Renovating Holiness Essay

Last year, Pastor Ryan and I submitted an essay for the new book Renovating Holiness that explores a younger generation's understanding and experience with holiness and sanctification. Below is the essay that was published. It is at times more theologically driven this most of our blog posts. You can check out the book here.

“Holiness Now: Resurrection and Shalom on the Big Island”

Ryan Fasani and Eric Paul

Hanu (hah-noo), an unwed mother of two young children, is a ‘local’ here—she’s of Polynesian descent, grew up in Hawaii, and considers the culture of the Big Island normative. Hanu conceived her first child as a teenager.  Under the pressures of motherhood, part-time employment, living in a multigenerational home, and being single, she chose to complete a GED rather than high school. Her current boyfriend (and father of her second child) works for a hotel when not serving scheduled, three-month stints in jail. Cost of living here is beyond their means and they suffer from health complications and family dysfunction. We have found Hanu’s story very common.  As pastors on the Big Island of Hawaii, we ask: What does holiness look like for Hanu?  

The doctrine of holiness is the church's articulation of Christ’s life being enacted, through the power of grace, in the world.  The life of holiness is the embodiment of that truth.  However, our observation is that the doctrine has largely ignored the Christ who came preaching the Shalom Community as the Kingdom of God, and thus has not been helpful for realizing embodied holiness.  We contend that holiness is the embodiment of Shalom in a particular place with particular people—where Christ’s life has become our own.  Consequently, holiness is both contextual (to a particular place) and communal (to a particular people).  We find it helpful to use the biblical vision of the Shalom Community (Micah 4) to understand embodied holiness, which is to say that the biblical vision of a particularly placed people will help us better understand how we ought to envision holiness for Hanu here and now—in our community. 

Hanu and the Holiness of Our Past

Holiness has been taught as a moment of entire sanctification rendered by the grace of God in an individual's heart.  Nazarene understanding of where sanctification occurs is indicative of where we locate sin: in the heart of the individual. This is why the adage “justification is what God does for us, sanctification is what God does in us” is so fitting. Sin is rooted in the human heart, and therefore, sanctification also takes root in the human heart. Unfortunately, with this understanding, holiness can only be understood in contrast to an individual’s (non-communal) breech of (non-contextualized) faithfulness.

In this way, the Nazarene church has focused on Hanu and her boyfriend’s litany of personal sins: premarital intercourse, criminal activity, poor financial stewardship. The Good News for Hanu, from this perspective, is that God forgives and can do a sanctifying work in her.  The bad news is that it leaves unaddressed a majority of Hanu’s life and therefore a majority of the healing God desires.

The scriptures are clear that God alone is a holy, self-giving God, and desires to sanctify Hanu's whole realm of existence (Colossians 1). Locating sin and sanctification in the heart of the individual certainly offers the potential for a narrow “inner cleansing” but it ignores the totality of God’s desire for reconciliation, which includes the breeding ground of Hanu’s sin. We simply cannot separate the experience of holiness from all that is implicated in the holy self-giving of God.  We contend that this self-giving and the Kingdom preached by Christ are all-encompassing—implicating the complex web of relationships and influences in Hanu’s life. Where Hanu lives, her social and familial network, and the cultural structures that govern her life are all environments of influence and sinfulness.  Sanctification, then, must be dislodged from the very limited locale of the heart so that it can be realized as broadly as God desires.

But Hanu’s life (and sinfulness) is unlike anyone else’s. So too should sanctification be unique to her experience.  Sanctification must be conceived broadly enough to included Hanu’s whole sphere experience and particular enough to be realized in her immediate, unique context. Hanu’s story teaches us that holiness is necessarily both communal and contextual.

