Dealing with Differences, Part 1: Groovy Spirituality

Self-Directed Life
- Self is on the throne
- Christ is outside the life
- Interests are directed by self, often resulting in discord and frustration

Christ-Directed Life
- Christ is in the life and on the throne
- Self is yielding to Christ, resulting in harmony with God's plan
- Interests are directed by Christ, resulting in harmony with God's plan

"These two circles represent two kinds of lives.

1. Which circle best represents your life?
2. Which circle would you like to have represent your life?"

See this illustration in context, here.

Roommate Deb and I were recently talking about our college experiences with Campus Crusade for Christ. A sincere nonbeliever until her junior or senior year, Deb would patiently let the Crusaders share the Four Spiritual Laws with her every semester or so. She thinks she frustrated more than one by answering the 'second question' here in Law 4, "Which question would you LIKE to have represent your life, incorrectly, glibly professing, "The circle on the left."

Moreover, Deb took issue with the diagram. She insisted that God must be a God of creativity - the whole thing with the dots did not seem right. Wouldn't He want the dots all different shapes and sizes and colors, not all lined up in a rigid row around the edge of the circle? She knew God was more groovy than that! (It was the 70s...) And of course He is. (Every model - and every evangelistic strategy - has its limits!)

"You must have had a lot of Crusaders praying for you!" I remarked. "They were! And it worked," she added. The Four Spiritual Laws never did much for her, but seeing her friend Lisa coming back from a Campus Crusade Christmas conference clearly transformed by the power of God, did. Deb listened to Lisa’s scattered 'testimony' and wanted what she had. Deb gave her life to Christ and has been walking with God ever since.

I think Deb's objection to the circle diagrams is similar to the debate that's been going on in missions circles about the question of contextualization. How much is it appropriate to change our message and means of communicating the gospel and the call to be the church? On one hand, allegiance to Christ seems to mean turning from our old ways and leaving them behind - a clear change of power, as in the circle diagram. Christ on the throne, not self, and that has a way of radically rearranging everything else in one's life. On the other hand, Christ meets people where they are, within their lives and families and cultures. Why would He want to extract us and make us unable to share and model new life within the communities He had put us in in the first place?

Ironically, believers struggling with these contextualization questions seem to seek universal answers - models and principles that will work the whole world over. But if what we are talking about has to do with context, the answer has to be: there's not one right answer. It depends.

Discovering (under teaching from Campus Crusade, actually) that God loves diversity and wants to be glorified in different ways by different kinds of people, was a key aha! moment in my life. It's what turned the key for me to say, yeah, I can be part of this evangelism/missions thing. On a personal level, I knew there was room for someone like me, and on a missiological level, I was no longer suspicious of - or even offended by - the idea of taking the gospel to all the nations of the earth. It was about inviting people to be set free and tap into God's power for transformed lives and communities; it wasn't about making them give up who they are to be like us.

So, this is a key thing in my life, what I do and how I see the world, but it's been assaulted in recent months. And that’s really what I want to write about: I've been holding out on you. Stay tuned. Part 2 will be up Tuesday or Wednesday. (Later: You can read it here.)