It does, admittedly, require considerable creativity for churches to avoid being on an adventure together. After all, Jesus Christ led his disciples on THE sacred adventure. However, history has shown that if churches and church-related groups are strong-willed enough, they can remain in their comfortable ruts, and avoid adventure altogether. Last week I tossed out some time-tested ways for individuals to avoid the adventure. Today I take up the task of providing suggestions about how groups and churches can do the same.
1. Develop an "us" and "them" mindset. This is crucial. We (the church) are the insiders, and those people out there are, well, I think you get the idea. The "us" and "them" mindset is helpful in several ways. It protects us from the challenge of having to welcome the stranger (and we all know how uncomfortable that is); it helps us to embrace a bit of 'holier than thou' (an insulation from adventure if ever there was one); and it protects us from the gifts of those outside our walls. (We wouldn't want to be challenged by their poets, writers and artists now would we?)
2. Outlaw all words that tie us to our past, such as 'tradition' and 'ritual.' It is a sad but true fact for those who wish to avoid adventure that the church's history is pregnant with examples of congregations that have stayed remarkable close to the adventure of Jesus. Many of those congregations and their members passed down what they learned of the art of prayer, how to cooperate with the Holy Spirit and how to embrace the rhythms of worship and service. If we can just toss out words like 'tradition' and 'ritual' altogether, we won't have to learn from those folks at all. In fact, we'll soon forget that they ever lived.
3. Become so heavenly minded that we are of no earthly good. The following idea will be extremely challenging, but perhaps someone could find time to cut out all references to God's good creation and our lives in it from the pages of the Bible. If we could do that, we could quickly forget that our lives in this world are important to God. Honestly, there may not be that much left of the Bible after we cut out all references to our lives here in the creation, but the holey Bible that remained (forgive the pun, please) might lack the power to call us to live deeply and well here and now. Take this as your mantra: "Nothing here really matters."
4. Avoid lament. "Lament," as you probably know, is a complaint about our circumstances and lives that is brought before God in prayer. The Psalms contained dozens and dozens of laments, so best to avoid the Psalms. We want to avoid lament because if we learn to bring pain and disappointment to God, it won't be long before we realize that God shares our sufferings with us. From there it's just a short step to realizing that God laments the present state of things in the world. And then--brace yourself--we might find ourselves joining God's protest against the brokenness of the world. And then--prepare to shudder--we might actually find ourselves joining our lives to God's love for the world.
5. If we're to avoid being on the adventure together, we must focus on all things trendy. It's better to stay in touch with today's fads than for churches to listen and think deeply about things like the preaching of Jesus, or learning to pray or serving the least of these.
6. And finally (only because of lack of time, not because of a lack ideas...), let's work very hard to maintain a sharp distinction between the pastors and the rest of our congregations. Well give them fancy titles like "the clergy" and "the laity." Pretty soon we'll forget that Christianity was, from the very beginning, a movement of all people, in ministry to the world. The sooner we forget that, the better!
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