We are in the business of leading people to God, or so I assumed after I got baptized into a small church back on January 12 of 1969. I learned that God is there, ready to welcome anyone with open, loving arms. There… Where? In heaven, of course. One day, though, we will meet him face to face. Meanwhile, we can join his church, the people "marching to Zion... the beautiful city of God," located "far beyond the starry sky." That's what I thought.
"Would you like to go to heaven?" I asked people. "The Bible is the map. The road is there for us to follow. Every step is plainly defined." That was one of my favorite metaphors. Another one was, "the Bible is an instruction manual. We are broken, but the great Engineer of human life has written a manual to fix our brokenness. If you want to solve your problems, you have to follow the instructions of the manual."
These metaphors defined our church, our practices, and our context. It became natural for us to follow rules, conform to our traditional patterns, teach others the way to salvation, and envision our church wrapped in our place of worship. The pulpit, benches, blackboards, baptistry, and many other props needed to perform the routines of a true church on its way to heaven were there. People in our neighborhood were lost individuals who did not know the way to heaven. Since we knew it, it was our sacred duty to share our knowledge with others.
For a few years, the world created through these metaphors seemed to make sense. Working hard on persuading others, some people were added to our church. Besides, other churches seemed to be prospering. However, at some point, we realized that we had become stagnant and were even declining. What were we doing wrong? Maybe we needed to work harder and preach more vigorously. However, I began to suspect that faith is much more than learning to live a decent life, worship properly, and belong to a church with the correct doctrine.
In those years, I could not question my basic metaphors, assumptions, and religious imaginary. I am doing it better now, and I think this is a necessary step. If we want to surmount our stagnation and share a message that makes sense in our rapidly changing world, we must revisit our basic assumptions. They were probably formed in a world that no longer exists. They belong to the time when the West was enchanted with the optimism of the Enlightenment. In reality, according to the Bible, God is not far above the sky, hoping for people to accept his clearly written instructions and waiting for us to die to welcome us into his heavenly city of gold. We do not have a map to show people the straight way to heaven.
What is happening is that God is involved in the world. He is in our neighborhoods. Jesus did not resurrect to go to heaven and wait for us there. He is alive and actively engaged in transforming the world, while creating a new humanity, the radically new Jerusalem. He is building his city with "living stones." We are not in charge of reading his blueprints to build his church organization accordingly. We are called to work with him as he displays his creative power and ingenuity, making everything new in front of our own eyes. He kindly invites us to participate in what he is doing. We are laborers in his masterful spiritual construction. Our hermeneutics does not consist of discovering his commandments and patterns of deducing the correct inferences. Instead, it aims at discerning what God is doing among us now.
As we read the Bible, we can see what God wants, and how he has often disrupted the misleading histories we have tried to build. In the Scriptures, this always resulted in his creation of radically new realities. We can learn from those stories and improvise at his side actions and practices that reflect God's agency in what Branson and Roxburgh call "the space-between." This is the space where God meets his human creatures, where heaven and earth intermingle, where divine power operates through weakness.
In the biblical narrative, his creative activity was never limited to the constraints of homogeneous religious institutions. To discern what God is doing, we must be open to the other. We cannot hide in the comfort of our church, but we must go where God goes to meet the strangers, to work with the people who we often think do not belong. We need to join them, listen to them, and accompany them in their own journey, making a way as we walk side by side into the newly formed territories God keeps creating ahead of us. In other words, we need to live and lead in the shadow of an active God.
