1.  A tendency to “backload” the missio into the sending of the Son, and/or

2. “frontload” [...]]]> David Fitch make an interesting comment about ignoring the role of “church” in mission.  He says that whilst the concept of Missio Dei has achieved a profound reshaping of the church’s identity there are two potential pitfalls:

1.  A tendency to “backload” the missio into the sending of the Son, and/or

2. “frontload” the missio into the Spirit’s work in the world.

The role of the church then can become either a) the following of a “personal Jesus” as individuals into mission, and the church simply becomes a retrospective construct, or b) the joining of individuals with justice movements in the world, where the church is dispersed into the world’s struggle for justice.

In either case, Fitch argues, there is the possibility that the church gets dispersed out of existence. This is less of a problem as long as there is already a church from which to recruit individuals for this missional involvement! As long as there is a church, individuals will go forth into mission.

But as the church diminishes however in the West, the problem becomes more acute: Where will these individuals/or groups come from that go into the world without the church which shapes these individuals into the “church as mission”?

This is a similar concern addressed by Stuart Murray in response to John Drane’s stakeholder model of church

John Drane’s proposal was mentioned in Post-Christendom: a ‘stakeholder model, in which there could and would be a place for diverse groups of people, who might be at different stages in their journey of faith, but who would be bound together by their commitment to one another and to the reality of the spiritual search, rather than by inherited definitions of institutional membership.’

Murray-Williams argues:

But [emerging] churches need custodians of their story and values. Inclusivity and open-ended belonging without core maintenance is unsustainable and dangerous, as membership-averse emerging churches are discovering. Other emerging churches are reconfiguring monastic patterns that establish a core community and allow for various stages of commitment to their core values.

The reality is that, at present, Fitch’s anxiety is right; we still need strong Christendom-style congregations, in order to release and resource emergent congregations. 

He points out how coca-cola was originally invented as a medicine – a nerve tonic, stimulant and [...]]]> I’ve just come across this fascinating illustration about Diet Coke from Slavoj Zizek in The Fragile Absolute. Zizek sees all social reality as ‘empty’ driven by antagonisms and contradictions as opposed to something real that we aspire to.

He points out how coca-cola was originally invented as a medicine – a nerve tonic, stimulant and headache cure. It was eventually sweetened and its strange taste was made more palatable. It became a popular drink during the US prohibition because of its medicinal qualities. It was the perfect “temperance drink”. Later, its sugar was replaced with sweetener, its caffeine extracted, and so today we are left with Caffeine-Free Diet Coke: a drink that does not qualify as a drink. The three reasons why anyone would drink anything: it quenches thirst, provides nutrition, and tastes good, have in Zizek’s words “been suspended.”

Despite not quenching the thirst, not providing any stimulant and tasting strange, nonetheless, it is the most consumed beverage in the world. We drink Coke because “Coke is “it”” not because it satisfies anything material. In essence, all that remains of what was once Coke is an artificial promise. We drink it only when our real needs have already been met.  Zizek says, we ‘drink nothing in the guise of something … It is in effect merely an envelope of a void”.

What a great illustration.

It’s possible to argue that many people’s experience of church is of such an artificial promise, of something which once meant something real. It is a entertainment we enjoy after we have secured all of our immediate needs.  Just as our society drinks Coke as an “it,” as something that makes us feel good but has little substantial value as a drink, so we can practice our Christianity as something we add on to our lives – not as something we need to live. It is something we do as an extra to our already busy lives that makes us feel better.

Perhaps this explains why the number of those in their 20s in church, 230,000, is the smallest percentage (3%) of any age group and fallen by half over the past decade.  Indeed the numbers of 30-44 year olds also continues to decline.  Church for them has become or looks like the “envelope of a void”.  

And that may also explanation in some measure why 30% of the population are described as “de-churched” – people who previously belonged but no longer do. These are the prodigals for whom church must become again a “people for hospitality, inclusion, authenticity, faithfulness and compassion among the lost and hurting”.

