Staying In The Neighborhood

There we were, processing every which way out of old church buildings to brand new ones up the street, bumper to bumper in cars or shivering on foot in the wind and rain, but with smiles on our faces, eyes and hopes glistening, grateful to share an experience of a lifetime. Short as it was, the journey nevertheless yielded time enough to conjure a few thoughts about what it took to get this journey in faith on the road at all.

Start-up churches aspiring to become large, and large churches aspiring to become even larger, typically follow the advice of church-growth consultants who believe that moving up always necessitates moving out, moving on, and most especially, moving away. And so, way out on mega-acres, paved over with mega-parking spaces, mega-churches continue to draw to themselves mega-numbers of newly prosperous city flee-ers content to leave the spiritual problems of the not so fortunate to be taken care of  by the smaller, struggling churches that they either avoid in the first place or eventually leave behind.

To be fair, most mega-churches have mega-budgets for outreach and mission. What they do not have, however, is physical presence with their left-behind fellow believers who need their presence the most. Inviting the remaining city and inner-city dwellers to “come see us, y’all” isn’t much of a gesture to those among them who have no cars and have yet to learn how many bus transfers it will take to get to their would-be hosts’ front doors.

By the time my umbrella threatened to fail me on my walk up Custer Road Sunday, what I was most appreciating was how short the trek itself was. And this realization led me to a more important one: as mega-church moves go, “Moving in Faith” looms up as a quite different kind of project than the First United Methodist Church of Richardson, Texas, could and might have entertained. Yes, the church has moved, and to a truly beautiful and inspiring new setting. But it has not moved far, and it is has not left behind those who over the years have found in this church a spiritual home close-by. This, as some like to put it these days, is a good thing --- a very good thing.

The heart of Richardson, its inner-city heart at least, is changing dramatically, and it will continue to change dramatically in the years to come. Its economy, at long last, seems to be turning around, which means that there could be a little more money to be thrown around. Some of it might even find its way into FUMCR’s coffers, to alleviate at least a little of the strain of paying for the new digs, and to help keep alive the church’s long-standing tradition of minding the ministries as much as it minds the store.
 
The really big changes taking place in Richardson, though, have less to do with the economic and more to do with the ethnic, less to do with prosperity and more with pluralism, less to do with achieving oneness and more with celebrating diversity. For this new church on the city’s central artery, the really big change worth contemplating, a change unusual for mega-churches, is its commitment not to hoard its fancy new buildings for the sake of the upwardly-aspiring and the privileged, but to make the beauty of and the community within the place an inspiration to people whose lives are constantly threatened with ugliness and hopelessness, and menace thrown in for extra measure. I’m glad, really glad, that the church has chosen not to move away from this challenge.

The positioning of the new complex itself makes for a powerful symbol of embracing the challenge. With so many of its stunning windows opening out on a major highway, it deliberately makes the traffic flow visible rather than hidden, and a constant reminder of the church’s mission to be in this part of God’s world a welcoming and centering place for all kinds of people passing by, moving in, and staying on, who can rightly expect to be renewed from the experience of having dwelled in it even for a short while.

In the decades to come, it will be good to remember that in 2006, this church moved on in faith by also staying close by, by bringing into even clearer view the increasingly diverse people who will both pass by and settle in, and by celebrating the fact that the congregation remained who it most essentially is by staying right in the neighborhood, to be with and for them.

A Global Spiritual Awakening

One of the last century’s most respected existentialist philosophers, Karl Jaspers, once put forward the idea of an "axial age" in world history. He described it as a period of simultaneous spiritual break-throughs at widely separated points on the planet that together have transformed human existence in the world forever. Jaspers’ captivating idea provided the substance of one of his most readable and enthralling books, in English translation The Origin and Goal of History.

Recently, I took what must have been my sixth or seventh look at Jaspers' idea and discussion of it. And once again, I was overcome with appreciation for the breadth and depth of this philosopher's deep spiritual insights, of a sort difficult to come by in the reading of modern philosophy. This time, though, my appreciation assumed a slightly different form. If I may beat up the English language just a bit, Jaspers got it "righter" than even he was aware at the time he wrote. In specific, he defined the temporal parameters of the axial age in terms of a couple of centuries, when he could have worked within a framework of mere decades.

The decades I have in mind are roughly those between 590 and 530, B.C.E. Making allowances for the approximations and educated guesses ingredient in all historical reconstruction, the records suggest that across those years, the following spiritual leaders attained the height of their powers and influence: Zoroaster in Persia, Lao Tzu and Confucius in China, the Buddha in India, and the Old Testament prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Second Isaiah, exiled in Babylonia. And to make Jaspers’ notion of an axial age even more interesting, while these men were making their monumental contributions in these diverse regions on the globe, a new philosophical spirit was emerging in Southern Italy (e.g., in Xenophanes and Pythagoras) and Asia Minor (in Anaximander), sweeping away the worst in ancient Greek polytheism and replacing it with ideas of a God truly worthy of human worship.

Astonished by the coincidences among these massive spiritual break-throughs in such a brief span of historical time, Jaspers invited his readers to dwell with him on the mystery of such an overwhelming release of mental and spiritual energy into human consciousness without succumbing to the temptation to reduce it to some pretentiously articulated "explanation." For Jaspers, the break-throughs are in the final analysis inexplicable. But their import for subsequent generations is not.

One remarkable element in the teaching of all the sages and philosophers of this remarkable age was the ease with which each subjected "established" religious traditions to scrutiny and assessment on logical and moral grounds. Anything that would not yield to logical scrutiny --- for example, Hindu Brahmins' claims that only they had the capacity fully to understand the divine-human relationship --- these leaders quickly relegated to the status of mythology and superstition.

And anything that would not yield to examination and criticism on moral grounds, these same leaders just as quickly relegated to a contemptible status beneath human repect and loyalty. For example, practices designed to appease the spirits of departed and yet overly-involved ancestors failed to hold up under moral criticism, as did devotion to gods and goddesses whose character failed to reach the level of even mediocre human beings. Hebrew tribalism wilted under its exiled prophets' emerging universalist outlook, and not much later, Sophia --- "wisdom" personified --- began to take up her own rightful place in the affairs of all humankind.

Two things about this axial period in human history especially interested Karl Jaspers as a philosopher. The first was the liberation of the human spirit from bondage to religious authorities who demand unquestioning loyalty and demean all but themselves as bearers of the same divine image and "spark." The second was the discovery of rational thought as a means of approaching and giving expression to ultimate, sacred realities. For Jaspers, ever the existentialist, the realization of freedom and the exercise of the capacity for thought are what make human beings truly human. Thus, for him, the time of the axial age is quintessentially the time in which the human race began to attain its distinctiveness as a human race, as homo sapiens.

Jaspers' idea of a turning point in human history that is fundamentally spiritual in nature is especially relevant to the struggle that believers all over the world are facing these days, with fellow believers who are absolutely certain that nothing is really worth noting in the spiritual sphere until, for some, Jesus, and for others, Muhammed, made their appearance in human history. Placed alongside a grander sweep view of humankind's spiritual history, certitude of this sort ought to be called to account for just what it is, silly. Unfortunately, it is also dangerously silly.