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:

“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

After SVS 2010: Matt Croasmun, The Cross, Eucharist, and Imitation in the Gospel of John

Today is our final installment. 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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Matt Croasmun: “The Cross, Eucharist, and Imitation in the Gospel of John”

Abstract
This paper consists of two parts. The first is an exegetical exploration of the “missing Eucharist” narrative and peculiar chronology of the passion narrative in the Gospel of John in a literary-canonical mode. Here, it is shown that the Gospel of John indeed includes a Eucharistic narrative and that this event takes when it does in the Synoptic accounts, though, in John’s chronology, Eucharist happens on the cross, as Jesus eats his food (bringing to completion the work of the One who sent Him) and drinks the cup which He obediently receives at Gethsemane. Using the foot-washing narrative as a lens through which to interpret this displaced Eucharist, the mimetic significance of Jesus’ death and His Eucharist is contrasted with the mnemonic function of Eucharist in the Lucan-Pauline tradition. The second part of the paper considers the systematic coherence afforded Vineyard theology as a whole in emphasizing the mimetic function of Jesus’ death. Here, it is noted that Johannine texts have long served as the source for the Vineyard’s basic mimetic stance towards the ministry of Jesus: that is, the Vineyard reading of the gospels has been a call to Johannine imitation of the Synoptic Jesus. The exclusion of the Cross from this exegetical program is a result of a confusion regarding the inimitable nature of Jesus’ death, understood exclusively as once-for-all atoning sacrifice. Receiving from John a Eucharistic theology that regularly invites us into imitation of Jesus’ obedience to the will of the Father and self-lowering love of others exhibited on the Cross promises to bring greater systematic unity to the Vineyard’s hermeneutical strategy in the gospels and to provide the Cross a more central place in the movement’s theology as a whole.

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: Several years ago, before I started Divinity School, I sat in on Harry Attridge’s course on the exegesis of the Fourth Gospel. Harry has substantial interest in the sacramental theology of this text. And, of course, the key problem with thinking about sacraments—especially Eucharist—in John is that there is no institution narrative. So we puzzled over this problem quite a lot in that course and I remember continuing to puzzle over it long after.

Around the same time, I was reading Bill Jackson’s history of the Vineyard church and noted there that the Vineyard had taken some flack for not teaching the Cross as much as the critics would have liked. I suppose it’s a sign of the times, but I’m really interested in the ways that larger narratives frame and in some sense control our theological reflection. So, in thinking about the problem Bill Jackson had highlighted, it occurred to me that perhaps integral to this problem was the Vineyard’s narrative of the Kingdom. Was there something about the way the Vineyard was understanding the Kingdom that left the cross on the sideline? When I went and read the Vineyard Statement of Faith, my suspicions only grew. Eventually, I stumbled upon the possibility that it is the radical imitation of Jesus (which is really the heart of Wimber’s hermeneutic of the gospels) that could provide the “hook” in the Vineyard’s meta-narrative on which to hang a distinctively Vineyard—distinctively “Kingdom”—theology of the cross.

The last piece of the puzzle for me is the methodological approach I’m trying to take in the paper. A mentor and friend of mine gave me Stephen Moore’s God’s Gym to read when I was in Divinity School. Of course, Moore’s conclusions are profoundly troubling—though, I think worth wrestling with. But I found his method of interpretation absolutely exhilarating. It was playful, it was deadly serious at times. It broke down the walls of historical criticism that have always seemed fundamentally out of touch with the ways that actual people of faith read the biblical text and encounter God there. So, I guess I wanted to try my hand at something that might skew toward the “literary” in approach. Interestingly, I was surprised at how little push back I got on this at the SVS conference. I thought for sure some large number of folks would want to skewer me for going right at the fissures in the biblical text, making much of them, and playing out their tensions exclusively in a stubbornly non-historical, literary way. Does this count as “exegesis”? Is “exegesis” a good description of what people of faith are actually after in their encounter with God in the biblical text to begin with?