It means that we have to work at being good news on two fronts simultaneously.

The first is the obvious one of what we do to reach out and embrace people of all [...]]]> My good friend Simon Jones writes some challenging words on his blog about the need to “bless everyone and save many”:

It means that we have to work at being good news on two fronts simultaneously.

The first is the obvious one of what we do to reach out and embrace people of all kinds, offer to bless them and bring good into their lives. It’s the ministry that Jeremiah urged on the exiles in 29:7: ‘seek the shalom (the well-being, peace, wholeness) of the city where I’ve sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom’. Everything we do should be good news, aiming to bless people regardless of how they respond to us.

The second is less obvious but equally essential: the community we build must be a place of wholeness and acceptance, a place where the barriers between people come down, where there is genuine forgiveness, where past hurts are not allowed to fester or ossify into stumbling blocks to one another. I think this is why Paul spends so much time in his letters talking about our relationships with one another. Time and again I come back to Philippians 2:1-5, 11-18 and see that this is key to being a missional people.

Which I why I found Mark Driscoll’s Confessions of a Reformission Rev. a challenging read.  Mark Driscoll was one of the early leaders in what has come to be known as the emerging or emergent church. He is careful to define both terms, suggesting that he still believes in the principles upon which the emerging church was founded, but deliberately separates himself from the emergent crowd and such as Brian McLaren. He says that “the emergent church is the latest version of liberalism. The only difference is that old liberalism accommodated modernity and the new liberalism accommodates postmodernity.”

Driscoll is typical of the kind of church planter who is so focussed on the vision that God has given him, that he is prepared to make astonishingly hard decisions to fulfil it.  At times, Driscoll places the entire future of the church in jeopardy, dismisses key staff and alienates others to drive forward.  His openheartedness to the twentysomethings of Seattle stands in contrast to his pastoral firmness with those who stand in the way.

I had heretics calling themselves Christians and I had lazy selfish Christians calling themselves mature.  So I started meeting with people one-on-one and calling them everything from sinners who need to repent, to leaders who need to lead, to heretics who need to leave. It was a brutal season… Though our church was brand-new, we has already lost focus of our mission, and people were debating things … that were a waste of time.

One feature of Driscoll’s method is that he is prepared to see off the less committed.  Another is his view that not everyone is even welcome! Only those committed to the core values of the church can join. If people cannot commit, he says, “they are encouraged to leave the church and go elsewhere”, and between a quarter and a half of new people do just that.  In an exceptionally challenging section, Driscoll says:

I wanted a church filled with missionaries, Christians who were learning how to become missionaries, and lost people.

I would not accept a church filled with Christians who did not give, serve, or reach lost people, because they invariably make themselves and their selfish desires the mission of a church and kill innovation and momentum.

Driscoll is a theological beast — his material is filled with such good theology and good practical content. He is conservative, even Reformed, in theology.  Yet, in one of the most liberal and unchurched cities in the US, Mars Hill church has grown to over 4,000 people.  He is not shy about what the Scriptures say, even if it debunks what the culture in Seattle holds to! And his honesty about the trials and tribulations of ministry endear many to his struggles:

I feared that if we did not put our marriage and children above the demands of the church, we would end up with the lukewarm, distant marriage that so many pastors have because they treat their churches as mistresses that they are more passionate about than their brides.

There is much in this book that is very good. Driscoll has some great insights into culture, Scripture and human nature. Sometimes, however, Driscoll’s comments show the sarcasm and vulgarity for which he has something of a reputation. For example, describing some men in the church:  “Every one of them was older than me, a chronic masturbator, a porn addict, and banging weak-willed girls like a screen door in a stiff breeze…”  My guess is that this hardly raises an eyebrow amongst twentysomethings in Seattle or here, but will alienate him somewhat from a wider readership.

A good read!

