It’s popular in Christian circles today to talk about creating community. It is argued that one of the greatest things lacking in most of our churches is a sense of community, that we all belong, and are headed somewhere together — and actually enjoying each other’s company as we do it!
Whole books are written about how to develop this community within your church. Church planters talk about founding communities of faith, hope, and love. Many churches will even put the word “community” in their name.
However, the more I read the Scriptures, the more I get this strange feeling that Jesus never really intended to create a community. Instead, my reading of the Gospels leads me to believe that Jesus never intended to found a new community and ask people to join it, but rather to find already-existing communities, and join with them. So he went to synagogues (the teaching centers), weddings, dinner parties, watering holes, and join in the community that had already naturally developed.
There were, of course, always problems in such communities, and Jesus frequently tried to heal the brokenness and pain that was present in the community. But this is a more natural way of developing community than by putting together a bunch of strangers and saying, “Now get along!”
So are you trying to “plant a church” or “reach out” to your community? How about rather than starting something of your own and asking them to join you, why don’t you find out what God is already doing in your community, and then see how you join them. Don’t try to found the community; just find the one that is already there.
Not related, but a nice article on the difference between our guilt-culture and the honor/shame culture of the Scriptures. Jeremy, the Tektonics apologetics site utilizes the Social Science approach, so check it out for good summaries.
http://www.tektonics.org/tsr/tillstill7-5.html
So according to Tektonics, in shame societies don’t get caught and it never happened and there is no guilt to be had?
and somehow, these societies are closer to what God intended?
personal relationship with Jesus out the window too?
Look at how well honor/shame societies are doing today. oh wait….poverty, women as second class citizens, caste systems, terrorism, oppressed citizens, etc.
from the article..
“I can most certainly say that the collectivist, honor-shame mindset was crucial to making the Chinese church I grew up in look a lot more like the one seen in Acts rather than the dead, formal service churches are popularly made out to be.”
Maybe they aren’t saying all this, but that is certainly the impression I got from reading it over a couple of times.
after glancing over that website some more, seeing who the contributors are (John Hagee and Joyce Meyer, etc) I lol’d.
not a free grace environment, and I don’t know about the rest of the contributors but John Hagee is insane and Joyce Meyer lives off millions of dollars in donations in her mansion with guesthouses
Right on, as far as it goes. Let’s not forget the descriptions of the believing communities in Acts and the letters to those communities though. While joining people where they’re already gathered is essential, the formation of believing communities is a natural response to faith in Christ. The objection, then, would be to artificially creating community, the religious equivelent of growing test tube babies… Church planters, really all mature believers, should be attempting to nurture and guide the community that God is creating among people as they begin to follow Jesus.
Nathan!
Good to hear from you. I hear through the grapevine that you are up in Vancouver now…or at least headed that way soon? How is Amy? You all have a new kid, right?
Keep in touch, my friend! Maybe we can come visit you sometime in beautiful Vancouver! I am jealous. Ha ha.
Kirk, Tektonics was CRITICIQUING John Hagee and Joyce Meyer in their newsletter. Didn’t you notice that? JP Holding, who runs and is the main contributor to the Tektonics site is dead set against those celebrities. Secondly, I am Free Grace, but I don’t brush people off who aren’t FG. If you want to know about honor and shame, you can go ahead and ask Jeremy himself. He did his dissertation at Dallas on honor and shame. Fred Chay, another Free Gracer, has written a 34-page paper defending honor and shame as the Biblical culture.
JP Holding of Tektonics isn’t FG, but that doesn’t mean we can throw everything out the window. Another thing, yes women were treated as second-class citizens, but Jesus reversed all that with his teachings, giving women honor and allowing them to be his disciples. The Tektonics article wasn’t even dealing with that issue. Seriously, even Jeremy knows the Bible was an honor/shame culture. The Pharisees tried to shame Jesus in challenge-riposte. If you want to learn more, read books by Bruce Malina like New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology. Jesus reversed a lot of things, but it was all in an honor/shame context.
Now, Jeremy and I don’t endose everything these guys say. Some of these guys may use the ancient Client-Patron system to prove NOSAS. But Jeremy and I believe we are in a Client-Patron relationship with God in Free Grace fashion. Unfaithful clients lose rewards, nothing more.
Jeremy, please make sure Kirk gets the above message.
Kirk, here is what JP Holding of Tektonics has to say about Hagee and Meyer.
“And now the categories:
Persons who teach heretical or questionable doctrines.
That people who can’t even teach proper doctrine are on this list is terrifying in itself. T. D. Jakes, #1 on the list, teaches a form of modalism; he may do so in ignorance, but it speaks badly for Christianity that someone this ignorant is in such prominence.
Others I would put here are Osteen, Warren, the 2 Crouches, Meyer, McLaren, Schuller, Hagee, Hayford, Hinn, Haggard, Dollar, and Parsley.
Osteen has fallen for feelgoodism to the point that he refuses to teach about God’s judgment. He’s gone the “itching ears” route. See our entry on Osteen on in the November and December 2008 E-Block here.
