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"[Some] might say that the church is on the verge of some radical transformation. And so it must be if the church is to ever regain its power, its edge, its robust health, its life-changing and world-changing mission." Tim Clinton, President of The American Association of Christian Counsellors.
My generation, those of us now over forty years old, was raised in the Temple with Temple spirituality. At the center of our collective lives was a building: settled, immobile, and with predictable forms. It was a spirituality of the center, where religious life was influential and expected. It was a spirituality for the familiar places, well-traveled paths and a way of life that was not strongly in contrast to the dominant culture. It had an established priesthood, mostly well trained professionals who did the spiritual work for us. The priests dominated the action.
Our own spirituality was primarily personal and inward, and its outward expression was secondary. Temple spirituality was all about forms and gathered expression: it was a liturgical and cultic spirituality. It was a dualistic spirituality: Monday to Saturday was secondary in comparison to Sunday, and the physical world was less real and less important than the spiritual world.
In the fall of 2000 my wife and I left our church community and began a journey of discovery outside the walls. We found that the church and its roles and rituals looked very different from outside the institution. We realized how insular and isolated church culture had become. We had been so busy with other believers and keeping the programs running running, we no longer had significant contact with non-Christians. Suddenly we had time to get to know our neighbors.
Suddenly we face a new diaspora. Since 1991 the population in the United States has grown by 15%. During that same period of time the number of adults who do not attend church has grown from 38 million to 75 million… a 92% increase (Barna, May, 2004). We are moving from Jerusalem to Antioch, and facing incredible challenges of translation. The Temple culture is collapsing, pushing us away from the Temple spirituality toward a mobile spirituality - a spirituality of the road. In times of transition we become flexible and mobile, or we become irrelevant. As we lose the center ground, we need a spirituality for exiles and a spirituality for the margins. As we lose the center ground, we need a spirituality of prophets rather than priests.
We now live in a culture where authentic faith and christian values are marginalized. Christianity is simply one option in a long list of options, and christian leaders have lost their voice in the culture. The Temple culture is increasingly isolated and defensive. As fear and uncertainty increase, and as the Temple priesthood feel threatened, their isolation increases. The Temple will continue to exist until that generation passes on, but for the emerging culture Temples will become an anachronism, a testament to a bygone era.
A New Diaspora: Temple to Text
When Christianity moves from the center to the margins we have moved from temple to text, says Walter Brueggemann (Cadences of Home). Those who recognize the irrelevance of Temple spirituality recognize at the same time the increased relevance of Scripture, and the increased need for a strong spiritual life. They have discovered that the Temple priests don't have the answers. As a result, exiles are no longer looking outside themselves, but are digging deeper within. They are learning a new dependence on the Spirit and the Word. As they listen and hear they become prophetic voices to the Church in times of transition.
Let's face it.. the Temple culture has its own attraction. The Temple is a safe place compared to the road. These are dangerous times, where we are all pilgrims. In the Temple we know what to expect. Outside the Temple the roads are not well traveled, and frequently we are off the map blazing new paths.
Priests are for Temples, and prophets are people of the road. As fixed places of worship become less important, the priestly caste itself is threatened. Priests live in Temples, where they can celebrate the cultic life. When the Temple is no longer at the center, the role of the Priest diminishes in favor of the Prophet.
Prophets are travelers and pilgrims, people of the dusty road. This places prophets at an advantage during times of transition: they are already mobile. They tend not to rely on buildings or predictable forms. They are in touch with culture by definition of their mobility. They are already rubbing shoulders with change and they are friends of transition. Prophets are comfortable with a degree of insecurity, just as Jesus "had nowhere to lay his head."
As the center of authority moves from Jerusalem to Antioch and from Temple to text, from outward forms and places to inward awareness, authority itself is decentralized. Authority becomes less about position and role, and more about relationship and identity. We move from a narrow definition of priesthood, the Temple definition, to something more universal. We move from places of power to empowerment, from a method to a movement. What was tame and predictable becomes wild and dynamic. Authority moves from earthly spaces to the Throne room above.
For all this change we need a spirituality of the road, a missional spirituality. This is a spirituality that is self-authorizing, decentralized, sacramental, personal, creative and incarnational. It is a spirituality for the road.. a missional spirituality.
