Faithful Presence

Seven Disciplines That Shape the Church for Mission

David E. Fitch

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780830841271
• eBook ISBN: 9780830899418
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

• Missio Alliance Essential Reading List of 2016

In our quest to renew the church, Christians have walked through seeker-friendly, emergent, missional, and other movements to develop new expressions of the body of Christ. Now in the post-Christian world in North America we're asking the question again: is there a way to be the church that engages the world, not by judgment nor accommodation but by becoming the good news in our culture? In Faithful Presence, noted pastor and scholar David Fitch offers a new vision for the witness of the church in the world. He argues that we have lost the intent and practice of the sacramental ways of the historic church, and he recovers seven disciplines that have been with us since the birth of the church. Through numerous examples and stories, he demonstrates how these revolutionary disciplines can help the church take shape in and among our neighborhoods, transform our way of life in the world, and advance the kingdom.This book will help you re-envision church, what you do in the name of church, and the way you lead a church. It recovers a future for the church that takes us beyond Christendom. Embrace the call to reimagine the church as the living embodiment of Christ, dwelling in and reflecting God's faithful presence to a world that desperately needs more of it.

PART ONE

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God’s Faithful Presence

He . . . has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

Ephesians 1:22-23

For a while now in North America we’ve been missing something. Most of us haven’t even noticed. We’ve been rushing back and forth to work, to meetings, to malls, to kids’ sports programs. We’ve been striving to do our jobs, have a respectable career, and pay our bills. All the while we’ve missed that God is present all around us and is at work; all we have to do is take notice.

For most Christians in the West, God is an individual belief, a personal relationship, a private experience, something we fit in between all the other things in our lives. The notion that we can be present to God, and he to us, is not on the horizon of our awareness. We do not imagine that God is present outside of me or between me and the other person I’m with, that he will confront me in the middle of my world if I will open myself to him.

A few years back I was sitting in a gathering of my local church on Sunday morning. There were about two hundred of us sitting in the round, as was our custom. Even though there was a large table in the middle of the circle, we still sat across from one another in full view of what everyone was doing. So we can be easily distracted. This particular morning I became distracted by how distracted everybody else seemed to be. We were preparing to partake of the Lord’s Table together. We were supposed to be silent, but people were moving and shuffling. As the pastor came to the table to present the bread and the wine, a few people got up and went to the bathroom. Others were tending to their children’s needs. A few looked at the clock, shaking their legs impatiently.

I noticed that George, who I had known for a couple years, could not sit still. He had been a heroin addict and was fighting the hold that the addiction still had on his life. A few times during the gathering he got up, went to the foyer and then to the nursery, where he picked up his infant. Then he went and got a drink of water. It was obvious he was struggling to connect and be present with what was happening in the gathering. But he was not alone. Many were struggling to sit and be present. No doubt George was battling physiological issues. Many had to tend to their children. (We welcome all children to be present in the gathering around the table.) Nonetheless, I was struck by how unimpressed everyone seemed to be by the table. There was little sense in the room that Jesus was present among us.

I wondered to myself how the striving in the room would change if indeed we were all gripped by an irruption of God’s presence (in Christ) around the table. How would we all be transformed if we could actually recognize Christ in our midst? Would George’s internal struggles be changed? What if people approached the table like the Israelites approached the ark of the covenant in the Old Testament, fearing imminent sickness or even death if they approached the table unworthily (see 1 Cor 11:29-30)? How would that kind of awareness of God’s presence affect George and the rest of us as we gathered around the table? I don’t wish anyone harm, of course. But I was struck with this question as I sat there that morning: How have we become so distracted from such a palpable reality as the presence of Christ at the table?

“God’s presence is the central fact of Christianity,” said American pastor A. W. Tozer. The heart of the Christian message is that “God is waiting for us to push into conscious awareness of his presence.”1 A perusal of Scripture testifies over and over again that Tozer is right: God comes to be present with his people.

The Story of God’s Presence

At the very beginning God created the heavens and the earth as the place of his presence. “Heaven is my throne,” says the Lord, “and the earth is my footstool” (Is 66:1 NIV). “The garden of Eden . . . is a place where God dwells and man should worship him,” says Old Testament scholar John Walton.2 Humanity was created to be in God’s presence, and Eden was God’s sanctuary.3 But Adam and Eve usurped God’s authority and broke fellowship with him, and when they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden the next day, they “hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God” (Gen 3:8 NASB). God’s presence with humanity had been disrupted. And violence broke out (Gen 6:5).

