3 posts tagged “chesterton”

Having posted that wonderful quote about brothels and God-seekers earlier this week, I was intrigued to find this fascinating website, More Intelligent Life, discussing the economics of high-end prostitutes.

Just as "rich" were the comments to the article, which included several self-professing prostitutes (both male and female, straight and homosexual).

It seems that they understood better than the rest why people would pay so much for sex--and it isn't that different than desires everyone has. We all have a yearning for acceptance, for love, for others. Some feel they can only get such things if they pay for it.

One of the points touched on is that there's something about paying a lot for something that causes us to think it is more valuable than something else. This relates to our pride. Same product, different price tag. Yet we feel better spending more if our pride is of a certain sort.

But missing in any of the discussion however was a frank acknowledgment of the nature of sex and addiction, and how broken hearts and bent psyches seek out something, anything, to fill the void. (Reminds me of Eliot Spitzer, which, by the way, Forbes has an excellent piece analyzing Eliot Spitzer's sex addition here.)

All that to say, the quote from earlier this week speaks in quite the contemporary way to our times.

Though dead, Chesterton still speaks. Not as loud as Abel, to be sure, but speaks nonetheless. Or, in the words of Chris Martin, of the band called Coldplay, "Those who are dead are not dead; they're just living in my head."

Bono's yearning lyric, from one of U2's greatest albums, The Joshua Tree, speaks to the most basic human need to discover satisfaction: "I still haven't found what I'm looking for."

We are never told what it is that Bono searches for. But we don't have to be told.  Its a poem, and its true enough as it is.

There's something painful in searching and not finding. It is a kind of suffering. What we experience is not what we know we ought to be experiencing. The way things are is not the way things ought to be. We want and cannot have. We have and still want.

Chesterton, good old Chesterton, supposedly once remarked that "every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God." (I read this quote in a review of Piper's book Sex and the Supremacy of Christ by Mark Hartzell of Harvest in their fall 2007 newsletter.)

Lewis, in his book, Surprised by Suffering, makes the point that heaven is more, not less, than the joys and pleasures of this life. If that's true, then searching for ultimate satisfaction here and now makes no sense. It will ultimately prove to be a fruitless search.

We have to go somewhere else to find what we're looking for. This is a good thing!

Here you'll find a list of qualities of a missional church, as well as those which do not characterize a missional church. Some I agree with; some I do not.

For example, one quality of the missional church is that it is an alternative community. If it is in fact true that the Church is to be an alternative community, not one that simply "mimics" the surrounding culture, does that mean we're going to wear black cotton clothes with no buttons or zippers?

How alternative does a missional community need to be before it is unrecognizable as such?

Another example of this kind of loose reasoning is this bit by Horrox, the author of an article commending the views of prominent missional author, Darrell Guder:

[In the missional church,] [n]ew yardsticks would be the norm: To what extent is our church a 'sent' community in which each believer is reaching out to his community? To what extent is our church impacting the community with a Christian message that challenges the values of our secular society? (click here for the full article)

That makes sense; an alternative community will challenge the secular society. However, is this not just another version of the fundamentalist retreat we weathered over the past century?

Likewise, in articulating distinctions, a "friend of missional" will move from professional to passionate. Since when are passionate disciples less than excellent in their kingdom ministry? The kind of "mission" that I imagine God sending out His disciples for is not "amateur hour."

So, as with most movements, "friend of missional" has in places been tempted to substitute slogans for substance.

A better path, I think, is to signify concretely, not just in terms of epigrams, what the Church ought to be doing in this generation in light of a carefully articulated foundation.

This foundation would be part of a conversation as well: but not only just with culture, but also with history.

Such a conversation with history was part of the motivation of the famous thinker and writer, G.K. Chesterton's conversion to Roman Catholicism last century, and while he may not have chosen the "better part," he has laid out a path for us to follow in the current missional church discussion.

Chesterton might have said, in this case (a favorite quote of his):

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around." - Orthodoxy, 1908 (Quote from here.)

This sounds to me like missional church Chesterton style. Ancient modern. Relevant. Historic. What are we waiting for? Let 's get started!