Sunday Reading: A Fellowship of Differents, by Scot McKnight

Over the next few weeks I will be blogging my Sunday reading chapter by chapter. I have enjoyed reading many of Scot McKnight’s books and his blog is usually my first “theological blog” to read in the morning. So when his newest book, A Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together, came out I immediately “one-clicked” it. It is especially applicable for where I am at right now as the church I am part of is doing some serious thinking about our future direction. So over the next few weeks I will be going through the book one or two chapters at a time every Sunday, posting some quotes on my Facebook page and a summary here on my blog. I welcome comments on my Facebook page. Today I will look at the first two, introductory, chapters. Quotes from the book are in blue.

In the first chapter McKnight makes the point that “Churches determine the direction of our discipleship.” He talks about his experience growing up in a fundamental church which focused on separation, holiness and was organized around the Sunday morning sermon. I could relate because I grew up in a similar, though not quite as legalistic, church environment as his. (Growing up in Santa Cruz, CA, the hippie movement, and our reaction to it, was also a big shaper of our church culture in my teen years.) The kind of church we grow up in is important because

Everything I learned about the Christian life I learned from my church. I will make this a bigger principle: a local church determines what the Christian life looks like for the people in that church. Now I’ll make it even bigger still: we all learn the Christian life from how our local church shapes us.12

In the second chapter, A Salad Bowl, he compares the church to three different ways people eat salad:

 “The American Way”  - If the American Way is smothering the salad with dressing so that it all tastes like dressing, we have smothered all differences in the church so that everything is the same: designed for one gender, one socioeconomic group, one race, one culture, and one theology…We’ve made the church into the American dream for our own ethnic group with the same set of convictions about next to everything.

 “The Weird Way,” – we separate all the difference and differents and scatter them across the towns and cities so that each group worships on its own.  And thus, The reality is that each of our churches has created a Christian culture and Christian life for likes and sames and similiarities and identicals. Instead of powering God’s grand social experiment, we’ve cut up God’s plan into segregated groups, with the incredibly aggravating and God-dishonoring result that most of us are invisible to one another.

“The Right Way” is to cut up all the diverse ingredients into one bowl “and finally drizzle over the salad some good olive oil, which somehow brings the taste of each item to its fullest. Surely this is what God intended when he created “mixed salad.” Thus, The church is God’s world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. 15

We have tended to organize our churches to only attract people who are just like us. In doing that we have neglected the very people the church is called to help. We have also disobeyed Jesus’ call to love and unity as the defining marks of the church. McKnight says,

The reality is that each of our churches has created a Christian culture and Christian life for likes and sames and similiarities and identicals. Instead of powering God’s grand social experiment, we’ve cut up God’s plan into segregated groups, with the incredibly aggravating and God-dishonoring result that most of us are invisible to one another.  but…

God designed the church to make the previously invisible visible to God and to one another in a new kind of fellowship that the Roman Empire and the Jewish world had never seen before.

He closes chapter 2 by challenging us to think about who we have made invisible in our churches and communities. I have been convinced that God will not work through the churches here on Guam in a mighty way until we get past our ethnic divisions, minor doctrinal differences and other reasons we divide, and reach out with unified purpose and mission to ALL the people around us. Then we will fulfill…

The purpose of the church is to be the kingdom in the present world, and the Christian life is all about learning to live into that kingdom reality in the here and now.