To Boldly Go
The Mission of The Black Church
The Starship Enterprise Is Made of Cheese
Well, not cheese per se, but, like the Lunar Module from the
Apollo days, the starship Enterprise was never constructed to
fly within earth’s atmosphere. The walls of the ship are made of
some futuristic polymer and “transparent aluminum.” Someone
could, conceivably, kick a hole in the ship’s hull if they tried
hard enough. Inside our normal gravity, the ship would likely
implode, and it is hardly airworthy and likely would use up
virtually all of its fuel reserves just keeping itself in the
air. Like the Lunar Module, the Enterprise is designed to
operate only in outer space.
What holds the ship together is something called a Structural
Integrity Field, which is, essentially, a charged magnetic
current that polarizes (or hardens, reinforces) the hull. Out in
space, with that hull so polarized, the ship is certainly space
worthy. And with its protective power grid, or “shields,” at
full power, the ship cannot be damaged by, well, anything.
That’s why the first thing the Klingons do when they attack is
fire at the shield generators. We can never build a spaceship
strong enough or load enough fuel on it to blast Hillary into
outer space. The truth is, if we are ever to reach the stars,
we’ve got to build that ship in outer space. Not in San
Francisco but in orbit over San Francisco.
If we were to build the Enterprise on the ground rather than in
space, we’d have to install all these things we’d never need in
space. Like heavy, steel-reinforced bulkheads to prevent the
ship from collapsing in on itself. Enormously complex
scaffolding—both inside and out—for work crews, which we would
not need in outer space because the guys could just float
around. Some kind of massive harness or cradle with which
secondary rockets could lift the Enterprise into orbit. Cleaning
crews constantly scrubbing off environmental detritus like rain
and dust, dead birds and insects. The flagship of the Starfleet,
the Enterprise’s design specs are top secret. Difficult to keep
things top secret when you’re building something the size of an
aircraft carrier out in plain sight. The turbolifts—elevators—which
work by manipulating the psi (pounds per square inch) of the
Enterprise’s artificial gravity (literally making the elevator
heavier or lighter than the gravity of the elevator shaft
itself) would not function because there’d be real gravity,
which we cannot turn on and off. So, more scaffolding, more
ladders. And forget the warp engines—they could not be installed
at all because even an accidental startup might rip a hole in
the fabric of the earth’s atmosphere and destroy the planet.
Without the warp core running, there would be no power to the
ship other than conventional batteries and so forth. The
Enterprise uses enough electricity to power a small city, which
would mean we’d have to build a massive power plant just to keep
the lights on.
These days, when we build a church, we are usually building a
bigger church, a better church, because we've either outgrown
the old one or because we are competing with the guy down the
street. A sleeker, faster, more powerful Starship Enterprise,
but we have no intention—none—to actually fly the ship anywhere.
We will, instead, hang out in port and congratulate ourselves.
Look at us. Ain't we great. Instead of a cramped, run-down
building where we sit and do nothing, we'll have a large, modern
facility where we'll sit and do nothing. We are spending money
on us, so we can continue huddling inside our walls while the
very street our church is located on continues spiraling towards
a Christ-less eternity.
In other words, we tend to build to hoard and gather, without
any clear rationale of why we're even doing it. After Hurricane
Katrina devastated New Orleans, Bishop Paul S. Morton opened the
Greater St. Stephen Full Gospel Baptist Church in Atlanta, (now
re-named Changing A Generation Full Gospel Baptist Church) under
the credo that they were becoming "One Church in Two States" and
vowing that they are "Changing the Way We Do Church." Changing
it away from the scriptural model. Morton, like many other
"Mega-Bishops," is building an empire. The Apostle Paul, on the
other hand, went about building local churches rather than
amassing an empire. The biblical model is purpose and mission.
I've had the extremely rare occasion of meeting black pastors
who are building a church in order to actually accomplish
something in the community. The trend toward "multiple campuses"
can often if not usually be about bragging rights, elevating a
pastor to "bishop" or swelling the ranks of the congregation.
The model of today's text is, the large church, the resourceful
and profitable ministry, seeks to plant new churches rather than
just enlarge itself. Resources (people, material things,
finances) are poured out into new ministries that are
independent of and, just as often, culturally divergent from the
parent ministry that planted the church.
This is something white churches do every day. While I'm sure it
is done within our culture, I am not personally, in thirty plus
years of ministry, aware of it. Instead, I see the profitable
and stable black church with thousands if not hundreds of
thousands and, in some rare cases millions, of dollars in the
bank. The bank. Resources which could be putting hands and feet
to the love of Jesus Christ are instead placed into treasury
bonds and certificates of deposit, whose value can plummet and
have plummeted overnight, wiping out everything we've saved
[Matthew 6:19-24]. The responsible church needs X-amount of
months' operating expenses in reserve, and perhaps Y-amount of
cash on hand above that. But once you've hit two million in the
bank, you're just being ridiculous and kidding yourself about
being a church. Keeping millions in the bank so you can brag
about having millions in the bank is a completely bankrupt
ideology. Pastors who go along with this foolishness are simply
lost, and the people following them are just as lost.
