meditatio at the water's edge

Structures and Following the Spirit
When Jesus gave his apprentices his direction immediately before his ascension, he said, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses….” The effectiveness of the church in its mission of bearing testimony (in word and deed) about the kingdom of God and about Jesus depends upon the presence and direction of the Holy Spirit.

We must confront the frightening possibility that we might not really trust the Spirit to lead the Church where it must go.

We must ask ourselves whether we, individually and together, have been intentionally seeking to follow the leading of the Spirit or stubbornly plodding along in a direction of our own.

We must discern whether we have been depending on ‘sound’ business strategies, capitalist marketing techniques, and established institutional structures and forms to keep the status quo, or whether we have been depending on the Spirit to provide ‘just-in-time’ direction and resources so that we can both hear and live out our vocation as the people of God.

Certain things many of us do in the way of programs, procedures, etc., are done because “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” Even in 'emerging' circles, those with 'traditional' backgrounds tend to go into 'default mode' when we get lazy. Of course, change for the sake of change is often disastrous, but so is staying the same for the sake of staying the same.

Some people have advocated that churches need to change to ‘keep up with the times’ or to 'be relevant.' The extent to which this becomes a 'driving force' it is clearly a kind of idolatry--taking our cue from culture (which ironically makes us irrelevant).

We must be a people that is willing to change to keep up with the Spirit—to ‘keep in step with the Spirit’—this includes changing structures, programs, locations, and whatever else God directs.

I have the sinking feeling that our remembering (recollection of past), thinking (perceptions about present), and imagination (assumptions about future) are shaped more and more by the un-stories of consumerism, capitalism, and individualism/tribalism, and less and less by the story of God--and that is just in the church. My hope is that we can turn this around, and that we will start to recapture the waiting imagination (i.e., hope), exhibited by the prophets and the first disciples, in our individuo-communal lives--that we will let our remembering, thinking, and imagination be shaped by the Spirit and the Story--that we will not act from our power and our motive and our agenda without testing it (together) under the direction of the spirit.

Paul wrote to believers in Rome, "Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is in them--living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life" (Romans 8, MSG). What would change if we would let this scripture read us, not just as individual disciples, but as communities of disciples?