My Faith - By Bent

A quite park in Christchurch, New Zealand, one of my favourite cities.

When living in New Zealand, I spent a lot of time mentoring, coaching, training and equipping pastors, denominational leaders and normal people who wanted to see God move in NZ. In some of that was teaching some formal courses.

In one of those, focused on communication, I had the pastors and leaders wrestle with something I had noted... Denominations and churches have personalities a lot like people. If you know the DiSC, Meyers-Briggs, Eniogram, Personalysis, PF16, etc, you may note that as well. Then when looking deeper, I had them wrestle how their church has their personality, bent, predisposition. Part of it was communication and our biases, part of it was getting them to see their power as leaders, and their blind spots. They resisted, until we put it to the test.

Take for example liberal main line denominations... tends to draw people who are liberal, more civic minded. The Baptists usually are pragmatists, and hence show up at community driven events. The Salvation Army (Yes, it is a denomination, for you Yanks. In more of the dominions and the UK, it is as much a church as the social ministry side and in fact are connected), is social justice, mercy minded. And of course the evangelicals, Calvinists are really into the nitty of theology and can't understand any different, and in fact condemn any who isn't, and are black and white... this carries over into every area of their life and I've never met an exception. And finally, allow me to also offend the Charismatic cousins. Are they not emotively driven, driving the others nuts... They tend to not wrestle the jot and tittle like the conservatives, nor move to action for the social injustices. They are the mystics who emotively actually relate with God. The liberals tend to be democrats, the conservatives tend to be, well, conservative, aka Republicans. The Charismatics don't care much about politics. Make sense? They didn't like it, but they saw my point.

One point I was making in the course was that we need to teach the Word from as much a posture and perspective of what is says and as much as possible, remove our own prejudices, preprocessed views. That's hard to do, as we approach it completely from our own perspective. Hence, the liberals ignore the hard teaching about Jesus, and the conservatives ignore the social justice and gracious side of Jesus. Tell me I'm lying? Yet, God is God, and He is who He is and our presumptive opinions of Him do not change that, though we try to return the favor of being created in His image.

Yet, the fact is that we are attracted to the bent of the church, often before or even more than the reality and complexity of Jesus Himself. Sad, but true. Conservatives would tell the woman at the well to repent, get her act together and get a freaking job. Liberals would never call the young ruler to give it all away, but to share it and be an educated, privileged elite who uses his position to manipulate the system.

Let's look at the first century: Saducees - liberals, Pharisees - conservatives. See, nothing has changed and each approached God from that point of view.

The biological resources of growing the church... having children...socializes them into a bent, a system of approaching God. Often, the children do have the bent of the parents. Often the juxtaposed personality of a child may leave them alienated from God because they eventually come into themselves (they know themselves) and reject the bent of their parents and hence their church. Sadly, they reject God when what they are really rejecting is the socialized bent of the system they were raised in.

If, oh if only if, we would be aware of this in how we approach God. We might be less autocratic in how we handle the Word, narrowing the black and white. Yes, there is certainly black and white... but there are ton of grays, and a lot of the narrower band of black and white is tinted by our own rose colored glasses. We might approach our hard line theological issues (outside of the deity and atonement of Christ and the other core doctrines) less dogmatically and therefore be worried about Satan's demise of the world and the church, and spend less time attacking other Christians. We might have a different approach to politics. We might learn from each other - now there is a different posture! A life long posture of being teachable, being a life long learner - how novel!

I am not the only one who has taken note of this. Christian Schwartz, German Christian author and professor who has done work on several areas of the church, noted this and used the primary color wheel to illustrate it. The further from the center, the more pure the color and less we appreciate the other two colors. The more towards the center, the more balanced and less distinction. He points out that God has all three bents in His personality. When we arrogantly deny the others, we divide the church. Don Miller has also noted this. He leans against the hard line fundamentalist origins of his faith, yes - okay he is still deconstructing a bit, and notes this same phenomena on his blog.

Can I challenge us, the bride, the church, to first love God for who He is? Can I exhort us, the church, to work at minimizing our prejudiced bents from interpreting God, the Word, other saints and churches, and even maybe our politics? Can we see the bents we have and how we dismiss others without listening, being life long learners? Can I challenge you that being a life long learner and giving others a fair hearing is not compromising or diminishing your own convictions? Can I offer that you might actually learn something and therefore approach the complex issues of life, theology, politics (they are all connected and not as separate as you might think) with a touch of respect, a touch of understanding and a pound of grace?

May the Lord Himself break through and help us see Him for who He is, even the sides of Him our created bents, and socialized bents, are not at first attracted to, and may our vision of Him therefore transform our prejudiced bents to be like Him, the real Him. May we treat others in the church, not yet in the church, in every sphere of life the way Jesus would treat them.

Grace and peace,
Mike