My issues with Warren are laid out in my review of his book The Purpose Driven Life. Christian occupation with this book and its related programs has now (since I wrote the review) gotten to the point of being disastrous. The book and programs appeal to modern American individualism and selfishness and do little or nothing to conduct serious spiritual growth or contextual understanding of Christianity.
I recommend the resources here (a site where you can also find more info on some of the others named here).
The Crouches are known for being indifferent to correct doctrine and/or teaching false doctrine, and for inviting guests onto their televsion programs who promote heretical doctrines. One might even say that they are indifferent to the point of hostility. Hayford is their pastor and so shares in the guilt, but has in the past, on his own, offered some questionable teachings on spiritual warfare.
Meyer, Schuller, Dollar and Parsley all to some extent teach or encourage “prosperity” (“name it and claim it”) doctrines (as does Osteen, though I think naively).
Hagee emphasizes dispensational eschatology to an irrational extent. (As an aside, I was surprised to not see Tim LaHaye on the list, but maybe he’s #51.) See my review of his work in the May-June 2009 E-Block.
I don’t think I need to comment on Hinn, unless someone reading just arrived from Mars. (The planet, not Texe, which is 2 Rs anyway.)
McLaren is part of a movement that tends to dodge giving answers and say that settled doctrines are open for discussion. They do this in part because they don’t have the knowledge they need. This isn’t heresy per se but it is couterproductive. I am also compelled to put Bell in this category.
Questions about Haggard’s orthodoxy have been raised enough by serious sources that I feel he should be put here. I’m also not too sure how much good is done by someone who writes a book like The Jerusalem Diet and now has been seriously scandalized. If he weren’t here, he’d be in category 2:”
Read the full article at http://www.tektonics.org/af/christianmyths.html
Again, I’m FG, so I won’t agree that faith is loyalty based on performance. I would say that as a client God expects loyalty. If it’s not there, I lose rewards only. And I’m not a partial preterist like JP is.
Dan
my bad on the supporters I jumped the gun cause it was on the homepage.
But yeah my original post still stands.
And I’m not saying that they weren’t honor societies, I’m saying that the points they were making about honor societies having no guilt was bunk, and that honor societies are somehow superior (look at how great things are in the Middle East today). I’d also point out how the Jews were influenced by Greek/Roman culture in that time period so even if they were heavily honor driven they had other cultural influences.
In that article they also tried to argue that there were NO guilt societies at all in Bible times, then later on mention Greek writers were the first ones to come up with our modern guilt. I guess they forgot where and when the Greek culture had influence.
/unrelated note, they think the end times already happened according to that myth page. how do they validate that view? Nero as the antichrist?
oh and last point, the patron client model was developed by the Romans, so that proves my point. Examples : Caesar Augustus wanted the people to look at him as the Patron and the people as his clients. The Philosopher Juvenal wrote about the patron client relationships in The Satires.
the Greco-Roman cultural influence on people in the Bible is very clear (for a lot of different reasons).
Good thing I took those history classes / philosophy classes on ancient Rome. this is one of the first times they have come in handy.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O88-patronclientrelationship.html
Greetings, all.
Seems to me like I’m reading good points on both sides of the guilt/shame discussion, but I’m not sure we need to argue about which one is better, or which we ought to have.
Consider instead what the gospel offers to each sort of culture. To a shame culture, the gospel offers vindication to God’s people when every knee bows before Christ — but challenges them to accept vindication before God’s throne as the only one that matters. Honor there is true honor; shame there is true shame; nothing else remotely compares.
To a guilt culture, the gospel offers forgiveness through Christ — but requires that we accept God’s estimation of both our guilt and our forgiveness, rather than our own. Guilt before God is guilt indeed; God’s forgiveness is forgiveness indeed; nothing else compares.
In both cases, the effect is to cast down idols — in the one case, the idol of societal opinion, and in the other, the idol of individual moral sense — and to return God’s valuation of us to center stage.
If believer A is from a shame culture, and believer B is from a guilt culture, and both of them have thoroughly learned the lessons of the gospel, what unites them will be a shared theocentric culture, in which shame is shame before God at the judgment seat and guilt is guilt before God at the judgment seat. I submit that the difference between those two is not really worth talking about.
His,
Tim Nichols
excellent points Tim
oh and we aren’t really arguing, it’s just friendly debate lol. I love debate cause even if you are wrong you still learn something
Hey Kirk! I wasn’t really clear as to what I was getting at in the original post. I agree with you that honor/shame cultures really stink. I wasn’t trying to imply that we should switch to an honor/shame culture at all. When I first gave Jeremy the link, it was just for online reference since Jeremy and I have been studying these issues. The only thing Jeremy and I want to do is understand the social context so we can understand the passages the way the original recipients would have understood them. Then we can make a secondary application to fit our guilt-culture. As stated before, Jeremy and I don’t agree with all their conclusions. They ain’t FG, but Jeremy and I are full-blown FG. There is evidence that 1st century Christians saw God as patron (because of the Roman influence on the Jewish culture), but in FG fashion. But the Christian community in that time still held on to an honor/shame system – but with different values of what was honorable and what was shameful that non-Jesus groups. Women were honored, and Christians were to outdo one another in honoring one another, refusing to play the shame game because there was now an unlimited amount of honor God would give (thus also modifying the client-patron paradigm of limited good). Shame of course would be necessary for cases like 1 Cor 5:1.
