The Christian Imagination

Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?
-James 4:4

The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’
-Matthew 11:18

Our pastor, Darren, preached from James 4 today, and primarily talked about James 4:4. What does ‘friendship with the world’ mean. His take on it was that James was talking about world systems, not people. The verse from Matthew certainly shows Jesus as a person who hung around people of the world. He didn’t seem to hang out with religious people too often though. To be called a drunkard, one would assume the guy who turned water into wine probably hung out in places where alcohol was served. Maybe he enjoyed himself a bit too much. Maybe grace was too powerful a message for those in power.

It seems a lot of systems are about power and money. What do we have to do for people to like us, to be accepted, to get what we want? Systems, whether they be cultural, corporate, organizational, or even church and family, they all help define us and shape our values. The dangerous aspect is that we are so integrated into the systems of worldly thinking that we often don’t realize it. The synthesis is too great. Thus, we’ll condemn obvious moral sins, but when it comes to not loving our neighbor, being materialistic, idolatry, greed, power, we don’t talk about these things so much. Once we learn a system, we may know how to manipulate it to a degree, may even achieve a certain degree of power. Conversely, we may feel a victim to the system. Then Jesus comes in and shakes things up by showing us a new kingdom, an upside-down kingdom parallel to this one, with values quite different. In this kingdom, it’s about letting go of power, and being humble, and not stepping over people on our self-centered quests to get what we want.

In my personal quest to get what I want out of life, I’m finding great comfort right now in grace and humility. It’s so hard to break out of the value systems around me. Sometimes it’s easy to try to ‘use’ God to get what we want in the false systems of the world, as if it’s God’s duty to help us ‘look good and feel good’ based on the world’s values, and if God doesn’t come through (as some say He should), then there’s reason to doubt Him. In truth, it’s hard to be in the world, but not define ourselves by it. It’s even harder when the false values of the world are in some ways supported by false values within the American church. For now, I pray James 4:5 for myself:

“God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”

I just started reading the cluetrain manifesto: the end of business as usual. I had heard of the book many times, and having now started reading it, am amazed at how it’s just the right time to read it, for me. It all began before Y2K, with a website put together by industry insiders at www.cluetrain.com. The book itself was published in 2000, though it seems like it was written today. The essence of it is that markets are conversations, that the Internet is about giving people a voice again, about connecting them with each other, and therein lies the power, and the understanding. Why are MySpace, YouTube, eBay, Facebook so popular? Why are there more blogs than one could possibly read? Voice. Conversation.

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, coupled with the legacy of the Englightenment and other cultural phenomena, modernism began to reach its pinnacle. So much was reduced to reason and science. Some, like Chesterton, avidly opposed this cultural trend. We very quickly went from a culture with some semblance of a marketplace (the kind where buyer and seller could know one another) to a mass production society, and soon, a mass media society. While some of this was definitely positive, we went from a land of craftsman to an assembly line where people just did there small part. Management and marketing became a science where marketing came to be about identifying people as consumers. Fortunately, we’ve been moving past some of the fallacies of American modernism the past several decades, with the Internet spurring the change further.

What of the American church? The Cluetrain Manifesto is primarily applied to the business culture, but the American church hasn’t escaped the influence of modernism, the American business culture, or the American dream. Based on my own experience alone, I can think of plenty of examples where church is ‘engineered,’ where it’s about formulas for Christian living, where people aren’t empowered, where having a ‘voice’ is discouraged, and it goes on. And lest you think I’m only talking about organizational churches, I’ve seen the same thing in house churches before. Part of what encourages me, though, is there are always voices. I have known wonderful, powerful people throughout the church, in churches of all models and denominations, who authentically try to live out the Gospel, most notably by loving people. Loving people as they are. Maybe we, as Christians, will get what other people are getting, that people don’t want a package sold to them. Rather, it’s a conversation, a dialogue, a human-to-human connection.

After thinking about it, maybe there’s a deeper reason the cluetrain manifesto has 95 Theses…

Hello, and welcome to my website. In this space, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the Christian Imagination, and related topics like the arts, the Bible, faith, creativity, and culture. The plan is for me to officially begin writing in September, where I’ll be blogging at the same time my small group goes through a Bible study on the Christian Imagination. I’m VERY excited about it. Until then, I’ll just be sharing more informally, and put some finishing touches on the website. I still need to add descriptions for all the books listed in the Resource section. Please visit my friends’websites if you get a chance. And now it begins…