The Church According to Us
Urban Acacia has recently started releasing a monthly news letter from its website (click here to read past newsletters), and the following is one of its first. This is a great way to get to know the mission behind Urban Acacia, and what has been behind their first year of ministry here in Logan SquarePlease email Dan Beirne at danbeirne@urbanacacia.com with any questions or comments!
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The Church According to Us
When interviewed after his years of success with the automobile and assembly line, Henry Ford was quoted as saying “If I’d asked the people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses.”I see a similarly limited perspective when we imagine the future of the Church today. “More buildings!” they say. “Fuller pews!” “Fancier worship!”Those are our dreams for the future of the church according to us.Perhaps, much like the people of Ford’s time, we’ve already met the limits of our typical ways of doing things. The horses, in other words, aren’t running any faster. No matter how much we’d like them to.Now with that said, I think that is as far as this comparison goes. For, with Ford, the answer was to revolutionize the transportation industry by advancing ahead with a brand new invention: the automobile. That is not what I believe to be necessary in the case of the Church. We have far too many new inventions in the Church already, each one getting in the way more than the last. In the case of the Church, I believe the opposite is necessary; we need to move back a few spaces in history and “invent” an older way of doing things.Throughout history, the movement of Christ followers known as Christians has been at its most fervent when in the form of nomadic groups of oppressed minorities. They met in secret in caves, people’s homes and temples to support and encourage one another and break bread with God and each another. This is true just as much in history as it is in modern cultural contexts such as Christians in South Africa during apartheid, believers in China today, and in many other parts of the world where being openly Christian is condemned. There was an intensity and an authenticity present in their fellowship that is evident in the writings of the New Testament, early Christian texts, and the stories of many oppressed believers throughout the world. Where has this intense authenticity gone?Zooming in now, in time and space, consider the state of the Church in the US today. We are cursed with a comfort that threatens to commoditize our faiths, turning the Church into another producer of consumable products and programs no different from the neighborhood Wal-mart. And, like Wal-mart, the more we succeed in the selling and promoting of our shiny products, the more we dampen the glimmer of our once small, intimate and authentic community. It is then that our priority becomes our programs, and not our people. It is then that we are made captive to numbers and enrollment, removing the urgent authenticity that was once endemic to the gatherings of earlier Christians.This is why the answer is not to invent or even re-invent anything, for that would only add to the programs and products that we’d need to recreate the following program year and thus perpetuate the cycle. We don’t always need something new to survive. Right now, we need something old. We need to look back to the characteristics of earlier Christian gatherings and to the best of our ability recreate the conditions of their faithful fellowship.Is oppression and hardship, like that of the earlier Christians, a requirement for authenticity to take place? No. There are plenty of distillable elements in those pockets of fervent Christian community that are not necessarily derived only from oppression and poverty. Hospitality, for example, hosting people in one’s own space, is a common denominator throughout history in these communities. Challenging conversation and dialogue, and generosity are also two common traits. While it can certainly be argued that hardship yieldssuch elements, it is not the only way to bring them about. It is possible to achieve an equally authentic community by pretending, at least for a little while, that we have no other choice but to gather in the way these earlier believers did: in each others homes, supporting each other, checking in, and holding each other accountable as if our lives depended on it. This practiced hardship, or discipline if you will, is exactly the key to creating authentic communal gatherings in a society so saturated in consumerism.Pretend we have less, in other words, and we will value more.We have been experimenting with this notion throughout our first year in Urban Acacia, and it turns out it feels really good to act like we need each other to survive. It turns out, more accurately, that we do need each other…it just appears that we’ve lost sight of it for some time now.After a year of sitting on one another’s couches, snacking on homemade hummus, and listening to each household’s personal play-list in the background, all the while discussing our lives and praying for one another, we have grown into something. We have become a community.The Spirit has moved regardless of our lack of buildings and pews.Its funny, putting it that way, I imagine we now have some idea of how Henry Ford must have felt the first time he made something move without a horse.urbanacacia.comdanbeirne@urbanacacia.com