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- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Outreach Resource of the Year Something is not right. The witness of the church in North America is eroding. Many Christians are alarmed by the decline in church attendance and seek a culprit. Too often, we point the finger away from the church, make culture the enemy, and build walls between us and others. But our antagonism and enemy-making are toxins that further eat away at our witness. Is there a better way? Tara Beth Leach could easily be one of those millennials giving up on the church. Instead, she is a pastor who loves the church and is paradoxically hopeful for its future. In an era where the church has lost much of its credibility, Leach casts a radiant vision for Christians to rediscover a robust, attractive witness. We need to name the toxic soil we've grown in, repent for past wrongs, and lean into a better way to become the church that Jesus proclaimed we would be. Leach casts down idolatrous false images of God to recover a winsome picture of a kingdom of abundance and goodness. We can be sustained by practices that will tune our hearts to God's and form us into the radiant communities God intends for us and those around us.
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RESTORING THE CREDIBILITYOF OUR WITNESS
For Kim,
For embodying the Radiant Light of Jesus
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
A Dim Light
“SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT.”
There’s been a time or two in my life when I’ve visited my physician and said those very words. Usually, some odd symptoms will show up that cause me to feel a little bit off. Several years ago I had convinced myself I was experiencing heart failure. That may sound overdramatic, except my symptoms seemed to be quite serious.
I was always exhausted no matter what I did. My husband would be content with seven hours of sleep, but I seemed to need ten. My hair started to fall out, and my skin was pale. I was once a triathlete and could run for miles, but even walking up a flight of stairs caused me to be winded.
I then noticed that my heart rate would skyrocket when doing the slightest things like standing up and walking to the next room. Even preaching became difficult.
“Something just isn’t right,” I told the doctor. I explained my symptoms, we ran some tests, and it turned out I was severely anemic.
When I look at the dearly beloved bride of Christ in North America, I see enough concerning symptoms for me to say, “Something just isn’t right.” I’m concerned about us.
CHICAGOLAND
I grew up in the peak of the 1990s youth ministry culture—think DC Talk, Jennifer Knapp, Switchfoot, WWJD bracelets, street evangelism, and my very own homemade bubble paint T-shirt that said “Jesus Freak.”
At sixteen I had a genuine thirst and love for Jesus, my newly discovered Lord and Savior. I grew up in a home of good, cultural Christians. I was baptized and confirmed in a mainline church. Sometime around my freshman year of high school, I developed a thirst for a more meaningful understanding of God. I’m not sure what the trigger was, other than the prevenient grace of God. There was also a sense of curiosity about some of the things I heard from the Christians in school. Something about them was remarkably different. They were close to one another, and I longed for the sense of belonging and community they exuded. They talked about Jesus in almost mystical ways, and I wanted the same experience.
So there I was, in the late nineties, standing in the back of a log cabin—the meeting house for Campus Life—searching for an answer for my yearning. Youth leaders and students testified about the goodness of Jesus, and I wanted more. Soon after, one of the youth leaders invited me to begin reading my Bible, so I did—cover to cover. Every night, as fast as I could, I would race up to my bedroom to plow my way through the story of God. I was completely captivated.
When I arrived at the Gospel of Luke, my mind could hardly comprehend the goodness of Jesus and the horror of the cross. But there in my bedroom, I said yes to Jesus. I had no idea of how that moment would set the trajectory of my life, but it did—drastically.
As a newly minted Jesus freak, I was ready to set the world on fire for Jesus. I started with my own high school. Every week I would illegally pack eleven kids in my Toyota RAV4 and bring them to Campus Life. Mondays were my favorite day of the week. I would come to a school on Mondays with a stack of fliers for Campus Life, and I would leave school empty-handed with a car full of kids. I wanted the world to know Jesus as I knew him. Church was my haven of rest and peace; it was the place I wanted to be nearly every waking moment. If you would have told me the church had flaws, I would have fiercely defended it.
