3 Questions About Jesus: Jason Clark

This week Jason Clark responds to our 3 Questions About Jesus: Who is Jesus the Christ? What has he done? And why does it matter? (Previous installments: Jason Coker | Jesse Schroeder | Cari Jenkins)
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We all try to make sense life, what the meaning of life is, asking what is my purpose here, what is a good life, at least for myself?  And we all seem to get one shot at this life, one chance to take all that we are and invest it into our best answers to those questions.  At this time in history, and even when I was younger (I know it was some time ago), life seems about competition, survival of the fittest, and doing to others before others do it to you. Or as my gentle white haired grandma used to say, ‘take care of yourself grandson, because in this life I’ve learned no-one else will’.

It’s not that we don’t want life to be about more than this, it’s just that in our fast paced consumer world, being successful, getting ahead, looking out for yourself, is what our friends and family and so often we default to.  And even if you wanted to, you can’t jam the system, there is no way to opt out of the juggernaut for getting ahead in life. It’s the way things are, so either drop out, or get stuck in.

And the effort and investment to get ahead, is kept alive and made worth while by the prize of what we think life is about, maybe a great career, great family, holidays, living somewhere cool, and retiring early.  Where we live, what job we do and what relationships we have reveal the answers to what we really think the meaning and purpose of life is about, they are the real investments we are making, daily with all we are.  It’s our life, we are kings of our kingdom with our decision and choices, as we decide who and what we are, and what we bring into our lives, as we make a life.

Jesus was someone who understood what life was about, and decided to invest his life very differently. Instead of getting ahead, he said he had come to serve others, that his investment was into a different reality and economy, which he called ‘The Kingdom of God’. That life, this life was about investing all we have, time, energy and money, our heart, soul, body and mind in a different reality. He said that jobs, where we live and relationships are very important, we’ve got that part right, but how we invest ourselves for those aspects of life is very different.

He even told us not to worry about all these things, that the reason we worry is because we fear losing things we shouldn’t be putting our heart and soul into in the first place.  And he did more than talk about this new reality, he lived it.  Every day, every breath, every step, he invested his life in helping others see that life was about knowing God, and entering into the plans God has for us. Using our gifts, and skills, passions and interest to invest in God’s economy.  And he said that if we do that, God will give the best life we could ever have.  And he said that if we practice this life investment, our lives will continue, after death into eternity.  Jesus brought a warning too, reminding us to take care.  That where we invest our lives determines who we become now and forever, so choose wisely.

Jesus invitation seems so impossible, it was as impossible 2,000 years ago as much as it is now.  In fact people intent on investing in a way of life much like ours today, eventually put him on a cross and killed him. And as they looked at him dying with no friends, no job, no career, no success, and no status they asked him, ‘where is your God and this way of life now’?

I was 17 the first time someone explained to me who Jesu was and is, and why it mattered, and maybe if I tell you what that friend told me, it will sum up what I’m trying to say here?  My friend said that, investing my life in Jesus, taking all that I am and giving it to Him, might not make my life easier, in fact in lots of ways it would be much harder.  But he promised me that, I would have something to live for and something to die for, that there wouldn’t be a day when I wouldn’t know meaning, adventure and purpose.

I chose to make that investment, and 24 years later, I have experienced the most amazing life, with all of that and more.  The depth and richness of discovering who I am, the most amazing experience of life with others, as I daily try to invest all I have in Him, has been stunning.  I’d love to tell you more about that sometime. Choosing Jesus was the best investment I ever made with my life.  Where are you investing yours?

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Jason Clark (www.deepchurch.org.uk) is British, recently turned 40, and lives on the SW edge of London, UK. He has three teenage kids, and is celebrating 20 years of marriage to Bev later this year. He is midway through a PhD in theology at Kings College London, holds a D.Min from George Fox Seminary, and is the senior pastor of a Vineyard church that he started with his Bev 13 years ago, having been involved in Vineyard churches for 23 years in total.

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The Parable of the Royal Invitations

(This parable was originally my contribution to the discussion of re-imagining Vineyard values over at Jason Clark’s blog, Deep Church. My task was to re-imagine the value, “Come as you are, but don’t stay as you are.” I’m re-posting it here just to add it to my own archives.)

Once there was a royal family who loved their people and ran their city as best they knew how.

They were generous, so they threw regular parties at their royal mansion in the center of town with all the best food, wine, art, and music. It was quite a spectacle. Because most people were fairly poor compared to the royals, everyone wanted to come to rub shoulders with the powerful elite and be influenced by them and, perhaps, gain a little power for themselves. Pretty soon, these parties were so popular that only certain people, from certain families, and dressed in certain fine clothes could gain entrance.

In time, however, the royal family fell on difficult days and lost some of their wealth. The local economy changed, and many of the “common” families made their own fortunes. Many still respected the royals for their heritage, but being royal wasn’t as prestigious as it once was, and truth be told, many resented them for their power. And so, fewer and fewer people wanted to come to their parties. There were other parties being thrown by newly-wealthy families and people seemed less interested in queuing up or wearing pretentious clothes.

Sensing they were losing their power, and desperate to revive their status, the King struck upon an idea: They sold all their fancy furniture and bought affordable Ikea tables and chairs just like the common folks and dressed in jeans and un-tucked Hawaiian shirts. Then they sent out party invitations to the whole city. The invitation read:

“Come as you are, but don’t stay as you are.”

The idea was that everyone would feel perfectly “at home” in the royal residence, and in so doing could, in a way, become like a royal family member too and be changed for the better by the influence of the royal family.

It worked beautifully.

Some still wanted to be like the royals, so wearing the same clothes and sitting on the same affordable furniture made it seem, for a time, like everyone actually was royal. Many people flooded back into the royal mansion and everything returned to normal.