Q: How do you think your paper is relevant to the Vineyard movement at large?

A: First, on the meta-level, I think the paper is relevant inasmuch as it might serve as a invitation to further reflection on the Kingdom and the Cross. How does the Cross fit into the Vineyard’s narrative of the Kingdom? I think I’ve offered a textual way into something like an answer to this question, but, presumably, there are others.

Second, in terms of the specific answer I offer, I really do think that it’s crucial when we talk about “doing the stuff” to consider Jesus’ death as an integral part of “the stuff” that Jesus was doing. We need to anticipate that imitation of Christ’s rejection, humiliation, and death is an integral part of imitatio Christi. I suggested in broad strokes in my paper that this mostly looks like self-lowering love of others; obviously, there’s so much more to explore there. A necessary caveat to that—the response I should have given to the excellent question posed from the feminist point of view—is that, of course, Jesus’ death is precisely also His exaltation—John uses the pun on Jesus being “lifted up.” So our imitation of Christ in his death is not fundamentally self-destructive; it is our salvation and access to true power and authority.

Q: What do you think might be the practical implications of what you’re exploring?

A: In our church, we’ve changed some of the ways we do communion. First of all, we take communion every week—partly because we want to make sure that the cross is shaping everything we do and are becoming. We receive communion right after the sermon, which has given us the discipline of having to have every talk land us back at the foot of the cross. At the same time, because we do communion every week, we have freedom to let the invitation to the table look radically different from week to week. That’s been a great practice for us. And, certainly, a fair number of communion invitations in our church are invitations to imitate, rather than simply “remember.”

Matt will be available for questions and interaction in the comments below

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Matt Croasmun lives in New Haven, Connecticut and is a PhD student in the Religious Studies Department at Yale University. He is studying New Testament, focusing on mythological language in the Pauline epistles. He has been in the Vineyard for 12 years, serving in worship and youth ministry, and helped to plant the Elm City Vineyard in New Haven where he and his wife Hannah provide senior leadership.

Technorati Tags: Jesus, John, Matt Croasmun, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS, Vineyard Community of Churches

After SVS 2010: Doug Erickson, Advice To Vineyard Theologians

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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Doug Erickson: “Advice to Vineyard Theologians (and Philosophers, and Scholars…)”

Abstract
Due to the diversity of interests and shall we say, the “complexity” of the short Vineyard history, there is some variety of opinion as to just what the “center” of our center-set movement is. For some, the center is our commitment to social justice issues: caring for the poor, and bringing the kingdom of God to the last, the least, and the lost. Other options could be a renewal movement, a signs and wonders movement, a power evangelism movement, a church planting movement or a pneumatologically orientated movement. I argue in my paper that while these elements are all important as to what it means to be a Vineyard, the true “center” is our enacted, inaugurated, eschatological vision of the kingdom of God. I really like the way people like Derek Morphew and Don Williams have expounded on this. We say enacted because we are committed to not only talking about the kingdom, but doing the works of the kingdom which includes things like social justice and evangelism, but much more: praying for the sick and demonized, bringing hope and restoration to hurting people, and doing our best to tend the garden- that is, taking care of this amazing creation that has been entrusted to us. We say inaugurated because this kingdom mission is established, inaugurated and primarily understood through the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. This picture of the kingdom is Eschatological because we see in the inauguration, the in-breaking of the powers of the future, into the present. When we pray for a sick person, and the Holy Spirit comes to heal, that is a prolepsis event: a “down payment” if you will, on the future age when there will be no sickness or suffering. This kingdom ideal can be loosely defined as the effective range of God’s rule, that is, it is encompassed by those places where God’s will is done on earth, as it is perfectly expressed in heaven.

