Jeremy L. Berg

I’m in the Windy City this week at our denomination’s Midwinter Conference catching up with ministry colleagues, getting inspired, commiserating on the past 2 years of leadership in a pandemic, and retreating to my hotel room for reading and writing and peace and quiet. Here’s a peace by Kurt Willems on a topic that I’m passionate about. Enjoy! -JB

From Kurt Willems:

I wanted to start a conversation that has been so liberating for me. I’m going to give you a few brief reflections on what it means to be “Jesus-Centred.”

As Christians, it would be difficult to say that we are against putting Jesus in the centre of our lives and churches, but what we mean by that differs.

• You can say that you are Jesus-centred, but in reality be centred on your particular ideas about theology and/or the Bible. 
• You can say that you are Jesus-centred, but spend more time policing the boundaries of who’s “in and out,” than actually centring on the person of Jesus.
• You can say that you are Jesus-centred, but actually be fuzzy on the definition of what that even means, or the ramifications for one’s life. 

So, we can truly put Jesus at the centre, which means that all other qualifiers of who’s “in and out” are tested by one’s tragectory towards and relationship to the shared centre. 

Or, we can define the group (church) with boundaries that are designed to rigidly include a few and exclude many more. 

Or, we can define the group (church) with little to no shared expectations or centre, so that everyone is “in” with little basis for why you gather in the first place. 

Those are some quick reflections on the idea of being committed to a Jesus-centred approch to church and life. But I have to say: this is a nuanced and important conversation. 

To this end, I highly recommend a brand new book by Mark D. Baker, Centered-Set Church: Discipleship and Community without Judgmentalism. 

Mark does a fabulous job helping us understand what it takes to truly be a God-centred people. It’s theologically rich and full of real-world examples of people seeking to live this out. He walks through the 3 main postures towards church that many of us have expereined in church life:

1. Bounded Churches: “…draw a line that distinguishes insiders from outsiders … The line generally consists of a list of correct beliefs and certain visible behaviors.”
2. Fuzzy Churches: “Some churches recognize the problematic fruit of line drawing … [so] they erase the line … [which] solve one set of problems [rigid religiosity] while creating others [relativism with a sense of little to no identity or call to sacrificial transformation].” [brackets are my inserts for context – Kurt]
3. Centred Churches: “Unlike fuzzy churches, centered churches can distinguish those who belong to the group from those who do not … God is the center focus. Therefore, the critical question is, To whom do we offer our worship and allegiance? In Galatians, we might imagine Paul asking centered questions such as “Are you living according to the new creation reality created by God’s action through Jesus Christ? Are you trusting God for your security or placing your security in certain rituals and beliefs? In which direction are you heading?” [in other words, Are you heading toward the centre or away from it?]

Being Jesus-centred, being part of a Centered-Set Church, takes a deep committment to the messiness of community life. Nuance. Nuance. Nuance. Empathy. Empathy. Empathy. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. And so much more. But it is the vision of life that we see offered to us thorugh God’s victory in Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, ascention, and sending of the Spirit.