This series of articles is currently appearing in The Recorder (EMMC). The following is Part 1.
“In the last issue I noted that every generation faces new questions and new challenges. But the pace of change in our world is unique in history. Technology, media, urbanization and globalization are unique and powerful forces that impact discipleship and mission.
“Furthermore, in the last thirty years our context in Canada has shifted from one where people knew the Christian stories, to one where they do not. We suddenly find ourselves as missionaries in our own culture.
“The first challenge we face as missionaries is to genuinely trust that the Spirit goes before us in the world. Jesus really does “love the world,” (John 3:16), and just as Jesus sent the disciples to prepare the way before him (Luke 9 and 10), so now he sends the Spirit to prepare the way before his disciples.
The Jesus Creed
We have confidence in Jesus
Who healed the sick, the blind, and the paralyzed.
And even raised the dead.
He cast out evil powers and
Confronted corrupt leaders.
He cleansed the temple.
He favored the poor.
He turned water into wine,
Walked on water, calmed storms.
He died for the sins of the world,
Rose from the dead, and ascended to the Father,
Sent the Holy Spirit.
We have confidence in Jesus
Who taught in word and example,
Sign and wonder.
He preached parables of the kingdom of God
On hillsides, from boats, in the temple, in homes,
At banquets and parties, along the road, on beaches, in towns,
By day and by night.
He taught the way of love for God and neighbor,
For stranger and enemy, for outcast and alien.
We have confidence in Jesus,
Who called disciples, led them,
Gave them new names and new purpose
And sent them out to preach good news.
He washed their feet as a servant.
He walked with them, ate with them,
Called them friends,
Rebuked them, encouraged them,
Promised to leave and then return,
And promised to be with them always.
He taught them to pray.
He rose early to pray, stole away to desolate places,
Fasted and faced agonizing temptations,
Wept in a garden,
And prayed, “Not my will but your will be done.”
He rejoiced, he sang, he feasted, he wept.
We have confidence in Jesus,
So we follow him, learn his ways,
Seek to obey his teaching and live by his example.
We walk with him, walk in him, abide in him,
As a branch in a vine.
We have not seen him, but we love him.
His words are to us words of life eternal,
And to know him is to know the true and living God.
We do not see him now, but we have confidence in Jesus.
Amen.
Brian McLaren
Many of my conversations lately have been about “place” — and I find myself living in the center of a paradox. To talk about “place” apart from talking about particular, real, storied locations is to deal in abstractions. But to talk about “place” ONLY in terms of particular, storied locations is to fail to make the connections and to see more broadly what are the theological and practical issues.
But I have had enough conversations to realize that “place” is not “space.” I was helped a little by Phil Sheldrake in this, but equally by Michel de Certeau. In Western history “place” became “space,” was universalized and abstracted, for pragmatic reasons, but reasons that were buttressed and helped by the gnostic tendency to separate matter and spirit. In other words, “place” was spiritualized and separated from life in this world and became neutral and unstoried “space.” This disconnection led to further abuse of our planet, and further separated the life of God from life in this world. One of the tasks of practical theologians today is to religio these terms : re – ligio = reconnect – true religion connects life in this world with the life of the One who first created it and then redeemed it.
And so along comes a new book, growing out of the Nieucommunities experience, written by Jon Huckins and Rob Yackley. (Watch the trailer HERE). This looks like a great bunch of people, doing a great work and doing it well! And so what I am about to say in critique is less about the book than about this issue of place and the need to rediscover its meaning in this new postmodern, post-colonial and post-Christendom location. Read the rest of this entry »
“The common assumption within the North American church is that with the right curriculum, the right principles, and the right programs, values, and goals, the Spirit will act to produce the ministry outcomes we envision. This plug-and-play approach to ministry makes God a predictable, mechanical device and it assumes his Spirit resides within organizations and systems rather than people..”
Skye Jethani, interview on Reclaiming the Mission, 4/2010
“The church service as we know it today is not a God-ordained, must have. Instead it should be viewed as a contextual option that can be re-imagined in fresh ways to keep God’s people united together and focused on their unique calling, the missio Dei. Whereas the altar, tents, tabernacle, and temple held God’s marginalized, on-the-run, wobbling Israelites together, the ecclesia of Christ was formed, not as a physical location or a building, but as a union of decentralized communities held together by the central life force of the Holy Spirit and the teaching of an apostolic band of leaders who gave direction to the communities.”
Hugh Halter, AND, p. 169
Jeff Bailey writes in the Vineyard publication, “Cutting Edge,” on The Church of the Savior (Washington, DC),
“Despite the church’s considerable impact on the city and beyond, however, it has always remained small. And that is by intention. Nine other faith communities have been planted directly out of Church of the Saviour (while scores of other churches around the country refer to themselves as “in the tradition of Church of the Saviour.”) Many who have heard about the church or seen the breadth of its impact are surprised that even at its largest Church of the Saviour never had more than 150 members (though hundreds more attended or were deeply involved).
