Redemptive Relationships
“We should be engaging the culture in a redemptive relationship where radical grace can be lived out, perhaps even more than sung about.” I made this statement a while back while booking a christian artist to perform at Bekah’s Barrista. And she asked me, more or less, what in the world I was talking about. Good for her, I needed to be kept honest.
So here are my thoughts.
It’s admittedly a somewhat reactionary statement about the evangelical christian culture at large, which has for too long been treating people as evangelism projects. Draw a crowd, make the pitch, bring them to a point of decision, and… voila! Christians! And I’ve been sensing a grievance of the Holy Spirit in that–not a grievance about people who have been legitimately reconciled to God–but a grievance that evangelicals have become so myopic in our view of people, as if their greatest value to us is as a Divine assignment. There are absolutely beautiful exceptions, but I’m talking about the general tide here.
God wants our love for them to be at once focused and complex — like his is. With the same grace that he exercises in “bringing rain on the just and the unjust”, he wants us to love people because they’re people. People’s actions aren’t necessarily love-invoking, but Love loves them nonetheless, at their core. Often that love is a “drink offering” of sorts — you pour it on the ground and it’s gone. You get nothing in return, but love is satisfied nonetheless. It’s a gift, it’s love.
We need to stop thinking of love as an investment for an expected return. In fact, we Evangelicals have been so investment conscious — investing “love” for the “return” of faith decisions — that we too often neglect the people, and ironically, the essence of love itself. We’re proud to cleverly view them as “pre-christians”, assuming that, like it or not, they are in process of becoming one of us. That probably registers with most us as an attitude of faith where we call it not as it is but as it will be, expecting God to do the miraculous. Fine, but keep it in the prayer closet. Because not only does it reinforce the negative stereotypes of smug triumphalism, it fails to acknowledge people’s God given dignity – the diginity of self-differentiation – the dignity of making their own faith decision.
To get personal here, if I’m honest, my desire to see strangers come to Christ is only awkwardly, perhaps mockingly, expressed as “I love you.”
When I was in the fourth grade at a christian school we thought it was funny to walk up to a girl and say, “I love you,” wait two seconds for the flattery to set in, and then totally dismiss it by saying, “in God’s way.” Apparently loving “in God’s way” was not as personal or serious.
I have no idea where we got that idea, but I see a sort of inverse application going on when I think of our evangelical love for strangers. We’re trying to love strangers, but it’s a distant, removed love because they’re… strangers! And we have put so much energy into “reaching” them that our outreach efforts have outreached our love. We’re fueled by programs and “great commissions” because our love doesn’t burn hot enough to propel the machine. We’re overextended, and so we salve our dis-ease by qualifying that we love them with God’s love. Rather than using the qualification to minimize a bold statement like I did in the fourth grade, we use it to try to reframe a discompassionate love. In the complete absence of any real, personal desire to know or be known by this stranger, I can still tell myself that I in fact DO love them because… I love them “in God’s way.”
But Jesus said that love will die for someone. I had a friend tell me emphatically, “You wanna know how much I love Jesus? I love him so much I would die for you.” He put his finger right in my chest. And I believe him!
Funny, I never thought of it that way before. Yet really, if I’m honest, this “love” that has compelled me to work at reconciling strangers to Christ, has also been hardpressed to be even inconvenienced by them, let alone killed for them. I bet I’m not alone in resembling that remark.
Of course, the desire to see others reconciled to Christ is a healthy, even essentially loving desire. I firmly believe that. As those who have graciously been reconciled, and in whom God’s love is being made complete, we genuinely want to see others reconciled with the God who loves them. That honors God and it honors people. But until we stop trying to “fulfill the Great Commission” and instead start loving our neighbor as ourself, we will continue coming up with different schnazzy methods of the same cattle call plan of saving the world. We will continue to broadcast the good news and gather in masses of people looking for a reason to hope. And we’ll continue to be too busy to love them as a friend. And we’ll continue to perpetuate the caricature that we’re just trying to dominate society with our belief system, the same as any political party or “world religion” might.
It’s so much safer to sidestep the love part and go for the decision part. To be sure, love is an investment, in the sense that we must invest our lives and our energy into the lives of individuals—but even if there is no measurable return on our investment, it is not a bad investment!
My heart’s plea to anybody is an echo of Paul’s, “Be reconciled to God!” But my heart’s plea to the Church is to imitate the Lord in Mark 10:21, who before answering the inquirer “looked at him and loved him.” Can we do that? If we did, would it change our urgency? Maybe we would stop trying to “grow the Church by one more person” and we’d start passionately loving that “one person” at the depths of their soul, from the depths of ours – compelled by the love of Christ to spend ourselves on them. That sort of love is complex, with its myriad difficulties and implications. That’s the kind of love that would die for someone.
So what did I mean by my words? “We should be engaging the culture in a redemptive relationship where radical grace can be lived out, perhaps even more than sung about.” Or talked about.
“Redemptive relationships” are genuine, heartfelt friendships with people that treat them more as people than “decisions”. There is definitely a time to talk and explain, and even invite, but the time before that is a friendship in which we can hear their real needs before giving them our solutions.
Our prayer for the salvation of those around us needs to find a new expression if we dare: Lord, fill my soul to overflowing with a perfect love for this person – so much that I would die for them if need be. Then maybe we could say together,
Hey neighbors! You’ve heard us proclaim that we love Jesus! Well, you wanna know how much we love him? We love him so much that we would die for you!
Amen?