Corporate Identity Versus Personal Indentity in Faith

At some point in the process of becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ, each of us must transition from a faith that is focused on corporate identity to a faith that is centered in personal identity. I have spoken of that corporate identity as responding to God’s initiative of grace by becoming part of the family of God.

Our first sense of who we are as followers of Jesus Christ is shaped by the community with which we identify. That community can be an actual family. It can be a Bible study group, a prayer and support group, or a worshiping community with which we identify. The “spiritual family” that this group represents provides affiliation, support, encouragement, challenge, and a sense of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. In this family we find welcome, acceptance, affirmation, encouragement, and support. We also find boundaries that separate our corporate identities from those outside the group—boundaries that define the expectations of the group. These boundaries may be explicitly stated or shared by common understanding; but they will describe the degree of involvement, the comfortable depth of the mutual relationships, and often the kinds of thoughts and behaviors that are deemed appropriate for participation in the group.

This kind of response to God’s grace is expressed in publicly identifying with the “family,” becoming a “member” of the group, or “joining” a church. This “family of God” blesses us with an identity. It embraces us in its sense of community. It instructs and guides us in how to live as a separate and distinct “family of faith” in the world. For many people and many churches, this is as far as you need to go in your discipleship. You have been “saved.” You have identified yourself publicly as a believer. You have accepted initiation into the community by being baptized.

My contention is that this “completed conversion experience” that ends in affiliation with “the family of God” is only the very first step in discipleship. It is only column 2 of the 6 columns in the “Making Disciples” chart. I identify it as the “Old Covenant” kind of faith that falls short of the radical transformation that the Gospel describes in calling us to become children of God and disciples of Jesus. It may never challenge us to the kind of Christlikeness that loves God with heart, soul, mind, and strength and loves our neighbors as ourselves.

The Gospel of John concludes with the fundamental question that I want to address in the days ahead. After three years of being associated with Jesus as one of his followers, Simon Peter faced an intimate encounter with the Risen Lord. Simon was a disciple—in fact, the lead disciple. He was deeply embedded in the disciple “family.” He had lived with Jesus, followed Jesus, and learned from Jesus. But one question still remained: “Simon, do you love me?”

“Of course, I love you. You know that I love you. I’ve shown you my love by following you through good times and bad. How can you question my devotion—well, maybe I did deny you at a crucial point—but that wasn’t the real me. I do love you.”

But Jesus pressed on—three times—with the central question of discipleship. We will explore the many facets of that question in the days ahead, and I will blend in with those some aspects of my own pilgrimage in seeking first to become a child of God, and then a disciple, and then a servant in the ultimate goal of striving to become like Jesus.

Adjusting to the Changing Times, Part 3: Science of the Mind

We all have come to appreciate the importance of genetics. The deciphering of the human genome is one of the most significant advances we are witnessing in science today. We are just beginning to see the complexity of the genetic factors that make us what we are.

A new field of science is emerging, however, that likely will have an equal if not greater impact on our understanding of humanity. Our genes are givens—we are born with them and they don’t change. Although some advances are being made in gene therapy, mostly we are in the “describing” stage in this science with the prescribing stage still to come. The new field of science, however, is addressing a far different component of humanity. It is exploring the “wiring” of the human brain with the goal of describing how memories, personality traits, and skills are stored. This nascent field of neuroscience is being called “connectonics,” and it is an attempt to understand the mental makeup of persons. In the same way that geneticists are trying to map the human genome, connectomicists are trying to build a map of the mind. By tracing the connections of synapses in the ganglions of the brain, these scientists hope to discover how we store memories, make decisions, and function as individuals.

The scope of this effort is mind-boggling (no pun intended). As an example of its scope (and to help you appreciate the complexity of the human mind), scientists say that about one petabyte of computer memory will be needed to store the images needed to form a picture of a one-millimeter cube of a mouse’s brain (that is about the size of a cross section of the wire used in a paper clip). In comparison, Facebook uses one petabyte of data storage space to hold 40 billion photos. To ramp this up to the human scale, a worm’s brain has about 300 neurons. A mouse’s brain has about 100 million neurons. The human brain has about 100 billion neurons and millions of miles of “wires” (connections) that must be unraveled and traced. Ashlee Vance, writing about connectomics in the New York Times, compares the task to trying to untangle a bowl of spaghetti by tracing how each strand of spaghetti touches each other strand as it winds its way through the bowl.

Scientists are better at describing than prescribing. Somewhere down the line we may be able to describe how a person changes his or her mind, but I suspect the “why” will continue to be a “spiritual” thing. And the most remarkable thing is that we can change our minds, we can “repent,” and we can do all of that with a “fixed” structure of brain connections that are adaptable and consciously controllable but hold the potential for conversion into something new.

Adjusting to the Changing Times, Part 2: r u lol yet?

A seismic shift is going on in our society, and a recent article in the NY Times brought this issue into focus for me. The Times highlighted several contemporary writers who are setting their novels in the “near future” (i.e. 2025 to 2035). In the spirit of George Orwell (who in 1949 published the futuristic novel 1984) and of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke (who in 1968 produced the film 2010: A Space Odyssey), these writers are giving us a glimpse of our society as it may become. Taking emerging trends in today’s world and projecting them into the future, they can help us weigh the impact and perhaps test the consequences of the innovative spirit of our time. One of the trends identified in these novels is the impact that text messaging will have on our use of language in the future. As a person who does a good bit of writing and who always has a dictionary open on the desk next to me so that I can check the spelling and weight the nuances of word meanings, this really caught my attention.

Text messaging clearly is a generational matter. My wife and I are on a family communication plan together with two of our daughters and one son-in-law. My wife and I have separate cells phones and have cut out our land line—pretty innovative stuff for our generation. One of our daughters and her husband have included text messaging in their part of our family plan, and they get by pretty well each month on their allowance of 250 text messages each. Our other daughter has unlimited text messaging in her part of the family plan. She not only sends text messages, but she frequently sends pictures and videos in messages. Last month she sent over 1500 messages.

While visiting our other daughter before Christmas, she commented that her son (who happens to be turning 14 today) only talked on his cell phone for about 20 minutes last month but sent almost 10,000 text messages. Do you sense the trend here? And with that trend comes a whole new language full of abbreviations and short-cuts that frankly I find quite confusing.

I’ve noticed on Facebook that the texting short-cuts are creeping into posted messages. I’ve tried to decipher some of these by weighing the context in which they were used. At first I thought “lol” meant “lots of luck” because it seemed to have a whimsical quality to it. On occasion I have thought someone was saying “lots of love” as a kind of affectionate sign-off. Then I discovered it meant “laughing out loud,” which I sometime find hard to understand in the context in which it is used. The real shocker came recently when a very accomplished writer with whom I have worked a lot through the years began substituting “u r” and similar abbreviations in her Facebook posts. This brought me back to the futuristic novel and the certainty that our written language and our whole system of communication is shifting quickly.

I’ve reluctantly decided that this shift is OK. The emphasis on spelling and grammar are important parts of clear communication; but frankly I’ve decided that communication is the objective, and spelling and grammar are the vehicles. We may be in the midst of shifting vehicles. Oral communication, video communication, and text messaging may replace the classical expressions of the written word. I will have to learn this new language in order to survive, just like an immigrant has to adapt to the language of a new culture.

In the spirit of the season, I also have concluded that sometimes and somehow the word must become flesh to really communicate. That is what Christmas is all about, and it is what I must be about as well. Where r u in all this?

Adjusting to the Changing Times, Part 1

I am finding myself a little nostalgic this Christmas season for Christmases past. I am reflecting on those Christmases when Christmas Day was a very special family day. In those days every member of the family went to my Grandmother Richardson’s house to celebrate Christmas together. Family members brought wonderful foods, and we had a delicious Christmas dinner together. Names of every adult family member had earlier been drawn from a hat (probably at the Thanksgiving Day family get-together) so that each family member gave one gift to one other family member. We children were exempted and generally received a gift from almost every aunt and uncle. This was a special time with nieces and nephews and cousins, and in many ways it became the epitome of Christmas for me. I even recall the Christmas when one of my cousins was serving in the army and was stationed in Germany. He wasn’t home for Christmas, and his absence left a hole in the family Christmas experience.

This Christmas is very different. In fact, Christmas is mostly over for me. Our family is scattered from South Carolina to east and middle Tennessee. One of my daughters and her husband are airline pilots, and their schedules provide only restricted timeframes in which to celebrate Christmas. So Christmas began a week-and-a-half ago when we celebrated with the exchanging of gifts for this portion of our family. Then a week before Christmas we went to Nashville, exchanging gifts to be opened later with one of our daughters and her family and actually opening gifts with our other daughter. We have a few gifts under the tree to be opened tomorrow, but Evelyn and I will be doing that together at home. For the extended family, Christmas was virtually concluded a week before the day and it was celebrated in fragmented intervals with a scattered family. I have found myself reflecting on the fact that Christmas is a season and not a day, and the spirit of a family Christmas is more important than a large family get-together.

Then my nostalgia caught up with reality. My grandmother died in 1958. Her family continued to get together at Thanksgiving and Christmas for over a decade after that; but beginning during seminary years when I was serving as pastor of a church, I was the one who often was breaking the family tradition. My church in Indiana was too far away to drive home and back on Christmas Day. I had responsibilities that tied me to the celebration of Christmas with my “church family” that overshadowed my clan back in Alabama. Then I recalled that my father’s family had only once in my memory ever tried to get together for a family reunion. His family had been scattered from Illinois to Michigan to Alabama; and while we went by and visited with one or two of my aunts and uncles each year at Christmas time, the family gathering was never a complete one.

So the times are not just changing for me this year—they have been a-changing for a long time. I was the first in my Richardson clan to move far away and to be away regularly at Christmas time. In the Fink clan, we never really developed a Christmas family tradition. So I have been living with a changing Christmas tradition for a long time. It just seems different this year with family scattered, with celebrations observed on several occasions, and with just the two of us together on Christmas Day. The joy of togetherness, the excitement of opening presents, the good food and fellowship around the table may not be focused on one day this year; but it is Christmas just the same—and it has been for the last week-and-a-half. Maybe the spirit of the season is more important than one twenty-four hour sweep on the clock. Even the first Christmas was celebrated far from home, in a strange setting, and with strangers sharing the occasion. So my Christmas Day will not be so different after all.