Jeremy and I have discussed the Parable of the Talents (Matt 25:14-30). Bruce Malina and other Context Group members take the position that the unprofitable servant is actually the hero of the parable, and that the Master is an exploitive patron, rather than God or Jesus. Jeremy agreed with them (don’t know about now, he’s still studying it). Since it was a limited-good society, they see the good and faithful servants as being those who exploited the poor for the benefit of the master. I still stand for the traditional FG interpretation that the unprofitable servant is an unfaithful believer. I added that the unprofitable servant is thus shamed and loses reward. I see God as the Patron, and the issue of talents as an allegorical way of expressing activity for the Kingdom of God using familiar social realities (but in keeping with Mark 4:10-12, 24 and Matthew 13:11-16, the peasants may have taken it too literally and thus missed the whole point – thinking that the unprofitable servant is the hero when he’s really not). Plus, the context of the passage (24:3-25:13 and 25:31-46), in conjunction with Luke 19:11-27, makes me confident that 25:14-30 is obviously dealing with believers and rewards. My reading is an honor/shame reading that fits the traditional FG reading, unlike Malina’s reading.
Tim, excellent insight!
Dan,
Ohhhhhhh ok I get what you mean now. Yeah man I agree with you completely then! (harder to communicate through text than you would think eh?) Darn guess there isn’t anything to debate then. oh well. lol
I have seen those posts on the Talents and thought it was pretty interesting. Never thought of it the way Jeremy put it before so it made me think a bit!
Good discussion going on here…always making me think! For example, “how did we get on to this from my original post?” Ha ha ha. Just kidding. Feel free to write anything in the comments about this kind of stuff, since I enjoy it!
A step further, Jesus made sure He did not begin communes. Although the “People of the Way” had all things in common, the early church was taught very soon that the family of mom, dad & kids made it to the top of relationships. Referring to the father He says through Paul, “love your wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it.” The Dad sufficed as group leader until meeting time and the pastor-teacher gift apparently brought the group together so that doctrine could be taught for living as a family, collections for the needy as well as missionarries and “what deacon was able to paint the fish sign on the meeting place door” Higher truth explained the church as the bride with Christ Himself as bridegroom, she was to be holy and family was their to protect that interest as well as practice forgiveness should there be an indiscretion. The family was to go to the assembly prepared to listen to preaching on the body of Christ, the future and how to rejoice in persecution, a common practice in the day. Mega-churches would have been condemned as too visible and so unpersonal, as well as watering down of doctrine, criticism needed today as well as then, so Jesus knew best for the church. Mega churches are not born that way they are formed to draw attention to themselves, not Christ, and they make teaching the Word a last priority to make sure the dumbing down occurs so the baskets are full. Communes are a part of the process of falling away and are welcomed by Satan. Surely the gospel, they say, included prosperity for all since God is love and the owner of Lexus, Toyota and other car dealers on a thousand hills. A parking lot of them is worth a thousand words. When the rapture occurs, very few will not return to their vehicles and then line up for the marketing genius of the mark of the beast.
Jeremy,
I was wondering the same thing, initially. I re-read your post about three times trying to find the link before I realized there just wasn’t one. 😉
Digressing back to the point, you’re certainly right that Jesus set about to leaven existing communities with the gospel and redeem them; no argument at all there. But I share Nathan’s reservations about the way you’ve made the point.
“Let us do good to all, especially to those who are of the household of faith,” would seem to imply that such a household — a community — exists. The collection for the saints of Judea during the famine (2 Cor. 8-9) would seem to be a concrete expression of that community. Bringing it closer to home, the people with whom I regularly eat the Lord’s Table are a community; in fact, the community is constituted by that practice (among others). When we gather on Sunday to worship, we enter the heavenly tabernacle together, approach God’s throne together to seek His mercy, and offer the New Covenant sacrifices of praise together; again, we are unavoidably constituted by this practice.
I don’t see how a church planter could avoid ‘creating’ a community. There wasn’t a church there before, and now there is. That’s both a local community in itself and the local outpost of a much larger community, an empire whose capital city has not yet descended from heaven.
My principal problem with the flood of ‘how to create community’ books is not that they’re trying to create community, but the terminally silly means they’re using to do it — Super Bowls and tailgate parties, nachos and beer instead of the means God gave us: prayer and praise, bread and wine. Don’t get me wrong, I love nachos and beer, but that’s a big step down from the body and blood of Christ. Having turned ‘church’ into a Frankenstein patchwork of hoedown, country club and lecture hall — and thereby emptied the means God gave us of all their significance — we’re letting all kinds of nonsense rush in to fill the gap. Instead, we ought to be mining the riches of what God gave us, and way too often, that’s just not happening.
(Btw, a good read on this would be Peter Leithart, _Against Christianity_ from Canon Press. It would probably tick you off in spots, but you’d absolutely love it.)
His forever,
Tim Nichols