I read an excellent article by Stanley Hauerwas called, Discipleship as a Craft, Church as a Disciplined Community. It was a great reminder to me that in the church we need a Master.
In it he uses the illustration of a bricklayer. To be a bricklayer requires you to take an apprenticeship to be taught by a master craftsman. He teaches you all that is involved; including the language. This is also true for playing baseball, being a cook, or carpenter etc.
But should this not be true for a Christian or a church? Yes. Sadly however, in our modern democratic infatuation and demand for individualism we don’t want a master to train us in life. To quote Hauerwas, “the accounts of morality sponsored by democracy want to deny the necessity of a master. It is assumed that we each in and of ourselves have all we need to be moral. No master is necessary for us to become moral, for being moral is a condition that does not require initiation or training.” We think we can set our own course in morality, and actually in our love to discover things by ourselves we think a valuable morality only comes when we discover it by ourselves.
Hauerwas goes on to say that there are less and less bricklayers because contractors are building more practical, cheaper plastic and glass covered buildings. The end result of course is less and less master bricklayers are needed. What will happen if in our democratic self made morality endeavour we get more and more morality? We will need a master less and less. To put it plainly, we will need Jesus and all he has set in place to nurture us less and less; namely Christian friends less and less, pastors and elders less and less, and the Christian community less and less.
Christian bookstores and conferences are full of self-help books for democratic reasons…people need to have these things available so they can discover the morality that suites them for themselves. No conversion to Jesus is necessary, and to submit to him as Master and Lord is seen as undemocratic. “After all he is to lend a hand to achieve my happiness, not be my Lord.” Following this way will leave us untransformed. There is no gospel in this whatsoever. Being made new by the Master is actually shunned out of a love and goal to renew ourselves. We can’t be failures because then we would have to go to the Master and admit we need his guidance.
The fact is we need the Master, Jesus Christ, and his body the church through which he works. This means…
1. Being a Christian is not about having all beliefs and behaviour right. It is about being born again into the craft of a new creation, or new life in Christ.
2. Following Jesus as the Master craftsmen of life comes from this grace of God.
3. He by his Spirit will train us in the art of humility. He will train us that we are sinners in need of his grace all the time.
4. From this he will train us to forgive. If we have been forgiven by him, he will lead us to forgive others too.
5. At this juncture, having humbled us to receive his forgiveness and having inspired us to forgive others around us who are failures like us; in his grace he teaches us to be creatures. That we are God’s creations set free from a self determining democracy and called to live his way in the world he has made.
This is antithetical to democratic Christianity. Most Christians live as if this world was theirs, and if in their belief about the end times they can’t wait to get out of this bad place and reach heaven; well, they make heaven theirs also. And no surprise because they have been taught Jesus and Christianity is about a democratic choice that the individual makes. Hauerwas was correct in identifying a huge problem in the Western church. His basic idea was that the great problem of modernity (post-modernity too) is how the church can declare Jesus is Lord, give Jesus centered discipleship, and practice biblical discipline in a democratic society? The answer he gave was simple…follow the Master, and grieve not the Holy Spirit. Live in his world as his child! To not have faith as a little child, but maintain a democratic right before God is tantamount to “grieving the Spirit of God.” To says Jesus is for me, church is for me, this world exists for my happiness alone, or that I need to master the Christian life on my own is to grieve the Spirit of God.
Discipleship and discipline are a gift of God’s grace. They come to us from the triune God, the Master of the world. However, if we need him less and less because of our successful morality we will live less and less too.
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