'Presence Based' Church
On seeking Jesus' presence to lead us toward justice
Truly I say to you, wherever this gospel is proclaimed in the whole world,
what this woman has done will also be told in memory of her.
Matthew 26:13
Over the last 10 years there has been a heightened activism around social issues within the church, especially as Millennial and Gen-Z adolescents emerge into the adult world.
Rightly, more attention is being given to the hardship of the poor, immigrants, systemically oppression and a host of other social issues. In the church in the United States, many young Christians have become conscious of the need to be a voice for justice in a way that was not a part of the conversation when I grew up.
I’ll admit when I was in my early 20s there was little, if any, conversation happening in my predominantly white, middle-class Christian circles around these topics. But as the church continues to transition to younger leaders, issues of justice will come further to the fore. In fact, a zeal for justice is becoming quite visible among these younger leaders.
I count myself in this number, yet with a caveat: I’m concerned that sometimes our efforts for justice have lost their center in Jesus.
If churches build their justice work off of ideas of structural injustice instead of first building upon Jesus’ real and present work in the world, we will run into problems.
The solution, I suggest, is to become a Presence Based church that is constantly attentive to the presence of Jesus through the Spirit, leading the way towards justice.
Jesus-Centered Justice
In Matthew 26:6-13 a famous, and quite odd, story takes place. In Matthew’s telling, an anonymous woman pours out an entire flask of perfume on Jesus’ feet. This stunning extravagance leaves the disciples shocked and offended.
R. T. France notes the disciples were once again out of step with what Jesus was doing as they protested that this money should have been “given to the poor” just like the rich man from a few pages earlier.
How was it possible to be out of step with Jesus if they wanted to help the poor?
This notion that France points out is quite significant. In the preceding story, Jesus has just gone to great lengths to explain that the very act of caring for the poor is caring for Jesus himself. In fact, this became such a central teaching of the early church that the practice of alms giving included an understanding that an encounter with the presence of Jesus was taking place in the act of being with the poor and oppressed.
Caring for the poor matters, but Jesus wanted us to see that all our activity in the world needed to be centered on His presence at any given moment.
The woman who anoints Jesus’ feet recognizes the gravity of this moment. Jesus is about to be betrayed and attention to His presence is needed.
France again, points out that this woman was giving to Jesus, “what his executioners will not do, given him the wherewithal for a decent burial.”1 In some ways, the dignity of the human Jesus that is at stake in this moment.
It is our attentiveness to the dignity of Jesus that enables us to give dignity to the poor. Otherwise, we become like the disciples, making a group called “the poor” into a faceless ideology. A project to be checked off the list.
Jesus’ rebuke to his disciples is centered on the fact that He is present with them and their first priority should be to pay attention to His presence, not the poor directly. This may seem counter-intuitive in some ways, but I suggest that it is our ability to be Presence Based that keeps justice about human dignity and not about a project or issue.
When we make the poor into a project we are not considering the poor as people. The poor become primarily a group we posture to take care of, that we petition and protest for, instead of befriending.
Presence Based or Jesus-centered justice keeps us from going ‘off the rails.’
Keeping Justice ‘On the Rails’
I’ve been working on my thoughts related to this piece off and on for a of few weeks but it wasn’t until two weeks ago when
put out his essay, entitled, “Circle of Hope: On deciphering two ways of justice in the neighborhood,” that my thoughts crystalized.Fitch reflects on a recent book about a church in Philadelphia that was working incredibly hard for justice in their neighborhood, doing some fantastic things. But sadly, as his article explains, the church began to fall apart over how to do the work of justice.
As he describes it,
“The pattern of justice work becomes: first, define justice, second, diagnose the injustice according to the definition, and then third, go work for that diagnosis to be enacted. In the process, we separate justice from the actual person and work of Jesus present in and working among us and in the neighborhoods where we live. Justice turns from something Jesus is doing, to something we do in Jesus’ name. Justice is something Jesus teaches us about and then we go do it, in the name of following Him.”
Fitch’s description of Circle of Hope is helpful in understanding how problematic it can be when we center justice instead of centering Jesus. When we center justice from any vantage point other than Jesus, we get all kinds of problems.
One of these problems is the power problem.
Often those in power get to make decisions about who gets taken care of when, devoid of the presence of Jesus. Consider what is happening in the story according to Matthew: the “powerful” men, the inner circle of Jesus, are attempting to define how the work of the Kingdom should go forward. However, it is a woman, someone of little to no influence in the first century world, that rightly sees and discerns Jesus’ presence and how to best follow Jesus in that moment.
When we pursue justice independent of the presence of Jesus we are just as susceptible to the power problem, among others. Jesus centered justice, however, keeps us from defining justice on our own terms and helps us stay in the space of humble submission to the King of Justice.
This is why I suggest we need to work to create Presence Based churches that are attentive to the presence of Jesus in every circumstance.
Worshiping Justice or Jesus?
Focusing on justice/injustice in the way described above also creates an idolatry problem. As many great theologians and preachers have said, we become what we worship.2
If we replace Jesus’ presence as the center of our churches, we are no longer worshipping Jesus, we are being shaped and formed by whatever we are gazing upon. If we center our focus (read worship) on the injustices around us, do we not run the risk of recreating those injustices in another form?
In Matthew's account, the demand from the disciples to focus on the poor functions in a similar way. They miss the point that Jesus is the one they should be giving their worship to if they would seek to provide true dignity to all people and see society be transformed.
It is actually through the worship of Jesus, not justice, that we also get justice. As we gaze upon the Just One, we become more like Him, better equipped to extend His justice to the world.
I’m reminded of theologian N.T. Wright’s words that, if we are going to live out the justice of Jesus it, “must be rooted in worship and prayer. Without that, we will turn even the finest truth into a self-serving ideology, or collapse it into a cacophony of mere slogans.”3
Those of us who are Millennial and Gen Z leaders would do well not to address the errors of previous generations that minimized injustice by over-correcting and stumbling into another error. We don’t need noise, we need Jesus. ALL of Jesus. It will require a posture of costly worship, like the woman with the bottle of perfume, in order to realize this vision.
A Presence Based church can cut through all of the posturing so prevalent in our day to actually be with Jesus so we can join what He is already doing in any given moment.
R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publication Co., 2007), 974.
See, G. K. Beale, We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry (Downers Grove, Ill. : Nottingham, England: IVP Academic ; Apollos, 2008).
N. T. Wright, God in Public: How the Bible Speaks Truth to Power Today (London: SPCK, 2016), 10.