When I first learned about Billy Graham, I wanted to be just like him, but only because Billy was telling people about Jesus by the multitudes. Then I heard about Bill Hybels. Somewhere around 2001, I joined a carload of students to drive an hour north to the Willow Creek campus in Barrington, Illinois. When I walked into the lobby, I saw escalators and food courts. When I walked into the massive ten thousand-plus seat sanctuary, the hair on my arms stood up. Someone gets to preach to this many people every week?
From that day on, Willow Creek Community Church was the epitome of success—through the eyes of a new Christian formed in Western evangelicalism—in the economy of the kingdom: church growth, large buildings, and bodies in seats. In my mind this was the golden vision every pastor ought to strive for.
When I began my journey in ministry in the early 2000s as a Youth for Christ director, we used to compare attendance numbers in staff meetings and then high-five one another when attendance was “crushing it.”1 There’s hardly a pastor that would deny feelings of excitement when numbers are unusually high or when the pastor glances out in the sanctuary and the seats are full. Needing to build more prominent and more state-of-the-art sanctuaries can be a thrill, no doubt.
In my early days of ministry, I recall attending a church growth summit, and as a young associate pastor, I was enamored by one pastor’s account of growing a church from sixty to five hundred people. I couldn’t take notes fast enough and couldn’t wait to someday apply the tactics I learned that day. With a quick scroll through Google, we can learn all about the “easy principles to church growth.”
Numbers tend to be quite a big deal for pastors. This can be a helpful metric and is something we celebrate for a good reason. As someone who has been so profoundly impacted by the gospel of Jesus, I celebrate anytime someone decides to follow Jesus for the first time. I celebrate when lives are transformed within the body of Christ. I celebrate every time someone is newly baptized. These are just some of the few reasons I do what I do. Simultaneously, an emphasis on numbers as the golden metric for success can become unhealthy, especially when we pursue success at the expense of faithfulness or appearance at the expense of authentic community.
After serving in ministry for quite some time and after attending seminary, I developed a more robust kingdom theology, ecclesiology, and pneumatology. I knew deep down that the metrics of empire weren’t necessarily the fruit of goodness in the kingdom. I knew it, but it was still so deeply ingrained in the mind of this young pastor.
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
In 2016 I accepted the new role as senior pastor of First Church of the Nazarene of Pasadena, affectionately known as “PazNaz.” PazNaz is a large and historic church in Southern California with a rich history in Pasadena as well as the Nazarene denomination. However, upon my arrival many left the church, and although there were compounding factors, some of it was over the sheer fact that I am a woman. Many just “couldn’t do a woman pastor” even if their theology agreed with it. For others it was a straight-up “abomination” and “sin.” Some believed that “PazNaz is doomed for failure and will lose the favor of God because they called a woman.” Many simply could not comprehend a young thirty-something woman taking on such a significant role “with small children at home.”
Many stayed, rallied, prayed, and jumped all in for the mission. Those that stayed are some of the godliest, most loving, and most faithful people you’ll ever meet. But they too were trying to comprehend the scale of loss. Many were concerned about the sheer loss. The bottom dropped out of the place, some shared. Concerned members lamented, “Pastor, how will we fill the sanctuary again?” which I interpreted as, “When will we be successful again?”
It has taken much prayer and therapy for me to recognize that the loss didn’t mean the church was wrecked, and for that matter, it wasn’t Tara Beth Leach who wrecked this precious church. What I was experiencing was symptomatic of something much bigger.
THE PROBLEM WITH OUR METRICS
I began to discover that hidden behind the curtains of evangelicalism’s golden crowns of success was a malnourished vision for flourishing in the kingdom. Not only was it malnourished but when lived out, there were problems and disappointments, and sometimes it produced fruit that was the antithesis to the vision laid out in Scripture. Perhaps “success” wasn’t what we thought it was.
Furthermore, what we have discovered in many of evangelicalism’s successful megachurches is that behind closed doors of rising attendance, building, and cash, the situation isn’t what it seems. Take, for example, Willow Creek, Harvest Bible Chapel, and the Southern Baptist Convention. The curtains were pulled back and the light shined in the darkness. We all saw moral failures happening behind closed doors in some of America’s largest churches.
