What if?

This weekend is Pentecost in the Christian tradition. Pentecost, though originally a Jewish festival, is held to be the "birthday of the Church" because it was during the festival of Pentecost when the original followers of Jesus received what we in the Church call "the gift of the Spirit". It was this Spirit which transformed that rag tag group of frightened disciples, bereft of a leader, into the founders of a movement which came to be known as Christianity.

So, in a few days, it's time to sing "Happy Birthday" to the Church. But I am not sure if I want to.

If you know me (or if you have read some of my blog entries) you know that I have a love-hate relationship with the institutional Church. I distrust the destructive hierarchies and I deplore the abuses of power. Yet I have such hope and vision that the Church can be so much more than it is. Which is ultimately why I stick with it. If I didn't have such love I would have left this racket ages ago.

Yesterday I was having lunch with my old friend Scott, always a bright and insightful man, but somewhere along the way, he has turned into a brilliant and reflective theologian and ethicist. Anyway, we were talking about my on-again, off-again love affair with the not-so-organized religion of which I am a part. He laughed. He has known me for a long time, and while I have grown much in the years since we first met, I still have the same love and hope for the church I have always had, along with same frustrations because the church fails again and again to be a place of love and and care and justice and compassion and peace and goodwill. [ugh! it drive me crazy! We could be so much, and yet we don't even try!!!] As we were talking, Scott posed a question to me, one he had posed to his students a few weeks back:

"What if we stopped calling ourselves 'the Church', and instead called ourselves 'a community of people who follow Jesus'?"

Now that has got me thinking. What if we did that? What would that mean? What would that look like?

I think I could get behind that. I mean, that is what the church ultimately is, "a community of people who follow Jesus", we've just made it into something icky. When Jesus called disciples, he didn't say, "worship me" or "idolize me" or "commodify me with your mass marketing you call evangelism". No, he said, "Follow". I interpret this to mean, "Follow my way of living. Follow my way of loving. Follow my way of boundary breaking, of opposing systems of oppression, of calling attention to poverty, injustice, and religious hypocracy." I consider myself 'Christian' because I choose the model of living presented in the man Jesus of Nazareth as one I strive to follow.

Another aspect of Scott's question/suggestion I find appealling is the emphasis on community. The Christian faith is not something that can be lived out in isolation. It's not some personal, private affair. Rather, the Christian life is one lived within a group of people who share values and commitments and together try to be faithful to discerning and fulfilling the calling to follow.

So, here we are on the weekend of the Church's birthday, and I am wondering what you think about reframing our understanding of Church and reimagining what it means to "be Church'. I am interested to know how you would answer Scott's question. What if we did that? What would that mean? What would that look like?

What if we stopped calling ourselves "the Church", and instead called ourselves "a community of people who follow Jesus"?