The Tangible Kingdom Week 2
Slightly offended.
That’s how I think I would sum up much of our conversation this last Tuesday night. We have finished the first week of The Tangible Kingdom primer, and had gathered together to eat, pray, and discuss our experience over the last week. The first week of the workbook is a guide to the question “What is missional?”. Using the story of Abraham as a base for the idea of God’s people being a sent people, each day of the workbook asked probing questions about our values, our hopes, and our actual experiences in being “sent” to the people and places among whom we find ourselves.
Most of the conversation on Tuesday centered around the realization that, for us, much of our training and discipleship within our church experience has centered on individual habits and practices to use as metrics of our spiritual growth. Daily Bible reading, personal prayer time, fasting, etc. There’s nothing wrong with developing those habits in our lives, but there is the nagging sense that those habits, as individual metrics of personal spiritual growth, do very little, if anything, to form us into a people. It could be argued that this framework of spiritual growth is a result of the prominence of the individual experience that Western thought has held onto as something of up-most importance since the Enlightenment. Since spiritual growth is something to be achieved individually, within your “personal relationship” with Jesus, we have formed many, many individuals who know Scripture well, and can clearly articulate all the basic tenants of faith in Jesus, and yet have no idea how to live together as a family, intentionally working together to bring wholeness and restoration to our neighborhoods.
I think my experience, which seemed to be echoed by others on Tuesday, was a slight offense at the ideas that the workbook was asking us to wrestle with. Having grown up among God’s people, been educated in a Christian university, and being involved in Christian service, here was a workbook, pointing me to Scripture and asking me questions that revealed that I do not know how to live with other believers as a family and missionally engage my culture! How dare it!
The good news is that everybody in our group desires to go further in learning these new missional and community habits. Week by week we will discover how to set aside our presumptions about Jesus-like living, and further engage the idea that our relationship with Jesus is intended to be lived out with, among, and for others.
Week by week. Together.
