The Presbyterian Polis - Connecting Churches to Churches

A Provocative Comment

2008-03-12T00:33:37-04:00

Sue comments on a posting from last fall - Theory-based or Experienced-based.

The only evidence you have for anything whatsoever is everything that is arising to and as your present (NOW) time conscious awareness.

Everything else is conjecture. Useful enough in terms of a collective consensus for getting the necessary practical things of living done.

And what happens to all of your seemingly concrete certainties when you (whatever you are) enter into the formless state of dreamless deep sleep.

Are you still a Christian in the this formless state?

What, therefore has what may or may not have happened in Palestine 2000 years ago, got to to with living creatively and intelligently and with great passion NOW, and in every moment.

When was 2000 years ago?
Where was or is Palestine?

Sue, to put it simply. Theory-based religion is a human-created faith. It is belief in intellectual ideas as the basis of the faith. We convince ourselves that our "perception" is absolutely true. As a result, our faith is faith in our own certainty. I suggest that you can never know anything absolutely, in fact when you think you do, you are merely practicing conjecture.

On the other hand, our only real security is in Jesus Christ, who 2000 years ago lived, died and was raised from the dead. My faith is not dependent upon an historical proof that this happened, because I know that none exists in any absolute, perfect sense. Faith is dependent on actions of trust. The Scriptural record informs my thinking about who God is, and gives me a partial sense that I can trust God each day. By trusting, living faithfully in the midst of uncertainty, I find God to be a good and gracious Lord who is dependable. Therefore, everyday is a test of faith as it really is.

I came to faith because I became aware that God exists. I remain a Christian because I have met the risen Christ in thousands of circumstances. My point is that if Christianity is simply a collectlon of ideas in which we place our faith, then it is a philosophy that has value but no certainty. Faith implies trust, and living in trust.

I realize this is no way to create and develop a religion, but I believe this is what it means to live by faith. Religion requires certainty to sustain itself. That certainty is born in creeds, confessions, and theological systems that are used to interpret reality. So, I am making a distinction between living by faith and what we consider religion. I'm not suggesting an antithetical distinction here of opposites. I am making a distinction between two different functions of our spiritual life that have value.

Faithful to our Baptismal Vows

2008-02-06T22:20:13-05:00

I love infant baptisms. It isn't because the baby's are cute and frequently do things to disrupt the service.

I love baptisms because of what they stand for. They are not only a statement of inclusion, but a statement of communal responsibility. We pledge to the spiritual welfare of the child being baptized.

John Richardson writes about the failure of our baptismal responsibility in his Presbytery Outlook article - College Ministries: I am a big, fat liar.

It is worth reading and passing around your church and presbytery.

Here are three things you can do to fulfill your sacramental responsibilities.

First, if you have students from your church who are a way at college. Organize a gift campaign. For special events, send them a box of food and other thoughtful items. Also put them on your newsletter mailing list.

Second, go find the closest college, go to the student affairs office, and ask about what the college or university offers in the way of campus ministries. Get the name and contact information for the chaplain or campus minister, and ask them how your church can help.

A little effort goes along way. Build relationships, and students will realize that the church is a place to belong. Be creative in organizing opportunities for interaction and service. You never know what will come from your outreach to the campus.

Third, encourage your presbytery to include campus ministry in its annual budget. The money needs to be more than token support. If you consider campus ministry a mission outreach just like those to other countries, then you'll begin to understand the kinds of things you can do to make a difference.

If you have questions about what to do, ask your local campus minister or chaplain. They can give you all sorts of insight. Don't wait until you think you can do something. Just do something, and then build on that slowly. In so doing, you will begin to fulfill the baptismal vows that are so important to the future of our church.

Can there be experience with Christ apart from the church?

2008-02-05T17:52:28-05:00

Dennis in his comment here provokes some deeper reflection in me.

One of the thoughts that has been lurking in my mind for some time concerns the difference between that real presence that is random, varied and unpredictable and the multitude of practices and cultural obligations that come with membership in a church.

It is just a question I have. But it is a question that I think is important.

In other words, can there be a genuine experience of the love and grace of Jesus Christ apart from the church. I'm not talking about some emotional ecstatic experience virtual out-of-body experience, but rather something that is more humble and grounded.

Recently, I heard a speaker talk about the importance of being present with people. My daughter has been after me ever since to be more present at home. I tell her it is a two way street. The deeper issue is when what we mean by present is that certain quality where many of the anxieties of the day slip away and we are able to just be present with whomever is there.

This began to happen for me a few years ago while I was serving as an interim pastor of a small church. As the weeks progressed into months, I found it more difficult to write a sermon each week. At some point, the sermon began to write itself between 5 and 6 am on Sunday morning. The content was there as usual, but something was different. I can only attribute it to a growing sense of Christ's presence, not in some freaky, emotional way, but quite the opposite. I was less anxious, less needing to manufacturing my authority and self-confidence. Most of all I became more free to allow situations to evolve without my need to control it. With this came a growing sense of humility and groundedness that I can only explain as a gift that came without my asking.

Oddly, enough as my compulsion to control circumstances diminished, my meaningful activity level increased. Now to get back to my original question, is this experience of Christ connected in any significant way to the church? Or, is this experience a by-product of the church's existence?

My sense is that they function in two different universes, and often meet in the same physical location, but not always. God's spirit goes and does what he will. The church on the other hand is not the same, except in some spiritual, universal, invisible body sense. But for most of us the church is a place where our experience of the presence of Christ can be nurtured.

In the church, it is quite easy to fall into the trap of doing as the way to be a Christian. When we do so, we are confusing doing the correct spiritual things with living into the presence that is made available to us in Christ. I guess, what is important to understand about this from my perspective is that I can take no credit at all for what has transpired. I didn't seek it, but I welcomed it when it came. I am grateful to the God who pursues us with his grace and love.

21st century Justice and the church

2008-02-05T14:47:24-05:00

In my last post, I referred to the political perspective of a conference on justice and the church as "narrow, biased and antiquated". I realized later that I probably should clarify what I mean.

There are more than two streams of justice thought alive in the church. The stereotypic ones are those focused on peace-making and those focused on a strong national security. One is pacifist, the other more militaristic. Both are inadequate views of justice. More so as the world becomes increasingly flat; see Tom Friedman's The World is Flat for a fuller explanation.

From my perspective, I don't accept these simplistic abstractions. They are products of a political culture that wants to divide people in order to accord power to the most radical of the proponents of the ideology. And the church has played into this trap, and as a result it has become the handmaiden of political ideologues for whom the church is simply a source of money and influence. It is in large part why I am an political independent.

So, what should justice in the church be in the 21st century?

