Holes in the bucket

I have been thinking a lot lately about what I really believe that I should be doing with my life. More than that, what does God think that I should be doing with my life? I have been reading about discipleship. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian, labels discipleship as complete self-denial and complete self-alignment with Jesus Christ. To me, that is a good theory, but what does that look like? I always have this problem with people who give good concepts, but never any advice about practice, but that is another topic for another essay. In my search for how to practice this complete denial and complete alignment, I have done a lot of reading. From Shane Claiborne, to J.I. Packer, to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and they all say the same thing. Give up your modern suburban consumer materialistic self-serving bastardization of Christ! Leave behind your possessions, abandon yourself and follow Christ as much materially as spiritually. So from this, I have gained a very negative view of the suburban Christian life. I have given up notions of a comfortable yuppie future for the vague romance of a missional life. This life would definitely not take me to dwell in the suburbs and go to a church with a Starbucks franchise in the foyer, but to the hood, the ghetto, to the margins, to the economically cast out, to the blind, to the weak, to the orphan, to the widow, to the poor, to the homeless, to the blacks, to the Hispanics, to the inner city. In my romantic notions of missional living, I will be married to a beautiful woman and we will live in the hood and love God and love our neighbors not because they are marginalized, but because they are made in God’s image and deserve dignity. We will serve Jesus by feeding the hungry, healing the sick, giving drink to the thirsty, visiting the prisoner, clothing the naked, and welcoming the strangers. Our neo-monastic lifestyle will flow from our front porch to our dinner table to the neighborhood playground. We will both have full time jobs, but we will love our neighbors and we will be the Good News in their impoverished lives full time as well. All of this romance about moving to the inner city and serving God without materialism to restrain our ministry lights me on fire. However, a good friend of mine recently started to poke some holes in this bucket of thought. He finds problems in the romanticizing of these missional notions. His contention is that many ‘believers’ are rich and live extravagantly. How can they justify this? I don’t know, but my friend says that there is nothing wrong with living comfortably, and I can agree with that, but I think that extravagance plants problems in the garden of ministry. We decided that the purpose for Christianity is somewhat two-fold. We can draw it from Ecclesiastes and the Sermon on the Mount. Ecclesiastes says to enjoy life, live comfortably, but fear and love God. If we can synthesize this with the somewhat missional message of the Sermon on the Mount, then we can found the reason Christianity: to enjoy life, and live with a purpose or a mission: to be the good news to those who need it.