The Shalom Community of Micah 4

Holiness, far from only being the state of a believer’s heart, is God’s move to restore the intricate web of relationships—personal, social, political, economic, etc.—in which we all participate. But if God is actively restoring these relationships, then we must be able to speak in terms of restoring concrete interpersonal, socio-political and even economic relationships. Inversely, we must speak of the brokenness-needing-healing in each of those relational arenas. We must speak of communal brokenness, and the communal context of restoration.  Scripture is ripe with such articulation.  Take for example Micah 4:

In days to come…

²   many nations shall come and say:

‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

   to the house of the God of Jacob;

that he may teach us his ways

   and that we may walk in his paths...’

³ He shall judge between many peoples,

   and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;

they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,

   and their spears into pruning-hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

   neither shall they learn war any more; 

⁴ but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,

   and no one shall make them afraid;

   for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. (Micah 4).

In general, the prophets proclaim words of disaster and optimism, grief and comfort, apocalyptic end and future hope. But they refuse to divorce “spiritual health” from the totality of health in communities. When we read and engage prophetic literature, we must read it through a totalizing “lens of life”: no aspect of the human experience is excluded from the blessings and ultimate judgment of God.  As such, three important aspects of Shalom are apparent in this prophetic vision.

First, this is a religious text.  God, judgment, and a divine voice along with particular references to “the God of Jacob” and “Lord of hosts” are all clear references to a religious tradition known as Israel.  But the vision itself is hardly “religious,” as if religion were a sector of life distinct from economy or politics.  Instead, God’s restoration is concrete and practical, a matter of worship and work.

Second, Micah gives us a broad picture of what the Kingdom will look like and it’s not only the restoration of individuals.  The restoration encompasses individual estrangement from creation, poverty, starvation, and violence.  God’s sanctifying power reaches into every facet of communal existence.

Third, the prophetic vision is a universal hope but not a universal reference.  In other words, the particularities of a this-world, communal context are evident.  Though there are references to “nations far away” and “many peoples”, the peaceful community envisioned is not like every community—it is a particularly placed people.  They are familiar with an agrarian lifestyle (“ploughshares”), which is to say they are not nomadic and make a living through cultivating soil.  They have a history of combat and wield a particular arsenal of weapons (“swords and spears”).  Among them are orchardists (requiring “pruning-forks”) and vintners or winemakers (“sitting under their vines”).  They may have a history of being the underdog, likely a reference to their small size (“strong nations far away….make[ing] them afraid”).  We get the image of an agrarian community with a non-aggressive foreign policy or expansion tactic, relieved to finally put up their weapons to more fully invest in peaceful and satisfying pursuits of stewarding creation.  

The holiness vision of Micah 4 is not limited to God’s sanctification of the human heart; instead it is a holy restoration of all the complex facets of a particular community, in and between the concrete lives of neighbors in a particular place.  Holiness is communal. Holiness is contextual.   

Holiness Now

So how does Micah 4 help us understand sanctification for Hanu? Micah clearly understood the distinctions of the envisioned community.  In order to envision redemption and sanctification, we need to know that which is broken (needing healing) and unholy (needing to be sanctified).  We can start, then, by better understanding unique brokenness and sin in Hanu’s context.   

Many of Hanu’s relationships are strained or broken, creating immense stress, anxiety, and fear.  The consistency necessary for marital health is abruptly interrupted every few months when her husband is in jail—vacillating between single parenthood and dual parenthood.  Her living environment is not conducive to conflict resolution because of the proximity to multiple adult family members. Discussions often turn to arguments, arguments to abuse.  And each sphere of relationship is negatively affected by her material poverty. 

She also suffers from multiple socio-political systems in Hawaii that have failed: a food system that promotes disease and unhealthy bodies, a punitive criminal system that dismembers families, an education system that cannot accommodate unique family needs, an economic system that exacerbates poverty, a governmental aid system that serves as a disincentive to gainful employment, and a cultural system that is often ethnically oppressive.

As we learn more about the complexity of Hanu’s brokenness, we begin to see multiple interlocking spheres.  When one sphere is stressed or broken, the pain (or sin) reverberates into all other spheres. We believe that God cares and longs to restore the brokenness in each of these interrelated spheres so that Life and sanctification may be fully expressed.

