I hear it daily in my own church circle as well as the Christian media: It is the faint quibbling over every last "church feature" that one could conceive of. Can we not just be content to be active disciples?

From how to take offering, to what to wear in church; from what style of music to play, to how seeker-oriented we should (or should not) be; and from how the preacher should preach, to whether or not we should serve lattes in the fellowship hall after the service - the discussion borders on the trivial.

And the list goes on, ad nauseum. Honestly, I am strained as I hear all of this discussion and have become weary of the increasingly nit-picky debates that are going on within the church. We have settled for making the church a veritable chorus of rants and raves - but mostly rants. I ask myself - How is the living Christ responding to our ongoing discussions of things not necessarily core to our effective function as a body of disciples? With overwhelming Grace, to be sure. But I am also certain that He is lamenting our keen ability to be distracted by the ultimately inane. I discern that He desires in His heart that we become wholehearted disciples of His, following His mandate, His example and living in obedience to Him. We must individually strive to become fully functioning disciples of Christ, loving our communities with the Great Commission in their own unique contexts.

I feel compelled to note here that I have stopped calling myself a Christian. It has become a loaded word that has been sapped of its life-changing meaning and converted into a mere media buzzword. I would rather call the kettle black - I am a disciple of Christ. This bursts with much more reality to me, because I can no longer be tainted by trite biases and cultural assumptions. It is out of being Christ’s disciple that I am compelled to act in love and grace in every area of my life. It is real and active and flows out of an intimate relationship with the Savior of the Universe, not some marginalized, media-defined demographic group. I am now obliged to act in this capacity. But I digress.

How shall we then live, as Francis Schaeffer so poignantly asked? How are we to become Christ’s effective disciples within the context of the church as we know it?

Becoming a more effective disciple begins with a diminishing notion of the importance of organizational structure and implementation (procedures, buildings, programs, management, etc.) that we have allowed to define the modern institutional church. It continues with an increasing sense of what it really means to be the Body of Christ in intensely practical terms. We must aim to live simply and profoundly as a living, broken, and redeemed community of disciples. Lofty words? Yes. Hard to live out? Yes. Possible through God’s grace? Absolutely.

The Gospels speak of loving others as ourselves. God is love in fact. With this reality as our foundation, I am convinced that we as disciples can transcend institutional church structures by living in redemptive community. We can be freed from limiting procedures and methodologies by actively loving one another in transparent community. And rather than becoming fixated on traditions, we can be fulfilled and completed by living out the holy sacraments. I can partake of the body and blood of Christ in a vacant lot in the barrio just as well as I can in the cathedral. Wherever two or more are gathered… The structures, expectations, procedures, and traditions can all tend to bog down the Body of Christ. Our mandate, then, is to love the communities within which we reside in very intentional ways. How do we do this?

First off, I strongly believe we must engage the culture. We must avoid at all costs living in a "Christian" ghetto created for us and by us that goes along its merry way, ignoring what is happening in our culture. Ours is not an exclusive cultural morass, but a living thriving place where the Holy Sprit enables us to speak the truth in compelling ways that our neighbors can understand and relate to and ultimately be changed by. The Gospel must be communicated in love to our communities in ways that it will understand. We are in this world, but not of it. Cultural relevance can occur while maintaining the integrity of the Gospel message. Love and the Great Commission should drive our tactics.

We need only look back at Christ’s example. He spoke parables that explained the Kingdom of Heaven using agricultural metaphors because that was the paradigm that the people at that time existed in. Because these people subsisted off of the land, it is only fitting that Christ wanted to give them His message in terms that they could understand.

In my own community of Redmond, WA, people are highly tech savvy (one Bible study I was part of consisted entirely of Microsoft techies), media saturated and affluently consumer-oriented. When people walk into our church the Gospel is communicated in relevant yet clear-cut terms and the worship is very upbeat, bordering on rock and roll. And all facets of our church are implemented with excellence through the rich but appropriate use of technology. This is how we love our community and carry out the Great Commission. Would this work in a small fishing town in rural Alaska? Likely not, but every church has an equal mandate to be disciples in their own respective community in relevant ways. At our church, our mission is to make more and better disciples. Our goal is that people come, stay and are taught and encouraged to new life-giving depths of spiritual relationship with God and other people. This only comes about when we ourselves are loving, transparent and redemptive disciples ourselves, and this leads to a whole other core issue.

