We interrupt the noise with this breaking silence:

Justin Edwards, a very talented and skilled friend from my days in Bowling Green, OH, is on his way to Africa - Kenya, to be precise. He will be working with a ministry already in-country, as well as starting a fantastic, God-breathed adventure - World Story Organization, Inc. (WSO): Changing the World One Story at a Time.

WSO is dedicated to providing a storytelling and film production education for marginalized communities around the world.

WSO is a registered nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization and is recognized by the IRS of the United States of America.

Links to WSO and JustInKenya are in this post and in the sidebar.  Read ‘em, get all excited about the work God’s going to do with Justin in Kenya (and beyond), and who knows?  Maybe even support it.  After that shameless plug, I’m going to go find out if I have a PayPal account, and do so myself…

This is an essay that I started on October 19, 2005, while completing my degree at George Mason University.  I find myself intrigued, inspired, and energized by the thoughts presented, and hope it provides much food for thought for all of us. Shalom, my friends.

 So, I’m in the middle of my first semester at Mason, and researching the emergent church movement for a paper for my sociology of religion class. It’s early; I’m not quite sure what to do with all the information I’m accumulating, but it’s got me thinking about some things. Among them is the fact that I’m 26 and still working on my bachelor’s degree, when by all previously constructed versions of my life I would have been so finished with this by now, and quite successful at whatever profession I thought important at the time.

Of course, to date, all my ideas of success have been dismantled and thrown out with the bathwater, leaving me with only a few things that don’t seem like much, yet matter far more than they appear to at first glance. I’ve learned a lot about God in the past couple of years; mainly, that God is a whole heck of a lot bigger and more dangerous than I thought. And what I thought I knew about Him wasn’t really accurate, either. I’ve also learned that what I think of as success in life, with God, doesn’t really look or feel like success at all. It feels more like failure. Compassion? Don’t got it. Honesty? I pick up a lot of things on the street, but not that. Doing the right thing? Nobody else does it; why should I? Yet, He asks me to manifest in my life compassion, and honesty, and mercy, and doing right, and expects my success in accomplishing what He asks. Impossible.

I think about the church I grew up in, a stringently denominational and separatist church, and how, if I’d tried to talk about these issues with someone there, I would have heard something about getting my heart right with Him, and just trying harder. There probably would have been some Bible verses thrown in for good measure, then a quick and pious prayer before sending me off to feel even worse and more guilty than I had going in. (Of course, when I was growing up, all I cared about was getting as far away from church and God as I possibly could, so I’m just making an educated guess about what would have been said.)

That church would have told me that there was no grace and no help from God in my walk with Him; there was no ongoing supernatural regeneration occurring within me, despite having accepted Christ as my Savior. Justification is a one-time deal, and it takes care of everything. The rest is up to you, and if you can’t be the Christian you’re supposed to be…well, help is not in great supply here.It took me a long time to find out that justification is indeed important, but that sanctification is also part of the deal, a discovery that was huge. Huge!! As Oswald Chambers states, “…if Jesus Christ is a Regenerator, One Who can put into me His own heredity of holiness, then I begin to see what He is driving at when He says that I have to be holy. Redemption means that Jesus Christ can put into any man the hereditary disposition that was in Himself, and all the standards He gives are based on that disposition: His teaching is for the life He puts in. The moral transaction on my part is agreement with God’s verdict on sin in the Cross of Jesus Christ.”[1]

God equips me for my lifelong sanctification at the moment of my justification. Sure, work is still involved, but the point is that, with my new supernatural “disposition,” as Ozzie so quaintly puts it, the manifestation of all that God asks in my life is no longer the quite-so-impossible thing. Since then, I have learned that it is the regenerative nature and process of sanctification over the course of a lifetime that causes the struggle and shaping and molding of the life of a Christ-follower. And it is for the support and equipping of Christ-followers in this process and struggle that the Church is called together.

The Church is called to relay this eternal message of regeneration to each generation in all times and all places, a message inherently relevant and meaningful because it is eternal. In its “eternalness,” it transcends the current and transient philosophies and popular attitudes and culture, which highlights, to quote C.S. Lewis, the fact that “all that is not eternal is eternally out of date.” The message is eternal; however, the mode of transmission is not. The Church, by the very nature of its calling, must transmit the Good News to the culture in which it finds itself, and do so in a way that connects to the mindsets and attitudes with which it comes into contact.

I think about the church of my childhood, and it saddens me to think of all the ways in which it alienated myself and my peers, and how its practices and teachings did little more than convince me that Christianity was not where I wanted to be. Because of their insistence and reliance on a certain way of “being church,” they lost the opportunity to become the place to which I could bring my sanctification-struggle and my reality, and there learn how to meet God in this world, and how to introduce Him to others. That church and others like it are finding themselves in the position of becoming more and more irrelevant and marginalized in the society and culture of 21st century America.

I’m not advocating a headlong rush down the newest, coolest path to “being church,” but I am asking for all of us who seek and follow hard after God, and who love the Church in spite of, and because of, its flaws, to think about what it is we profess to believe, and ask ourselves if we truly believe it. And then, to ask ourselves if we’re willing to simply talk about those basic and core beliefs we hold, and the Person who holds us.

If we as a Church don’t figure out how to get back to the basics (the fundies of my childhood church said the same thing, so I guess there’s always this danger and opportunity), the basics being that single, eternal, home run of a message of grace, redemption, regeneration and relationship through and by and with the Savior and Creator of the universe…well, Christianity won’t die, to fly in the face of a lot of predictions, but we of the American Church will miss out on a lot of the challenges, blessings and promises that come from being a “fundy.” You think about that.

[1] Chambers, Oswald. “October 6th: The Bent of Regeneration.” My Utmost for His Highest. Grand Rapids: Discovery House, 1963. 280.