Suffering for the Gospel

     For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid,  but gives us power,  love and self-discipline. So do not be ashamed  of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner.  Rather, join with me in suffering for the gospel,  by the power of God. 

-2 Timothy 1:7-8 (NIV)

Without a doubt, one of the great humanitarian crises of our time is well underway. And you’ll hear very little about it in the American media, and what you hear will be heavily politicized.

     I’m not saying it should displace coverage of the ebola epidemic in western Africa, or that it’s more important than the fighting in the Ukraine, or unrest in Syria, or clashes between police and civilians in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting. What I am saying is that a crisis of these proportions should be getting more coverage than it’s getting. It’s a story that large numbers of Democrats and Republicans have a stake in, and those who do would largely be on the same side. And yet you won’t hear much about this crisis from your usual news sources.

     Listen to the numbers. Over the past decade, this crisis has cost the lives of 100,000 people per year. It’s happening in well over 100 nations on the earth. Every hour, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, 11 people die in this crisis. And yet there’s a good chance you haven’t read or heard a news story about it all week. All month.  

     The crisis I’m talking about is the persecution of Christians.

     According to the International Society for Human Rights, a non-religious organization based in Frankfurt, Germany, 80 per cent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed at Christians. In other words, Christians are by far the most persecuted religious body on the planet. And I don’t mean what passes for persecution in countries like America, where Christians have held a large majority for years, and live in freedom to practice their faith.

     I mean persecution in places like Iran, where Christians in areas controlled by ISIS are forced to convert to Islam, pay a tax, or face the death penalty. Or like Nigeria, where Boko Haram has killed thousands in their efforts to clear all non-Muslims out of the north, and where a group of over 200 Christian schoolgirls were recently kidnapped. Or like India, where militant Hindu groups like the RSS, non-conversion laws, and a government that looks the other way when Christians are threatened means that Christian shop owners can’t keep business, and that Christians in many areas face daily danger of arrest, assault, rape, and murder. I mean persecution from family like Christians face in many nations: being disowned, forced to leave their homes, even murdered in “honor killings.”

     There are all kinds of reasons why you don’t hear about these things. Maybe the largest is that news agencies give us the news we want to hear about, and Americans are notorious for not caring much about what happens outside our borders. If news outlets knew we’d watch, listen, and click, they’d give us Christian persecution 24 hours a day. But they know there’s no audience for that kind of news — even among American believers. (Who feel persecuted when their town disallows a nativity scene in the square.)

     Beyond that, there are partisan political reasons for the silence of the media on this too deep to get into here. Those who want us to hear more about it usually have reasons relating to closed borders and distrust of foreign nations, especially Muslim ones. Those who don’t want us to hear have their own agenda too: protecting allies and propping up their own foreign policy among them.

     Without resorting to fear-mongering, let me just warn you of two missteps:

1. Don’t make the largely American mistake of thinking that “happening on the other side of the world” and “not happening” are the same thing.
2. Dont’ think for a moment that it can’t be happening because CNN isn’t reporting it.

     OK, I guess I’d add a third important thing, too: it’s our brothers and sisters, our family in Christ, who are dying. Not strangers, not foreign nationals: family. That’s what Jesus does, see — he brings together those who believe in him and follow him as Lord into family. In him, there is no longer Jew or Gentile — nor is there Palestinian or Korean, Iraqi or Pakistani, American or Egyptian.

     Hebrews reminds us put ourselves in the shoes of brothers and sisters in Christ who are suffering and imprisoned. We’re to take their suffering as our own, share in it as much as we can. Paul says much the same, reminding us that the Holy Spirit who lives in us gives us power, love and self-discipline. We’re not given such a Spirit in order to be quiet about suffering sisters and brothers, he says. So we shouldn’t be ashamed of the gospel, and especially not of those who are prisoners for its sake. 

     I think that might be a lot of the reason for the silence about persecution — shame. We live in a culture that preaches a surface form of tolerance, and the American church sometimes drinks as deeply as any of this spirit. We’re so practiced in getting along in a largely secular culture without bringing up our faith too much that we have a hard time imagining anyone not getting along.

