I’ll admit I’m not a dancer. Now that may seem like an odd place to start but I feel it’s only fair to warn you. And though I have never seen an episode of dancing with the stars I do appreciate dance as an art form. In my community there are number of professional dancers. They dance for company called Corps Bera (from the Latin corps meaning body and the Hebrew bera meaning worship) which has been involved with our community since its inception. Last week I attended one of their performances.

I love live arts

One of the pieces was called “heart and killing”. Not a particularly cuddly title but it struck a chord with me. The dancers conveyed with such intensity the struggle to battle busyness and expectation in our lives. The drain of being pulled in every direction at every moment. Apparently the title of the piece comes from the Chinese character for busyness which is a combination of the two characters heart and killing. I don’t know my Chinese but it’s a poignant linguistic statement.

I could identify with such raw emotion that feeling of just always needing to be somewhere- else. This isn’t about the demands of being a pastor either because I would venture to suggest that we all know that desperation.

I wrote earlier about all the kinds of things that vie for our attention but even those seem somewhat harmless compared to all of the things that vie for our time. Honestly, I don’t care whether you’re some high-powered CEO of a fortune five hundred company or the house husband because your wife is the CEO there are more than enough things to fill our days with.

Generally I like to think I’m pretty busy. I take some limited pride in that accomplishment even with the fact I’ve stated we’re all there already. The fact of the matter though is that I like it this way. I’ll schedule my whole day at the coffee shop just because I like the busyness and the energy of people around me. I find impossible to just can’t sit and work in my office and so I pay the exorbitant price to Starbucks not for the privilege of drinking the fine coffee but because I am renting that seat for the day. I scope out the good one next to the plug and plant myself. People will come in to meet me. We sit. We talk. We journey together and then once they leave I stay to write and work until the next person drops by. It’s just seems to work for me.

Even when I’m on vacation I need to have a project to do. On my days away from the office the only way I can stay away is if I have a project to keep me occupied for the day. I’m just one of those people

Sometimes that means I go for a bike ride. Get some exercise. Focus on that. Sometimes it takes a project around the house. This week I moved my compost. It was beside the garage, on the side, out of the way. Problem was it wasn’t getting enough sun to keep the process going. So this week on my day off I dug it all up, moved the box and then refilled it. My wife thinks it’s kind of gross keeping all our organic waste in yogurt containers under the sink but she’s never dumped out the entire compost, moved it 15 feet, and put it back in.

And I used to think this was a pretty busy life. That is, until a friend of mine went away on vacation and my wife and I volunteered to look after his kids, aged seven and nine.

I may have thought my life was busy but clearly I am not ready to handle the role of Mister Mom.

On the first night my friend’s son wanted to watch Star Wars and not one of the good Star Wars everyone likes, episodes four through six (Episode IV: The Empire Strikes Back clearly being the best of the series) but the ones no one likes episodes jar-jar through Hayden Christiansen. So in goes the disc on comes the film and before the words have scrolled up the screen my new friend is beside me on the couch cuddling up against me. Not being the most touchy-feely guy I’m a little awkward but settle in. Five minutes later the first light saber fight is on the screen and now I’ve got a seven year old Jedi dancing around trying to eviscerate me with his plastic light saber he previously had stuffed in his pajamas.

Day two is car pool day. I pick up the neighbors kids and drop the troupe off a school. Nothing too eventful. Three o-clock rolls around and it’s time to pick them up. Back to the school. My friend’s daughter, nine, and the neighbors daughter six, are waiting. I load them in my little two door car.

“Where’s your brother I ask?”
“Oh, I’ll go get him”

She disappears into the playground leaving me with a talkative six year-old stranger strapped in the back of my car. Now I suppose the years of being told not to talk to strangers as a child must have worked because all of a sudden I am feeling really awkward. Here’s a talkative six year-old in my car and I am now the stranger. I wanted to tell her she shouldn’t be talking to me. She doesn’t know me. I could be the stranger her parents had warned her about. I decide it was better to politely respond to her questions about my hair, my car, the weather, school, boys, candy, teachers and existential philosophy. That last one might not have really happened.

