In his challenging book, The Importance of Being Foolish: How to Think Like Jesus (Harper San Francisco), Brennan Manning offers this provacative commentary:
" Why are so many Christians mummified by middle age? Why do we stop growing in the spiritual dimensions of our lives? Why do our liturgies become so stagnant...? Why have creativity and flexibility given way to repitition and rigidity? Where is the life lived as new creations?
We trot out once more what worked in the past. The breath of God is bottled and the gallivanting Spirit (my emphasis) is stymied. The new, the creative, the fresh is looked on with suspicion, not with fascination. 'To live is to change,' wrote John Henry Newman, 'and to have lived well is to have changed often.' ... In the lives of many Christians, apprehension about making mistakes stunts growth, stifles the Spirit, and ensures the progressive narrowing of their personalities.
The church of Jesus Christ is a place of promise and possibility, of adventure and discovery, a community of love on the move, ... But the security seekers are the enemies of openness. Their insistence on preserving the status quo thwarts innovation and spontaneity and discourages the exploration of new roads into the mind of Christ Jesus; wanting to keep things the way they are automatically introduces a new insecurity with more cautions, threats, and nervous tension" (pp. 67-68).
Manning has hit the nail on the head. Sizeable segments of established, insitutional Christianity are floundering because so much of their structure and policy is devoted to preservation not exploration--revival (of the past) not discovery. Hobbled by fear-based doctrines into which they have retreated to avoid tainting by this big bad world until their exegetically contrived escape from it takes place, many Christian groups now find themselves fighting with everything they have to preserve and justify their existence. The language of return--to the faith of our fathers, to "holiness", to the old time religion, to the Bible (as it was taught "back in the day")-- flavors the sermons and enclaves of such Christian entities. Some are making genuine efforts to regain effectiveness (usually defined by numerical and monetary growth), but usually only end up trying to do what they used to do only better. New marketing strategies and reconfigured flow charts will never accomplish what a ready to change pursuit of the "gallivanting Spirit" will. In my opinion, nothing short of a radical break from the past (see my blog on "Abraham Momemts") will result in the vital Christianity we long to see in the 21st Century.
Among the things of the past I think we should leave behind are clergy dominated churches, building centered entertainment oriented church services, fear-based doctrinal schemes that lead to isolation and exclusion, the cerebral-biblicism-supercedes-humble-spirituality approach to the faith, and all the pitfalls of routinization and institutionalization that have been characteristic of "mainstream" Chrisitianity. Unencumbered by all this baggage, who knows what Christ's church might look like? No one does and that's the point! It's time we go gallivanting into our future and find out.