     In the name of these sisters and brothers of ours, suffering for their faith around the world, Paul calls those of us warm and safe in the American church to suffer along with them. That’s how those who would follow Jesus tackle evil, you see. We suffer. When we see injustice, we don't stand outside and point fingers, and we certainly don’t turn away blindly. We do what Jesus did — we take that sin upon ourselves. We stand with those who are suffering, and we bear their pain as we are able. Maybe only emotionally, as we invest ourselves in prayer and weeping for persecuted believers. Maybe economically, by depriving ourselves of something to give to the work of organizations who are ministering to the persecuted and working to stop the persecution. Maybe we write letters to imprisoned Christians, reminding them of our hope.

     Maybe we contact representatives and encourage them to make basic human rights for all people — including Christians — a foundational block for any foreign policy. Maybe we raise awareness about persecuted Christians at our own churches, in our own prayer groups, in our own families. Maybe we simply go to our knees on behalf of these suffering believers in Jesus. We ask God to free them from prison, to guard their lives, and most importantly to use their witness to proclaim his kingdom, and the hope and life that are in Jesus. 

      Our brothers and sisters need — and in Christ deserve — that we share in their suffering. So let us, with grace, joy, and hope, share in their sufferings as gladly and as joyfully as we share in their hope. 

Check out Voice of the Martyrs for ongoing information about brothers and sisters in Christ living with persecution.

A New Order

“These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.”

-Isaiah 29:13, via Jesus in Matthew 15:8-9 (NIV)

I still remember the Sunday night worship service when I was a teenager in which the preacher talked about sexual immorality. But I don’t remember it for the reasons I should. I remember it because of the invitation song that night, where people were invited to respond to the lesson.

     It was “Why Not Tonight?” No kidding. Someone should have given that more thought, if the pew of guffawing teenagers I was sitting with were any indication.

     At my church, we’ve recently changed up the order of worship. 

     The changes we’ve made haven’t been all that earth-shaking, honestly. The main thing we’ve done is to change up the order of the sermon and Communion. The old sequence is Communion, then sermon. The new sequence is sermon, then Communion. We shifted a prayer around in there too, but that’s the main difference between the “old” order of worship (which is about twenty years old) and the “new” order of worship (which is now the way it was before we changed it twenty years ago).

     If you’re not a regular church attender, then you probably have two questions. One is What’s the order of worship? Good question, and the answer is that it’s the order in which we do things in our worship services. In our church, as in most, it’s written out in advance in the church newsletter that’s available when folks arrive on Sunday mornings.

     Your second question, if you’re not a regular church attender and hear that we’ve changed up the order of worship at our church, might very well be So what? 

     So what? Well, for starters, people get very comfortable with the order of worship on a Sunday morning. They get very accustomed to things happening at about the same time, in about the same order. There’s a reassurance in familiarity, a sense that all’s well with the world, that things are as they should be. In case you haven’t noticed, churches thrive on tradition — even if it’s not all that old.  So one So what? is that people are pretty comfortable with the old order. As someone said (jokingly, I think) on the Sunday when we made the change, “Now I don’t know when to go to sleep!”

     Really, though, our church has handled the change very well. We’ve gone back to the “old” order a time or two since we made the change, and at least some of us seem to like the “new” order better, for various reasons. 

     It’s those various reasons that frame my second answer to the So what? question. The what — the reason that the change is significant — is that it has people thinking and talking about the way we do things, and the reasons we do them in the way we do. And, when it comes to the community of faith gathered for worship, talking and thinking about what we do and why we do it is inherently very important.

     One of our worship leaders likes the “new” order, he says, because it keeps us from having to change our focus to Communion, then back. On the other hand, another doesn't care for the “new” order because he’s accustomed to having the time around Communion to get himself ready to hear the sermon. Two differing opinions, both well-thought-out and well-expressed. Neither opinion is right or wrong. Both express some assumptions, some values, and some priorities. And, hopefully, the change is sparking others to think through what they expect to happen on Sunday, and why, creating other conversations that bristle with theology and ecclesiology. 

     It’s always a good thing when the church thinks and talks about what goes on in worship, and why it goes on.

     I say this because I grew up hearing that we did what we did in worship because the Bible says so. That is, we sang, we prayed, we gave, we shared Communion, and we listened to a sermon because the Bible has examples of those five acts of worship. We don’t see incense or candles in the New Testament church at worship, so we didn’t have incense or candles. There was no band when the New Testament church got together for worship, so we didn’t have a band. We do what we do, the teaching ran, because the Bible says we should do those things.