By the third night it was 9pm when I crawled into bed before midnight for the first time in recent memory.

I said to my wife, “I don’t know how they do this.”

Work.
Kids.
Past-time projects.

Now add in to that the stress of church and it’s easy to see why we relate sometimes to the emotion communicated in the dance I saw.

These are busy lives we lead and there is always someone or something asking more from us. After a day of deadlines and expectations we come home to kids that need help with their homework. And after a day of writing and creating and imagining I’m welcomed home by my wife who wonders why I can’t be just a little more romantic.

It seems there’s always one more thing to do- or one more expectation to live up to.

And in the early church it was these types of expectations that lead to the first major test of the fledgling movement.

This question of what are we supposed to do?
What are the expectations and the rules to live up to?
What does this idea of church look like?

The big issue centered itself around what to do with new converts to the Christian faith. One group argued for staying within the traditions of the Jewish story. That everyone should first convert to Judaism. Another group said those rules didn’t matter anymore. You come directly into this new faith in Christ. Even well known early leaders like Peter wrestled with how to walk through this issue.

Now you’ve got to remember that these guys didn’t have a lot to go on. There was no model for them to build on, no template to look at, other than what they already knew and so the default became Judaism since most of the early followers were Jewish.

Time for some history, so if that’s not your thing you can skip ahead.

Before Jesus had left he said, listen, and I’m paraphrasing here, I’ve got to go but I need you to wait here in Jerusalem until I can send you my Spirit. Now trust me, when that happens things will be different. So the disciples do as requested and in Acts chapter 2 on the day of Pentecost the disciples more than get there money’s worth. They are completely reenergized by this gift of the Spirit and on that day, Peter gets up and preaches to this huge crowd and thousands, literally thousands of people respond.

I mean this is Billy Graham, without all of the cultural conditioning.

These people are completely new to the story.
No background.
No history.
They are just captured by Peter’s words about this story of Jesus and they believe.

Now large groups had come to hear Jesus while he had been around but this was different. If you go back to the gospels you can read these stories about huge crowds wanting to hear Jesus. There’s even one point where so many people are coming to hear him speak as he walks along the shores of the sea that they literally crowd down onto him to the point where he has to get in a boat and push out into the water so the people can see and hear and stop pushing to get closer. The difference was those crowds came and went. It was in the tens and hundreds of people that really followed Jesus from town to town. So this was something new even for the disciples that had walked with Jesus.

So what do you do with all these people?
How do you manage them?
How do you keep them occupied and interested?
What types of things do you need to provide for them, to teach them?

Well the church in Jerusalem opted to base their answer off the only thing they knew the Jewish customs they had grown up with. So they said converts had to convert to Judaism.

That meant, for the men, circumcision; probably helped eliminate most of the riff-raff. Now I know they didn’t have anesthetic back then and I doubt the scalpels were all that sharp, so I would have to be pretty convinced before I let them have a whack at me.

But this was how they dealt with the tension of the shifting culture around them

They tried to cover it up with action, with busyness.
A lot of things to do.
A lot that you had to live up to.
More of what they already knew.
It was a very task oriented approach to religion

And it’s not all that unfamiliar is it?

Now at the time the persecution of this fledging religion was increasing. In fact it was starting to fairly becoming intense. The Jewish powers obviously didn’t like a new religion sprouting up in Jerusalem of all places and the Romans had had about enough of the Jews and their religious arguments, they were just sick of these guys, so they were more than happy to help see the Christians out the door, so many of the early believers fled. They left Jerusalem and spread across the Roman Empire and one of the major centers where a lot of them ended up was a city called Antioch, a couple hundred miles from Jerusalem. In Antioch Christianity started to take off the same way it had in Jerusalem. The difference was the Jewish influence wasn’t as strong because the city wasn’t primarily Jewish. So most of the converts were gentiles, meaning anyone not Jewish. Up in Antioch nobody really cared about any of the Jewish traditions or rules because they had never lived with them anyway.

