Church planting is town planting

I was having a conversation the other night with a group of friends when our talk turned to homeschooling vs. public schooling. Now, by no means was it an argument. I actually don’t have a big dog in that fight; that is, unless your public school is actively crusading against biblical christianity. My dog gets a little bigger then, or I at the very least, I’d put on one of those spiky collars, just for effect. 

The conversation was actually quite funny. I think at one point I made the remark that public school gave me a solid lesson in shame management. If I remember correctly I said the phrase “tons of shame” to describe the vibe at school with a heavy emphasis on tUHns. Yeah, I said it like that. My mom also happened to be in the room during this conversation. She didn’t appreciate my analyses of her educational decision. What was good for the goose shamed the gander, or something like that, er whatever. 

This post actually has nothing to do with homeschooling, at least directly. What I am trying to illustrate is the human proclivity towards bashfulness. As a shy kid walking the halls at a decent size high school I learned what it was like to blush. I’m not talking about showing up to the first day of school in last year's style kind of blushing. Like being the last kid to finally work up the nerve to frost his tips during the summer just to find out that all his friends are rocking a buzz cut with a nike swoosh in the back. I’m talking about getting picked last for dodgeball, sitting by yourself at lunch, having no one to go to the dance with kind of blushing. You know, doing something that makes those cheeks rose up like the conceited man from Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince. Now, don’t read too much into that. I wasn’t picked last for dodgeball. But I did learn a thing or two about my own insecurities and how an environment like public school inflames them. School, like anything else that gets tUHns of hormones together in one building, serves an important social function as a kind of industrial shame factory, teaching kids how to deal with deep and shallow issues of belonging. What I’m trying to say is that nobody wants to find out that they don’t belong. And so we work hard to belong.

Many Christians are blushing right now in our culture. There is a heavy sense of shame that I discern as I navigate the halls of the Church. It’s not just that our worship leaders are still wearing skinnies when the rest of the world is rockin’ those mom jeans; you know, the ones that sit at the hips. Get 'em up where they belong! Eeesh, I slipped into a dark memory of back to school shopping at Kohls. Anyways, Christians are blushing. We’re blushing because we’ve been so used to hanging with the cool kids and now we’ve come to school and were treated like the smelly kid who wears a trenchcoat in the middle of spring. But the problem is our moms dressed us and we are feeling kinda awkward about it. Christians are blushing because as the culture shifts around us we are realizing that it’s not so much the poor coffee or the bad music that is making us uncool, it’s actually just plan ol’ us that people find disgusting. Is that too harsh? I don’t think so. We’ve showed up to class thinking that the biggest issue for us to fit in was our style when in reality it’s our savior. Our boy Jesus is making us look bad. It’s like the difference between Tim Tebow getting razzed by his locker room buddies for being a ‘Jesus freak’ and Tim Tebow getting hate mail and death threats for being a Bible believing Christian. The church is now the latter.

What happens next is important. What happens when you're walking the halls of your high school and you suddenly realize the rules changed on you? Your face flushes. What do you do next? 

Here’s how it’s been going down for many Christians. You show up to class in a respectable polo from JCPenney and your I Am Second bracelet, eager to be a good little boy, and are astonished to discover you’ve been seated next to a guy wearing a horn hat. You know the hat I’m talking about. He looks like if Daniel Boone were a marauding Viking, war paint and all. And to your horror the entire class, including the teacher, is chastising him for his seditious political activity and his propensity for civil unrest. And you know what, you realize you want nothing to do with that shame. So you distance yourself from this guy. So when civics class comes around and the class discusses political philosophy and action you want nothing to do with it because your ‘conservative’ principles sound a little too close to horn-hat guy’s for comfort. So you tap out.

