Being an Online Guest: Nashville's GracePoint

I like attending GracePoint's online worship. Here's a short list of what I appreciated in this worshipping community.

* My struggle to believe and fully trust God, are not judged as weak or inadequate; my experience is valued. 

* Preachers and topics are shown in weekly email. 

* The musical melodies are not familiar. It was refreshing to hear something new.  

* I am not asked to sing songs that I honestly cannot believe nor pretend that I do. 

* Everyone was worshipping online- not sure if this was due to the spike in Covid-19 variants. This gave the sense that we are all in this together.

* Beyond a simple, one- time registration, I could focus on the service

* The church partners with community needs in concrete acts of doing justice and loving mercy. 

This church is self-defined as "Progressive Christianity," and there's an absence of the classic creeds as well as the familiar hymns. There is a belief presented, for example, regarding what the Bible is and is not.  To be honest, what is stated is also a tradition, just not the one of contemporary Evangelical Christianity. 

While using the right and agreed upon words has always been central in Christian faith (for example, the Bible is the Word of God), what is understood by those words? What do they mean?  Asking question will take us beyond ascent. What is genuine faith if it is not an honest searching for the core beneath, even beyond the correct words and phrases. 

 

Loving Enemies (1): Niceness Isn't Love

Enemy: one that is antagonistic to another, especially : one seeking to injure, overthrow, or confound an opponent.*

Being nice to everybody, especially with those whom I disagree, is not the measure of Christian discipleship. The law of love is, according to Jesus, measured by my treatment of my enemies. If growing in love is the point, it has to be more than being nice, whether it's returned or met with a scowl.

What is the taproot of this teaching of Jesus?Besides the honest declaration that I have enemies, the rule is a sharp restraint to my propensity for making and maintaining enemies.**

But there is even a deeper root of enemy- love that' forms the core of my discipleship: given the fact that real enemies do exist, i.e., those who plot, speak, or act in harmful ways, I am asked, required, taught, to love and pray for them. 

I will long remember the wisdom learned in a covenant group where we agreed to pray for our enemies daily. Praying for my enemies on a daily basis restrained me from harmful behaviors that would have certainly made a difficult situation worse. This practice helped me survive, ethically and spiritually, one of the more challenging seasons in my life and ministry. 

Inevitably, praying for my enemy is not magic; it's hard spiritual work. It's repentance from enacting harm and plotting self-vindication. From making a bad situation worse. Yet, I cannot think of a more non-violent way of resisting evil as a Christ-follower than to pray for my foes as well as my friends. 

Nice-ness pretends there are no enemies and shrivels in face of evil. Nice-ness also excuses me of my complicity in stoking the fires of hate and harm. What about the faith of Jesus Christ? In the end, while pleasantness is helpful to get along, nice-ness is not necessarily a mark of growing in love.   

*Merriam-Webster 

**The word "restraint" is named as a work of the Holy Spirit in the classic baptismal prayer (UMC). The pastor prays to God, for the newly baptized infant, that, "by the restraining and renewing influence of the Holy Spirit, she may always be a true child of yours, serving you faithfully all the days of her life."