The question of holiness could be posed thusly: what if these relationships could be healed?  We contend that this is the abundant, shalom life that God desires.  When we abandon the belief that sanctification addresses the sinful heart alone and begin to believe that the self-giving holy God that we worship desires the complexity of our existence to heal and be made new, then we begin to harness the imagination of Micah and the Shalom Community.  Sin, we believe, is a “heart issue” and a “systems issue” and a “relationship issue” (Ephesians 2), thereby making sanctification holistically relevant and necessary.  

For years, the local church created specific programs to heal suffering in each sphere (i.e. food pantry or ESL classes).  But, in Hanu’s case, her experience and suffering from sin is unique to her context, rendering generic programs partially effective at best.  Because Hanu’s sin is both internal and systemic, she suffers from a web of brokenness, rendering charitable, one-dimensional solutions too narrow and mostly unhelpful.  The only “solution” we can imagine for Hanu’s convolution of sin is the slow and gentle inclusion into a worshipping body that takes seriously God’s call to Life and holiness in every facet of existence. 

As is the case in Micah 4, only a self-giving community bent toward holiness can envision and ultimately realize holiness for Hanu’s broken context.  Only a community of shalom can realize a radically different (set apart, holy) way of life together—from the way we consume and clothe ourselves to how we interact with the broader market economy, from the way we nurse our babies to the way we adopt unwanted children, from the way we embrace a diversity of cultures to the way we worship one God, from the way we use our ploughshares for farming to the refusal to bear arms. These are part of the Shalom Community—these are all part of Hanu’s sanctification. We find that we can not talk of Hanu’s holiness apart from the holiness of the community in which she lives. Imagining and enacting such a community contextualizes Hanu’s life while caring for both individual and communal growth in Christ.

What We're Reading

A glimpse into our free-time in the past few weeks. You can click on the picture to learn more about the book:

Kid Pictures

Balance

Sometimes taking a new job is a direct correlation to dissatisfaction at a current job. We are not happy with how things operate, or have a personality conflict with a boss. Maybe the hours aren't right or the "work" unfulfilling. The reasons are plenty.

Two years ago Eric and I were wrestling with a job offer in Hawaii. If you've been following our blog through the years, you'll remember that this was indeed a wrestling match for me. I did not want to go. In one of our video-chat interviews, Pastor Ryan asked what my ideal job would be. I remember something like, "If you could dream up the perfect job, perfect work/home balance... what would that be?"

Admittedly, my imagination was a little out of practice. But I remember describing the job I was currently holding, in Nashville. And somewhere in that conversation he said, "Oh, you already have it. You're not looking for a change?" Nope. Eric and I had a great balance of work/family. We were both engaged in fulfilling work. For the first time we were living and working in the same neighborhood, a deep conviction of ours that we had just managed to bring to fruition a few months prior. I was using my giftedness and my passions. I had jumped in with both feet to answer the question, What does it mean to live here? To be part of this community? 

Fast forward a few months, we did indeed take the call to move to Hawaii (shocker, right?). My training is in education and in my experience, those jobs have been easy to come by. Maybe not the "perfect" job, but a job nonetheless. Wrong. Eric and I worked to find a good work/home balance, surely, we could implement what we had already learned. Wrong. We had a second child... but people do that all the time, it wouldn't be that different. Wrong. And I had the recent experience of jumping into a community, meeting moms, and making that city a home. New city, same expectations. Double Wrong.

I've come to identify some of this as naivety. Some of it as LIFE. And some of it as ignorance of the new 'job' as missionary. From the outset, we knew our first year would largely be making Kona our home. I've learned that knowing in my head I'm making Kona home and feeling in my heart I'm making Kona home are two very different things. Some of making Kona home has involved the work of attending community meetings, meeting community workers, becoming familiar with social services, and other things that feel like work. Then there's the other part of making Kona home... the part that collides with my ignorance of what it means to be a missionary. I probably should have had someone scream at me, "Don't even think about jumping in with two feet! Observe for a while. YOU, my friend, are an outsider." My unrealistic expectations lead to frustration that could have been lessened with more realistic expectations.

Recently, at a Christmas gathering, a long-term missionary with a few decades of ministry experience told me something I didn't expect to hear. She said, "In my experience it takes 4 years to make a new culture your home. And if there is NO language barrier, it could be lessened to 3 years." WHAT?! I've been marinating on that for the past 6 weeks and it is helping change my attitude. I am viewing the work we've done so far as progress in the bigger picture instead of an unmet expectation. And when I think about it like that, I am so incredibly hopeful for our future; for the future of Mission:Kona Coast. Because the reality is we have done work this year. Formational and foundational work that will help us build a strong ministry. Heart work and marriage work and family work.

Eric and I have recently hit a new stride, we have a fantastic balance of sharing work and kids. We have more energy (likely related to no longer having an infant). Instead of identifying a hurt in the community and logging is as head knowledge, we are beginning to get involved and get our hands dirty. Don't get me wrong, we've been busy. We did jump in with 2 feet in our local church context. As with any church, there's always work to be done. But now we are becoming more comfortable in our community. And as we form new and deeper relationships we are starting to match passions with needs. Sometimes it's overwhelming. Sometimes our vision is still a bit blurry. But we're doing it. and that's pretty exciting. And though this looks nothing like my unrealistic (and naive) expectations, it is prayerfully and faithfully pursued.

Reviving Stories

Over the past couple of months, we have been praying and discussing as a staff what our theme for 2015 should be. This past year (2014) we devoted our preaching and discussions around "Building the Church" using Ephesians to walk through the tough issues of becoming a Christian community on mission together (i.e. being the church in the world). We have long felt that we are on the precipice of revival. We believe we are laying the groundwork for personal and social change in the lives and community of the Kona Coast. With that mind, we believe that story telling will play a prominent role in the life of our church. So, this year our theme will simply be "Reviving Stories," and we will walk through the first story of Jesus written in the Bible, The Gospel of Mark. I'll give a brief summary of what this means for our role as missionaries, but if you're interested in reading Pastor Ryan's perspective, you can find it here. 

1). We live in a predominately Oral Culture. Especially in Hawaii, the majority of people interact and grow up in traditional oral structures; that is, a person's primary engagement with the world is oral rather than literate. Culturally speaking, oral communities place high value in relationships, learn more through experience/mentorships, process through stories rather than theory/critical thinking, and process together rather than in isolation. Just think about this: 58% of the US Population never reads a book after high school while 70% of people in North America prefer non-literate forms of communication. The majority of people in our congregations learn through stories, proverbs, songs, and lived experience. And yet, I bet much of our discipleship takes place in the realm of personal introspection and deepening head knowledge. For example, many small groups form around a particular book study, working against the very context of learning assumed by the group's participants.

2). The majority of scripture takes the form of a story. In fact, one could say that the Bible itself is a story with a beginning, middle, and end, plot twists, character development, and even has various authors directed/inspired by the Storyteller for its narrative arc. Each author tends to have particular way of telling how God's story meets their experience, but it remains God's story nonetheless. The Gospel writers seemed to think that the best way to witness to the Kingdom of God and challenge Christians to faithful discipleship was simply to tell the story of Jesus. Stories, orally told, were the key to learning, experiencing, and sharing God for early Christians. For those living in an oral culture, we believe this still to be the case. We want to revive this form of discipleship by reviving stories, working through how God's story intersects and ultimately transforms our own story. We need to learn how to place our story within the Story of God as found in Jesus. If we don't do this, people will continue to find meaning through the various other stories our cultures tell.

