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go here to buy my stock photography Alan Creech
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aaron klinefelter
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We have deeply seated notions about what is what and how "what" happens when, etc. One of the biggest is perhaps dealing with the concept of time and how it interacts with the church, spiritual development, "growth," "evangelism," and a number of other things. That question I mentioned before - you know the dreaded one: "how many people ya'll got?" Maybe they say it differently in Minnesota, but the question remains the same. Someone just told me last night of a chance encounter with someone they used to "go to church with" who asked them this question about Vine & Branches. It happens all - the - time. Anyway, that question is loaded with assumptions. "I didn't mean anything by it when I asked.." Hold on here - did I say you intentionally and with malice aforethought, asked that question? No, I just said it was full of assumptions, and it is. It has laced within it, a timeline - a definite idea of how long a church should take to reach a certain level, to become successful. Hmm, successful. Yes, there are timeliness built into your thought patterns. "How many baptisms did you have last year?" "How many new believers are you discipling now?" Again, I think these questions are laden with timeline assumptions, but in this case about "evangelism." I know the common wisdom is that "we're" bad at evangelism - we suck at it, whatever. I wonder - by who's criteria? According to what concept of evangelism? Is there more than one? I think there are. How long? How long does it take? How long does it take to "get someone saved?" I don't know. Do you? There are some very interesting theological ideas that underlie how we think on these issues. Some of us never venture outside our assumed lands of thought on these things. We might have changed how we do church but perhaps our concept of what these other things mean haven't changed at all. Are you really a failure? Do you really suck all that much at evangelism? Or are you perhaps measuring yourself by a foreign rod? How long, how long, O Lord, does it take for us to become comfortable with each other? How long!? Here's a question for you? How long are you willing to put into it? How long will it take you to get your marriage perfected and working like a well oiled machine? --- OK, mine either, but again, how long are you willing to work on it? Are you going to jump off the train if it doesn't get where you want to go in the time you want to get there? Maybe you will, I don't know. Do you have in your mind a timeline so strict that you can see no other way? Think about that for a second. Seriously - how tight is the schedule? I'm not talking about the train crashing or being blown up, just traveling. But someone, maybe all your life you wanted to take this trip (sorry for the analogy), and someone talked to you about how long it would take - you'll get on that train someday and lickity split, you'll be there, yessirree. It's just up over the hill and around the bend there. Well, maybe not dear. That train moves a little slower than you were lead to believe and the destination is much farther down the track. So, sit back and do what needs to be done on the train and don't wring your hands so much. TIME! This time thing is a big one. It runs through all the other stuff we talk and fret over. How long anything. When will I be fully transformed in the image of Christ? When will I stop hating my brother? When will I ever be patient in traffic on the way home!? When? Well, here's the deal on all of it. It takes a while. Those whiles depend on so many factors that if I tried to pretend I knew, I'd be legitimately full of shit. I do know this - a long time. It takes a long time for us to go from being one kind of creature to being another. So, it takes a long time for a community of faith to become what it should be. Relationships are a lifetime proposition. They are always developing and evolving, as are we - it's all very dynamic. These things cannot be looked at statically. "Well, you know how you should be, just be that way." "You know what do to, just do it." These are statements made out of, I believe, ignorance - ignorance of how a human person develops and changes. I think we're also ignorant in ways about how some of these other things happen, how they actually happen - like the process of transformation inside a person or the process of beginning that journey or of how we relationally invite someone to begin that journey. These things are far more complicated than we give them credit for and absolutely more complex than can be dealt with in one blog post. I think, lest I ramble like I probably already have, I'll stop here. Hopefully that's something to think about for a while. Peace to you. Labels: church, community, emerging church :::
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