One of the characteristics of post-modernity is that everything is in flux, and the old certainties (and enmities) of the past no longer make sense. 

The rise of the emerging church is only one manifestation of that, and is a key reason why some [...]]]> I’ve started following 2churchmice.wordpress.com where I read this fascinating insight:

One of the characteristics of post-modernity is that everything is in flux, and the old certainties (and enmities) of the past no longer make sense. 

The rise of the emerging church is only one manifestation of that, and is a key reason why some people dislike it so much, because it is (on the old paradigm) eclectic and illogical. 

Viewed from this angle, the coalition of ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ in government looks like a version of the same thing – emerging government, perhaps? 

Just like the emerging church, it will be loved and hated in equal measure.  Those who still prefer the old certainties and tribal identities will be especially cynical.  Which should mean that no emergent Christians will be among them, but you never know.  Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

That blog post arrived in my RSS reader just as I was drawing a blank in a Google search for UK churches who are successfully building an “eclectic and illogical” range of congregations within a single church.  By which, I mean a single church committed to common values but which is able to express its worship in multiple congregations having a diversity of styles.  That is not the same as having different kinds of service offered to, or imposed upon, a single congregation.  I am still reminded of the challenging words from Leonard Sweet and worship leader Andy Flannagan:

Leonard Sweet: “There is a new standard of excellence: the quality of the participation, not the quality of the performance.”

Andy Flannagan: “Worship that is sung is very prescriptive. It leaves very little room for interaction, participation and individual creativity. I often ask people, ‘How do you know where your people are at if all you ever do is tell them what to sing?’ That’s what we do with our words on screens. It’s like karaoke. God desires our expressions of worship to be honest, heartfelt and of-the-moment, rather than us only relying on someone else’s words and experience, even though that is also an essential discipline.”

Of course, very many people like their worship to be prescriptive and others just dread it!  But that’s the point of emergent church.  Both are valid expressions – but who knows how to develop it and then hold it all together! ‘Tis a journey which we now appear to share with our new government.

• One-third of all adults [...]]]> It’s rather to easy to point a finger at American Christianity, without first acknowledging the paucity in the spiritual life of many UK Christians.  However, I was fascinated by this data from the esteemed George Barna about the changing views of Americans.  In a recent survey, his organisation found that:

• One-third of all adults (34%) believe that moral truth is absolute and unaffected by the circumstances. Slightly less than half of the born again adults (46%) believe in absolute moral truth.

• Half of all adults firmly believe that the Bible is accurate in all the principles it teaches. That proportion includes the four-fifths of born again adults (79%) who concur.

• Just one-quarter of adults (27%) are convinced that Satan is a real force. Even a minority of born again adults (40%) adopt that perspective.

• Similarly, only one-quarter of adults (28%) believe that it is impossible for someone to earn their way into Heaven through good behavior. Not quite half of all born again Christians (47%) strongly reject the notion of earning salvation through their deeds.

• A minority of American adults (40%) are persuaded that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life while He was on earth. Slightly less than two-thirds of the born again segment (62%) strongly believes that He was sinless.

• Seven out of ten adults (70%) say that God is the all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the universe who still rules it today. That includes the 93% of born again adults who hold that conviction.

A worldview serves as a person’s decision-making filter, enabling them to make sense of the complex and huge amount of information, experiences, relationships and opportunities they face in life.  So most troubling of all, the research data showed:

1.  That young adults rarely possess a biblical worldview. Less than one-half of one percent of adults of those aged 18 to 23  have a biblical worldview, compared to about one out of every nine older adults.

2.. Although most Americans consider themselves to be Christian and say they know the content of the Bible, less than one out of ten Americans demonstrate such knowledge through their actions.

3. The decline in Christian worldview amongst 18-23s, indicated that parents are not focused on guiding their children to have a biblical worldview. One of the challenges for parents, though, is that you cannot give what you do not have, and most parents do not possess such a perspective on life.