     “The Bible says so” is, at first glance, a pretty good reason to do something. But it’s felt to me since that “the Bible says so” was sometimes used an excuse for giving little thought to what we do when we get together for worship, and why we do it. It made us comfortable with the illusion that we didn’t need to give our orders of worship much consideration at all beyond getting those five acts in each week. 

     Jesus, like the prophets before him, warned of “vain” or “purposeless” worship made up of merely human rules. It angered him to see traditions that carried the stink of death wrapped up in religious garb and trotted out as worship. One order of worship or the other probably won’t prevent that, but what does it suggest if there’s only one order that is acceptable for your church? Churches like mine, that don’t have a liturgy handed down to them from on high, are by nature open to the possibility of change and variation. But we aren’t immune to the petrifying nature of empty, thoughtless tradition — however “biblical” that tradition may seem.

     Change things up, and people start to think. They think about what, and why. And thinking about worship is good, usually. It opens hearts and minds, it drags assumptions and prejudices out into the light, and it wakes us up from sleepwalking through songs, prayers, preaching, and table. It allows us to hear the Word anew and attend to the movements of the Holy Spirit.

     Give some thought to what your church does, and why. Choose songs carefully, with an eye to theme and movement. Make sure public prayers have real content, and ask yourself what you expect worshippers to do. Think through the way Communion is done: What does it say, for example, if the church literally gathers around tables, versus having the symbols brought to them? How do your worship times engage children, or the physically or mentally challenged? How does your building’s architecture affect worship, and what can you do about it?   

      We may not be used to thinking about worship in these ways. But we can all individually think about why we do what we do. And those who lead churches can and should consider how to help worshippers do so “in Spirit and in truth.”

     Maybe it will even help keep laughing adolescents quiet.

A Christianity to Believe In

…Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy,  cleansing  her by the washing  with water through the word, and to present her to himself  as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 

-Ephesians 5:25-27 (NIV)

Several months ago, a friend of mine wrote this blog post titled Why I No Longer Believe in Christianity. The fact that he’s a minister, and a friend, made me fairly interested in his apparent lapse from the faith. Was he announcing an imminent shift to Buddhism, or atheism, or, I don’t know, had he become a Jedi? 

     You only have to glance at the post, though, to see that my friend hasn’t lost his faith, not really. It’s actually a very faithful and thoughtful attempt to point out that “most Christians tend to take their identity in Christ from their religious tradition.” He points out that “Salvation comes through belief in Jesus, not belief in Christianity.” And then this little gem of a sentence that I wish I’d written:

“So, I am a Jesus follower who currently hangs around with a little band of broken followers in a broken movement known as Churches of Christ who seek in broken ways to serve a broken world. No wonder we need a Savior and Lord beyond ourselves.”    

To which I can only say that I think my friend still believes in Christianity. It may be a matter of semantics, but to be a Christian is not to believe in the church. It’s to believe in Jesus.

     And Jesus pretty much disrupts whatever kind of church you let him into.

     Most of us believers in Jesus see him through the lenses of our particular expressions of faith. To a Catholic, Jesus looks very Catholic, to a Lutheran, very Lutheran, to a Presbyterian, very Presbyterian. Even those of us who are a part of religious traditions that challenge established denominations understand Jesus in ways colored by those traditions. If your history is with the Restoration Movement, or if it’s with megachurches, or even if it’s with newer movements like the Emerging church or a house church, you will tend to relate to Jesus through the doctrines or values or emphases of those movements. 

     By that I mean that you may find yourself, unconsciously, even, tailoring Jesus to fit those traditions. You’ll emphasize words and actions of his that legitimize and validate your tradition, and de-emphasize those words and actions that aren’t as friendly to your history. It’s not intentional, of course. You’re probably not even aware of it, and have in fact probably inherited a lot of it — after all, most denominations and religious traditions came about originally to fix a perceived fault in the existing church. But its being largely unconscious makes it that much harder to see in ourselves, sort of like a fish would have a hard time describing water. It’s just where we live, and what we breathe, and it’s hard to imagine life without it.

     Again, let me emphasize that this happens even among those of us who claim to reject tradition. Our iconoclasm easily becomes a tradition of its own that leads us to value an iconoclastic Jesus who strips faith of tradition and leaves it with the “essentials” — coincidentally, the very “essentials” that we’re so sure about!

