the radical discipleship of little old church ladies...

I’m definitely not alone on this. The moment my faith first mattered to me was the moment I discovered that Jesus was not, in fact, the lame white guy, smiling meekly in the halls of my childhood congregation. Just the opposite, actually—Jesus was a badass.

For all of us little boys (and quite a few girls) formed in the sanitized surroundings of suburbia, whose need for danger, and adventure, and purpose was lived out vicariously through Indiana Jones in childhood, James Bond in adolescence, and Che Guevara in college, the discovery of badass Jesus is very nearly the difference between life and death.

We want to ride the wave of that initial discovery, whatever the cost. We go running off into inner cities and far off countries fearful that we might lose it.

This is really valuable formation time for us. I wouldn’t trade this part of my story for anything. At some level, I hope it continues for the rest of my life. But at some point we need to integrate our image of badass Jesus into the life we’re actually living, not the life we fantasize about living in our highest ideals. Hardly willing to confess the reality of our middle class lives, we risk becoming caricatures of disciples. Still benefitting from middle class upbringings and middle class educations and middle class incomes, our hypocrisy becomes every bit as entrenched as that of the pseudo-Christianity we rebelled against, our devotion to Jesus every bit as vicarious as our devotion to Bond.   

At the height of my reforming zeal, it was very clear to me that what the church needed was a good clearance sale, everything must go. The church was in disrepair and I was going to repair it, dammit. Terms like “Constantinian” and “Churchianity” and “American civil religion” became a part of my everyday lexicon. The church of yesterday had sold out, far too many accommodations to the culture.

I had become what the ancients referred to as “a jerk.”

Sure, I would have cluttered it up with some snotty verbiage about the “thin tradition” and the “saints in every age,” but the simple version of my simplistic worldview was still that church of yesteryear had gotten it wrong and I was going to get it right. The problem was nearly as clear to me as a Colorado spring. Nearly. There was just one pervasive fact of church life that kept clouding it up. Little old church ladies.

It seems that every moment I’d finally settled into the black and whiteness of this narrative—out with the old, in with the new, new wine needs new wineskins, and so on—I’d turn around and there’d be some old church lady knitting a quilt for the poor, praying with the sick, bringing a warm meal to the grieving.

As I made my way through seminary, I’d gradually find bigger and bigger stages on which to talk. Man, I loved to talk. I was good at talking. I’d talk about everything I was going to do to lead a more Christ-like church into a new age. People loved my words. I loved their accolades. Meanwhile, some old church lady would be washing dishes in the basement or setting up some floral arrangement in the Narthex for someone who had died.

At this time, I’m quite certain that I would have explained to Jesus how “service needs to be the ‘calling card’ of the ‘cruciform church’” just as he was bending down to wash my feet.  

So here’s what I predict: I’ll continue to talk, and emergent church leaders will continue to talk, and mainstream church leaders will continue to talk, and conservative church leaders will continue to talk, and in each of their basements some little old church ladies will continue to get shit done for the kingdom of God.

If the church is going to become more Christ-like, it won’t be because of Guevara-wannabe hotheads like myself who are ready to take a can of gasoline and a match to two thousand years of church history. If the church is going to change, it will be because of love. The kind of patient, unpretentious love that little old church ladies have been trying to teach us since Easter morning.