Unarmed Empire Revisited #2
The Posture Before Belief
Regardless of what anyone says, there is always a posture which comes before beliefs. And that belief might best be described as posture. It’s obvious. We stand, sit, lay down, kneel, bow, and other physical postures based the appropriateness of what it is we believe his happening or about to happen, and that decision occurs before we enacts anything.
For example, the school where I attended college required daily chapel. These services were held in the same gym where our school’s volleyball and basketball teams hosted games. During chapel, I typically sat on the floor — the basketball court — in the rows of chairs which were placed nearest the stage. That was the appropriate, but late that same night there might be a basketball game in the same space, with many of the same people in attendance. However, it would have been grossly inappropriate, not to mention physically dangerous, to sit in the middle of the court, in the same spot, even in the same chair, during the game. During games, I sat in the bleachers.
What determined my posture? My belief and knowledge about what was happening in the room.
Enacted Imagination
Unarmed Empire begins with the posture of the church.1 I tell the story of the killdeer which nested in our church parking lot when we lived in Temple, TX. Sitting in the cracked pavement of our church parking lot, and protected by our church members, each year multiple mothers of killdeer would find a home there. Killdeer are not rare. They are not special. Yet, our community, without having a single meeting or designing a program moved to protect them.
For churches to be the kind of places envisioned by Jesus and addressed by Paul, our orientation to the world matters. This comes as a shock to many who see the church’s primary task as believing certain propositions to be true. What we believe matters, but before that, we need to a more developed sense of what God is up to in the world. If we, for instance, believe that God’s chief aim in creation is to sort out and judge, we will construct and inhabit churches which judge. If we believe God is primarily up to helping humans feels good about their decisions — whether good or bad — our assemblies will become about increasing comfortability and consumer services.
We enact in the church — both gathered and scattered — what we imagine God to be doing. And here is what this is important: I have read hundreds of church websites and doctrinal statements and most of them talk about the churches posture toward people. 90% of them, however, tell readers what that church thinks about a range of subjects. Again, these are important, but the question people are actually asking is, “How will I be treated?”
How Will I Be Treated?
The question, “How will I be treated?” is actually the question folks both inside and outside the church ask. “When folks discover I’m divorced, or gay, or struggle with depression, or am addicted to alcohol, drugs, money, or pornography, or any number of realities of human existence, how will I be received?”
“How will I be treated?” is why women and minorities stalk church websites for pictures and pastors who look like them and search the web for sermon content. They are not looking for whether a church believes the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and other topics which are largely taken for granted. They are not looking for the intricacies of Pneumatology. They want to know if in their particularities, glories, and struggles, a church honors their humanity.
A good deal of the questions contemporary churches “wrestle” with can more easily (and quickly) be resolved if churches pre-determined the ways we are committed to loving and walking with one another — forming an orientation to see each other as persons rather than policies. Like the killdeer in the parking lot, will people be protected or discarded for the sake of convenience.
The post in this series assumes you have or are reading Unarmed Empire. Fuller treatments of these ideas can be found there, rather than simply rewriting the book.