Just the Right Counterbalance

Sometimes I read things for school that cause my mind and emotions to start spiraling out of control. When that happens, what I really need is something to anchor me back to what is true.

I am halfway finished with The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21^st-Century Church by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch. It is one of those books that is sending me spiraling into confusion. When I finish it, I’ll post a full review with my pushback included. For now, though, suffice it to say that the book raises a harsh criticism of the Western church. Many of the statements are, I believe, overgeneralized. Regardless, when you read a book like this, it is easy for it to cause you to see only the bad in your local church. This was beginning to happen for me. I was wrestling with the claims about Western churches not being missional. I was thinking about times that my local church has not felt like a community to me. My tendency was to see only the bad and ignore the good as I read this book. And to be quite frank, it was sending me spiraling.

In the middle of this, I went on a retreat with my college group. The speaker and the community I experienced on this trip were just the right counterbalance to what I was reading. It was the medicine I needed to undo the overthinking and criticizing that was taking place in my own heart while reading the book.

In one of the sessions, our speaker talked about the tension between the good and bad in people. We all think we are pretty good, and then one day we are confronted with the evil that is in our hearts. Conversely, we often look out at the world around us and at people around us and only see the bad. We need to be reminded that God created all things and declared it to be “very good.” In this tension of good and bad, I saw something about my local church. Yes, there are things that are bad, uncomfortable, and not right. My local church, your local church, any local church is not perfect. It is made up of human beings who have an immense amount of evil in our hearts. But, at the same time, each of those human beings is good. We are created in the image of God. When God created humanity he declared it to be “very good.” And so, yes, our churches also have a lot of really good things in them. This was a reminder to me that I need to take the time to remember the good and not focus on the bad.

At another point, the speaker was talking about bearing one another’s burdens. He was proposing that this was the anecdote to being judgmental. I was convicted that this judgmental attitude he was talking about was present, very strongly, in my own heart as I thought about my church. Serving and bearing one another’s burdens, being a community, is the way to counteract these judgmental tendencies. As an ex-fireman, he spoke about how the Fire Department has an understanding between members that “if you go down, I’ll take care of your family.” That’s the way the church should be. Paired with the warning about being judgmental, this was a call for me to recognize and remember the ways that the church has been a loving community to my family in the past. It was even a slap in the face to appreciate the community I was experiencing around the campfire at that moment.

At another moment in the weekend, I was having a discussion with one of the other young adults on the trip. I’ve known him for as long as we both have been alive. We grew up at this church together. He was my brother’s best friend for a long time. We were taking a few moments to catch up. He told me that he was trying to be more purposeful in downtime at work to do things that matter (reading a helpful book instead of watching tik tok). I asked him if he was able to have purposeful conversations with people at his work. He gave me a few examples of times he has had purposeful (in the language of the book, missional) conversations and how he is trying to keep in mind ways that he ought to live in order to show his coworkers by his actions that he is different. This is important, because one of the claims of The Shaping of Things to Come is that our churches don’t adequately train people to “live missionally” in their communities. Yet here was one young man who is doing just that (though he wouldn’t have used the term “missional” to describe his purposeful way of living and acting around coworkers).

I am so thankful for the speaker and the community I got to spend time with this past weekend. I am so, so thankful for the way it helped to balance the emotions I was feeling after reading The Shaping of Things to Come. And I am so thankful for how God is using difficult books and fun weekends (both!) to grow and shape me more after the image of his son.