From the Center to the Margins: From Security to Insecurity
Human beings don't naturally embrace insecurity and change. When Moses led the people of God out of slavery, their strongest inclination was not to go forward but to go back! Remember the movie "Chicken Run?"
How do we survive the transition from Temple to text, from the center to the margins? How do we become a people free from addiction to the culture, even from the church culture, out on the open range, a people comfortable with the insecurity of freedom?
A couple of years back someone gave me a copy of Margaret Wheatley's article, Goodbye Command and Control" from Leader to Leader magazine. An insightful look at shifting paradigms, this was just one gem I found there:
Wheatley helps us understand why it is so HARD to explain why we need change. We can have some ideas about the need for change, and we may think we even understand a new place without being there... but we are deluded. Looking at the map gives you no real experience of the Grand Canyon. Not until you step outside your normal world or practices into a new world and new practices do you learn new questions, new truths and see things you never saw before. All your senses become engaged, and then even your self-understanding will change.
Without this personal transformation and new sense of identity and vocation our hope of birthing a new movement is unrealistic. As Frost and Hirsch put it:
Consider the context of the building of the Temple in the Old Testament. Before the Temple existed, God instituted a tabernacle (which was actually a tent). In the Mosaic covenant the tabernacle symbolized God's presence. In his Gospel John makes use of that symbol in a way his readers can understand when he says of Jesus that he dwelt (Greek: "tented") among us.
The Mosaic tabernacle was assembled at the command of the Lord to Moses: "Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst" (Ex.25: 8). The core idea was God's habitation with His people. The Lord could not dwell in their hearts because of sin and rebellion, so his living among them had to be symbolic. The Lord ordered the tabernacle assembled, and He revealed the structure to Moses in exacting detail (Ex.26: 30).
In the reign of David the tabernacle was replaced with the temple. Are these things only different forms of the same idea? Are they culturally neutral? The Old Testament account shows clear differences between tabernacle and Temple. Before we look closely at the rise of the Temple, consider the description of the ark of the covenant, which rested within the tabernacle. "Two cubits and a half shall be its length… And you shall overlay it with pure gold.. you shall cast four rings of gold for it, and put them on its four feet.. and you shall put the poles into the rings on the sides of the ark, to carry it by them.." (Ex.25: 10-14).
On top of the ark were the mercy seat, a golden cover with two cherubim, with wings stretched out over the ark. Isn't it striking that this beautiful and costly creation was carried on ordinary wooden poles?
The ark itself was a perfect symbol of the Presence of God with His people. The people of God moved with God. God was not captured or anchored in the tent of meeting, but was mobile. God is free to be spontaneous, unpredictable. He is always true to Himself, but not limited to our conceptions.
In the same way, the tabernacle symbolized God's presence with His people. The mobility of the tabernacle represented His dynamic nature.
So the tabernacle was flexible, impermanent, mobile. It was a simple yet beautiful place. But the temple was fixed and immovable.
The tabernacle was God's idea. But the temple was David's idea. God sent word to David:
God allowed the temple to be built, but not by David. David made the preparations, and Solomon did the building. In contrast to the tabernacle, the blueprint did not come from Mt. Sinai. God was not the architect this time.
The tabernacle was the true sign of the presence of God with his people, and it correctly symbolized his nature and his character. The Temple, in contrast, was an accommodation that the Lord never wanted. The tabernacle is a truer picture of how God relates to His people, and the New Testament moves us an even greater distance from Temple religion.
Defending the Purity of the Gospel
Remember the story of Stephen in the book of Acts? He was arrested under the charge that he spoke "against this holy place and against the law." It was reported that he said, "Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place [the temple] and change the customs of Moses handed down to us" (Acts 6: 13-14). Stephen's defense went ok until he got to the part about the temple. He quoted from Amos:
Stephen was saying the same things that Jesus had told the Samaritan woman, that "the time has come when those who worship the Father must worship in spirit and in truth," that Jerusalem was no longer the place. This rejection of temple and priesthood and everything associated with the established religious order of the day was the basis of the charge of blasphemy against Stephen and resulted in his being stoned to death.