It is distracting and futile to wring our hands about the disparity between the global rich and poor. It is a reality. Penalizing the rich doesn't help the poor. It is about the transferring of wealth from one wealthy elite to another. The only solution is development. By development I mean creating the social, education, health and governmental infrastructures that enable small to medium size businesses to develop.

However, for this type of development to take place, ending the violence and conflict inherent in tribal societies will require military intervention. If you read Atlantic Monthly writer Robert Kaplan, you'll know that about half of the US military's work is in humanitarian aid.

Lastly, if we are to be a just society and a just church, it will begin with our own lives being models of justice. In reality, this is not something that we can do out of our own strength. It is a product of God's leading us to be the people we are call to be. It starts with our own humility that typically is hard won and rich in the kind of suffering that brings wisdom.

The Fly in the Ointment

2008-02-03T06:10:30-05:00

This weekend I attended a conference on political justice and the church. I was a bit surprised by three aspects of it.

An Antiquarian Justice Paradigm
The first aspect was how the justice paradigm in the church has really not changed much in forty years. While appeals to moving away from the left-right, conservative-liberal divide were appealed to, I found the political perspective quite narrow, biased and antiquated. A left-leaning Democrat would have loved the message while a right-leaning Republican would have found little to cheer. As an Independent, former Democrat, I found this disappointing. I expected more than simply a forty year old religious/political paradigm dressed up with contemporary issues.

The Missing Context
I was also surprised that the focus of change was totally on the individual. There was no consideration for the context that all of us live in. The impression left is that if you change your lifestyle, the world will change. The reality is that institutional structures and social systems determine to a large extent the choices that we make. The rejection of capitalist institutions doesn't change the world for the better. The naive epigram of Margaret Mead - Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. - plays into this notion that all change is basically individual change. The reality is that while nothing happens apart from individual initiative, it isn't simply individual or small group initiative that matters.

The problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and society. We are social beings and we group according to our values. Those values get institutionalized in organizations, and those organizations determine the values of society. If you want to change society, you must change the institutions. You don't change them by destroying them. We can complain about consumerism and greed, but it does nothing to address the social context that has been institutionalized in society. This is why, in my opinion, that people who desire change gravitate toward political office. They see government as the seat of power, and through wielding power they can change society. As a result, gaining and holding power becomes the focus of political office.

If Christians want change in the world, then they must address the institutional nature of global organizations. Lasting change comes from within. Revolutions rarely last and rarely benefit those who are supposed to be the beneficiaries. It is a false and deceiving promise to say otherwise. If you want change, become a part of an organization, and take on the responsibilities of leadership. Do not sit back and complain from a self-satisfied position of thinking that individual or personal change is all that matters.

Christ: Abstract Construct or Real Presence
The third issue that surprised me is more complicated. It is a deeper issue of spirituality and the Western intellectual tradition. I'll try to be clear and succinct.

The Western intellectual tradition has flourished on the ability of people to think abstractly. In order to do this, we objectify, or separate ourselves from the reality of the focus of our thought. This ability to abstract reality is the strength of the scientific tradition. The fly in the ointment of this strength is that we find it easily to think in such a detached manner than we are personally disconnected from reality. Truth, knowledge and personal responsibility get severed into different intellectual areas. In the church, the Neo-Platonic tradition characterizes issues in idealistic, dualistic terms. As a result, we simplify the complex in order to manage it. We exclude or reject that which doesn't fit in our idealistic paradigms. This is a condition of both the left and the right. It is a basic human intellectual function. In an attempt to find meaning and order in a chaotic world, we compartmentalize into simple, idealistic, often dualistic categories so that we know who we are and where we stand. When the parts don't cohere, we become intellectually schizophrenic and either retreat into harden categories or we seek to find coherence by looking connect diverse threads of thought into a whole picture.

This idealistic tradition of abstraction ends in classifying people in various typologies. We have rich-poor, liberal-conservative, Reformed-congregational, traditional-progressive, and on-and-on. One of the effects is that we treat people as abstract constructs that must fit into our idealistic paradigm. We end up denying their individuality because they are characterized by their gender, race, political affiliation, or national origin. We don't really deal with them as real people, just these intellectual constructs that allow us not to deal with the messy reality of true difference. We think that because we have come to a logical, coherent understanding of the issue that we have changed. Just because I understand racism, doesn't mean I'm not a racist. Just because I can give you a biblical argument against consumerism, doesn't mean that I'm not a greedy, selfish consumerist. The power to abstract is the power to deceive, to lie, to spin and to tell stories that remove us from obligation to live with integrity. The question of whether that is the result is a question of character and spirituality.

This is part of what I was thinking as I sat through the conference over the past two days. What provoked this line of thought however was more an emotional reaction to what I was hearing. I felt cold and despairing. I felt no love for the people in poverty or under oppression. All I felt was despair and personal guilt. I was afflicted with how much I must change, and yet without any real hope that those changes ultimately make a difference. In other words, the hope we claim in Christ just becomes another abstract construct that we have derived from our abstract reading of Scripture. I don't see this primarily as a failure of our intellectual tradition, but more of our spiritual tradition in the West.

I am now old enough to have come to a better understanding of the complex relationship between our emotions and our intellect. From my own experience as an obsessive devourer of intellectual content, I have come to understand that what lies behind much of that obsession is the desire to control, to master my life and surroundings, to never to be found incompetent or lacking in strength. That drive still exists in me, and has never been satisfied, but is now leading me to desire greater humility and a greater sense of Christ's presence.

Lurking in the back of my mind was a question about God's real presence (no eucharistic allusion intended). Is the Christian faith simply an idealistic intellectual construct, or is it a spiritual reality that is just out of reach of our minds, and that can only be discovered on some emotional level? I'm raising a question for which I don't have a final, definitive answer. As I have thought about this in the grand tradition of Western intellectual abstraction, I've reached the conclusion that God is not one whom we can contain intellectually. We see in part, and know in part, and only are given a glimpse of the whole picture through the lens of experience. As a result, humility combined with conviction is essential.

This fits within the broader discussion of the relationship between Christian community and the institution of the church. In this sense, one is more an experience of the real presence of Christ, while the other is a more abstract, idealistic formal conceptualization of that community in institutional form. The conversation that is taking place about this relationship is healthy.

For me though, what underlies this conversation is the human tendency, mastered in the West, to abstract out reality so that it may be controlled. We talk about community as this thing that is better than the institution of the church, but from my perspective, what I read and hear of community just seems to be a looser form of the institutional church we've always known. As one "seeker" pastor told me years ago about his more casual, community-focused church, "We are church for people burned out on church."