4. This in turn has a impact on the effectiveness of Christian churches, schools and parachurch ministries in Christian education, as there has been no change in the percentage of adults or even born again adults in the past 13 years regarding the possession of a biblical worldview.

[More: http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/12-faithspirituality/252-barna-survey-examines-changes-in-worldview-among-christians-over-the-past-13-years]

One of the things I especially notice is the change in the style of book titles.  They used to be called “Knowing God” [...]]]> One of the most exciting things about returning to a local church pastorate, has been the renewed opportunity I’ve had to engage with more recent Christian literature. And I’m really enjoying that.

One of the things I especially notice is the change in the style of book titles.  They used to be called “Knowing God” and “I believe in the church”.  Now they are called Making Sense of Church: Eavesdropping on Emerging Conversations about God, Community, and Culture, or More Ready Than You Realise: Evangelism as Dance in the Postmodern Matrix, or The Search to Belong: Rethinking Intimacy, Community, and Small Groups.

So from the rather more simply entitled The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World, I came across these chapter headings which could make great set of challenging sermon titles:

Communication: From Print to Cultural Transmission
History: From Ahistorical to Tradition
Theology: From Propositional to Narrative
Apologetics: From Rationalism to Embodiment
Ecclesiology: From Invisible to Visible
Being Church: From Market to Mission
Pastors: From Power to Servanthood
Youth Ministers: From Parties to Prayer
Educators: From Information to Formation
Spiritual Formation: From Legalism to Freedom
Worship Leaders: From Program to Narrative
Artists: From Constraint to Expression
Evangelists: From Rallies to Relationships
Activists: From Theory to Action

But I’m also trying to think through the impact of what Leonard Sweet says in his book Post-Modem Pilgrims. Sweet argues that church in the twenty-first century has more in common with the first century than with the modern world that is collapsing all around us. For him, twenty-first century church should be Experiential, Participatory, Image-driven, and Connected —  EPIC.

Experiential. ‘If churches are to effectively disciple postmodern teens they have to help them experience God.’…

Participatory. ‘Postmoderns are not going to simply transmit the tradition or culture they’ve been taught. They want to transform and customize it.’

Image-driven. ‘The best tool religious leaders can give postmoderns is a metaphor on an image.’

Connected. ‘…The pursuit of individualism has led us to this place of hunger for connectedness to communities, not of blood or nation, but of choice.”

But, it seems to me, Sweet also helpfully addresses the same issues from the perspective of those who have naturally embraced modern information technologies rather than those who are older and have not realised the transformational impact on younger people that computing (rather than TV) has had.  As a result of the Internet, we now have generations who do not need authority figures [teachers] to provide access to information.  However,  he says, these generations, more than ever, need those who can process and assess that information.

First, he says, older adults must move beyond rational thinking about faith to focus on a relationship with Christ. This culture is not looking for something else to believe in. Their hunger is to experience a relationship with God.

The second step, Sweet says, requires older adults to move from a performance-based mode of thinking and doing, to a participatory, interactive model.

Third, Sweet argues, younger people respond best to the gospel when it is presented in images rather than words. “How exciting to present Jesus, who is the image of God, to an image-based culture,” he says. “[but] we must give them the right image through which to prepare for eternity.”

Finally, Sweet says older adults must move from an individual to a connective approach to faith in order reach younger generations. “The essence of connectivity is, ‘I can’t be me without we‘”.  Sweet, drawing on his experiences as a former college president, says he experienced a major turnaround in 1987 when he moved from being a learned academic talking to other academics to become a co-learner. “Stop being learned people and become learners together,” he urges.

For Sweet, therefore, the church should be:

missional (God sent) rather than attractional (come to us);

relational (connective) rather than propositional (true/false);

incarnational (ministry where we are beyond the walls of church)
rather than colonial (ministry to and at the local population).

