Something good happened this evening. All day I was near tears with the great joy of the things God is doing in my midst. But, the only problem — there was no one to share them with in person. How could I pass them on if I had no one? I decided to pray and ask the Lord to begin to grow a fellowship around me. In fact, I sked Him for a plain all-out miracle if that’s what it took.
Then, decided to go out for a spell. On my way downstairs from my upper level apartment, I ran into a lady who lives downstairs. We run into each other now and then and chat. I knew she had married a man who is not, as far as we know, a man who walks with Christ. However, she told me this evening that she has been “out of church” for about six years and feels bad about it. She watches Christian television sometimes, but reports feeling dead and wonders if her heart is just hard. Aha…shades of things a number of us have been through. I told her no, and cracked open more of my personal journey and shared some of what I’ve been seeing.
It is interesting that she sees some of the same things but has not had to yet undergo some of the deeper griefs of many I know who are trying to find their way to the “true church”. She was very receptive and I saw a spark of recognition in her eyes as I chatted away. I’ve invited her to fellowship some time and she says yes! (That is enough to shock me right there.)
I told a friend that I am going to start having worship on Sunday mornings, our Lord’s day of Resurrection. Maybe I will do this even if no one else is here. What I’m seeing is to develop very simple community traditions so that the narrative is passed down and we don’t forget how to have community worship. I don’t need the habits and God doesn’t need them, but the generation to come needs the story and I need to honor God. After that, I need to listen to what people have to say and learn from them as they learn from me. God willing, we will learn to walk together in shalom and in the common faith that was handed to us through the apostles. We will let God prepare us in the time of peace so that we may bring others in and stand in the day of trouble.
Following my reading of The Story of Christianity, vol. 1, by Justo Gonzalez (San Francisco: Harper, 1984), I feel compelled to make the case briefly that the Christian faith is not a “white man’s religion”, as has often been charged. It was birthed in the Middle East and not in Europe. Before the spread of the Christian faith into the West, its strength of paganism rivaled that in the East.
In many places this paganism survived alongside of or syncretistically with the Christian religion. Yet it seems that one of the peculiar aspects of Christianity in Europe and Asia is the difficulty of naming a truly indigenous church. Surely there must have been regional or tribal aspects of community worship in the early days, but nothing much survived after officialdom but a normed church culture. Worship in many places became a contrivance that carried little relevance in daily life for many.
If I have bashed the councils following Nicea, there is one good thing we may say of it. While the marriage of church and state had a corrupting influence on both, that first council called by Constantine left us a summation of what the churches had always believed up to that point. The council did not create new beliefs; it merely strained out what had been believed for over 300 years. When Paul told Timothy not to forget the traditions he had learned, it seems doubtful that he referred to a set of rituals. Rituals are culture dependent. More likely, Paul referred to the fundamentals of the common faith. I believe the Nicene Creed spelled out these fundamentals and it went something, more or less, like this:
We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father.
With the Father and the Son
he is worshipped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. AMEN.
From my point of view, that was the last important thing any council ever did, as later councils engaged in little other than hair-splitting debates over matters that God never invited us to peer into. The Nicene Creed sums up the gospel for all time, albeit in a freeze-dried state. For many, these became memorized words, but as God does now and again, He waters those words so that they come alive to those who seek.
The indigenous churches thereafter were mostly suppressed into a sameness of ritual and custom that served the purposes of the state. Occasionally, God has burst through the cold concrete of the imperial layers to reach His people. I believe He did this in Francis of Assisi and in Bernard of Clairvaux and probably in many others whose names have been lost to us but whose influence remains.
Consider the irony that today there is a push underway to grant Native Americans and other non-European types the freedom to establish their own indigenous churches. I find it ironic, considering that the European diaspora sent missionaries to so many tribal people, yet had no indigenous church of its own. Indeed, it did not know that it was even missing such. The closest we come to a legitimate native European church community is that of the Celtic church in the far West Isles before the influence of Constantine.
