belonging to Jesus

The reformer in me is ever-tempted by the idea of a Ninety-Five Theses moment—a complete break from the ball of religion attached to my limbs by a chain of bureaucracy (in other words, your average Western church). What would it feel like to run—to set off at a sprint toward the finish line, cheered on by that Cloud of Witnesses, unencumbered by sin, guilt, law, fear, or any other unnecessary hindrance?

I have spent my life immersed in evangelicalism, in a variety of different local church bodies. The weight of religion seems to grow heavier over time, and I wonder if it’s because it didn’t feel like much of a burden when it gave me belonging. But what if conformity, not Christ, has been at the root of that belonging? Ever since I started seeking first the kingdom of heaven—sometimes at the expense of the “kingdom” of the church—the shackles of religion have become much more obvious.

When you belong, it’s so easy to believe that you’ve got it right. You are where you’re supposed to be, doing what you’re supposed to do. Your church must be approved by God, because you feel so at home there. But wait a second. Doesn’t that just mean your church is approved by . . . you?

I heard this quote recently for the first time, and it made me think:

Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence—religious meaning—apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but, at least in America, almost never against the crowds.

Eugene H. Peterson

When my sense of belonging began to erode, I noticed: I may have been substituting the ecstasy of being part of the crowd for the actual transcendence of being part of Christ’s body.

I may have been conflating going to church and doing “churchy” things with obedience. I may have been measuring my faithfulness by how many Sundays my butt was in the pew. I may have started making my faith about going somewhere once a week for two hours to play-act the perfect mix of smiling and submissive and vulnerable and guarded—not about being something, being an apprentice of Christ alone, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

When Jesus called His disciples, He didn’t say “Meet me at the synagogue on the Sabbath for an hour.” He said, “Follow Me.”

Starting here, now, wherever we are and wherever we go—and continuing indefinitely. And, importantly, doing it together, even when our backgrounds are beyond disparate, our personalities mix like oil and water, and our political differences would normally have us killing each other. That’s what being a disciple means.

That’s what being the Church means.

The ball and chain of religion would have us believe that “church” is a place we go with a bunch of people who look and sound and think exactly like us. That it’s an event we help make happen, not a body that we are an animating part of. It often pushes a certificate of church membership or confirmation like it’s a certificate of marriage, forgetting that biblically, we don’t marry a church; we are the Bride of Christ. Religion tries to pass off valuing conformity as treasuring the truth, gatekeeping ministry as protecting the body, and upholding legalism as fearing God.

The truth is something to treasure—so maybe we shouldn’t try to shut down truth-seekers for fear that they’ll find where our statement of faith doesn’t fully reflect God’s heart.

The body is something to protect—so maybe we shouldn’t try to silence and dismiss whole demographics within it that could provide a valuable voice and perspective on behalf of its vulnerable.

God is Someone to fear—so maybe we should consider how He will judge those who, like Pharisees, obstruct the entrance to the kingdom of heaven by paving the way instead toward kingdoms of this world. Jesus said of them: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut the kingdom of heaven in front of people; for you do not enter it yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (Matthew 23:13, emphasis added).

I’m not calling out any particular church I’ve been part of in the last 30 years. I’m pleading with all of them. All of us.

Unity does not, cannot, mean conformity to a particular denomination or set of secondary and tertiary doctrines. The goal isn’t to belong to a large and growing crowd, it’s to become one healthy body. Genuine unity can only come through recognizing Christ as the body’s Head—meaning, according to Ephesians, its Unifier. Only a central focus on the Messiah Jesus, His death and resurrection, and His kingdom can bind us together into one living and working and fruit-bearing organism.

Any “unity” achieved through legalistic conformity instead of the pursuit of Jesus will lead only to the (continued) mass fracturing of Christianity into a million tiny echo chambers. We can’t accomplish our mission in that state.

The call of the disciple is simple and difficult: She must deny herself, take up her cross, and follow Jesus.

Jesus, not a crowd.

Jesus, not a husband.

Jesus, not a pastor.

Jesus, not a denomination.

Jesus, not a political party, candidate, or policy platform.

Jesus, not a particular side of a culture war.

Belonging, while a vitally important aspect of human flourishing, is not a biblical metric for how well we’re doing this. Belonging—at least the kind that feels comfortable, confirms all our priors, and lets us come together to congratulate ourselves on our rightness week after week—may not be part of the deal.

We belong to Jesus, and no other.

“My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand.”

John 10:27-28

counterculture or kingdom?

My day job (besides taking care of my own babies) is helping families build healthy and sustainable sleep foundations for their babies and toddlers. One of the first things I try to instill in every set of parents I work with is the following principle:

Respond, don’t react.

When you respond to your baby’s crying in the middle of the night, you might pause for a moment and listen. You might evaluate the sound of their cry. You might compare it to how they normally communicate with you when they’re hungry, sick, cold, or just annoyed. Based on all of that information, you’d then decide what kind of response they need, and offer it to them accordingly.

This way of operating allows your baby, not yourself, to be the guide of your actions—in contrast with when you simply react, rushing to stop the crying in any way that you think might work, even if it’s not what your baby needs.

I think a lot of us as believers and believing churches could stand to work on this.

Among congregations that highly value the Bible and the holiness of God, there is a temptation to recoil from the secular culture and go in the opposite direction—ironically, instead of actually following the guidance of the Bible.

We react instead of responding.

Consider one example from my formative years: A book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye was published in 1997, at the height of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board’s extremely popular and widespread “True Love Waits” abstinence campaign. The book and the associated purity culture movement gained enormous traction in evangelical Christian circles. And it was a reaction to the Sexual Revolution’s influence on church youth in the 1970s and 1980s.

But instead of achieving any meaningful “purity” or teaching a healthy sexual ethic, sound data now overwhelmingly indicates that the principles of purity culture primarily succeeded in warping an entire generation of Christians’ understanding of sex and sexuality (see the work of Sheila Wray Gregoire).

Or how about another that is both as old as time and very current (and, clearly, on my mind): The effort to stop any movement toward true mutuality in husband-wife relationships, let alone toward equality of men and women in a church setting, has in the past several decades largely been a reaction to the feminist movement. More recently, it has gained a new momentum as we recoil from the confusion in society around gender and the gender binary.

And instead of putting on display God’s glorious Genesis 2 vision, in which men and women work in equal partnership to achieve His goals on earth and reflect His nature, the church’s grip on complementarianism has only succeeded in handicapping our witness by Christianizing the idea that some human beings naturally rank higher than others. This idea is anti-Scripture, anti-Gospel, and anti-Christ, but nevertheless has been used by the church to justify atrocities throughout history, from slavery to the Holocaust to many forms of abuse.

When the Bible calls us out of the patterns of the world, it doesn’t say “Observe the way the world is going and run in the opposite direction.” Instead, the Word of God calls us to discernment. Discernment is what we need to navigate an environment that is rarely black-and-white. Discernment is what we need if we intend to respond instead of react. Discernment is what we need when the answers aren’t easy.

Discernment is what keeps us off the endlessly swinging pendulum of react, react, react.

Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.

- Romans 12:2

Like taking a moment to breathe and tune into my baby’s cry in the middle of the night prevents me from acting out of my own panic or frustration and allows my baby’s need to dictate my response, taking the time to investigate the Scriptures and listen to the guidance of the Holy Spirit when we notice unholiness in our culture allows God, not the culture, to be the leader of our actions.

Doing a 180-degree turn away from the culture does not make us holy or our culture better. There are often pieces of goodness even in the parts of our culture that we find most abhorrent, and in our haste to react, we lose the good along with the bad. Thus the traditional Christian church, desiring rightly to uphold Scripture’s clear teachings that men and women are not interchangeable, at the same time lost hold of Scripture’s clear teachings that God made men and women absolutely equal in both calling and value.

Holiness comes through transformation—transformation that takes place through the renewing of our minds. Our thoughts, intellect, reason, perceptions, judgments, and determinations must be made completely new. We think of the kingdom of heaven as the “upside-down kingdom” not because it operates exactly opposite of how earthly kingdoms do, but because it operates in a way that is entirely foreign to all of us. It is not instinctive, it’s transformative. To be part of that kingdom, we can’t just change course; we must be born all over again, into an entirely new way of thinking, understanding, judging, acting.

Then alone can we discern the heart of God, which doesn’t fit neatly inside any of our comfortable categories.

But if we study our Bibles through the lens of our culture, it will be culture, not Scripture, that gets the last word.

little children, guard yourselves from idols

Before I begin, I will say first: I am writing this to me. I hope it encourages or rebukes you, too, if that’s what you need, but I’m writing it first to me.

