The Way of Jesus

Re-Forming Spiritual Communities in a Post-Church Age

Jones

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781498272131
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Countless books have been written about the impending death of the institutional church, but this one both celebrates the resurrection that will follow and lights the way toward a new kind of spiritual community. The Way of Jesus identifies seven principles upon which authentic and vibrant Christian communities can be built in today's diverse and ever shrinking world. Toby Jones traveled across the country, from San Francisco's Glide Memorial Church to New York's Church of the Holy Apostles, and from Chicago's Wicker Park Grace to Minneapolis's Solomon's Porch. He sojourned with seven communities in all and conducted in-depth interviews with their leaders and participants to reveal what distinguishes resurrection communities from those in precipitous decline. In The Way of Jesus, Jones draws both from the scriptures and from such fresh thinkers as Brian McLaren, Dallas Willard, Doug Pagitt, and Shane Claiborne, offering genuine hope and practical direction to the millions of spiritually homeless. But just as importantly, The Way of Jesus offers a clear path to struggling, shrinking congregations who desire to re-form themselves in a way that is both more faithful to the Gospel and compelling to post-modern generations, who have long since abandoned the institutional church.

1

A New Approach to Theology

Theology matters. The way we think about who God is and what God is like is extremely important in influencing the way we live, the way we treat one another, and the way we interact with the rest of creation. As Emergent theologian Tony Jones puts it, “Good theology begets beautiful Christianity, and bad theology begets ugly Christianity.”1 There has been no shortage of ugly Christianity in America throughout the last several decades: Christianity that justifies racism; Christianity that allies itself with right wing politics; Christianity that leads some to bomb abortion clinics; Christianity that purposely and categorically excludes gay and lesbian people; Christianity that makes people feel good on Sunday without having any effect on the lives they live on Monday; Christianity that endorses material wealth and excess; and Christianity that condones pre-emptive and unjust war.

It is just such ugly Christianity that has led so many terrific, spiritually minded people—including many of my closest friends—to reject Jesus. This saddens me, because they are not rejecting Jesus at all, though they may think they are. What they are rejecting instead is the poor excuse for disciples that we in the Christian Church have been. As someone more articulate than I once put it, “Those who don’t go to church generally don’t go because of the people who do.”

I’ve lost track of how many conversations I’ve had that begin something like this: “You Christians are so judgmental. You condemn homosexuals, women who have abortions, and even people of other religions. What makes you so superior to everyone else?” Would such charges ever be levied against the Jesus of the gospels? Or what about this one: “You Christians seem to think that the only thing you really have to do in this life is accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior. That seems like a pretty watered down religion to me. At least other faiths ask you to actually live a good life.” I want to scream, “So does Jesus! Jesus is totally concerned with the kind of lives we live here and now. But his life-altering message has been distorted and reduced to a mere belief system by those who have come after him. Please, don’t blame Jesus for what’s been said and done in his name!” Again, it is bad theology that has led to such a huge gap between the life and teachings of Jesus and the lives led by his followers.

Christianity has fallen so far from the Jesus it purports to serve. (For further evidence of Christianity’s fall, read unchristian (2007) by Lyons and Kinnaman, who have done extensive research through the Barna Group showing exactly how deplorable the reputation of Christians is in the non-Christian world.) If there is any good news in all this bad news, it is that future communities of Christ followers are going to have to radically alter their approach to “doing” theology, to articulating it, and, most of all, to living it, so that it bears some resemblance to the One they call “Lord.”

To shrink the enormous gap that the institutional church has created between the vital life Jesus exemplified and the far less costly one that institutional Christianity perpetuates, at least two seismic missteps will have to be corrected. First, we will have to address our long held misunderstanding of the word “believe,” as it comes to us from the Greek word pisteuw (pronounced pi-stay-oo-oh). Secondly, once we properly understand pisteuw, we must put a much greater emphasis on right living instead of right belief.

Let’s begin with a careful re-examination of this Greek word that gets translated into our English bibles as “believe.” Pisteuw means infinitely more than any single English word could ever capture. In fact, pisteuw includes all of the following nuances:

to cling to, like a cat sinking its claws into the bark of a tree, to hang on for dear life;

to pour one’s self into, like an artist or musician would pour herself into her work;

to put absolute trust in, the way the smallest cheerleader has to trust the others in the squad to catch her after she gets thrown high into the air to do triple flips and twists.

Perhaps most importantly of all, pisteuw is an action verb rather than a state or static condition.

But we English speakers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have grown accustomed to using the word “believe” as if it were something we do only in our minds. To us, believing in something requires only that we give intellectual assent to it. For example, when we say we “believe in” ghosts, all we’re saying is that in our heads we recognize the possibility that ghosts exist. Such an assertion costs us nothing; it demands nothing of our lives. We might say we “believe” a story our child tells us when she arrives home an hour past her curfew. In such an instance, “belief” in our child simply means that intellectually we accept the excuse she has given for being late. We use the word “believe” in a very simplified, narrow, risk-free way. Our definition of belief is cheap; it’s watered down, and it has almost nothing to do with the Greek word pisteuw. And this gap between the Greek word of Jesus’ day pisteuw and the English word “believe “ in ours has created a HUGE problem, both within Christianity and outside it, a problem that simply must be addressed if Christians are ever going to remotely resemble the Jesus they claim to serve.

