The Bride(zilla) of Christ: What to Do When God's People Hurt God's People - Softcover

Kluck, Ted; Martin, Ronnie

 
9781601428721: The Bride(zilla) of Christ: What to Do When God's People Hurt God's People
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1601428723 ISBN 13: 9781601428721
Verlag: Multnomah, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Sometimes, Church Hurts
 
The Church, the Bride of Christ. That description conjures up images of radiant white bride, eyes sparkling with peace and harmony, right? Maybe that’s why it’s such a gut-punch when that Bride behaves more like a grade school bully or a hot tempered drill sergeant.
 
What do you do with that reality, a reality that sometime hurts? Ted Kluck and Ronnie Martin aren’t interested in 140 characters of tweetable comfort. They’d rather share their own stories of being both the wounded and the wounder.  Plus they offer practical, yes-you-can-do-this steps to moving forward in those times not if, but when the Church hurts. 
 
Bride(zilla) of Christ is a verbal I.V. dripping with the mercy found only in Christ. Though you’ve been wronged, or perhaps wronged another, there is cause for great hope. The hurt is not the deepest thing. Grace is deeper still.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ted Kluck has authored or co-authored over a dozen books, including the bestselling Why We’re Not Emergent. Kluck’s work has appeared in ESPN the Magazine, Sports Spectrum Magazine, and ESPN.com. He is an assistant professor at Union University and lives in Jackson, Tennessee, with his wife and sons. Ronnie Martin is an internationally known Dove Award–nominated recording artist with more than 20 album credits spanning three decades. He is lead pastor of Substance Church in Ashland, Ohio. He lives in Ashland with his wife and daughter.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Picture a bucolic midwestern town. A little blue collar. A little university. A little conservative, and of course by a little con­servative I mean a lot conservative. This is an American flag T-shirt kind of town. This is a Republican think-tank kind of town. It’s the kind of town where “rapid change” is measured in decades, not minutes, hours, days, or weeks.

In many ways it’s the perfect kind of town. People say hello. The quaint coffee shop remains quaint because people love and support it accordingly. The town even supports a few “uncon­ventional” types, like the skinny, long-haired middle-aged guy who runs the used-record store, because somewhere in the cos­mos there’s a bylaw that says all used-record store owners are skinny, long-haired middle-aged guys.

In this town there happens to reside the national headquar­ters of a large church denomination, which, culturally, resides someplace in between mainline and evangelical. The denomi­nation’s showpiece church resides in town and is the biggest, most impressive building in town. It’s also, maybe, the town’s most successful business. Like most churches birthed out of the Hybels/megachurch/’80s model, it is large, taupe, carpeted, comfortable, and well appointed, and there is also a café. This, I’ve found, is a staple of all churches of that era.

Into this scene steps my friend. My friend has been an in­dependent thinker, an entrepreneur, and a musician his entire life. He’s recently moved to Midwestern Town (henceforth MWT) from Los Angeles, California, where he would rou­tinely spend two hours in traffic each evening and where change was breakneck and constant. In L.A., change was the only con­stant. Not so in MWT.

For a time, there was a mutually satisfying honeymoon pe­riod in which the American flag–shirtpopulation was enam­ored by my skinny-jeans, faux-military-jacket-wearing Los Angeles friend. He couldn’t have stood out more if he was walk­ing down Main Street each day wearing an astronaut’s outfit. Each trip out for a latte he would be regarded and talked about as though he were a real living, breathing celebrity, with peo­ple’s reactions ranging from “Tell us about the music industry!” to “Why on earth would you move to this town?”

For a while my friend and the town reveled in their mutual discovery of each other. Antique stores were frequented. Au­tumns were enjoyed, and fallen leaves raked. The first winter was quaint. Photographs of the snow were taken and of course Instagrammed, and comments were made like, “How are you and your wife surviving winter?” to which my friend would guffaw good-naturedly and say something polite about how much they were enjoying it. What’s weird is that they actually did enjoy it. A series of get-to-know-you dinners were had and enjoyed.

My friend took a job as a worship leader at the Hybels knockoff, and the moment he signed his contract he became the hippest person who had ever darkened the door of said church. While the rest of the aesthetic was all taupe and faux ficus trees, my friend’s office was a minimalist’s delight replete with art books, vinyl records, and a reformed book collection that made his office look like an annexed Crossway Publishing warehouse in the way that all reformed pastors’ offices should look like annexed Crossway Publishing warehouses.

But the thing was my friend loved the Bible, loved the church, and loved ministry. He did his best to lead worship, teach Sunday school classes, and lead small groups. He longed to do more than pick three praise songs to play each Sunday, but for a long time did the picking and the playing of those songs, steadfastly, each Sunday.

At some point the joy of discovery waned as joys of discov­ery always do. This is why people don’t spend forever falling in love, and if they say they do, they’re lying.

My friend, being creative, entrepreneurial, and eager to minister, began longing to preach. This longing to preach was met, initially, by some opportunities, but later those opportuni­ties began to diminish. His ideas fell on deaf ears in a town and a church where change happened at a glacial pace. Discourage­ment set in, but then, in time, discouragement gave way to inspiration.

Concurrently, harmony and mutual discovery gave way to acrimony and conflict. A conflict that, as all conflicts are, was distressingly living and active. The kind of conflict that loads a glance in a hallway. That loads a previously unloaded comment in a meeting. That thinks the worst of the other. The kind of conflict where the idea of grace given because of the boundless grace of Christ we’ve received is somehow but also understand­ably forgotten. This is the Enemy at work in concert with the still-live cultures of sin nature, ego, and pride that swim in our hearts—hearts that are capable of nothing good apart from Christ.

Sometimes we forget this and wield the kind of power that the world wields. People do this. It’s not unusual. People hurt other people. Commitments are broken and motives are im pugned. There’s usually someone involved—usually a strong, charismatic leader—who has never had his motives questioned before or, at least, has never met an argument he hasn’t won. He sees human interaction as competition and perhaps sees church as a territory that must be either annexed or protected, because he has been fed a steady diet of the world’s constructs of power via 1980s corporate culture and his steady diet of John Wayne movies, which are both “clean” and “wholesome.”

For the record, I love John Wayne, and I met and really like the John Wayne figure in this anecdote, which all serves to al­most hopelessly complicate these sorts of conflicts.

He is a strong figure. John Wayneian himself in stature and stride. He was probably a college athlete of some kind. The church is “protected” and prospers. People feel safe. Coffee flows. Conflicts are somewhat gray and difficult because that’s pretty much how they always are. My friend loses sleep. He knows his days are numbered. His chest pounds while he lies in bed, and the house and town, which once seemed so quaint, now fill him with questions like, “Should we have come here?” and “What are we doing here?” and “Why is this happening?” The coffee shop that once held fawning, curious admirers now holds the aroma of distrust and anxiety, which is perceived even if not actually there.

This kind of thing happens outside and inside churches every day because we need Christ desperately, and we don’t just need Him on that one sunny day when we’re six, by the swing set, when we “ask Him into our hearts.”

E-mails are sent and, as is often the case when people are in a deep state of conflict, misinterpreted. The John Wayne figure feels especially at odds with the Los Angeles figure. Meetings are held. Forgiveness is asked for and, perhaps, not given. Spiri­tual rhetoric is thrown around via words like character and con­cern. This is a time in which it’s not especially advantageous to be perceived as a flaky former California rock star with one too many fast-paced ideas. Ideas are currency in some places and threats in others.

Eventually Ronnie leaves the church. He has three weeks to dismantle the minimalist office (which takes only a few min­utes for obvious reasons germane to minimalism). He has three weeks to return things like staplers, three-hole punches, and antiquated Toshiba laptops....

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Verlag
Multnomah
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1601428723
ISBN 13 
9781601428721
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
208
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