Over the last few months, what little I have written has been my effort to process the enormous and sometimes all-consuming topic of the pandemic, and what it means to live at this moment in history as a follower of Christ. I’m hardly the only one. There are probably millions of memes and Twitter hot takes and longform articles on the Internet right now devoted to the same topic, and they all say something different.

Some say taking a mandated vaccine is akin to receiving the Mark of the Beast. Some say wearing a mask is the only way to love your neighbor. Some say we are shortsightedly throwing away the religious freedoms that the first colonists of this continent endured immense tribulation to establish for us.

In other words, there is no consensus. There is no unity. The voices of the Church are just as divided as the voices of government. Those of us who are trying to hear them all out are being pulled in a dozen different directions, and it’s no wonder that so many of us have given up on discourse, picked a thought bubble to occupy, and stayed there.

But as delightful as that sounds to me, I have too many questions, and they won’t let me rest.

I don’t think the vaccine is the Mark of the Beast, but the intense peer pressure, financial pressure, and governmental pressure currently being exerted on the unvaccinated has shown me how simple it would be to implement the Mark of the Best one day, and how difficult it would be to resist. When we choose whether or not to get the Covid-19 vaccine, most of us are not choosing between allegiance to God and allegiance to this world; however, the question is still worth pondering: What does it look like to live in absolute allegiance to the authority of the True King at this time? What does it mean for me and my house to serve the Lord?

Does it mean I wear a mask everywhere I go? Some would say yes—that the most loving thing I can do for those around me is to protect them from my breath, although the effectiveness of most masks is scientifically dubious. It’s true that I don’t know what kind of vulnerabilities others may have to the virus, or how they’d be affected if they caught it. I have no desire to be unknowingly responsible for someone else’s illness, let alone their hospitalization or death, however unlikely. But is it true that the primary way to love my neighbor is to protect their health? Sometimes we seem to think that Jesus Himself would go to any lengths necessary to protect the health and safety of others, but if that were the case, how could He ever have asked anyone to follow Him? To follow Christ was, for every single one of the apostles and many of their converts in some way, to follow Him through suffering, ostracism, and death.

It would be silly to equate not wearing a mask with calling others into Christ, of course. But I do think we need to examine ourselves for an ungodly aversion to pain, including the pain of others, if we want to be truly Christlike. When Paul set out to evangelize the known world, he could not afford to fear the fact that he was inviting people into persecution—the eternal state of their souls had to be more important than the temporal safety of their bodies. Christianity has never been a path to safety and comfort, as our brothers and sisters in so many other countries know too well.

At the same time, only from our couches of prosperity does being required to wear a mask in public places feel like persecution! What will our response be when real persecution arises? What should it be? It’s certainly not wrong to try to protect and preserve the freedoms that we enjoy; these freedoms in turn protect current and future generations of all faiths from oppression, and create a haven in the world for those who wish to practice their faith without repercussions. At the same time, we can completely neglect the real mission of Christ on earth while we are busy championing the mission of freedom. They do not always serve the same ends.

I’m asking these questions because I see too few questions being asked. I see many, many Christians unquestioningly toeing the party line on either the left or the right, failing to test the narrative they’re being fed against scientific facts and Scriptural truth. For some of them, mask-wearing and vaccine-touting have become like pagan rituals—things we do to cover our bases “just in case,” to look like we are doing our part to control the uncontrollable even when our actions don’t make sense, all to appease the unseen Covid-19 virus in hopes that it will pass over our house. For others, rebelling against the regulations has become its own kind of religion, whose sacred text is merely “whatever is opposite of what the government commands.” Both of these belief systems are anti-Christ.

What if we could all stop weaponizing Christianity against those who disagree with us, and instead choose fearless love that welcomes others into our hearts and homes, whether we feel “safe” or not?

What if we could all stop using Jesus to justify our misplaced need for control, and instead choose to walk with Him—even when His path winds through the Valley of the Shadow, whatever that may look like?

I don’t advocate for prideful science-ignoring recklessness that disregards the opportunities we have to protect ourselves and others, nor for history-ignoring idealism that disregards the importance of protecting our liberties. But I am pleading with the Church to lay down her idols, whether they take the form of a political party, individual rights, personal safety, fear of loss, or anything else.

We know that we are of God, and that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. And we know that the Son of God has come, and has given us understanding so that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.

Little children, guard yourselves from idols.

1 John 5:19-21