Vision is incompatible with church community. The vision and mission statement talk is very provocative and tempting. As soon as anyone questions what our purpose is, it has the immediate and alluring aura of imagining, creating and shaping our future. It’s called futuring. And it is very sexy. If you are a business or an influence or lobby group or club or even a charity or anything else, you will need to have a vision and articulate a mission statement. But not a church. People, even believers, must have the freedom to assemble without being required to serve a vision created by the pastor or the leaders or even the collective. Otherwise their personal freedom out of necessity is sublimated. You have a choice: you either serve a vision or you serve people. The church can’t do both. nakedpastor ☀
The blustering televangelists, and the atheists who rant about the evils of religion, are little more than carnival barkers. They are in show business, and those in show business know complexity does not sell. They trade clichés and insults like cartoon characters. They don masks. One wears the mask of religion, the other wears the mask of science. They banter back and forth in predictable sound bites. They promise, like all advertisers, simple and seductive dreams. This debate engages two bizarre subsets who are well suited to the television culture because of the crudeness of their arguments. One distorts the scientific theory of evolution to explain the behavior and rules for complex social, economic and political systems. The other insists that the six-day story of creation in Genesis is fact and Jesus will descend format the sky to create the kingdom of God on Earth. These antagonists each claim to have discovered an absolute truth. They trade absurdity for absurdity. They show that the danger is not religion or science. The danger is fundamentalism. Chris Hedges ☀
Abraham Heschel once said that the first commandment… to not have any other gods before me… is the first one because idolatry is the root of all the others. Calvin said our minds are factories working around the clock in the production of idols, and labyrinths of idolatrous thinking. The church is constantly setting up idols for people to believe in. Then when these idols, these small gods, don’t deliver, and the people for good reason lose their faith in them, we blame the people for it. Some of the people I talk to who have lost their faith are still caught in the same trap. Once they were on the shiny side of the idol, believing in hope that it was true. Now they are simply on the smudgy side of the idol rejecting it as false. Been there. I have been a devout idolator as well as a backslidden one. Now, when someone says they’re losing their faith or have lost it, I say, “Fine! Been there. Am there. Will be again. Let’s walk this together.” Mother Teresa, frequently enjoying communion with Jesus before she went to Calcutta, receiving her call and going there full of faith to fulfill her vocation, suddenly lost touch with Jesus and never heard from him again. We throw around “Dark Night of the Soul” when we’ve had a bad week. Try never sensing the Lord’s presence ever again! I validate those who never sense God’s presence. I see honor in rejecting gods. It takes nerve to topple idols and walk away from falsehood. It is fearless to detach oneself from people who cherish counterfeit and peddle snake oil. And I think it sometimes takes courage to be an atheist. I embrace atheists, for in many ways I am one myself. nakedpastor ☀
A GNT creation ©2007–2010
