THE WRONG DREAM

The Western church has got it wrong, say Tom and Christine Sine, American authors and teachers. While the world's needs increase, the church's capacity to respond is dwindling. And the middle class dream is getting more expensive...

Crisis of Vision

The number one crisis in the church today is a crisis of vision: the image of a better future. We have allowed modernity and Western culture instead of biblical faith to shape the aspirations and values that drive our lives. We have uncritically allowed the Western dream to define what is important and determine how we order our private worlds.We must rethink what it means to be disciples of Jesus Christ.

We are trying to do discipleship on a two-legged stool. One leg is personal piety (devotion to God). The other is private morality But the third leg is missing: inviting the Holy Spirit to transform cultural values. We understand that following Christ has to do with transforming our hearts, healing our psychological hang-ups - but leaving our life directions absolutely untouched.

What is our life direction before we become believers? Upward mobility. What is it afterwards? Exactly the same. The only thing that has changed is that we are told in too many of our churches that God is there to help us to get up the mountain a little quicker - instead of us being part of what God is doing to bring righteousness, justice and peace to the earth.

Those of us in evangelical/charismatic and Pentecostal churches throughout the Western world are responsible for selling our young people the wrong dream. For all the talk about the Lordship of Jesus, we have sold them the Western dream with a little Jesus overlay. And it is a dream that is no longer accessible to them.

If they seek to live out their parents' lifestyles, they will not begin to have the money or the time to support Tear Fund's ministry, or any of the other important works of the Kingdom into the next millennium. In the US, the under 30s generation is giving 50 per cent less - not because they don't care, but because they can't.

People of all generations are getting busier and busier, trying to keep up, working extra jobs. But in this whole rat race people have less time and money to support the church.

A New Vision

We tend to use Scripture devotionally - How con this bless and encourage my life? - rather than to define a new image for our lives and future. We need to go hack to the Scripture, to start taking it seriously for all of life.

If we were to ask a different question: What are God's purposes for the human future? - we could find within Scripture an alternative to the Western dream. We would find imagery of a God who intends to create a new heaven and earth.

Isaiah's imagery is of the great homecoming (2:1-4), when people come from every tongue and tribe and nation to the City of God. It is imagery of banqueting (25:6-9); of justice coming for the poor, and sight to the blind; of swords being made into ploughshares; of people and creation being restored to wholeness (35:1-7). It is incredible imagery, and that dream is different to the Western dream.

In our churches, we have very little music that begins to capture the imagery of the great homecoming of God - the God who intends to make all things new. We don't have many ways to bring this into our lives. But if we could recover that biblical vision and use that to redefine what we are here for, we could burst the wineskins - the conventional. We could start to move in some new directions.

The Third Leg

In the first century, the first disciples were not living out Roman culture with house church at the weekend. They understood that following Jesus was a whole-life proposition. God wants to put a third leg on the stool. God wants to start messing around with our cultural values too:

• to transform our life direction from upwardly mobile to outwardly ministering
  
  
• to change time styles so that families and individuals can find time to be involved in making a difference, for those that don't do it through their vocations.

Many of the people we work with in the Third World could help us biblically redefine what the good life is. Life has nothing to do with how much we own. The good life of God has to do with the celebration of relationships, of caring for others.

The first call of the gospel of Christ is not to proclamation - and we do believe in evangelism. Nor is it social action. The first call of the gospel of Christ is incarnation - living out something that is radically different.

God does not just want to transform our hearts and help us with personal morality. God intends to make all things new. That vision needs to capture our lives.

For more, see Tom Sine's books Live it Up! How to Create A Life You Can Love (Herald Press) and Wild Hope (Monarch Press). Christine Sine has written Confessions of a Seasick Doctor (Monarch) and Survival of the Fittest (MARC) on preparing for mission.

Taken from an article in Tear Times, Autumn 1996. Reprinted with permission.