Declaration and Demonstration – Word and Works

One of the most intriguing people I’ve come across in my time in Bletchley goes by the name Ricky Rew.  I’m not intrigued by the name, fascinating though it is, I’ve been tremendously blessed by this man primarily because he captures that precious quality of being very real and human and being very much motivated by God to do great things for him.  That combination is not as prominent as you think in certain Christian circles, so it is a delight to come across it.

I am a fan of Twitter, as you should know by now, and I follow the man Ricky (as should you @RickyRew).  Today he posted a link to an article that sparked my interest.  The article has the teasing question for a title – But Is It Church?  Have a read of it.

As I read it a number of things sprung to mind.

My understanding of church has been exposed in the last 12 years to be a very narrow view indeed.  In my formative years on the planet, church and Christian living revolved around church attendance, moral uprightness and observance of key Christian functions like baptism, Lord’s Supper and Sabbath.  Incorporated in that was an element of evangelism, but nothing too serious.  The main thing was as long as I attended the church services, behaved meself like a good boy and went through the key church rituals, I’d be right with God.

That view was shattered when I left the comforts of home and lived at the university campus and visited a church in the same denomination but in a different locality.  Slowly but surely, some of the givens that were the bedrock of me definition of church were shaken.

By the time our family left Stoke-on-Trent in 2009/10 it was clear that church life wasn’t about observing rituals alone.  It was about impacting the lives of those around us. When Jesus said let your lights shine before men – that actually meant men had to see the light we were shining.  When Jesus said that the two great commandments was love for God and love for the neighbour – that meant that our neighbour had to experience the love we had for them.

Jesus was not on the earth to bring people to a mundane existence of going through holy hoops to tick the boxes and say we’d done our little bit in our holy huddle.  Jesus was on a mission – and that mission involved being light in the darkness, hope among the hopeless, healing for the sick, peace for the dysfunctional and love for those who so desperately needed it.

Living out that mission involved two crucial components – declaration and demonstration.

My background had focussed more on the former and saw the latter in terms of being distinctive by moral upright behaviour.  Even the focus on the former tended to be rather insular and had little impact beyond the walls of the church building.

Meanwhile as I was exposed to other expressions of Christianity I came across those who were so focussed on the demonstration element that it was enough to have done good works without any follow-up in terms of declaration being necessary.  They adopted the quote often linked to St. Francis of Assisi ‘preach the gospel and use words where necessary’ to be the permission to just crack on with good works and that being enough.

The Empowerment Course shared in the article linked at the top could appear to veer towards this preference of demonstration over declaration.  I am in no way condemning this.  I applaud it.  I believe that God has equipped men and women to serve the needs of those in their community and express God’s Shalom through initiatives like this.  As I believe brothers and sisters in Christ who work in non-Christian businesses and institutions with similar aims, are also strategically placed to be Light and Salt where they are without necessarily having a T-Shirt with ‘Jesus Is The Answer’ and a scripture verse as an answer to every question.

God’s Kingdom is wider than we think and so is church.

Having said that, the missional element of Christ was still all about making disciples.  The impact He made in his healing and miracles was designed as a sign that people would note and follow back to the Father.  The commission left with His disciples is through the demonstration to declare the sign so that those who got it could follow Jesus to the glory of the Father.

Part of the limited view of church of my upbringing and the extreme of demonstration without declaration is that it doesn’t fulfil the element of our active engagement in making disciples.

Of course, then there is the question of what does it mean to make disciples – and that’s a whole different issue – with crucial connections to the issue of demonstration and declaration.

It’s not enough to sit in church and go through the rituals.  It’s not enough to mentally assent to the nice sentiment of loving our neighbours as ourselves.  It is not enough to be doing noble acts for the community.  Somehow the dots have to be joined, in some way we are still called to make disciples – teaching them.

Doing that however, does not necessarily comfortably fit into a nice church program.  That’s why it is a whole life project powered by worship, motivated by God’s glory and sourced in connecting the reality of the divine with the walk in the messy world around us.

For His Name’s Sake

Shalom

dmcd