I was a teenage fundamentalist - part ten

Barry Gittins asks if we are expecting a ‘return to form’ by Jesus.

Firstly, a prologue: if you are still clicking on to read this series I want to commend and thank you for your tenacity and patience. It’s been a long haul; occasionally bumpy, sometimes uncomfortable and smelly from the fumes of the human road. Still, we are in the home stretch now; discussing the 10th and 11th doctrines of The Salvation Army and your chauffeur’s limited understandings of those statements, both ‘back then’ and right here and now. Feel free to chat about the direction we are taking or give me a rest by taking a spin at the wheel through any relevant and reverent comments. Shalom, Barry

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his is not an article about ‘Christ’s second coming’. I accept that Scripture awaits such an event; I note the some of the church has gone cold on it and also that some highly dodgy teaching has been around for a century or so now, concerning that event’s likely shape and form. Christ himself suggested that we live our lives and avoid speculation about the end of life. I am happy to comply, leaving the topic for wiser and more gifted parties.

This article is a love song about a guy named Jesus and a girl he aimed to make his bride. It’s not imagery that sits comfortably with most heterosexual males, I know, but it’s biblical, important and eminently assuring.

You know the thing about going to weddings? They connect you with others and put you in an altruistic space beyond your own rumbling stomach, tired feet or hectic schedule. Regardless of if you are attending as a single, as someone’s main squeeze, as a married person, a divorced person or a remarried person - all radically different experiences, I can vouch for that - you enter a space where the needs and desires and hopes and dreams and fears of the happy couple are paramount.

You enter into community with them. You uphold them in your heart and soul.

I believe Jesus wants to woo the world. Mixing metaphors, we as his Body, are expected to help by actively recruiting members for his Bride; um, which is also us. Confused? You are not alone; western traditions of Christianity have tiptoed around these images for millennia. Endearingly, in more innocent, perhaps naïve days, Salvationists used to sing of Jesus as the ‘tender lover of my soul’, and of keenly waiting to experience ‘intercourse at hearth and home’.

So, who wants to be loved, and who wants to love? Who wants to stay at home and wash their hair, or keep their oil unused for later, more desirable lamps?

As a teenager I knew without any doubt or disturbing grey areas that God loved me and God loved the world. Unlike that dodgy trio of enemies ‘the world, the flesh and the devil’, I knew that my tribe, the Salvationists, used the term ‘the world’ in this instance to include an almost infinite number of people.

All the people I met. Passed by or bought newspapers off. Studied with or threw chalk at. Watched on TV. Played footy, cricket or volleyball against. Dated, attempted to date, or played music with. Read about, or went without food for (I was a weak excuse for a participant in the annual 40-hour famine, often caving after the first 20-odd hours and consequently assuaging my conscience with extra self-donations).

‘The world for God.’ It was big news for me, and good news for everybody.

But the good, big news seemed to get smaller in some people’s minds. I looked around at the people who weren’t there while I was oom-pa-pahing with my bandmates at the open-air meetings we held on empty street corners and heard Salvationists criticising those unsaved hordes not present for, well, being not present.

I attended the evangelism seminars that talked the talk to Christians. I listened to altar calls preached at ’saved’ folks while looking out church windows at long lines of cars of ‘unsaved sinners’ roaring past. I celebrated my faith with people who shared it.

I occasionally broke through with friends, enjoying moments of truth and revelation and beauty and Spirit. But I was getting mixed messages.

Some Salvationists, who I looked up to and admired, saw God as an active presence in their lives; somebody out and about, busy and loving, ‘the whole world redeeming’ - other Salvationists, who depressed me and confused me, drew up embarkation lines between their take on faith and the rest of a soon-to-be-damned, unhelpful and unsaveable humanity just waiting for God to smite ‘em good and proper.

This confused me. One mob of Salvationists wanted to open the doors wide and let love rule. Another mob wanted it simple without any gray: black and white, us and them, saved and damned.

I even, as a callow 19-year-old, rocked up for one night meeting (when we still had “salvation meetings”) to have a corps officer get us to our feet and tell us to go and stand in either the ‘heaven’ spot or the ‘hell’ spot, depending on how we saw our relationship with God. I never could accept or follow that person’s simplistic, dualistic way of thinking, when scripture teaches us to rest in the assurance of salvation, all the while ‘working out our salvation in fear and trembling’.

It seems to come down on how you read the gospels and the other books of the Bible. Either A) God loves us and wants to be reconciled to us. Or B) God is cheesed off that expectations weren’t met, goals weren’t scored and it’s all gunna burn when Jesus comes back to get ya.

I tend to side with A) because that’s where Jesus is at, in word and in deed.

Consider the 10th doctrine of The Salvation Army:

‘We believe that it is the privilege of all believers to be wholly sanctified, and that their whole spirit and soul and body may be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.’

If you believe in Jesus, in God’s love and power to change you and save you from yourself and all the wrong that occurs in life, then you aren’t held responsible for being human and stuffing up. Not that you are invited to continue stuffing up royally without fear of condemnation; that’s cheap grace and ingratitude.

Rather, our life in this realm and our life in other realms to come revolve around how we choose to live our lives. In other words, how we treat others and how we respond to God (you cannot separate those two aspects of life and faith). We await new life after this gig’s through; but it’s right here and now, on this planet, in this universe, as you read this article, that Jesus wants us to have ‘life and that more abundantly’. We need to resurrect ourselves now before we can worry about an afterlife, for God’s sake.

Just as with Christ’s resurrection, and the scriptural message of his return (when was the last time you heard that preached, incidentally?), so our life and continuation of life is in God’s hands: we serve at God’s pleasure.

Captain Jason Davies-Kildea has written, helpfully, that ‘the real challenge of resurrection is not about belief, but about experience. It challenges us to place deeds before creeds, to live resurrection before we can begin to preach resurrection.

‘Here the message of Leonardo Boff resonates powerfully with the mission of The Salvation Army: Wherever people seek good, justice, humanitarian love, solidarity, communion and understanding between people, wherever they dedicate themselves to overcoming their own egoism, making this world more human and fraternal and opening themselves to the normative Transcendent for their lives, there we can say, with all certainty, that the resurrected one is present, because the cause for which he lived, suffered, was tried and executed is being carried forward.

‘There is only one appropriate response to the reality of resurrection experience: to seek out and work towards creating resurrection experiences and opportunities for new life in the lives of others.

‘The Salvation Army is continually finding ways to impart hope into people’s lives. Surely this is something we want to multiply, so that every corps, every social centre can function as a community of resurrection possibility.’

Amen.

Writer: Barry Gittins is a Melbourne-based writer, lifelong Salvationist, husband (to Trudy) and father(to Emily and Benjamin) who seeks God in everyday encounters. A frustrated poet and playwright, he has worked for the Salvos’ Australia Southern Territory in various roles since 1991: as a journalist (for Warcry, The Young Soldier/Kidzone, The Musician),technical writer and CD-ROM author in corps program (mission development), senior review editor (Warcry) and editor (On Fire). He currently works as a social program and policy consultant (writer/researcher) for the social program department.

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