What Motivates Me to Stick My Neck Out

Why I Am Writing This

Stephen Covey, in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, famously taught that we should seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Unfortunately, I feel the need to violate that habit of highly effective people—perhaps because I am not all that effective.

I need to try to be better understood.

I am sticking my neck out in a number of ways. I ask questions, raise concerns, get involved in things, and sometimes say things that can easily be misunderstood. Before you decide what to make of any of that, I would like to give you the best possible chance to understand why I am doing it.

Maybe, in the process of trying to explain it to you, I will come to understand it a little better myself.

That is what this is about: what motivates me to stick my neck out.

Where I Am Coming From

I want people who encounter something I have written to have some idea of where I am coming from—why certain questions keep troubling me, why certain possibilities excite me, and why I sometimes seem to have one foot in several different Christian worlds at once.

That will not be especially easy to explain. My personal and spiritual history is complicated. I have encountered Christianity through a number of different traditions, movements, ways of worshiping, and ways of thinking about the Church. All of them have influenced me. Some have left me with convictions. Some have left me with questions. Some have left me with both.

I am not writing this because I think I have finally figured everything out. Quite the opposite. A great deal of what I write is part of my attempt to work things out.

Disagreement or misunderstanding does not make me courageous, and it certainly does not make me correct. But some questions seem important enough that I would rather risk being misunderstood than leave them unasked.

Why Am I Doing This Within the Catholic Church?

One question I will probably need to explain more often than most is why I continue to involve myself in various efforts within the Roman Catholic Church.

In some respects, that may seem puzzling.

I have much in common with Christians and Christian schools of thought outside the Catholic Church. Many of my instincts about Christian community, disciple-making, evangelization, leadership, and the structure of Christian life overlap with concerns raised by people involved in house churches, simple churches, missional communities, disciple-making movements, and other attempts to reconsider the ways Christians organize themselves.

I also think there are serious problems with the prevailing model of how we "do church"—and I do not think those problems are uniquely Catholic. Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Evangelicals, and others can all fall into patterns in which large numbers of Christians attend services, participate in programs, and identify with a church while relatively few are intentionally being formed into mature disciples who are themselves learning to form other disciples.

So why remain involved in Catholic efforts?

One reason is simply the extraordinary potential that is already there.

The Roman Catholic Church comprises roughly half of the Christians in the world who profess Jesus Christ. It possesses an enormous worldwide network of parishes, dioceses, schools, universities, religious communities, charitable institutions, clergy, lay movements, ministries, and ordinary believers.

I look at all of that and see tremendous potential.

If even a relatively small portion of that immense body became more intentionally oriented toward forming people into the likeness of Christ, making disciples who make disciples, proclaiming the Gospel, equipping ordinary Christians for ministry, building genuine Christian community, and seeking the unity for which Jesus prayed, the consequences could extend far beyond the internal life of the Catholic Church.

That possibility is one reason I keep sticking my neck out.

This Is Not an Argument That Catholicism Has It All Figured Out

I am not involved in Catholic life because I believe Catholicism has already solved the problems that concern me.

In fact, many of the questions I ask arise precisely because I believe the Catholic Church possesses enormous spiritual, theological, institutional, and human resources while often falling far short of what those resources could accomplish.

Nor do I believe the answer to Christianity's problems is simply to make everybody Catholic. I do not think the answer is simply to make everybody Protestant, Orthodox, Evangelical, charismatic, liturgical, non-liturgical, house-church, megachurch, traditional, progressive, or anything else.

I have spent enough time around different parts of Christianity to see both strengths and blind spots in many of them.

Sometimes one part of the Church seems to see something another part has forgotten. Sometimes the people outside our particular tradition are asking questions that those of us inside it badly need to hear.

The Question Underneath Many of My Questions

Increasingly, I find myself coming back to one question:

What did Jesus intend His people to become, and what would it take for us actually to become it?

That question leads to many others.

What does it actually mean to make disciples? What does it mean to become like Christ rather than merely learn more about Him? What is the relationship between worship and mission? Between clergy and ordinary Christians? Between institutions and relationships? Between evangelization and discipleship? Between personal holiness and the restoration of God's Kingdom? Between loyalty to a Christian tradition and the unity for which Jesus prayed?

What should Christian community look like if we take seriously all those New Testament commands about loving one another, encouraging one another, bearing one another's burdens, teaching one another, confessing to one another, serving one another, and building one another up?

And perhaps most uncomfortably: if our churches are doing what Jesus intended them to do, what sort of people should they be producing?

I Am Interested in the Gaps

Much of what catches my attention is a gap between what Christians say is true and what actually seems to happen.

We say that making disciples matters. What does disciple-making look like in ordinary Christian life?

We say that Christians are members of one body. Do we actually know one another well enough to function as one?

We say that every Christian has gifts and a calling. Are ordinary Christians actually being equipped to use them?

We say that Jesus prayed that His followers would be one. How seriously do we take the divisions among us?

We say that the Gospel is good news for the world. Are we forming Christians who know how to live and communicate that good news outside church walls?

We say that the goal of Christian life is transformation into the likeness of Christ. Are our churches actually structured around helping that transformation happen?

Those questions can sound critical. Sometimes they are. But criticism is not ultimately what motivates me.

Possibility does.

What I Hope For

I want to see Christians become more like Christ.

I want to see disciples making disciples.

I want to see ordinary Christians recognize that ministry is not something performed primarily by professionals while everybody else watches.

I want to see Christian communities in which people actually know, love, encourage, challenge, forgive, teach, support, and accompany one another.

I want evangelization to mean more than attracting people to religious activities. I want people invited into allegiance to Jesus Christ as Lord and King and then accompanied as they learn what living under His reign means.

I want Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Evangelicals, charismatics, and others to be able to learn from one another without pretending our real disagreements do not exist.

I want us to take seriously Jesus' desire for the unity of His followers without reducing Christian unity to either institutional uniformity or polite coexistence.

And I want to keep asking what all of this would look like not merely in theory, but where the rubber meets the road.

So I Keep Sticking My Neck Out

That helps explain why I keep joining conversations, contacting people, proposing ideas, writing articles, experimenting with projects, questioning assumptions, and occasionally saying things that may irritate people on more than one side of a theological or denominational divide.

I am not convinced that I know exactly what should replace everything I criticize. I am suspicious of grand solutions, including my own. I am still learning, reconsidering, and sometimes changing my mind.

I also know that I have my own blind spots. I can become preoccupied with the things I happen to see clearly and fail to appreciate things other Christians see more clearly than I do.

But I keep coming back to the conviction that the questions matter.

Christianity makes astonishing claims about Jesus Christ, about humanity, about the Kingdom of God, about the Holy Spirit, about reconciliation, about transformation, and about what God intends to do with His creation.

If those claims are true, then I do not want merely to ask how we can preserve our churches as they are.

I want to keep asking: