Last night I finished reading The Jesus Proposal by Rubel Shelly and John York.

Yes, I know; most folks in my tribe of Christianity started and finished reading it years ago when it was first published. (Those who are of a mind to seek to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, anyway.) But I am behind on my reading list by several years, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that my LIFE Group at church is studying this tome, I might not have made time for it for a few more years.

You see, I’ve been trying to spend more time in scripture itself and less time with books telling me what the authors think it says.

The Jesus Proposal states many of the same conclusions that I have reached in my study of scripture and have blogged about here – and states them far more eloquently than I could.

(David U, it’s quite possible that the book you are always nudging me to write has already been written!)

So I would encourage you to purchase or borrow it, read it, and weigh it carefully.

But first, read an article from the archives of New Wineskins that predates my tenure as its WebServant or Managing Editor: On Second Look, Maybe There Is a Pattern by Mark Black (January-August 2001 edition).

Meditate on the implications of the author’s premise: that the companion works of Luke and Acts form a pattern for living and community set by Christ and imitated by His followers … that the early church did virtually everything they did; taught everything they taught; helped in every way they helped because Jesus did so first.

Then, when you have a copy of The Jesus Proposal in your hands, think about the implications of living as part of that Christ-centered, Christ-fascinated church – and how much broader your definition of that church might become; how much more inclusive and how much more characterized by the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Now excuse me; I need to go back to the Leafwood Publishers site right now and order Shelly and York’s followup work, The Jesus Community.

Once upon a time there was a legendary Elvis Presley Impressionists-Fan Club … the one and only original Elvis Presley Impressionists-Fan Club, and it was extraordinarily successful in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The club members would practice with each other and critique each other’s performances and help each other sound like, look like, dress like, and move like the one and only original Elvis. They even ate fried peanut-butter and banana sandwiches together.

Each of the impressionists had lucrative careers and could pack a night club with their on-spot impersonations. People loved seeing the impressionists almost as much as they loved seeing Elvis in person; they shared a kind of fellowship with these pretenders in their adoration. Plus, the tickets were cheaper.

And when the King of Rock and Roll semi-retired for a while – before his 1968 comeback – they did even better. And when the King succumbed in his Graceland palace, the tributes they performed comforted the grieving.

Then things fell off for quite a while. The club didn’t meet like it had before. The impressionists were growing older, like the King himself had. There were arguments about which incarnation of Elvis was the best; which period of his performance was most worthy of imitating (at the cost of custom-fit rhinestoned jumpsuit or tight leather attire) and whether their sandwiches had to contain bacon in order to be authentic. There were other differences of opinion. Soon, there were other interests in life. Eventually, the one and only original club was no more.

And when a new generation of Elvis impersonators began to sprout, still heady from the performances of the impressionists they grew up watching, they hardly knew where to begin. Some fledgling attempts fizzled quickly; but a couple of bright thinkers among them had the brilliant idea that all they needed to do was restore the one and only original Impressionists-Fan Club and do all the things they did and they would get the same results. So they met together, and they sang all the right songs, and they wore all the right fancy costumes, and they went through all the right motions.

They even critiqued each other – though sometimes the criticism was harsh, and sometimes club members had to be ejected. Or they just left on their own. Then there were hard feelings and new chapters or new clubs.

Yet – even though they were imitating the original imitators – the crowds failed to gather in thousands or hundreds or even tens. One night, one of the bright thinkers -after months of disillusionment and bills for fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches that he could no longer pay – asked the only remaining disappointed fan in the night club why she was leaving in the middle of his “Early Elvis” set.

“You just don’t get it, do you?” she said. “Don’t you ever watch the old recordings? Don’t you ever listen to them? Didn’t you see how he reached out to the audience in each song, and sang himself into their hearts every time? How it was more than just a performance or a costume change or a gig? How he connected with every pair of eyes in the place with his own?”

The bright thinker was taken aback. “But we formed a club just like the original club and we did everything that they used to do and we tried to help each other be just like the original members were and even ate fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches – with bacon!”

