Faith and Action

Introduction:
Theologian George Hunsberger said, “Proclaiming a gospel about Christ that is not shaped by the gospel Jesus preached distorts the gospel by proclaiming only part of its meaning” (in Darrel Guder, ed., Missional Church, Eerdmans, 1988, p. 88). The gospel Jesus preached, as I explore in The Secret Message of Jesus, is the revolutionary message of the kingdom of God. And as I explain in Everything Must Change, our most radical challenge is simply to believe that message– over and against the dominant framing stories and values massaged and driven into us by the suicidal societal machinery of our day.

As Everything Must Change makes clear, our suicidal societal machinery works through a clever, covert curriculum. Through everything from political speeches to children’s stories, from box-office-blockbusters to advertising jingles, from grade school curricula to values learned in some sports and video games, from dirty jokes that elicit an embarrassed grin to patriotic songs that elicit a reverent tear, from so-called objective news reporting to religious broadcasting, our societal machinery teaches and forms, forms and teaches, through a kind of subtle subliminal seduction.

Followers of Jesus must, in this light, teach people to expose and reject the covert curriculum wherever it appears, and replace it with an overt curriculum, “teaching people to practice everything [Jesus commanded],” as Matthew 28:18-20 puts it.

So, one of the many powerful ways faith communities can subvert the suicide machine is through this essential work of helping people become life-long learners (or disciples) who are becoming savvy to the covert curriculum and who actively and joyfully learn to live in freedom from it.
Sadly, many of our faith communities have lost this focus, replacing the kind of radical discipleship that is so desperately needed with a more institutional or privatized religiosity which forms people into – not disciples of Jesus – but “fans” of Jesus. This domesticated faith renders people unwitting drones in our suicidal societal machinery (to use Paul’s term, people who are “conformed to this world”). They fall prey to what Dallas Willard calls “the great omission” from “the great commission”: they seek to be adherents to the Christian religion, believers in certain doctrines, consumers of religious products and services, and attenders of religious meetings without being radical disciples of Jesus in their daily lives.

This kind of religious life may cause a great commotion, but will produce little transformation, personal or social. Neither these people nor their faith communities pose a serious threat to the status quo dominated by our societal machinery and its framing stories, because whatever knowledge they accumulate or emotion they generate, they don’t withdraw their confidence from the suicide machine and translate their faith in Jesus’ kingdom-of-God narrative into action. People who want forward motion, not just religious commotion, always find ways to put
knowledge and emotion into action. They do so through practices. Practices are small actions within our power that exercise us so that we can gradually do things beyond our current power.

In this way, practicing the faith is akin to practicing the piano or karate or medicine: one learns to do big things through the disciplined practice of small things. (Spiritual practice will be the theme of my next book, Finding Our Way Again [Nashville: Nelson, 2008].)

Brian McLaren