The Disruption of the Invisible Jesus

When you lose sight of Jesus in his church, what do you do? Do you look for him or conclude that he isn’t real?

Photo by Sean Benesh on Unsplash

I remember well when it hit me—that Jesus was completely missing. I felt the darkness. Matt and I just returned to the car after attending a regional meeting full of church officers in what is now our former denomination. We watched pastors and elders wearing their authority like costumes, parading around as if they were lawyers, debating the Book of Church Order, deciding the fate of my church leaders. I was mocked multiple times in the meeting, as my writing was the supposed underlying cause of all this ruckus.

When we got out of there, back into our vehicle, and shut the doors, it felt like an escape. I realized how unsafe I felt in there, the lack of love and oxygen—like the life was being sucked out of me. The obvious finally became clear—Jesus wasn’t in that room. What was going on in there? And where was he?

This was a turning point for us. The disillusionment was palpable. “Church” was a dark place void of Christ and his love. It wasn’t even safe. Like a bad dream, the people that I thought were to show us and teach us about Jesus transformed before my very eyes into a different vocation entirely. And my own elders and pastor seemed clueless as to how they got there, going along with it all. And yet they didn’t really let themselves question it.

But my story is one of many. When you lose sight of Jesus in his church, what do you do? Do you look for him or conclude that he isn’t real? There is a large wave of people deconstructing their faith and leaving the church. Scot McKnight and Tommy Preson Phillips urge us to listen to their stories and their longing, saying that many are still looking for Jesus outside of the church. What if there is something prophetic to this? The authors “believe the work of deconstruction is often born of the Spirit, a movement of God attempting to bring the church back to Jesus. It is for Christ’s sake that many today are walking away from churches.” They take the time to do the “exit interviews” of the many leaving the church. And their book Invisible Jesus directs us to remember what he looks like and how to find Jesus in the faces of others.

I had so many questions after experiencing that darkness. What do I know about God, really? What attracted me to this church and denomination in the first place? Where do I belong? What kind of Jesus have I been showing my children?

The disruption of the invisible Jesus was also an invitation to look again.

As I share in The Hope in Our Scars, I thought I had a theology of love. One that was carefully learned in the narrow path of orthodoxy. Along the way, I’ve been caught up with the questions: What does it look like to be a disciple of Christ? What do you believe? How do you live? Where do you go to chuch? How do your kids turn out? What a funny story it all is…me searching for one thing only to realize how very small my questions were. How I was looking for a type that Christians are to be rather than the personhood God is developing in each one of us as we grow into the reality of who we are in Christ.

The whole picture looks different to me now. Hope is altogether different from our striving. From our perceived goodness. From our wretched nostalgia and optimism. Hope looks at the same picture, seeing something else—what’s real—and therefore seeing the husks and the deadness of them. And it tells us where we do not belong. Like faith, hope resides near our anguish. The anguish of knowing how glorious we and the whole world are to be and how we are turned the wrong way. We must feel it, grieve it, and look again. This is all part of the glory of repentance.

And what do we then see? That too often we’ve been seeing distortions of what is really there. Or we see only what we want to see. We’ve been hearing what we want to hear, filtering it all in our pretty, well-designed “managed reality” of goodness. We are looking to the husks. The disruption of hope usually comes in the wake of a major incongruency to our lenses—a harm, a tragic event, an unmanaged memory breaking through the story we tell ourselves. And it invites us to revisit the setting. To look again.

When we look again, we see church better too. We see that this invitation of hope comes to us in the basic, concrete elements that make up the church’s symbols, helping us to see the husks that may need shucking. They beckon us to question, Why do we come? Whom do we want to belong to and with? What will we do for it? How did we lose it? These symbols call forth our senses of sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste. But is this what we are beckoned to now in church?

McKnight and Phillips want to face these questions. Maybe it’s time for the institution of the church to look again. Where is Jesus? My favorite chapter was, “Burying Jesus in Production.” They ask some doozy’s in there, like:

What kind of Bible is being held up to follow?

Should the sermon be the center of worship?

Is the role of a senior pastor biblical?

Is the congregation supposed to be so passive?

What is the purpose of Sunday gathering?

Is the posture of passive conformity a posture God intended Christians to take?

Why does so much evangelical music reflect White cultural mores?

Are we building friendships that can lead to genuine Christian fellowship?

What do I need to believe in order to belong?

What is the language of the table and how have we lost it?

            What if our churches were looking again, asking these questions, and facilitating conversation, learning what the Holy Spirit is directing us to according to his Word and witness? What if we really listened to the Spirit and one another? What if we became more curious readers of his word together as covenant communities?

            What are our expectations for church? To begin with, we are to be helping one another to see Jesus. We are even bringing Jesus to one another as we encounter our otherness. I think there is something to Emmanuel Levinas’s saying that “theology begins in the face of the neighbor.” I think that is what McKnight and Phillips are getting at when they beckon us to listen to and love those who are deconstructing. To look for Jesus with them. The blessing is to see the act of God in the awakening to love provoked by our neighbor’s face. Levinas: “God descends in the ‘face’ of the other.”