Go to Church, Change the World: Christian Community as Calling

By Gerald J. Mast

In a time when many are questioning the relevance of the church to their spiritual journeys, this book makes a bold case that "going to church" is intrinsic to Christian faith. Drawing on Anabaptist life and conviction, Mast presents Christ's call to all believers to be the church, whether gathered for worship or scattered for service.

By exploring such practices as baptism, communion, singing, and group discernment, he asks us to consider how participation in the life of the church shapes our daily witness—how “going to church” transforms “going to work” in the world that God loves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Herald Press
• Release date: Jan 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9780836197020

Gerald J. Mast

Gerald J. Mast, Bluffton, Ohio, is Associate Professor of Communication at Bluffton University.

Book preview

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mast, Gerald J., 1965-

    Go to church, change the world: Christian community as calling / Gerald J. Mast.

         p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and indexes.

ISBN 978-0-8361-9564-4 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Church attendance.

2. Christian life—Anabaptist authors. I. Title.

BV4523.M37 2011

262—dc23

2011043162

All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or in part, in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the copyright owners.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture text is quoted, with permission, from the New Revised Standard Version, © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

GO TO CHURCH, CHANGE THE WORLD

Copyright © 2012 by Herald Press, Harrisonburg, Virginia 22802

    Released simultaneously in Canada by Herald Press,

    Waterloo, Ontario N2L 6H7. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011043162

International Standard Book Number: 978-0-8361-9564-4

Printed in United States of America

Cover design by Merrill Miller

Book design by Josh Byler

15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To order or request information, please call 1-800-245-7894 in the U.S. or 1-800-631-6535 in Canada. Or visit www.heraldpress.com.

To my children:

Anna Lynn, Jacob Daniel, and Jorian Thomas

CONTENTS

Foreword by John Stahl-Wert

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction

WORD: DISCOVERING TRUTH

1. Go to Church

2. Read the Bible

3. See the World

WATER: RESPECTING LIFE

4. Join the Church

5. Be Baptized

6. Love the World

WINE: SERVING OTHERS

7. Give to the Church

8. Share Bread and Wine

9. Serve the World

WE: LIVING IN COMMUNITY

10. Yield to the Church

11. Sing Together

12. Confront the World

WITNESS: BECOMING PRIESTLY

13. Sacrifice Yourself

14. Praise God

15. Show the World

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Scripture Index

Subject Index

The Author

FOREWORD

In a time when the practice of yielding oneself to others within a real and enduring community is quite beyond the pale of Western experience, Gerald Mast’s book title—Go to Church, Change the World—strikes the ear as archaic, naïve, and simply weird. Not a few book browsers will hear this title, do the aural equivalent of a double-take, and then say something sophisticated, like, Wha-?

A possible second take for this casual browser could be to observe that the idea of go to church, change the world is potentially interesting (let’s leave the practicing of this idea out of it for the moment). There’s some merit, is there not, in the idea of the church that is a place where one goes and experiences oneself as belonging, as though one could actually belong; as though our occasional attendance actually constituted going; as though places were actually still real.

A great deal has been written over the last thirty years about this idea of place. Place matters, as every twenty-first-century urban planner now opines. Just at the time in human history when place has disappeared from our lives, neighborhood and community and soda shop having been plan-fully paved over, place has become all the rage.

Mast’s casual browser might even, at this point, be wishing that the title of his book were Walk to Church, Change the World, as this hipster likely already lives in a neighborhood where one can walk to the micro grocer-franchise to pick up enough fair-trade coffee beans, free-range chicken eggs, and organic arugula to hold one over between lunch out and dinner out.

And speaking of place, we must all have our third space too, mustn’t we? Churchless as we now actually are, home and work can’t fulfill that need we have for a place where everybody knows our name, or at least our unique grande-no-whip-low-fat-mocha-extra-shot-extra-hot coffee order that the check-out girl shouts over to the barista before we even have to say a word.

Belonging rocks now also—at least the idea of it. This is especially true at our no-name, non-denominational church community that used to foolishly over-emphasize believing. People want to belong, see, and once they really experience what it feels like to belong in a, like, community (a walkable one, preferably, with an espresso bar in the narthex), then everything else totally falls into place.

Of course, none of these ideas ever survives nascency. Next year we’ll all read that the trend is outdated. Place will be so yesterday. There’ll be a new, hot book about it, downloadable to our mobile devices. Year after that, we’ll need to become letter writers again (how embarrassed we’ll feel to still use email or text or Twitter; it’ll be actual text that reifies our humanity—ink words on real paper delivered by human postmen is where it’ll be at!). God knows what comes then. Make it up. It doesn’t really matter, because little of this is actually real.

In humiliating relief to what the cultural and intellectual fashionistas are constantly averring as important, Gerald Mast suggests, simply, that, if we are to live in Jesus-centered truth, we must go to church. Mast goes further than this; not only must we go to church, but we must read the Bible (he means the actual Bible) and undergo baptism and participate in daily and weekly church mundanities like the choir, the committees, and the clean-up crew. When Mast says, go to church, he means actually going to an actual church with the kind of actual people one is likely to find in such a place, people infuriatingly much like the people we, ourselves, are.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned, yet, how much I love this book! To the modern and postmodern mind alike, Mast’s beautiful treatise is close to nonsensical, and so desperately needed. Going to church matters, he shows us, both to the working out of our salvation and to the transformation of the world. The actual practice of yielding ourselves to Christ’s actual body, and of doing so incarnationally, just as Jesus yielded himself to his actual body, matters in every way! We must be part of an actual place of gathering, one that stays put day after dreary day, an actual place with actual people in the actual world where actual heartaches and actual problems plague actual relationships every disappointing day.

No wonder we read Mast’s title and blurt, Wha-? We would rather exercise a more moment-by-moment flexibility to drop in, as interest piques, to world café salons where we can ruminate with other ruminants about the importance of things like place, all the while sipping upon our grande-no-whip-low-fat-mocha-extra-shot-extra-hot drink, pleasantly enveloped within a most vague impersonation of an Italian café from some piazza far, far away.

In his famous prayer in the seventeenth chapter of John, Jesus makes a declaration that is not unlike Mast’s: I gave them the same glory you gave me, Jesus says to his Father, so they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to total unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

Translation: The world will be able to know the most important thing that must be known, through Jesus’ body dwelling together in loving unity! John Howard Yoder, in Body Politics, said it this way: The people of God is called to be today what the world is called to be ultimately. Simpler translation still: Go to church, change the world!

Mast walks beautifully through the pages of this book as one moves liturgically through the order of Sunday worship. With him, we consider afresh how it is that going to church, joining the church, giving to the church, and, yes, yielding to the church moves us ever more powerfully into a new and transformational posture with and for the world. Our formation ever more deeply into Christ and the church does not produce an ever increasing irrelevancy to the world. Exactly to the contrary!

There is a mystery here, and Mast captures this mystery both through the direct appeal he makes, and in the elegant—even poetical—structure of it. I was reminded, as I spiraled deeper and at the very same time higher through his treatise, of C.S. Lewis’ memorable line from The Last Battle—farther up and further in. Our concrete usefulness to the changing of the world expands in scale and scope as we concretely give ourselves to the deep work of loving and growing with the people with whom we are covenanted to belong. We can’t give what we don’t have!

What the world needs is not disembodied ideas about love and forgiveness and justice and peace; the world needs our capacity to be these things, a capacity that can only be grown in the crucible of covenantal relationships over time.

Meditate on Go to Church, Change the World as a personal devotional guide. Draw upon it as a liturgical companion for worship planning. Recommend it as a small group or Sunday School study text. Read it together as a whole church to bring renewal to the life and witness of your congregation. Do all four.

But, first things first. Go to church!

John Stahl-Wert is president of Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation (servingleaders.com), founder of SHIP (theshipcompany.com), and internationally best-selling author of The Serving Leader, Ten Thousand Horses, and With: A True Story.

PREFACE AND

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I began thinking about the meaning of Christian calling when I was a student at a small church-related college. My peers and I worried about what we were called to do with our lives. Influenced by a vision of God’s sovereignty, we imagined that God had a plan for each of our lives and that it was our job to find out what it was. We played mind games. If we had certain skills, did that mean God expected us to use them? Or were these skills distractions from the sacrificial discipleship God expected from us?