Where I'm taking this discussion is to the question of what is the true nature of spirituality and the real presence of Christ in our world. All I can tell you from my experience is that it is not abstract, not idealistic, not dualistic, not controllable, very emotional, very liberating, very expansive, very real, very personal, very relational, very clear, and full of peace, joy, confidence and daily purpose. The result has been greater opportunities to serve and make a difference. I'd be lying if I said that I have a formula and a plan, and did it purposefully. All I can say is that I allowed it to happen to me.

It is out of this experience that I find that what our idealistic, dualistic, abstract life as the church is simply another example of how we try to control all aspects of life. It is self-deceiving, condescending, patronizing, and destructive of our real connection to one another and to the real presence of Christ in our world. If we want to care for people in need, it won't come in any sustainable way by focusing on our guilt and our need to change. It will come by trusting God and responding to the opportunities to serve that are presented to us every day.

At the end of the conference yesterday, we were asked to frame a word that described our response to the message. As I thought about this, I realized that it was "available." Available to God to be present with whomever is before me. They are real people, living real lives. They aren't simply rich or poor, liberal or conservative, one race or another. He or she is simply a person who has his or her own individual life to live with all its complexity. We enter into the relationship through our stories and established our relationship with common values that unite us in a real community.

As we slog through this political season, the abstractions of politicians and their comrades in the church lead us to the impression that our only hope is in these brilliant men and women who are greater than you and me. Already, I'm fatigued by their unreality, their lack of real presence and the constant message of panic and demise. I don't really want to know their promises or their past opinions. What I want to know is how they have suffered, come through it, and built something that is lasting and sustainable. I want to see tangible representations of their humility and clear sense of a noble calling to public service. As politicians, their lives are lived in the abstractions of words and concepts. I want to know about their concrete achievements in life

I am convinced that our hope is not in abstraction but in concrete action of personal engagement with the people that God brings into our path. We can't abstract our own release of control. We can only learn to practice listening and focusing on the person who is right there, right now, trusting that God is present in that encounter. Through that practice of real presence, Christ's presence intrudes and widens our perspective and lengthens the horizons that are before us. It touches us in ways that we can't control and comes at us in ways when we least expected it. From my experience, this is where change really begins.

Emergent and Traditional

2008-01-20T21:33:53-05:00

I've felt for some time that the traditional mainstream church has the potential to be the place where real transformation in Western Christianity can take place. For this to happen, all sorts of changes need to take place. One is the end of the battle royal between the left and right, between progressives and fundamentalists, and for the middle of the church to move out of a survival mindset into a open, more missional one. There are lots of people writing on this and are pushing the envelope of Protestant thought and culture in ways unforeseen just a decade ago. I find it healthy, and leading to a stronger church in the future. However, we are going have to go through a season of turmoil as the traditional middle comes to see that it can accept new perspectives and changes in how the church functions without diminishing its historic foundations.

One of those who are writing with great intelligence is David Fitch, a pastor/ theologian from Chicago, author of The Great Giveway. In a post today, Fitch publishes an interview with two twenty-something guys who are from the Emergent church world that is worth reflecting on. Fitch, whose church is attempting to challenge every notion of how a church is to be led and organization makes the following comment about these guys.

... an interview with two twenty-something emerging church type guys. They were leading a house group at Jack's church. They were also teaching a class and talking about church in ways that was all new to the rest of the more traditional Baptist church. Their words really illustrate the deep cultural shift taking place among the sons and daughters of evangelicals. ... Yet it continually shocks me how many churches are unaware of the depth of this shift taking place. ... If you are looking for some clarity on these issues, I offer this somewhat lengthy interview ... And if you have time, can you answer this: How would your local church receive these two guys, Matt and Jose, and what they have to say?

These ideas are not necessarily new. What is new is the commitment to let these ideas transform the church as an institution. For this reason, I believe these ideas that I've heard for over thirty years, will finally take root in new forms of the church. Here's a portion of the interview.

MATT: …In the evangelical world…we throw terms like repentance around and how we just try to sell the gospel to people… going door to door, using the four spiritual laws, which are half-truths anyway. They are ridiculous. They’ve only been around about 10 or 15 years anyway…selling the gospel becomes like selling fire insurance. You just have to believe, intellectually that Jesus is God, and that he died for your sins, and then you are saved and can just sit around for the rest of your life. And I think this is all just so ridiculous because God wants us to move, and go, and do something. It has nothing to do with simple belief. Your beliefs may start something, but actions come out of your beliefs and that’s the point. The evangelical system says, “believe the right things, adhere to the correct intellectual things and you are going to be saved.” And “saved” to evangelicals is the idea that you are going to heaven later— then life becomes a kind of a waiting room. But they don’t realize that God wants to save you from traumas of the past. God wants to save you from what’s going on inside you right now, psychologically, physically, emotionally, spiritually, it’s every part of you that God wants to renew you. And evangelicals forget about this. They make an empty system where all you have to do is have a little bit of faith—whatever that means—and then you will be saved. And it’s just like becoming a mere shell of a Christian and totally miss the point.

JACK: Do you see decisions to follow Christ as connected to the background of the seeker?

MATT: Right, it’s about the filters we all have. It’s the parents we grew up with, the culture, the time, the atmosphere, just everything about us. And these filters move into our theology too. Moderns think, “We’ve got it! ! It’s been over 2000 years and we finally have a good grasp on the Bible and what it means, and we have archeology and all this other evidence and facts and we’ve now finally got it!” Unfortunately, they don’t realize that maybe their idea of God and how to understand him and their theology, is like just one way. They don’t understand that it’s not the only way but just one way of thinking which came from somebody before, right. Their idea isn’t the best one, it was just a new one when it came out for the first time—when they had to fight against the modernist interpretation of scripture. And now, we’re doing it in the postmodern age. And people today are saying, “No, you’re just wrong, and you’re heretics” and stuff. But the modern viewpoint and how they interpret scripture isn’t the only way or the best or the most evolved. The world is changing. I mean, God doesn’t change, but He is changing us, right.

And here's there take on the intersection of their emergent/postmodern perspective with a more tradition church .

JACK: Do you see a need to try to bridge the gap between the young postmoderns and the older traditional members of the church?

MATT: Yes. It would be really bad if we had this group of people who were postmodern and emergent and this group modern and traditional. This would be divisive. This is why people often leave churches. Some people feel unwanted and just leave. We have to have an understanding at some point. And we don’t want another denomination. The emergent church is not a denomination. It’s a new way of understanding church within every denomination. This is huge. It is something about the faddish aspect of the emergent movement that it becomes a denomination.

This perspective is worth hearing and discussing. In response to Fitch's question, I think these two guys would definitely find a place in our church.

