“Why do pastors so often treat congregations with the impatience and violence of developers building a shopping mall instead of the patient devotion of a farmer cultivating a field? The shopping mall will be abandoned in disrepair in fifty years; the field will be healthy and productive for another thousand if its mysteries are respected by a skilled farmer. Pastors are assigned by the church to care for congregations, not exploit them, to gently cultivate parishes that are plantings of the Lord, not brashly develop religious shopping malls.” -Eugene Peterson
“Love God, love yourself, and love your neighbor”. Why is this so hard? We say it all the time. Preachers mention it and congregations nod their heads. Speakers say it to large gatherings of church leaders and they nod their heads. We talk about the need to simply “love God, self, and neighbor” but we struggle to do it. So we justify ourselves by the occasional outreach project in which we engage; we put together some kind of program, good programs that should not be minimized, and we pat ourselves on the back for loving God and neighbor.
Loving God, self, and neighbor is not a strategy, program or even a ministry. It’s how we are to live. It is a way of life. It is the kind of life we are to live every moment of every day. Sometimes I think our programs, strategies, and ministries actually impede a life of loving God and neighbor rather than fostering such a life, because they teach us that loving God and neighbor has a specific context, location and start and end time. Our programs do to our spiritual lives what I feel like the over-programming of our kids does to them. Kids don’t know how to play anymore. They don’t know how to go outside and make up a game and just run around the neighborhood anymore. They don’t know how to gather the neighbor kids and play stickball in the street with the corners as bases, a frisbee as the pitcher’s mound and timeouts for cars. They need a programmed organized team or they’re paralyzed.
I feel like this has happened to “loving God and neighbor” in our churches. We don’t know how to do it. We know how to show up for a worship service and an outreach project, but we need a program and structure to tell us how to do it as a community in our actual lives. The way my effectiveness as a pastor is literally and specifically measured against how well my church is growing in “love of God and neighbor”. I just don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind here.
Has the American Church become so embedded in capitalism and the free market that “love of God, self, and neighbor” has become a programmed commodity that we buy and sell? What does a community fully and wholly committed to a simple but robust way of loving God, loving ourselves, and loving our literal and metaphorical neighbor look like? Let’s paint that picture. And then let’s live it.
Moving Through Matthew 