When head office back in Jerusalem heard about this they were furious and so they decide to send this guy named Barnabas to check things out; to sort of stamp out these hippies not playing by the rules. Thing is on the way up to Antioch Barnabas travels through a city called Taursus and meets this guy named Saul, who would eventually change his name to Paul.

Now Paul has just had this experience with God while he was traveling along the road to another city called Damascus and he’s become a Christian all on his one. He had this incredible moment with God, saw a vision and turned his life around completely without ever having set foot in a church. Remarkably it does still happen. Well the two of them hit it off and they decide to travel to Antioch together and once they get there they find this church that is emerging out of no where. It’s crazy all of these people that are excited and coming to be part of this story of God and so they end up staying for a year and they live and teach in the city until eventually this church in Antioch says listen we can’t just hang on to this for ourselves we need to help others find what we have.

The congregation in Antioch was blessed with a number of prophet-preachers and teachers:

One day as they were worshiping God—they were also fasting as they waited for guidance—the Holy Spirit spoke: “Take Barnabas and Saul (called Paul) and commission them for the work I have called them to do.” So they commissioned them. In that circle of intensity and obedience, of fasting and praying, they laid hands on their heads and sent them off.
_Acts 13:1-3

Back in Jerusalem everyone is pulling out their hair at this point because they are still holding on to the Jewish rules and customs and part of that means centering worship in Jerusalem. They weren’t interested in starting new churches and now these guys from Antioch are planting new churches all over the place.

The tension between Jerusalem and Antioch is ratcheting up with every step

Now let’s pause here for a second, because you’ve got to understand, the Christians in Jerusalem weren’t bad people. I mean look at Peter and his struggle to come to terms with this very issue in Acts chapter 10. This is not a story about bad people. It’s about honest followers of Jesus who were trying how to figure out faith in the face of change.

The culture was shifting under their feet
Issues they had never thought of let alone formulated an answer for were being posed.

How were they as leaders supposed to hold on to what they knew when so much was changing?
How do you balance what you know to be true with the unknown that’s staring you right in the face?

The problem is balance is never a static thing. Every time you take a step you need balance. Walking to the door takes balance. Sitting in your chair takes balance.

Sometimes the image of balance we have is one inanimate object placed on another inanimate object in a closed, unchanging system. e.g. a house of cards perfectly balanced on a table until someone walks by and knocks it down.

And sure that’s a type of balance but it’s not a helpful balance for us as we walk through life. See a balance that’s useful is when we are able to lean into the stresses in our world and remain standing in the face of change.

I test a drove a smart car a while ago. You know, those little two seat glorified power-wheels. I loved it. It was great, at least in part because it was a grown up version of a go-kart. Every time I got to drive a go-kart as a kid I thought about how great it would be to have my own; all the others kids are riding their bicycles and I pull up in my go-kart; how cool is that? Essentially that’s a big part of the appeal to driving any car for me; childhood wish fulfillment.

But as I drove it on the highway I couldn’t believe how much work it was to keep that thing moving in a straight line. Every time a big gust of wind came or a truck drove by with every one I’m hanging on for dear life. Listen I drive a little car already so I’m used to being blown around on the road and let’s be honest, I weight 150 pounds, I’m used to being blown in the wind when I walk down the street, but that car didn’t have any balance in the face of wind.

I had the balance.
I was the one able to steer into the changes.
I was able to compensate for the stress; to adjust for the situation.

Balance is not about being static and unaffected; it is about being able to remain in the center as the circumstances change around you. With every shift of the landscape balance responds to stay on track. To remain rigid and inflexible will never help you keep your balance. In fact, it’s a recipe for your house of cards scattered on the floor

Paul Spalding said it this way in his book Proclaiming Christian Truth in a Postmodern Culture

Reality is the dynamic medium in which human knowing does its work. Both human knowing and the reality it knows are in a dynamic state. And what is discovered in this process [of interacting with reality] is living truth, that dynamic confidence that reality has been engaged and that a real connection has been made that is trustworthy and true.

