I thought I’d share my thoughts about the retreat as a way of (1) recapping the retreat for those who were not able to attend and (2) continuing the fruitful conversations that were birthed during the retreat.
To start, a little background on the theme…
Here is my first draft of the welcome note I wrote for the retreat program:
“Familiarity breeds contempt. When it comes to church, contempt may be too strong a word. Or maybe better put, at worst it can be contempt, but more often it’s a kind of inattentiveness or carelessness. Ideally, things we do week after week after week become second nature for us. The repetitiveness allows us to do them without thinking, so that they become as natural to us as breathing. But this isn’t always the case. The repetitiveness can also turn them into things we do unthinkingly – mindlessly doing what we’ve always done.
So it is with church.”
I thought it was a bit dark, so I changed it to this: “Our topic for the weekend is a simple one: Church. Whether it’s going to church, being church or doing church, like most things we do week after week after week, we can lose sight of where it is we’re trying to go, who it is we’re trying to be, what it is we’re trying to do.“
Either way, both capture the sentiment that inspired the theme for this year’s retreat: getting back to the basics of what (the point of) church is.
With such a theme, I knew of no one better to address it than my (our) good friend, Jon Tran.
Jon’s answer to the question revolved around two things: (1) Community and (2) Story. Putting these two together, the answer to the question, “What is church?” becomes: The church is a story-formed community. This story of course, is the story we find written in the pages of Scripture – a story, as Jon described, that can be told in 5 acts:
- Creation & Fall
- Israel
- Jesus
- Church
- The End (New Creation)
Many of us may be familiar with this 5-act structure, but, what I think Jon helped us to see is how beautiful and powerful and utterly remarkable this story is and the life-giving adventure it calls us into. This is what it means to be church: a people gathered around this story, which in the end is the stunning story of God’s self-giving love that refuses to abandon us (and creation) to the destructive emptiness of sin.
At this point in the retreat, things were moving along swimmingly, until we got to Saturday night, where words like “overwhelming” and “depressing,” were being uttered.
That night, Jon described the dire straits we find ourselves in. As many scientists have been warning, our greed and consequent disregard for the environment has stripped the earth of its ability to sustain life as we know it. Our situation is like that of a frog in water that is slowly being heated up. We don’t take seriously the warning signs, because we simply adapt to each degree of heat. The problem is that once we realize we are being boiled to death it is too late – indeed, some say we have already passed the point of no return.
If that wasn’t enough, we were then made to look at how our bottomless appetite for comfort and convenience, contributes to the continual oppression of those our economic system systemically and systematically hides from us. Our wealth is made possible by the relentless exploitation of our global neighbors. We go in, take what we want. When there is nothing left, we move on, leaving the place worse off and or desperate than when we entered.
We are like cannibals, voraciously feeding off the flesh of others to sustain and further our “way of life.”
Indeed, as Jon pointed out, cannibalism becomes an apt metaphor for what happens when we do not shape our lives around God’s good story of abundance and grace. That when we allow the story of the world, the story of sin and scarcity to shape us we cannot help but have our desires deformed in such a way that we devour any thing and any one for our own benefit.
Interestingly enough, as depressing as it was, many of us also found ourselves strangely warmed that night. Inspired even. We experienced the reality that when we are able to see the world for what it is – or more accurately, when we are able to see sin in all its disfiguring ugliness we are able to recognize just how wonderfully ridiculous the gospel is. I think this is what Paul meant when he said, “But where sin increased, grace increased all the more” (Romans 5:20). To face with brutal honesty the sin that infects us and the good world God created, it helps open our eyes to see again what we once saw so clearly – that there is no story so beautiful, so good and so true as the one that finds its heart in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord.
As Christians, as the Church, we then are called to be bearers of this story – to faithfully carry this story by living according to the hope contained within it.
Lastly, what I think was truly special about the weekend, was that there seemed (to me at least) to be a heightened appreciation for one another. That Jon’s talks as well as the testimonies that were shared throughout the weekend helped remind us what a gift it is that God has given us one another to be church together. We are fellow travelers on this great adventure called Church and we need one another to be and do what God intends for us to be and do (muck like the rabbits of Watership Down).
And so our last day (Sunday), we spent thinking and dreaming together about what is next for Christ Kaleidoscope. I think this is the question, the conversation, that we need to continue as a community. In the end, this is something that was at the heart of what we wanted Christ Kaleidoscope to be about – a community where we are able to discern together what it means to be God’s people, shaped by God’s story, in the specific time and place we find ourselves in. So let us continue the conversation…
What is next for Christ Kaleidoscope?