In that setting, it was a relief to encounter a theology of vocation that affirmed our skills and strengths as gifts to be offered in the service of God’s project to redeem the whole world. This perspective, which had become a movement at many evangelical Christian colleges in the 1980s, encouraged us to develop a Christian worldview that would shape the pursuit of our chosen profession.

During that same time, some of my mentors from the Reformed tradition introduced me to the writings of John Howard Yoder, a Mennonite thinker who helped me remember the call I had accepted in baptism. This call was direct and straightforward: will you renounce Satan and all works of darkness and join yourself to Jesus Christ and the church? In the years since, I have realized that by answering yes to that question I was at the same time saying yes to God’s plan to redeem the world. God’s redemption is taking place through the body of Jesus Christ presented to the world wherever that peaceful body appears. Our first calling, therefore, is life together in this body of Christ.

I am thankful to my mentors from a variety of Christian backgrounds who helped me to see the simplicity and clarity of the Christian calling. Among these are Kim Phipps, my undergraduate academic advisor at Malone College; Jerry Herbert, of the American Studies Program, who assigned John Howard Yoder; John Stahl-Wert, my wise pastor during graduate school years; and J. Denny Weaver, my Bluffton University mentor and colleague, whose friendship and tireless discussion of Anabaptist theology have been profound gifts to me.

Bluffton University provided the intellectual and professional context for this project in numerous ways. The university awarded me two grants during the summers of 2005 and 2008, making it possible for me to interview people and read books and take notes without breaking the household budget. A fall 2005 sabbatical leave provided focused time for developing early drafts of the chapters. As part of Bluffton’s Pathways to Mission and Vocation program, funded by the Lilly Endowment, I was invited to be the faculty scholar during the spring of 2006, which enabled me to share initial chapter drafts with colleagues for feedback and discussion on a monthly basis. Among those colleagues who provided useful and, at times, challenging feedback were Trevor Bechtel, Laura Brenneman, Perry Bush, Larry George, Jeff Gundy, Karen Klassen Harder, Hans

Houshower, Jim Harder, George Lehman, Lawrence Matthews, Pam Nath, Hamid Rafizadeh, Alex Sider, Sally Weaver Sommer, Willis Sommer, and Rory Stauber. Although I have not always conformed to the perspectives of my colleagues, the book has been strengthened greatly by the conversations provoked by these and other friends.

Students in my Communication Ethics classes from 2007 to 2011 read drafts of these chapters and provided a student perspective. Two research assistants in the Communication and Theatre Department assisted with the preparation of the manuscript: Anna Yoder and Rachel Giovarelli. Finally, it should be noted that the first four sections of the book reflect Bluffton’s enduring values of discovery, respect, community, and service, thereby signifying its roots in the soil of Bluffton University and the church to which it relates: Mennonite Church USA.

I am grateful to the keen editorial eyes of Amy Gingerich and Byron Rempel-Burkholder at Herald Press who helped me focus the vision for the book and revise it for a broader audience. It has been a pleasure to work with the staff at Herald Press whose professionalism and accessibility persists amidst challenging institutional realities.

My wife Carrie read numerous drafts and offered many useful suggestions for simplifying and illustrating my ideas. Her deep commitment to a life of service has inspired me to be more Christ-centered and neighbor-oriented in my daily life. I thank God daily for the extraordinary gift of her love.

During the writing of this book, my children Anna and Jacob grew from energetic toddlers to precocious elementary students. Their lives and love are reflected in the following pages, as is the joy with which our family has welcomed a new member, Jorian Thomas. The book is dedicated to these children of mine, with the prayerful hope that they will discover their calling amidst the life of God’s people.

INTRODUCTION

What is the point of my life? While many profound and challenging answers have been proposed to this basic and persistent question, this book offers a simple answer from a radical Christian perspective rooted in the Anabaptist tradition. Jesus Christ calls us to be his ambassadors of peace in a lovely but broken world, and he sends us to join God’s great plan to reconcile and restore the whole creation (2 Corinthians 5:19-20).

How do we do this? We do it by letting God’s love flow through us to the world, just as Jesus did, offering all our gifts and resources to the work and glory of God.