The Community of Suffering Mercy

³Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, ⁴who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. ⁵For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. ⁶If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. ⁷And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.

~ 2 Corinthians 1:3-7

As if pain and suffering weren’t bad enough, one of the common features of suffering is that those who are afflicted tend to feel terribly alone in their distress. We often contribute to that isolation by distancing ourselves – either physically or emotionally – from suffering people because we just don’t know what do say or do. We want to solve problems, not just acknowledge them, and when we don’t know how to solve the problem we sometimes make the mistake of not acknowledging it at all.

The Christians in Corinth are going through a particularly difficult time and Paul wants them to know they are not alone, so he charges right out of the gate in this letter with a praise for the “Father of compassion and the God of all comfort.” Paul wants these believers to know, first of all, that they do not suffer without relief, for our God is the God “who comforts us in all our troubles.”

But notice, Paul says here that at times comfort from God comes not in the form of a solution, but in the form of empathy and understanding from others who have suffered! Paul says

“[God] comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (v4).

Paul then uses a powerful image to drive home his point: Picture a large kettle filling up from a rapidly flowing tap, the liquid racing to the brim and them gushing over the edge, splashing down the sides and running out onto the floor.

This is the suffering of Christ.

As the people who place our trust in the faithfulness of Christ, his suffering inevitably spills out onto us. Yet, this overflow is also the comfort of Christ, and as he comforts others we too are bathed in that merciful flow.

Paul’s evocative image illustrates a surprising and distinctively Christian truth that we can receive comfort and empathy from God for our sufferings because we serve a God who has himself suffered. Christ meets us in our pain and misery – not from a sympathetic distance, but shoulder-to-shoulder in the muck and mire of our broken humanity. He has been there as a broken human, and he offers us mercy from the wellspring of his empowering grace.

When we have received this mercy  – sometimes in prayer, sometimes in scripture, but mostly in community – we respond by sharing it to others around us. That is the community of mercy in action. The gift of grace must be moved or else rot and spoil like lay-old manna. We are common sufferers, and common comforters, in Christ and with Christ, and by this activity we begin to enjoy a kind of equality that is peculiarly meant for the people of the Kingdom of God (2 Co 8:13-15).

Technorati Tags: Comfort, community, Corinthians, Devotions, Paul, Suffering

Galatians Series at Ikon Community Starts Today

This week at Ikon we began a series on Paul’s letter to the Galatian Christians. We kicked it off last night with a gathering centered around one of the major themes of the letter, and today I started the daily reading with an introduction of why I think this should be an important series for our little group.

As usual, any of you are welcome to join us!

Technorati Tags: Galatians, Gospel, Ikon Community, Paul

The Worker’s Wages Part 3: The Essence of Ministry

(This is the third part in a six-part series exploring the dynamics of clergy pay in missional churches. See previous installments: Prelude | Part 1 | Part 2)

In my last installment I tentatively proposed that the minister’s wage isn’t money, it’s community care. Now, practically speaking that care must manifest as money, or food, or housing (or perhaps other goods and services), but strictly speaking the wage itself isn’t any of these things.

What Kind of Work?
However, understanding the essence of the wage doesn’t get us all the way to understanding how to appropriately convert our care into food and shelter for ministry leaders, or how to appropriately frame our expectations of the kind of work they do (an equally important issue). For that, we’ll need an understanding of what kind of work a ministry leader does. To gain it, we’ll go back to our original passages.

1 Timothy Chapter 5:17-18
Again, we’ll use Paul’s words to Timothy as our starting point:

The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, “Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain,” and “The worker deserves his wages.”

Paul is describing the gifts, and we have several passages concerning that topic (Rom 12, 1 Cor 12, 1 Pet 4:10). Indeed, the church is very comfortable talking about the roles of the people according to gifting, and there have been popular movements to identify the role of everyone in the church by gifting because, in a critically important sense, everyone is a minister according to their gifts.

