On Eating Crumbs That Fall From the Table

May 17, 2016

My 2016 Ongoing Journey: Exploring Matthew to discover what following Jesus and becoming more like him would look like.

Matthew 15:21-39 ~ This passage is among only a few passages in which Jesus simply moves among the people, teaching and healing. There are no controversies, no Pharisees or Scribes. Every pastor envisions that kind of ministry.

Ministry changed during the twentieth century. Early on, basically prior to WWII, local church pastors did pastoral work: teaching, preaching, counseling, guiding and tending the spiritual health of the faithful, and calling sinners to repentance. And they lead the church in outreach ministries of evangelism and compassion.

As the century wore on, ministry morphed. It became more “professional” and a ton more administrative as the church adopted corporate structures of organization. The problem was that as the churches became “more like a business,” the ministers work grew to become “more like a CEO”.

As Baby Boomers took their turn at leadership, the church floundered—a fish out of water, gasping for oxygen as it tried to meet business-like standards and adjust to an increasingly consumer-oriented culture whose mantra was, “the customer is always right.” Boomers told pastors, “We’re the customers, and you’d better please us or we’ll take our business to the Mega-Church down the street.”

In such a consumer culture, everybody wanted to “have” a church; but very few were willing to “be” the church. “Isn’t that what we pay the preacher for?”

I am encouraged by the spirituality of the millennial generations who are less obsessed with “success” and materialism. They’re more family oriented and much, much more spiritually oriented. They’re spirituality is not necessarily exclusively Christian—at least not American Southern Evangelical Christianity. Their spirituality is more of a hunger for connection with God. And they’re not finding that connection in the corporate model of church or in the “Prosperity Gospel” or in the judgmental rantings of the recently emerging confluence of the religious and political right (a marriage that historically has always—ALWAYS—been destructive).

They simply want to know how to follow Jesus.

You remember Jesus. He’s the one in this text who has just come from serious encounters with the right-wingers of his day who had heaped up a ton of religious rules and regulations designed to justify their own harsh understanding of God and to exclude anyone who wouldn’t jump through their hoops. He’s the one who then went to the coastal area northwest of his home, where he found receptive hearts and hungering spirits—even among those the religious right referred to as “dogs.”

And he fed them. All of them. And he has called me to follow him.

That's the way it looks through the flawed glass that is my world view.

Together in the Walk,

Jim