Technorati Tags: David Fitch, Emergent

Len Sweet's 10 Paradoxes for the Future

2008-01-09T22:11:40-05:00

Len Sweet offers up some thought provoking ideas in The Top Ten Paradoxes that Will Rule The Future in the latest Next-Wave Ezine.

He starts with a trip back 55 years to Crick & Watson's discovery of the Double Helix. He sees this image as a metaphor for the paradoxical nature of everything, including Christianity. He speaks of orthodox Christianity as filled with paradoxes.

The Double Helix as the "secret of life" applies as much to our spiritual life as to our physical life. In fact, in book after book I have argued that the essence of orthodoxy is paradoxy, and that every Christian must learn how to put on the spectacles of paradox and become a paradoxalist.

His point is more than valid, yet our dualistic cultural of harden categories of right and wrong, truth and untruth, don't fit into a paradoxical perspective. Yet, Sweet makes an excellent case for this perspective.

*The 5 biggest stories of the last fifty years are still playing themselves out: 1) the demise of Marxism-Leninism as a potent ideology outside of China; 2) the rise of the Internet as the primary delivery system for communication and information; 3) the discrediting of Freudianism as a reliable guide to human choices; 4) the slow death of postmodernism; 5) the resurgence of political Islam or what is called Ïslamism. Any one of these can reassert itself at any time.

Simplified, Sweet's dominant stories are 1) political, 2) technological, 3) psycho-spiritual, 4) philosophical, and 5) religious. I would add two more. The Baby Boomer social revolution beginning in the 1960's. The rise of science (genetics, environmentalism and biotechnology) as both a social and religious phenomenon.

*The most predictable thing about the future is that it never conforms to our expectations.

This simple truth is why looking at the future through the lens of paradox may make more sense that one might think. Here are his ten paradoxes.

1) Do little large.

2) To move up, move down.

3) Learn to fail so you can succeed.

4) Your only control is in being out of control.

5) It's more important to know what you don't know than what you know.

6) The more you think out-of-the-box, the more you need well-built boxes to think.

7) A graying globe requires greening.

8) Only locavores can globalize.

9) When fast replaces vast, go slowly with the holy.

10) Moore's Law makes Murphy's Law all the more relevant.

Some of these are not only paradoxical, but counter-intuitive. Here are my thoughts on a few of these.

3. Failure/Success: When success comes too quickly, it is quite possibly that you don't know why you have succeeded. Success without wisdom is empty.

5. Knowing what you don't know. All I can say is read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan. If, after reading them, you don't realize the importance of what you don't know, then you also don't understand #4. on being out of control.

6. Box. No matter how much people hate institutions, including churches, they are necessary support systems for human community.

Sweet says he is going to write more about these paradoxes over the next several months. Stay tuned looks interesting.

Hope and the Character of Persistent Resilience

2008-01-09T08:32:11-05:00

Hope. It is a theme that I hear increasingly discussed.

It was the theme - Hope has a Voice - of the Montreat College Conference last weekend.

I was there for part of it. I was glad I was because I got to hear students from Virginia Tech who are involved with the Presbyterian Campus Ministry and the Blacksburg Presbyterian Church speak about the tragedy of the shootings last April.

It was a story that was told with great finesse and pathos. It was as much the story of one freshman woman - Heidi Miller - who was shot and the people who are her friends at VirginiatTech and how they handled the tragedy. She tells of how hope mattered as she faced her assailant.

“I learned that lesson for the first time in those first few moments I switched from being student at my desk to a student lying on the floor playing dead wondering whether I would ever make it out of that room in Norris Hall alive. Because that morning, as the smell of gun residue and blood penetrated my nostrils and blood seeped through my jeans and three bullets entered into my body, hope seemed far away — because he left the room, but came back in, he would run out of bullets, but then he would reload.”

… “Evil was standing there embodied in this person standing four feet away from me, then it came -- hope found its way into that room.” It first appeared when she began to move her left foot. “I realized that I wasn’t paralyzed and that my nerves still reached my foot despite the three bullets that had just entered my left side.”

Here's what I thought as I listened to their presentation.

1. Hope comes in human form. The stronger our care for one another is, the greater sense of God's care for us, and from that comes hope.

As Matt (Drumheller) stood around in the nearby hospital “waiting and waiting,” there came on a gurney “my friend Heidi (Miller), laying in a dazed, post-surgery state. She smiled at me.” It was like “…God was standing right there beside me saying, ‘She’s alive.’” Drumheller told the crowd, “God was right there beside me, beside all of us.”

2. Hope is a product of persistent resilience. What does this mean? We never give up. We never believe that all hope is lost. We continue to work and to strive for a better future. Even at the darkest moments we believe that God is there. I see this in these students. I see it in other people who have persisted in the face of disease, tragedy, disappointment, and all sorts of crisis in their lives.

From Heidi Miller:

During and following a hospital stay, the support of family and friends continued to renew her hope, along with the hard work of physical therapy. “ …and my faith was there to remind me that somehow this was all going to find a way to work out, and inside myself I found a way to hang onto the person I was before but also make room for this new facet of my life.” ...

This past fall semester was an “emotional mountain” for her to climb, she told her peers. “There were times when things got hard, really hard, but I had to keep pushing along. … Hope was hard to find at the times when I found myself facing rock bottom.”

3. Hope is a belief that whatever the story is today, it is not the whole story. And much of the rest of the story is determined by our own attitudes, decisions and actions.

Again from Heidi:

Looking back on the whole experience she reflected, “That morning of April 16^th in my French classroom in Norris Hall I saw evil in its purest form. I faced someone who had no hope at all.” She has not tried to psychoanalyze the killer. But, “the only way I can conceptualize it in my head [how] this happened is that he had no hope, no hope at all, and that is where his hopeless path led him.” This is as close as she has come to an answer, she says, “and I’ve come to terms with that.”

Heidi closed her remarks by quoting from her first post-incident journal entry, 12 days after the shooting: I never thought that this journal would go from being about the frivolous trivial things that occurred during my super awkward freshman year to a journal chronicling my life as I recover from the physical and emotional trauma of being shot. I am glad I had at least one year of innocence in college. I know that somehow it will teach me and has taught me way more about life than I ever thought I would learn by the end of the year. The rest of my life won’t be conventional. That could be viewed as a bad thing, but in my mind and one thing that I am not ashamed to talk about now is how I know now more than ever that I am destined for something greater in life, something else is out there for me to accomplish and I have more motivation than ever to seek out those goals.

Hope is not some abstract notion but a gift we receive from God. It is a portion of grace and love given as we face the future. As these students learned, and was affirmed to me, that God is with us, even at our most darkest moments.

Jack Haberer has an excellent article in the Presbyterian Outlook on their presentation . Share with people who will be encourage to have hope when everything seems against it.

The quotes are from Jack's article.

Questions for the turn of the era

2008-01-01T20:40:22-05:00

As a new year arrives, I've been reflecting back over the past year. What is interesting to me is the amount of change that is happening in the world of the church. It isn't the typical type of change. People joining. Pastors leaving. New programs starting. Rather it is change at a more fundamental level.

What I'm seeing is an increasing level of questioning about the institutional nature of the church. What I find fascinating is the change in the question itself. It is now less a matter of whether Roman Catholic/Anglican/Methodist forms are more biblical than Presbyterian connectional or congregational independent ones. Rather it is more a question whether any institutional form can be considered biblical.

As this level of questioning has intensified, it raises for me the question as to whether we are witnessing the end of Protestantism. I know it seems silly as we see the proliferation of Mega-churches and huge Protestant denominations. But I think this maybe more a last ditch effort to preserve Protestantism's prominence.

If you spend any time reflecting on churches, one of things that I believe you will see is that increasingly churches are diluting their message and programs to that which is the lowest common denominator. One of the phenomenon's that I see in the midst of this is a growing resurgence of a call to committed community. It reminds me of a similar line of discussion that was present a generation ago. Today, there is a greater degree of urgency, and much less obligation to traditional institutional forms of church. In essence, a purging of institutional forms is happening, and the preeminent form of the past 500 years, the Protestant congregation and denomination, is feeling the effects of it.

As I have reflected on this perception that I have, I keep returning to a line of questioning that developed in my work with leaders and organizations, including pastors and churches. Four simple questions that look beyond institutional questions to a more fundamental understanding of the purpose of the church. I'm not looking for a perspective that proof-texts Scripture to argue an abstract conceptualization of the church. No, I'm thinking more of a set of questions that will reveal what I'm to do in the minute after I've answered the question.

The Four Questions that Every Leader Must Ask focus on clarity of thought that leads to action. If a church or a denomination were to ask these questions, they would ultimately find that institutional questions are secondary to those that identify the church's impact upon people.

The questions can be framed in many ways. We can ask the questions this way. What should be the impact of the institutional form of Protestantism? What should be the impact of a Christian community? If you look at the diagram to the right, you'll see that the impact question is focused on three separate dimensions that leaders must address. One is the dimension of ideas, another relationships or community and the last organizational structure. When you can answer what the impact of each dimension should be, then you'll begin to understand how to integrate the three so that each dimension's potential impact can be realize in coordination with the other three.

Is this an impossible scenario? Only if the church is unwilling to change, to adapt to a change in perspective. The value of asking these questions is not to get a correct answer, but rather to foster an environment where the Holy Spirit may speak through people to illuminate a church's potential impact.

Many churches are looking back to move forward. Many of my seminary classmates have left Protestantism to join Roman Catholic and Orthodox congregations. Other people I know have left the institutional church all together and cling to a faith that finds no place in the contemporary church.

Myself, I love the church, but at the same I believe God drugged me kicking and screaming into it. I am both a traditionalist and entrepreneur who loves change to preserve tradition. Make sense?

Much of the church's cultural baggage, the boredom of church services and belief systems, and the process-obsessed institutional structures lack relevance to contemporary life. As I see how people I know deal with the institutional church, and how my client churches address questions about the future, I realize that we are at the beginning of an era of change that is unprecedented in the past 500 years.

I won't say that we are witnessing a new Reformation. I really don't think that what is coming has any continuity with the past, except the past that is the eternal story of God's engagement with his creation.

Here's one example of what I'm seeing. I'm in the midst of reading The Starfish Manifesto by Wolfgang Simson (HT-Bill Kinnon). It is a free ebook written from a Pentecostal perspective. Simson expresses many of the ideas about mission that I find in many, many places, including many Presbyterian churches. I don't agree with everything he writes. We come from different traditions that are vastly different. However, what seems to be an important thread in his work, as for so many people writing about the church today, is the separation of the individual believer in Jesus Christ from the institutional form of the Body of Christ.

Here are two ways that I understand this change.

First, that the Christian church in the future will not be sustained simply by institutional forms, whether buildings, confessions, rules of order, seminaries or theological systems. What will sustain the future of the church is the spiritual character of individual believers. This is the hunger that is at heart of all change in the church today. It is a hunger for an authentic life of faith. Not just words or ideas, but faith that lives in our words and deeds. It is not a joining impetus but a contribution passion.

Second, that the Christian church will be sustained by our common life, by our relationships of service and friendship. For example, at my old traditional downtown tall-steeple Presbyterian church, a men's ministry has begun. The overarching desire of the men who have joined is for fellowship where trust and transparency live. It is not an institutional program, but a coming together of men who desire authenticity in their relationships with other men. This is a window on the future of the church.

So, what do we do with the institution of the church?

First ask the question, what should be its impact? More than anything, the institution should exist to nurture individual calling and the fellowship that is needed to sustain it. No more, no less.

Second, we should ask who should the institution impact? This isn't a question a planning committee answers, but rather asks of the congregation in a many that allows for reflection and vision creation.

Third, we should ask what opportunities for impact do we currently have with our present institutional structure. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. Institutions are human creations, and adapt to human initiative. If the impact that the church should have cannot be met with the current institutional structure, then change it. Of course, this requires leadership.

Lastly, we should ask the hard question of the problems that our current institutional forms have created for us. When we understand what are the impediments to impact, then we understand where we start to change. It may not be easy, may not be able to be accomplished overnight, may alienate and confuse people, but in the long run, the impact that the church have will be realized.

As the new year turns, we are presented with an opportunity to talk with people about these sorts of issues. Asking the Four Questions That Every Leader Must Ask is a good place to start.

If you do try, let me know how it goes. If need to know more, just ask. Asking question is where all the right kind of change starts.

May God grant you and me the opportunity to have a greater impact than we did this past year.

RandomKid December 2007 Newsletter

2007-12-21T06:21:36-05:00

RandomKid is an organization that my daughter has been involved in for about a year. I wrote about the organization here. It is a unique organization because it is focused on kid initiated, kid directed projects. Check out the project page of their website. These aren't adult projects where kids can participate. These are projects that kids have thought up, and through the support of their parents, families, friends and RandomKid, are either making a difference or a looking for the funding to start.

Here is their latest newsletter. I post it to bring encouragement and opportunity. Share it with kids that you know. Maybe one of them has a project idea that RandomKid can help them start.

RandomKid Newsletter
National Task Force Visits the Gulf

Watch NBC Nightly News This Sunday, December 23*for a Special Report on RandomKid's Water Project.

