The lightness of being

I had a wonderful conversation recently with one of our church planters who told me how important “being” was becoming to him. Now, that’s quite an admission for someone who belongs to a class of people that typically focuses on “doing” – on goals, numbers and so on.

He made the point that we are fundamentally acquisitive as North American Christians. Our lives are driven by “having,” and having and doing are simply part of one another.

The Mennonite Brethren movement was begun by entrepreneurial characters and that DNA has always played out in our conference. At times it resulted in a plethora of Bible schools. Other times it’s pushed us to strong church planting initiatives. We’ve been characterized by strong vision and accomplishment.

And so, we tend toward the doing side of the being-doing continuum. The problem is that we don’t always assess very well what our character should be vis-à-vis Canadian society.

In The Politics of Jesus, John H. Yoder describes the radical subordination of Jesus Christ to the will of God. From the human point of view, Jesus didn’t have any guarantee that death would actually lead to anything. However, He knew who He was and submitted accordingly.

I suggest that we don’t go there enough. We don’t surrender ourselves to the fog of uncertainty on the other side of sacrifice. We want to have guarantees! We have goals we want to accomplish. But in the process, we lose something very significant: the pure dependency on God that should characterize us as followers of Christ.

A pastor named Bob Roberts recently spoke to a group of Mennonite Brethren pastors about his church’s commitment to radical discipleship, with striking results both in North America and overseas. The temptation, of course, was to find out what exactly he did to achieve that growth and “cut to the chase” on methodology.

Roberts was adamant, however, that everything was predicated on a crisis point in his life and church where they simply concentrated on what it meant to be fully committed followers of Christ. The rest followed as a gift of grace.

Then he closed his presentation with this: “But why am I telling you all this? You’re Mennonites. You know all this already!” I had my doubts. That’s not the rhetoric I hear in our circles – and I’m often as guilty as the next.

Let me simply say this: if you’re tired of the spiritual rat race and want to get off the “doing” treadmill because it’s exhausting you spiritually, get off! Find your centre in Christ, really grip who you are and what you have to offer, and live in that for the sake of the gospel.

If you’re solid at the core, and pursuing with energy, faith, courage and inner peace the goals and vision God has provided for you, then please keep on! I’m not suggesting anyone pull away from that.

But I do want to sound a warning bell for the culture of our conference: if we don’t take care of the core, we’ll burn out, sin out, check out (of ministry, or worse, faith altogether), or “nuke” out (tell others never to get involved).

My spirit was heavy and I was close to burnout last fall when I took my sabbatical. A significant component of my time was personal devotions – reading, praying and journalling daily as long as it took to feel full. It took almost the entire three months to find my core, but since then, my inner being has been lighter, more established. It’s made a real difference to my approach to ministry.

That’s the lightness of being I’m looking for – personally and for everyone in our church family.

Out front is a column written by leaders in our conference. David Wiebe is the executive director of the Canadian MB Conference, based in Winnipeg.