Divine Intention

Introduction

When a group of people practice something for two thousand years, the expectation is that they’d eventually get whatever it was that they were committed to doing right. That doesn’t seem to be the case with the church. Two millennia worth of spent energy should have produced answers for individual believers on how to live what Jesus called the “abundant life.” By now local communities of believers should have mastered some competency in “corporate incarnation”—being the embodiment of Christ on Earth. However, a quick survey of church history reminds us that church has not lived up to its promise and potential. The Crusades, the Inquisitions, Luther’s pogroms, the “Confessing” Church in Germany, etc.: Each extreme example warns us that the church has the ability to mutate into something decidedly not God-shaped.

Perhaps all you need is your own personal history with church to tell you that something’s amiss. You’ve logged in countless pew-hours and dutifully captured the essence of every sermon you’ve listen to in your journal. Each week you’ve collected the preacher’s three to five application points and added them to your spiritual “to-do” list. This list has now grown from a three step dance to an impossible ribbon of religious expectations.  You signed up for a new life and settled for new lists.

Maybe you’ve graduated past pew-sitting and signed up to volunteer on a ministry team. The hope of using your spiritual gift to serve the church in a meaningful way prompted you to sacrifice your time and energy. Then church politics pushed you away. You experienced a lack of consistency between the values celebrated on Sunday and how the church truly operated during the Tuesday night board meetings. Love and servanthood triumph from the pulpit on Sunday’s, but the “greatest of these” is a good old-fashioned power play any other day of the week. Christian character seems little more than a veneer of politeness used to lubricate the social exchanges that occur before and after worship services.

Being a sensible person, you’ve decided to keep those realities at arm’s length. You’ve learned to live with these disappointments without walking away from church. You echo Peter’s sentiment when Jesus asked if he was going join the disciples who were abandoning Jesus. Peter’s reply? “Lord, to whom should we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Peter was pragmatic. Following Jesus and living in the community of disciples was difficult—and Jesus’ most recent difficult words seemed to further compound the matter, but Peter was savvy enough to see he had no real alternative.

I’ve had my share of ambivalence toward church. I have a singular passion for the church, it’s part of my deepest fiber.  I love the church. I was raised in a Christian home and was brought to church whenever the doors were open. But most of my earliest memories are church-oriented—Sunday school teachers working flannelgraph boards, spinets with warped sound boards sounding out hymns, and the weekly altar call. My dad informed me that the wooden altar was originally part of the bar at a local tavern. I grew up watching the adults in the church kneel for prayer over the same rail where patrons had once leaned over drinks to forget their long days at the local steel foundry.

Church was my sanctuary during my teen years. I was a socially awkward teen who just didn’t fit in at school. Youth group became my sanctuary. God placed an undeniable call on my life into the pastorate when I was sixteen. Upon graduation, I left Erie, Pennsylvania, for Trinity International University and a degree in Biblical Studies that would prepare me for a lifetime of serving the local church.

After receiving my degree I returned to Erie only to find the church of my childhood gridlocked in intractable conflict. Now, barely an adult, I learned the congregation had been engaged in similar conflicts for over a decade. However, this fight was different: The senior pastor left in frustration and I was asked to assume the preaching duties and to help lead the church until a new pastor was hired. Four years of theology and biblical studies did nothing to prepare me for this. Bill Hybels once said: “There’s nothing like the local church when the local church is functioning right.” Well, I can assure you there’s nothing like the local church when it’s not functioning right either.

I stayed to witness the hiring of my church’s next pastor, and shortly thereafter took my first pastorate at a much larger church across town. The interview process was extensive, but I never discovered that I was about to join a congregation reeling from controversies over worship styles and issues over the best way to govern the church. A few heated congregational meetings and an exodus of families fleeing the church oriented me to the church’s crisis in short order.

I will always remember the wounds, the insomnia, the anger, and the stress of those years. I considered giving up on the church, or at least those local churches. But a reality check had me echoing Peter. “What else is there? Really? What else is there on earth worth pouring my life into?” I love the church, but at times I’ve felt trapped by it.  And I’ve wondered if there is something more.

Many have faced Peter’s choice and have chosen to distance themselves from the Christ-followers. Its commonplace for people, Christian or not, to pit religion against spirituality. The church, or at least a church—the one he or she was “burned” at—is viewed as a religious bureaucracy, not a place to nurture the spiritual life that God implanted. Peter, if he were alive, might say that discarding the church, in spite of it’s problems, is no choice at all. When Jesus walked the earth, he realized that not following Jesus would separate him from eternal life.  Today Peter would still point to Jesus as the only source of eternal life, and he would insist that the Jesus-community is still the only adequate place to nurture this life.

Abandoning church is no real choice, but neither is a life of just “doing our time” with a congregation that has no real chance of being a source of spiritual empowerment. Resignation is not a quality of the abundant life.

There is a third choice, a choice bound up in the narrative of young Samuel. First Samuel opens with Hannah literally giving her young son to God. As a child, Samuel spent his days surrounded by the trappings of religion. He spent his days dusting the tabernacle furniture and doing odd jobs. Samuel literally polished the machinery of the “organized religion” of his day. His breakthrough came, not by abandoning the congregation, but by learning to hear God’s voice himself. The act of personally hearing from God was the beginning of a personal spiritual awakening for Samuel, and it was the beginning of his role as a spiritual reformer and prophet Israel.

