by Clint Wilson | Pastor
In Christopher Nolan’s breakout film Memento (2000), an insurance investigator experiencing anterograde amnesia uses a combination of sticky notes, tattoos, and other clues to daily rebuild his life—and to remind him of his search to discover his wife’s killer.
I sometimes feel like the protagonist of Memento. Well, not the part about chasing down a killer and tattooing my arms with reminders of who I am. Still, I am often tempted to live my days in a kind of spiritual amnesia. Each morning, I awake and without a kind of liturgical practice of reminding myself of God’s grace—and my need for that grace—I am tempted to go about in the world in a kind of mindless, forgetful bliss of my own life’s meaning.
How do you take stock of your life’s direction? How do you imagine, and reimagine, what you’ve been placed on this earth to do? How rare is peace for you? (It’s pretty rare for me, if I’m honest.) How comforting is faith for you? What do you do with your doubts? What beliefs animate your passions? What passions animate your beliefs? How do you make decisions? How do you rest, or do you? How do you love, and how do you open yourself to love?
These are a very small selection of the questions that encircle a human life. When I think about the next five years of City Church, I dream of a place that creates room for these questions. That doesn’t simply permit hard questions, but actually designs communities equipped to address those questions with love, intellectual honesty, humility, and grace. Of course, I hope we’re already doing just that. But one of the most exciting prospects of having a permanent home, for me, is that we can be even more consistent in hosting these conversations.
Put more simply, I am encouraged when I think about the possibilities for spiritual formation at City Church over the next five years. Communities that care across the spectrum of our lives. Public-facing events that acknowledges the struggle of faith as well as the freedom of the gospel. Concerts and arts initiatives that cultivate an environment of beauty, orienting our spiritual journey toward more than simply “understanding”—but, more importantly, toward the delight we can find in the beauty of our Creator.
As I write these words, I am also aware of a kind of paradox within the heart of my hope. As the Apostle Paul reminds us, “Who hopes for what they already have?” (Rom. 8:24). I realize that these words represent hopes, not certainties. They represent a confident faith, but not a certain vision. In humility, our hopes must be handed over to the one who is the author of our faith, the author of any future we discover.
The “future,” after all, is a funny thing. One philosopher I admire argues that the essential characteristic of what we call the “future” is that it is fundamentally unknowable. Once one knows something to be true, once one has experienced the future they hoped for (or feared), they find themselves living, by definition, in the “present.”
The future slips through our fingers, and unless we learn to find meaning in our present, we can fall prey to a hamster-wheel pursuit of the next fleeting desire. In this way, our staff team is getting to live out the difficulty of faith. We are building for a future we cannot control—one in which we can only lean on God’s provision. We are planning for encounters and opportunities that are, as yet, only foggy visions in the cloud of that elusive future. We work confidently, I think, but humbly. For me, at least, my work is uniquely echoing my relationship with God. It’s open palms all the way. A posture of prayer. A spirit of hope.
The theologian Jürgen Moltmann spent the majority of his life arguing that “hope” is the central theme of the Christian life. Interestingly, he contends that “hope” for the future creates in us an impatience that leads to radical change:
Faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man [sic.]. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.[1]
I resonate with this kind of “unrest”—this desire to see relationships made new, beauty restored where only brokenness once stood. I hope you do, too. That is why City Church is here, embracing the tension of the rest found in Jesus and the unrest for renewal spurred on by the hope found in Jesus. It’s a paradox, to be sure. It’s about dreaming for the future and finding peace in the present.
After reading this—let’s be honest, if you have read this far—do you have a better sense of the next five years at City Church? Maybe not. But I hope you will join my hope. I hope you will be part of the movement that imagines these big conversations about big ideas. I hope you share in our sense of optimism about the beautiful things that God is already doing, and will surely continue doing, as we begin meeting, oh so soon, at 201 E. 9th St. in the Heights.
[1]. Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 21.