It turns out we had been using the wrong metric all along. Suddenly, we all had to come to terms with the reality that what was once anointed as a success wasn’t successful after all. These old metrics only told some of the story.
Imagine going into a doctor with chest pains and the doctor pulling out a stethoscope. After listening for a moment, the doctor says, “Your heart is beating rhythmically. I think you’re in great shape!” I imagine that you would explain to the doctor that more sophisticated measuring tools are needed. The stethoscope shows only part of the picture.
Or imagine going to the doctor for your child’s yearly checkup, and the doctor measures only the child’s weight and height. If the doctor were to declare your child healthy but your child has aches and pains on a regular basis, you’d ask for more tests.
We are acting like this doctor by measuring the health of the church numerically. Of course, measuring numerically is far easier than measuring faithfulness or love or kindness or hospitality or integrity. Measuring numerically is low-hanging fruit. At the same time, what if our measuring system has been covering up symptoms for decades, and only recently are we coming to terms with the severity of the crisis?
You see, it isn’t just about Willow Creek, Harvest Bible Chapel, and the Southern Baptist Convention. It isn’t only about evangelicals’ propensity for partisan politics. We could find many symptoms: #ChurchToo, segregation, polarization, hypernationalism within local church worship, and a history of systemic racism. These didn’t happen overnight; rather, they are symptomatic of a crisis that has been brewing for decades.
The erosion of the witness in the church began to crumble years ago, and today we are trying to make sense of it all. Through all of this there have been ongoing conversations on the post-Christian context. There is a notable shift happening in churches and communities all around America. PazNaz has been around for decades, which means many of its members have been around for long enough to talk about what they call “the good old days.” To them, the “good old days” are the days when “most people went to church.” Now, most people don’t go to church.
Many look for somewhere or someone to point the finger at, and the finger is often pointed outward instead of inward. Blame the millennials, blame the erosion of Christian morals in America, blame the liberals, blame immoral presidents, blame the decay of culture.
Perhaps we are pointing in the wrong direction. Maybe we ought to honestly and humbly look in the mirror and turn the finger back toward ourselves. Maybe it isn’t the post-Christian culture, and instead we have a post-Christian church. Maybe it’s time for us to look in the mirror, examine our hearts, and ask the Lord to show us where we’ve fallen short, confess, lament, and repent.
LET’S GET UNCOMFORTABLE
I can remember back when I was a young student studying to be in ministry; whenever someone would critique the church, I got uncomfortable. Don’t talk about my family like that, I’d think. Don’t talk about the very people that birthed me, nurtured me, fed me, and formed me. But these days I can see the ways that systems of evil have entrapped us, and I yearn for the church to break free from the systems that entangle us and experience the free, full, flourishing life that Jesus came to teach, live, die, and ascend to the throne for. We were meant for so much more than this. But before we experience freedom, we need to first be uncomfortable. It’s time to name some things, lament some things, repent of some things, and step into new wineskins.
No longer can we ignore our symptoms or turn a blind eye. It’s time we courageously poke at the things that may sting a little. Actually, you may get angry, and I’ll be honest, that makes me a bit nervous. I once heard someone say that good rabbis make their listeners mad. If a doctor pokes and prods and I suddenly yell, “Ouch!” then the doc has exposed a painful symptom. I’m not a rabbi, and I’m certainly not a doctor, but I do see concerning symptoms these days. I’d rather poke than turn a blind eye.
But after some of the poking, I want you to know how much I think Jesus believes in us. I actually think it’s a gift that our symptoms are being exposed. Perhaps the curtains are being pulled back so that the Spirit might do a new thing in our midst. Perhaps this wilderness will bring us to our knees so we might experience new humility, new dependence, and new freedom. Lisa Sharon Harper says it best about evangelicals:
What if the process of repentance—restitution and repair—is the way of God, the narrow road to the health of our world?
And what if repentance is the way to the restoration of the image of God in a people twisted by hubris?2
WHO AM I CRITIQUING?