However there is little exploration, that I’m aware of, regarding how the nature of “gift work” may or may not be different than other kinds of work. If it is different, wouldn’t that have some bearing on the “how, why, and what” of wages for those who require compensation? (We’ll have to hold off, for now, on why some ministers are worthy of a wage while others are not.)

Gifts Are Different Than Skills.
It’s my proposition that gifts are significantly different than skills (based largely on the ethnographic work of Marcel Mauss and the thoughts of Lewis Hyde). A skill is a kind of property. You earn it and you own it. Under normal conditions, the skill-worker has mastery over their skills, that is, they control them completely. Therefore, you can reckon compensation for your skills fairly easily. Skills serve best when they are accumulated like capital, and like capital, they affect a kind of return on investment for their owner. Hence, the skilled trades-person accumulates skills as a kind of wealth.

But a gift is not a property. It cannot be earned or purchased, only freely received. Nor can it be mastered because it doesn’t belong to the gift-worker. In fact, gifts, because they are given for the purpose of creating relational ties, must be given away again, and often fade (or rot i.e. Ex 16) when they’re not used-up or shared. They come and go, and are notoriously difficult to control. Because the gift-worker cannot master the gift, they can only be good stewards of what they have been given, while they happen to have it – and to be a good steward specifically means to give it away, leaving the gift-worker in a perpetual state of spiritual poverty.

Therefore, it is also notoriously difficult to reckon the compensation of gift-work, because it’s production cannot be controlled. Often long hours (or days, months, even years) go into waiting and supplicating for true gifts to arrive. Yet once they’re received by the gift-worker, they typically “work” in a frenzy of productivity, giving generously to all who benefit from it, and (in a way curiously distinct from skills) are multiplied in the giving.

(Of course, there is a very important sense in which skill-work and gift-work cooperate, but that is not the important point here. I think we must begin by understanding the prior distinctive essence of ministry as a gift-work, before we can understand how to appropriately re-integrate it with trade skills.)

Let’s return to our other central passage to illustrate gift-work among ministers:

Luke 10:5-7
Let’s start by revisiting Jesus’ instructions, to the 72 disciples:

¹After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. ²He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. ³Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. ⁴Do not take a purse or bag or sandals; and do not greet anyone on the road.⁵“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ ⁶If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; if not, it will return to you. ⁷Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.

⁸“When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is set before you. ⁹Heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God is near you.’

This is classic gift-work, with several prominent features of gift-exchange occurring:

1. The Gift Is Transient: The disciples can only give away what Christ has first given them, namely peace, power, and kingdom. Again, these gifts are not a property to be held as capital. They must be given in order to multiply, so the ministers, although they are givers, remain as dependent as those to whom they give.

2. The Gift Requires Personal “Poverty”: The disciples go with nothing, demonstrating the “poverty” of gift-work, because receiving the gift first requires the emptiness of poverty, prayer, and sacrifice. This is congruent with 1 Tim 5 and echoed in the Beatitudes.

3. The Gift Provides Community “Wealth”: The hosts are sustained by the gift and the ministers live off the reciprocity typical of gift-exchange. They give what they have and are, in return, given gifts of food, hospitality, shelter, etc. This kind of return, as distinct from payment, is a way of demonstrating the communal abundance of the gift-economy through the multiplication of the gift as it is passed from one empty hand to another.

4. The Gift is Fertile: Characteristic of other gift-cultures, we have an illustration of an agricultural motif (v2). The enthnographic data from such societies shows that the cycle of planting and harvesting becomes significant as an embodiment of the economic gift-cycle, with it’s dependence on the ultimate giver (God or the gods), its sowing and reaping reciprocity, its abundant multiplication via fertility, and its sustenance. All are images of “the gift” at work.

5. The Git is Consumed: The 72 ministers literally feed off of the abundance of the gift. In this way they are not only consuming the multiplied abundance of the gift, they are also literally consuming the return gift of sacrifice made by their hosts.