In Samuel’s day, religion was the enemy of God’s design for an authentic faith community. Samuel was raised in the midst of a corrupt priesthood—a priesthood that created barriers between the common person and God. Today, many of us see church as a barrier, not a bridge to the Divine. But God’s divine intent wasn’t the rejection of “organized religion,” but its reformation.  What if, like Samuel, we could hear God’s voice and experience both personal and church renewal? What if we could learn what it means to be a part of God’s new humanity and his new society?

For centuries the church has turned to the book of Acts to hear God’s voice and to rediscover his divine intentions for the church. Intimate house churches, sprawling mega-churches, and churches of every size in between have turned to the Acts as a sacred meeting place to encounter God and recapture what it means to be God’s people.

Acts doesn’t offer us seven keys to effective church growth or ten steps to walk in the spirit. Acts isn’t a volume of systematic theology or a well organized manual for the business of running a church. Instead Acts is the unsanitary account of Jesus’ followers struggling to follow an absentee savior. Jesus died on the cross, rose from the dead, and effectively shattered the alienating effects of sin. The cross created the possibility of humans experiencing spiritual renovation and friendship with God. A different type of community was now possible—one characterized by love, grace, servanthood, and forgiveness. However, Jesus returned to heaven before spending adequate time tutoring his followers in the art of being citizens of this new community. Throughout Acts, the church seems triumphant in one chapter only to be seen flailing in the next as they struggle to live out their new identifies. The book of Acts can be seen as God, primarily in the person of the Holy Spirit, making divine interventions in the church in order to reveal his divine intentions. Acts captures human struggle, but it also recounts the process through which God tutored his people to become everything they were meant to be. 

This book you are holding is for those who love the church but have been deeply disappointed by it. This book is for those who see the church as boring, lacking nurture and vision, and, at times, a spiritually noxious environment. This book is for those brave enough to see the church with bald realism, but who love the church too much to walk away. This book is for those willing to make Samuel’s choice—to hear from God and then undergo personal and communal reformation.

Now, I understand that not everyone feels as I do, and if you don’t, that’s okay. Just put the book down and walk away. But if you in any way reflect what I just described, then by all means read on! But first allow me to walk you through the structure of Divine Intention and disclose some of its limitations…

Each chapter carefully examines one of God’s excursions into the life of the early church. Together we’ll explore in depth how God interrupted human routine in the early church and discover how that reflects his desire for us as his people. Now about the beginning and end of these chapters… Each chapter opens with a fictional dialogue between Jonah Adam, Alice, and Ron—three friends who’ve reunited for the first time since their collegiate years at an evangelical Bible school.  I invite you to eavesdrop around the table as they share their journeys and experiences with congregational life.  I’ve chosen to use fiction because of its great power to disarm. Fiction can address the areas of church life where we have the greatest need to hear God’s intentions and still allow us to side step our defenses and religious-jargon to confront reality as it is. The characters you’ll meet are authentic individuals; each possesses a heart for God but also hang ups and hurts. Don’t look to any one character for answers. Instead, look to all three to be a source of relevant questions.

Speaking of questions, each chapter ends with a set of questions. If you’re like me, you might be tempting to skip the questions in your rush to dive into the next chapter. I’d like you to treat these questions in a different manner. As far as I’m concerned, this book is not finished, and the questions are my way of inviting you to complete the work by applying the lessons you learn here to both your personal and community life. The questions are designed to help you wrestle with the text, to help you hear God’s voice, and to help you set your personal agenda for renewal and reformation. This is your chance to customize this book and discover God’s divine intention for your life.

Finally, let me acknowledge some limitations of this book. We’re not going to cover every significant moment in Acts. There’s not enough pages allotted. I’ve chosen ten accounts of divine intervention in the early church, ten “divine tutoring moments” that help us get at the core of what it means to be members of a new humanity and new society. There are other accounts that could have made the list but didn’t. Therefore, Divine Intention makes a better starting block than it does a finish line. It’s my hope that this book will whet your appetite and prompt your own unguided excursions into Acts.

Divine Intention is also limited by its focus. Paul, a major player in Acts, wrote these words about the focus of his teaching: “The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith” (1 Timothy 1:5 NIV). Love is the pinnacle of Christian teaching. However, the church has historically evaluated its Biblical teachers with the yardstick of doctrine purity. Little attention is give to whether or not the teaching inspires greater love in the teaching’s listeners. Historically, heretics have been identified by their corrupted ideas. However, if we take Paul seriously, perhaps heresy should be also measured in terms of love—“life and doctrine” as Paul elsewhere put it. In Divine Intentions, I’d paid close attention the facts and doctrines that I’ve laid out in these pages. However, I’m just as concerned by this book’s ability to motivate you to grow in your capacity to experience great love.  I’ve admitted two focuses in this book. First, we want to grasp God’s intentions for living out a new way to be human (to steal a phrase from the band “Switchfoot”). Secondly, we must understand to how participate in the new community that Jesus established through his death. These two focuses correlate to the two greatest commandments — loving God with all that we are and loving our neighbors as ourselves. 

The musical “Rent” opens with the question of how we are to measure the quality of our lives … in minutes, seconds, cups of coffee consumed, in sunrises witnessed? The song resolves with the conclusion, “How about love, How about love, Measure in Love.” My prayer is that this book will be evaluated not on the number of interesting facts unearthed regarding the first century church, but on its ability to spark small personal reformations in the quality of our love of God and our love for others.
Larry Shallenberger October 2006

Copyright to Larry Shallenberger, 2006.

Divine Intention is scheduled for publication on Victor Press in July of 2007.