We can see the enormity of the problem when we examine one of the most important passages in the evangelical branch of our faith, Romans 10:9. Here the Apostle Paul declares, “If you confess with your lips and believe in your hearts that Jesus is Lord, you will be saved.”2 If belief here is simply a matter of the mind, then, according to Paul, all one needs to do to inherit salvation is accept as fact that Jesus really did come to Earth and did all that the Bible says he did. Salvation is pretty cheap with this understanding, is it not? But, on the other hand, if Paul is talking here about pisteuw belief, he’s talking about something completely different, something that affects the way we live.

As one who has been involved in Christian churches for nearly a half century, I can state with relative certainty that only a tiny fraction of Christians are even aware of what pisteuw faith is, and fewer still actually live it. If I am correct, then millions upon millions of well-intentioned, self-proclaimed “Christians” have taken this single verse of Paul’s and a few others like it, given their mental assent to them, and concluded that they are doing all they need to do as followers of Jesus Christ. Is it any wonder that those outside the Christian fold find little if any resemblance between Jesus and the one third of the planet’s inhabitants who claim to follow him?

To better understand the life changing nature of pisteuw faith, we should also look at Matthew 14:22–29, where Jesus comes to the disciples walking on the water. The eleven disciples who remained in the boat, cowering in fear, exhibited belief faith, while Peter, who got out of the boat to walk on the water with Jesus, demonstrated pisteuw faith. In fact, Matthew seems to have written this story precisely to bring out Peter’s unique grasp of pisteuw faith, the faith that none of the other disciples had. As the story unfolds, all the disciples see Jesus walking on the water. But it is only Peter who addresses Jesus, and what Peter says strikes the modern reader as highly unusual, perhaps even illogical. He says, “If it’s you, Lord, tell me to come to you on the water.”3 Can you hear pisteuw belief at work here? If Peter were operating out of our cheapened English definition of belief, he might have said, “Lord, if it’s really you, make the storm stop and the waves calm.” Or “If it’s really you, Lord, do a back flip with a half twist and land it without sinking.” These kinds of requests would have reflected a “seeing is believing” mindset, for they would have put all the responsibility on Jesus to prove that he was actually walking on the water. Such requests would have been aimed at helping Peter give his intellectual assent to the fact that it really was Jesus walking on the water. But Peter’s deep and unprecedented grasp of pisteuw faith led him to say, “If it’s really you, Lord, tell me to come to you on the water.” Do you see the huge and vital difference between cheap, “belief” oriented faith and genuine pisteuw faith?

The story is told of a tightrope walker who was performing in front of a large crowd. He did amazing things suspended a hundred feet above the ground. After his fourth or fifth trip across the rope, he bantered with his audience. “Do you believe I can cross this rope with a full-grown man on my shoulders?” The crowd encouraged him, screaming, “Yes! Yes! We believe!” The tightrope artist repeated, “Do you really believe I can make it across this rope one hundred feet above the ground with a grown man on my shoulders?” The crowd continued shouting, “Yes! Yes! We believe!” The tightrope walker then pointed to a particular man down in the crowd who was shouting, “Yes, Yes,” and said, “You, sir, do you believe that I can cross this rope with a full-grown man upon my shoulders?” The man responded, “Yes! Yes! I believe!” The tightrope artist said, “Then climb up this ladder, sir, and join me, for I will carry you on my shoulders across this rope.” The singled out man grew pale and panicked. He began backing away from his earlier enthusiastic “Yes!” To that man in the crowd there was a difference between “believing” the tightrope walker could carry someone across the tiny rope on his shoulders and actually volunteering to be the one carried across. But in Peter’s mind and the mind out of which the Greek New Testament grew, there was no such difference. Peter’s pisteuw belief meant that if Jesus were out walking on the water, then Peter would have to join him there as well.

The hard truth for today’s Christians with our western mindset is that Jesus was never really interested in having people believe in him in the casual, intellectual way we tend to use the word. Jesus was, instead, interested in having people follow him and walk his path. Jesus was interested and still is interested in our being disciples, not believers, and there is a huge difference between the two. Being a Christian in Jesus’ mind required and requires a way of life, which is why the earliest Christians were referred to as those following “the Way.” Following Christ entails embracing and living the way Christ himself lived. When Jesus asked anyone to follow him, he asked him to “take up his cross and follow” him.4 He meant for his disciples to follow him to the poorest places in town, to heal the sick, to care for the suffering, and to live in solidarity with the outsiders. Jesus didn’t want people who merely believed in him; he wanted people who “pisteuw’d” in him, people who were interested in a whole new way of living.

By now it should be clear that the Christian misunderstanding of the nature of the faith Christ called us to must be corrected if we are ever going to lessen the gap between the way we live and the way Jesus lived. Outsiders to the faith have had good reason to dismiss our watered down faith as an illegitimate expression of biblical Christianity. But to make matters worse, we further widened the gap between New Testament pisteuw and our practice of it by making idols of the particular beliefs to which we have given our inte...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A New Approach to Theology
• Chapter 2: Disciple Making
• Chapter 3: Communities of Risk and Adventure
• Chapter 4: Radical Inclusiveness
• Chapter 5: Service. Period!
• Chapter 6: Getting Out of the Real Estate Business
• Chapter 7: A Return to Tent-making
• Conclusion
• Bibliography