This last two observations, I think, connect this passage with the function of the priests of the Old Testament, who eat of the meat sacrifices brought to the temple and burn the grain sacrifices (Lev 6). By eating the gift/sacrifice the minister/priest is simultaneously included in the sacramental community and demonstrating the role of God in the gift-cycle by returning a portion of the sacrifice to God (burning accomplishes this same latter function, though with an emphasis on faith-dependence rather than sustenance). Ethnographic data depicts this same eating/burning practices in the religious rituals of other gift-cultures, for example in the Maori tribe (eating of sacrifice by the priest) and the North American Native practice of Potlatch (burning of excess wealth).

There are many other passages I could connect to this theme, but this is a blog not a book : )

I think there are also, obviously, very strong Paschal tones here as well, reaching backward toward passover and forward toward Eucharist. But that is not directly tied to the subject of leadership vocation and wage, so we’d better leave those explorations for another time, and perhaps for a better commenter (I’m looking at you Geoff).

So, what are your thoughts? Do you agree with the characterization of a minister’s work as essentially gift-work, rather than skill-work (or property-work)? If so, does it matter? Are there implications to be explored, particularly for post-Christendom missional leadership with regards to how we treat vocational leadership?

Technorati Tags: 1 Timothy, Christianity, clergy, Jesus, Leadership, Luke, Paid Clergy, Paul, The Gift

Why The Bible Is Insufficient For Mission

“Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)

For about seven months last year I worked as a project manager, creating branding strategies and building websites for non-profits and social enterprises. The business was built around code-writers, SEO engineers, and content writers, most of whom were basically the postmodern equivalent of pagans. They all knew my ministry background, which made for some really interesting interactions. One of the things I discovered there was how much I enjoy pagans.

So fun.

The owner, a Christian, brought in a local pastor to act as a “corporate chaplain.” He’s a great guy – young, warm, and very approachable. He has a Bachelors in Bible or music, I think, from a Christian college. He’d come by every Wednesday and chat it up with people.

So painful.

When our chaplain was introduced to the staff there was an awkward moment that basically determined his future there. After briefly introducing him, the owner turned the meeting over to the new chaplain. He very sensitively articulated his open availability to anyone who “just needed to talk” through any kinds of issues; depression, grief, anger, etc. He was there to listen and help. Everything would be confidential. Then he looked to the staff,

“Any questions?” he asked. People sort of looked around the room for a moment until one young woman raised her hand.

“Uh, yeah,” she said, “Do you have any actual training for this sort of thing, like a psychology degree or grief counseling courses or something?”

“Well, no,” he said, “but like all of you I’ve lived life and as a pastor I have good experience helping people with…”

It really didn’t matter what came out of his mouth after that. He was done. Being a pastor meant nothing to them because as far as they’re concerned the Bible has little or no bearing on the actual knowledge required to help people deal with psychological pathologies. There are professionals for that. The chaplain is a great guy, but he has an impossible task if he relies solely on his credentials as a pastor.

This is the dominant cultural we enter as post-Christian missionaries. We cannot rely on an inherent respect for Christianity as a body of actual knowledge (a major point Willard makes in Knowing Christ Today). The Bible is generally seen as a collection of opinions – most of them hopelessly archaic.

That’s why it’s pointless to keep using Reformation debates as a distillery for producing the gospel we offer. Those are Christendom debates. Nobody in post-Christendom cares about the difference between Calvinism and Arminianism. Nobody really cares what you believe about Hell or the nuances of God’s sovereignty (unless it gives them a convenient excuse to dismiss you), because most of them don’t believe in Hell or a sovereign God in the Calvinist sense, and they couldn’t care less what a book of ancient opinions has to say about it, except from maybe an historical-literary perspective (and as T.S Eliot said, to take the bible seriously as literature is a sure sign that you don’t take it seriously at all). None of them cares about a grace vs. works debate because, quite frankly, despite what Reformed preachers and theologians say, nobody outside the church is trying to earn their way into heaven. Hard-core Reformed folks have an absurd habit of turning every human thought into Pelagianism because that’s what must be done to justify an archaic theological construct. If your orthodoxy depends entirely on a particular kind of heresy then your first task is to convert the world to your heresy before you can convert them to your gospel.