3). Our Teaching/Preaching at KCN will take the form of interactive story-telling. Starting in February, we will host a class that will focus on uniting Biblical story-telling with personal narrative; learning to share how our story falls into the scope of God’s story of redemption and communion. Each class will focus on one story from the Book of Mark oriented around a theme of evangelism. Through group dialogue and discovery, our stories of God’s work will be shared with each other, putting into practice the act of “Declaring the Gospel of God.” But even more than that, this will be a starting place for the 7 people within our congregation discerning a call to ministry. 

Over the next year, we will learn together the story that God has for these potential ministers but also the Story that God longs to see told throughout the Kona Coast. I, for one, can't wait to see how this narrative unfolds. 

P.S. SEVEN People within our congregation discerning a call to ministry! Praise God with us. God is being faithful in calling local leadership to lead locally. May we continue to be faithful to the calling of training local leaders for God's work on the island.

Place Matters

Since moving to Kona, I have been working part-time at a coffee shop in town. My love for coffee has developed over the years as I have patiently and passionately moved closer and closer to coffee nerd-ism. My pallet has become more refined, detecting nuances between stone fruit or berry fruit flavors, noting coffee that has been over-extracted (leaving a slight bitterness), over roasted (covering the nuances of coffee flavor), or just plain bad quality coffee. I have preferences in brew methods, leaning more toward the clean and crisp feel that my Chemex and Kalita Wave give rather than the muddled and heavy feel of a french press coffee.

The myriad of factors that go into the taste of a cup of coffee is extraordinary. Everything from water temperature to grind size, from brew method to roast date, from water purity to extraction time all change the way coffee will taste. And these are only the factors that I, as a barista, can control. The other end of the spectrum contributes to taste as well: quality of soil, rainfall, sunshine, shade, pruning techniques, coffee varietals, processing methods, storage, and geography. In the last 20 years, many have begun recognizing the unique differentiation of coffee based on all of these factors, much like wine connoisseurs talk about regions, grape varieties, and aging.

Many coffee roasters are moving toward direct relationships with coffee farmers. I have tasted two different coffees of the same variety from the same farmer. The only difference was that one coffee grew on one side of the mountain and the other coffee grew on the other side of the mountain. And the coffees were different. The context in which the coffee grows matters in its outcome, in how it tastes.

Kona coffee is world famous. It holds a type of romantic edge rivaled only by a few other coffees worldwide (Blue Jamaican and Geisha to name two). The majority of Kona coffee is now from a "Guatemala Typica" variety imported in the 19th century. And yet, it's distinct and unique.

If you take the same varietal of coffee, say typica, and move it to a different location, it's going to taste different. The place matters.

At Kona Coast Nazarene, we believe that place matters.  In fact, if you were to spend time on our website you would recognize that its even set up differently than most church websites. We do not start with when our worship services gather, what ministries/programs we offer, or a list of calendar events coming up. We begin with geography. We begin with a place and recognize the importance of how that place will require and produce a unique and distinct expression of the Gospel.

We do not start with the 'goods and services' the church offers to those who wish to consume them. Turning the church into a franchise that markets 'new life' or 'good news' has worked in the past to bring people to us. But we have found over time that this strategy has the adverse effect of creating passive observers and not disciples. Furthermore, assuming that what the community hopes for is another worship service that is distinct from the 'other' church down the road only in contextual preaching, ignores- or at least limits- the church's capacity to listen and engage our neighbors' hurts, hopes, and cultural histories. We have also seen that over time, the people have just stopped coming. Perhaps its time for us to stop assuming people will come and for us to start going to them.

If you take a church of the same denomination, say Nazarene, and move it to a different location, its expression is going to be different. The place matters.

We posit that we shouldn't know the vision for one of our Mission Zones (we have eight distinct communities stretching across the West Coast of the Bis Island) until we've shared meals with those who eat there, labor with those who work there, know the names and stories of those who live there, and joked around with those who laugh there.

