The Long Trip II

About a month ago I blogged on The Long Trip from consumer to mature follower of Christ. It's a difficult thing to take a culture full of people who function primarily as "consumer" (even if we don't cognitively think of ourselves in those terms) and to move them to becoming people who are willing to lay down our rights, our time, our energies, our very lives for the sake of God's kingdom, his work, his priorities.

I was still thinking on these things when I came across this passage from Hebrews 13:

11The high priest carries the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place as a sin offering, but the bodies are burned outside the camp. 12And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. 13Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. 14For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.

The invitation to go and join Jesus in the place of shame, disgrace, and pain "outside the camp" captured my imagination for several days.

If our culture is full of "consumers," then let us imaginatively consider what it means to meet them at the "marketplace" in the city. Isn't that what incarnation is all about? Doesn't the Jesus event mean that God takes seriously the human context and that he does whatever it takes to engage people exactly where they are?

But of course we cannot stop there. The work is this call from the writer of Hebrews: to encourage movement to a new place outside the camp, outside the city gate, to the place of disgrace with Jesus.

So here's the challenge for your church and for mine and for my ministry on campus: to simultaneously engage the secular culture of consumers at the marketplace while at the same time leading people away from the marketplace to the place of disgrace outside the city.

Can we have structures and events operating at a consumer level while at the same time trying to wean people off of their consumerism? Or in attempting to do both at the same time are we automatically reinforcing the consumerism and thereby making the journey outside the city gate even more difficult, maybe impossible?