Annual Christmas Letter

I have been off-line and over-involved for the last few days, so no new posts have been put online. If you would like to receive a copy of our 2010 Christmas letter, send an email to:
thinkingaloud@comcast.net

Finding a Place in the Family of God

Making disciples involves both instruction and experience. If you reflect on the accounts of the disciples of Jesus, you will find both of these dimensions. The common factor between these two dimensions, however, is some sort of teaching-training community in which the disciples develop. That community is a critical factor in making disciples.

If you will reflect on your own experience and the experiences of others you know, I think you will find some kind of special group of people who became a community of love, grace, and learning for you. For most of us that community was and is within a church setting. Traditionally that community has been a Sunday School class or some kind of intentional study group; but others find their way into the community through fellowship opportunities, sports teams, work projects, mission trips, musical groups, or even through an extended family. In reality, discipleship is fostered best when individuals find a comfortable community of supportive people who genuinely are interested in its members and are living, learning, and working together for their mutual benefit and for some larger vision.

In the “Making Disciples” Chart, I have called this community the “Family of God.” Just as a human family is the initial setting into which a child is born and nurtured, discipleship has its roots in a small group that guides the “child of God” in discovering how the basic needs for identity, love, acceptance, achievement, and legacy can be met in the grace of God. The Old Testament provides a biblical context in which we can understand this family of God idea. The individual finds a sense of personal identity in the account of creation. The individual senses God’s love in identifying with a people whom God has chosen to represent and serve among all the people in the world. The bond to God and community is sealed with a covenant, which itself is set within the instruction of the community’s teaching (Torah or Law). The family of God blesses those who are part of the community and empowers its members to share that blessing with others.

Sometimes we are born into a family. Sometimes we choose a family. Sometimes a family chooses us. It is within that family, however, where we begin to discover and experience the grace of who we are and who we were intended to be. In that family we discover the power of genuine love that embraces us in our best and in our worst. In that family a bond of mutual covenant is formed where we find our special place in the community and embrace the unique contributions of others in the family. In that family we are instructed, guided, and trained for living in the family, for maintaining the integrity of the mutual covenant, and for communicating the family’s grace to others who need it. As we draw others into the family, into the love and covenant that binds it together, and into its instruction and life, we are blessed and we bless others through our family.

Historically, God initiated that community of grace. Creation and the call of Abraham formed the initial parameters, but God still invites us into a community where we can experience grace and find our place in the family of God. This is the first step in making disciples. We invite people into a grace community where they can find their identity as a beloved member of the faith family.

Children and Discipleship

One crucial issue we face in making disciples relates to children and their developmental readiness to made decisions that reflect a mature understanding of discipleship. In the “Making Disciples” Chart I have tried to provide a progressive understanding of how a person moves from the beginning conception of faith to a mature understanding of discipleship. That progression is in the bottom row of the chart that deals with the human need for integrity.

I view discipleship as an integrating factor related to our understanding of who we are and why we are. Every disciple will find each aspect of that progression relevant, but the rate at which a new believer progresses in “Integrity” will depend on many individual factors. From my perspective, those who work with children need to focus on “God’s Initiative of Grace” (columns 2 and 3 in the chart) for the foundational concepts, experiences, age-appropriate perspectives, and emerging self-understandings that are relevant to children. While many will disagree with me, I think that making a response to God’s grace is an experience for which adolescents are ready but children are not. Thus I would hold off on an emphasis on repentance, making a profession of faith, becoming part of the covenant community (church membership), and identifying oneself as a disciple until the person is mature enough to commit “one’s life and gifts to God’s service in the church and the world” (quoting column 4, row 6). While maturity is not solely a matter of age, I would think that ages 16-18 reflect the level of maturity that makes “commitment of one’s life and gifts” a realistic and reasonable response to grace.

Many will argue that the church will lose its prime opportunity to “convert” people if we wait that late. Ages 16-18 are the very years when youth begin to pull away from their childhood commitments; and if we haven’t sealed their eternal fate by that time (these folks will say), we will face enormous hurdles in getting them engaged at this or any later stage. My contention is that we must lay the foundation for discipleship with all people (including children) with a focus on grace. If we do that well, the prospective disciples will come to recognize that they are members of the “Family of God” ( that is, they are “part of a separate and distinct people serving God in the world”—see last row of column 2) and that each of them is a “Child of God” whom God has called into a personal relationship with God and to committed service to God (last row of column 3). These are grace-gifts from God that inform us of who we are and what God intends for us, but these are foundations for calling for a response to that grace.

The call for a response requires a level of maturity that possesses the ability to make commitments that are realistic and actual. A profession of faith and the decision to become a disciple of Jesus are not foundational matters—they are life-surrender matters. My contention is that children and even early adolescents generally do not have the sense of self-determination required to make a commitment that is mature, genuine, and realistic for the remainder of their lives.