The Let Go Approach To Life

The Main Issue

The counterpart to "take hold" Christianity is "let go" Christianity. It forms a second stream of thought throughout Scripture.

I first encountered "let go" Christianity on my first parish, a First Nations Reservation in a remote area of North West Ontario. I had been raised on and had reaped the blessing of the best of the "take hold" version up until that date, and the training I had received had oriented me to address the needs of that community in light of that dimension of the Gospel.

The community development challenges presented by a reservation community with no roads, airport, radio, TV, newspapers, and one hundred and thirty miles of bush to the nearest "jump-off point", were invigorating. It was a town of about one thousand people, most of whom only spoke "Oji-Cree", and about fifty white professionals in various capacities who mostly only spoke English. It was the proverbial "whites in the center with their circle of wagons and the Indians around the outside" in more ways than one.

I went through a classic and violent case of "culture shock". Having arrived in the summer, by Christmas I was a wreck. I realized that I needed to get help or else I would have to leave, because it was affecting not only me, but it was "splashing" over onto my family in very negative ways.

When I finally snapped, just after New Years, I took the opportunity to share my situation with the Mennonite lay-minister who was up building a church there at the time. He had been teaching me Cree at the time, and we talked it over following our lesson that night. Over the next several months he cleared away the mis-conceptions I had picked up about "let-go" Christianity, and opened me up to this second theme.

I would go home and check out what he was saying in the central literature of my tradition, reading all the works of John Wesley (Methodist) and some of that of John Knox (Presbyterian), and the theme was certainly all there, but it had not been emphasized in my United Church tradition. The "let go" theme is summed up best in an old joke: A person has been standing on the edge of a cliff when it suddenly gave way. down he slid until he managed to grasp a protruding branch. He started to call out "Hello, is anybody up there?"
A big deep voice says, "Yea, I'm up here",
"Who are you?"
"I'm God."
"Can you get me out of here?"
"Yep."
"What do you want em to do?"
"I want you to let go."
The man looks up a a couple of hundred feet, and down a couple of thousand feet, and asks, "Is anybody else up there?"

the issue that is being raised is the "let go" outlook is that the Christian faith's good news. It is clearly seen in Matt.5:17, where Jesus as a preface to his upgrading the old laws from the Old Testament to a set that addresses not just action but attitude (ie. he raised the high bar) said that he did not come to abolish the old law but to fulfil it. That is, let me into your life and follow the leading of my spirit in you and you will and turn around and realize that you just did it...I did it through you. Just walk in the spirit. This is the second theme which runs through the whole of scripture: that God fulfils quality living out through us, rather than us striving to "make like Jesus". As Paul put it in one of his letters, "It is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me"(Gal.2:20). Throughout history the Church seems to swing back and forth to one theme and then the other. The two seemed to be correctives to each other. In the Protestant Church on he prairies,the Evangelical Churches which tend to cluster along the vertical axis of our diagram tend to relate more to the aspect of the Gospel, and he mainline churches tend to cluster along the horizontal pole, preferring the "take hold", Imitation of Christ, outlook.

The Relation Between Let-Go living and Let-Go Ministry"

The"letting go" approach to ministry springs out of a "letting go" approach to life, just as the "taking hold" approach to ministry flows out of a "taking hold" approach to life.

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