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Friday, 04 July 2008
What's On Your Agenda
We've been looking at the beatitudes in Stone Soup and using Dallas Willard's The Great Omission to lean on through it. Along with this I'm re-reading Power & Passion by Samuel Wells. All these strands seemed to have converged this week onto the topic of agendas. When is OK to push your agenda and where do you get this authority to know what the right agenda is? Why is my perspective better than someone else's?
In terms of passive resistance then, why is calling someone to die for a cause better than telling someone to kill for a cause? I know that harm to the other person is involved here but isn't that the same as inciting someone to give up their lives? How am I not involved in killing when I ask someone to matry in passive resistance? Isn't that just pushing and promoting a different cause?
What Willard and Wells both hint at is surrender of power and plan. In other words if, through seeking Christ what you do is try to live in a Christlike way, you try to be disciple to the extent which you then stop trying to manipulate outcomes. You are faithful to a way of being so much so that you are prepared to be the loser ( I am taking what they say and running with it a bit here).
This does make Jesus being abandoned on the cross really important. If Jesus really felt alone, abandoned and without help then everything he did could have been pointless, meaningless and all for nothing. In the face of this though, he still hung there. He had surrendered his agenda, in fact any agenda really. He was a fairly spectacular loser. And those he had asked to follow and live like him? Those he invited to live kingdom lives, us now who chose to either stick with him or not bother? There can be little doubt that if we want this kind of God then it involves us being perpetual losers to. Our agendas will rarely make it into the daylight. We will lack credibility.
On the plus side though, it also means absolute freedom. To live in Christ means I can't be owned by state or media, materialism or ambition. If I really have no agenda other than being faithful to God then I have no vested interest in the outcome of situations only in the process of conduct. I think this is more exciting than it sounds. I know I'm not going to actually get to the state that I'm so in with JC that holiness emanates from me and I have no selfish desires or agendas. I'm not totally deluded.
I can start to think though that I don't understand God's agenda therefore it's not my job to push it. It's just my job to be faithful.
The glaring question that then comes up for me is, where does this leave evangelism?
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Comments
Don't know if this thought chimes with what you're saying or whether this is just a subtle (?) bit of self-deception on my part.
The relatively few parts of my ministry that have felt most evangelistic have been the ones where I've met people in different situations and told myslef that I'm going to spend chunks of time with people with absolutely no expectation that they will ever come to church or join my religious empire or become part of my personal paid up supporters' club.
Like the atheist/agnostic who I visted with his terminally ill-wife and carried on as friends after her funeral. The lady (call her Kay) who I visited in hospital who'd stopped going anywhere after her mother died. The Christadelphian couple who in terms of that non-Trinitarian circle are church leavers, but who still regard themselves as different sorts of Christadelphians. I could just be kiddinig myself here as I'd love any of them to come to church and would probably, with a different head on and speaking to a different group of people, regard that as a "result" or evidence of God at work.
But God's at work in the existing relationship in its own right regardless of the outcome.
Kay's Christian cousin would love me to convert her or 'bring her faith back to life', but I don't necessarily think we would agree on what constituted that for Kathleen.
The more I see people as a scalp to be claimed or a vindication of my ministry the less I feel as if I'm representing Jesus who healed ten people and only one returned to show gratitude (were the other nine a waste of time or signs of God's new world?). Or the Jesus who sent people back to their homes (like Legion and the woman at the well) when they wanted to follow him.
The more I see the people as valuable in themselves, regardless of whether I get any payback from the encounter and the free commitment of my time, the more, looking back, I seem to detect Jesus in the encounter.
Maybe that's just me making excuses, or engaging in self-delusion about my real motives and rationalisation about my effectiveness. But that's where I am at the moment.
Whatever motives underlie it, this approach probably won't get me a mention in the Top Ten ways of filling your church...
Posted by: andy jones | Friday, 04 July 2008
Where it always was - bearing faithful witness.
Posted by: Glen | Saturday, 05 July 2008
Hmm...
I agree with much of this, BUT
I think you exaggerate the point when you speak of disinterest in outcomes in favour of process. Intuitively that sounds dangerously like living according to a set of rules. If you play by the rules you've discharged your responsibilities so you can't be blamed for the outcome (yes, I'm exaggerating the other way for effect).
I'm ok(ish) with this model for interpersonal relations. In that case it's about respecting other people; not seeing them as merely as a part of our lives - an object to be acted upon - but as equals who do and must make their own choices. It's about loving others as ourselves.
Where it falls down for me is at a corporate level. Here I think we have a greater responsibility than just demonstrating an alternative means of living. We have to actually usher in a new world. That means making difficult moral decisions about who to support and when; it involves partnership with non-Christians in a way that individual witnessing and evangelism clearly don't. The specific desire is to manipulate outcomes, in part because that's what we're charged with doing.
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I actually think that the example of passive resistance vs killing is a problem that arises from an focus on process rather than outcome. In this case the prophet believes that one process is a more Christlike way of behaving and so advocates that process. If the prophet had been more concerned with the outcome than the process, the question would be which process (eg passive resistance or armed insurrection) would be most effective. That's clearly a question the potential participants are best-placed to answer. Passive resistance was pretty successful in India, but it wasn't sufficient in South Africa. Again, it's about respecting the potential participants. If you're really on their side you're going to go with their choice even if you're uneasy with their tactics.
Posted by: tim f | Sunday, 06 July 2008