Great Visual, Makes No Sense: Building a starship within Earth's gravity would require us to install tons of things we'd never need in outer space. Star Trek spaceships are built in orbit, one of dozens of things Director J.J. Abrams ignored in favor of a cool visual. Which, of course, misses the point that scien fiction ideally includes actual science.
Adapt. Change Become.
We will celebrate change and growth. When we stop changing we
will start dying. We will embrace the obstacles and grow around
them. We will be a part of the place where we live. Our
geography will color us and shape us. We will lean and move to
reach the light and nothing will stop us from innovating and
adapting as the Holy Spirit compels us. Our structure will
always submit to Spirit. —Eric C. Mason
It's a familiar story. A minister feels called by God, starts a
bible study in his basement. Sets up folding chairs in a
storefront. Shares space in an existing church. Bleeds the
congregation for a down payment and then struggles forward with
the mortgage and the utilities and installment payments on pews,
musicians' salaries and administrative costs. Welcome to church.
What few, if any of us, ever ask is... why? Why are we doing all
of this? Why are we working ourselves to death? Why are we
oppressing people for money and running bake sales and turning a
blind eye and deaf ear to ungodly behavior—most especially with
our leaders and musicians? Why are we going through all of this?
It is a question many if not most of us simply have no answer
to. Many, if not most, of us could not explain—even at
gunpoint—the mission of our church. Our purpose, what it is that
we are building. Maybe if we could, we could trim down the
amount of junk—the sheer gross tonnage of unneeded stuff—we
bring along for the journey.
A journey to nowhere. In our tradition, we spend all of our time
prepping. Building the ship. The early church was built in the
environment in which it was needed. It was built on road trips
through Asia and Europe. Built in peoples' homes but, more
importantly, in peoples' lives. Suffering persecution in
Jerusalem, many of the early Christians fled to Antioch, which
became a stronghold for the early church, a place of prophets
and preachers and teachers. There, five leaders (Barnabus,
Simeon, Lucious, Mananen and Paul) started nine churches
(Cyprus, Iconium, Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, Galatia,
Colosse, Corinth and Ephesus). These men faced both religious
and political persecution, risked torture and death at the hands
of angry Jews and hateful pagan worshippers.
But they kept on with their mission. They built churches along
the way, out in the void, along their journey. They supported
those initiatives through prayer and finances, revisiting the
churches in their early stages to help support and correct them
as needed. These leaders were not content to simply maintain the
status quo. They were zealots, empowered and inspired by the
Holy Spirit to move, to keep moving, beyond the conventions of
the established community.
Had many of us been in charge, the church would have died out at
Antioch. We don't invite anybody to church. We certainly don't
take the church to them. We are uncomfortable around strangers,
weak in our scriptural knowledge, and we lack the empowering
Spirit of God that brings boldness. Many of us have shrillness
and an innate hostility we confuse with boldness, but that's
just us being jerks. That loud, brassy, hostile, quick-tempered
Church Folk attitude ha nothing whatsoever to do with Christ.
That lack of love is the most obvious sign that Christ is not
working within us.
Trek Junior: Fun, fast, and makes absolutely no sense. If your local junior high put on a Star Trek play, it would be on par with this.
The Transformative Power of The Holy Spirit
Fire. We will be a bright, hot fire in the cold. Relevance is
not an option. We will relate and understand the community we
live in. We will live among it and in it. We will burn endlessly
in the night and throw ideas on the fire when the fire burns
low. We will meet people where they are. We will go where they
go and relentlessly share the Good News of Jesus Christ. —Eric
C. Mason
The healthy church is like a tree planted by the river (Psalms
1). Its roots in the community are long and deep. It knows the
people, the places, the things they do, the times they do them.
A church without roots in its own community is an obscenity. It
is in a ridiculous state of denial about its very nature. It is
an affront to the cross.
Most of our churches today wouldn’t buy their neighbors a pizza.
Their doors are locked, windows shuttered, lights out most days
of the week. Except for Sunday worship, bible study, and a few
half-hearted rehearsals, the church stands empty, neighbors
passing by not even curious about what might be going on inside
there. Many of our churches are simply dying off, pastors
admonishing their dwindling membership to pray. Pray that God
would send them in, Send them in, Lord, send them in. Send in
the people we routinely ignore and walk past. Whose driveways we
block with our cars and whose needs we leave unaddressed. Send
in the hopeless we refuse to comfort. The hungry we refuse to
feed. The lowly we refuse to comfort. Send them in. This is how
utterly backward we are. This is why our churches do not grow.