December 2007

I’m really excited for you to read what we have to share with you in this newsletter. RandomKid’s National Task Force to Rebuild the Gulf, a group of 10 kids from around the country, had the opportunity to visit the largest chapter of Habitat for Humanity, tour and volunteer in the gulf, thanks in large part to a grant from Target Corporation and a kind invitation from the Mississippi Gulf Coast chapter of Habitat for Humanity. Our mission was to witness the progress that’s being made, the work that still needs to be done, and report back to kids across the USA to encourage continued support.

There are still nearly 60,000 people living in FEMA trailers over two years after Hurricane Katrina. Faith has helped them all get through a tough time. It is a message we hear from everyone over and over again. They also are being helped by Habitat for Humanity, the Salvation Army and the countless volunteers that go down there to rebuild homes. But none of this can happen without money. We can’t allow ourselves to be tired of the story because it’s old news and we want to move on to something new. We have to commit to helping every last hurricane survivor back on their feet. It is the patriotic thing to do, and our human responsibility to help people who can’t help themselves. We need to show them that the power of their faith can also be seen in each of us, their fellow Americans who care.

All but one of the articles here were written by the RandomKid Task Force kids. One column was written by our newest Board Member, and dad of one of our Task Force members, Ed Brenegar. Please take a moment to see the gulf from a kid’s point of view. We hope you’ll help.

Happy Holidays!

~Talia Leman, 12-year-old CEO, RandomKid

“The Gulf trip was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life! I got to meet new people and help out in the Gulf. After being there, I’ve come up with a new idea on how to children in that area. I LOVE being a part of RandomKid!” –Task Force Member, 10-year-old Emma

Having Hope and Faith on the Gulf Coast
By Task Force Member Shelby of North Carolina

Nasheka Chatman and her three children met with the RandomKid Task Force on a warm Fall day in Biloxi, Mississippi. Chatman has been living in a FEMA trailer with her three small children and her husband for over two years now. The FEMA trailer that the Chatman family is currently living in is 10 feet by 40 feet, or about the size of your garage. They are very cramped and there is not a lot of privacy. When Nasheka was asked how she has gotten through everything over the past two years, she replied, "with prayer, lots of prayer." Chatman says she has had lots of support from family and friends. Of all the things that this family lost, what they miss most are family pictures. She wants other people to know that Habitat for Humanity was "sent by God. The people were sent by God." Nasheka's children, ages 4,6 and 7 have put lots of thought into what colors they will paint their new bedrooms. The family is moving into their Habitat house on November 12th and they are going to celebrate by making a sign for the front yard that says, "Thank You Jesus for our new home." Chatman reminded us that, "People on the Gulf are doing okay. We still need you're help, but we are okay. People here are strong in their hearts." When asked what other Katrina victims should remember, she thought for a moment, then added, "Don't give up on your dreams [of getting out of a FEMA trailer and into a new home]."

“They will remember this trip for years to come. So will I. Nicholas is already brainstorming new ideas. He can’t wait for the next conference call!” –Task Force Mom, Kelly

Leaving Louisiana
By Task Force Member Nicholas of Massachusetts

As the jazz music dies; the scent of beignets disappears; the wrought iron architecture ends; and the skyline of the French Quarter blends in with the horizon, the memory of the destruction comes back to mind. The bus rattles and shakes along the highway. We pass abandoned homes and empty lots – painful reminders of the past. I can’t help but think of everything lost during the storm. There are so many still left with so little. It makes me feel like I need to do more. Money is really necessary to help others. I am reinvigorated. I am inspired to take up the task where I left off. I will once again look for new and creative ways to get others interested in the Gulf Coast disaster. So many have forgotten. But not me. I want to help the poor people of Mississippi and Louisiana. And I will.

Click here to DONATE to RandomKid’s “Rebuild the Gulf Fund.” 100% of your donation will go to our “Rebuild the Gulf” program, 90% of which goes directly to building a Habitat for Humanity house in Biloxi, MS.

“Being a RandomKid parent has been an amazing experience! I feel blessed and renewed as I see our children...our FUTURE... at work, giving so selflessly of themselves and their time! I feel like I’m along for the ride of a lifetime as I see what these children are able to accomplish through their hopes, dreams, and energies!” -Task Force Mom, Eldonna

A "Taste" of the Gulf
By Task Force Member Emma of Iowa
(Editor's Note: These are reflections written after a day when the task force got to experience many of the wonderful, unique things about the Gulf Much of their time was spent in the New Orleans area on this day, and Gulf Port / Biloxi the other two days.)

Our day started with a LONG bus ride! During the ride we rode on the bridge over Lake Ponchartrain. It was really scary because the bridge went on and on for miles over nothing but water! It was a funny feeling!

When our ride was done we ate brunch at Court of the Two Sisters in New Orleans! It was really good food, and they had a jazz trio playing that was fun to listen to. I tried crawfish for the very first time (I don't think I'll try it again for awhile!), and I also tried grits (I'll pass on those next time too!). But the omelets were super, and so were the desserts!

After brunch we went on a ferry ride across the Mississippi River. It was really cool! Even cars could drive right onto the ferry so they could cross the river! That was a strange sight!

After the ride we went to the Swamp Fest at the Audubon Zoo. It was neat seeing al those animals! It's hard to believe that alligators can be so dangerous because they looked really lazy and didn't even move a muscle!

Next we went to Cafe du Monde (that's where the picture of the task force above was taken), and ate bengiets. They tasted like funnel cakes at our State Fair, only better! I ate three! We then had about an hour to walk around in the French Quarter and do things. It was really fun. My mom and I had a street artist draw our caricature! We look kinda funny in it...he gave us real big heads and big teeth!

Then we went to the "old" Brock Elementary in Slidell that had been destroyed by Katrina. We interviewed the principal, Rose Smith. The school was all boarded up, but they're working on the inside and hope to be in by next school year.

We then saw the current school the Brock students are in. They all have double-wide trailers for their classrooms. It was neat seeing all the things they've been through and knowing that they have never given up hope. Their trailer classrooms were actually very, very nice and big. It was a nice feeling to know the kids can have good classrooms until they get back in their real school.

At the end of the day we ate at the Southside Cafe. It was really good food...I had fried oysters! I like oysters anyway, and these were yummy!

After that we went back to our stadium and went to bed. It was a good, busy, and tasty day!

