The Ministry Plant

Incarnational liberation

God becomes a human being. The divine is known amidst our human context. With the first Christian thinkers, we ask the question, “Why did God become human?” Historically and still today, Christianity too often has spiritualized things, disconnecting Christ and salvation from human needs. But the Incarnation means our bodies and stories matter to the work and kingdom of God. God heals our bodies; God redeems our bodies; God liberates our bodies from oppression and evil of all kinds – natural, spiritual, human. The Incarnation is a sign that God is going to transform it all, going to undo the effects of individual and systematic sin. The empty grave opens up a new realm of human reality, beyond the one marked by sin, death, and destruction. The life of Christ shows us this new way: that the way of liberation is the way of humility and love. In the weakness of our embodied interactions, we can raise the whole earth up with us in the power of the Word made flesh, delighting in this transforming new creation.

What does this mean for us? We delight in being human, and we delight in humanity. We also want to be human in a certain way, and so we follow in faith the pattern of the Word made flesh and listen to the Scriptures given to us. We walk a path of servanthood, empathy, weakness, humility, and love—all of which has a power to transform and liberate our reality. Jesus shows us the way: God heals our bodies, rescues our bodies from oppression and sin, transforms and redeems our bodies. We consider it God’s work, in part, to seek social justice in the earth. God cares about the little things in our life, and meets us there, even while lifting us to a higher plane of living.

Disruptive discipleship

God continues to move in the earth with power through God’s Spirit—the Spirit which inhabits and transforms God’s people and the entire earth in the name of and for the glory of Christ. We are saved, empowered, filled by the Spirit in order to live a life that is both ordinary and extraordinary. As followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to a radical discipleship, to the deeper life, to a greater filling of the Spirit. In this journey, the Spirit moves us out past the frontiers and boxes we make (as the book of Acts shows). The people of God, through the work and word of God, come to trust God’s direction through the Spirit, come to develop the senses and ability to listen to what God is saying. In this way, the Spirit of God moves the people of God to disrupt the status quo of the present order marked by sin, fallenness, and disordered affection (lust, greed, power-seeking, and so on). As at the beginning, the Spirit hovers over the chaos of the earth, bringing order and new life. And as Christ’s open grave testifies, God through the Spirit brings life in the midst of death and calls into existence the things that are not—the things that hope knows should be.

What does this mean for us? We will not settle for cheap grace and false kinds of Christianity. Through the Spirit, we seek the deeper life and a more radical discipleship. We desire to be the kind of people that can hear God’s word and move accordingly. We seek to be an obedient and humble community, one both quiet enough to hear what God says to us today and yet bold enough to move out into a future of risk, disruption, and danger. We move forward by the power of God and for the glory of God, trusting that God through the Spirit can do immeasurably more than we can think or imagine.

TRUTH

We abide in the authenticity and vulnerability that comes with a life given by God’s grace. We are open to being wrong. So, we start in this place of honesty with ourselves, each other, and God about who we are and where we should be as we listen with open and humble hearts to what God is saying in a chaotic world. This is about an attitude of our heart, a complete willingness and openness toward what really is, even if it is difficult.[1]

CONFESSION

Having hearts fundamentally open to the truth, our speech and actions come to reflect reality. This truth-speaking may look differently, either as confession of sin or testimony of persistent self-love. Our words matter, both as we speak and listen, and that is where we strive to carefully and painfully forge greater patterns and worlds of truth as we speak and listen to each other with love and honesty. This forms our community as genuine and strong, though not idealistic or inward-looking.

REPENTANCE and RECENTERING

Truth, having entered our community through our listening and speaking, confession and testimony, comes to shape the whole of our community. Relying on God’s power, grace, and work in our life, our entire mindset and embodied patterns of our life are changed. A community of repentance is a community of faithfulness: such fidelity creates a dialectic of accountability and forgiveness where those who have power and privilege pledge accountability to justice and equity while the oppressed pursue righteousness while entrusting themselves to hope and grace in forgiveness. Through this difficult commitment the community finds a new center.

RECONCILIATION

Having pledged ourselves to truth and confession, and to repentance and recentering, we entrust ourselves to God’s power in forging a difficult reconciliation. This will be neither to think in unison nor in polarities, nor to erase our histories and differences. Ultimately, reconciliation is about finding a new way to relate to each other, a kind of harmony in diversity that reflects the very life of the Triune God. As such, the work of reconciliation is not a static thing, and as such never the status quo; it is a mode of relating (as reconciliatory) in an always unfinished project.

[1] The notion of these four values is adapted from Jemar Tisby, Color of Compromise, p. 15.