I am a child of White evangelicalism, and I am speaking primarily to both pastors and lay leaders of the White evangelical church. While I know that not all evangelicals are White and certainly have diversity, I am speaking to a generation of believers who have historically worshiped in White evangelical churches. It is my hope that we as pastors and leaders can name and acknowledge the places where we have become entrapped by “the powers not of this world.” The apostle Paul names this for us, “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph 6:12).
There is indeed a struggle happening within the White evangelical church; there are places where we are under the grips of dark powers of this world. It’s time we move away from dismissiveness and denial, and face reality. I hope that we don’t just name our problems, but I pray this brings us to our knees. I pray we lament, confess, and repent. I pray we lean into the creative and missional imagination of the triune God. Lisa Sharon Harper poses an important and uncomfortable question for us, “What if the call to White evangelicals is to stop trying to be God, to control everything and everyone and to join the rest of humanity—the beloved dust? . . . Will lament lead to surrender?3
Are you squirming yet? I am.
Dear reader, perhaps you find yourself a bit uncomfortable like I was years ago. I get that. The church is my family. Week in and week out I get to worship with, journey with, and live in a mutually edifying relationship with a local church. The church is the radiant bride of Christ, and I too get defensive when others trample on the bride’s garment. But the way I see it, the bride’s garment is tangled up and entrapped in ways that are holding us back from the free, full, and flourishing life we were meant to live.
I pray you hear my words like a mother or aunt who deeply loves her family and wants to see her family live into its full potential—that is, the radiant church in all its beauty. I believe the whole church is called to total radiance, and while I may be critiquing what is primarily White evangelicalism, I am calling the whole church to radiance. May we come alongside our brothers and sisters of color and partner to be radiant people.
WHO IS RADIANT?
The writer of Hebrews says this about Jesus, “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven” (Heb 1:3). Jesus is in the radiant image of the glory of our majestic God. No one is fully radiant but God, and we see this embodied in the person of the radiant King Jesus. We are the bride of the King, called to bear witness to this radiant gospel and this radiant kingdom where Jesus rules. In Christ, we are brilliantly radiant. Throughout history, Jesus’ radiant bride has shined with luster and brilliance, but at times it has waned. As a pastor I lament when our light is pale, and I rejoice when we shine with brilliance. There is nothing more that I long for than a radiant church that blazes in the darkness. My hope is that throughout these pages I’ll be able to name the places our light is diminished, and paint a vision for a church that illuminates in a weary world.
I write this book with much fear and trembling, but also with a push from the Spirit that I can’t ignore. So I can’t think of a better way to start this book than with a prayer.
Lord, I am ill-equipped to write this book, and yet words are birthing in my mind and heart that I can’t seem to shake. So I give the pages of this book to you. I pray this book will be a tool to help expand the imagination of the church. Help us to see, name, and flee from the things that entrap us, and help us to lean into the radiant vision of the kingdom rooted in Scripture, held together by the covenant of God the Father, fulfilled by King Jesus, and birthed by the Spirit. Amen.
QUESTIONS FOR INDIVIDUALS AND GROUPS
1. What do you love about the church?
2. Considering there is not a perfect church, and the church is certainly imperfect, what are some of the symptoms you notice of the imperfect church?
3. In what ways has the church ignored the symptoms? How has this been harmful?
4. In what ways has the church measured success that has been harmful?
5. In what ways has the church measured success that has been helpful?
6. What are your laments for the church?
7. What are your hopes for the church?
1
THE CALL TO RADIANCE
“YOU’RE NOT ONE OF THOSE born-again Christians, are you?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that question. Was it a trap? What did they think “born-again” meant? I leaned over the fence that stood between my neighbor and me, and we both watched our children play together in the yard. “What do you mean by that?” I tried to ask in the most nonjudgmental tone as possible and instead take the posture of curiosity. “Well, those born-agains talk about a God who loves you, but they live their lives as anything but loving. They only care about their own political agenda and not the people that they have politicized.” I can’t remember exactly how I navigated the conversation that day, but perhaps it’s familiar to you.
Some circles project hostility between the church and culture. While plenty of people have the opposite and more loving view of the church, I think it’s safe to say that there’s a growing tension between the church and culture in the Western world.
