maybe it is about the numbers

I completed reading two books of spirituality today: Walking a Literary Labyrinth and Irresistible Revolution. While I really enjoyed Nancy Malone's writing--it often reminded me of the best work of Karen Armstrong or Thomas Merton--between the two the one that's likelier to stick with me longer is the Shane Claiborne book because it irritated me over and over again like an infection. You tend not to remember why you have a scar fondly but you remember it nonetheless.

But what won me over--although to be fair, the fact I kept reading it despite my repeated annoyance with it confirms I was won over long ago--was the following in its final pages:

Certainly, thousands were added to their number in the early church--the poor, outcasts, people fed up with the world. They were the scum of the earth...Our context is quite different. We live among the wealthiest people in the world (top 2 percent), a tough mission field. We are preaching a gospel that declares that it's easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom. But look on the bright side. After we preach the crowds down, we will not need such expensive buildings...

And yet whether it's the Prayer of Jabez or the war in Iraq, many Christians seem to be hoping that the kingdom of God will come in triumphal greatness, expanding God's territory and taking over the world with glory and power--shock-and-awing the masses, if you will. But that's the very temptation Jesus faced in the desert, the temptation to do spectacular things like fling himself from the temple or tun stones into bread, to shock the masses with his miracles or awe them with his power. And yet he resists. The church has always faced the same temptation, from the time of Constantine's sword to now. We are tempted to do great things like rappel from the rafters in the newest church gym or throw the best pizza party so that kids might bow before the altar.

But amid all the church-growth tacticians and megachurch models, I want to suggest something a little different: God's kingdom grows smaller and smaller as it takes over the world...

Despite the fact that God's Word insists that "God does not dwell in temples built by hands," we insist that God should...God just digs camping. No wonder when I think of my most powerful encounters with God they seem to involve camping of some kind...That is where I have met God. God still dwells there. No doubt there is power in corporate worship, and there are times when I feel God among the masses (and during Masses), but it has had nothing to do with the color of the carpet or the comfort of the chair...

As we build our buildings, human temples are being destroyed by hunger and homelessness. The early prophets would say that a church that spends millions of dollars on buildings while her children are starving is guilty of murder...The more personal property is retained as private space, the more corporate property becomes a necessity. And the cycle continues, for as we enlarge the territory of corporate property, private property remains comfortably sacred...[We] find ourselves less likely to meet in homes and kitchens and around dinner tables. We end up centralizing worship on corporate space or "on campus." Hospitality becomes less of a necessity and more of an optional matter, a convenient privilege...

One of the underlying assumptions is that money from the offerings or tithe belongs to the church. But the Scriptures consistently teach that the offering is God's instrument of redistribution and that it belongs to the poor. Giving to the poor should not make its way into the budget; it is the budget.

Now, as I've pointed out, there is a disingenuousness to an organization with directors and marketing people like Claiborne's Simple Way calling "85 percent of...church offerings is used internally, primarily for staff and buildings and stuff to meet our own needs...border[ing] on embezzlement." But simply because an organization finds itself unable to meet the ideal doesn't mean the ideal isn't worth trying or is inherently worthless. It just means they haven't figured out how to do it yet.  It may be that in smallness and simplicity such ideals are more likely to be realized.