“We are honored to be hosting these children here in the gulf. They have proven to be a driving force in bringing awareness to our gulf rebuilding efforts, and we hope that their reports from the gulf will inspire many more children around the country to continue to help rebuild the thousands of homes that were destroyed by the 2005 hurricanes.” ~Kent Adcock, Director of Business Development & Community Relations for Habitat for Humanity of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Carabiners: A Kid’s Idea and a RandomKid “Micro Loan” are Catalyst to Gulf Trip
by Talia Leman, RandomKid CEO and Task Force Member

It all started with our carabiners. You know, those cool clips you can stick on your backpack, key chain, and just about anywhere else (They make GREAT GIFTS—HINT HINT!! Click here to buy some!). Click here to read backstory on carabiners.

Kent Adcock with the Mississippi Gulf Coast Chapter of Habitat for Humanity received a carabiner at Habitat for Humanity’s “1000^th Home Celebration.” He thought they were pretty cool, and called us up to see if we’d partner with them to sell carabiners with their logo and our logo on them at a big event with professional golfers in November. Next thing you know, he invited the task force to come! But we still had a big hurdle: How to pay for everyone to get there. That’s where Target Corporation comes in. Hooray for Target! They helped the entire task force come together in the gulf. The Task Force has worked together for over a year, and finally met in person for the first time. We stayed in the Salvation Army’s VolunteerVillage in Biloxi, MS. The Salvation Army ROCKS! We met a really great kid named Conner there. He and his family moved to Biloxi to help the Salvation Army after the 2005 hurricanes, and they’ve been serving volunteers in the MS Gulf Coast now for a year and a half. I am happy to say that Conner is the newest member to our task force!

In Closing

by Anne Ginther, President of RandomKid

There are many more stories to tell. "RandomKid National Task Force to Rebuild the Gulf" members met kids who had to swim through their house to get to safety, parents who lost everything. Can you imagine having survived such a disaster and then living in temporary housing for over two years, knowing that there may be thousands ahead of you on the building list?

GOAL: Break ground on a RandomKid / Habitat for Humanity house in Biloxi in 2008 = $25,000 needed!

The children on the Task Force were so moved by what they saw, that they have decided to set a goal to raise enough money to break ground on a MS Gulf Coast Habitat for Humanity house in Biloxi in 2008. These kids have already raised a lot of money with their entrepreunrial ideas. They need to raise $25,000 more to be able to break ground on a house. Please help these kids make their goal, and help a family into their home.

Please click here to donate online using any major credit card, or make out a check to

"RandomKid - Rebuild the Gulf",

and send it to:

RandomKid

P.O. Box 2064

McKinney, TX 75070.

In the coming months we'll share more of stories, photos and video from the Task Force trip. We'll also introduce you to the new things they are doing to help our fellow Americans in the gulf.

We thought we'd close with some favorite quotes from Task Force member Shelby:

*Be the CHANGE you want to see in the world. -Mahatma Gandhi

*A big shot is a little shot that kept shooting.-Unknown

*You are never given a dream without also being given the power to make it come true. You may have to work for it, however. -Richard Bach

Thank you for not only helping the gulf, but helping KIDS realize their power to help others.

Sincerely,

The RandomKid National Task Force to Rebuild the Gulf:

Ellison, Tiron, Shelby, Tonisha, Sarah, Talia, Lanna, Emma, Tonisha, and Conner

Anne Ginther, RandomKid President

RandomKid Quick Links

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Final Comment:
I written about RandomKid previously here . You are going to hear more from me about RandomKid. I've just joined their board. I believe in their mission. I endorse their - our - mission because it is about the Kids and their ideas, and their leadership and their impact.

Your financial support will help kids make difference. I hope you'll consider making a donation. You are not only investing in the future, but making a difference today.

Celebrating a Chesterton Christmas

2007-12-19T21:28:54-05:00

GK Chesterton wrote some great stuff about Christmas. Here's some past postings and one from Bill Kinnon that feature Chesterton.

Did Shopkeepers Invent Christmas? - Bill Kinnon

Christmas Paradox

A Chesterton Christmas

More to come in days that follow.

Looking for the Real Jesus in Life

2007-12-09T09:32:20-05:00

When I'm with clients, strange things happen.

This week, I spent an hour and a half with a seriously paranoid business executive. His twisted view of life was very disturbing.

I've met with egotists, the chronically depressed, the lost, the forelorn, and people that everyone thinks is normal, but are hiding all kinds of trauma. Many of these people are angry and in control. Some are on the edge of breakdowns.

I'm not a depressed, pessimistic or fatalistic person. I'm a glass is half-full kind of guy. I look for the positive, for opportunities to learn, grow, develop and being transformed. That is my personality.

I also recognized that to be a human being is to live with suffering. For some it is more physical, others more emotional or psychological, and even for others it is social, spiritual and intentional. Suffering is reality. Jesus is peace. Yet, those words don't help when we are not just morally broken, but broken at the level of our DNA. Good theology doesn't have much effect there. It would be nice, but it doesn't work that way.

Read these two postings from Brant, here and here. Here's a real man. Not perfect, not complete, not a failure, not a celebrity-level success, just a man who is trying to maintain order in his relationship with himself, his family and his God. He takes meds to do it. If I was him, I'd do it too.

What concerns me as I need to walk out the door to church in three minutes is that we plaster over reality to convince ourselves that Jesus has saved and healed us. My experience is that we don't get healed that way. We get healed by facing up to our brokenness every day. It requires honesty and humility. It requires coming to the end of our rope. It requires seeing Jesus not as an abstract theological concept, but a divine person whose life has been passed to us.

I don't have Brant's issues, but I know I suffer from many of the same expectations of success, productivity and completeness. All I can say as a consolation to myself is that the more in touch I am with my own suffering, the more I am able to see it in others, and be a friend who offers hope and healing. I know this because I've seen healing to come to people just because I was there.

So, as hard as it is to say, Praise Be To God for Our Suffering that lets us find that same depth of life in others, and consequently know the surpassing comfort of Christ.

HT:BT

Objectivity and Truth

2007-11-29T13:39:27-05:00

Going back almost 30 years to seminary, I recall one of the major topics of discussion in our New Testament classes was the issue of the nature of objectivity in interpretation and the truth of the Bible. The idea of truth as this fixed thing never made sense to me. It didn't because it presumes that I or anyone has the capacity to stand outside of truth and objectively make the judgment of what is true and what isn't. It always struck me that this definition of truth was an alternative faith object. Instead of faith being in Christ, based on the witness of Scripture, my faith was to be dependent upon the Bible being true. My trust was suppose to be in the Bible first because that is where we discover Christ

All this came back to me as I read Virginia Postrel's posting on the new book, Objectivity, by Loraine Daston and Peter Galison. Virginia provides two long quotes from the book that are worth considering.