His not-so-much-of-a-fan just shook her head sadly. “You don’t need to be like the club,” she said softly, turning away.

“You need to be like the King.”

A paragraph I was blessed to be able to write for this coming Sunday’s bulletin and the Web site of the church where I work and attend:

By the time evening donations had been added to the $79,600 contributed at both worship hours Sunday morning, Sept., 21, the total for our special collection for disaster relief from the damage of Hurricane Hanna in Haiti totaled $81,800. Our elders had sent $20,000 in immediate, unbudgeted funds right after the hurricane – and you exceeded their hopes by MORE than a factor of FOUR!

That, in spite of the dire economic news that preceded the special collection last Sunday – of mortgage/investment banks taken over or going out of business, and possible bail-outs, and disappearing retirement accounts, and pending market collapse.

I titled this post “Generosity.”

I could have just as easily titled it “Faith.”

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” ~ Matthew 6:19-21

William Shakespeare put these words in the mouth of his character Cassius (sowing seeds of discontent early on, Act I, Scene II) in the play Julius Caesar:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

It is quoted – sometimes out-of-context – to the point of tedium.

But the Bard is right, you know, whether speaking of ambition in the world or desire to please God through churches like the seven stars of the Revelation to John.

The one like unto a Son of Man does not take them to task for their inconsistent church structure or their incorporation of Gentile traditions as well as Jewish in their gatherings. Neither does the apostle to the Gentiles. We know from what Paul wrote that churches differed from one time and place to another in all these matters. And he has no more toleration for those who would dilute the gospel with Jewish law than he does for those who would water it down with Gentiles’ Gnostic-sounding fables and genealogies. He has no opposition to celebrating the Lord’s Supper in a Greco-Roman dinner party setting as long as it is done with Christian equity at heart.

No, the one whose eyes were like blazing fire warns the seven churches about their tolerance of man’s teachings, their loss of first love, their inactivity, their lukewarmness. Pretty much the same issues with which Paul, Peter, James and John concern themselves.

So when you read books about how Christians have forgotten the old ways or about how church has most or all its origins in evil Gentile tradition or about how Christian gatherings must be patterned by-the-book after those in century one and-here’s-how-the-author-interprets-each-of-those-patterns or about how everything must change … well, weigh them carefully.

Weigh them in light of what scripture says. Weigh them by what the inspired writers criticized and applauded and recommended.

See if the vast majority of the themes scripture deals with are not corporate aspects of structure or governance or worship style, but are in fact the individual issues of everyday greed, ambition, jealousy, dilution of the gospel – and everything else that stems from self.

In an e-mailed response to a private comment on my blog, I recently wrote:

I don’t want to get into a spitting match over a book that has a lot to say – and I agree with some of it and disagree with some of it.

The assumption of the book is that everything churches do that comes of tradition that is not Jewish in origin is wrong and must be dispensed with. Yet I do not see that defended as an axiom; it’s just assumed as a basic truth.

This assumes that God could not/did not foresee the effects of incorporating Gentile culture into His church, and that the basic principles of being Christ in the world are not strong enough of themselves to overcome Gentile influence.

I resist that, as I find it to be an unscriptural assumption. What corrupts the attempt to be Christ in the world is not racial heritage or even tradition, but self and Satan.

I continue to be unable to believe that the most important thing Christians should be worried about changing is the trappings of what happens for one hour on Sunday mornings, when people God loves are starving for good spiritual and physical food; subsumed in a culture of self-satisfaction; and drowning in a cesspool of sin and its consequences in this world as well as the next.

If we are underlings and underachievers in our efforts to address those needs, does the fault lie in the way the seven stars meet or worship or conduct business?

Or in ourselves?

---

^{The Restoration paradigm, for me, is best phrased in a re-telling of the old preacher’s story about the boy and the makeshift puzzle his grandfather cut from a magazine page that was a complicated, detailed picture of a church, then challenged him to re-assemble it. The boy amazed grandfather by doing so in seconds. “How did you do it so quickly?” Grandfather asked. The boy had turned it over and found a much simpler picture of Jesus there. “When I got Jesus right, the church was right.”}