You have to condition people to care about this stuff. For most regular folks who don’t believe in Christ, seeing churches and Christians stake out rabid territory on these topics is like watching two Phrenologists fight for customers by arguing the finer tenets of their trade.

For people who haven’t been doctrinally conditioned yet, all they really care about is this: are you competent to help me solve my problems. If you’re a mechanic, can you really fix my car? If you’re a teacher, can you help me understand something in such a way that my life is better equipped to deal with the actual reality in which I live?

Who in Christianity today, has consistently demonstrated they possess a body of knowledge which produces people who actually resemble Christ himself? I’m not asking who is the most articulate preacher, or the most venerated scholar, or who leads the biggest church, or who writes the best books. Those accomplishments may constitute competency in leadership, logic, prose or marketing, but not necessarily competence in Christlikeness.

So, merely pointing to what the Bible says or being able to articulate the nuances of a theology are largely useless skills for a post-Christian missionary. That’s not the kind of knowledge people want or need. And yet, one of the curiosities of a dying Christendom is that entrenched factions are getting increasingly louder and more shrill about these very issues as they fight over a dwindling market share. The huge missiological problem that results from such public bickering is that it actually undermines our claims of authority in the very kind of knowledge people desperately do want and need – and which our grasp of the Bible is supposed to foster.

Ironically, then, the Bible alone is insufficient for this task. We can’t keep pointing to it and shrugging our shoulders as if to say, “Hey, I’m not the one who said it, He did.” We have to take responsibility for actually becoming competent practitioners of the vocation to which we have been called through the person we claim to have found within those sacred pages. This is why Jesus’ comments about the truth “setting us free” came not after a discourse on education or theological savvy, but after an exhortation to follow him obediently.

To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32)

Knowing and following Christ is the knowledge that liberates because it actually brings us closer to the Kingdom reality of God in which we live, much like a mechanic’s knowledge liberates us by fixing our car.

Who then, like Paul, is willing to look the world in the eye and say, “Imitate me. I know how to be like Christ,” (1 Cor 11:1) and then go out and prove it? Whoever does will have no trouble being taken seriously.

Technorati Tags: Bible, character, Christianity, Christlikeness, Dallas Willard, Jesus, Knowledge, Paul, Pelagianism, Reformed, T.S. Eliot

The Worker’s Wages Part 2: The Biblical Lens

(This is the second in a six-part series exploring the dynamics of clergy pay in missional churches. See previous installments: Prelude | Part 1)

When I first posted my initial prompt asking whether clergy should be paid I received a quick response from an old family friend simply stating, “The worker is worthy of his wages,”referencing Paul 1 Timothy Chapter 5 and Jesus in Luke 10. That would seem to settle it then, wouldn’t it?

Well, not for me. My questions are: What kind of work? What kind of wages?

It’s too easy to read these passages through our Modern market-based lenses where work is a 40-60 hour a week assembly-line-optimized style of productivity and wages are either paid hourly blocks of labor or annual salaries with compensation packages. This is clearly how we’ve read Paul and Jesus, with most Pastors in the U.S. making between 70k and 97k per year. Some who identify with being “missional” believe this kind of professionalism is detrimental to mission, but most would probably at least agree it’s unsustainable considering our trajectory.

We can’t simply graft isolated passages onto our contextual paradigms but we can’t ignore our context either paradigms either, so what I’m aiming for is an understanding of a church leader’s work and wage that is:

• Biblically Consistent: I identify pretty strongly with organic and anarchist approaches, however I’m troubled by the tendency to dismiss the OT model of leadership and place it in opposition to what is usually characterized as a more “organic” NT model.
• Genuinely Contextualized: I find there’s often a polarity being wrestled with between a Christendom approach characterized by professional clergy and a pre-Christendom approach characterized by non-professional clergy (please excuse the gross generalization). These both strike me as essentially restorationist approaches, with the former seeking to restore Constantinian supremacy and the latter seeking to go “all the way back” to a presumably pristine pre-Constantinian form. I think they’re both naive. You can never go back. We are in new territory, and the landscape grows curiouser and curiouser every day.

