The 4 Pillars

“Theology is the study of God and his ways.  For all we know, dung beetles may study man and his ways and call it humanology.  If so, we would probably be more touched and amused than irritated.   One hopes that God feels likewise.”  - Frederick Buechner

In life we all have main pillars giving structure to our lives.  Jesus didn’t want to make life more complicated than it needed to be.  When asked about what was really important, he said, “Love God and love people.”  The Bible is full of advice and rules for how to live life, but when you look at its essence, this is what you have left.  The Bible gives us a process governing the way in which we do these two simple things.  They boil down to this:  seek intimacy with others.  Discipleship is the process whereby we love and become intimate with God.  Koinonea is the process whereby we love and become intimate with fellow believers. 

Recognizing with humility that if Jesus kept it simple, so should we, we must recognize that God wants us, his creatures, to be happy and gives us a great deal of latitude.  Freedom within the context of these guidelines is the atmosphere that God seeks.  And God is not only interested in relationships.  He wants to spread His love across the world.  He gives us something to do and attaches a goal to it.  Spiritual dominion over evil is the goal that we’ve been given as we interface with an unbelieving world.

So, here are the four main pillars governing our life together:

 

1. Discipleship – Growing in God, getting his DNA
2. Koinonea – God with skin on
3. Freedom – God’s creativity unleashed
4. Dominion – God with shoes on

Discipleship – Growing in God, getting his DNA

Disciple-making means showing people, over time, how to live life to the fullest.  In doing so, we bring them into intimacy with the Father.  The disciples said, “Show us the Father.”  Jesus replied, “You’ve seen me; you’ve seen the Father.”  He brought them into intimacy with the Father by modeling what that looked like.  Similarly, we disciple others by being God’s ambassadors.  If you were to meet the Japanese ambassador, he might make a similar claim, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen Japan.  I am the physical representation of Japan in America.”

We don’t naturally know how to walk as citizens of the Father’s Kingdom anymore than the 12 disciples did.  It took Jesus about three years of intensive modeling of life and ministry before they began to see God’s big picture and walk in authority and faith.

Jesus was intentional in making disciples, selecting them one-by-one.  So our churches need to be hotbeds of disciple-making, places where believers are encouraged and challenged.  Successful disciple-making produces the fruit of intimacy with God.  It encompasses the activities of worship and prayer, which are the way in which we live our lives before God, and our attitude toward the gifts of the Spirit, which are God's empowerment of His people to take dominion over His creation.  As God empowers us, so He decentralizes power in His church, making us all priests, giving us all Kingdom DNA.  As such, we become a threat to our sworn enemy, a threat that is realized as we begin to embrace the partnership with God that He desires.

 

Koinonea:  God with skin on

Just as we were fashioned to find our true identity in God, so we were created as social creatures to interact with one another and in that interaction, find our context in a group of people whom we love and whom we are loved by.  This inter-working is grounded in the Greek word, koinonea.  It forms the basis for our understanding of what church should look like.

Some might call it “fellowship,” but that word has connotations of potluck dinners in fellowship halls.  It is insipid next to the red-blooded, full throttle corporate celebrations and nurturing body life that God designed us for.  The deep peace and security that we experience in being known and accepted by a group, the celebrating which we do together and the grace we offer and experience, are all foundational aspects of Kingdom living.

True koinonea produces the fruit of intimacy within our fellowship.  The profound commitment to one another that makes this dynamic possible is called “covenantal.”  This is a term that has fallen on hard times in our individualistic, mobile society.  It is hard to commit when neither you nor others know with any certainty whether you’ll be there in the next year.  True covenantal relationships are based on shared responsibility and mutual accountability.

When we do find koinonea, we find a part of ourselves that we never knew was missing.  We become complete as we fulfill our role in something much bigger than ourselves.  We were born to be team players, not renegades, yet too many Christians have never found their team.  When at last we find it, the dynamic we experience is koinonea.