Or so it seemed. In reality, the economic and political landscape was still steadily changing – and with it, the royals gradually lost all their political power until one day the family was overthrown and evicted from their mansion at the center of the city. To some, these seemed like the hardest times they had ever experienced.

At first the old King was determined to gain back their status because he thought that was the only way to continue taking good care of the city. “How can we do what’s best for them if we’re no longer in charge?” he asked. So he decided to keep throwing their once-famous parties right there in their ramshackle hut on the outskirts of town. He rallied all the sons and daughters and aunts and uncles to paint the plywood walls and sweep the dirt floors and they sent out invitations to the whole city, which still read: “Come as you are, but don’t stay as you are.” And they waited.

But nobody came.

For most folks, going to a party on the poor outskirts of town was plainly absurd. And what was all this about “Don’t stay as you are”? People thought it arrogant that the family still believed they had something to offer. Truth be told, they thought the royals were merely trying to win back their place of power and prestige.

Then one night the old King was struck by a realization. So he gathered the old party invitations, scrawled something inside them, and addressed one to each member of his family. The next day at breakfast he carefully handed out the invitations and said, “Our family has been called to care for this city – wealthy or poor, powerful or weak – and there has never been a better time to do so.” At that, everyone opened their envelope and saw that the old invitation, now given to each of them, had been changed:

“Come Go as you are, but don’t stay as you are.”

And with that each member of the royal family understood that the time for asking people to come had passed, and that it was they who would now be changed.

Technorati Tags: Deep Church, Jason Clark, missional, Parables, Vineyard Community of Churches

Re-imagining Christendom

Recently my friend Jason Clark has been hosting a series on his blog, Deep Church, called, “Re-imagining Vineyard Values,” wherein several of us have been trying to engage with the classic ten core postures of the Vineyard Movement.

Today it was my turn to re-imagine value #6 (“Come as you are but don’t stay as you are”) and my response takes the form of a parable. Click here to read “The Parable of the Royal Invitation.”

Technorati Tags: Deep Church, Jason Clark, Parables, Vineyard Community of Churches

Rebuilding Tomorrowland: My Guest Post at Deep Church

I have a guest-post today over at Jason Clark’s blog Deep Church for his current series on re-imagining Vineyard values. This week’s value is the “now and not yet” of the The Kingdom of God. In my post I propose a re-embrace of eschatology as a corrective to the loss of apocalyptic intensity that I think characterizes the current Christian movements of social justice as the new “now” of the Kingdom. You can click here to to read my post.

Technorati Tags: Deep Church, Eschatology, Jason Clark, Kingdom of God, Vineyard Churches

After SVS 2010: Jason Clark: Consumerism, Social Imagination, & Ecclesiology

After SVS 2010 is an extended dialogue with presenters from the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, held Feb 11-13, 2010. Monday through Friday until March 26th we’ll profile an SVS presenter and dialogue with them around their paper. Click here for a brief intro and link directory of the series. Full text of papers are available to SVS members.
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Jason Clark: “Consumerism, Social Imagination, and Ecclesiology”

Abstract:
This paper suggest that a previous freedom within mission for understanding the nature of church, has given rise to a situation where it is the imagination of consumer for life, that often determines the forms of church life. Where previous forms of church became captive to the nature of market forces, new emerging forms of church are seen as further captive to this logic. This paper, traces the emergence and nature of this western individualism and agency, and it’s self creating nature, seeing identity free from commitments to any others. Examples of this are shown with:

1. Blueprint Ecclesiologies:  where idealised models of church are made, that are never realised
2. Any understanding of Church becomes pathological, where Christians form church life around ideas of what is wrong with Church, with no confidence in Scripture or mission
3. The naive belief that church can be non-instutional, when what is needed is not the absence of institutions, but an articulate institutional imagination
4. The imaginations for any of these forms of Church are often taken from consumer culture
5. What is called ‘revolution’ is often not revolution at all, but a pandering to consumer ‘authenticity’
6. And the collapse of Church into the creation of private God spaces within which people make their own isolated meaning of God, that do not lead to new christian conversion

It is suggest that the solution to this problem is to re-discover the ‘giveness’ of church life, that Church is something that is necessary to Christian identity and formation.  And that is best found in a scriptured and traditioned understanding of Church organisation, life and mission.

Interview With Jason

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: Through the planting of a church, and by doing some theological reflection on the power of consumer imaginations of what life is about, and how that shapes what people give themselves to and expect the Church to support. Also through the day-to-day in pastoral life, seeing people have prayers answered and have experiences of God that seemed to lead to God becoming just one resource amongst many to get the consumer dream. In this way, you might have Oprah, but I have Jesus and he trumps Oprah to get me the life we are both trying to pursue: that is, the consumer dream. I wanted to explore what was it about consumerism that causes all of life, including the Christian life so often, to be bent around those ends. Finally, after 10 years of seeing many friends explore that dynamic by moving away from any form of Church at all, it seemed that the new post-church forms of church were pandering even more to that problem, and continuing to enable people to use Christian resources not for mission but for consumer life identities and constructions. I began to ask: Was there anything in theology and church history to help respond to this problem?

Technorati Tags: Church, Consumerism, ecclesiology, Jason Clark, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS

More Demise-of-the-Vineyard Discussion at Deep Church

Jason Clark over at Deep Church has picked up the Demise-of-the-Vineyard convo with his recent post “Is There Any Move Left in the Vineyard Movement.” The discussion going on in the comments section is really very good. If you’re in and around the Vineyard, check it out. Jason is going to be blogging with some forward-looking thoughts on the subject in the days ahead, leap-frogging off Caleb Maskell’s recent presentation at the U.K. Vineyard gathering. I would highly recommend tuning in.

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Jason Clark, Vineyard Churches