To participate in or to imitate Christ? That is the question.

Many people have been heartened by reading Thomas a Kempis' book, The Imitation of Christ. And, at first blush, imitating Christ seems like a very good idea. Ghandhi, while he obviously would never accept Christ's claim as Saviour of the world, believed that the world would be a better place if everyone read Jesus' teachings and sought to live a life based on them.

The problem is that God wants to be the actor. And our insistence on being people who imitate Christ makes us the actors instead. Eugene Peterson says that when we seek to imitate Christ, we become the actors and move God to the sidelines in the role of judging our performance--giving us scores as if we were participating in a cosmic Olympic Games. Professor Andrew Purves of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary puts it another way. He says that rather than ask "What would Jesus do?" we need to ask "What is Jesus doing?" When we ask the latter question, we are seeking to know the ministry that Christ is doing here and now and looking for ways to to get in on it, rather than looking at the actions of christ in the past and seeking to imitate them as best we can.

When we accept the invitation to participate in the ministry of Christ, it is God who acts through us, directing our actions and empowering us with Holy Spirit. So God is the actor and we move in tandem with the one "through whom we live and move and have our being." In fairness to Thomas a Kempis, he gets much of this and, despite the title of the book, much of what he advocates in it is about participating in Christ, though not all.

We would all do well to focus on the fact that participation in Christ means that our ministry does not belong to us. It belongs to God. And that is as it should be.