Circuit Thoughts

This past Sunday was Ascension Sunday. Ascension Day was May 13, 10 days before Pentecost, which will be this coming Sunday. This is the day that Luke talks about in Acts 1:1-11. I’ll let you read that for yourself.

It is kind of interesting, (and I think a little humorous) that verse 11 has two angels kind of chastising the disciples for standing around and looking up in the sky after Jesus was lifted into the clouds. “They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” (verse 11a). Imagine, if you will, grown men doing nothing but looking up in the sky with only clouds.

But Jesus had a plan. In Matthew he tells the disciples to go and make disciples. (Matthew 28). Basically, the idea was to not just stand there, but to do something.

You see, Jesus died because of the established religion of the time. The temple of that time period was the place to worship God. If anyone wanted to know about God, they had to go to the temple. There really wasn’t an evangelical outreach from there.

Jesus however didn’t want the disciples to build a new temple. The call to go and make disciples tells us everything we need to know about what the church is supposed to look like. What Christ called for was a movement, not an institution.

Today, we in the USA have developed the church into the hallmark of institutions. We have doctrine, dogma and denominational teachings. To be fair, that isn’t completely our fault, we did inherit quite a bit of institutionalism from the church in England and Europe. But instead of using the church as a staging area for ministry, we have turned it into our own comfortable theological nest.

And there lies the rub. The Gospel was meant to move, not be frozen in one place. The church is supposed to be mobile, not tied to a building or location. Christ told us to go, and the angels reminded the disciples they needed to move.

The question is, how do we break out of this institution we have put ourselves in? How do we get out of the theologically, doctrinal box we have managed to build around ourselves? Well, that is a conundrum. To become de-institutionalized means, we must get uncomfortable and maybe even dirty.

Becoming the gospel means we must step out of our comfort zone and into the message of Christ. We will need to become that message, and by doing so we become the feet and hands of Christ.

Teresa of Avila expressed this reality thusly:

“God of love, help us to remember that Christ has no body now on earth but ours, no hands but ours, no feet but ours. Ours are the eyes to see the needs of the world. Ours are the hands with which to bless everyone now. Ours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good.” (The Westminster Collection of Christian prayers. Dorothy Stewart)

If we want to change the world, we must change. To make disciples, we must GO.

Time to be the church.