Media Through the Lens of Jesus: Confessing Community

So the second crucial piece for any kind of genuine transformation to take place is what I'm currently calling "confessing community."

Post-modern culture in general celebrates authenticity. Be you, keep it real, do your thing--these are all common slogans. The general mood of the times is that people might be free to be real, be authentic, and that the communities that we share life in together would be real, be authentic.

This is a deeply biblical value. But for Christian community, we cannot stop there. Christians are called to participate in communities that do not value authenticity simply for authenticity's sake. We are called to be communities of transformation, not just honesty.

And so, we are called to be confessing communities. Confession means both that I'm honest about my stuff and that I'm looking for transformation, freedom, change. My stuff does not have the last word. Transformation does. Jesus does. Hope wins.

In my deeply pluarlistic mission field, this does not fly so well. The secular university would prefer that we simply affirm wherever anyone happens to be at this point in time. It is not up to us to try to "fix" or "convert" or "change" people.

Now clearly there is something that Christians need to take heed of here. We are often too quick to try to fix people, too heavy-handed in our approaches. Christian community is supposed to be full of messy, broken people who are in process of transformation. So we have this tension that we must balance faithfully and well.

But the place of transformation is and must be the last word in our communities, not simply authenticity. We must not confuse the means (authenticity) as the ends (which, in the Christian worldview, is transfomation into Christ-like-ness).

And so confessing communities are the places where we are both free to be a mess and free to move out from under the tyranny of that mess into the glorious Lordship of Jesus Christ. Apart from both of those ingredients, there is very little hope of genuine, long-term change.