wonder how many churches actually have this viewpoint though.
I can see that if you believe in the second coming, and that it’s imminent, that you might view what you’re trying to fulfill as a destiny, but I suspect most churches are more concerned with the ongoing question of how to continue spreading the word and bring people to know the love of Christ as an ongoing mission.
It’s a difficult challenge, and one that I don’t think can ever be completed. One of the most frustrating things I’ve come to realise in the last year is that christianity is never going to create world peace. We already have fighting and disagreement within christianity, and adding more people is not going to improve things.
The problem is that noone can know for certain what God wants (assuming God actually wants anything. I won’t get into the anthropomorphism of God for now). Unlike in science, theology cannot be proved through repeatable tests. Science is based on physical observations which we each experience more or less equally giving us a frame of reference. Theology is based on spiritual observations, for which we cannot establish a frame of reference since we each experience it differently. As a result, we’ll never be able to establish a concensus. Take for example the question: Should the bible be read literally? There are plenty of arguments for both sides, but there’s no unbiased test that can be done to prove one side correct which will be accepted the other side.
Getting back on track, my point is that with such diversity churches will always need to be Uniting. If they consider themselves United and the job done then they’re kidding themselves. Christianity is about a way of life, which is an ongoing journey. Not about a state of being.
I was born in 1978 into a family who are members of the Uniting Church. This was a year after merging so I didn’t go through the “Uniting” process. From my point of view I believe the point of christianity being an ongoing journey is what is reflected in the name, not that we are trying to achieve an end goal of being United. That said, the UCA is made up of lots of congregations, and what you experience in one place will be different from another. I may have just been lucky not to experience the “Are we there yet” mindset.
You quoted “We don’t have to achieve unity, we just have to recognise that anything else is not possible.”.
When I first read this I had to stop and read it again because I thought you’d made a mistake. I intially disagreed with it, but after reading your explaination I see how it applies. It depends what you’re basing unity on. I was initially thinking of to statement in terms of trying to unify what we believe, and that just doesn’t work, however thinking of it in terms of us all being part of God it makes a lot of sense.
You wrote, “it’s a question of readjusting our hearts, minds and attitudes to reflect the reality that Christ sees”
Now we just need to get everyone to agree on the reality that Christ sees.
Nate
July 24, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Hi Nate
Yes, we’ve got RSS. If you paste the URL of this site into your aggregator it should work.
When I talked about a denomination’s destiny, I’m trying to capture the idea that many church organisations develop very specific plans around the future God has in store for them. And there’s nothing wrong with that – far from it, because we act in response to our relationship with our Father. But there’s also a different way to look at this issue of our future, or destiney – we already know God’s will for the church.
Jesus told the disciples in Matt 28 (Message version): “God authorised and commanded me to commission you: Go out and train everyone you meet, far and near, in this way of life, marking them by baptism in the threefold name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then instruct them in the practice of all I have commanded you.”
The challenge for me is to pursue this calling that’s given to all Christians. The more I think about it, I don’t believe Jesus meant this calling was optional!
July 24, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Hi Mark,
I had tried the URL from the site and it didn’t work. I figured it out though. After viewing the html source I found that I needed to use http://markjones.id.au/feed/
disclaimer: I was never very good at writing and I find it difficult to get my thoughts down, so hopefully this makes sense. If something isn’t clear feel free to ask me about it.
Do we really know God’s will for the church? Everyone has their own slightly different understanding of what God’s will is. Even taking the Matt 28 message of “Go out and train everyone you meet, far and near, in this way of life, …” we need to be able to discern what “this way of life” is.
Obviously we are being asked to model our lives on Jesus’ life, but how literally do you take it? Do we all need to be teachers like Jesus and spread the message? Or do we accept that we each have different gifts and then do our best to underlay whatever we do with th morals of Jesus and his understanding of the world and how we should treat each other? To me it seems obvious that it’s the later, but there are plenty of people who believe the former, and there is probably a range in between.
I like Jesus’ message about final judgement in Matt 25. The Sheep and Goats were divided based on who fed the hungry and thirsty, helped strangers, clothed the naked, cared for the sick, and visited the imprisoned. There is no mention of those who “saved” the most sinners, or even about those who believed in God. This says to me that the point of Christianity is not about getting the entire world to believe in God. It’s about spreading love and support no matter what the religion. I realise that this seems at odds with the idea that in christianity salvation is achieved through faith, not deeds, but the way I see it is that our faith saves us by freeing us (from guilt, from hatred, from societies norms, from religous ritual, and others) which hampers our ability to love and care for others.
Having said that, I realise that the degree to which you literally follow Jesus’ example is probably of little importance. If people follow Jesus example literally then so long as they’re also following his base beliefs (such as loving and respecting, and helping those in need) then God’s will is still being done. What scares me is when people start getting fanatical and start demeaning or opressing others because of differences of belief or opinion.
Nate
P.S. Thanks for your comments. Really giving me a lot to think about.
July 24, 2007 at 7:52 pm
No worries, and they’re important issues you raise. The angle you raise is one that I blogged about on this site recently – the “social gospel” idea. It’s not good enough to have great doctrine. We need to put faith into action and serve those in need.
September 13, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Happy birthday!!
We need to not only enjoy the journey, to stop and smell the roses – we also have to have vision and dreams and a “destiny”. We have to plant more roses so to speak. The readjustment is to hold both as possible, desirable and in fact necessary. The Western mindset appears to be brilliant at planning and visioning the future but appears to neglect the “moment”.
I can’t think of a contrasting culture but I’m sure they’re out there…
But of course there is no point in having a vision and focussing only on planting the roses if one doesn’t live right now and smell them, because “right now” is all we have! When we get to tomorrow, it’s today again for example.
BTW for a guy who says he is in a rush (where are you rushing to now??)- as an outside observer I think you do enjoy life/the moment very much. I would always describe you as one who sucks the marrow out of life (while looking for the next bone perhaps…) and I don’t think that that is necessarily bad or wrong.