This Thing We Call Church Part 2: The Drum of Liberation

Photo by Elbert Lora on Unsplash

I want to make it clear that I have no problem with traditional local churches. Even though my own spiritual journey seems to be moving away from them, it might have never began without them. If the least that can said is that I gained an awareness of Jesus from those places, then that is enough. There may be no better foothold than that. No matter where our paths have taken us since then, many of us who have emerged from such spaces cannot deny we owe the traditional local church at least that much. Whether the love of Christ was developed later, I cannot say, but for me at least the local church was like being present at the feeding of five thousand. Even if you weren’t close to the baskets of fish and bread you still knew that something special was going on and that life had the chance to be markedly different from anything you knew before.

So, if you do not believe in anything I have said regarding church before, then I implore you to continue on in your commitment to the traditional local church because it is on your heart. If I believe in Christ and I do, he can work through such spaces, and he has already done so. If serving Christ through a commitment to a traditional local church seems best to you then do that and do well in it. I did not write to you earlier in part one in order to make you abandon your efforts, but to raise your awareness. May the light of Christ shine through as you live and serve but know that the boundaries of church are not limited to an institution. Have mercy on others and yourself. You can carry your church far beyond its own walls because the cornerstone is already set. So, if you must be Baptist, then be Baptist. If you must be Anglican than be Anglican, but do not let the desire to do well at those things overcome the person and church that Jesus has called you to be. Some of us have been liberated from the world only to be taken captive by denominational/tribal rules and politics. It is no different for New Monastics. If a day should come that its practice supersedes the calling of Christ, then it would better for it to be abandoned.

To carry church around in our own bodies and adopt it as a spiritual practice is by no means an innovative practice. If there is anything the church needs less of, it would have to be innovation. Everything it needs to be effective is already present; namely the giving of ourselves. The great strength of the church described in Acts was in its people and how they put church into practice. For them, church was the sharing of each other’s life on a day-to-day level regardless of how clumsy it might have looked. The selling of land and possessions to ensure that no one went without created this local economy that’s aim was liberation. Liberation from not only hunger and lack of shelter, but liberation from things like worry, stress, and anxiety…. things which continue to plague our society today.

Church ought to be the great drum of liberation, not a captor. If we are held captive by anything it should be by Christ and our captivity in his love is what liberates us from everything else. Too often in our modern moment do we hear of church as something to escape from rather than a means by which our bonds are cut. Instead of centers of faith, we have developed centers of rules despite knowing that we are not justified by the law. We imagine that if we control the world then we are free from it, but we have only dug ourselves in deeper. We say that if anyone is not with us, they are against us, not realizing that line is meant for Christ alone. In this way we believe we are gathering alongside Christ when in truth we are scattering.

Even in light of this sobering reality there is still hope. Just as Peter had to be confronted in Galatians for his inconsistency in regard to Gentile inclusion within the Church, so too must we confront our own narrowness in regard to how we do church. Only in doing so may we be liberated into a church that is better. A church that is closer to Christ.

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This article is written by Network Writer Stefon Napier, and is crossposted from his personal blog on substack! To learn more about Stefon visit his team page at https://www.kfmbroadcasting.com/team/napier-s. You can find his full library of writings on his substack at https://stefonnapier.substack.com/