Identification Please

"We suprisingly get our identities more from our jobs than our life in a Christian community pursuing God's kingdom on earth." David Fitch The Great Giveaway, p.171

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This quote from Dave Fitch was shared during my class on missional church as an introduction to what a "missional" community looks like and acts like in the world. What Fitch is getting at in his book the Great Giveaway is that we as Christians in America in the 21st century have been shaped more by capitalism (i.e. our jobs) than by a deep connection to our identity as image-bearers of God who are called into a community that represents his Kingdom here on Earth.

Using this quote as a springboard, I want to reflect on:

1) What should our conscious identity as a community of Christians be?
2) In what ways does that rub against the grain of the culture we find ourselves in?
3) What difference does knowing our identity in Christ make for ourselves and the places where God has sent us?

I'll tackle the first now and the other two in later posts.

One of the callings of a Christian is to grow into becoming more like the Savior whom we serve. Its not enough just to pray a prayer and never have intentions for being transformed. The Christian faith is on that expects transformation, specifically transformation into Christ-likeness. The more we become like Jesus, the more we fulfill our first purpose on the Earth, which is to be image bearers of God (Gen. 1_27-28).

But the question that is being raised more and more is, "what does it mean to look like Jesus?" Over the past 200 years in this country, being like Jesus has been equated with trying not to sin, trying to live a holy life, and being as nice to everyone as you possibly can. But is this what Paul means when he says, "we are... being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory" (2 Cor. 3:18)?

Many leaders under the umbrella of "missional" are reimagining what it means to be in Christ's likeness by examining why Jesus was incarnated here on earth. As we behold Jesus from the perspective of his mission, we as his torch-bearers (so to speak) will be reformed.

The Jesus we see in the gospels saw himself primarily as a missionary ambassador. He considered himself sent by the Father to earth as a representative of the kingdom of heaven. He left his culture in heaven to become one of us: speaking our language, eating our food, wearing our clothes. His incarnation wasn't just of flesh, but of culture. As John Calvin puts it, he condescends himself the way a parent does in order to communicate with a child. He spoke "baby talk" so that we could understand.

But as much as he was relevant to the culture he was sent to, he also challenged that culture in big ways. He never forgot that the culture he was sent to wasn't his own. In the same way that the US ambassador in France doesn't forget that he is an American, so Jesus never forgot his "heavenness" and his mission.

Keeping those two aspects in mind, consider what Jesus tells his followers in John 20:21, "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." This is the key indentifying marker of a follower of Christ. He or she one who is sent by Jesus into the cultures they find themselves. What this means for us is that we are not first and foremost Americans, we are missionaries sent from heaven to America.

My deeply convicting question for all of us (myself included) is, "do we see ourselves as a people sent by Jesus into the world for the purpose of representing him to the nations (US included)? Or do we tend to forget our true citizenship in heaven and allow ourselves to be defined more by our jobs, families, sports, bank accounts, denominations, good deeds, (fill in the blank)?

More to come...

Individual Trees or a Collected Vineyard?

Being that it's been about 5 months since my last blog, I figured that it's about time I give this thing another shot. I like the idea of blogging in general, but being consistent at it will be a challenge for me.

In high school I was a half-way decent sprinter, but a terrible long-distance runner. I could never pace myself over a longer period time, and so I would exhaust myself in the first half of the race and have nothing left in the tank at the end. Hopefully that won't be indicative of my blogging experience. The way I see it, the fear of inconsistency should never be reason enough not to experiment with something.

Anyway, the name of this blog comes from Jesus' teaching on the vine and the branches, specifically John 15:8 "This is to my father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples."

The underlying question I hope to wrestle with in this blog (and all of life) is what does the fruit look like that Jesus expects of his disciples? In what way does it bring the Father glory? What does it mean to be a collection of people (the church) bearing fruit together such that the Father is pleased to dwell amongst our vineyard? OK, that was more than one question. But they all fall under the umbrella of wanting come to some understanding of what it means to be a part of God's mission in the world (more on "mission" later).

The only thing I'll mention here is that Jesus talks about fruit in the context of community. I'm convinced that we're so individualized in America that we can read "I" into just about anything. Part of what I'm coming to grips with is that God calls a people to reflect his presence to the world because an individual is incapable of that task alone. How could we expect to represent God to the world as individuals when God himself is a community of 3 in 1?

Whatever it is that he's calling us to (the kind of fruit), he's calling us to produce it together. The "you" in "you bear fruit" is plural in Greek, suggesting that the disciples identity as fruit-bearers of the kingdom was bound to each other as much as it was bound to Jesus. Their unity, together under Christ, is what was going to tell the world about the kind of God they served.