This is what’s happening with a variety of issues in the church. Politics is just one of the most obvious to point out. To be a little more concrete. The issue of abortion is a slam dunk no brainer political issue that Christians everywhere should be absolutely loud and clear on. Abortion is murder. And a culture that believes murder is health care and is a fundamental human right is a dangerous culture of death. As Christians we should vigorously oppose this culture and actively work toward building a counter culture that actually upholds the dignity and sanctity of human life. This will inevitably include fighting in the realm of politics to see real change on this matter. This is just one example. And Christians everywhere shy away from taking a strong public stance on the issue, presumably because it seems a little too ‘evangelical’ or too much like the ‘moral majority’ or too ‘Republican’ or whatever label is unpopular in pop culture. And this creates a leadership vacuum. And instead of solid Christians filling the vacuum, the vacuum is filled by more people who are building a culture that is anti human flourishing, because Christians everywhere are abdicating. But where are the Christians going if they are not going to the cultural frontlines? I believe Christians that realize they are losing cultural ground are retreating. But where too?

Many, not all, are retreating to the church. Instead of marching toward the frontlines of the culture war many Christians are retreating to the home front, to paint fences, to oil the pews, and polish up our sermons on the theories of the atonement—all good stuff here. But the problem is that we are in the midst of a war that we can’t claim neutrality on. Actual lives are at stake. If we retreat we risk neutering our gospel witness. And this is because the scope of the Christian gospel is farm more expansive than the narrowness of personal salvation and building the institution of the church, eternally important as those are. Our Christian mission is to broad to simply tidy up the church while the neighborhood burns around us.

In his book Gospel Culture, Joseph Boot wrote this about the scope of the gospel. It’s worth quoting in full.

The gospel knows nothing of escape from the world, but only of our service as priests of renewal. The gospel is therefore not simply that we are saved from our sins, but that we are delivered into the kingdom of righteousness, now to serve God’s purpose of righteous dominion as his image and office-bearers in Jesus Christ. The gospel sweeps up into its great symphony every movement of our daily work, our marriage and family, our vocations and callings. Everything that has been dominated by sin is now being transformed by the gospel. This gives the gospel a limitless application.

I love that. Christians are “priests of renewal.” This has “limitless application.” But the problem is that many Christians, out of fear and shame, have neutered the gospel by limiting its application to the realm of the institutional church. This is wrong. It’s not wrong because Boot says it’s wrong. It’s wrong because God says its wrong.

Genesis 1 teaches us that God created humans with a special endowment as his vice regents, his princes and princesses of His creation. ‘And he gave them a commission. His commission is often called the cultural mandate. He told humans to fill the earth, be fruitful, subdue and exercise dominion over it. Simply put, we were created to take the stuff of God’s creation and make and establish a God glorifying culture. We were charged with ruling the world to the glory of God and for the flourishing of all people. That commission was never taken back. This is still our job to do. 

So when we talk about being Christians we have to talk about engaging the world around us to the glory of God. More specifically, when we talk about following Christ we have to talk about Christ as King. And as Colossians 1 says, Christ is really King, ruling and reigning over everything. And he is actively reconciling all things to himself. This means that the risen ruling and reigning Jesus Christ is actually renewing the entire creation that he made, not just saving the souls of the faithful, but redeeming the entirety of His created world. And as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5, Jesus is reconciling the world through us. So to say we are Christians and then to retreat from broader cultural engagement is quite contrarian. We are called into a priesthood of cultural renewal. This is going to actually require us to grab dad’s shovel from the shed and move some dirt around.

So here’s one way the all encompassing scope of the gospel makes a specific point of contact. The work of church planting in Clinton is not just limited to saving souls and gathering the faithful on Sunday mornings. Church planting in Clinton is town planting. This is because all around us is an unreconciled, unrenewed, broken landscape, eager to be redeemed by the risen Christ through his called out people, the church. The stones crumbling off our buildings, the children languishing in broken families, the lost souls searching for hope, all groan for the revealing of the sons of God to pick up a shovel (Rom 8). Seeing it this way thrusts the big fat finger of the gospel straight into our chests and begs us for a response. Will you obey the call of Christ to go, to tell, to build, to seek the renewal of this place; for the glory Jesus and the Joy of Clinton.