Above Reproach Part Deux
From Megan: Here's my question:how does the attitude of my heart (teachability, humility, willingness to change) play into the process of learning what being above reproach means. Do we really have the ability to hold up the process? And how does that harm a ministry like the Ring? I'm not concerned with my being right as I am with the possibility of my leading others astray.Well, I'll post my response, but what do we think?
posted by Wayj @ 3:59 PM
4 Comments:
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Well, I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but this is why I'm pushing community exegesis especially for a ministry like the Ring.
You definitely have the power to hold things up, as does every other single person involved in the process as long as that is what has been agreed upon. I think this is crucial to what can happen.
I understand Megan's question, but actually 99.9999999% of people at the Ring (and elsewhere) have the exact opposite problem. They believe that no matter what they say or do, things will move on without them. The system continues whether they are there or not.
Commiting to the process of discerning "Above Reproach" together will accomplish two tasks:
1. For those of us worried about getting in the way of the process, it is a chance to model listening and sharing rather than dictating and moving on. You must invite others to participate and decide at the outset that you will not "move on" no matter how long it takes, until the community has decided something.
This doesn't mean that everyone agrees, far from it! It means that everyone can live with the decision, even if they disagree. You may be staunchly against drinking, but if the community decides it is not a concern (beyond public drunkeness), can you live with it? If so, then we move on, if not, we break and pray and come back at a later time until we have decided.
2. As you can tell, this may be a SLOW process. That is great, because it is the business of the church to hash out what modeling the kingdom to the world looks like. It is also great because there are literally hundreds of people at the Ring who have never participated in anything. Setting up and tearing down the stage and other "activities" are secondary to the work of discerning where the Spirit is moving our community.
This allows those people to realize they are part of a community. It allows the ones who are worried that "sin in the camp" will keep us from moving ahead to see that for every generation that balks at the borders of the promised land there is another behind it being raised to know nothing but dependence on God.
If we were in a more communal context, I would encourage us to think more for ourselves and weigh the weight of individual decisions. The Ring, however, is an individualistic pursuit where we turn down the lights and let people get "alone" with God and forget about those around them.
We are individualists at heart and by training, therefore I have no fear pushing us in a more communal direction, because we will never go to cult/mob mentality.
Well, I'm not proposing we "hold the group back" as much as I'm proposing we don't go forward with a decision until all are in agreement. I'm very informed by anabaptist thinking in this but my basic premise is this:
Making disciples is the primary action we as the church are to be about. The problem with this is that it is not very action oriented, so it will appear very slow at first as we unlearn the modern assembly-line Christianity we have perfected.
A lot of my thought is informed as well by the fact that I am part of the School of Intercultural Studies, which is the primarily Missional wing of Fuller's schools. Because of the work of Bible translators, we know that there is a distinction between "relevance" and "dynamic equivalence". For example, how do you describe a phrase such as "white as snow" to a village of islanders who have never seen snow before? Some translators have suggested a phrase such as "white as crane feathers" to better communicate the message.
Is this being relevant or are we seeking an equivalence of ideas in order to better communicate the gospel? You may think that such people are "corrupting the text" but study Greek and Hebrew and you see that all translations involve interpretation, as my Greek professor at NOBTS was fond of saying. Any translation is seeking a way to describe the thought in two languages into another language and the negotiation is never straightforward.
What I am suggesting is that we have to seek in applying what the Bible says to today's context in a similar way. The Bible is alive and must be allowed to speak to our culture, what this means is that we constantly ask ourselves "what does that passage mean for us?" I'm not suggesting that go to relativism, but I am suggesting that we don't simply assume that the answers people came up with in Germany 400 years ago, or England 200 years ago, or the US 100 years ago apply equally to us today.
The Bible cannot be deadened with our trusting more in a theory about the Bible rather than the Bible itself. We have to follow what God is doing here and now, and that means approaching each situation as if God wants to do something in it rather than thinking we already know the answers. The Incarnation models to us that God trusts the context, Jesus comes to a specific village and country with a message pointed at them and it is up to us to interpret what His words mean to us, both individually and corporately.
Wow, point well taken Lebraix. I'm reminded of Paul trying to get local churches to worry more about Christ than the law. I guess I'm a little less literal about the whole thing (in that I think any definition of "above reproach" would be renogotiated later) but your point is well taken.
We can't let the fact that things will change in the future keep us from doing something now, however. The knowledge that things are not as they used to be and will change in the future should make us very humble about our "decisions" and allow the edges to be a little fuzzy, even though we always want hard and fast legal rules.
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