Evaluating our motives for doing what we do requires a rare kind
of humility and selflessness many of our pastors, having failed
the character test, simply do not possess. Many of our pastors
have become vain and self-absorbed, and would rather keep riding
their shrinking base of struggling faithful than to evaluate, in
any spiritually meaningful way, the purpose and effectiveness of
their ministry or question their motives for even being there.
It is the rare pastor that I’ve met who can coherently define
their ministry’s purpose for existing and identify specific, key
goals for the ministry within the community in which it is
located. Most pastors can define some canned, rehearsed, generic
sense of what their church is about, but when pressed to tailor
that definition to the specific community, the specific, literal
corner their church is located upon, most pastors choke. They
simply don’t know the immediate community in which their church
is located. These pastors drive to church, do their thing, and
drive out, having never even met the people who live, literally,
right next door. So, all the fund raising, all the pamphlet
printing, all the pressuring of the faithful—what’s that all
about? Most pastors will tell you it’s about church growth. Many
will dance around the head of a pin talking about the goals
Jesus set forth for His church, Peter and Paul and the second
chapter of Acts. At the end of the day, if these men were
truthful, they’d admit that, in most cases, church growth is
simply about money. About increasing the base number of
tithes-paying members. About their own paychecks. About the
struggle to keep the lights on. When, truthfully, the church
should be proactive. Moving, growing, adapting. The church
should be on a mission and we, all of us, should be explorers.
Adrenaline pumping, blood flowing. Excited about what's around
the next bend. We should be on a mission. Where No Man Has Gone
Before.
Instead, we build these earthbound churches. Instead of building
them in the wondrous void of the heavens, we ground them in
Kansas. And we install all this junk we don't need for the
voyage. All this heavy steel and iron, which we would not need
if we'd built the thing in the environment in which it was
designed to function. Churches taking out second mortgages for
pews. Pews. Tens of thousands of dollars on immovable wooden
seating that renders the main sanctuary completely useless most
hours of the day and many days of the week. We waste so much
fuel on pastors, especially pastors we know, for a fact, are
corrupt or lazy or ineffectual. But, boy, can these clowns
preach. So, for that show—a show that inspires us to do nothing,
that moves us nowhere—we guilt and oppress people in order to
line his pockets. This is the evolution of the African American
church tradition: to do nothing and go nowhere. To load down our
churches, building them in the wrong place and in the wrong way.
To motivate our membership the same way the world does—with
money. Give Us Money So We Can Brag About How Much Money We
Have.
One church I know recently had a giant mock check—like those
Publishers Clearing House award prizes—made out to their pastor,
presenting him with more than ten thousand dollars for his
anniversary. We Love Our Pastor. We Worship Our Pastor. We fear
our pastor more than we fear God. But there were no figures
publicly presented about how many souls were saved, how many
hungry fed. That this ignorant clown of a pastor allowed this,
stood there grinning, taking this huge mock check paid for by
the sweat and sacrifice of his memberships' tithes and offering,
makes him a complete phony and the very model of the snakes and
vipers Jesus preached against. Yet this is, to one extent or
another, the rule rather than the exception. The needy are
routinely turned away from this clown's church during the week,
a church with an unfathomable amount of cash on hand and
investments, that does absolutely, positively nothing. It sits
there, congratulating itself.
One of the things I liked most about Gene Rod-denberry's
hopeful, utopian future (which was all but completely missing
from the idealistically shallow 2009 reboot) was that, by the
23rd century, we'd not only eliminated war and disease and
famine, we'd stopped using money. There was no money. Money was
no longer the motivating factor for humanity. "We work to better
ourselves," Jean-Luc Picard said in Star Trek: First Contact.
Some of our church mothers have been frying chicken for the Lord
for forty years. These women have, for the most part, simply
been exploited by pastors lining their pockets and high-fiving
each other while comparing head counts of tithes-paying members
(many pastors I've known tend to differentiate between members
and tithes-paying members, our scripturally inaccurate
legalistic bullying and guilting of people to pay up being one
of the church's core scams: we fuel our spaceships with guilt
and fear).
If we were led by God, if we were following God, we'd build our
ministries with less junk. With less pettiness and fear. With
less arrogance and bullying, a cultural tradition handed down
from slavery. With less meanness. We don't need big hats. We
don't need loud, ridiculous shiny suits. We don't need luxury
cars or chandeliers or top-of-the-line this or that. All that
junk does is weigh us down for the journey.
We should never build a spaceship on the ground. We will,
someday, build a spaceship in outer space. If not made
specifically of cheese, the ship will be extraordinarily
lightweight. So lightweight that we would never be able to land
it as gravity would crush it like a tin can. The ship would be
fuel independent, such that it refuels itself along its journey.
We would polarize the hull with the love of Jesus Christ so
nothing could damage it. And we all need to buckle in for a trip
that would last many, many years.
Christopher J. Priest
7 March 2010
editor@praisenet.org
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