Tomorrow’s Sermon: Word-Made-Flesh Mission

Tomorrow I have the privilege of taking church anniversary at the main church I served in my first appointment. Such invitations can be an opportunity to share some of the big thinking and passions that are now prominent in my ministry and spirituality. I have chosen to share my ‘conversion’ to missional thinking. Here goes:

John 1:1-14

Introduction
Happy Christmas! I just thought I’d get that in early. The shops are already
wishing ‘Happy Christmas’ to your credit cards, so why not?

Seriously, what did you think when you heard that the
opening verses of John’s Gospel were to be our text? Did you not think, ‘That’s
a Christmas reading’? We hear those words at carol services and on Christmas
morning. Of course, they are wonderful words for Christmas, and especially
verse 14, which is going to frame my thoughts today:

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have
seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

Christmas is about the Word made flesh. But we cannot
restrict these words to Christmas. They are a missionary text. ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us’
describes the missionary strategy of Jesus. And they are relevant to us,
because they are the model for the mission to which Jesus calls us.

How so? Skip from Christmas to Easter for a moment. Move
from John chapter 1 to John 20. It’s the evening of Easter Day. The disciples
are behind locked doors out of fear. The risen Jesus appears in their midst and
says (amongst other things), ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you’ (John
20:21). We take our model for mission, then, from the way the Father sent
Jesus. And how did he send him? ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us.’
That was how the world saw the glory of Jesus, and that is how it will see his
glory through us today.

What do I mean? Jesus moves the traditional locations of
Christian practice into new places, and he calls us to follow him on the
journey:

1. From the Temple to
the Tent
There are some lovely alternative translations of our text. Eugene Peterson, in his
paraphrase of the Bible entitled ‘The
Message’, puts it this way:

The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the
neighbourhood.

More literally, you could render it,

The Word became flesh and ‘tabernacled’ among us.

The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.

Do you remember the tabernacle in the Old Testament? It was
the tent, which was the portable sign of God’s presence. We are more used to a
‘temple’ notion of God’s presence – a worthy place to which people travel in
order to find God. That is how we have tended to view church buildings. We have
talked about ‘going to church’.

And it is also how we have conceived of mission. We are
looking for people to come to us. We
put on certain events, and we work to make everything attractive and
hospitable.

But I suggest to you that this is radically different from
the way Jesus operated. Although he attended the synagogue, he never invited
anyone to go there. Although he said things like ‘Come to me’ and ‘Follow me’,
he did not do so from a distance. For Jesus, it was all about him going to
people rather than expecting them to come to him. Jesus pitched his tent in the
world, and moved it around, rather like the Bedouin people of the Middle East.
Jesus, who was the very presence of God – ‘we have seen his glory’ and ‘Whoever
has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9) – tabernacled the presence of God in the world. People saw the glory of
God in Jesus, who based himself not in the religious building but in the world.

And how necessary such a strategy is for us today, too. Have
we not learned the painful lessons yet that people will not simply ‘come to
church’ any more? In generations when there was a common appreciation for
Christian values (even if they were sometimes honoured more in the breach), the
‘come to us’ or ‘temple’ approach to mission was understandable. But those days
are long gone.

I minister at a church where I inherited a building
refurbishment scheme when we arrived. The revitalised premises are lovely,
especially in the worship area. They are better than the previous tired design.
But on its own, it will not lead to fruitful Christian mission.

Similarly, we have been evolving a new approach to Sunday
morning. It now begins with breakfast. However, just putting on breakfast and
advertising it will not of itself attract new people. When we do make
missionary contact with people, it will be a helpful safe introduction to
Sunday worship. But it is not a missionary panacea on its own.

I’ve reached the conclusion that there has been an important
reason for this ‘come to us’ approach to mission. It means we do things on our
territory, in places where we feel comfortable. However, for most people in our
society today, church premises are not comfortable places, because they are
unfamiliar and strange. Jesus calls us instead to go to where the people we
want to reach are comfortable. To use the jargon, he wants to get us out of our
‘comfort zones’. After all, that’s what he did. He left the comfort zone of
Heaven for a stable.

For us, it means fewer obsessions with church meetings and
structures, and more commitment to involvement in the community. Debbie and I
are committed to setting up our tent in the vicinity where we live, being
involved in community organisations and events such as the pre-school or the
friends of the primary school, being known as Christians there, building
relationships with people, and socialising with them. We then want to see what
shape things take, rather than forcing people into a predetermined shape in an
existing church. The Australian church leader James
Thwaites says in his book ‘The
Church Beyond The Congregation’: if Christ is present throughout creation
and the Church is the Body of Christ, then the Church needs to be present
throughout creation.

That, essentially, is what the Fresh Expressions movement is
all about: meeting people on their own turf, and creating church around them in
their cultural environment. It’s pitching the tent, not journeying to the
Temple. It requires cutting church structures to a bare minimum: gathering for
worship and fellowship, plus no more business than is essential. It is more
honouring to Christ to do that than to wrap ourselves up in a holy huddle,
using the Church as a crutch for a social life.

2. From the Classroom
to the Street
One of the largest ‘mega-churches’ in the United States is based just outside
Chicago. It’s called Willow Creek.
Over the space of thirty years, they have pioneered ways of giving a high
priority to reaching people for Christ, based on high quality musical and
dramatic productions. With tens of thousands of people associated with their
church and its satellites, they have put in place a dazzling programme of
activities for those who become Christians. But recently,
they have made a startling
admission: their research shows that their programme and meeting-based
approach to discipling people in the ways of Christ hasn’t worked. Putting
people through church activities and programmes hasn’t made them more
Christ-like.