There’s been a pulling away of sorts, however. No longer do we enjoy easy approval from Western culture, and going to church on Sunday mornings is no longer the thing to do. According to Gallup, the most dramatic shift is those who don’t identify as religious at all.1
Aside from decline, our reputation has been put to the test. If we were to dial the conversation back to 2007, David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group, noted this from an outsider to Christianity, “Most people I meet assume that Christian means very conservative, entrenched in their thinking, anti-gay, anti-choice, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders, they want to convert everyone, and they generally cannot live peacefully with anyone who does not believe what they believe.”2 A few years later, in 2011, David Fitch declared that evangelicalism was coming to an end. He writes, “Evangelicalism’s influence within American society is painfully on the wane. As recent as just this past decade, evangelicalism had carried a significant amount of political influence within society and seemed confident of its identity as a church in America.”3
The influence the church once had is waning, the light that once shined bright is diminishing, and the salt that was once salty is losing its saltiness.
Over a decade ago, as many influential church leaders and theologians saw the future of the church they gathered to create manifestos. Many called for a redefining, a rebirthing, and a reidentification of the church. It was time for renewal and revival, and for the evangelical church to embrace the God who births new things. Fast forward a decade and it would appear that the church has missed the moment, or perhaps it’s something that “gets worse before it gets better.” Either way, I think it’s safe to say we have reached a crisis moment.
The crisis, however, is not just the decline of those who declare faith in King Jesus—though that is certainly to be lamented. The crisis, instead, is an issue that must be dealt with in our own family room. This is not the time to point the finger outward, and it’s not the time to blame the world. Instead, I pray that we take this opportunity to look in the mirror.
SYMPTOMS OF THE CRISIS
Moral failures. In the last few years, moral failures of pastors and so-called Christian politicians alike are being brought to light at a rapid rate. But what’s troubling is how quickly we defend the perpetrator rather than the victim. Perhaps even more troubling is that at times the world is defending the victim while the church defends the perpetrator. This was an alarming reality when Bill Hybels was first accused of sexual abuse and harassment from a number of female staffers at Willow Creek. The leadership was sadly quick to defend their pastor and blame the victims. Rachel Held Evans tweeted this about the #ChurchToo movement, “The Church in America, and specifically evangelicals, are going to have to muster up some humility and take a serious look at how patriarchy, sexism, and toxic masculinity have infected their culture.”4
In many ways it would appear that the curtains have been pulled back on systems of power—power often held by my brothers in Christ—that are wrapped in toxic systems. We have learned in recent years that behind closed doors things weren’t what they appeared to be behind the glimmer and glamor of the large auditoriums, fog machines, and rapid growth of butts in the auditorium seats. Maybe all along the very things we anointed as success weren’t successful after all.
Then we started to hear whispers from the mouths of trembling, broken, and fearful women. At first we asked them to keep quiet; we must not ruin the witness of the church. Some quieted down, and some got louder. When American culture started the #MeToo movement, the church had its own movement, #ChurchToo. Thousands of stories emerged—gut-wrenching, painful, and devastating stories. Take a moment to scroll through Twitter’s #ChurchToo feed and grab a box of tissues while you read. If it doesn’t make you weep, I don’t know what will.
Many did gather ’round to listen while others continued to silence the voices of the hurting. Some who held the power had plenty of opportunities to call for the church to repent, apologize, and work toward reconciliation. I was especially grateful for leaders like Dan Meyer, senior pastor of Christ Church of Oak Brook, JR Rozko, director of Missio Alliance, Rich Villodas, pastor of New Life Fellowship in Queens, New York, and New Testament scholar Scot McKnight for the ways they and countless others prophetically called the church to confession, lament, and a better way.