Of course Acts teaches the radical transformation of Temple religion well before Stephen's sermon. In Acts 2 "Luke is saying …. that with Pentecost the one true and living God, the creator of heaven and earth, has come to live in and amongst those who believe in Jesus, constituting them, together and even individually, as living Temples, as people on whose hearts the Law has now been inscribed." (N T Wright, "A sermon at the Eucharist on the Feast of Pentecost," June 8 2003)
Few in Jerusalem grasped the significance of Stephen's words. They continued to embrace the gospel and their Jewish customs, and then insisted that those things were essential to the gospel for all believers. The Hebrew Christians prior to the Jerusalem Council thought that Jerusalem remained the center of God's work in the world. They saw no need to reach out to the Greek and Roman gentiles. The Old Testament and its regulations remained part of their culture, now baptized with the coming of Messiah.
When it was evident that God was working outside the circle of the church of that day, they sent messengers to ensure that their cultural values were observed (Acts 15). They really believed that those Greeks had to become Jewish (as some think postmoderns have to become modern). They didn't like Greek customs, Greek epistemology, the way they dressed, the way they ate, or the language they used. They found them profoundly secular and irreligious.
When Paul returned to Jerusalem he was ready to go to war for the purity of the gospel. He fired off a letter to the churches of Galatia, warning that a culturally based gospel is no gospel at all. The counter-missionaries were not questioning the essentials: their only concerns were matters of Jewish custom. But Paul defended his actions, shaking the Hebrew-Christian world. He recognized that unity depended on the ability to actively support diversity. And what better spokesman for the diaspora than Paul, a Roman citizen with a thoroughly Hebrew lineage? He understood both worlds and he enabled the Gospel to spread into the Greek and Roman world without the baggage of Hebrew religion. The Temple and priesthood were no longer necessary, and were even a problem that could come between God and His people.
Tradition and Traditionalism
By the time of Jesus the forms that had served Moses so well had taken on a life of their own. The Temple and the priesthood and the teachers of the law had grow accustomed to their places of honor and authority. Jesus was crucified not because he taught about grace and mercy and the kingdom of God, but because he was a threat to the status quo.
When Jesus appeared he faced a five hundred year old religious institution that was controlled by an elite group of leaders. They claimed faithfulness to the Scriptures and saw themselves as the only authorized guardians of the truth.
Traditions are forms that once were useful to accomplish a certain function. We need structure, and we need forms. Tradition in itself is not harmful. But once forms are created they tend to take on a life of their own. We experience a hardening of the categories. Function and meaning may be lost, and tradition forms a new culture with an authority of their own. Finally it becomes heretical even to question the forms of the authority behind them. This is part of the meaning of Churchill's famous dictum: "We create our buildings, then our buildings create us."
What we are seeing in the book of Acts is a battle against traditionalism. Paul warns us against succumbing to what appears to be wisdom, but is actually a hiding place for fallen
powers: the stoichea (Gal. 4:8 ff, Col. 2: 8ff). People who get stuck on elementary truths do not mature. Part of the process of growth is the ability to have "trained oneself to distinguish good from evil." Traditionalism tries to do that for us. It says, "just follow these rules." In so doing it becomes an obstacle to maturity.
Today we have "churches" which are not the church, since the church is a people. But we have spaces which we call "sanctuaries" as though there are holy places. There are not; there are only people indwelt by the Spirit of God.
When we adopt a Temple religion, our buildings create us. We lose our flexibility, and our ability to respond to change. The medium is the message.
We say, "The Temple of the Lord!" but our Temples do not depend on what God is doing; they remain in place whether God continues to ordain them or not. We can't risk "ending" a Temple because we have a mortgage and priests to support. We have to keep oiling the wheels. The inertia of large Temples is like the cruise ship traveling at 25 knots; God cannot quickly take us in new directions. For this reason God is allowing Temple religion to fall down, while raising up small groups of people who are not tied to tradition and are not afraid to venture to unknown places. Jim Peterson comments that, "Our temples are territorial. They cause us to ask questions about "who is in" and "who is out," and to worry about the other temple down the road lest they gain more adherents than us. They support competition and division in the Body. They cause us to dwell in fear and to regard people as our possessions instead of the Lord's." (NAVPRESS: Church Without Walls)
On the morning of February 4th, 2000 I was reading in Nehemiah and Ezra, thinking about the church in the new millennium. The Lord was helping me pull some pieces together when I had to leave to meet some friends for coffee.
I drove to the home of a friend, and when he got into my car he began telling me about a dream that another friend's nine year old son had had early this same morning. The boy's name was Joshua.
