June 28th, 2024

ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
June 28, 2024
I’m going to church camp next week. No! Not as a camper. I am keynoting the Chi Rho (middle school) camp at Disciple Oaks, our camp ground outside of Gonzales, Texas (thus, the reason it is often referred to as Camp Gonzo). This was once a way of living. Literally! I was on the staff of a church camp for two summers, working with ten camps each summer. Once I started ministry, specifically Youth Ministry, I was still doing 2–4 camps each summer. But today, that feels as if it were a long time ago. Actually, it was a long time ago. As I have been working on my keynotes the last two months, one of my biggest aha moments has been in regard to illustrations. I’ll think to myself, “Oh, that wasn’t long ago.” And it wasn’t, but the youth I’ll be working with were only 4 when that happened… so probably not a key memory for them. This experiment (in a week, I’ll let you know if it was successful or a complete flop) has been a good reminder about what is relevant. The church has constantly struggled with relevancy, balanced with tradition, unchanging values, and truth. For example, we might claim that love is the most important characteristic of the Jesus life, but what does love look like in our daily lives? How does it look different from someone living a thousand years ago, a hundred years ago, or even twenty years ago? At each point in history, there has been some group, nationality, or way of existing that was considered unworthy of love. Today, we not only disagree with that assessment but also express embarrassment or even anger for such limitations. Of course, what are people two hundred years from now going to be saying about us? In the past, there have been respected Christian theologies that suggested that God gave people deadly diseases as a way of expressing love—maybe as a way of humbling them. Today, if someone were to intentionally give another person a deadly disease, we would call that illegal and arrest the individual… and we certainly would not call it love. People will say to me all the time, “You want to change the Gospel (or the Bible),” but my response is to point out how Judaism and Christianity have done this very thing throughout their entire existence. Yes, there is struggle and questions that arise whenever something new is pushing against the norm, but if that would never have occurred, Christianity would still be the greatest defender of slavery today.

Holy God, continue to push and expand my notion of the Gospel wherever my expression is currently falling short and not communicating the beauty and depth of your love. Where needed, provide me both peace and boldness for the task of seeing the power of your love reach its potential in this moment of time. Amen.