I was listening to Moody Founder’s week on the radio yesterday morning (I love Moody’s Founder’s week). Francis Chan was speaking and told two stories that I loved.
Story One. Chan talked about a gang member who got saved and then baptized in his church yet disappeared a year later. A leader in the congregation noticed and sought him out and asked “What happened?” He said “I had the wrong idea about what I thought church would be. I thought it would be like family, a different kind of family. See, when I was in the gangs, we hung together, watched each other’s backs, took care of each other, we committed to each other 24-7, not just two meetings a week. When I got here, it was like each one was on his own. There was just no reason for me to be here with these people.” Chan said this broke his heart. The gang was better at being the church than the church was at being the church.
Story Two: Chan met with the elders over this (I presume). They talked about their commitments to each other. They talked about the ways they were so radically independent of each other and tried so hard to maintain that independence. Each had their own insurance policies to take care of their families if they died. Each sought hard to take care of their own needs and never ask each other for help. They saw in themselves what this gang member saw in the congregaton. And they started to break it down and commit to each other. In the midst of praying they started to make commitments to each other. “I commit to take care of your kids if you die.” “What is mine is yours.” “They opened up their bank accounts.” “They sold their insurance policies gave some money away.” Chan said these commitments were not haphazard that night they prayed. They were commitments out of deep trust in God and that relationship borne out in their relationships one with another. Chan said they left that meeting that night with a feeling of awe like you read about in Acts – kinda like – “Whoah … that just felt like Christianity.”
I don’t know Chan or his church although I’ve run into him at times. But I commend what I heard in this sermon and I ask a question I’ve asked for many years in the last two church communities I have served: is this kind of commitment to koinania possible in our time?
Forgive me if I go off on this again, but I really do think this is central: Given the ways we are influenced by capitalism and the way we let it reign in so many areas of our lives, is this kind of koinania possible in our times? I get chastised whenever I try to show how capitalism shapes Christians into being pagans. Many of my evangelical friends, automatically assume I am espousing socialism as a social system that is better than capitalism. Sorry, I am not doing that. Instead I am showing how this system shapes us into a spiritual formation that disables us from being Christians. Chan’s illustration of life insurance illustrates my point. Many of us have sat down with an insurance broker and watched him/her outline on an excel sheet how much we will accumulate if we contribute so much. We then hear the words and if we “want to maintain our lifestyle” when we retire we will need some sort of outrageous number of dollars of life insurance. Then this person walks off in disgust if we dare question these “scientific expert” projections. But right there, as we listen, we are all being shaped by the powers to be independent, do not trust anyone else, and be responsible, and maintain a lifestyle you never needed in the first place. This in turns shuts us off from one another, and keeps us working harder and longer and keeping more of our money so we can pay these insurance premiums. We lose our capacity to be dependent upon one another and to give time and money to His Mission. This is one good example of how capitalism shapes and forms our lives into being pagans.
I have no desire to get rid of all insurance (I still recommend car insurance). Our church requires health insurance of some kind to work at our church although there are Christian coop’s now that embody the idea of sharing our medical burdens much better than insurance companies (who got the idea from Christian coop’s in the first place). I do wonder however if we can ever come together in these incredible ways (hinted at by Chan’s sermon) to find the blessings that come in koinania. Or has capitalism done us in. Better yet, perhaps now that capitalism as we once knew it is unraveling, these days might be coming sooner than we think.
Blessings, and if you want to listen to Chan at Moody, here’s the link.
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Thanks for this David.
I’m fascinated how central our “system” of dependency on ourselves is integrated into our lives to a point where we actually defend it before any life of following Jesus. Just try challenging people to toss away their life insurance and watch how offended they get. I don’t blame them though, because if they did they would still be part of a community that wouldn’t take care of their kids if they died and there would be no money to do it.
So what I think is crucial is for people to stand up and do exactly what the story tells of the elders doing it within their already formed close relationships. If I went to one family and said “cancel your life insurance, I make a commitment to take care of your children if you die” this is a lot more radical then me just preaching from the front challenging people to trust each other and live in community. It has to start with people just doing it, unfortunately we’re all too afraid, because what about us? What will happen if we die to our kids? No one else is doing this and we don’t think its necessary.
