Does your faith have a crumple zone?
At that place was a time when cars were build with rigid chassis which ran from one stop to the other, with the bumper fitted on either finish. The logic of this was that, if the car crashed into annihilation, surely information technology would make sense to build the auto equally strong as possible, and then that it would protect the passengers from the affect. It turned out that this logic was exactly the wrong way to go nigh it. With a rigid chassis, all the shock from the impact is transmitted to the whole machine, causing serious injuries to the occupants.
Information technology was realised quite early on that this was not the best way to build cars—but it took decades before change came. The idea of the crumple zone was first conceived and patented by an Austro-Hungarian engineer Béla Barényi (the 'male parent of modern car safety') in 1937, simply it didn't observe its way into car design until 1959, and merely became widespread in the 1970s and 80s. The idea is the opposite of the chassis; instead of having a rigid frame from one terminate to another, you lot really create soft and flexible zones of the car at the forepart and rear (and possibly even on the sides), and in a crash these plummet, absorbing the energy of the impact. Meanwhile the passengers are kept condom in a rigid cell in the heart of the car; not only is this strong enough to protect them, it is at some altitude from the point of impact, so that the energy has been dissipated and the passengers are saved from the stupor of the affect.
What has all this got to do with the Christian life and discipleship?
I thought about crumple zones after reading this honest and moving article written by Laura Turner, John Ortberg'southward daughter, as she reflected on why she and her contemporaries who has been raised and nurtured in the Chicago mega-church Willow Creek concluded upward in such different places.
In high school, my friends and I were inseparable. Nosotros grew up in the same church with the same organized religion. How did we all drift and then far apart?
But it is not just here that Turner's feel was slightly discrete from aspects of real life. She describes Willow Creek in these terms:
At Willow Creek, a mile-long driveway wound effectually a manmade lake where believers got baptized in the summer months, and in the spring it was littered with Canadian geese and their goslings. The parking lots were so big that I learned to bulldoze in that location, on uninterrupted swaths of flat Midwestern bog.
This is non the experience of your average church in the UK, or even in u.s.a.! When we attended one of the outset Willow Creek conferences where Bill Hybels was speaking in 1994, he mentioned in passing that he had a lx-foot yacht on Lake Michigan which he sailed with friends on a Saturday. It was true that this was comparatively modest for a megachurch pastor—just information technology felt a piffling removed for virtually of us in Anglican ministry!
Our instruction, in every surface area of life, needs to exist tested from the first with the realities of life—and that is why experience in a different cultural context is often cardinal to the growing of mature religion. Will what I have learnt in one context stand up to scrutiny in quite a different context?
2. Focus on the 'why' not merely on the 'what'
In the ministry of both Jesus and Paul, there is a consequent emphasis onunderstanding things, and not but doing what they are told. When Jesus saw the crowds, he 'had compassion on them—then he taught them' (Mark 6.34). Jesus did, of course, respond to the crowds in compassion by healing them and feeding them—but his pity stirred by their lostness also meant that he healed and fed theirunderstanding by teaching them about the kingdom of God.
This emphasis on understanding is also found all through Paul'south writings. Although he begins his showtime alphabetic character to the Corinthians by rejecting certain Greek idea of clever rhetoric and philosophy, he in fact deploys some sophisticated arguments on a range of issues, and wants the Corinthians to fully understand:
Brothers and sisters, stop thinking similar children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your understanding be perfect (i Cor 14.20)
Paul is here using the language of perfection,teleios, that we discover in Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount: 'Exist perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect'. In the opening of his letter to the Philippians, Paul has a similar accent on understanding:
And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more than and more in cognition and depth of insight, and then that you may be able to discern what is best and may exist pure and blameless for the twenty-four hours of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the celebrity and praise of God. (Phil 1.9–xi)
Paul doesn't only rebuke the Corinthians for their divisions; he explains that information technology is God who gives the growth, so individual leaders are not that important. He doesn't just urge sexual purity; he explains why the bodily resurrection might shape our thinking. He doesn't merely tell them to let all to participate; he roots it in the do and purpose of the Holy Spirit in giving gifts to the church—and then on. Information technology makes usa feel that Paul's letters are complex and demanding (and I suspect his beginning readers/hearers felt the same!) but it models a pastoral arroyo to the development of mature discipleship.
3. Encourage the request of questions, not the acceptance of formulas
When nosotros were at the conference in 1994, Hybels was teaching about fruitful evangelism, and he shared with us his formula:
Nib Hybels says it boils downwardly to a simple equation so for all you algebra nuts here it is:
HP + CP + CC = MI
Information technology is that simple, so we can all get dwelling house now and the church should grow from here. Well maybe nosotros should put this formula to work.
You know what? It isn't actually that simple! There is enough of wisdom in this formula, and it has an explanation that is rooted in the didactics of Jesus:
HP simply stand up for Loftier POTENCY, information technology means being a good example. It means letting your calorie-free shine brightly throughout your everyday life. It means agreement that those who alive in darkness are attracted to calorie-free, so you need to be that light, non a flickering candle. Lose your temper and curse in public, y'all just lost some wattage. Laissez passer judgment on people in town with others, your light is getting dimmer. Get involved in gossip about your neighbors, you become a candle flickering in the current of air. We need to be a HIGH Authority light for the world.
CP – stands for close proximity. This simply ways, being a shining light only at your house is doing nada for the expansion of the kingdom.
CC – stands for clear advice…
These things are skilful—but I call up thinking, as I came away from these teaching sessions, 'This is a formula'. Sometimes formulas, summary sayings, and helpful alliteration are good to enable people to call back things. But formulas are not existent life, and they oft close down the possibility of asking questions, like 'Does this really work?' and 'What if it goes wrong?' For many people, it is asking questions of exploration that really enable them to learn.
In a plenary session, I asked Bill Hybels what he did when there was a theological departure that opened up in the church. His reply was 'We take the question to our theologian, Gilbert Bilezikian, and he tells u.s.a. the answer'. That did non strike me as the most robust way to bargain with questions.
four. Offer a secure 'cell' of primal conventionalities
Crumple zones in cars merely work to protect the passengers if they besides incorporate a potent safety cell as a complement. For some unknown reason, my parents once bought an Austin Allegro, consummate with its bizarre square steering wheel. The Allegro was bully in terms of its crumple zones—it would collapse quite happily at the slightest impact. Unfortunately it didn't have an effective prophylactic cell, and was notorious for dropping the engine into the lap of the forepart passengers in an accident. (I am glad to say we never learnt that from our ain experience!)
This, for me, is a model of what 'progressive' Christianity is like. There are plenty of crumple zones around—y'all can ask questions about anything and everything. But where is the safety prison cell of core Christian belief? Very often information technology is not at that place, and that is why you often find people making the journey from traditional faith, to progressive faith, to lack of faith. Something like happens for those shaped by Fowler's model of 'stages of organized religion', where greater maturity seems to be associated with a greater ability to ask questions and a reduction of any kind of certainty. Autonomously from the practical problems with this model, information technology leads y'all to expect that the person who modelled the greatest maturity of faith, Jesus, would be someone who was sure of nothing—which hardly accords with his depiction in the gospels.
We build a 'safety jail cell' past inducting ourselves and others into the historic core of the Christian faith, for example by saying (and teaching on) the Creeds. Someone commented on Facebook terminal week: 'We recited the creed this week, something we don't normally practice. It had an interesting effect; possibly we ought to do it more often.' Possibly indeed. It seems to me that one of the major structural and strategic weaknesses in all forms of 'emerging church' is the failure to attach the flexibility of form and context of 'church' to the solid condom prison cell of creedal confession.
5. Model patient enquiry in community.
If nosotros are going to develop a stiff safety prison cell, but develop these 'crumple zones' where nosotros can question and challenge, and so we are going to demand to observe a way of sustaining religion in community whilst questions are being resolved—and the bigger the questions, the more patience we are going to need. I have been struck by Paul'due south explication of the nature of love, which begins 'Beloved it patient'. What does that then mean for our beloved of God? In an instant world, are we prepared to be patient with God as we seek answers to hard questions?
A large part of that patience is delivered by a faith community that creates space for questions, and maintains relational allegiance, whilst also offering the safety cell of creedal belief.
However we do it, nosotros need to nurture ourselves and others so that we all grow a religion that tin cope with the challenges that life throws at u.s..
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