Ray’s Letter
Oh, my dear brother, how much I have enjoyed what you have just said.
My text may have been “shadowed” in a way that I don’t think I meant it to be, but your speaking expressed exactly how I feel.
The source means everything, and I am beginning to see that only our abiding is what the Lord really is calling for. He has chosen, set, and sent us to depend upon Him. The Christian life is simply a life of Zoe dependence. It doesn’t mean robots or motionless beings. We live according to the source as the source so leads.
My writing may suggest something other than yours, but my inward response is identical. Not one word is objectionable.
Abiding is not a direction as much as it is a realm. “Abiding in” is a realm of Zoe life containing the Triune God coming to open the way for us to enter that realm. This realm is where we abide. A mingled living.
We are a branch in the vine receiving everything from it.
The branch only expresses the vine; it has no separate work or activity. All the branches are identical in life, nature, and expression. There is one source for the vine and branches, the Husbandman.
This just occurred in me as follows:
Our Lord said in Matthew 16, “I will build My church.” Looking back in history, did Zoe life build what we have today? If so, it is a “degraded procedure.” At Pentecost, Zoe came forth and the Ecclesia formed. The church was born.
The night before He was crucified, our Lord said, “Abide in Me and I in you.” I wonder how much relevance this had to all of the disciples.
Within our present situation in the churches, how can we practically apply John 15?
It seems we are worse than Corinth, yet the call continues for more churches, church buildings, and conference centers. Who is abiding?
He who has ears, let him hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches. Is what we hear and see today the result of abiding in Zoe?
This realization brings me to a further point: How can we go on outside or inside the present forms we have been accustomed to?
Affectionately,
Ray
My Reply to Ray
Dear Ray,
Your words warmed me, brother. I feel that we are touching the same reality, and your question about how we go on stays with me.
When I look back across Christian history, I see something heartbreaking. Life springs forth. People discover Christ as their life. There is freshness, affection, simplicity—a living recognition of one another in Him. Then something begins to gather around that life and swallow it up.
We organize it. We give it a name. We establish who may speak for it. We build somewhere to preserve it. Eventually, what began as the overflow of life becomes an institution requiring people to maintain its existence.
The people are still precious. Christ has not ceased to live in them. But the thing they are spending themselves to sustain is not necessarily an expression of the One within them.
A building is not life. An organization is not God. A denomination is not the living One. And none of these things is the bride.
How did we come to place so much weight upon what cannot live?
Consider how little unmistakable archaeological evidence survives from Christianity’s earliest generations, particularly before AD 200. The church existed. Believers gathered, shared their possessions, suffered together, and knew Christ as their life. Yet they left comparatively little of the distinct religious architecture through which later Christianity would make itself visible.
By the third century, in certain places, we begin to find clearer material evidence of specifically Christian worship spaces and religious art. The Christian building at Dura-Europos is one such example. But its existence does not settle the question troubling me. Finding an early religious building does not tell us whether its construction expressed life or accompanied a growing dependence upon outward forms.
Here I must distinguish the historical evidence from what I believe it reveals. Archaeology can uncover walls and paintings; it cannot measure the inward erosion of abiding. Yet I see in this developing outward religious world the beginnings of a pattern that would eventually become dominant: what could be built, arranged, taught, displayed, and administered increasingly came to define what people understood the church to be.
I do not mean that all life disappeared, or that every gathering followed the same course. I mean that religion increasingly occupied the visible ground. Its structures became the accepted framework. Its preservation became a duty. Eventually, it became difficult even to imagine the church apart from the institutions claiming to embody it.
That is the erosion I am speaking of, Ray. People can continue using the language of life while their practical dependence moves elsewhere. They begin depending upon the arrangements to hold them together, the teaching to establish their identity, and the organization to ensure their future.
What began as an expression becomes a substitute.
