I was altogether serious about it. In my mind was a wealth of possibilities for building a new and different kind of faith community. I still hope to see that, but I won’t be involved in that mission in the near future. You can expect me to keep talking it up because it’s still a shining vision of what God can do. I sincerely hope that, if you have the opportunity, you get involved in something like that, dear readers.
In other words, don’t be discouraged because God has called me to pull back from that mission. What I expect to engage here in the near future will still aim at the shining vision of church as God intended. For me, at least, there is some ground to cover before I can get involved directly.
On scholarly grounds alone, I would contend that we have to rebuild a whole lot more of the individual faith and morals of Scripture before we could know where to start. It’s almost as if each of us is Abraham all over again. We see the land and hear God’s promise to give it to those who follow in our faith-steps, but there is a certain reduced likelihood that we ourselves will see much of it on the ground.
Thus, the emphasis here will be more on individual faith and how to survive in a hostile world. As the old Petra song “Not of This World” says:
We are pilgrims in a strange land
We are so far from our homeland
With each passing day it seems so clear
This world will never want us here
We’re not welcome in this world of wrong
We are foreigners who don’t belongWe are strangers, we are aliens
We are not of this world.
(Bob Hartman, 1983, Star Song Music)
They didn’t know the half of it. This kind of talk was trendy with folks in the new rock-oriented “Jesus Movement” at the end of the previous century. Not to attack their sincerity, but they were still too close to the dominant culture for my tastes. Let’s say it’s a good start in the right direction, though.
What we are up against is a world of resistance from just the folks who fondly remember this song. Any attempt to attack the primacy of Western Civilization is the shortest path to marginalization from even the most well-meaning believers these days. Most Christians are convinced that the West was a work of God, the results of the Church trying to remake the world. That would be an oversimplification at best. But those of us who feel called to this ancient faith of Abraham as the heart and soul of what Christ taught are not just aliens, but alienated from the rest of believers.
It’s been my experience that until we demonstrate the power of our faith, show how it works to defeat the flesh and bring a peace that outlasts the earth itself, we can’t win a hearing. That’s what we share here on this blog. I rather doubt many of my readers sense the exact calling I do for myself, but there is plenty of ground we can share. What I want to promote is not that we hold off experimenting with doing church right, but that we also give consideration to what it takes to remain in the grip of faith when church is impossible for us. From what I’ve seen, we don’t have a broad legacy of religion that stands on this more ancient ground. We don’t know much about living the ancient faith in the face of such overwhelming odds until we do more of it.
This is the ground I sense I need to cover first. In the near future, you should expect to read more about real-life experiences here. I am convinced the Lord is calling me to a rarefied atmosphere that tests this kind of faith. I’m still serious about how this is supposed to play out in a congregation of folks with similar faith. Meanwhile, this online, virtual parish isn’t going anywhere until someone or something shuts it down over my objections.