For my next grand experiment, I hope to examine ways and means of taking the church back for the people it was intended for. The difficulty is that culture does not stand still and, though I stand perfectly in the way to exhume the Celtic community flavor, I find myself at a loss. I cannot represent the Celtic community as it was, for I am a member of the Celtic diaspora to the New World — not the world that was and having no contact with the lands my people came from. Fortunately, my generation was the last who were taught anything of the stories, song and dance of our people at large and so I bring a vicarious memory that stretches beyond the manufactured culture of the television.
Because my background is blended from having been in the New World long enough to be mingled with people of other lands, my interpretation of the ancient church cannot be a pure product of one heritage. To top it off, I live in a region where my culture has been shaped by the proximity of Mexico and the addition of a Germanic heritage. But, a truly indigenous church should be able to shift with such changes so that the members of its worship community feel at home in their skin while still being able to accommodate those unlike themselves.
While we are on the topic, I thought I would throw in a video I found the other day about the up-and-coming churches of the Native Americans. It has great implications for the rest of us. Here are people who still operate according to the family rather than nationalism. Some of their practices and symbols might shock us, but I realized this may be little different than our Celtic crosses or the Coptic ankhs which were originally pagan symbols. There is nothing inherently “Christian” in concepts of eternity, judgment, righteousness and other universal ideas. The meanings still hold. Please have a look here and enjoy stretching your understanding of how God communicates in and through native thought.
1 Give ear, O my people, to my teaching;
incline your ears to the words of my mouth!
2 I will open my mouth in a parable;
I will utter dark sayings from of old,
3 things that we have heard and known,
that our fathers have told us.
4 We will not hide them from their children,
but tell to the coming generation
the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might,
and the wonders that he has done. [Psalm 78, ESV]
Recently, I told a friend that I have come to appreciate the story of the Passion as the central part of an intentional service. Being raised in a Protestant background, I have sat through my share of lectures, lectures, lectures. There is nothing that compares with the narrative passed down of the Lord’s Passion and what that means to us. It is the opening chapter of the story of the Church, to which has been added stories of saints through the ages. There is only one Church in heaven and earth, comprised of all the saints who have ever lived. This is where community and persons meet — our stories added to theirs.
But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels,
To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, [Heb.
12:22-23]
The institutional churches usually limit their concentration to either the community story (e.g., Roman Catholic) or the personal one (e.g., Evangelical “personal testimony”). Why can’t we have both? I think we can have both just as surely as we can have intentional worship and organic spiritual life. They are all the heritage of the Church. The Church does not know its own heritage so it wanders like an orphan in the wilderness. It’s time to wake up and know that we come from spiritual fathers whose story belongs to us and to whom we add our own story.
We share the passion of Christ; His story is our story. Paul viewed his own suffering as a continuation of the suffering of Christ, that the Church might be built up:
Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church: [Col. 1:24]
Jesus also said:
The disciple is not above his master: but every one that is perfect shall be as his master. [Luke 6:40]
The way of our testimony is the way of Christ. We are his witnesses on earth that we know Him and are known of Him. And further, Paul tells us:
For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread. [1 Cor. 10:17)
Put these together. It begins to make sense. Our tearing is the sufferings that fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ…for his Body’s sake, which is the Church. We are added to the bread that is Him… A friend of mine reminded me of Amish friendship bread where one person makes a starter out of which come multitudinous loaves of bread when passed around. (Remember when Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes?) My first thought was something my aunt taught me years ago about the reason wine is to be preferred over grape juice for communion. Wine has spirits that continually reproduce much like the yeast in Amish bread. It represents the eternal life of Christ.
The point is that we, as members of the Body, have stories to add to the parables and dark sayings of old — things that the Lord has done for us that will not be added to the record until we tell of them. Like yeast and spirits, one person’s testimony is the starter for another. The individual story must be understood in the context of the starter story. The narrative is preserved and treasured in the community life, but it is developed in the personal life. We must have experiences that speak to our hearts alone but we must also have a story to share with those who have no story.
In the next post, we will look at the how-to of passing down the story and we will examine our spiritual roots. (They may not be what we think.)
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