Thanks for posting this David, while I’m far from where I should be in regards to this I want to think its what I’m striving for and stories like this remind me and encourage me that it is right and not just crazy.
I am reading Vincent Miller’s book Consuming Religion, where he makes a similar point: that contrasting the values of Christianity vs. consumer culture is not enough, because consumer culture isn’t simply a system of beliefs and values, it is a structure through which people interpret everything else, including religious belief.
Thus in late capitalism it’s extremely easy to enthusiastically embrace belief without actually allowing it to affect your everyday practice. So most people would probably say that selfishness and greed are bad, that we should be less independent, more focused on community and bearing one another’s burdens, but that belief never gets translated into practice because of the structures in place that form us as pagans, like you said (single family homes, private insurance, private bank accounts, even the way our food and clothing is produced).
I agree with your assessment, in other words. But it sure it difficult to argue that viewpoint nowadays.
This cam via e-mail yesterday.
Yo!
I just wanted to comment privately about your last post and chan’s comments. I completely understand what that gang member went through, being a former one myself. It is the one thing that drove me to ministry in the first place (I wanted to change what I experienced). For me, it was one of the most disheartening things I have gone through; gathering together with a people who theologically speak as if they are not of the world and yet live very much like the rest of society.
Dave,
Thank you for posting this. Being a former gang member myself this is my story. From my early days of conversion as a teenager, right out of the gangs, I had a hard time understanding why the church wasn’t more 24/7 and taking liability for one another, particularly, economic liability. I did experience some wonderful mentoring as a young Christian, but eventually I found my way to a parachurch missionary organization that ultimately became an intentional community.
I’ve spend a good part of my adult life in intentional community, where we’ve earnestly tried to live out these truths of genuine ecclesia. But I’ve found that the average American Protestant Christian doesn’t know what to do with you, being so counter-cultural. Other cultures are more open to this and we’ve found more acceptance among Catholics, as monasticism is familiar to them.
One doesn’t have to share housing or a bank account to live out the gospel, but it seems there has to be some kind of radical sharing to embody the truths of the kingdom of God. It’s just odd to do so in our culture, and part of following this path is to bear the shame and disapproval of others, which makes this an unattractive (and understandably scary) choice for many.
This is exactly what we’re working through here in our local church. What does a “community of the called” look like in our time and place. Surely it’s more than a couple meetings a week. Our North Am culture though emphasizes independence. Suggesting to people that we spend time just being together makes most of us very uncomfortable.
Thought provoking. Probably too late to comment on this but here goes… The tendency of people under Capitalism to, more often than not, assume that talk of bearing one anothers burdens means Socialism shows how truly ingrained we are in the politics of the world. I don’t mean that as criticism, I’m guilty too. But living in a society that is Socialist, I have come to understand the ways which this political structure can also deaden the church. Interestingly enough, from what I have observed over the past 8 years, the Socialist structure leads people to really live lives of isolation… there is always some bureaucratic structure in place to take care of one’s problems. I have seen a great apathy in the church here to do anything incarnational to meet the needs of brothers and sisters who are suffering in some way or another. Political systems are very effective at distracting us from living out the call and in whatever system we find ourselves we must be willing to cast off the status quo and listen to what our Lord is asking us to do.
Jenny,
Outstanding. I think both systems, capitalism and socialism, are systems built in autonomy from God. We simply can never espouse them as Christians as solutions to any given problem in the world. The most we can hope for is some amelioration. We should therefore never, NEVER be so strongly advocating one political solution over another as somehow God’s solution. The evangelical republicans have been guilty of this, most recently the progressive evangelicals have been equally as guilty. We should be much more humble in our political advocacy (but not abnegate either). Most of all we should be ever critically engaging the temptations to abnegate being the church by relying on government to solve all social and moral problems, whether they be moral (for the evangelical right) or social (evangelcial left). Yours was a great comment illuminating how socialism creates another set of problems for those of us seeking faithfulness to be the church in our modern times. Thanks for commenting
This post is very refreshing…
Amen to that. I had the same very thought about fellowship (http://soulofachristiantriathlete.blogspot.com/2009/02/confession-my-hinderance-to-community.html) and Francis Chan’s church clearly showed what it means to be in fellowship and commitment to each other.
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