Being the Church, Living the Kingdom

American Christians suffer from a terribly debilitating lack of imagination. And our eyesight it horribly shoddy, too.

Our imagination is poor because we have no picture in our minds, in our hearts of what God desires for us as individual Christians and as a church community. We simply take the salvation and forgiveness that is offered to us and go merrily on our way. But the image that Jesus painted (which is very similar to that painted by Moses and the prophets before him) was of the kingdom of God, of the reign of God in the world through transformed lives and a new way of living that transforms the world through the way we live.

Our eyesight is poor not because we can’t see what others are doing, but because we can’t see what we ourselves are doing. What would we see if we could see ourselves through the eyes of our dog or bank teller or next door neighbor or co-worker or fellow committee member or even of God himself? Does the idea of really seeing you as you actually are make you shiver? Should it?

Perhaps the first step toward an adequate imagination is better eyesight. In order to get anywhere, you first need to know where you are and where you’re going. Knowing where you are requires good eyesight, enabling you to see yourself as you really are; and knowing where you’re going requires good imagination (or “vision” as some people call it).

Sadly, whenever the pollsters examine the way that Christians live, they come up with devastating statistics. George Gallup talks about an “ethics gap—the difference between the way people think of themselves and the way they act.” Also responding to the data, Michael Horton says, “Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered, and sexually immoral as the world in general.”

Here’s some of the evidence against us:

• Only 8% of devout Christians tithe, with the more money we make resulting in smaller gifts.

• Annually, the average church member gives $20 to global outreach (social concerns and evangelism) but spends $164 on soft drinks and more than $1,000 on recreation. Meanwhile, more than a billion people worldwide survive on $1 a day.

• The most devout spend seven times as much time watching TV as we do praying, reading the Bible, and in worship.

• We still haven’t gotten over our racism, preferring not to have black neighbors.

• Our sexual practices are a mess, both before and during marriage.

There’s more. But I’m depressed enough already.

So, what’s to be done? If the promise of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit point to a whole new way of living that changes the way we act in the world, not just an individualized salvation, then something has to change. Otherwise, we’re frauds living a fraudulent faith.

Ron Sider makes some suggestions: “We need to recover the biblical truth that God is blazing holiness as well as overwhelming love. We need to recover the biblical teaching on the awfulness of sin and the necessity of repentance and sanctification. We need to turn away from American individualism and recover the New Testament understanding of mutual accountability. We need to bring all our people into small discipleship groups of genuine accountability so we can, as John Wesley said, ‘watch over one another in love.’ We need to rediscover the almost totally neglected biblical teaching on church discipline” (Ronald J. Sider, Prism, Jan-Feb 2004).

We need to make more than cosmetic changes to our churches and ourselves. I pray that the desire for transformation through the powerful love of Jesus will be a constant desire for ourselves, our churches, our cities, our country, our world. Then we will truly live the kingdom and be the church God dreams of. (This entry was inspired by a column by Ron Sider which can be found at: http://www.allelon.org/articles/article.cfm?id=174)