I tend to think, as with most people arguing a case these statements are too polarising.  Church needs to both/and and not either/or.

I’ve been reading Floyd McClung on the subject of “Belonging before Believing before Behaving”.  He says that, wrongly, we expect people to believe in something before they can belong to it. Jesus, on the other hand, asked his followers to belong to his movement before he asked them to believe. He understood that belief [...]]]>  

I’ve been reading Floyd McClung on the subject of “Belonging before Believing before Behaving”.  He says that, wrongly, we expect people to believe in something before they can belong to it. Jesus, on the other hand, asked his followers to belong to his movement before he asked them to believe. He understood that belief is not a set of propositions to give ascent to, but a person to know, love and then obey.

McClung argues that Jesus approached building his community the opposite way that most of us do today. He invited people to join him before they understood his mission or who he was. He was inviting them into intimacy, into friendship with him. They were part of a community. 

As a general principle, then, people buy into the leader or the community before they buy into the vision or beliefs of the leader or community. Belonging precedes believing precedes behaving. Being loved and accepted comes before changing our behaviour. 

Top down hierarchy or rules that govern people’s behaviour cannot liberate people from the burden of sin nor does it introduce them to the goodness and loving kindness of God.  McClung says he has tried both. He has exercised controlling leadership and he has tried to “help” people with rules concerning their behaviour. Neither have worked and neither has helped his own soul either!

Jesus invited people to join his movement without their beliefs or their behaviour getting sorted out first.  He wanted them to believe from their heart. He was going to call upon them to die for him, and he knew that no one dies for controlling leaders and legalistic churches for the right reasons. His was a revolution of the heart.

Very radical. But right.

In [emerging] churches where belonging, believing and behaving are in flux, is there any [...]]]> This is a challenging section of Stuart Murray-Williams book on being church in a post Christian culture: Church after Christendom.  And especially on the theme we are thinking a lot about at GBC, what is “the church” in a multi-congregational/cell structure?

In [emerging] churches where belonging, believing and behaving are in flux, is there any room for a category of ‘members’? Is there any difference between ‘belonging’ and ‘membership’?

 

As Steven Croft notes, ‘member’ derives from membrum ‘which means “a limb or part of the body”…a very strong and close way of belonging.’ But ‘member’ today sounds institutional and many find this terminology unhelpful. In a post-commitment culture, membership (however defined) is problematic, not only for churches, but for many organisations. Post-Christendom churches will need categories and terminology that are culturally attuned – but also counter-cultural.

 

The single category of membership (differentiating members from non-members) is unwieldy, static and exclusive in centred-set churches, where more nuanced, dynamic and inclusive concepts are operative.

 

Post-Christendom churches may need various categories of belonging:

• Flexible and relational, rather than institutional, categories.
• Categories that encourage expressions of commitment consistent with changing beliefs and behaviour.
• Inclusive rather than exclusive categories that refer to core values rather than boundaries.
• Categories coherent with our identity as pilgrims who respond haltingly but hopefully to Jesus’ call to follow him.

 

John Drane’s proposal was mentioned in Post-Christendom: a ‘stakeholder model, in which there could and would be a place for diverse groups of people, who might be at different stages in their journey of faith, but who would be bound together by their commitment to one another and to the reality of the spiritual search, rather than by inherited definitions of institutional membership.’

 

But [emerging] churches need custodians of their story and values. Inclusivity and open-ended belonging without core maintenance is unsustainable and dangerous, as membership-averse emerging churches are discovering. Other emerging churches are reconfiguring monastic patterns that establish a core community and allow for various stages of commitment to their core values.

 

Nigel Wright, affirming diverse forms of belonging, warns that a church is ‘unlikely to endure unless at its core there are those who commit themselves on a covenantal basis’. He proposes an open ‘community membership’ and a ‘core membership’ open to those who accept its demands.

Church after Christendom: Belonging/Believing/Behaving | The Anabaptist Network