The issue is not that a wall or a painting is inherently evil. It is that we can give outward things a place that belongs only to the living One. We can preserve the content of a testimony after its inward reality has become unfamiliar. We can teach the words with increasing precision while scarcely recognizing the life those words once expressed.
And then the visible success of the religion conceals the loss.
Sometimes I imagine the meeting hall in Tacoma, and the religious building across the street, someday becoming museums. People might walk through them examining the arrangements, reading the names, studying the remnants of what once occupied so much earnest attention. Here people gathered. Here they defended an understanding. Here they believed that maintaining this particular expression was essential to God’s purpose.
But where is the life in the exhibit? Where is the living bride?
I cannot know what will become of those particular buildings. Yet the picture exposes something to me. We can preserve the room and lose sight of what made gathering in it worthwhile. We can spend our lives maintaining something that will outlast us physically without asking whether our labor proceeded from Christ.
You cannot excavate abiding. You cannot place the love of brothers and sisters behind museum glass. A cup may survive for centuries, but the life shared around the table is not contained in the cup.
And I think the matter goes deeper still. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil becomes especially difficult to recognize when it takes religious form. We know to distrust obvious evil. We are much less prepared to distrust the natural man’s determination to accomplish something good for God.
He can construct an entire religious world. He can study, organize, recruit, teach, raise money, and build. He can become extraordinarily accomplished at discussing life while continuing to act from a source independent of it.
Then we attach God’s name to the result.
Brother, this is where my language becomes severe, because I do not know how else to express the tragedy. What we treasure as religious achievement can become outward, visible excrement—the refuse of our own activity, elevated into something sacred. It is not life. It is not God. It is not the living One. It is not His bride.
I am speaking of what we produce and enthrone, never of the people whom He loves.
When the knowledge of good and evil becomes intermingled with religion and the language of God, the result can appear almost beyond questioning. Who would object to another building for God? Another organization to advance His interests? Another campaign to increase the numbers?
Yet the question of source remains unanswered.
What will remain of all this when Christ is fully revealed? I fear that much we have celebrated will prove to be refuse—the off-scouring of the universe rather than the treasure we imagined: the residue of humanity’s attempt to manufacture, from the wrong tree, something acceptable to God.
The sorrow is that genuine life may have been present at the beginning. There may have been tears, real fellowship, real release from religious bondage. Yet every time life appears, something seems ready to swallow it—to turn it into a movement, a possession, a program, a heritage that must be defended.
Soon the people are serving what was originally intended to serve them. Their time, money, strength, and affection become necessary to keep it going. We call that faithfulness. Sometimes I wonder whether we have taught people to feel guilty for ceasing to maintain what life never required.
I have to bring that observation home to myself. I can do the same thing with a little light. I can turn something living into an explanation, then become more occupied with protecting my explanation than with abiding in the One whose life it expressed.
So I do not think our answer can simply be to leave a building. We can carry the whole machinery out the door inside ourselves. We could meet in a living room tomorrow and begin constructing the same thing again.
Your question, “Who is abiding?” reaches much further into me than the question of where we should meet.
Can we be together without immediately making something out of our togetherness? Can we recognize Christ living in one another without gathering that life beneath a name we must promote? Can we allow a brother to speak without turning him into an office, or receive something living without turning it into tomorrow’s required practice?
I long for that simplicity, Ray. I do not have a plan for producing it. I have less confidence than ever in our ability to build a container that will preserve life.
But His life is already ours. We have been made members of Him and of one another. The bride is living. She cannot be manufactured, administered into existence, or identified by a property deed.
Perhaps this is where we can go on together: giving our attention to the living One who is our life, and becoming willing to let whatever has displaced Him lose its hold upon us—even when it is something we helped build.
Affectionately,
Brent
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A Living Room Does Not Guarantee a Living Body — On the religious patterns we can carry into even the simplest gathering.
The Branch Has No Fruit Goals — On abiding in Christ and fruit as the expression of His life.