We must learn how to let the Body of Christ grow and thrive despite our best efforts to mess it up with sound business practices and all the latest management fads and hoopla. Don’t get me wrong; there is a place for such methods, provided that they are driven by Biblical purpose and truth. Part of "doing church" is business. Money comes in. It must be budgeted. Staff must be hired and structures must be developed to manage all of this. (It’s a shame really. Paul’s profound influence on history likely relied little upon organizational structure, but more on developing fully functioning Disciples of Christ and functional communities of the same.) While a business component must exist in every modern church, it must be lean and subservient to the real mission - to go and make disciples of all nations. Just because a decision is a good business decision does not make it the right decision within the Body of Believers, an organism that transcends management and business ideas. It is key that our decisions are well founded in prayer and that an honest attempt to rightly divide the Word of God occur.

I have heard it said that the church is the only safe refuge in this world where we can safely allow the messy work of redemption to take place. We live in a time in history in which we need to take stock - Are we as a community of believers and believers-to-be fostering a true environment of brokenness, truth speaking, transparency and reality? Or are we merely "managing" the "organization" with status quo, don’t-rock-the-boat politics and temporal fads? It is time to get dangerous with the honest truth (lived out Biblically with love and dignity) that leads to grace, redemption and restoration. The gossip must stop. The building of power bases must end, and those that already exist must be vigilantly (and lovingly) dismantled. Leaders protecting other leaders in their sin must step up to hold each other accountable. The light of truth must radiantly shine into every crack and crevice of our lives as disciples. When one has fallen, we must rally forth with mercy. The seeds of dissension must be forcefully cast upon the wayside, to whither and die under the radiant force of Grace. My vision is that I, and all of us that call ourselves disciples, would have such openness and honesty when it comes to the dregs of our lives, that the love of Christ would have the opportunity to gloriously transform the world immediately around us. Out of this milieu, the Body of Christ then can bestow its succulent flavor into a world that has become spiritually tasteless.

Being hidebound to the structures, traditions and "business" of the church will only serve to stifle the Body from being the true community of disciples that we were truly designed to be. We must diligently press on toward the goal of touching the lives of others through the Holy Spirit by throwing off the ball and chain of the way we think things ought to be.

It may not make sense to minister to the hoi polloi that visit the local bars each night, but they need the touch of God’s love just like we did. But the church has taught that we shouldn’t go into a bar. Will you take a faith risk to give of yourself by going into a building filled with alcohol so that lost and hurting souls will be able to take a drink of the True Wine?

Those gruff looking Harley riders that hang out at the local diner every Sunday morning may make you miss church. Will you as a disciple find it in your heart to miss church on Sunday morning so that they won’t miss entering the Kingdom of Heaven?

Sunday’s worship may have ticked you off because the special music was ex-cocaine user Eric Clapton’s song "If I Saw You in Heaven". Will you as a disciple kindly try to get over yourself for a few moments as you realize that the grieving Baby Boomer dot.com CEO two rows up from you that lost his child in a car accident was touched by the Holy Spirit through a tool that is not what is traditionally viewed as church-like?

What seems nonsense or out of church protocol to us at times is the wisdom of the Creator of the Universe at work. Are we willing to give up our cultural understanding of church to be disciples in the True Church? The world has been tainted with a flimsy pre-supposition of what church is. The institutional church has become a mere production with poor production values. The real Church - the Body of Christ, the community of disciples, YOU - must once again be allowed to flourish. Are we willing to throw out the flimsy pre-suppositions? Christ’s powerful plan has no need for our imperfect structures, empty traditions or denominationalism. He desires that we simply be His devoted disciples, integrated spiritually with Him into every aspect of our lives. This is the real church - a collection of such individuals.

Recently, I read the Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. You may not know that Dostoevsky was a follower of Christ. In his profound, complex and spiritually touching work, he richly communicated the Gospel as part of the story. His magnum opus was published in Russia at just about the time that the communists were trying to purge all forms of religion and religious expression from the culture. Somehow, Dostoevsky’s work slid under the proverbial radar. Copies of what is now considered the greatest novel ever written ended up in the hands of political prisoners that had been removed from society to make way for utopia. Upon reading this work, it has been said that some of these prisoners were exposed to the message of Christ and the Gospel and subsequently became followers of the Holy God. It is here that we must pause to consider a profound historical footnote: Some of these individuals had never lighted the door of a church or seen a Bible. Churches and denominations were not present to these lost people, and God didn’t need them to eternally alter the course of their lives. All He needed was a lowly author, to be a disciple through his writing, willing to pass on God’s love. I am convinced that many other such examples abound.

It is high time that we ask ourselves how we are living as disciples? Have the structure of church and all its non-essential trappings distracted us from Christ’s mandate? Has the institutional church we have created taken on too much importance in our eyes and hearts? Or are we serving together with other disciples, living, worshipping and acting redemptively in open and honest community with others? If not, everything else is but an insignificant vapor.