A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [81]
That unifying vision requires not just careful strategy (although wise strategy would be a good thing), but a profound openness to the Holy Spirit. Putting it in Latin might make it sound a bit more official: Nemo dat quod non habet, “You can’t give what you don’t have,” which means, before anything else, we who lead must actually embody the Spirit-saturated, Christ-following, God-loving way of life we hope to pass on through our churches. To become like Christ, we need to have the Spirit of Christ within us, among us, before us, beside us, as the old Celtic prayer says. We need to be Spirit-saturated people.11
That sounds good, but it sure can seem a long way from where and who we are. Yes, our churches are doing beautiful work, and they are sanctuaries of sacredness, beauty, and kindness without which our world would be a much poorer place. But we must also acknowledge that our churches are divided, immature, confused about our purpose and identity, in danger of fragmenting our way into nonexistence, all at once bending over backwards and straddling fences, stiff of neck and soft of spine, and otherwise twisted and contorted in compromise. We have financial problems, sexual controversies, pride problems, schism threats, excesses in some forms of spirituality and deficits in others, and all manner of authority issues. And as soon as some of us point the finger at others, they hold up the mirror and show us that we’re as much a mess as they are.
Rather than flogging ourselves with guilt over these characteristics, on the one hand, or denying or minimizing them, on the other, perhaps we should simply acknowledge them with candor and humility. And then perhaps we should add that all these troubles taken together perfectly qualify us as authentic “New Testament churches,” since these are the very issues with which the original churches struggled, as Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians illustrates.
The “church of God in Corinth” (1:2) to which Paul writes is a divided (1:10) collection of personality cults (1:12), each claiming superior wisdom and knowledge (2:4–5). As a result, its members are not maturing into truly spiritual Christlike people, but are rather stunted—“infants” (3:1) and “merely human” (3:4). Paul urges them to see themselves as one field, planted by God (3:6), and one building project (3:10), but he sees their community as being destroyed (3:17) by competing factions, each claiming superiority based on wisdom and knowledge (3:18–20). While they’re boasting about superior wisdom and knowledge, they’re tolerating gross immorality (5:1, 9–11; 6:16–18) and suing each other in court (6:1) rather than resolving their differences maturely (6:5) or willingly suffering wrong (6:7). (One recalls Jesus’s words to the Pharisees about straining out gnats and swallowing camels, Matt. 23:24.) He emphasizes the urgency of the times to them (7:29), already in 55 CE anticipating the chaos that will come soon enough in 67–70 (7:31).
Then he bears down on the root issue, as he sees it. They have a whole tangle of arguments and disagreements (about marriage and sex in 7:1–39, about dietary scruples in 8:1–13, about leadership and politics in 9:3–14, about disorderly public gatherings in 11:2–33, about the use of spiritual gifts in 12:1–31 and 14:1–25, about the timing and meaning of the resurrection of the dead in 15:12–57). But all their controversies have one root problem: competing claims to wisdom