I am a father of two. So, this past week, I did my parenting duty: I took my kids to see the movie Finding Dory.
As a writer and a preacher, I should probably watch more movies than I do. But to paraphrase Jonathan Goldsmith: I don’t always watch movies, but when I do, it’s a kid’s movie.
In the prequel, Finding Nemo, the blue tang fish Dory is a supporting character providing plenty of comic relief with her forgetfulness and scatterbrained demeanor. In Finding Dory, she is the main character in search of her family of origin. Central to the film are themes of finding our way home and how stories and experiences are what we connect with and remember best.
(The following summary contains spoilers!)
The movie is about Dory’s search for her parents, and she gradually overcomes her memory loss when certain objects or places call to mind an experience with her parents that she relives in her mind.
In particular, the image of shells in the sand eventually reminds her of how her parents kept her from getting lost. Because of her memory problems, Dory’s parents had taught her to follow lines of shells to find her way. Earlier in life, Dory had been sucked out of her aquarium exhibit by venturing too close to a piping system. Now out in the open ocean, Dory finds her parents who escaped to look for her and had been spending most of their time laying out lines of shells in different directions that lead back to their cove in hopes that Dory would eventually remember and follow them home.
The North American church has been out in the open ocean for a while now. Gone are the aquarium days in which the church was a dominant cultural force, Sundays were reserved, and people could be expected to find a local church upon moving to a new community. Many believers have become aware of this. However, the response has too often been one of trying to return to the aquarium or, even more futilely, trying to build an aquarium in the open ocean where we control the boundaries.
In all that has been written about the decline of the church in the West, the underlying assumption seems to be that the decline will continue unabated. Some take it for granted that it is a slow march to zero. But I have a prediction that probably puts me in a minority: if the church in the West can lay enough shells in the sand of our culture, we will, in time, see the church rebound.
“The gates of hell will not prevail against [the church],” Jesus said (Matt. 16:18). Today, I see the church making a crucial turn. It is a (re)turn to what the church was at the beginning: a people of The Way; a missional community of disciples living out the radical values of the Kingdom as taught and lived by Jesus. I see it in the emerging focus on community transformation. I see it in movements like Fresh Expressions. I see it in the work of small communities of Christians who may not be counted by the census bureau as a “church” but are doing church. I see it wherever well-established churches focus on essence over form.
Brian Zahnd recently put it this way: “What we desperately need is a renaissance of Christian aesthetics. … If we can be so formed in Christ that we begin to live beautiful lives, we will gain a new hearing; if not, we deserve to be ignored.”
When we bear witness to the Way of Christ, we lay shells in the sand leading back home. These shells serve as reminders of what humanity was created for, and must be there when the wanderers have found that other roads lead nowhere.
In our culture today, for example, the individual is paramount. We see ourselves as self-made, autonomous individuals. Freedom is seen as a personal goal, achieved when one feels unencumbered. Eventually, this will be revealed as unsustainable. The same goes for the troubling wave of nationalism and isolationism sweeping many Western countries. When the time comes to find our way back, will the church have lived the alternative and laid the shells, or will we have gotten sucked away in the same ill-fated quest for self-preservation?
Another example is our fast-paced, break-neck pace of life characterized by workaholism. This is dangerous and degenerating, something even the business world is already starting to realize. In response, meditation and mindfulness has become a multi-billion dollar industry. The business world is realizing that a 7-day work week is beyond what humans can do, but people of faith have known for millennia that we need Sabbath. In noting the psychological and physical benefits of meditation, people have stumbled upon a truth that Christian mystics have known for a long time. The trouble is that it is done without reference to the Author of these truths and is being encouraged as a way to boost job performance and sales, the very obsession that caused the need in the first place. Have we placed our shells? Do we live and teach the God-ordained Sabbath pattern and values like family, or are we just the religious version of the world that never rests?
As Zahnd asked, “Are we just a religious version of our ugly age or can we actually be the alternative counterculture of Christ?” One way we too often get sucked into this “ugly age” is when we hitch our wagons to political candidates and platforms. Southern Baptist ethicist Russell Moore recently wrote a scathing piece on what has happened. He said:
The church of Jesus Christ ought to be the last people to fall for hucksters and demagogues. After all, the church bears the Spirit of God, who gifts the Body with discernment and wisdom. But too often we do…If you are angry with the same people we are, you must be one of us. But it would be a tragedy to get the right president, the right Congress, and the wrong Christ.
Dr. Moore’s words are directed at his fellow conservative evangelicals who have inexplicably sold out to a brazen, unprincipled candidate. But to Christians of other persuasions, I say: beware. Beware of shooting fish in a barrel with one person’s disenfranchising words while turning a blind eye to the other’s violence abroad. I’m not suggesting that there’s necessarily an equal or fair comparison, nor would I ever say that we shouldn’t civically engage. But as Martin Luther King Jr., said, the church is the conscience of the state, not its tool, and we can’t fulfill that role if we’re sucked into the current too. These days, it’s a pretty nasty current. We are called to bear witness to something different; a Kingdom that transcends and challenges any human system.
As Richard Rohr has said, “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” When we practice the better and live as the body of Christ, we lay down lines of shells so that our culture — and perhaps even we ourselves in our Dory-like forgetfulness — can find the way home.