DUALISTIC WORLDVIEW TO SACRED WORLDVIEW

In the beginning God gathered the waters together and dry land appeared. God saw that this was good. Moses encounters a bush that is on fire but is not consumed. When he moves toward the burning bush and he hears these words, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” When Jesus died in the Gospel of Matthew, the temple curtain was torn from top to bottom, removing the only barrier between the people and the “holy of holies” in the temple.

What do these three stories share? All of them point to an idea that is has been in Christian tradition since the beginning in Antioch but since the enlightenment has been forgotten. With the dawn of the enlightenment, and the rise of science as a valid way to understand and learn about the world, humanity quickly learned to organize and categorize things in order to better understand the world around us. Animals were classified into Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. We organized a separate order for plants. The rise of the industrial revolution leads to humans creating time into distinguishable blocks. There was time for work, time for home and family, time for play and time for worship. We have become masters at categorizing the world around us like a giant waffle.

However, the walls of the waffle are breaking down all around us with the advent of the internet, social media, cell phones and TiVo. We can do work from home and set our home coffee maker from work. Where once we had to block of time to fly and see friends, now we connect through Skpye and webcams. We ‘pause’ live T.V. in order to answer a phone call from work. As we break down the walls around us, it feels like we are in the midst of the temple curtain being torn. There is no longer a set time for work and only work. There is no longer a set time for play and only play. As such, we have to begin to shift our thinking away from there is a set time for church. The ground Moses stood on did not ‘become’ holy. Rather, the ground, according to Genesis, was already holy; Moses just became aware of it. We need to be like Moses and become aware that all ground and time is sacred. I invite all cultural architects to join with me to begin to break down the waffle walls around us in order to allow the Spirit of God to move as freely as possible. Who knows, you might be waking by a burning bush not only in worship on a Sunday but by the water cooler on Thursday.

COUNTING PEOPLE AND MONEY TO COUNTING RELATIONSHIPS AND MISSION

It is said that we count what it important to us. Each week we ask Sunday school classes to turn in the number of people present in the class. We ask people to register attendance with us in worship and, for good measure, we have someone else count heads during worship. Each Monday morning we have a faithful group of people who count the previous day’s collection of tithes and offerings. I know these numbers are important and we also count other things; however, I wonder what it might look like if we elevated the other things we count to the level of importance that we have for counting people and money? What if we began to count the number of new relationships our members created in the past week? What about relationships we have helped reconcile? What if we counted the number of failures we had in the past year? Let us face it, if we are not failing at something then we are not doing anything new or innovating ministry. Does your small group count the number of hours served in mission in the past week/month? What if we shared in worship not the amount of money collected for a ministry but the amount of time invested by our members to the community? So from one Cultural Architect to another, I ask you, “What do we/you count? What do we not count?”

TALKING AT PEOPLE TO TALKING WITH PEOPLE

Current culture elevates the voice of the individual more than previous generations have. For instance, the way we watch television has changed. Before, we would sit and watch the program. Now, we watch the program and ‘text’ in a vote which influences the direction of the show. The shift away from being ‘told’ what is good and entertaining, is shifting toward each of us having a voice in that conversation. We get to decide who the next singing sensation will be and which dancer is the most graceful. For years the Church has stood up and told people what the Word of God is and what it means and cared very little of what the gathered community of faith had to say on the matter. The Church needs to be “conversation-al” rather than “dictation-al”. We need to move out of our pulpits and down from our stages and invite people into conversation about the Living God. Just as few people want to live under a monarchy, we need to stop treating the Bible and the message of Christ as though we “church people” are the monarchy of the Word telling people what it means and how to live. Rather, to become a cultural architect is to acknowledge the value of every person and engage everyone in a conversation, because each person matters – not just the monarch.

FEAR OF FAILURE TO EMBRACING OF FAILURE

Previous posts have looked at what it means to shift from being Church focused to becoming Kingdom focused and shifting from maintenance leadership to missional leadership. All of these efforts are in an effort to explain what it means to be a “cultural architect” in the life of the church. This installment invites us to look at something that every successful group in the history of the world has understood. We all know the story of the invention of the light bulb, specifically the number of failed attempts it took Edison to perfect what he was looking for. (As a sidebar, Edison did not create the light bulb but only improved it. Humphrey Davy actually is credited for “inventing” it.) It is not a matter of needing to share about the need to “get back on the horse that bucked you”, it is a matter of recognizing that we need to find the bucking horses! The Church has a bit of a reputation for playing it safe and looking “old fashioned” (take a look at the book Unchristian), and it might very well be rooted in our fear of failing. As argued in previous columns, the fear of failure is directly tied to the Church’s felt need to get members of the institution rather than seek to make disciples of Jesus Christ. When we are seeking members over Disciples everything we do will be pushed through the lens of “will this upset or drive people away”? Jesus did many things which did not make people feel very warm and fuzzy (driving out the money changers, pointing out the woman at the wells situation, not throwing stones at another woman, ignoring Pilate’s questions, etc.). God’s desire is not that we build up a wonderful institution with many members. Rather it is God’s desire that we build up the many members of the body of Christ! It is our call by Christ to go out into the world and Make Disciples, but it is hard to make disciples when we are fearful that we might fail and people might leave the institution. Of course this does not mean we fail for the sake of failing, but that we learn to fail forward. When (not if) we fail we must fail in such a way to learn from our failures so that we can advance the Kingdom of God. Perhaps one of the greatest numbers we do not count in the UMC is the number of failures we have had. I would argue that the rate in which we fail forward is directly tied to the amount of growth a community of faith sees. So the question is, have you failed forward this week/month/year?