After the Noahic flood, God set out to restore his presence with his creation. God called Abraham and birthed a people to bless the nations. God would be present in this nation. Through a series of events, this nation ended up in Egypt, where they were enslaved. After many years of suffering in Egypt, God manifested his presence to Moses at the burning bush and sent Moses to deliver his people. In that sending, God promises to be “with” Moses (Ex 3:10-12). The pattern of God’s presence being with those he sends runs constant throughout the entire story of God in the Bible.

Moses, as we know, then leads God’s people out of Egypt. They come to the same mountain where God had earlier spoke to him, and God calls Moses up the mountain to be “with” him. While Moses is with God, the people of Israel fashion a golden calf and worship it. So God, in great anger, sends Moses onward and withdraws his presence from Israel “because you are an obstinate people, and I might destroy you on the way” (Ex 33:3-4 NASB). But Moses intercedes, “If Your presence does not go with us, do not lead us up from here. . . . Is it not by Your going with us, so that we, I and Your people, may be distinguished from all other people who are upon the face of the earth?” (Ex 33:15-16 NASB) God’s people are not his people apart from his presence.

God relents and consents to go with his people. Shortly thereafter a traveling tabernacle is built to house God’s presence among the people. The next several accounts of Moses encountering God’s presence around the tabernacle tell of the care needed for anyone in physical proximity to God’s presence. God’s presence is so viscerally real that they all must know how to approach God. His presence is at the core of his work among his people.

Time and again the Psalms repeat the theme of God’s presence with his people. My favorite is Psalm 46.

God is our refuge and strength,

A very present help in trouble. . . .

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,

The holy dwelling places of the Most High.

God is in the midst of her, she will not be moved;

God will help her when morning dawns.

The nations made an uproar, the kingdoms tottered;

He raised his voice, the earth melted.

The LORD of hosts is with us. . . .

He makes wars to cease to the end of the earth;

He breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two;

He burns the chariots with fire.

“Cease striving and know that I am God;

I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.

The Lord of hosts is with us;

The God of Jacob is our stronghold. (Ps 46:1, 4-7, 9-11 NASB)

Notice the words with, in the midst, present, and dwelling in this text. Throughout the Bible they are some of the important code words for God’s real presence. As Psalm 46 makes clear, his presence dispels violence; it brings peace and stops all striving. He rules as Lord. He rules in and through his presence, which brings the richness of love, reconciliation, and justice. He will never coerce his people. Israel disregards his presence often, and God challenges them to be still and be present with him (Ps 46:10).

Years later, in the Promised Land, the temple stood in the middle of Jerusalem as the nation’s meeting place with God’s presence. This is where the people came to be reconciled with God, be present with God, and pray in the presence of God. When God’s people rebelled and ­disregarded God for false idols, God left the temple (Ezek 10). The temple was eventually destroyed, and the people were dispersed in exile. Nonetheless, God promises to renew his presence among his people (Ezek 37:27). God would come again to renew the broken relationship, forgive the people of their sins, break the hold of violence, and be among them. God will heal Israel and the world through his faithful presence.

This promise was fulfilled in the form of Jesus Christ, the incarnate God, “God with us” in flesh. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is born of Mary in fulfillment of the prophecy, “THE VIRGIN SHALL BE WITH CHILD AND SHALL BEAR A SON, AND THEY SHALL CALL HIS NAME IMMANUEL,” which means “God with us” (Mt 1:23 NASB). God has come in flesh to be the very presence of God among us. The Gospel of John describes this same dynamic, invoking the language of the tabernacle in the wilderness. He declares that “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt [tabernacled] among us” (Jn 1:14 KJV). The amazing reality of the living God having come to dwell with us cannot be missed in the presence and mission of Jesus.

In the farewell discourses of John’s Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples that though he goes, he will not “leave [them] as orphans” (Jn 14:18 NASB), but instead the Holy Spirit will come. The Father and the Son by the Spirit will make their “abode” with them (Jn 14:23). “Abide in Me, and I in you” (Jn 15:4 NASB). God’s presence has been renewed to us in Christ by the Spirit as Jesus goes and the Spirit comes in his place (Jn 16:5-7). In Jesus’ parting words in Matthew’s Gospel he promises, “and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Mt 28:20 KJV).