     What you’re left with is a Jesus who never surprises you, once you learn the doctrines and traditions of your particular denomination, movement, or fellowship. You’ll simply hear him saying and see him doing what your religious tradition says Jesus should be saying and doing, and tune out whatever doesn’t fit with what you’ve learned. And you’ll think that’s just because your group has Jesus right, when all along it’s because you have an edited version of Jesus appropriate for your group’s beliefs, doctrines, practices, and values. A Jesus remade in the image of denomination X or fellowship Y.

     The problem, as you well know, is that an edited Jesus isn’t Jesus at all.

     The fact that this kind of thing happens in every denomination, or fellowship, or movement, or sect should be no surprise. The church, as my friend points out, is made up of “little band[s] of broken followers.” Our best intentions fall woefully short of the glory of God. Our grandest efforts often fail to accomplish even the limited dreams we dare to dream. Our highest aspirations can’t compare to the vision God has for who we are to be. And, let’s face it, we’re rarely at our best, our grandest, or our highest. We are broken, after all, and full of sin, pettiness, fear, faithlessness, sadness, anger, and hurt. 

     The thing to remember is that the church came after Jesus, and does not mediate our relationship to him. The Holy Spirit is not given to locations, but to people, not to denominations, but to believers. The Bible is to be read with the church, it’s true, but no one person or group in the church is to be its sole interpreter. And through his Spirit, and through the Scriptures, and in the experience of the whole church, Jesus can still be heard.  

     So let Jesus speak to what you believe, and even against what you believe — especially if you believe it largely because you’ve been told to. Look on the church with love, but recognize that the groups within her are perhaps as interested in self-preservation and guarding their own interests than they are in letting the voice of Jesus be heard. Jesus died for his church, all of it, and is cleansing and making her holy, ready for presentation to him. But the church isn’t quite there yet. We need his grace to cover our stains and wrinkles and blemishes until they are finally and completely removed and we are finally and completely what he died to make us. 

     May we let Jesus speak. May we not silence those who dissent from “orthodoxy,” but welcome prophetic voices that speak Jesus words’ in resistance to our traditions. May we let him speak in voices from traditions different from our own, so that our horizons are broadened and we learn to listen in a different key than we’re used to. 

     This is the church I want to bequeath my son, a church that drinks from many streams of faith and listens to a fully fleshed-out Jesus, one that can hear his gospel and walk bravely where it leads them. I want to leave him a church less sure of doctrine and more sure of Jesus, less certain in our readings of the Bible and more certain of Jesus, less reliant on our own constructs and more reliant on Jesus and the Spirit which he’s poured out. 

     That’s a Christianity I can believe in. 

Carrying Your Grievances

Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.

-Colossians 3:13 (NIV)

This guy in my neighborhood drives a van that’s obviously been in an accident. It has a crumpled front bumper and dented fender, but that’s not what you notice when you first look at it. What you notice is the message painted on the side: the name of a well-known insurance company, the word “Hate”, and the words, “I don’t love this insurance company.” The message also appears to be written in Korean characters as well.

     It takes some commitment to do that, doesn’t it? It looks professional — I guess he paid someone to paint the words, so it had to cost something. And then there’s the commitment of driving around in, let’s face it, a pretty unsightly vehicle. I’ve never actually met the guy, and so I don’t know the story, but I bet he’d tell me if I asked. I bet he’s passionate in his outrage, certain he was wronged, and anxious for justice. 

     Thing is, I’ve seen this van in my neighborhood for at least 10 years, maybe longer. Ten years. Seems a long time to advertise your grievances on the side of your van.

     And yet my neighbor’s hardly the first to advertise his grievances for what seems like an awfully long time.

     There’s the guy I know who has never gotten over the slights he received from his brother. He’ll tell anyone who’ll sit still long enough all about them. It’s been decades since they talked, and though he needs some family around him right now, he prefers to be alone in his bitterness. 

     There’s the woman I know who, after more than a decade, still carries around her anger toward her ex-husband. It’s poisoned every other relationship in her life, it seems, because she demands that those she keeps around her share and reflect her anger back to her. Anyone who won’t is cut off.

