Notes from Vox: Reimagining Church Discipline and Treating Symptoms and Roots

Unified Series

Mike Erre / Tim Stafford

Language warning from the text below.

This is third and fourth episode in the centered set churches series.

Mike and Tim talk more about the differences between centered set churches and bounded set churches.

It isn’t that these episodes had less in them but I had a lot of windshield time while listening to them. The point isn’t that I write something compelling about each episode, but that I write what surprised me. Surprise is an unusually helpful heuristic¹.

In the Jewish mind, justice was not punishing the guilty but making things broken things and people whole. When calls for justice in the Psalms and proverbs, this is what the authors are asking for.

The order of these are important and taken from Scot McKnight:

a commitment to them,
a commitment to be with them,
a commitment to be for them,
and then, and only then, a commitment to help them grow towards something.

Mike’s point here was that we often start with loving people toward something before doing anything else.

“Sir, I just want you to know if you don’t accept Jesus you’re going to hell.”

“Bud, you don’t even know my name.”

“I just love you so much, I need you to know the truth.”

But they don’t. They may have a general love for people and that’s well and good, but you don’t know them. I’ve had people try to share the gospel with me, raised in the church, attending Saturday / Sunday / Wednesday night, eagle scout, youth group helping, snapped my wrists with rubber bands to stop cussing, bible reading, Wayne Grudem reading, mars hill before it was mark’s hill podcast listening man. And I still felt guilty when they did, like I wasn’t doing enough.

I was being chewed up by the church machine and still felt I wasn’t doing enough.

“You’re going to hell if you don’t accept Jesus as your personal savior.”

Mike relates a story of someone coming up to him in church and telling him he needed to lose weight. If a rando came up to me in a church, and told me I needed to lose weight might respond “Excuse me, fuck you.” Not because it isn’t true that I need to lose weight, but because there is no way that person actually cares about my health, they have no basis for saying anything to me about my appearance and it doesn’t affect them one way or the other, except that they have to look at me for an hour if they stared at me during the entire church service. Now, if my wife says, “Honey, I want you to be around for a long time. Are you doing the things that you need to in order to make that happen?” And we can talk about that.

The problem with the first person and my weight and my wife is that I know that my wife is committed to me. I know that she wants me to with me. I know that she wants to me to be healthy and happy and flourish. It’s delights her to see me happy and doing well and I know it. So she has earned the right to love me towards something.

There are only a couple of people at a time that you can love towards something at a time because it takes so much time for people to believe in their bones that you are committed to them, that you’ll be with them no matter what and that you are for them. Only after they know those things can you love someone towards something and it really be taken in love.

From the episode though was another helpful differentiator between bounded set and centered set thinking.

Take an example where I am annoying my sister on a drive to Califiornia when I am at the wise age of 5.

“I’m not touching her,” while my finger is approximately half an inch from her face.

Bounded set thinking would have my parents say, “Don’t put your hand near her” or coming up with another rule I must follow, and then I can again make stupid faces at her or generally act like a monkey.

Centered set thinking might think ask the question, “Are you loving your sister as yourself?”

With centered set thinking you don’t ask the question, “how close can I get to the line?” but instead, “is what I’m doing wise?” or “is this getting me closer or further to who I say I want to be?”

rule of thumb ↩