Living Wide Awake

eric posted on June 17, 2009

“Living Wide Awake” by Erwin Raphael McManus

Recently, I was having dinner with one of Hollywood’s gifted cinematographers and directors. In the course of the conversation, he asked me what my newest book, Wide Awake, was about. At first, I simply said it is about finding a dream that fits your life. He looked interested, so I pressed ahead: “You know the narrative known as the Gospel? I think it has been demeaned. It has been reduced to this, ‘Come to Jesus so that your sins will be forgiven and you can go to heaven and not hell.’ For me this is the most narcissistic and self-preserving message I have ever heard. Wide Awake proposes that Jesus lived the ultimately heroic life by giving Himself as a sacrifice for all of humanity and that He now calls us to give ourselves away for the good of the world.”

As soon we left and began walking the streets of Hermosa Beach, he remarked after much thought, “The Gospel has never made sense to me. It is such a narcissistic narrative. But this idea that it is about provoking us to the heroic—this is intriguing to me.” Then he asked me a question I will never forget: “Is it possible that Christianity has rejected this Gospel because it demands too much of us?”

Sensible.

History is made up of the heroes of their times. Yet, somehow we miss this when we put on the lens of the Scriptures. Through this lens, we are able to see the activity of God in all of history. We must never forget that. But somehow we also become blind to the heroic culture that permeates the Scripture. Just like human history, the heroes who rise up and call the masses to something greater write biblical history. This is how God works—by calling out greatness from each of us.

It is the creative and enterprising spirit of people that is indispensable. Everything else is supplemental. It is the human resource that must be valued, developed and maximized. What would the world look like if we all lived our most heroic life? What would our communities of faith become if we were committed to mentoring each person until they found the dream that matched their life?

When researchers try to break down what is happening at Mosaic, far too often they see the skin and miss the heart. They see nine gatherings in seven locations, and so we are a multi-site congregation. Or they see more than 50 nationalities, and so then we are a multi-ethnic church. They see a community whose average age is 25, so we are postmodern. Or they are captured by the fact that we meet in a downtown L.A. club called the Mayan, defined by the thousands of pagan gods that cover the entire complex, and label us an emerging church. The most ironic is that when they listen in on our conversation with an unbelieving world and discover that our community is overflowing with people far from God —and they conclude we must be emergent.

To tell you the truth, I don’t know what we are. We are constantly learning and growing and changing. We are really an experiment. We are endeavoring to discover if a community of faith can exist purely for the good of others. Can the Church become the greatest humanitarian movement on the planet? Can we become the epicenter of human creativity, innovation and compassion? Can we create humanity’s next great culture? We think to ask what kind of church we should become is not only the wrong question, it is boring. We should be asking… what kind of future do we want to create?

At the heart of all of this is that every human is created in the image and likeness of God. We are broken and fragmented images—the material from which a mosaic can be formed. We are committed to calling out of every person the greatness that lies within. We are a disrupting sound breaking the silence of the mundane, awakening the hero within us all. This call is not in conflict with the glory of God but in fact brings God the glory He is due. We have fallen far short of what we were created to be, but in Christ all things are made new. Jesus came to bring us life in abundance—we’re just trying to flesh that out in community and in the world.

A world where everyone is fully alive … that’s what makes me lose sleep and dream wide awake.