God's Heart for His People

I'm increasingly aware and troubled by how much my mindset as an evangelical believer has been shaped by the individualistic bent of the western culture. The 20th century is known for the rise of evangelicalism and while there are certainly some positive elements to evangelicalism, there are some serious deficits in the way we think about God and His Kingdom.

With this is mind, I plan to quote from a couple of sources along the lines of this topic in the next weeks. Some of this material may be controversial, especially for those of us who have spent most our years "swimming" in evangelical waters. We are uneasy and uncomfortable with thinking outside of the evangelical box...but I believe God's heart for His people is for much more than we have experienced, so I share this with the prayer that many hearts will be prepared for the coming of what could be the greatest "upheaval" the Church has experienced in her history. We may not know what this will look like yet, but we can be awake and aware when things are shaking badly and thereby be of help to many believers who will be completely disoriented by the shaking.

This week I'm quoting a portion from Hal Miller:

“Christianity is culturally relevant when it offers a qualitatively different society. Jesus called it “the kingdom of God.” Paul saw its first outlines in the gathered disciples of Jesus, and so he called them ekklesia – we translate it “church”- a Greek word denoting citizens assembled to attend to their common project, their city.

The evangelicals missed this. Evangelicalism sought to transform people and so transform the world. They did not see that something might be missing from this vision, something their assumption of American individualism would hide from them. The true Christian vision is to transform people, transforming them into a people, and so transform the world.

The evangelicals missed that middle term. They could not see the church as a foretaste of the new society; it was a club for the new individuals. The evangelicals simply dressed American individualism in Christian clothing. They ended up with new isolated individuals, but in the old society. Since their expression of Christianity did not take form as a new society, it quickly became culturally irrelevant, even though it was admirably culturally open.

To be culturally relevant, Christianity must offer an alternative. God has indeed chosen to deal with persons as individuals- in this the evangelicals were right. Yet they are not simply individuals; they become members of a social reality called ekklesia, which is the entering wedge of the new society of God’s making.

Too often, for example, we assume that evangelism involves the simple aggregation of more and more new individuals. If enough people are “born again,” the world’s problems will diminish...

The Christian calling requires being reconciled with God, to be sure. But it also requires being a new, reconciling society characterized by forgiveness, acceptance, and responsibility in a common task- a society qualitatively different from its culture, yet engaged with it. Little gatherings of Christians for worship and mutual help in being disciples become the seeds of God’s coming new society.
Such a new society will be culturally relevant because it springs from God’s movement among God’s people. The persons who make up this new society live their faith in the face of day-to-day problems that they share with the world around them. They face the same questions as unbelievers: finding joy and meaning in work, living at peace both personally and globally, raising responsible and compassionate children. And in facing those questions, Christian faith becomes relevant even for unbelievers.

Imagine a group of people gathering to help each other in the common task of seeing God’s kingdom incarnated in their work, in their families, in their towns, in their world, in their midst, and (rather than only) in their individual lives. This gathering is ekklesia. It will be relevant to its world because it lives the life of the kingdom in the world, not apart from it.”