ReJesus

Into my inbox this morning came an e-mail from my team leader containing the following short review from a friend of his.  

"One of the books I really enjoyed reading last year was ReJesus by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch.  The sub-title of the book is A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church.  The book explores the connection between the way of Jesus and the religion of Christianity.  The authors ask a variety of questions including: Why is what we experience as Christianity discontinuous with the way of Jesus?  How consistent is our witness with his life and teachings?  Can we move away from his prototypical spirituality without doing irreparable damage to the integrity of the faith?  How far is too far?

I enjoyed the whole book, but their chapter on ReJesus for the Church and Organization really challenged me.  Here are some excerpts from the chapter" :

As Jesus’ disciples we are called to a Christ like life, and no matter how we configure it, that must surely mean that somehow our lives and our communities must be in significant congruence with the life, teachings, and mission of Jesus.  The degree that we are living the life laid out by our Master is directly proportional to the degree that we can call ourselves authentic disciples.

We have built and established a massive global religion comprising thousands of organizations with massive capital and resources.  The problem is these organizations drift towards pragmatism over radicalism, although, we suspect, in more honest moments many of them would probably admit that much of what we do seems to only have an indirect correlation to the uncluttered, nonreligious, life-oriented faith so compellingly portrayed in the Gospels.  These objectors might, in spite of their deepest spiritual intuitions simply say that we have no choice but to continue to operate the services and maintain the system or else the whole edifice might crumble.  But we cannot escape the question:  “Is this what Jesus really intended for his movement?”

Does advancing in the kingdom of God boil down to this? Running programs and services and/or guiding the laity through liturgical complexities in order to help people get to the God they are all meant to access directly through Jesus anyhow? Was this what Jesus had in mind when he established the church (Matt. 16:18-19)? And, whatever happened to the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers that many within the Protestant movements are meant to adhere to (I Peter 2:9)?

Unless we can validate who we are and what we do by lining ourselves up with the measure that Jesus laid down in his life and work, then what in God’s name are we doing? His modus operandi, teaching, his critique of religion, his commitment to the way of the kingdom, must become our primary source of guidance.

We believe that in order to find renewal we need to discover Jesus afresh even though this be a dangerous course of action because it calls into question so much of what we might build our various religious houses on.  At the beginning of this new century, we have never needed so desperately to rediscover the original genius of the Christian experience and to allow it to strip away all the unnecessary and cumbersome paraphernalia of Christendom.

Roland Allen wrote about missional movements: The spontaneous expansion of the Church reduced to its element is a very simple thing. It asks for no elaborate organization, no large finances, no great numbers of paid missionaries. In its beginning it may be the work of one man and that of a man neither learned in the things of this world, nor rich in the wealth of this world. What is necessary is faith. What is needed is the kind of faith which uniting a man to Christ, sets him on fire.

We need to learn from the story of the Israelites in the wilderness.  They tried to store up manna from heaven for another day.  Religion can give in to the same temptation to try to store up and rely on souvenirs of a past spiritual experience.  For how many years did the church rely on the system of holy Christian relics – a bone from Peter’s finger, a wood shard from the cross of Christ, cathedrals and sacred buildings, inherited rituals, even creedal formulas, more than it relied on a fresh, daily encounter with Jesus?  We, like Israel, are called to be willing to collect the fresh manna every day – and we are to do this without becoming spiritual thrill seekers but rather lifelong worshipers.  To do otherwise is to “outsource your encounter with Jesus” to a religious system of souvenirs, ritual, and religious paraphernalia.

To ReJesus the church, we must first look in the mirror and ask ourselves whether the strange and wonderful God-Man has invaded our life with purpose and freshness. If Christianity minus Christ equals religion, then Christianity plus Christ is the antidote to religion.

Max Weber, the famous sociologist, noted that in order to survive the loss of the founder, the movement has to somehow build the charisma of the founder into the life of the organization.  We also know from the Gospels that Jesus spent significant and strategic time devoted to initiating his followers into the ways of the kingdom and to discipling and teaching them to recognize the dynamics of what it meant to be one of his followers.

Likewise for the Christian movement, the founder must be able to be seen in the lives of the found. This must surely partly be what it means to live “in Christ” and he in us. People observing us ought to be able to discern the elements of Jesus’ way in our ways. If they cannot find authentic signals of the historical Jesus through the life of his people, then as far as we are concerned they have the full right to question our legitimacy.

"Frost and Hirsch certainly have some challenging thoughts.  They cause me to reflect on my daily encounter with Jesus.  Am I living on day old, or even month old manna?  Do I see regular evidence that Jesus has invaded my life with purpose?  Do people in my orbit see authentic signals of the Jesus life in my life?  So this month I’m praying that you will ReJesus.  That you won’t mistake the programs and rituals of Christianity for the authentic Christ. "