It's The Great Trunk or Treat, Charlie Brown!

Orange leaves, a harvest moon and shorter days mark the season for that time honored tradition of donning a costume, grabbing a pillow case and walking around the church parking lot!  Yes, it’s time for Trunk or Treat; the most sterile, abstract, safe night of your kids life.  I can almost hear Linus now, “I don’t know how a parking lot can be more sincere than this one. Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see.” Oh, brother.

In our modern, Levittown neighborhoods, the houses are close together but the people are far apart. In fact, my neighbor's home is a mere 18 feet from mine, yet it took three years for me to finally learn his name. And what did it take to bring us together? A couple of kids and some candy.  

Halloween is the most welcoming night of the year; a night when the entire neighborhood opens their homes to one another; a night when I am received on my neighbor's porch, and he on mine.  And what is the church’s response?  We lock our doors, turn out the lights and like that stupid blockhead of a brother Linus, we make an annual fool of ourselves.  

Trunk or Treat is a small example of the failure of institutional Christendom, reducing the Gospel of Christ to a commodity dispensed only at the church building. You want grace? You want salvation? You want some Skittles? You have to come to us and get it.  Sadly, the church’s event based strategy of evangelism has reinterpreted the Great Commission from “Go and Make” to “Come and Get”.  Drawing a crowd is the end justifying our programatic means.  How then can we, the local church, recalibrate our place in the spatial parish we inhabit? In short, living missionally. 

Missional living necessitates a change in the church's practice, place and posture.  A change that deconstructs controlled, contrived clusters of Christians, and replaces them with organic, authentic, local community. It requires that the life of the church be shaped by an alternative narrative, a story that has at its heart the work God is doing through Israel, Jesus Christ and the church to bring his kingdom to bear in the communities where we live. This story, when lived within an embedded community of God in the world, competes with and offers an alternative narrative to the fragmented, violent stories of the world. Our call is not to escape from our neighborhoods, hamlets and precincts, but to live as salt and light within those contiguous environments. 

Christians have continually struggled to interpret Jesus' desire for his followers to be 'in but not of the world.'  In fact, that isn't really what he says:

"I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world...As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world."

We are not of the world, but sent into it. Maybe a better interpretation of Jesus' prayer is to 'live in the midst of, and for the world.' The Body of Christ can no longer exist spatially apart from the world, her call is to be the implanted people of God living, eating, working and dying in every corner of town.  Jesus said, "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you."  We are a people sent to minister personally and locally on our own streets to the real people we see every day from our front porch, and who we hear fighting with one another through our thin apartment walls. Why then are we so quick to leave the very place God has sent us to return to the abstract and institutional? 

This impetus toward missional living is God Himself, who in his very nature is relational.  “God is a plurality of oneness.  God has ‘lived in community’ from eternity as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God as Trinity is the core reality of the universe, and that means that the core of reality is community”[2].  And this is why, two thousand years later, we seek to share the message and bear the image of Christ to the world through faithful, local kinship. "Living in the midst of the world as an alternative community requires the ability to function as a community of discernment. Much of this ongoing discernment will be focused on whether the community is being faithful to its call to be an embodied witness in and for the world without being of the world."

And so, as your friends flock to church this Halloween, let me encourage you to stay home.  Stay in the place God put you.  Walk your streets and meet your neighbors.  Don’t miss out on the opportunity to build lasting, real relationships with the people in your life.  Be the hands and feet of Christ in a Spiderman costume.  And in so doing, may you experience once again the joy that being salt and light in a dark world brings.

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[1] Sally, It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown.

[2] Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and Enuma Okoro. Common Prayer: A Liturgy For Ordinary Radicals.