He’s acknowledging that life is dynamic.
That reality is dynamic.
That you– are dynamic and it’s only when we honestly engage with the life around us that we can find this living truth, truth that leaps off the static page and finds life in our experience of the world.

That doesn’t happen simply because holding on to what we’ve always done, it happens when we fearlessly, maybe even recklessly jump into conversation with life.

Back to our history lesson.
The Jerusalem church sends some people up to Antioch in Acts chapter 15 to straighten them out and they show up telling everyone what they need to do to be saved. Of course everyone in Antioch is confused and upset and mad and so from Antioch they decide to send Paul and Barnabas back down to Jerusalem and the leaders down there agree to this big council, actually the first church council, the council of Jerusalem. In Acts 15 Luke records the meeting

The apostles and the leaders called a special meeting to consider the matter. The arguments went on and on, back and forth, getting more and more heated.

Then Peter took the floor: “Friends, you well know that from early on God wanted everyone to hear the message of this good news and embrace it- and not in any second hand or roundabout way, but first-hand, straight from his mouth. And God has given them his Spirit exactly as he gave us. He treated the outsiders exactly as he treated us.

So why now are you trying to out-god, God, loading these new believers down with rules that crushed our ancestors and crushed us too.
What are we arguing about?

There was dead silence. No one said a word. And then, with the room quiet, Barnabas and Paul reported matter-of-factly the stories of what God had done among the other churches. The silence deepened. You could hear a pin drop.

Finally, James broke the silence. “Friends listen; we’ve heard the story of how God from the very outset made sure the racial outsiders were included. This is in perfect agreement with the words of the prophets:

I’m coming back;
I’ll rebuild David’s house;
I’ll put all the pieces together again;
I’ll make it look like new
So outsiders who seek will find,
So they’ll have a place to come home to,
All the peoples included in what I’m doing.

God said it, and now he’s doing it. This is no after-thought he’s always known this would be the plan.

So here’s my decision we’re not going to unnecessarily burden the non-Jewish people that turn to the Master.”
_Acts 15:6-19

See even this was about that

Here they were arguing about a very small part of the story– how do we do church? And it was this cultural shift brought on by the non-Jewish believers that brought them back to the big story of God’s invitation of grace to the world, to everyone. See it was in part their inability to find dynamic balance with the changes around them that had caused them to lose sight of the big picture.

We have categories like liberal and fundamentalist and both somehow get thrown around like they’re derogatory terms. Balance though isn’t about one or the other. Some fundamentalists want to fight about everything. Every disagreement that comes up is worth starting a new denomination over and at the same time some liberals want to be gracious about everything, like there’s nothing we can stand on for our center. Balance though is different. Balance is about valuing dialogue and discussion, about valuing relationship over just being right all the time and yet at the same time keeping sight of the big picture, knowing what that small and central core is that we are not willing to let go, or compromise. The church in Jerusalem wasn’t willing to dialogue about how the church should change with the culture but the church in Antioch refused to compromise on the big story of God’s grace to the world.

The inflexibility of the church in Jerusalem to deal with the culture that was increasingly becoming less and less Jewish prevented them from having the balance that was needed to hold on to the core of the gospel as the circumstances changed around them and the harder they fought to deny the cultural shift the farther they moved from the center of the story. All the while it was the church in Antioch’s ability to be mobile and fluid that gave them the flexibility to deal with the stress of cultural change and still hold firmly in the center of God’s story of grace to the world.

And this is where the question of the emerging church comes into view. There is a lot of talk about the emerging church – and what that means but the reason people like myself like the term emerging, even though it’s picked up some baggage is because it reminds us not that we fit into any particular category or group but because it is a reminder that we are part of this big ongoing story of church.

After 2000 years nothing has changed we are stilling wrestling with the very old question of how to live out this incredible story of Jesus. Just as the story of the church in Antioch emerged from the story of the church Jerusalem, we continue to emerge. Let’s be honest it’s nice to feel that we’re novel but there is nothing new about this emerging church conversation.

