William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament
does not contain the word ‘church’ because, he said, the word is simply not
there. [See my blog "God Without Church".] He was murdered for that, along
with a few other words, all of which are ‘church’ words and were inserted into our
English bibles illegitimately by edict of King James, not by informed,
spiritual translators. Revival begins
with our seeing the elephant in the room and putting it out – or at least
letting those so gifted do so instead of marginalising them and ensuring they
can only serve the body in certain ‘acceptable’ ways.
The implications of this are comprehensive and
profound. Nothing is left untouched;
most things are re-defined; everything is re-made and re-shaped. In my view, that’s revival: personal
spiritual renewal; corporate spiritual restoration; community/national
spiritual awakening. But we delude
ourselves if we think we can have the revival without the restoration and the
renewal; and the renewal and restoration is a comprehensive and profound
transformation. As author Brian McLaren
says, Everything Must Change. The subtitle of this 2008 book is “Jesus,
Global Crises and a Revolution of Hope”.
On my watch, over the last twenty years, God has been saying
– through His prophets and teachers – that everything must change. And, of course, that is way too radical for
most if not all to hear. It is no less
true just because we struggle to hear, listen and obey. Throughout the journey of my watch since the
early 1990s, there has been no subject or ‘theology’ that does not need to be
transformed, renewed, turned on its head or – frankly – properly heard for the
first time. The vast bulk of our
theology traces its heritage back to one version or another of ‘historic church
doctrine’. In the process, its DNA has
been corrupted and it can no longer reproduce uncorrupted offspring. We need – if you’ll excuse the analogy for a
moment – stem cells from Jesus and Paul to bring our body back to health and
make it capable of reproducing according to the apostolic pattern.
And at the core of this entire process is our profound need
to understand – as the first-century disciples did – that a full and complete
and perfectly mutually satisfying relationship with God is available without church, without religion and without
bible-thumping. And on that last matter,
we need to understand – again, as the first-century disciples did – that the
bible and “the word of God” are not
synonymous; one really must not interchange the two terms.
In an interview about his book Everything Must Change with ‘theotherjournal.com’, Brian McLaren
said this:
… when you think about civilization, in many ways it’s like a machine.
It’s this complex structure that we put together to help us achieve these three
good desires for prosperity, equity, and security. Not to say there aren’t
other desires too, but those seem to be the fundamental purposes of
civilization. But if that machine is driven by bad programming, and once
again, the term I use for this is a destructive
framing story, then the very machinery that you’ve built to help
you becomes machinery that can destroy you. That’s why I call it a
suicide machine. And you know, it’s interesting that this shows up in
modern film. You think about a movie like The Matrix. It’s about a machine that we’ve
built turning on us. Or the movie I-Robot. Or even the movie Titanic, in a certain way.
It’s a machine that we’ve put our confidence into to take us where we want to
go, and because of the hubris or overconfidence that drives it, we sink!
In his book, McLaren reminds us that the earliest followers
of Jesus were called ‘disciples’, “which means students and apprentices. As disciples, they would learn to practice,
to live, to walk this new way, which would also require them to unlearn old ways.”
He then goes on to say (page 284):
So, faith communities that seek to form
disciples of this sort today will have a dual task. First, they must recognize that the dominant
societal system, the collective reality we have called the suicide machine, has
its own covert curriculum, a curriculum that must be unlearned. Second, they must develop their own creative
counter-curriculum to teach people the art of living in this new way. As they do so, they discover the subtle but
pervasive power of the dominant system’s covert curriculum.
Although I have not
employed this language, I have really warmed to McLaren’s idea, which
apparently came from something Dr Leonard Sweet said in McLaren’s hearing (see
McLaren p.52 ). In particular, I’m
interested in this “covert curriculum”, or McLaren’s “framing story”. Embedded within it are what he calls “the
stories we tell ourselves” – the narratives that form a central part of the
covert curriculum. And this curriculum
is the engine, if you like, of the suicide machine, contributing significantly
to the various dysfunctions that turn our societal-system machine feral and it
begins to turn on its creators.
Personally, we tell ourselves all sorts of strange things:
“that’ll never happen to me”; “I can quit anytime”; “if I can do it, anyone
can”; “good will triumph over evil”; “positive thinking will win the day”. We tell ourselves these things so we can feel
like we’re in control and not letting anything get the better of us. We become over-confident and hubristic; and
it seems to never enter our heads that these ‘stories’ might be lies.
And it’s not just ‘stories’ like these; on the one hand, we
have large and elaborate myths – personally and nationally – that we pass on
from one generation to the next for the purpose of social control. On the other hand, we have individual words
we love to use even though those words mean different things to different
people and we have deliberately changed their meaning to suit our purposes.
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