JUDGE AND SAVIOR TO CULTIVATOR

Suppose, for a moment, there is a man named James. James was set up on a blind date with a woman named Julie. When James and Julie identify one another in the restaurant and are seated by the host, and the waitress begins to place water on the table James begins the conversation saying, “When I saw you I knew right away there was something about you that I found interesting. You know what it is? You were born with one leg slightly longer than the other leg, which is why you walk with a bit of a limp. It is no big deal but I think you should see my doctor so she can have a look at it and maybe straighten you up a bit.” What does Julie do?

Or suppose for a moment, you walk along the street in Fort Worth with some friends who are trying to cheer you up after a long day at work. You turn to enter into a local business establishment, when someone you do not know says to you, “I know why you are sad and I know exactly what will cheer you up. You need to give more back to your community by volunteering.” What do you do?

As silly as these scenarios are, I have encountered non-Christians who have experienced Christianity as people who act like James and the unknown person. We have the stigma of meeting people, telling them what their problem is (sin) and then share with them the solution (Jesus). The Church becomes the judge and savior to people. Could this be why 87% of people outside the Church aged 16-29 view Christians as “Judgmental” (See the book Unchristian)? Yet not even Christ himself came to condemn or judge the world (John 3:17). Rather, Jesus spent much of his time talking with people (verses talking AT people). Jesus spent years on this earth cultivating relationships. He has a circle of 12 and an inner circle of 3. He listened to the man born blind and cultivated a relationship with him (John 9).

So I challenge all those who would take on the mantle of “Cultural Architect” to move away from judging and trying to save people and move into a life of cultivating as many relationships as we can. What would it look like if we stopped watching some of the reality television which makes us feel superior to others and called an estranged friend or family member? What would it look like if we stopped pointing our fingers at the proverbial liberals/conservatives and tied to listen to others with opposing views to work toward a compromise? I am not sure but I think that looks a little like the Kingdom of God.

DUALISTIC WORLDVIEW TO SACRED WORLDVIEW

In the beginning God gathered the waters together and dry land appeared. God saw that this was good. Moses encounters a bush that is on fire but is not consumed. When he moves toward the burning bush and he hears these words, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” When Jesus died in the Gospel of Matthew, the temple curtain was torn from top to bottom, removing the only barrier between the people and the “holy of holies” in the temple.

What do these three stories share? All of them point to an idea that is has been in Christian tradition since the beginning in Antioch but since the enlightenment has been forgotten. With the dawn of the enlightenment, and the rise of science as a valid way to understand and learn about the world, humanity quickly learned to organize and categorize things in order to better understand the world around us. Animals were classified into Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. We organized a separate order for plants. The rise of the industrial revolution leads to humans creating time into distinguishable blocks. There was time for work, time for home and family, time for play and time for worship. We have become masters at categorizing the world around us like a giant waffle.

However, the walls of the waffle are breaking down all around us with the advent of the internet, social media, cell phones and TiVo. We can do work from home and set our home coffee maker from work. Where once we had to block of time to fly and see friends, now we connect through Skpye and webcams. We ‘pause’ live T.V. in order to answer a phone call from work. As we break down the walls around us, it feels like we are in the midst of the temple curtain being torn. There is no longer a set time for work and only work. There is no longer a set time for play and only play. As such, we have to begin to shift our thinking away from there is a set time for church. The ground Moses stood on did not ‘become’ holy. Rather, the ground, according to Genesis, was already holy; Moses just became aware of it. We need to be like Moses and become aware that all ground and time is sacred. I invite all cultural architects to join with me to begin to break down the waffle walls around us in order to allow the Spirit of God to move as freely as possible. Who knows, you might be waking by a burning bush not only in worship on a Sunday but by the water cooler on Thursday.

COUNTING PEOPLE AND MONEY TO COUNTING RELATIONSHIPS AND MISSION

It is said that we count what it important to us. Each week we ask Sunday school classes to turn in the number of people present in the class. We ask people to register attendance with us in worship and, for good measure, we have someone else count heads during worship. Each Monday morning we have a faithful group of people who count the previous day’s collection of tithes and offerings. I know these numbers are important and we also count other things; however, I wonder what it might look like if we elevated the other things we count to the level of importance that we have for counting people and money? What if we began to count the number of new relationships our members created in the past week? What about relationships we have helped reconcile? What if we counted the number of failures we had in the past year? Let us face it, if we are not failing at something then we are not doing anything new or innovating ministry. Does your small group count the number of hours served in mission in the past week/month? What if we shared in worship not the amount of money collected for a ministry but the amount of time invested by our members to the community? So from one Cultural Architect to another, I ask you, “What do we/you count? What do we not count?”

TALKING AT PEOPLE TO TALKING WITH PEOPLE

Current culture elevates the voice of the individual more than previous generations have. For instance, the way we watch television has changed. Before, we would sit and watch the program. Now, we watch the program and ‘text’ in a vote which influences the direction of the show. The shift away from being ‘told’ what is good and entertaining, is shifting toward each of us having a voice in that conversation. We get to decide who the next singing sensation will be and which dancer is the most graceful. For years the Church has stood up and told people what the Word of God is and what it means and cared very little of what the gathered community of faith had to say on the matter. The Church needs to be “conversation-al” rather than “dictation-al”. We need to move out of our pulpits and down from our stages and invite people into conversation about the Living God. Just as few people want to live under a monarchy, we need to stop treating the Bible and the message of Christ as though we “church people” are the monarchy of the Word telling people what it means and how to live. Rather, to become a cultural architect is to acknowledge the value of every person and engage everyone in a conversation, because each person matters – not just the monarch.