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

Frank Gray developed the Engels scale (which is essentially a knowledge based understanding of the gospel) to include a second axis.