“That is due, in large part, to the high commitment required for membership. From the earliest days of the church, after Gordon Cosby returned from World War II, a core assumption has been that the greatest impact on the world comes about by small, highly committed and disciplined communities of people focused on outward mission, inward transformation, and loving, accountable community. Church history, COS members point out, shows this to almost always have been true. Gordon is convinced that size actually inhibits effectiveness, that it works against a community of people being truly counter-cultural, to having depth, to breaking addictions to the culture, to truly witnessing to the gospel. “Large numbers,” he says, “tend almost inevitably toward depersonalization and institutionalism, toward a lessening of commitment. So we resist the temptation to power that comes through numbers.”
Interview with Gordon Cosby, 2003 in Cutting Edge
Dave Harder quotes Ben Sternke who asks an important question: “Why do missional ventures fail?” Why do some efforts which look so good on paper, and which make sense in relation to both the Gospel and the cultural context, simply fail miserably?
It’s not tough to come up with an answer. We know a lot more about systemic change and complex adaptive systems than we once did. We know that trying to graft a third eye or third leg onto an organism will probably not increase its adaptive strength. Likewise trying to plant mango trees, no matter how wonderful they are, in Edmonton Alberta is not a good idea.
There are some systemic issues which are critical in thinking about change. One of the big ones in missional shift is decentralization. Decentralization is the operationalization of a fundamental biblical truth — the priesthood of all believers. It is the operationalization of the reality of the indwelling Spirit, who is given to root the identity and then empower the sentness of God’s people (John 20:21). Read the rest of this entry »
Paul Maconochie writes on Mike Breen’s blog,
“When I trained at seminary to become a Baptist Minister, there were a number of assumptions that were made about what that ministry was going to look like. The major focus was on theology, because of course it would be my job to make sure that my future congregation understood the Bible in the right way. Other key components included pastoral care and a little on how to preach. I had no training in leadership, no training in what it means to be a disciple or to disciple others (other than Bible study), no training in how to build or facilitate effective evangelism.
“My training was equipping and shaping me to fulfill a certain role; one that most churches in the UK expect their Pastors to perform and one that most Church leaders go along with. The role I was being trained for was this:
To look after the people of the church and care for them
To teach the people and to feed them spiritually.
To help them to be comfortable and healthy as they try to live good lives in a difficult world.
“The huge problem with this is that it’s a million miles away from the model of discipleship presented in the Bible. In fact, it could be argued that it’s the exact opposite. Jesus said:
“The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.” (Luke 22: 25-26)
“A benefactor is someone who provides for other people and in return is able to exercise some degree of control over their lives. The provision of a benefactor can be financial, intellectual, social or spiritual; sometimes it can be all of these.
“Pastors in the Church seem to have entered into a ‘benefactor agreement’ with their congregations, where they are expected to be the providers of what people need pastorally and spiritually. We have ‘taken hold of that for which the Church has taken hold of us’ instead of taking hold of that for which Christ has taken hold of us.
“When we do this, we effectively become like a ‘shell’, insulating people from the life of discipleship that Jesus has called them into, instead of a skeleton supporting and helping people to disciple others.
“The church becomes like a crab or a wood louse, with the staff surrounding the people with care and teaching, catering to their needs. But what we want to see is the church operating like a human body; arms, legs and torso supported by the skeleton and working together to achieve the commission that the head gives it.
“Jesus’ commission is ‘Go and make disciples.’ Are we primarily doing that as leaders? Are we helping the people in our church to do that? If we are not, then are we really fulfilling the commission that Jesus has given us?
“In a city with rock-bottom levels of church attendance, we have seen folks coming to know Jesus on a weekly basis. We are seeing hundreds come into our missional communities each year in a country where the average church congregation size is 38. And we are not just producing consumer-Christians, but believers who get straight back out there, discipling others. Why is that? What have we done that is different?
“I believe that it starts with us as leaders.
Rather than providing pastoral care, we should be building a culture and supporting structures so that our people care for each other. Rather than providing spiritual food, we should be equipping our people to access God’s Word and receive food from Jesus directly. Rather than making people into clients for what we provide, we should be making disciples who can in turn go and make disciples.
“We can do this by ‘pruning’ out a lot of the management we do, and then start living the life. We form a core community, live life-on-life and reach out to others to bring them into the Kingdom. Like Jesus, we identify and call a group of disciples to go on the journey with us and ask them to do the same. We percolate this throughout the whole church.
What are your views and questions?
Oswald Chambers writes,
“Salvation does not mean merely deliverance from sin or the experience of personal holiness. The salvation which comes from God means being completely delivered from myself, and being placed into perfect union with Him. When I think of my salvation experience, I think of being delivered from sin and gaining personal holiness. But salvation is so much more! It means that the Spirit of God has brought me into intimate contact with the true Person of God Himself. And as I am caught up into total surrender to God, I become thrilled with something infinitely greater than myself.
