The Church as The Messy Middle

While we at The Candler Foundry aim to make theological education accessible to everyone—and this usually means by teaching or facilitating learning—we also spend time learning together ourselves. One of the ways we learn as a team is by reading things together, often things outside our ministry/education/theology repertoire. Our most recent read is The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky.

Belsky’s book observes that for start-up companies and big daring projects, a lot of attention is placed on the beginning and the end. The beginning is usually marked by excitement and adrenaline; there is plenty of hope. The ending of a project is a time to celebrate success, like selling a company for a large profit or a design being accepted for widespread use.

But the middle of any venture—be it writing a book, building a company, or raising a family—comprises the biggest part of the undertaking. But it’s also the least glamorous, the most frightening, and requires the most effort. The middle is where the project takes its true shapes and so either fails or flourishes.Oddly, writes Belsky, the middle is the least discussed part of any enterprise.His book attempts to address the real challenges of this time period and to offer helpful perspectives on how to keep going.

And I couldn’t help but think that the Church (the worldwide body of Jesus throughout time and space) is essentially Jesus’s “messy middle.” Think about it. We have the beginning of the Christian faith start with quite a bit of drama and adrenaline (I mean, crucifixion and resurrection?!). And the end of theChurch—the goal of history—is for Christ to return and God to ultimately redeem the world in an absolute sense. I don’t know about you, but I find myself longing for this more and more.

And what is the middle? The Church, trying really hard to figure out how to live faithfully and work for the gospel, and often if not usually failing at it. In fact, the Church wrote the New Testament as a troubleshooting manual for navigating the middle! We read Paul’s letters, where the churches start off enthusiastic for the gospel but then lose perspective. We read Revelation, a call for endurance and wisdom as we wait between Jesus’s resurrection and our own.

But lest we assume that beginnings and endings are good and the middle bad, Belsky reminds us of the wonderful things about the middle. The middle is where relationships—friendships—are formed. The middle is where creativity happens as we continuously reimagine our initial ideas and understandings. The middle is where we learn how to make it work. It’s supposed to have failures and do-overs and reinventions. This is really good news for the Church! Rather than either defer God’s goodness to the future or mourn over our decline since the supposedly glorious past, we can gratefully and joyfully accept the gift of our present time as another opportunity to mediate Jesus’s presence and manifest the good news right here.

The middle may indeed be hard, and it may be messy…but it’s ours. Jesus left this earth and entrusted this middle time to us. Let’s receive it as a gift—mess and all!

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