• 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

There is no subject of more solemn importance to human happiness than prayer.  It is the only [...]]]>

I’m rather challenged at present by what Bunyan had to say about church.  Bunyan spent about a third of his life in prison for his faith.  Writing from prison in 1662, he says of prayer and worship:

There is no subject of more solemn importance to human happiness than prayer.  It is the only medium of intercourse with heaven.  It is that language wherein a creature holds correspondence with his Creator; and wherein the soul of a saint gets near to God, is entertained with great delight, and, as it were, dwells with his heavenly Father.

 

God, when manifest in the flesh, hath given us a solemn, sweeping declaration, embracing all prayer — private, social, and public — at all times and seasons, from the creation to the final consummation of all things — “God is a Spirit, and they that worship him MUST WORSHIP HIM IN SPIRIT AND IN TRUTH” (John 4:24).

And later he says that there is no man nor church in the world that can come to God in worship, but by the assistance of the Holy Spirit. “Without the Spirit, [even if] we had a thousand Common Prayer Books, we do not know how we should pray … One word spoken in faith, is better than a thousand prayers, as men call them, written and read, in a formal, cold, lukewarm way. ”  Or he puts it, “When you pray, rather let your heart be without words that your words without heart”.

Worship, he argues, is meaningless if the worshipper knows nothing of the dynamic inner work of the Spirit. Christians will always be non-conformists because they will always be open to the Spirit and the breaking in of the kingdom of God.

God’s people are, as it hath always been, looked upon to be a turbulent, seditious, and factious people (Ezra 4:12-16).

“A turbulent, seditious, and factious people”.  Love it!

John Bunyan on Prayer: Peace Makers, Christ’s Peace, Church Discipline

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

Grace is a Christian alternative worship community/network. It has varying degrees of importance/significance/levels of commitment for the people involved. Some are involved in other churches and Grace is a [...]]]> I came across “Create | Engage | Participate | Risk” as a brief explanation of worship in the emerging church, Grace based in west London (www.freshworship.org).

Grace is a Christian alternative worship community/network. It has varying degrees of importance/significance/levels of commitment for the people involved. Some are involved in other churches and Grace is a supplement, some are involved in St Mary’s and Grace is part of that, for some Grace is their church. There are also the complexities of how people’s partners and children fit in or are part of Grace. But it is the people and the network of friendships/relationships that makes Grace what it is.

Grace is about worship in ways and forms that we can relate to. It is an authentic offering of worship to God out of who we are, not something we target other people with. Implicit in this is the idea that if we produce worship that we relate to, we will be able to invite friends.

Liminality is a state of being on the “threshold” of [...]]]> My friend, Simon Jones, gave me a copy of Alan Roxburgh’s book Leadership and Liminality. My first task was to work out what on earth liminality is. I may blog some more on this excellent book – but here’s what I’ve discovered about the title!

Liminality is a state of being on the “threshold” of or between two different places. It can used about a rite of passage, which involves some change to the participants, especially their social status. People in a liminal state disappear from society for such a rite of passage.

The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. It is a time when the sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behaviour are relaxed – a situation which can lead to new perspectives.

When used about the church, it refers to the transformation in western society as a result of which the church has become largely invisible to the wider society.

Before the 1900, the church had been for centuries the central religious and moral role model in society. Even during the early 20th century, as the church became more marginalised, it still performed a spiritual and therapeutic role.

Roxburgh suggests that liminality is much more than the church being marginalised in favour of other social structures. The world of late modernity is a de-centred world, and for Christians it is no longer our world. It is a flux of ever-shifting and competing forces within the culture. In complex societies such as ours there is no longer a coherent ‘centre’. So it is not that something else has replaced the church at the centre of society. Everyone and everything is on the margin because there is no centre.

For Roxburgh, few in the church have come to terms with how far this process has gone. The Christendom phase of history in the Western world is over; we may now find ourselves back in the liminal role experienced by the pre-Constantine Church.

Roxburgh says that the urge is for the church to try and return to the former certainties of ‘Egypt’! But that re-entry into the lost world of pre-20th century is impossible; the door is firmly closed.

However, Israel’s wilderness experiences can be a paradigm for the kind of benefit that this liminal places can be for the church. In both Hosea and Exodus the desert is the place where Israel enters her most profound reshaping experiences of God. In the desert, the potential for a new future is forged. God promises Israel that through the process of wilderness cleansing she will become a new people.

So that’s liminality, I think!