“To say that we are called to preach holiness or sanctification is to miss the main point. We are called to proclaim Jesus Christ (see 1 Corinthians 2:2). The fact that He saves from sin and makes us holy is actually part of the effect of His wonderful and total surrender to us.
“If we are truly surrendered, we will never be aware of our own efforts to remain surrendered. Our entire life will be consumed with the One to whom we surrender..”
Our house is sold. Our rental is done. My job is finished. Lately the temptation has been to doubt God’s provision or care for us. The temptation is to put our focus on the unknown future, rather than the faithfulness of God in Christ. It is oh so attractive to worry, as if some measure of control comes from there. Anxiety and fear are like the flame that draws the moth, bright and attractive in the darkness.
It takes a conscious choice to trust and to surrender. And then, with eyes fixed on Jesus, to know the peace that is beyond comprehension.
It seems a lot to give up – home, security, friends and familiar places. If I was completely in love with Jesus, following Him would be effortless. I would immediately be delighted to cast my cares on him, to toss all this other stuff into the sea and to know I would be carried by Him alone. To know him as my sole inheritance — what fulness of joy!
But only rarely is that my experience. Every choice to surrender, however, brings this deeper life closer to my experience.
To live on mission is to follow Him, wherever he leads. It is to become like him, having “no place to lay his head.” It is to know something of his vulnerability, and his surrender to the Father.
Paul Maconochie writes,
“Incarnation is better than intervention.
Intervention says “I really want God to touch my life and make it better. But God is a little scary; I think I need a Pastor to stand between him and me.” Of course we never actually come out and say this; we just act as if it is true. Instead of going to Jesus directly we expect our Pastor to go to Him, praying, fasting and reading the Bible and then to instruct us in what he has learned at the worship service. In return, we pay out tithes and turn up on a Sunday morning before going back to our lives, and to be honest, not changing too terribly much.
Intervention also operates the same way with other people. We want to help others who are poor or struggling or who do not know Jesus, but we want to do it from a distance. So we give money to overseas missionaries (not a bad thing in itself!) and maybe occasionally even take blankets or soup to folks living on the streets before going back to our nice warm comfortable homes.
These things are all good and I am sure that God likes it when we intervene to help people, but I believe that God actually has a preference for incarnation. He does not want to help us from a distance, through our Pastor. He wants to be in every part of our lives. I love Eugene Peterson’s translation of John 1:14; he writes:
The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood.
God wants us to access His presence and His Word for ourselves. He wants to deal with us directly, and He wants us to do the same with the Last, the Least and the Lost.
In recent years in our church we have seen an incredible thing – every day members of the church who consider themselves to be missionaries even while they still live in their home city, and who actually live that way. They believe that if you’re a Christian, it means you’re a missionary. There isn’t really a choice in the matter. They have found that life-on-life engagement with others allows our contagious faith to spread. They share their time, energy and resources with each other and move into the lives of those they are trying to reach. In a city where no-one goes to church, we have begun to see people come to the Lord in the hundreds, most without ever darkening the door of the church.
Not only the name of a great album by Bruce Cockburn, but mirrored in a chapter of the book by Brian Walsh, “Kicking at the Darkness.” Walsh writes,
“Consider a song like ‘The Gift’ from the 1988 album, Big Circumstance. Those early themes of a radically temporal world suffused with grace return in lines like ‘everything is motion / to the motion be true’ and the chorus:
The gift
keeps moving–
never know
where it’s going to land
you must stand
back and let it
keep changing hands.
“The gift of creation, and all the gifts that can be received as the good fruit of creation, must be received and not controlled. As in ‘Starwheel,’ there is wise counsel here against any autonomous attempt to grasp this world. If life comes to us from the generous hands of grace, then it must be received and passe don with just such grace. No wonder Cockburn will later sing, ‘I believe it’s a sing to try and make things last forever / Everything that exists in time runs out of time some day / got to let go of the things that keep you tethered / Take your place with grace then be on your way.’
“A world rooted in grace is fundamentally sacred in character. And so, in the second verse of “The Gift,” Cockburn sings,
in this cold commodity culture
where you lay your money down
it’s hard to even notice
that all this earth is hallowed ground
harder still to feel it
basic as a breath
love is stronger than darkness
love is stronger than death
“If we are to engage this world with grace and receive our lives as generous gift, then the sacredness of all things, the hallowedness of this earth, must be something that we feel so deeply and so integrally that it is as basic as the very air we breathe. This is a sacramental view of the world that insists that reality ‘bears witness to its own gratuitous givenness’ before it becomes an object of human control and manipulation.” (Walsh, 68-70)
