"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Daniel Morgan

So, I have a tendency to be a little more forthright than people like. Fortunately, with my irrepressible charm (heh, almost said 'irresponsible' there), I can usually offset that feature. For instance, I often get annoyed at the conventional greeting, "How are you doing?" The weird thing is you can't ever just tell someone how you're doing. It's often times complex and involved and requires a bit of back story, which most people are not overly inclined to sit through. Will they really want to hear first thing after they've had they're morning coffee that I'm conflicted about having quit my job and intent to leave home for nowhere definite, questioning Church and missing my ex, and not to close to Jesus at the — uh, hello? Hello . . . ?

Compound that with the sad thought that the place where transparency should be valued the most, the Church, is often where we find it the least. To some extent I like to think that's changing with this younger generation and the blogger atmosphere they're raised in. That brings up a third quality of mine, namely naivety. For one thing, even the word "blog" is decidedly ugly, imitative of the act of vomiting out one's innards without forethought or an especially edifying design in mind. As far as transparency, it's that of the exhibitionist, which isn't true transparency at all. It vents a little political alarm or enthusiasm for some pop culture or just a random gallery of personal facets, but nothing of the inner person who hurts tremendously or has questions beneath the superficial questions that make it to the website. Even those that have legitimate questions and a few valid answers, instead of bringing it to the town square or church doors, they! post it on the message board to no one in particular from no one in particular.

Like everyone, I have bugaboos bugging me. Like everyone, there are few people I can be candid about those with, and less who can handle my "issues." I suppose this is a roundabout way of talking about authentic community. I may have mentioned this before, the fundamental shift that going on in the American Church today and how some is good and some is bad. Here we come back to the problem of context. To start a whole essay or cogent thesis of those thoughts would first require a lot of unpacking. When I say "American Church" what I really mean is my experience and readings around the traditional, conservative Baptist-type found scattered about the Bible Belt and bulging over into television and book outlets. Despite their spotlight in the bestsellers list, the truth is that the traditional Church model, at its best a source of rapid-fire worship and sound preaching for a few, at its worst a heretical self-help business, is literally dying out.

I think much of my frustration comes from two things. There's not a handy name for the Church model that is shifting things. The natural term is "emergent" but that's already taken by the heretical side of things. I'd get into why they're heretical, since just labeling people does no good, but I'm crunched on time and space. The simple solution to tell you the names of the books I've been reading so you can look up the capsule summary on Amazon.com, but that wouldn't help with all the jumble of thoughts of mine that've been synapsing through conversations with others. I could supply links to websites so you could read those articles, and then get back to you when you've had a chance to catch up, but I'm afraid like Zeno's Paradox I'd be that much farther along by then.

The topics are so broad and interconnected. Questions range over the actual role of Church, its biblical polity, who and who is not included. What is preaching? To whom is it to be addressed? And teaching? What's the difference? Is the pastor of a mega-church really a pastor, i.e., shepherd who knows his sheep, or just a preacher, or merely a speaker? Most importantly, what is the gospel? What is and is not included? Furthermore, assuming we have an orthodox definition after all the cultural paraphernalia has been pared away, how do we communicate that gospel?

What is this guy getting at? you wonder. After all, he's not just vomiting out intelligible words in a stream-of-consciousness polemic of deferred meaning is he?

No, faithful reader, I would never do that to you. I have several answers ready for the above, but I had to go through countless questions and getting my bearings in the greater context to get there. It's no different for helping you share in those conclusions with me. We can all see how coming in the middle of a conversation can distract you, just as if you looked at the title of this article with the word "starting" as a verb instead of an adjective. Our lives are like that. It seems to take an infinite number of points on the old asymptote to reach a deep rapport with another, to get us parallel. Unfortunately, we all know a brief argument can quickly shatter those years of shared memories.

If we can focus on a different sample set, this is even truer for marriage. Understanding the Church of tomorrow, we could look at any number of images the Scriptures use: the holy nation of priests, an ordered and loving family, a living temple of worship, the unity of the body of Christ, the expanding kingdom of God. For our purposes here, the bride of Christ may represent us. She is weak and ugly in many aspects, but, pray God, she can learn to wean herself away from phatic technology and meaningless social exchanges of pleasantries to have righteous boldness and confessional transparency.

The second of those frustrations I mentioned (Did you remember to wait for me to pick up that fragment? I'm touched.) is just the bigness of these issues. God knows there's a lot of surface area for a friend to explore with me until we're relatively on the same page. It's no less so with your authentic faith community, your local church of a handful of pretentious, but needy people. Such life is like conversation: we stumble, we repeat ourselves, we ramble on. It is not rehearsed, or some professionally polished program that comes to a close at precisely eleven o'clock. When it leans in that direction, just politely refer them to Jesus and his company and do what you have to do to follow suit.

As for me, I've come to a few conclusions thus far, and with those hopefully a few more down the road.

While I do not write off the traditional Church as corrupt or apostate as the Reformers had to do with Roman Catholicism, I do see that my time and efforts are best spent on starting and living in simple Churches, those obscure, off-the-radar, on-going, relational, organic house gatherings of various groupings and make-up and levels of discipleship throughout the week that stumble, repeat, and ramble on in that gleeful, nerdy way old friends do. Amid, the murky explosion of forms of postmodern Church, and whichever amorphous expressions that might echo what I've been saying, I commit to keeping orthodox, to pursuing life in the salvific Spirit, and to leave aside the comfortable encumbrances that would prevent me from taking up my cross. It was messy and nameless and repetitive and discursive and self-referential and glorious enough for Jesus to incarnate: by golly, it's good enough for me. If you're interested and in the tangential Houston area (as long as I'm there), drop us a line.

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