Personally, I need a biblically-informed way to think about and practice leadership vocation that makes sense for the future, not the past. We’ll start with trying to become biblically-informed, so let’s take a brief look at the aforementioned passages.

1 Timothy Chapter 5:17-18
It’s interesting to note that in this chapter Paul is giving practical advice about the general care of the neediest people in the community – namely, older widows – and out of that advice he suddenly switches gears to the care of the church elders who govern:

The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, “Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain,” and “The worker deserves his wages.”

In order to lend credibility to this advice Paul quotes Deut 25:4 and Luke 10:7. I think these passages are telling, so let’s look at them too, in reverse chronological order.

Luke 10:5-7
The occasion here is the sending out of the 72 disciples. Jesus has given them authority to heal the sick and drive out demons and now he is giving them practical instructions for the trip:

“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; if not, it will return to you. Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.”

By using the Greek word misthos (which generally to work-wages of some form) Jesus is clearly saying that the disciples ministry alone is worthy of being considered “work.” However, it’s interesting to notice that Jesus sent them out with nothing (v4), essentially making them itinerant beggars. Moreover, what he says they are permitted to receive, strictly speaking, is not payment – it’s hospitality. Jesus seems to be saying that their payment will come in the form of care, not that their care will come in the form of payment. (As a bit of an aside, it may also be that he is warning them against capitalizing on this care and hospitality by admonishing them to not “move from house to house.”)

Deuteronomy 25:4
Here in Deut. we again find practical instructions focused on the just care of people in the community. But strangely enough, sandwiched between negotiating conflicts and caring for widows we find this:

Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.

Apparently even beasts deserve to eat. Moreover, the ox’s sustenance comes from the work itself. That is, his care is tied intimately to his work. Here’s what I’m noticing so far:

1. Ministry is real work: Jesus and Paul seem to make this clear. Of course, everyone in ministry leadership knows this, but not everyone outside of ministry leadership does, and that seems to be a growing problem in post-Christian cultures. Every pastor has dealt with the question, “What exactly do you do all day?” But for some reason this was apparently enough of a problem in the first century that Jesus and Paul needed to reinforce it. Can this tell us something about the nature of ministry work?

2. The work of ministry involves the reciprocity of giving and receiving, not the transaction of buying and selling: The distinction is subtle but important and lies in the general lack of reckoning value and extracting profit. There is a recognition of the contribution people do or do not make (especially in 1 Tim 5), but no reckoning of specific value or profit. The ox gives work and eats of the grain upon which he treads. Jesus receives from the Father and gives to the itinerant disciples; the disciples give what they’ve received to the people of the towns; the people give the disciples food and shelter. This is a cycle of gifts whereby what is increased is the kingdom, not individual wallets (one could say it is the Kingdom that profits, not people, or even that they are “laying up treasures in heaven”). Along the way people extract from the increasing Kingdom for their own needs, but not for their own profits.

3. Christian leaders are part of the society of the poor: This is humbling, but I just don’t see any other way to understand these passages without recognizing that each is dealing with the care of those who are lowly. Paul’s “elders who govern” are mentioned in the same breath as old widows who have nothing left (1 Tim 5). In fact, it would appear that church elders are even worse off than young widows (v11-16)! Jesus sends out the disciples as beggars – which is appropriate, given that prior to Luke 10 Jesus is referring to “the least”as “the greatest” and turning away followers with a warning about the poverty of his own society (Luke 9:46-50; 57-62). It’s possible to read this as a deficiency in the early church (many have), but I don’t think so, for reasons I’ll address in Part 4.

