So, What's "The Wall"?

What's the "wall"?

What are Christians bouncing off of, that keeps them from being Kingdom of God believers, all out for Jesus and believing that their lives don't belong to them anymore but to the One who bought them with a price?

What is confining Christ followers to a comfort-focused, "me" centered, "I just need one more Bible study before I'm ready" mentality?

What is it that keeps Christians, in the U.S. at least, staying within what can only be called the Christian ghetto, while too often the world shrivels and dies and chokes and suffocates untouched by the Gospel?

In his magnificent book, The Dangerous Act of Worship, Mark Labberton describes the wall as the experience of being asleep to God's heart for a world filled with injustice. We are "absorbed with our own inner life, wrestling with our own dreams and traumas. . .busy with life, preoccupied with ministry, absorbed with what is personal, local, immediate. . .liv[ing] quite contentedly inside the bubble of my middle-class American life." (p.15)

Michael Frost talks about our being mesmerized by the prevailing culture (Exiles:Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture, p.53). This is seen in various ways. The insistence on privitization of faith matters permeates the very air we breathe in this culture, leading us to cocoon ourselves within the physical, social, and emotional safety of what we call "church." The marginalization of the church is becoming a reality, with the message being regularly communicated that the church is irrelevant. It is all too easy for Christians to simply withdraw from the traumatic shift that this represents.

Edwin Friedeman, a Jewish rabbi, revealed the same reality through a different lens. He spoke of the surrounding emotional climate as something that could only be broken through by the clear self-differentiation of leaders. One needs the capacity, he said, "to separate myself from the surrounding emotional climate so we can break through the barriers that are keeping everyone from going the other way." (A Failure of Nerve, p. 33). The wall, he says, is an emotional reality.

I would add that the wall is consumerism-fed. The omnipresent cultural phenomenon we call consumerism blows like a mighty wind, such that we are like flies - without the ability to fly in its face, at best we hug whatever is stable, to keep from being blown away. And just the exposure to this unstoppable force has not filled us with revulsion but rather resignation at best and passionate embrace at worst. The wall is built by human hearts in love with "what I want": comfort, happiness, my way, experiences I want, relationships I want, being a "success," having money, whatever. And it is personal choice that has replaced the Lordship of Jesus. No wonder there's a wall.

Oh, yeh, there's a wall, all right. And not many Christ followers here in the states are getting through it or over it these days.

But consider this: this could be the most awesome adventure of our times.

"Adventures are funny things. They offer dark, uncertain times, forks in the road and choices between comfort and peril. And in such times, heroes can be made or undone."

Wayne Thomas Batson, The Rise of Wyrm Lord.