Joy and I in the past year have been doing this work of learning the stories of the community and its neighbors. And now, in year two, our vision and our goals are becoming more clear. We're excited to share with you what those are in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, continue to pray with us that God directs our work, provides the means of support for our ministry, and continues to grace us with new and deepening friendships.

On Becoming a Disciple

Disciples are not born, they're taught. 

And children are not adults, they too are taught. I'm currently reading a book about parenting and finished the chapter on giving too many choices. The basic premise revolves around parenting appropriately to developing abilities, understanding, age, and moral judgment. In this chapter, the authors deal with the ever-present temptation to give too much freedom to a child who is not ready to handle it. I'm sure those of us who are parents remember, or experienced today, struggling with a child who wants certain things, done a certain way, and in their own time- whether or not their parents have given another instruction. Sometimes as parents, it's simply easier, less conflict-ridden, to give into the daily whims and desires of our children. Does it really matter that Justice wants cow's milk instead of almond milk even though I've already poured almond milk? If we think of the way children develop over time, it really becomes less about the immediate choice and more about training our child to listen, growing into a more mature use of freedom, and teaching against the grain of a culture addicted to personal freedoms and choice. More than likely, a child lashing out, throwing a tantrum, and repeatedly saying 'no,' has learned these bad habits over time and their perspective must change.

If you've spent any time getting to know Joy and I or read about our work on this blog, then you know we are quite passionate about discipleship. And this doesn't sound unique or different or more radical than any other church. Most churches will express a desire to make disciples, because it's in scripture. But when I look around the Christian landscape and do a subjective survey of the state of Christian discipleship, I think most Christians bend toward 2-year old tantrums, addicted to personal freedom and choice, and treat the church like parents who merely make suggestions for Christian living. There exists no new alternative, no changed perspective, no un-learning of bad habits and re-learning of new ones. We think people will become disciples randomly by rubbing shoulders with enough 'good' people. It seems to me that a disciple of Jesus has come about more by accident (or perhaps by the Spirit's continual pursuit) than by building a culture of discipleship in which believers commit to one another in grace, love, and mutual submission (what the church ought to be). 

But we've all experienced and witnessed low levels of commitment and high levels of church shopping. How can you re-train someone (a process that takes time) if they're not around long enough, or only commit to showing up once a week, to break free from the old way of doing things? 

I'm also currently reading through Starting Missional Churches in which the authors combine many of the benefits from the church planting movement with the keen insights from the missional movement of the last decade. They note the detriment to churches of the rise of the self-proclaimed individual through enlightenment thinking and consumeristic practices. They write, "Too often Protestant splitting [when individuals or groups leave a church] is tied (unconsciously) to believing that a church is a set of commodities to be consumed. When churches focus on their own preferences and their assumptions about other shoppers, we fall into deadly traps of our consumer culture and nobody wins- neither the church nor the neighborhood." Or put another way, the child gets what he/she wants, but its detrimental to their own development. In Ephesians, Paul talks of some being like infants, tossed back and forth by every whim of teaching. Rather, we are to grow up into the kind of love fitting for those who follow Jesus.

Notice that for the church, it isn't necessarily about itself; it exists for the sake of the health of the community for which it is a part. If the members of the church cannot practice a core principal of "Unity" (just read Ephesians), then the neighborhood surely notices and will not benefit from the church's presence- and mission is destroyed. Like a child whose perspective needs to be altered through preventative measures, so also Christians must move away from consuming spirituality and move toward committing to one another through the daily grind of life. 


If we as Christians are fixed upon our own desires, go to church to 'be fed,' or walk away at the hint of conflict, then we will not grow into the full maturity of Christ. If I'm unable to place my life underneath the story of Christ's death (a story of giving up power), I will continue to fall to other stories of greed or violence or selfishness or hatred and I will destroy community. To be a disciple is to give up all the stories of the world for the one enacted in Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. That story creates reconciliation, produces love, and teaches grace (the exact elements I wish my children to embody). And when the church looks like that, it won't take long for our neighbors to take notice and want be a part of it.