Organic Qualities of the Church

The metaphors the Apostle Paul employs to describe the church are all life forms -- meaning they are organic (body, bride, family, household, living stones, etc.). This leads me to believe that the essence of the Church is therefore organic. Or at least the physical organic realm of creation has corresponding qualities that hold understanding and insight regarding the church. Maybe for every organic quality in the eco-system of our universe there is possibly a corresponding spiritual quality in the eco-system known as the Church.

Organic qualities such as simplicity, complexity, biotic potential, and self-organization just to name a few. What if like the physical and material realm they overlap, assimilate, and are interdependent in relation to one another in the spiritual realm? Just maybe these spiritual qualities operate within like the physical in the realms of simultaneity and synchronicity.

I'm convinced that within the church’s genetic code, all these qualities are employed for the health and well-being of the Church organism. The organic reality is as Howard Synder states in Decoding the Church “ that the church is a complex ecology of spiritual, physical, social, political, psychological, and economic dimensions.”

The Truth Isn't Sexy

I receive the Mustard Seed Associates online newsletter. Today there was an article by Si Johnston with this picture detailing the world-wide slave trade of the sex industry. The truth of this reality is not at all what most of us understand it to be. Did you know that slavery today is three times larger world wide then it was when William Wilberforce and his colleagues were fighting to rid the world of this evil. Johnston's article also concerns the Emerging Church and it's relationship to this issue.

Here is the article:
Even in our sophisticated 21st century world, slavery is worse than it has ever been. Having surpassed the drug trade and with a turnover of 9 billion dollars per year, human trafficking now represents the second biggest underground economy behind only the arms trade.

Its causes are complex and its depths are hard to plumb; however, it is not new. In the Bible, Joseph was sold into slavery and a little later Amos lambasted Israel for selling the needy into slavery for a few pairs of sandals. Fast forward to the 5th century and on Slemish Mountain only a few miles from where I sit and write this, St. Patrick experienced six years of bonded slavery when he first arrived in Ireland. More recently, and exactly two hundred years ago, some 11 million Africans were sold to the plantations in the West Indies and America to fund the greed of the British Empire. While a cursory reading of history shows many have been enslaved, few ever realise that it was wrong or at least speak up about it. One man in particular did—William Wilberforce. Through sheer persistence and creativity he succeeded in blowing the whistle on the trans-Atlantic slave-trade.

Sadly, today we have no William Wilberforce, but rather a slave trade that has multiplied in scale times three. I’ve spent the last few years living with the statistics of an evil that is careering across our globalised world making misery of the lives of millions. And yet out of all the numbers and stories, one young girl in this darkened underworld is the most important statistic. She is advertised as a mail-order bride; she is the ‘Kid as Industry’ moved next door whose body is put out for hourly rent; she is someone’s daughter; she is our sister.

Her story, if she told you while looking into your eyes, would have you do for her what you would want done for yourself. Her pain might have you rise at night from the comfort of your own bed and weep. Or still further, it may well have you sell all your possessions and give your money to the poor. Wilberforce wasn’t content with cap-tipping at the injustice, he was a creative loud mouth who stood against the odds in opposition to systemic dehumanising evil.

At a recent event I took part in, someone suggested we hold a conversation entitled “Is the Emerging Church middle class white boy intellectualism and mac computers or does it have a genuine concern for the poor and justice?” Perhaps surprisingly it was a well attended conversation which apparently continues to have unexpected implications for those who attended. Similarly, a couple of years ago, while he was preparing the manuscript for ‘Conversant with the Emerging Church’, I ended up parked beside Don Carson on a short-haul flight. During our now documented tete-a-tete, he leveled the criticism that the Emerging Church has too little theological substance and lacks sufficient enough organisation to bring about any social change of the sort catalysed by William Wilberforce and his Clapham Sect associates.

Carson wasn’t to know that only months earlier a collection of people, who would identify themselves as belonging to emerging church communities across London, gathered to learn more about modern day slavery. It was here in the same church that our community gathered and that Wilberforce used as his base from which to lobby government, that Protest4 began and subsequently the Truth Isn’t Sexy Campaign. In saying that, ‘meeting’ doesn’t constitute ‘acting,’ and we’re at a moment in time when the words of Jesus as recorded by Luke have a particular resonance for us in our world:

“The Spirit is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
-Jesus

Wilberforce, surprised by the lack of support from fellow Christians concluded that they were culturally deluded as to what it meant to be a Christian. Jesus offers us a statement that seeks adoption into all our faith families and it needs to be primary, not just an archaic tag line in our polity. It’s these words that are tugging on the imagination and passion of the new abolitionist movement that rises in our day and which will prevent us believing and behaving ‘un-Christianly.’ This movement is beyond ‘events’ but like a siren, repeats the words of Jesus to those who would be ‘activists’ against injustice.

