"Gospel and..."

  
  

    I’ve spent most of my life apart of the church. Going to Sunday school, youth groups, edgy alternative saturday night services, church camps, and the works. Each one building upon the foundation of the other to give me some semblance of the reason we congregate to worship. In the midst of this onslaught of power solos and Christianize I think I learned more about the sub-text of worship than anything else.

    Sub-text is a tool used by actors and writers alike to communicate without communicating. Facial expressions, body language, vocal tone––each communicates something different––or something unifying–-without ever having to say a thing.
  
Without meaning to the church does the same thing––what we spend our money on, our time talking about, what we wear; each gestures communicates something different about the character we are portraying to the world. Good or bad each piece of sub-text is absorbed––building upon the foundations of the prior, piece by piece a sub-textual worldview of the church emerges.

    The message often sounds like the “gospel and,” the beauty of the gospel story is rarely removed but it often has a predicate, like the the “gospel and cool,” or maybe it’s the “gospel and money,” or the “gospel and poverty,” take your pick of predicate to modify the subject, it doesn’t really matter which one it is.

    The problem is rather implicit. Anytime we as the church modify the subject something has gone wrong in the telling of the story. We have taken the focal point of the story––the gospel––and added our own little sub-text, weighting the gospel in our favor, making the gospel story a little bit more about us. But the gospel has never been our story it was never meant to be.

    Anytime we add our own ideals we pollute the story with our fractured sensibilities. Its not easy for us to handle a story that doesn’t revolve around us––a story that calls us to participate in something out side of own paradigm. Humanity has never done well with not being God, but truthfully have we done well as God?

    I don’t want to sound condemning, or try to say that you can ever communicate the gospel without a little subtext––or that you should even try. Personality in the midst of story telling is always good, just not at the expense of the story.

    The only question to ask is, what story am I telling? With my words, my life, and my subtle gestures. What story is the church telling? With its words, its life, and its subtle gestures.