Look back over your life and remember the last time you fully experienced passion - something that caught your heart by surprise, gave you purpose – a sense of mission and higher calling.  Put that feeling of conviction and excitement in your mind?  Okay – good, read on…

Now, if you can, think back to the moment when that passion was first doubted.  When did you go from pure certitude to…maybe an unmet expectation, or conflicting evidence of how you understood how things should work?  When, after receiving that divine sense of calling, did you run up against someone of importance in your life who disagreed with you or even sought to stop you in your tracks?  Maybe it was a parent subtly but condescendingly pushing you away from your intended college major and into something they wanted for you.  Maybe it was a boss dismissing your dreams for the future of your business as misguided.

How did you respond to that first bite of doubt?  That sting of original uneasiness with your own beliefs?

 By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, 25choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. 26He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward. 27†By faith he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible. 

What happens to a person who has seen “him who is invisible?”  For Moses, it was after 40 years of shame and isolation, away from his Israelite family, exiled from Egypt — an exiled prince! — he had every right to be in the royal family, but he has a passion - he had a reason to buck the trend…

…and it cost him all the status quo due him in life, but that made all the difference.

He was not focused on the anger of the king, on the doubt of his Egyptian subordinates, or his Israelite brothers, sisters, cousins… He was fixed on the passion, the original passion that found him in the wilderness – he had such a sense of his own calling, of his own intimacy with that calling, that nothing and no one would stir his fear or doubt.

We all go through life with a web of convictions – some stronger than others.  As we learn more about the world and how it works, certain strands in the web are broken, new ones are formed (i.e. as a child, we learn that we cannot fly when we jump off the stairs in a cape).  This process continues all throughout life, and its an important part of building a cohesive sense of TRUTH in the world.

But what strands CAN’T be broken?  Are they all susceptible to pressures from the outside – from the wind and debris that inevitably blows through our fragile webs?  I feel that I want to be stronger than that – on certain things – I am learning what those things are – and resolving myself to those certain strands help me allow less important strands to be let go of – opening my heart and mind further to the truth of things.

Its all about becoming passionate about the right strands in your web – choose wisely, and you’ll have passion your whole life long.

I think its because I know that most Christians when they hear those words believe that today’s dominant expression of church in America should continue to be the default image in our minds when we think “church” .  This expression of the Church is the Sunday morning programmatic model, built around staff, buildings, high-cost infrastructure – with the aims of becoming another “mega”church.  This the picture most people think of when they think of “church” – at least here in the West.

And yes – every part of me is thankful to God that there are tens of thousands of churches built around that expression of God’s family – it is obviously reaching tens of millions of people with the authentic Gospel of God!  Praise God for that!  Lives are changed!

And yet – there are still 250 million people who were not a part of a church gathering last Sunday – and have no connection with a church…many more still may have no true commitment to the Lord Jesus.  And that number is growing all the time.

So a quote stands out to me:

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve already got.” — Genius unknown

Jeff Kirsch, a member of the City on a Hill faith community has a recent, great post on some of the metaphors and assumptions Jesus used to describe what God’s Family looks like – yeast, field, flock, seed, soil… this is a Kingdom, a church that doesn’t need institutional maintenance and a ministry marketing department -

…it is a “subtle contagion”…

…or as in Mark 4:26-29 the farmer (read pastor) sleeps while the Kingdom grows beyond his control!

Why not work with the grain of the Kingdom, rather than against it?

Let the Gospel seed grow underground in your friendships, permeating every nook and cranny of your life – truly trust that the fire of mission and divine love will bubble up in people as you share life on life with them.

Trust that Jesus truly is the head of the Church – and not you and your staff.  Could it be that our churches look too much alike – each vying for the same 15% of the population – meanwhile hundreds of millions more are looking desperately for a church that looks like Jesus-with-skin-on in their context, only to find the same praise band or Powerpoints wherever they go.

I’m writing this not out of anger or bitterness; I’m writing this as a missionary, crying desperately for the Christians to reach out to a lost world.  Could it be that the biggest obstacle for people in discovering the true Lord Jesus and his Church is our pre-conceived notions of what church is and how it should function in the world?

The lost need us to recapture the characteristics of the Kingdom of God and to tear down the walls of the church-box in our mind.  The desperate are dying for us to incarnate the Gospel in fresh ways on our block – even as we love and bless what God is doing down the street.

I am cautiously optimistic though, as I look at the horizon of “church planting” – the wineskin of the church is becoming fresh, new. Churches gathering in nightclubs, poetry circles, homes, parks, under overpasses and in city centers.  Churches that live together 24/7, that function as a little family and a source of light and healing for their blighted neighborhood.  I’m seeing new forms of God’s family take shape in our little organic church network.  I’m seeing new faith-community experiments bubble up all over Chicago, and the country.

Its time to take the lid off – where might things spread if we took Jesus’ images of his Church seriously?

Its BOTH/AND.

If you attended Christian college, or if you were awake for even a few of your pastor’s sermon series – you’d be forgiven if you thought that “change the world” were the very words of Jesus Christ.  But nothing could be farther from the truth.

In fact, it might be said that every chance the Church has taken to “change the world” has ended in utter disaster – and yet even current Christian churches and organizations (political and otherwise) are making “change the world” evolve into their raison d’etre.

We’re seeing a backlash from the culture in the Christian attempts at changing the world into a Christian world.  To sculpt our picture of heaven as it is on earth. Could it be that Jesus is calling us to something else besides political campaigns, protests, and all forms of effective ministry?  Could it be that even efforts like serving the homeless, caring for widows and orphans, and bringing hope to the hopeless is merely another form of “changing the world” that has nothing to do with the mission of the Church?  Whether you are James Dobson or Shane Claiborne, your “change the world” project is actually counter to Jesus’ desire for his Church…

…That’s the premise of James Hunter’s To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. He states that the Church in our day, or in Jesus’ day for that matter – was never to change anything.  Only God can change a human heart, or a human world bent on its own destruction.

The only thing the Church is called to do is to live as a “faithful presence” in the world – to be a consistent and intentional “picture of Jesus” before the the broken world.  To be an icon of grace – to be the “2nd incarnation of Jesus,” but not to try to change the world – because you can’t change anything, not even your own life – only God can.

I don’t agree with Hunter.  I DO see his point.  I see the abuses of many of us in the Church putting our own desires for worldly influence to wash out the call of Jesus Christ to renounce power and become a slave to the world.  I see his point that whether its the politics of the Christian Right or the Christian Left, the conversion tactics of the Evangelicals or the social justice of the Ne0-Monastics, “changing the world” can potentially be about changing the world to look more like ME – not more like God or his Kingdom.

Even still, I believe that the dream of a brand new world made possible in this one is central to what Jesus invites us to as his followers.  ”Making disciples of all nations” is a call to change the systems built by the Evil One.  That we are to be a “city on a hill,” “salt” and “light.”

I do love Hunter’s impulse – let’s live incarnationally; and humbly ask God to change the world for his sake, rather than feeling as if the change needed will come from ourselves.  Live in proximity to the people you feel called to – and God will do the changing in the lives and neighborhoods you are investing in – only he can change us, only God can save us…