 

 

Freedom:  God’s creativity unleashed

A little tyrant lives within us all that wants to find structure and comfort where the only certainty is mystery.  We by nature seek to bring order out of chaos.  As pioneers in any new world, whether it is physical or metaphysical, we want to cut down trees, plant gardens, and put up fences.  Because this is the way we are hard-wired, we need the in-built brake on our proclivity that the doctrine of freedom brings.  Theologians are inveterate fence-makers whose lives generally cannot support their vocation.  As they erect spiritual fences for the rest of us, we assume they know what they are doing and live within the confines of their boundaries.

A consequence of this sad fact of life is that thousands of denominations speak definitively about things which are debatable.  While God designed us for the freedom which an embrace of myth and mystery produce, we default to variations on the theme of legalism, a theme proven to be bankrupt in the Old Testament, and excoriated by Jesus in the New.

Embracing the freedom Jesus came to give us softens the edges of doctrinal positions which define the terms by which we engage with God and one another, terms which when reduced to paper and interpreted by men, inevitably become hard-edged and joyless.  Understanding that this dynamic is what drains the vitality from all denominations over time, we need to allow God to be God.

Ultimately, embracing a lifestyle of freedom, we live as children of the covenant and masters of creation, realizing that we were born to soar.  Unfettered by lifestyle strictures mandated by theological curmudgeons, we find our wings and take flight.

 

Dominion:  God with shoes on

Back in the garden, God gave Adam the keys to the Kingdom, dominion over all creation.  Because Adam lost them, God’s been trying to help the rest of us as Adam’s heirs to recover our inheritance.  God didn’t set this up as some grand, failed experiment.  After that initial setback, He put in motion a plan whereby we, His proxies and territorial stewards, would re-establish His Kingdom.

This enterprise was summarized by Jesus in His last words to his disciples – marching orders we know as the Great Commission:  “Go and make disciples.”  But reconciling men to God and helping them discover their true royal identity and authority has always been God’s plan.

Consequently, our posture towards the world projects the confidence of displaced heirs.  The earth is the Lord’s.  He didn’t create humanity for the misery and bondage that so many endure, but for a life of joy and abundance.  Recognizing this, the original disciples moved out fearlessly into a hazardous and antagonistic world, a world that they turned upside down.  As we recognize the mandate of exercising dominion that our royal identity confers, we raise the dead no less fearlessly than did Jesus’ disciples.

As we take dominion over creation, we exercise the Great Commission authority Jesus conferred on us.  We do so understanding God's kingly relationship to it both in a past-tense and future-tense perspective, church planting, which is the strategy by which we take dominion over small subsets of territory, and apostleship, which is the strategy by which we plant churches. 

Practically, we exercise divine authority in every realm of the real world in which we live.  Whether in our families, our workplaces, or our social and governmental institutions, we allow God to transform our culture through our interactions with it.

 Our tribe

g42 is nothing if not a tribe.  What do we mean by that?

In America, we're descendents of cowboys and rough riders - independent souls that killed those living in tribes. So it's no wonder that we struggle so to find our tribe. We don't understand tribes - their power is mysterious to us. For example, we are baffled by the tribal violence in places like Rwanda.

And it's no wonder that so many people are tribe-less and profoundly lonely. Even the tribal lowest common denominator - the extended family - is in such disarray that it fails to serve as a model of a tribe for most people.

Tribes are groups of people held together by common interests and values. Students and retired people tend to be tribal, hanging out on-line or in RV campgrounds. Myspace.com is a mechanism for building virtual tribes, but can't deliver on the real thing.

Real tribes are cross-generational, blending old and young around a vision for the future that inspires hope and loyalty. The Amish and the Masons were cohesive tribes that inspired prior generations, but which struggle to say anything relevant to young people today.

Of course God's people have always been profoundly tribal. The Jewish experience has always had the power of a shared story and religious identity. And wherever people are earnestly seeking and following Jesus, there is a tribe. We share a common Lord, a common purpose, a common spirit, and a common vision for loving others.

Many Jesus-followers may not live at this level, but a yearning to find our tribe and to belong to it lives deep within us all.