Flying Without a Pilot's License

From my vantage point, we are witnessing a fascinating shift in our understanding of God and faith and the church. We are asking different questions and considering new ways of living as a community of Jesus followers.

Yet we often look at all that has been established and then downplay what slowly emerges around us. After all, how could anything new compare to what we've previously seen? Especially considering that the church has existed in one form or another for two thousand years. This can often pose a challenge if someone doesn't feel like they have a healthy option for a weekly church gathering. Is there anything else, or is it just a surrender to what we already know?

But this is the way new things emerge.

As the author Gordon MacKenzie observed, "Orville Wright did not have a pilot's license." Today you would need a pilot's license to do what Orville Wright did. But he was on the cusp of something new and unprecedented. There were no rules to follow and no expectations to be met. It was the creation of something different.

So too with the new things Jesus births among us.

In one of my all-time favorite books, the theologian Walter Brueggemann says we must "...nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us."

As Brueggemann explains, "In thinking this way, the key word is alternative, and every prophetic minister and prophetic community must engage in a struggle with that notion." 

Alternative to what? We engage in alternatives to the status quo, to the centuries of Christendom, and to the militaristic marriage of Christian nationalism, to name just a few.

You don't need to worry if you don't feel like you fit nicely into Christianity today. A few hundred years ago, almost all of us would have been labeled heretics by the Church. In case you think I'm exaggerating, medieval Christians would be shocked to hear our views on communion not literally being the body and blood of Jesus. Or they'd be shocked by our sober views of the Pope and how we don't follow His every word today.

Just as those topics may seem trivial to you now, I suspect many beliefs we think are mandatory today will also change. I'd wager we see a change in the years to come in the collective Christian understanding of things like the Eternal Conscious Torment view of hell (sinners will burn), Penal Substitutionary Atonement (God the Father was angry and needed Jesus to die to appease Him), and even what we refer to as the "Biblical view of marriage."

Christianity is often learning how to fly without a license. That's because the Spirit of God continues to work in our midst, ever inviting us forward, sometimes challenging us to move beyond the rules we thought we were supposed to follow (see: Overcoming Attentional Blindness).

Keep moving with the Spirit and trust that even though it looks unknown to us now, God will meet us there.

Photo by Sean Mungur on Unsplash