     There’s the gentleman disappointed by the church so many years ago, who refuses to consider the idea that maybe it’s time to let those hurts go and reconnect. All he has to say about the church, based on that one disappointment, is bitter and angry. The grievances he bears have made it impossible for him to see with any kind of clarity the other churches that didn’t hurt him, churches where he’d be welcomed and encouraged and made strong again. 

     But that’s what carrying grievances around for so long does. It makes you blind. It becomes so all-consuming that it destroys healthy relationships. Though we carry them, in part, because we’re looking for sympathy, carrying them is ironically isolating. There’s a commitment required in carrying our grievances, a cost paid in love and friendship and relationships. 

     Carrying grievances around keeps us locked into the past. It makes us unable to live in the present or look forward to the future with any hope or anticipation.

     Worse, carrying grievances around affects our spirits.

     A person with grievances prays almost entirely about those grievances. When she reads the Bible, all she sees is condemnation for the person who hurt her. A person with grievances can’t live in relationship with the church. He can’t thank God for what he has, can’t praise him joyfully. Nursing grievances is the end to spirituality. That’s why Paul calls hatred, discord, jealousy, and fits of rage “acts of the flesh” and contrasts them with the “fruit of the Spirit.” If a person is clinging to their grievances, it’s not the work of the Holy Spirit in his life. 

     But that’s not even the worst of it. When we carry grievances around, we fail to glorify God.

     Remember Israel in the desert? Their besetting sin out there wasn’t idolatry — that was just a symptom. Their problem, articulated over and over again, was “grumbling.” The last straw seems to have been their refusal to believe that they could take possession of the land God had promised them. And in that story you see why holding to your grievances is ultimately so destructive.

     God’s anger against the people comes from the fact that they treated him with contempt. “How long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the signs I have performed among them?” he asks Moses. That’s the real problem with holding on to our grievances, carrying them around with us for everyone to see. It’s faithless. It obscures the message of the glory of God that our lives are supposed to communicate, and replaces it with another message: a message about the hurts and slights we’ve received. 

     That’s why the message of Jesus regarding grievances is consistently one word: “Forgive” — not just generously, but extravagantly. Holding tightly to our grievances gives them power. It witnesses to the truth that those grievances are the strongest power in our lives. It lets the world see their power as they strangle our relationships and rot us spiritually.

     But to forgive is to show the power of God to redeem and renew even the worst of circumstances. It shows that where there is death, God can create new life. It shows that the evils of the world to do not disrupt God’s plans, even in our minds. It witnesses to the forgiveness we have received in Jesus, and the hope that we have for others — even those who have hurt us — because of him.

     That’s why Jesus forgave those who crucified him, even while they were doing it. That’s why he asked God to forgive them. It wasn’t because the nails and the lash and the thorns didn’t hurt. It wasn’t that the crucifixion was a show for our benefit. It wasn’t because he was somehow immune to agony and anger and humiliation. He “learned obedience by what he suffered,” said one New Testament writer. Part of that obedience was the requirement to forgive.

     I don’t know what your grievances are. I don’t want to pretend they’re trivial. I know that they aren’t. But I also know that they will poison your life if you carry them around with you. I know that they will kill you spiritually. And I know that they will compromise the message of the glory of God that your life is intended to embody.

     I also know this: if you’re in Christ, you have experienced forgiveness. And the Holy Spirit lives in you, and will give you the strength to let those grievances go. The marks carrying them has left on your life might not go away overnight. But, by forgiving, you can begin the journey of getting rid of them and embracing the new life God has for you.

Every Believer Needs the Church

“I believe in God, but not the church.”

     It wasn’t the first time I’d heard a sentiment like that. I’ve been a minister for over 20 years — I’ve heard them all, believe me: spiritual, but not religious, Jesus, but not Christians, and that old favorite about how the church is responsible for most of the violence and bloodshed in history. (As Jonathan Storment puts it: “You have one Crusade, and suddenly that’s all everyone wants to talk about.”) I’m fairly well-versed in the historical wrongs of the church, both because I’ve read the history and also because folks who want nothing to do with the church have kept me well informed. So it wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone say that the church was something they wanted no part of.

     This time, though, the words came from someone whose faith I knew about, someone I knew loved the Lord and wanted to be a part of his mission in the world. And I felt far away from him at that moment, because I don't know how a person separates concern for the mission of God in the world from being a part of the community of faith.