4. The fundamental driving ethic is a community of inclusive care, not an economy of exclusive transactions: Seeing the “wages” as payment sets these passages in opposition to other relevant biblical paradigms, especially Exodus 16, Acts 2, and 1 Cor 8, but also (IMO) including that of the Priests and Levites who are not so much functioning as a profiteering professional class but rather are key servants participating in the gift-cycle of sacrifice, particularly by the “eating” of the sacrifices (more on this in Part 3). Of course payment can be a kind of care and a kind of gift, but such gifts can all too easily become corrupted into something else such as profit, power, or status – especially, I would add, in market-cultures where profit often is the currency of power and status.

5. There is something qualitatively different about the work of governing, teaching, and preaching: I’m deeply uncomfortable with this statement, so please correct me if you think I’m wrong, but I can’t get away from it based on Paul’s words in 1 Tim 5:17: “The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching” and the more I rflect on the biblical paradigms as a whole the more I’m struck by the distinct role of certain people with these gifts. It would be easy to suggest that Paul’s “double-honor” is actually an upside-down term, but I don’t think that’s true to the spirit of this statement. I think it’s clear that Paul is saying there is something different about the kind of work these leaders do that must be honored through the intentional care of them, perhaps partly because they must “eat of the sacrifice” and perhaps partly because it’s apparently easy to forget that what they do is “work.”

This has gone on long enough. What are your thoughts? Disagreements, insights, additions?

Technorati Tags: Christendom, Church, clergy, Deuteronomy, Jesus, Leadership, Luke, Paul, Timothy

Toward a Missional Economy, Part 6

This is the final installment in my series on moving churches toward a practice of missional economics: Part 1: Manna in the Desert, Part 2: Manna in the Postmodern Desert, Part 3: From Wealth Building to Gift Giving, Part 4: From Scarcity to Abundance, and Part 5: From Altruism to Reciprocity.

The Modern Doctrine of the Autonomous Self
Each of these three paradigm shifts lead us to another major dilemma rooted in our commons Modern concepts of the self and the life of virtue that only the cross of Christ can address. The common thread of all the dominant economic paradigms previously mentioned is the Modern doctrine of the autonomous self.

Concerning this, theologian Thomas Oden states, “The rhetoric of unrestrained, individual freedom is a prominent earmark of the spirit of modernity.” Westerners today simply assume that well-being means being free from dependencies on others. Likewise, Christopher Kaiser observes

“We painstakingly differentiate ourselves from our families, our upbringings, and our jobs. We affirm our freedom, even at the expense of the extreme psychological discomfort associated by a sense of homelessness.”

The church has played a powerful role in the development of this doctrine, principally through a particular theological stance of Martin Luther’s. Unwilling to impose the difficult scriptural prohibition on usury amid emerging mercantilism (particularly among of his financial benefactors), Luther declared that all life was divided between the “civil” and the “religious,” freeing the realm of civil affairs from the strictures of biblical paradigm (even for Christians) and effectively fragmenting society into a collection of isolated individuals. Lewis Hyde astutely remarks on the affect of this for every person: “Now each man is separated. The church and the state may be separate, but each man partakes of both.”

In other words, Luther blessed the Modern fragmentation of the individual self in the realm of economics allowing us to “believe” one ethic in our private lives yet live another ethic publicly.

This radically new and free sense of self created a wilderness of being, where everyone lives ultimately free, disconnected, and isolated lives even in the midst of a society. One result has been the lionization of self-sufficiency – a public virtue that creeps into even our compassion work. For example, even Christians in the West frequently judge the impoverished precisely because they haven’t achieved autonomous financial independence. It’s no wonder that Dallas Willard calls ours the, “culture of rejection,” and says that its roots in Modernity, “deeply affects the concrete forms Christian institutions take in our time.”

This doctrine is not without its Modern critics, who point out the sad consequences. Alexis de Tocqueville found American individualism frightening because it leads to the apathetic withdrawal of people from public life into a private sphere of isolation. Lewis Hyde agrees, saying,

“In the ego-of-one we speak of self gratification, and whether it’s forced or chosen, a virtue or a vice, the mark of self-gratification is its isolation.”