Allegiance. And then the curtains were pulled back on our own allegiance. I think somewhere along the way we got confused. Of course, the history of this is deeply rooted. Is it God and country? Is my citizenship first in the kingdom of God or in my country? Or are they the same? Flags on altars next to the cross were on equal footing, and the gospel according to the empire began to collide with the gospel of King Jesus. The church fell in love with the empire, and the witness suffered because it wasn’t sure which was which. Patriotism trumped the values of the kingdom, and eventually it seems we developed multiple personality disorder. On the one hand, we loved Jesus and the gift of salvation, and on the other, we sought more power, more strength, more dominance, more prestige, more wealth, more flourishing, and more gain. Eugene Cho warned,
I would submit that the greatest challenge is actually within Christianity: It’s the temptation to build the structures and institutionalism of Christianity but without the parallel commitment to Jesus. It’s politicians and even Christian pastors and leaders who sprinkle on a pinch of Jesus into our thinking, speeches, or sermons but often in a way that fulfills our agenda or goals. In other words, using Jesus to promote nationalism is simply not the way of Jesus.5
We abandoned the imagination of Scripture and instead adopted a Western political imagination that we tried to keep firmly hitched to the Christian way. But if we were honest, it’s a dimly lit version of the early church—if lit at all.
A polarized church. Instead of falling to our knees, we took to larger platforms and louder megaphones to make our views known. We took to Twitter with hateful words and memes. Instead of peacemaking, we took to dividing and violent speech. We were more interested in being right than unified, so we drew harder lines in the sand and pushed the weak, marginalized, and hurting away.
Meanwhile, young ears were listening, and young eyes were watching. What was meant to be beautiful slowly eroded away. As the pastor of the second oldest church in my denomination, many grandparents are lamenting over the decline of the attendance of young people, and many are fearful for the future of the church. Perhaps many decided that the radiance of the church wasn’t what they thought it was.
IT’S NOT THEM; IT’S US
No longer can we point the finger away from ourselves and put the blame on culture wars. No longer can we say, “It’s because they took God out of our schools,” and, “That generation is ruining everything!” Instead, dear Christians, we have a few things to sort through and talk about.
We’ve been exposed, and the curtains have been pulled back. Instead of saying, “To hell with the church!” I cling to the promise of Scripture that declares, “The gates of hell shall not prevail against [the church!]” (Mt 16:18 KJV). I know how this story ends, and I know that the bride of Christ will never fully crumble. I hope that this exposure would lead us to our knees, crying out for the Spirit to birth something new, alive, beautiful, and radiant.
I believe this more than anything: what isn’t revealed can’t be healed. It’s time to embrace what has been revealed and lean into a new kind of healing that can only be explained by the faithful presence of Jesus.
BORN-AGAIN
Somewhere in the mid-1990s, when I was a new Christian, I came across a popular bronze statue by Dean Kermit Allison. The sculpture was called “Born Again,” and it depicted a man shedding his old self with a bronze layer of skin, and his new self was being born anew as a radiant, glassy, crystal version. I remember staring at that statue mesmerized and in tears. I was the statue, I thought. Newly in love with Jesus and recently beginning my life in Christ, God was doing a radiant new thing in my life. But today, that statue seems more prophetic, and it tugs at my heartstrings as I long for the church of the future.
I pray that the church would begin to see, acknowledge, and name the bronze layers that are saturated with worldly beliefs and behaviors and flee from them. I pray that the church would know that we have not been destroyed—it’s not too late. I pray that we would reclaim, be renewed and revived, and allow the work of the Spirit to birth something new and radiant. Like the bronze statue, may the layers of our own systems that have hurt and harmed others begin to peel away, and may the lamp of truth, love, and righteousness be placed firmly on its pedestal and shine in all of its illuminating beauty. Not beauty for the glory of ourselves but for the glory and majesty of our King and Creator. May we shine in such a way that instead of hard lines in the sand being drawn, those who once felt excluded are now drawn to the radiant light of the church.
But birthing isn’t easy work. It’s painful, it’s laborious, it’s long, and it literally brings blood, sweat, and tears. On the early morning of April 17, 2010, I woke up at 6 a.m. to discover that my water had broken. Fortunately, I wasn’t feeling any pain yet, so I decided I could take a shower, put on makeup, and grab breakfast on the way to the hospital. By the time my husband and I arrived at Panera to pick up some breakfast on the way, the labor pains began to kick in. I’ll also confess that I had no idea that when the water breaks, it isn’t just a one-time occurrence; rather, it keeps on coming. This was rather problematic standing in line for my bagel. After a minute or two of waiting in line, I turned to Jeff with my lips curled and my teeth together and said, “We have to go now!”