In his dream Joshua was standing outside a temple and God was standing beside him. God spoke to Joshua and told him that the temple had to be destroyed because the people were not worshipping the true God; they were worshipping other things.
God told Joshua to kick the temple with his heel. Before he did so, Joshua yelled at the people inside, warning them about what was going to happen. Some began running out of the temple, but there were some that stayed in the temple and who wouldn't come out. Joshua then kicked the wall. The people who remained inside were standing under their idols when the temple started to collapse. Joshua saw the idols that they had made fall on the people and crush their heads.
The Lord is moving His people out of Temples and into tents. A tabernacle (or tent) can be taken down in an instant. It can be transported to other places. A small group of people in a tent can move quickly when the cloud moves. A large group in an established Temple have too much to protect.
Before we stood outside the Temple we didn't understand the meaning of the movement from tabernacle to Temple. We had read some things about change and about religious culture, but we always missed the heart of it. We were like Martians trying to understand green grass.
Talking about some aspects of emergence with established leaders who live their lives n the Temple is like trying to talk to a Martian about "green grass." Even though we may share many common values with established leaders, they have not been where we have been. On the other hand, once you've seen it, tasted it, smelled it and rolled in it... you know what green grass really is.
From the Temple to the Wilderness
"Learn from me, how difficult a thing it is to throw off errors confirmed by the example of all the world, and which, through long habit, have become a second nature to us."
The tabernacle was built for the wilderness. The wilderness is always a metaphor for danger. Like the road, it is a place of wild animals and bandits, unpredictable and wild. The spirituality of the Temple will never carry us through the wilderness, and the wild places are where we need to be as we transition toward the city we haven't seen. A spirituality for exiles is predicated on insecurity because we no longer need outward points of reference... buildings, rituals or even necessarily designated leaders. We want to live in spirit and in truth, and we share a common Leader. It's a subversive spirituality, a communal spirituality and a spirituality of emergence. As Walter Brueggemann put it,
The subversive community's mission is not to bring the kingdom of God from without; we can't stand apart from the culture in comfortable groups. We can't hope to be merely attractional and encourage people to come in. We must be among; we must release the kingdom of God from within. Subversives live and do their work 'undercover' where the world lives and breathes. Their goal is not escapism (trying to build a Christian utopia), but to show people how they can lay hold of life as God intended, in his Kingdom. Eugene Petersen comments on subversion that, "the status quo is wrong and must be overthrown if the world is going to be livable. It is so deeply wrong that repair work is futile. The world is, in the word insurance agents use to designate our wrecked cars, totaled." Petersen also argues that, "If we have neither a preponderance of power nor a majority of votes, we begin searching for other ways to effect change. We discover the methods of subversion. We find and welcome allies."
Let's face it, we don't arrive at these places without pain and struggle. We aren't going to get there if we are still sitting in a traditional sunday gathering, smiling at the back of other heads week by week. Transformation happens in furnaces, not in clean and brightly lit foyers.
Apart from personal transformation we are likely to simply become a new problem. The head answer may be right, but the soul is not.
"The lie often comes in a new form that looks like enlightenment. We all say, "This is it," and we jump on the bandwagon, the new politically correct agenda. And then we discover it's run by unenlightened people who in fact do not love God but love themselves. The do not love the truth, but control. They often do not love true freedom for everybody, but freedom for their system. That's been my great disappointment in liberalism. Liberals tend not to create anything that lasts. They lack the ability to sacrifice the self or create foundations that last. They can't let go of their own need for change and control, to stay in there in a patient, humble way that people of faith often can. No surprise that Jesus prayed not just for fruit, but "fruit that will last" (John 15:16). A rare synthesis, it seems." Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs
While some will act as subversives, others will embrace revolution. There are those around us who need the courage to move forward; it is too easy to sit back and let others take the risk. We have to connect with those who are treading water, waiting for the Temple walls to fall down around them. Frost and Hirsch advocate encouraging holy dissatisfaction:
The need is urgent, because the culture no longer recognizes Christianity as a spiritual movement. Only as we subvert and reshape the Christian movement and incarnate an alternative community will the world take notice.
