This Beautiful Mess

Stalwart cacophonists may be interested to know that for half a day this blog was called 'This Beautiful Mess'. It failed to stand the test because, while the notion behind the title was brilliant, it wasn't original. And that just wouldn't do. I think I'd just heard Rick McKinley talking about his new book by the same name and it stopped me in my tracks. In many ways it paints a picture of what Cacophony's about.

My recurring thought is that beneath the beautiful mess is a holy intent.

I'm yet to open the book, but it's about the Church, Christ's Bride. Stumbling around in a tattered dress. Stained by milleniums of unfaithfulness, forgetfulness, emasculation, legalism, violence and judgement and yet still, though the ashes, radiating with the beauty of that Holy intent. The radiance sometimes only seeps through the cracks, yet it's there. Every time someone reaches beyond themselves, cheers someone on, sees context over method, seeks justice with grace, speaks words of life...in short, whenever someone points towards the Bridegroom. Every time a bunch of Jesus-followers grow up a little more and shine God-colours into their worlds or add saltiness to their patch of influence. In fact, any time we pull on our pants and go to work with an eternal agenda, we allow that holy intent to seep out. And we allow the beautiful mess to reverberate. In those moments it becomes more beauty than mess.

Pull back the curtains on churches everywhere and you'll find people: broken, healing, doubting, affirming, downcast, believing, wrestling, comforted, hopeful, encouraged, lamenting, praising, arguing and reconciling but, ultimately, redeemed and restored. This beautiful mess is the melting pot of God's holy intent.

Perhaps the moment you put more than one person in a room, you plant the seeds of disharmony; of messiness. And, as the number grows, you also plant the seeds of legalism. After all, if we're going to be lights to the world, we better have our lives together and be singing from the same hymn book. At the very least, our veneer should communicate this. The problem is, we can portray perfection through a vivid fascade—a charade we think is pretty convincing. But rather than attracting, it repels—inside and out. The reality is a struggle: a wrestle that reasonates. But if the church finds reality too confronting we can be lured into peddling a romantic comedy rather than a real life drama. We underrate the average punter's ability to spot a fake. It's not that hard when the veneer is such a poor imitation of authenticity.

As one band put it, we are a beautiful letdown; painfully uncool, the church of the dropouts, the losers, the sinners, the failures, the fools. That's so unattractive isn't it? We want to be so much more. And it's true, in Christ we become so much more. Yet we need be continually reminded of the mud we were rescued out of. And to remember that it is because the bridegroom has said 'come' that we get a chance to eat at this celestial bridal table.

For some reading along, this beautiful mess is thoroughly confusing. Your context is so beautiful (glamorous even) and the dew of unity runs continually down Aaron's beard. If this is true of your context (and it's beyond superficial thin-slicing) that's brilliant. I don't doubt the presence of such communities. Although I once heard someone say that if you find the perfect church then leave, you'll only ruin it! Don't construe my sentiment as negativity or resignation. I believe in God's intent for His Bride with all I am.

But beauty is more than skin deep. And we're porous. We leak. Who we are seeps through our skin. As we mature as a community of Jesus-followers we can certainly seep beauty, but I believe that comes through a steady formation of our spiritual character. Through the rough and tumble of relationship. We weep with those who weep, we rejoice with those who rejoice. This is life. This is the church.

As a lecturer I had last year said: 'I know so much more than I live. I don't live nearly as well as I talk'. We know how we see ourselves and how others see us and, often, it's not that great. Our mandate is not to air our dirty laundry; I'm not advocating that. Our mandate is to usher in the Kingdom of God and be agents for Jesus' restoration of the world. Much of our journey of discipleship and formation together becomes a journey of seeing ourselves through the new reality that we have in Christ. We've been brought up in a graveyard yet we've been given this new life and we're not used to it. Grace is a different world altogether. As so we need a new vocabulary—everything re-imagined through the lens of grace. As another song says, 'grace makes beauty out of ugly things'.

And that's the church: this beautiful mess. The church is not the utopic place for figuring out this new life of grace, but it's the best place. It obviously wasn't God's intent that the church be perfect—He's taken the weak and the poor to build His Kingdom. He uses people like us. Is it any wonder that it gets messy?! The truth is that the beauty is the God-colours shining through the cracks in our brokenness to reveal his Holy intent.

We needn't to throw our hands up in despair either. This sometimes limping, sometimes bumbling, gradually mended, strident and purposeful church that we are a part of is God's plan to reconcile the world to Him. This scares and excites me. In the wake of Jesus, God has a bold one-point plan to restore man to God: the church empowered by the Holy Spirit. Whether or not you believe the church is effective or ineffective, potent or impotent, it's God's idea. He says to us as He says to Peter: 'the gates of hell will not prevail against it'.

Many facets of our journey in Christ comes back to a gradual discovery—or a wrestle to reveal this holy intent. Never let the mess blind you to the beauty (or vice versa) but search for the Holy intent that God continues to hanker after for His Bride—you and me—the Church.

Grateful acknowledgement to Eugene Peterson, Rick McKinley, Jon Foreman and Bono for their influences on this post. Some of these words are from their lips.