Whether you’re talking about the Roman Catholics or the charismatic movement, if you’re looking at the growth of the gospel in places like Africa, or the emerging church in North America, this is about that, because this question about how to do church today is about that very old question of 2000 yrs ago;
What does it mean to live this story of God in the every changing state of my reality?

Does religion for you bring up the same kind of emotions as the dance I saw did for me? It’s tiring and painful at times but at least I know exactly where I’m supposed to go.

There’s nothing worse than dancing and not knowing the next step, right? Well there’s me dancing in the first place – that’s clearly worse if you have to watch.

But is that what religion brings to the table for you?
Painful certainty?

If that’s the case then something is out of dynamic balance because in fact, what faith should be bringing to the table is often times the exact opposite, you have no idea what the step beyond the one in front of you is and at the same time you couldn’t be more alive

No doubt some will say that God is not a God of disorder, incoherence, or arbitrariness, but a God of order. Of course he is. Unfortunately the whole of the Old Testament shows us that God’s order is not that which we conceive and desire. God’s order is not organization and institution. It is not the same in every time and place. It is not a matter of repetition and habit.

On the contrary, it resides in the fact that it constantly posits something new, a new beginning. Our God is a God of beginnings. There is in him no redundancy or circularity. Thus, if his church wants to be faithful to his revelation, it will be completely mobile, fluid, renascent, bubbling, creative, inventive, adventurous, and imaginative. It will never be perennial, and can never be organized or institutionalized.

If the gates of death are not going to prevail against it, this is not because it is a good, solid, well organized fortress, but because it is alive; it is Life that is, as mobile, changing, and surprising as life should be. If it becomes a powerful fortified organization, it is, in fact, because death has already prevailed.
_Jacque Elles

What if we didn’t know the next step?
What if we didn’t have anyone telling us where to go, or how to dress, or what a good Christian looks like?

The church in Jerusalem had no idea what it was doing- of course neither did church that emerged in Antioch. The difference was instead of retreating from that uncertainty they jumped into the story and they found themselves as they went.

Whether we’re talking about our religious paradigms or our work life, if we are too busy living up to what everyone else wants from us then we have missed out on life.

I mean what would be left if you just stopped
Could you be you without your job?
Could you have faith without religion?

I’ll be honest here sometimes I wonder how much there is to me beyond what I have to say in front of an audience.

Granted, there’s something positive in that, for better or for worse, what you see is generally what you get with me. Regardless of whether you can appreciate it or not, this is me– maybe it’s an acquired taste?

That can be good but sometimes I wonder what there will be left of me when my days as a communicator are over.
When no one is asking anything of me.
When no one is expecting anything from me.
If there’s no audience listening do I really have anything to say– to myself?
The church in Jerusalem fought so hard to hang to what they did, to the roles and expectations that had for years defined them but in that struggle they had lost who they were meant to be. Who underneath all of the labels, they really were.

If religion and faith are ever going to live up to the ideals in the mind of God, then they have to be worth more than rules to us. We have to be willing to let go of the security of busyness, of hanging on to what we already know, so that we can find something much older, and much bigger, and much more true?

What I wasn’t a pastor? What if you weren’t a contractor or consultant or student or plumber or teacher? If you weren’t liberal or conservative and the community you’re a part of wasn’t fundamentalist or emergent– if we weren’t busy living up to the labels we plaster over ourselves could we find ourselves in this ongoing, never-ending, universal, story of God that continues to be written, in every culture, every context, in every moment and in every life? Because in the final evaluation wherever there is someone willing to hear the song of God and sing along in harmony this story of church emerges.

The question for us is whether our lives are open enough to offer that fertile ground for God’s to story to grow in. Are we too busy doing church to hear him? Are we too busy being successful to find our purpose? Have we succumbed to the busyness of life and allowed it to kill our heart and passion and vibrancy.

Or– can we slow down enough to get past the categories and the labels to remind ourselves of the opportunity to touch the big picture of God’s incredible grace?