Space Enough, and Time

A few years ago I (somewhat grudgingly) took the StrengthsFinder test for work.  Of the five strength themes, connectedness, empathy, and relator surprised me the least.  Input was a nice way to label what had become my renewed appetite for reading and learning.  It was the top theme, though, that struck me funny: strategic.  According to the debrief, those with this theme “create alternative ways to proceed.  Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.”  If this is a true strength of mine, it has only manifested itself in adulthood, primarily in my time as a teacher.

These last few years have led me to be something of a systems-thinker (small-town variety).  No real formal training in it.  More of a feel-it-as-I-go thing.  Of particular interest to me as a Christian, though, has been the way Christians relate and do (or don’t do) things in community.  This has been especially true as I find myself in different positions of “leadership.”  A few weeks ago, while digesting things from Augustine and the Gospel of John and a couple of other sources that I will cite over the next few days, I finally put together a theory about what often frustrates me most about the trend I see in relationships, cultures, and organizations.  I characterize it as a kind of unnecessary and damaging breakdown.  So four of this week’s posts will deal with the issue organizational dysfunction from a place of faith.

A few days after I shared my thoughts with some of my co-workers, I back-doored myself into a pertinent passage from Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus that has new significance for me.  I was reading the passage because it is the source of “speak the truth in love,” which is something that I don’t do well at all.  Here’s the text, Ephesians 4:11-16 [ESV], which I’ll use as a “through-line” in my thoughts this week:

¹¹ And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers^{, 12} to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, ¹³ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, ¹⁴ so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. ¹⁵ Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, ¹⁶ from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

Tomorrow’s title: Out of Order.  Some of it, probably most of it, you will have heard before and better.  But it’s definitely something I’ve been working through that I’d like to share.

I heard it again recently: the assertion that the Christian faith is a relationship and not a religion.  And while I totally get what those who say such a thing are “going for,” I can’t help but feel like there’s some dangerous false distinction occurring just beneath the surface.

I say this because I see (and have experienced) the fallout of an over-emphasis on each of them.  If the Christian faith really is all about “me and Jesus,” then we’ve created an immensely subjective construct that, unchecked by “religion,” becomes almost insurmountable.  And so you get lots of conversations about spiritual gifts or inerrancy or whatever is the topic of the day, but rarely do you get the “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” that Paul wrote about.  It’s a kind of spiritual “ear candy” mentality that’s sweet for the moment but isn’t nutritious at all.  Or you get the other side of the same coin: a faith that is so personal that it cannot be talked about whatsoever.  I’ve found this to be true quite a bit these last few years: “yes, it’s about a personal relationship with Jesus, and that relationship is none of your business.”  As a co-worker of mine has noticed, you get discipleship with out doctrine.  I’m beginning to think that there’s nothing very Christian about that at all.

I also know that people have different things going on in their heads and hearts when they hear the word religion.  They often use it as a substitute for denominationalism or church culture or salvation-by-works.  Which is really unfortunate because the simple fact is that Christianity is a religion.  And if you reject the “religion” part of the faith, you very well might find yourself bereft of corporate worship, confession, the Lord’s Supper, prayer, and so many other things that Jesus instituted or Paul put in place (or at least placed in our thinking).  With the overemphasis on this, you can still end up with “topic of the day” conversations also void of “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.”  You get doctrine without discipleship.  There’s a potential earnestness, an immediacy, to these concerns that can leave you feeling that the sky is falling. But that’s usually as far as it goes.

The false distinction of relationship or religion ultimately leaves us unable to talk about either very well (if at all).  I see it because I experience it every day.  People want to talk about religious experience but don’t want to read what Paul says about it.  Or they want to talk about the intricacies of the biblical text without it having any real bearing on day-to-day faithfulness.  Everything is always up for grabs and yet it has no real implications beyond the existential moment.  We’ve reduced the relationship and religion of Christianity into a either a free-for-all or some weird form of 21st century Christian gnosticism.  And if we don’t turn our attention to bringing the two back together, we will have effectively gutted it all . . . and we won’t even realize that we’ve done it.