HOW WE DO WHAT WE DO
This has become a mantra for me: HOW we do what we do is as important as what we do. The HOW is actually everything.
I learned this lesson the hard way, working for a lead pastor who took his cues from the Mars Hill (Seattle) model of "get on the bus, or get the f*ck out of my way" style of leadership. (This was actually an almost-direct quote he gave to the Elder Board just before I resigned.)
Did the ends justify the means? A certain number of baptisms or Sunday attendees all worth treating the Staff Team as disposable, manipulatives in the objective of "growing the church?" Yeah - it didn't. That church went down in a blaze of sorrow.
As I spent months recovering from the trauma of that job, I kept coming back to that question. When my co-pastor, Mark, invited me to help plant Highlands Church, one of our first conversations was about this very idea: the HOW of what we do. I couldn't sign on to another staff team that would sacrifice people in service to some ideal. In the business of "Church" it seems that the how IS, actually, the ideal. It's the whole point.
If we aren't working through relational conflict, if we aren't actively seeking out the ideas and opinions of the minority voices, we are missing God. This seemed to be Paul's purpose in writing to the church in Rome. The two facets of Christians - Gentile and Jewish - couldn't see the sacred dignity in the other. To Paul, this was missing the point of the gospel entirely. They might as well not be called the church. They had entirely misunderstood the gospel of Christ. Their relationship was the point: living out their belief in the sacred dignity of the other was their embodiment of the Good News.
It's certainly hard work - believing in the sacred dignity of people who drive you crazy. It sucks having to work through conflict when it would be so much easier to just write that person off. But Paul's right: if we don't pay attention to the HOW of relationship, we've missed the gospel entirely.