On the 20th March, The Truth Isn’t Sexy Campaign joined the echo of Wilberforce’s voice around the House of Commons exactly 200 years after he succeeded in garnering enough support to end slavery. Former Conservative Party leader and MP William Hague spoke of this new wave of abolitionists as he pointed out to a full sitting in the House, the need to take note and act against 21st century slavery. Hours later, we launched the campaign in the presence of MP’s and law enforcement agents in an adjoining parliamentary room.

Protest4 is not a charity or organisation. We have no employees or tangible resources. We gather under a vision of freedom, liberty, and redemption in the Protest For a more just world. You might say Protest4 is a spirited network. With presence in the UK, the USA, and Denmark, we’re inviting any and all who would add to our voice and efforts. We’ve recently held Freedom Day in Southern California and in connection with the Home Office are rolling out the Truth Isn’t Sexy Campaign in the UK. The campaign began while on a trip to Cambodia and seeing Western men draped with the bodies of young Khmer girls. I realised that it was market economics. Men create demand and traffickers/pimp rush to supply. Women believing the streets of the West to be paved with gold, reply to cleverly placed adverts for ‘work’ or fall into the hands of a deceitful ‘boyfriend.’ We believe that if we address this demand, we’ll simultaneously knock out the supply.

Finally, we’re asking that those who read this and learn of it, don’t just consume anti-trafficking measures and this human-rights issue as the next funky wave of campaigning to get on board with. God spare us from jumping off one bandwagon onto another every time something captures our imagination. Instead, let’s see this one through to the end and ensure that none ever again fall into the trap of commodification. Let none of us sit back in passivity but do all that we can to ensure that no one remains a slave—no one.

Ekklesial Leadership

From Len Hjalmarsen's site

http://nextreformation.com/wp-admin/images/leadership.jpg

An extremely profound description of leadership necessary for the Emerging Church. Thank you so much Len

National Day of Prayer

This being the National Day of Prayer I thought it would be good to rehearse some wonderful reasons why we all should pray illustrated for us Scripture. Here are just three to start with:

FIRST: TO OBEY - Because God expects us to pray. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, "When you pray" (Matt.6:5). It is kind
of assumed by Jesus in using the word "when" that his disciples would pray. Using the word "if" instead of "when" would have suggested that it was optional, but not so. "When you pray," means it was expected that we would do just that.

SECOND: TO COMMUNE - "But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father" (Matt. 6:6). Being in a private room with someone often suggests intimacy and opportunity to converse (commune) with that individual. In this case it suggests getting alone with our Heavenly Father as his child, and just spend some time together talking.

THIRD: TO ALIGN - Prayer is more for our benefit, not God's. "For your Father knows what you need before you ask him," (Matt.6:8b). See, he already knows what we need. Our prayers are a matter of aligning our heart with his heart so that we might further deepen the relationship we have with him. And then Jesus goes on to teach how we are to this:

Matthew 6:9-15
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us to the time of trial,but rescue us from the evil one.
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you;
but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. NRSV

One purpose of this prayer just might be for the aligning our hearts with God's heart resulting in a deepening of our relationship each day -- and thus strengthening the National Day of Prayer.

Have a blessed National Day of Prayer!!

The Organic Essence of the Church

In looking at the body metaphor, Greg Ogden asks the following questions:

Is Paul’s choice of the human body simply to be a nice analogy for the way the church is to function? Is Paul only saying that just as the body is an organic picture of interdependence, so the church should be? Or is there something deeper than metaphor that Paul has in mind?

Paul seems to be pointing to a deeper reality. Metaphors are often symbols that point to deeper realities, but the symbol is not the same as the reality. An example of this is when Jesus broke the bread at the Passover meal before his disciples and said, “This is my body given for you,” “We Protestants do not believe Jesus was speaking literally. The bread was not in actuality his body, but it was a symbol that pointed to his broken body.” In contrast, when it comes to referencing the church as the body of Christ, Paul intended much more than just a word picture. Reading 1 Corinthians 12:12 numerous times, I have subconsciously understood it in the following way: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with the church.” What is wrong with that? I emphasized (in italics) the way I have understood this verse to be. I have read church into the text because this is what I expected, since the church is Paul’s subject. But this is not Paul’s concluding phrase. He says, “so it is with Christ,” not the church. By interchanging Christ with the church, Paul is making the point, that the church is nothing less than the living extension of Jesus here on earth. The church and the resurrected, reigning, and living Jesus are inseparable. The church is not merely a human organization designated with the task of keeping the memory of their leader alive, but it is a fellowship of those who are members of Christ’s body giving viable expression to who He is. The church is an organism mystically fused to the living and reigning Christ who continues to reveal Himself in and through His people. Ray Stedman puts it this way: “The life of Jesus is still being manifest among people, but now no longer through an individual physical body, limited to one place on earth, but through a complex, corporate body called the church.”
As God’s household (oikos), the church is called to administrate kingdom economics in the process of bringing fulfillment to the larger eco-system, the created order. In order to complete this assignment, it is necessary for the church to perceive itself as a life giving and sustaining entity. In other words, the essence of the church is organic, and maybe for the purpose of completing its mission.

Sometime in the future I would like to delve more deeply into the organic essence of the church.