     The difference may be generational. Believers younger than me tend to think of the community of faith, if they think of it at all, in less rigid terms. Being a community of faith, they reason, has little to do with where you spend your Sunday mornings. They reason that it has more to do with feeding the hungry than with sharing communion, more to do with helping the sick than praying for them from a comfortable distance, more to do with conversing over coffee with someone who’s lonely than with sitting in a big room listening to a sermon. The “community of faith,” younger Christians sometimes argue, is wherever people of faith are doing works of faith. The community of faith, to them, isn’t found at a church of any denomination as much as it’s found with those who join them in handing out sandwiches to the homeless under an overpass, or who move with them into an economically depressed neighborhood and plant gardens, or who march with them for justice for immigrants, or who dig wells with them in Africa.

     In fairness, the church hasn’t been good about recognizing those communities of faith. Concerned sometimes with safeguarding the gospel, or biblical inerrancy, or moral purity, or our own interests, we have sometimes looked with suspicion on anything outside our walls or budget that some might call the work of God. We’ve groused that we shouldn’t feed the hungry or help the homeless in just any old way, that it isn’t a work of faith if it doesn’t happen in a church building or the name of Jesus isn’t pronounced. And then somewhere we started handing off kingdom work to government, to the health care industry, to social service and para-church organizations. 

     Church, in the meantime, became the place where we went to learn the self-help secrets of the Bible, to improve our marriages, make us better parents, and learn to be more successful in our careers. Church has become all about us. Stripped of their reason for being, local churches have become obsessed with creating an experience that will win members from an increasingly shallow pool. While some of these churches grow explosively, the communities around them remain largely untouched by the gospel of Jesus.

     The fact is, though, that our kids are starting to notice. They may not be able to articulate it, or even notice it consciously. But they hear us say God is concerned about the poor and the marginalized, and they notice some other folks somewhere doing some good work among the poor and marginalized, and they see us sitting in our worship centers sipping coffee and talking about how much stress our careers are causing us, and they can be forgiven for starting to wonder why they need the church at all. 

     Truthfully, I would have to say they probably don’t. Not that kind of church, anyway.

     But I would also say that the church is not supposed to be that. It isn’t supposed to sanctify our self-centeredness. It isn’t supposed to cater to our every whim like some ecclesiastical Wal-Mart. (“Self-Esteem, Aisle 7. Complaining About How Much Better Things Used to Be, Aisle 4”) Prior to the last century, no Christian ever wondered why the church didn't offer better child care during the Sunday services. (They were too busy caring for orphans, like, all week.) The church isn’t supposed to reflect our prejudices and opinions back to us. It isn’t supposed to be comfortable, or easy, or convenient, and please, God, it isn’t supposed to be some experience created with music and lighting and atmosphere, like a low-budget U2 show. 

     I don’t mean to step on any toes. We’ve come by it honestly. The church has simply absorbed our cultural values, until it’s become just another reflection of a shallow society heavy on instant gratification and excitement and light on allegiance, commitment, and sacrifice.

     So I would remind the church — and those who prefer to turn away rather than do what their spiritual ancestors have done and make the church more what she should be — Jesus calls us salt and light. We’re those who call ourselves “blessed” even when we’re hurting and mourning and penniless and hungry for a taste of justice. We’re those who believe that we’re God’s children and will see him, that there’s a new world coming in Jesus, and that we’re its heralds, its vanguard. 

      Our work is to show what that new world looks like in the way we work, live, parent, and serve. On the one hand, we don’t have the right to define that new world as we want to, by making it all about our personal forgiveness and self-realization. On the other hand, neither do we have the right to serve the fruits of that new world without acknowledging and naming the One through whom it’s coming into being. If the church many younger believers are turning from is empty of the works to which the good news of the kingdom calls us, then what they’re turning to are those works emptied of the presence of the kingdom. The gospel doesn’t proclaim that if we all band together and try really hard, we can end hunger or sex trafficking or gun violence or AIDS. It proclaims a kingdom where those things don’t exist. Our small efforts are just a taste of the grace, love, forgiveness, and peace that God is bringing about in Jesus — but it is essential that we witness to our faith in the coming kingdom through those small efforts.

     That’s why every believer needs the church, even though the church has often been and will often be less than we should. And it’s also why the church needs every believer, especially those who will call us to be more than we are. I believe in God, and I believe in the church. And I believe that God is even now renewing the church.