This theological self-identification is important for a young movement like the Vineyard as we, more and more often, are engaging in dialogue with Christians from other theological traditions. As Christ’s prayer “that they shall be one” calls us to ecumenical dialogue, we must, and can, enter into this dialogue from our decidedly Vineyard presuppositions and commitments. I contend that we have a unique and significant contribution to the larger body of Christ, but we are just beginning to discover what those contributions may be.

Interview with Doug:

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: I became interested in this topic because although I haven’t been in the Vineyard that long, less than 17 years, even in that time that have been several twists and turns as we have struggled to identity ourselves. The question of “what does it mean to be a Vineyard” has been answered many different ways. To some extent, there are different answers to this related to the issues of theological commitments or praxis, although the two are obviously related. So in this paper, I wanted to re-establish what I, and many others, consider to be the central theological distinctive of the Vineyard: our commitment to the practice and proclamation of the already-not yet conception of the kingdom of God. In my view, our eschatology drives other theological commitments, so rather than being a pneumatologically driven movement, I see that eschatology conditions our pneumatology, especially the work of the Spirit.

Q: How do you think your paper is relevant to the Vineyard movement at large

A: I think this paper has some import on the movement especially as pastors and structural leaders are increasingly moving into discussions and dialogue with Christians from other traditions. A base element of ecumenical dialogue is answering the question, “what makes you tick?” or, what theological doctrines do you ground yourself in? How do these grounding beliefs affect other areas of theological reflection, such as the doctrine of God, anthropology, soteriology, or ecclesiology? At the conference, I was quite amazed and encouraged by the breadth and depth of theological reflection ongoing in the movement. We are just now probably entering into a stage where we can began some significant constructive theological development, so understanding our central theological distinctive is absolutely crucial as we move into this type of work.

Q: What do you think might be the practical implications of what you’re exploring?

A: It’s a tautology that theological commitment influences praxis and visa versa. So there is an obvious connection between what we teach, train and preach and what we practice. For those of us in the academic community, understanding our theological grounding should assist us in dialogue with believers from other traditions. Practically as a movement, we can think about how the various areas of  cultural engagement intersect with kingdom grounding. We are a movement known for caring for the poor and seeking justice, and that should continue. We are not however, primarily a social justice movement; we are a kingdom movement, who sees caring for the poor as an essential feature of the kingdom message. We embrace evangelism and power ministry, but again, centrally we are not just an evangelistic movement; we do evangelism because we see that a central feature of the kingdom conscription is to “go and make disciples”. Many of our churches and structural leaders have embraced the challenge to creation care, but we are not primarily an ecological movement, we are a kingdom movement that sees the call to tend the garden as an element of the kingdom message. So as we enter in to all of those areas, our engagement should reflect our central belief in the enacted, inaugurated eschatological kingdom of God.

Doug will be available for questions and interaction in the comments below

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Doug Erickson is from the Duluth Vineyard in Duluth, Minnesota, where he makes constant supplications to St. Columbanus, the patron saint of motorcyclists. He is currently writing his Ph.D. dissertation from Marquette University on the relationship between eschatology and pneumatology in the Vineyard movement. He teaches for the Vineyard Biblical Institute in the U.S. Doug is married to Sandi, they have three kids and the entire family enjoys the outdoor lifestyle that Duluth offers.

Technorati Tags: Doug Erickson, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS, Vineyard Community of Churches

Schedule Changes to the After SVS Series

For everyone following the “After SVS” we’ve had a slight change to the schedule. Doug Erickson’s profile – originally scheduled for yesterday – was pushed due to a delay in posting Jon and Jamie’s profile. Doug’s piece “Advice to Vineyard Theologians” will now appear Monday. Also, I’m glad to announce that Matt Croasmun’s excellent paper, “The Cross, Eucharist, and Imitation in the Gospel of John,” has been a late addition to the schedule and will appear on Tuesday.

Thanks for all your dialogue and comments in this series, and please continue to jump in!

Technorati Tags: Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS, Vineyard Community of Churches