By the time we got to the hospital, I was in full-blown labor. Before having Caleb, I thought of myself as a tough woman with high pain tolerance. Turns out, labor was much more painful and difficult than any friend or textbook or Lamaze class could have prepared me for.
At one point during labor, my husband and parents were in the hospital room having a good old time, sharing, eating, laughing, and watching Ghostbusters on TV. I was angry that I was suffering and they were enjoying the moment. My husband came over to me with an angelic and peaceful look on his face, gently put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Hey, babe, I was thinking that the next baby . . .” and before he could even finish his sentence, I angrily interrupted him with what probably seemed like demon eyes and the voice of his worst nightmares, “Next baby? Next baby? You think I’m going to go through this again? There will be no next baby!”
Perhaps the scariest and most challenging moment came during what many call transitional labor, which is the stage between active labor—labor pains that are a few minutes apart—and actually having to push for delivery. It’s intense, and the only way for any sort of relief is to push and potentially scream. I did both. The nurses and my family surrounded me saying things like, “Breathe, and keep your eye on the prize! Caleb is coming! Breathe; keep your eye on the prize! Focus! Caleb is coming!”
Breathe. Keep your eye on the prize. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Dear church, creation is groaning. The labor pains can no longer be ignored. It’s time to push and birth something new, something radiant, something wrapped in love, truth, and grace.
There is nothing glorious about labor; there is nothing easy about pushing. It hurts. It’s hard. But push we must. That is, we must repent, we must name, we must rid ourselves of toxic systems, and we must abandon the imagination of the principalities and powers of this world. Let us push, breathe, keep our eyes on Jesus, press in, lean in, and reclaim the radiant vision that comes alive in Scripture.
A CALL TO RADIANCE
In Matthew 5, Jesus steps on a mount and begins to teach. His prophetic words are drenched in love and wrapped in vision. It was a sermon unlike any other that has now found its home in what we call the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5–7). In it, Jesus shares his dreams for the already-but-not-yet people of God in Christ. He paints a vivid vision of how the people of God are to live, love, act, and care for one another. His words are no doubt piercing, and they likely make us squirm at times, but what Jesus proclaims is an illuminating and radiant vision for the bride of Christ.
Jesus’ words are no mere suggestion; rather, they are passionate and piercing commands for the people of God to live into no matter where they live.6 That is, those who are citizens of the kingdom of God.
Following Jesus’ declaration of those who make the list of the blessed life, Jesus calls the church to lean into the radiant vision of the church. He calls us salt and light.
You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. (Mt 5:13-16)
Like other popular passages of Scripture, we sometimes miss out on the fullness of what Jesus is calling us to. Often we read this passage through the lens of I instead of we and then interpret it as, “I should do more good deeds.” However, this prophetic declaration of Jesus should push and pull the church into the radiant church it was meant to be. While one star is certainly something to behold, a sky full of sparkling stars is stunning. Our witness is corporate, found within congregations and communities. Our witness is a collective presence and voice and light rather than individuals.
This passage isn’t a random call to do good things; rather, we are called to lean into the missional imagination of the triune God—that is, the imagination that unfolds beginning in the book of Genesis.
WE ARE THE STARS
In the first eleven chapters of Genesis, the problem of sin, brokenness, darkness, and evil is rather glaring. Murder, betrayal, division, pride, and havoc, even from Mother Nature, are just a few examples. However, we don’t observe a planless God scrambling to heal God’s broken creation, and neither do we observe God lashing out in anger. Instead, we discover a redemptive God who moves in with acts of love and grace. By the time we arrive at Genesis 11, we discover the beginnings of God’s rescue operation. God doesn’t run from the problem of sin; rather, God moves in and addresses it.
God calls Abram and Sarai to a foreign land, a place of discomfort, in a posture of trust. Without the full picture, Abram shows us a life of faithfulness, even in the midst of ruggedness and the unknown. God then unveils this grand plan:
The LORD had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.
“I will make you into a great nation,
