“Jesus reveals God to us; God does not reveal Jesus to us…We cannot deduce anything about Jesus from what we think we know about God; we must deduce everything about God from what we do know about Jesus…”

As a Christian Jesus is my ideal starting point. If I want to better understand the mystery of God I should seek to better understand Jesus. If I want to better understand the whole of Scripture I should seek to better understand Jesus. What does God feel and think about suffering? Look at Jesus. What does God feel or think about rejects and freaks? Look at Jesus. What does God think about money, materialism, and consumption? Look at Jesus.

Let me quickly add one caveat before I move on. Things are not simple! Just looking at Jesus is not simple. The reality is that I don’t have a clear picture of Jesus. I only see him through my own world view, through my own baggage. So while it is an incredible and difficult task in a sense to look at Jesus, I do believe that it is a forgiving task full of mercy and grace along the way. One of the beauties of following Him is that he knows my baggage, he knows my (in)ability to comprehend and understand who he is and what he is about. And most importantly he is able to meet me where I am at and create transformation and a new creation despite my ignorance or brokenness!

My purpose in this blog is to talk about church. If we are honest about ourselves we must accept the reality that most of what we practice and believe about church is solely taught or read about in the book of Acts and the letters in the latter half of the Bible. Very little of how we define and practice being the church is founded in our reading and understanding of Jesus. While I do not believe that Paul (who wrote many of those aforementioned letters) and Jesus would disagree with each other or throw down in fisticuffs if given the opportunity, I do think that we have improperly done our theology about church (in biblical theology circles this is called ecclesiology). Similar to how we try to fit Jesus into our understanding of God instead of the other way around, with church we have spent more time trying to fit Jesus into our understanding of Paul. Would things be different if we started with Jesus? Would things be different if we attempted to define what a movement of Jesus followers (church) would look like based on the life and ministry of Jesus himself and then look into Paul and the other New Testament writings to see what they came up with in doing the same process?

Take a step back and think about the early church. What did they have? They had the stories about Jesus. They had the Old Testament. They had their own context. And they had the working of the Holy Spirit. WE, on the other hand, get all that PLUS the stories of what those early faith communities did, what they struggled with, the questions they asked, and the dysfunctions they developed. If I created a formula to better describe how the early followers of Jesus came up with what church looked like, it might look like this:

• Jesus + History (including the Old Testament) + Context + Spirit = first century church

Couldn’t you look at our churches, our ways of defining how to do church and suggest that our formula looks more like this:

• Paul + your grandpa’s context + Spirit = western church

What if we tried to craft a different formula? Would church today look different if we made an authentic effort to live and practice out of this formula:

• Jesus + Church History (including rest of Scripture) + OUR context + Spirit = ?

I’m no scholar, but I know that much of the early churches structures, practices, and disciplines were not new. They were things that they borrowed from out of their own context, history, and surrounding culture. They borrowed things that were of value in following Jesus. We, in turn, have made those things concrete. Have we made the wrong things concrete? Have we inadvertently practiced idolatry by elevating that which is not holy (the practices and structures) to a place of holiness? In Paul’s writings we see a community of people struggling with the equation, with the formula. In those writings we see the churches journey, their story, their “becoming”.

Have we I ignorantly tried to adopt their culture, their context, their problems, and their journey without following their lead? Would it not be more true to their journey, to Scripture, if I was to follow the early churches lead by looking at my Lord, looking at my context, looking at my story (history), and listening/looking for God’s untamed Spirit? I wonder what type of church I would end up with?

Sorry for the heresy. I’m an out loud processor, I grow most through dialog, through putting things out there that I may not even agree with…though, to be perfectly honest, I’m kind of liking what I’ve come up with.