God fulfills this promise through the outpouring of the Spirit’s presence on men and women, sons and daughters, prophets and prophetesses (as proclaimed in Peter’s sermon on Pentecost, reflecting the fulfillment of Joel 2:28-32) at Pentecost (Acts 2). God has come again to be among his people. Through Christ, God has restored his presence among us, which began with his people at Pentecost. According to the apostle Paul, we the church, God’s own people, are his “temple” in the midst of the world (2 Cor 6:16). We are no longer strangers to God but fellow citizens of “the household of God,” being knit together into “a holy temple in the Lord; . . . for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit” (Eph 2:19, 21-22 RSV). God’s presence in Jesus does not end with Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. In Jesus, God extends his own presence by giving of the Holy Spirit to his people, and subsequently sends them into the world (Jn 20:21-22).

In the final chapter of the book of Revelation we are told where this is all going: the coming of the new heaven and the new earth. Revelation depicts the image of the new city of Jerusalem as the place of God’s indwelling, where no temple is needed. Indeed, the new heaven and earth are described in terms of the dimensions of the temple, the dwelling place of God among Israel.4 And so the voice in Revelation 21:3 says, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them” (NASB). This is the goal of God’s redemptive work: that we will be restored, along with all of creation, to be with God and he with us. His presence will flood the new heaven and earth, and everything will be made new.

The Scriptures, from beginning to end, tell the marvelous story of God returning his presence to all creation. It always was God’s intent to be with his creation in the fullness of his presence.

The Loss of Presence in Our World

But this sense of God’s presence has been lost in our modern world, even among Christians. Daily, we obsess about holding our lives together. We walk in isolation and protection from other people. We pass homeless people on the street and give a dollar, but we do not know them. Indeed, we dare not know them. At work we look at clients as profit-loss statements. Even our most intimate relationships can turn into negotiated contracts. As a result there’s a distrustful distance between people in all types of relationships. We are empty and long for some kind—any kind—of presence.

Ultimately this is a longing for God. But God has not left us. We, in all our striving and independence, have not allowed any space for him to be present between us and the people we do life with. We roam frantically in a maze of disconnected souls.

Even when we go to church, we find no respite from this frenzy. Though there’s a flurry of activity and programming in our church buildings, it seems as if we’re avoiding something. We see our pastors projected on video screens, separated by technology from the people they are preaching to. We do not really know the pastor, or anyone else in this gathering for that matter. And when the well-produced worship experience is over and we leave the church building, something gnaws at our souls. Emptiness creeps back in, alerting us that there was something missing in that building.

Rarely do we gather to be present in our neighborhoods. More often than not, church leaders teach us how to defend ourselves against the forces of darkness “out there.” We don’t learn how to recognize God’s faithful presence in the neighborhood. We are lost in our inability to be present before God, among ourselves, and in our neighborhoods. We want another way of life.

This stunning loss of presence in our society is glaring. But God is still there, and we still long for presence with God and with other people. We long to be truly known and to truly know someone. We long to be with someone on a journey that means something. We groan in the depths of the night—groaning for God’s presence.

It’s Time for Us to Pause

When things get crazy at my house, we try to stop everything and clear some space. I find myself saying things to my ten-year-old son like, “Max, I will not play the goof-off game with you anymore until we at least have some face time. One serious conversation!” “But Dad! Come on Dad, you never goof off with me anymore.” And right there, rather t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Searching for the Real Church
• Part I: God’s Faithful Presence
• Part II: The Seven Disciplines
• Epilogue: How God Changes the World
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix 1: What Formation Looks Like Around the Table
• Appendix 2: The Indispensible Role of the Dotted Circle in the Disciplines
• Appendix 3: Extending the Presence: An Alternative Basis for Ecclesiology and Mission
• Appendix 4: Where Is the Church? A Closer Look at Matthew 25
• Appendix 5: A Simple History of the Disciplines from New Testament Church to Christendom
• Notes
• Praise for Faithful Presence
• About the Author
• Praxis
• Missio Alliance
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright