Our Church Mission statement at St Jude’s notes that it is our mission to transform disengaged people in to fully engaged men and women of God. This mission statement was aimed at inspiring us to reach out to a disengaged world and bring them to Christ. However, some of our members initially felt that they were disengaged themselves.
Many have felt a growing engagement with God as a result of the challenge they had been given. A fully engaged man or women of God is not a super -spiritual person or one who is perfect in all that they do. They are people who become engaged with God and are growing in their relationship with Him.
At the same time it is good for us to realise that the culture of our society contains a number of influences that encourage us to disengage with life, people, family and self. There is a strong undercurrent of passivity that we as Christians need to address in our lives and in our relationship with others. These influences include:
Western Buddhism – This is a term used by psychoanalyst and philosopher Slavoj Zizek. It refers to people’s attempts to keep up with the dramatic changes in technology and the fast-paced movements and interactions of life. Western Buddhists have assimilated the passivity of withdrawal and disengagement of that philosophy and see themselves as detached from the daily activity of their lives, which does not affect who they “really are” inside. They see their work with its tensions and challenges as a game that they play that they are not really connected to it. They are aloof from it in the midst of doing it. That is they are disengaged.
Post-Modernism – rests on the de-construction of the meta-narratives of life. Post-modernism detaches us from any sense of inner-self or core value. We are de-centred selves without any core centre at all. We have no unique identity of being. It disengages us from real relationships and commitments to others. It removes the “I” from who we are so that there is no one inside to make a commitment for us.
Yoga and Transcendental Meditation – both of these forms of Eastern mysticism encourages us to disengage from thinking, to empty our minds in order to find tranquility.
The Enlightenment Project – aimed to dislocate any sense of spirituality as being real and related to facts that can be proven via scientific experiment or experience. It aimed to disengage the church from any influence in the real world and left Christians in a ghetto of individual faith and experience that did not interfere with the social or political realm.
Each of these influences (and others) engulf us in an environment of disengagement. Jesus Christ came so that we could be truly engaged with God and have an intimate relationship with God the Father through Him. Despite the influences around us Jesus strives with us to bring us into intimate engagement with God.
Next week we will look at how to engage with God and the things pertaining to His Kingdom.