We will have to become comfortable working on the margins. The main force of the church in society today is the group who inhabit the large and visible Temples. These Temples are like cruise ships in a narrow channel.. the force of their ponderous movement through the water draws many smaller vessels in their wake. Trying to move against that flow can seem hopeless and futile. We can't turn those huge ships around.. they may be traveling on engines that no longer run, but the force of an ocean liner in motion remains unavoidable.
The religious climate of Jesus day was little different, however. The main spring of religious culture unwound slowly and inexorably; Jesus life and teaching made little difference. Yet he continued to work at the margins, with marginalized people. Did he know something we don't know?
"We need to watch the margins of our society - the inner cities and the rural areas where creative approaches are emerging, often born in despair. And so when desperation forces us to let go of the old ways, God can bring new life." Ann Wilkerson-Hayes in "New Ways of Being Church."
Change will not come from the established priesthood, who have a vested interest in maintaining the life of the Temple. Change will come in small ways, but like leaven in a lump, it will grow in force and in power.
"One of the most important lessons from history is that the renewal of church always comes from fringes, and we mean ALWAYS. ... It is this radical openness to, and engagement with, the margins that so often brings that needed inrush of new thinking, acting and feeling to Jesus' people." Frost and Hirsch, "The Shaping of Things to Come"
We need leaders who will sacrifice their personal advancement to inspire the risk and sacrifice necessary to bring change. These are people unafraid to risk moving against the tide, who aren't tempted by the rewards offered by impressive cruise ships who are moving with the tide and dragging smaller vessels in their wake. We need dreamers and visionaries who understand how dangerous a dream can be. We need people who are comfortable with the margins, with smallness, with ambiguity, and with obscurity.
CONCLUSION
We need, like Ginger the chicken, to inspire a vision of real freedom founded in love.
When the Gospel first went from Jerusalem to Antioch, the Temple began to lose place as the center of Messianic faith. . I have here emphasized the discontinuity of Temple religion and the priesthood. But of course, that is a one-sided perspective, and the other side of the story is that the Temple now moves to human hearts, and the priesthood is Universal. The diaspora we are seeing in our own day, with increasing numbers of believers not claiming any traditional church institution as their home, is divinely orchestrated by God to move us from a Temple religion toward incarnational and missional communities. We need to support that movement and the hunger for authenticity even as we encourage a new dependence on God and a 24/7 life of discipleship outside traditional forms.
We aren't going to move forward by designing new programs. We are no longer in Jerusalem where religious methods are established and expected. There is no longer a religious center to our culture. Instead, we have many tribes and great diversity of thought.
One of the incarnational efforts we are seeing locally is a pub church. Others include parties and bbqs where believers can mix casually with unbelievers. This kind of initiative by believers.. community centers, pub churches, gatherings of people around special interests.. are likely to result in christians mixing with non-christians in new and effective ways, and new impact for the gospel.
Frost and Hirsch comment in a footnote that, "if we aim at ministry, we seldom get to do much mission. But if we aim at mission, we have to do ministry because ministry is the means by which mission is achieved. The established church has generally got this wrong."
The direction of this article has not been missions per se, but a new spirituality to support a biblical vision. As Temple religion dies, and as believers increasingly mix with unbelievers in outside-the-walls contexts, conversations and conversions will happen. The church will expand, and will increasingly move from a ministry oriented culture to a missional culture. We need to support these missional-incarnational efforts by encouraging faithful, self-authorizing tribes and communities and decentralized networks that support innovative kingdom cultures.
But how do we gather non-traditional believers and move them forward? Under what banner will they be organized? We do not need a new apostolic structure. Rather, new communities will arise in the Name of Jesus, around the spontaneous organization that arises from the vision that takes root as they are obedient to the Holy Spirit. These new churches need support and encouragement, but not centralized control. They need to find ways to gather that supports their unique expression of kingdom life.
At the end of their seminal work, Frost and Hirsch talk about herding cats. No one who has ever tried this has experienced much success! They note that cats, unlike cattle, are fiercely independent. But cats always know where the food dish is. If we recognize the hunger for experience, the hunger to know God, and the hunger to be connected authentically in community, and if we create places where these hungers can be met, we can gather tribes of people and move them forward.
Finally, instead of sending new converts to a central location for nurture (Jerusalem, John 4), we need to encourage them to sink wells where they live. An infinite water source is available wherever Jesus is.
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• © 2005 Len Hjalmarson.•
Last Updated on September 9, 2005