What they’ve done (with greater resources at their disposal
than the average church) is nevertheless similar to what the ‘ordinary’ church
says. In addition to a life of personal prayer and Bible study, join a
fellowship group, or attend a midweek meeting. And you know what? It no more
works for us than it does for Willow Creek.

Jesus, on the other hand, did his discipling, largely in the
world, where he – in the words of our text – ‘lived among us.’ He called
disciples from their professions, but not for them to become rabbis attached to
the synagogue. They learned from him rather like apprentices to a trade: they
watched him doing kingdom things; then they did some themselves under his eye;
finally, he let them loose. Most of Jesus’ teaching occurs not in the synagogue
but on the road. Many of his images are drawn from working life – hence the
preponderance of agricultural images in the parables. Jesus moved discipleship
from the classroom to the street.

I believe it means for us that all our approaches to
discipleship must have a practical edge. Learning something in our heads is not
of its own transformational; letting that knowledge travel from our heads to
our hands and our feet is.

Because of this, I have become a fan of the ‘cell church movement’. The small groups –
‘cells’ – are as much church as the Sunday gathering. However, they are also
much more than the average Bible study group. When they study Scripture, it is
with a view to asking, ‘What should be our active response to this?’ When they
pray, it is for missionary things – friends who don’t know Christ,
opportunities to demonstrate the love of God to the needy. They are not the
sort of groups who get obsessed with the maps on the inside covers of their
Bibles. They are groups that are passionately committed to working out their
faith with concrete action.

Likewise, I’ve become impressed with the way some ancient
spiritual disciplines of the Church are making a comeback. One in particular connects
growth in discipleship to our daily living. It’s called the ‘examen’. A few
brief words can only provide an over-simplified summary of it, but it boils
down to this. Twice a day, at lunchtime and before bed, you review your day,
prayerfully asking the Holy Spirit to show you where God has been at work, and the
parts of your day from which you could learn. The learning is connected to your
experience.

When Jesus moves our discipleship from the classroom from
the street, he does so, knowing we can expect to meet him by his Spirit in the
world. As the author of the Willow Creek report put it,

Our dream is really to discover what God is doing and how
he’s asking us to transform this planet.

3. From Reformation
to Revolution
If Jesus calls us to move from the temple to the tent and from the classroom to
the street, he is asking for a massive change in our thinking and practice. How
might we approach such a revolution? I recently read some background on Vaclav Havel, the playwright and first President
of the post-communist Czechoslovakia and then Czech Republic.

Havel was a dissident playwright under the communist rule,
and under that régime he was jailed. During the 70s and 80s it seemed to them
that the system would never change. It seemed literally immutable, an iron
curtain, a system that dominated every aspect of people’s lives. It wasn’t just
“out there”, it was also “within”, within their heads, within their hearts,
within their spirits. He describes the system as founded on a simple lie:
“You’ll be happy if you have enough things.”

Havel and other dissidents began to ask, “How can we live the
truth in a culture based on a fundamental lie, especially since the lie is in
our heads? How can we begin to live the truth? We desire so much more than just
things. We want something to hope in, a reason to believe.” Mary Jo Leddy of Romero House writes,

“In his country as in
other iron-curtain countries people began to set up what he called “parallel
cultures.” They had underground study groups. They studied Plato. They had
drama. They had music groups. They wrote novels and poetry, and published them
underground. He called this a “parallel culture.” It was not a counter-culture
because, he said, it was impossible for us to live totally outside the system. You
cannot live outside a culture. But you can create within it zones and spaces,
where you can become who you really are. It is in such places that one can
speak the truth, where one can gather with others who share that truth.

This went on for
years, not without difficulties, but for years. Over time, the truth became
stronger and stronger, and at a certain point people began to walk in the
streets and to say to the system, “We don’t believe you anymore.” And the
system fell. It fell, not because of the power of Western nuclear equipment,
but because the people said within the system, “We don’t believe you anymore.”
It was a vision that had been nourished within those parallel cultures.”[1]

Moving from the Temple to the Tent – from ‘come to us’
mission to ‘going and being’ mission – requires a parallel culture. So does
moving our discipleship from the classroom to the street, from theory to the
whole of life. The forces of ‘Temple’ and ‘Classroom’ are powerful in the
Church. They have held minds captive for centuries. But today they are not
working, yet they are still being repeated. Such failure in our day reminds me
of Einstein’s definition of insanity: ‘To keep doing the same thing while
expecting a different result.’

I suspect that rather than reforming our ‘Temple’ and ‘Classroom’
approaches, we need to start new parallel cultures of ‘Tent’ and ‘Street’
instead. And not only because of the pervasive power of the old ways in our
churches: we also need to do this, because of the power of the society we live
in. Vaclav Havel may have grown up under communism, but we who have grown up
under capitalism have also experienced a culture that says, “You’ll be happy if
you have enough things.” In fact, our economy would collapse without it!

No, if Jesus calls us from Temple to Tent and from Classroom
to Street, then he is calling us not simply to reformation. He is calling us to
subvert the old structures with parallel cultures. He is calling us to prepare
for revolution, in creating a new society under the reign of God, a society that
will say to the existing ways, “We don’t believe you anymore”, and demonstrate
life as word made flesh.

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