reparing tents not making booths... political alignments and Christian discipleship

There is a systematic problem with Christianity, all types and stripes of Christianity... the longing to make a booth and dwell in it. To be clear this has nothing to do with maintaining our buildings. Christians are, in fact, quite ready to abandon their building if it means they can maintain the mental booth they are sitting within. To see this in reality visit any mainline parish in a neighborhood that has experienced white flight... it was much easier for them to abandon a building than for the parishioners to actually move beyond the tightly held conceptions of what their church and neighborhood was supposed to look like.

What I am speaking to is the finding a method, a construct, of being Christian within which we are comfortable, advocated for, and given privilege and then making it our default spiritual and religious dwelling. It does not matter if this is a Tridentine Mass method of being a Christian or an Eco-Queer construction of Christianity... if either is made a booth, a permanent residence for one's expectations of Christian living, then one is eventually going to be in trouble when it comes to going about a Christian life.

Which does not mean abandoning our constructs and methods. The issue is to not make them booths, which gather to become settlements, and soon we have an intractable enclave readily fortified with guards at ever pass. What we have to make them into is tents. Tents whose parts can be gathered, placed in a pack, and moved where the spirit calls us. Tents whose parts will wear, and break, and need to be fixed, replaced, or crafted again from scratch. Tents that over time will transform into completely new dwellings as the grow and move with us on our walk with Christ.

This is the only means by which we can remain Christian... for if we choose instead to simply live in our booths it is far more likely that we will stop being a Christian and start being a Tridentine Mass Method or an Eco-Queer Construction... when what we are called to be are Christians responding to the Spirit in the midst of Tridentine Mass in the midst of Eco-Queer and integrating the Proclamation of Christ Crucified from both into our understanding of the God we can never house but only ever be on a Journey towards and with.