Part II: Incarnational Christianity
In 1980 the country music artist Mac Davis wrote a song that most of us have heard in our lifetime. One of the lines goes like this, “O Lord its hard to be humble when your perfect in every way.” It is a funny little line, but I have found many times this is the message that the world hears coming from so many sectors of the church. The message is that ‘we’ and what I mean by ‘we’ is those who go to church are actually more pure, holy, ethical, moral and just simply above the rest of fallen humanity. If the world could get it together like us then this world would be a better place.
The sad thing is that I can take you through just the last couple of years and literally fill up half a page of the numbers of church leaders who have been a public disgrace and prime example of why the world rejects what the church is saying. We preach perfection, but many times lead a life far below the standard we set.
The error I am describing is not a new one, but it permeates much of the western church, which is a prime reason for our decline and the rejection of our leadership style. If you read the gospels then you will see that the main idol that Jesus had to confront was not paganism, but a self-righteous man-made religion. Self-righteous man-made religion has an appearance of godliness, but it is actually a departure from the faith. The reason it is a departure is because we say one thing, yet do another. It is building on sand since it is impossible to live up to man-made traditions and religious demands. It is the same error of arrogance that Israel fell into, which led to their demise. When we do this we are deceiving ourselves. At the same time the world sees through our hypocrisy and says ‘no thanks I don’t want what you are peddling’. Our message falls on dull ears because it lacks authenticity, humility, transparency and something real, which people really are looking for.
Traditions although not bad in themselves produce a sense of false confidence when embraced as a foundation for our identity. The main problem is that we are trying to fit into a system to gain our identity, acceptance and self-worth. It really puts a lot of strain on leaders who try to hold systems like this together, while wearing a cloak of perfection on the outside they inwardly are struggling with their own personal issues and can’t be real because to do so would unravel the facade they have built.
I have spent the last 10 years in corporate America and I have learned a lot about systems and how they work. One thing we have learned in America is how to manage systems. In our Six Sigma programs we have learned to get the most out of every penny, every product and every person, but it is a system based on greed, power and usually results in corruption, extravagence or both. It can be dehumanizing because as Seth Godwin so eloquently puts it, we just become a cog in the wheel keeping the machine running while in the end we are replaceable. In corporate America we have built systems that value the upper echelon’s of power while the main players are many times treated as pons not valued and considered of lesser quality than the top of the organization.
Like it our not this same mentality has seeped into and is deeply engrained in the American church. It is absolutely contrary to the gospel, but because it helps in building a working organization therefore we tend to accept something lesser than what God has intended. We need to manage the resources God has given us with excellence, but the church is more than a well run organization. The goodnews is that there are more and more churches moving away from the American corporate mentality as fast as they can without destroying what they have built. To accomplish this it is going to take a lot of oil to bring flexibility to the wineskin. Moving from a centralized organization favoring the top to a decentralized organization putting value on the entire body is not an easy feat, but it has to be done and the oil to accomplish it will be the oil of humility.
Jesus humbled Himself taking upon our humanity and identified with us. Philippians 2:1-10 describes the process of Christ identifying with us. Jesus identified with our weaknesses and was even tempted although He never sinned; He was nonetheless acquainted with our shortcomings. In Galatians 6:1 Paul says a sign of maturity is knowing your own weaknesses while having a heart of mercy and humility in helping others. The beautiful message of the incarnation is that Jesus put confidence in our humanity by putting His Spirit within us. He totally identified with our weaknesses while at the same time giving us His ability so that we can actually live like Him. It takes time, patience and actually support from other members of the body to accomplish true character. However, the treasure of Christ has been put within this mortal, frail earthen vessel so that when His character is displayed “the surpassing greatness of the power may be of God and not from ourselves” (II Cor. 4:7).
In ending this post we must understand that the world is looking for an authentic, real, transparent people who know their weaknesses, but totally rely on the cross of Christ. To accomplish this we cannot rely on tradition or corporate American managment systems, but only the inward Spirit of life to help us display the very nature of Christ. We may have traditions and great management systems, but they cannot be the centrality of what holds us together. As leaders we must pattern ourselves after Jesus who was not afraid to distribute his authority to frail humanity. He spoke against centralized power structures that favored blind submission to systems, which favored the few. He set the pattern of a decentralized structure based on the replication of His nature strengthened through mutual relationships. The organization that Jesus is building, the church (ecclesia) puts value on each member and it is that incarnational power released through joint participation with Christ and each other that will cause us to fulfill the mission. It is leadership, but servant leadership, which is not to be hierarchal in its administration but to have a mutual interaction allowing and encouraging each part to do that which it is created to do. The only way all of this can be accomplished is following our founder’s example of great humility.
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