The Moral Muslim

I'm reading "The Missional Leader" by Roxburgh and Romanuk for a class. I hated the book as I saw it leering at me from the top of the To Read stack. But quickly upon opening it I realized these guys are doing good stuff. They put their fingers on the general malaise in the church, and they point a human, non-guaranteed-success way forward. The content is applicable to other areas, but it is presented to deal with church leadership.

One idea they mentioned in passing finally unlocked something I've been working on for a long time.

The American church has long been about being moral. There's decent reason for that. Leading a moral life at its basic level can lead to health. But we've heaped layers of bad stuff on morality. Control. Superiority. Judgmentalism. Easy methods of being judgmental.

Morality has long been our "good news." When we present the gospel, what is the first reaction? "Well, I could never be that good," or "I still wanna have some fun." We always insist that being a Christian isn't about being good, but this visceral critique from outsiders is actually spot on.

The American Christian game: Be moral. We're better than you.

Now judgment is coming upon us. Christians are having an identity crisis (if they let themselves think at all) because they look at moral Muslims. They're beating us at our own game! We're still within the infancy of this realization. There are several possible responses. We can redouble our moral efforts to win the old game. We could change teams and become Muslims because they have more discipline and they're going to win the championship. We could go pluralist and ask who set up this stupid league in the first place. We could go play fantasy moralism and take the best aspects of each team to try win in our own made up league. (While parts of this are appealing, it only compounds the problem.)

Or we could become Christians. The gospel is something more like God's Spirit coming to live among us, recreating us. Jesus, the creative speech act of God, breathed on his disciples, the mud of society, as the Creator breathed on Adam, the dust of the earth. Jesus constituted a new humanity here. (Thanks to Missional Leader for some of this.) And he didn't say, "Go out into the world and be moral." That would be on par with saying, "Go be that old rotting carcass that you all hate." He told them to announce the good news that the Spirit is now among us, animating this new creation.

If Christians want to be distinctive, the tellers of the real metanarrative, they're going to have to go this direction. For the time has finally come that the world is becoming aware that there is a new superstar in the moral league (though with many of the same failings as the church). We have a unique story. We have to tell it.