This is the essence of poverty; whatever possessions one might hold, isolation makes one impoverished. Miroslav Volf adds to this spiritual diagnosis: “All things are from God and through God, and yet we want to be independent of God, standing on our own two feet, claiming God’s gifts as our own achievement.” Relational detachment – principally from God – is the truest form of bankruptcy and naturally leads to all other forms of poverty.

The New Kingdom Self
Countering isolation must involve re-defining the self in terms that are relational rather than consumeristic. Bryant Myers agrees, “Development cannot be reduced to simply empowering individuals with new choices.” We must recognize that the solutions to economic inequality can’t be found in the building of new markets for the inundation of new consumer products aimed at the underdeveloped.

Not surprisingly, it is the Apostle Paul who is most radical in his terminology when he speaks of the death and rebirth of the human self in relation to Christ:

“It is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:19-20).

Paul is talking about nothing less than the re-definition of the self and Volf captures the implications of this for the act of gift-giving, saying,

“But now hasn’t our very self disappeared and been replaced by Christ? What else could the death of the self mean? In fact, however, it has not disappeared at all but has been reborn as a new self, as a self that has been returned to itself. Christ’s indwelling presence has freed us from exclusive orientation toward ourselves and opened us up in two directions: toward God, to receive the good things in faith, and toward our neighbor, to pass them on in love.”

So the new self of the Kingdom is subsumed into the person and work of Christ – a kind of self-death that recapitulates the cross in the life of the believer. This new self is radically open to giving because doing so does not violate any boundaries that need protecting. Rather – and perhaps most importantly to the three shifts outlined previously – being “in Christ” re-locates the boundaries of the self beyond the walls of the body, extending them throughout the sphere of Kingdom relationships, and rooted in one’s relationship with Christ himself. This is not an autonomous self, but a self dependent on Christ, interdependent with others, and intimately intertwined throughout; it is a Kingdom self.

Only by learning to live such a collectively cruciform life can the Church hope to embody a truly missional economy and appropriate the equality of the eschatological Kingdom in our time as a prophetic sign and foretaste.

Questions:

1. What do you see as the boundaries of the “Kingdom self” proposed above? Is every Christian our brother/sister, or is every “American” (or other compatriots), or is the Christians called to consider every human being a fellow child of God? What are the implications of these boundaries for a “missional economy?”
2. What do you think are some ways missional churches could put missional economics into practice?

Technorati Tags: Bryant Myers, Christopher Kaiser, Economics, economy, Kingdom of God, Martin Luther, Miroslav Volf, Paul, Self, Thomas Oden

Toward a Missional Economy, Part 1

I recently spoke on “Economy and Mission” at Verge L.A. 2009. Since starting Twoshirts.org almost two years ago, this has been a significant subject of study for me and it has direct bearing on how we shape community – something we’re currently neck deep in defining over at Ikon Community. So, over the next few days I’ll share my Verge presentation here in the hopes of stimulating some thoughtfulness about how missional churches might follow the Holy Spirit in cultivating subversive, grassroots economic communities in a desert of greed and inequality.

_________________________________________________

I am an economist. Not by education or by training. The truth is I don’t know much about “macroeconomic rigidities” or “consensus forecasts,” but what I do know, perhaps naively, is that the heart of economics is merely the stewardship of resources, or, quite literally the “rules of the household” (Greek: oikos & nomos). Therefore, I am economist simply by living.

This means you are an economist too. It doesn’t matter if you’re poorly educated or hopelessly impoverished. Economics isn’t about what you know, or how much you have; it’s about how you handle what you have. Everyone has stuff, and everyone has a way of figuring out what to hold on to and what to let go of.

Obviously, then, God is also an economist because God has stuff – lots of stuff! So if, as I take it, “mission” means going where God goes and doing what God does (John 5:19) then a critical question for us is, “What is God the economist doing?” Or, perhaps a more helpful question for shedding our cultural prejudices would be, “What are the rules of his household?” Continue reading…

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