Our classroom seminary discussions often focused on the subjectivity that we each brought to the task of biblical interpretation. Even the Gospel writers were subjective interpreters of the life and ministry of Jesus and the early church. While this may seem to be a logical, rational perspective to have, it was not the only one. Objectivity or biblical truth was sacrosanct; a reality apart from human interference.

From my little corner of the church, what I have seen is a Bible that lost its character as an inspired text in a historical context, and became an encyclopedia of proof texts. This latter form which became so popular in evangelical circles as inductive bible study became the standard means of interpretation. It lost its historical character and therefore its rootedness in the time of its origin. This notion of objective truth came to mean a single truth that was available to all who followed the appropriate methodology. As a result, we became less a biblical church and more a church of epigrams, pithy sayings that inspire warm thoughts yet lack reality.

It is odd therefore, that the branch of Christendom that most hailed a high view of Scripture lost its grip on the Bible as it came to us. Is it the word of God? Yes. Is it a document of objective truth as 19th century science understood it? I don't think so. Daston and Galison describe a type of objectivity that I suspect actually only exists in the abstract. And the Bible is far from being simply an abstract repository of objective truth.

Truth lives in the person of Jesus Christ, who lives by his Spirit in the individual and collective lives of believers throughout the world. Truth is not the idea of God's love, but the actual love of God for sinners. As long as truth remains abstract and objective, it remains in the control of we human beings. Even as it does, it remains truth as I see it and determine it to be so. It is defined, contained and without amendment. It is my possession and the possession of my church. The intellectual history of science of the past 2500 years should tell us that our human perception is never whole nor complete. Therefore, whatever it is that I think to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth is still partial and subjective.

Bonhoeffer's After Ten Years for our time

2007-11-24T22:56:37-05:00

For past couple of months, I've been drawn to the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His short book Life Together has been a helpful perspective in a church world torn between artificial triumphalism and institutional cynicism. It's about how real people engage one another through their faith in Christ and in their relationships with one another.

Lately, I have been reading portions from The Cost of Discipleship and Ethics trying to grasp who this man was. I find his perspective on the Christian faith and the church totally different from most of the people I know and read today.

A couple days ago, I ran into United Methodist pastor colleague Tony Sayer at the bookstore. After a wide ranging discussion that lasted over an hour, I told him I was reading Bonhoeffer. His eyes lit up. He's a Bonhoeffer devotee and after some discussion, suggested I read a piece Bonhoeffer wrote in 1942, not many months before he was arrested by the German Gestapo. So, I went home, dug through a box of books and found my 40 year old copy of Letters and Papers from Prison. The copy I have is not the expanded edition that is now available. I've ordered it and its on the way here.

The essay that Tony suggested is After Ten Years. It is his reflections on his work and life in the context of the rise of National Socialism under the Nazi dictator Adolph Hitler. His thoughts are not historical, but more personal and spiritual. I find them quite relevant to our time.

Bonhoeffer speaks of the radical evilness of evil of the Third Reich and the multitude of failed attempts to confront it.

The failure of rationalism is evident. With best of intentions, but with a naive lack of realism, the rationalist imagines that a small dose of reason will be enough to put the world right. In his short-sightedness he wants to do justice to all sides, but in the melee of conflicting forces he gets trampled upon without having achieved the slightest effect. Disappointed by the irrationality of the world, he realises at last his futility, retires from the fray, and weakly surrenders to the winning side.

Worse still is the total collapse of moral fanaticism. The fanatic imagines his moral purity will prove a match for the power of evil, but like a bull he goes for the red rag instead of the man who carries it, grows weary and succumbs. He becomes entangled with non-essentials and falls into the trap set by the superior ingenuity of his adversary.

Then there is the man with a conscience. He fights single-handed against overwhelming odds in situations which demand a decision. But are so many conflicts going on, all of which demand some vital choice - with no advice or support save that of his own conscience - that he is torn to pieces. Evil approaches him in so many specious and deceptive guises that his conscience becomes nervous and vacillating. In the end he contents himself with a salved instead of a clear conscience, and starts lying to his conscience as a means of avoiding despair. If a man relies exclusively on his conscience he fails to see how a bad conscience is sometimes more wholesome and strong than a deluded one.

When men are confronted by a bewildering variety of alternatives, the path of duty seems to offer a sure way out. They grasp at the imperative as the one certainty. The responsibility for the imperative rests upon its author, not upon its executor. But when men are confined to the limits of duty, they never risk a daring deed on their own responsibility, which is the only way to score a bull's eye against evil and defeat it. Then man of duty will in the end be forced to give the devil his due.

What then of the man of freedom? He is the man who aspires to stand his ground in the world, who values the necessary deed more highly than a clear conscience or the duties of his calling, who is ready to sacrifice a barren principle for a fruitful compromise or a barren mediocrity for a fruitful radicalism. What then of him? He must beware lest his freedom should become his own undoing. For in choosing the lesser of two evils he may fail to see the greater evil he seeks to avoid may prove the lesser. Here we have the raw material of tragedy.

Some seek refuge from the rough-and-tumble of public life in the sanctuary of their own private virtue. Such men however are compelled to seal their lips and shut their eyes to the injustice around them. Only at the cost of self-deception can they keep themselves pure from the defilements incurred by responsible action. For all that they achieve, that which they leave undone will still torment their peace of mind. They will either go to pieces in face of this disquiet, or develop into the most hypocritical of all Pharisees.

Who stands his ground? Only the man whose ultimate criterion is not in his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all these things when he is called to obedience and responsible action in faith and exclusive allegiance to God. The responsible man seeks to make his whole life a response to the question and call of God.

I find this a relevant discussion concerning the future of the church. There are so many attempts to address the central crisis of our age - the purpose and function of the church in the 21st century. Much of this crisis is institutional, justifiably so. Yet, that is not really where the problem begins.

Instead, the problem begins with what does it mean to live as a Christian. This question is what I find in Bonhoeffer that challenges my whole perception of what it means to be a Christian. It shows itself in how dependent I am on structure and tradition. What comes to mind as I read Bonhoeffer is not the crisis of the church against the culture of an evil regime like the Nazis, but the church in conflict with Christ at its very core.

The various approaches to address the National Socialist threat that Bonhoeffer describes above reminds me of the various approaches that we are trying to use to fix the structure and function of the church. Bonhoeffer speaks of the lack of civil courage in Germany during these ten years, though not the lack of bravery and self-sacrifice.

In the course of a long history we Germans have had to learn the necessity and the power of obedience. The subordination of all individual desires and opinions to the call of duty has given meaning and nobility to life. We have looked upwards, not in servile fear, but in free trust, seeing our duty as a call, and the call as a vocation. This readiness to follow a command from above rather than our own private opinion of what was best was a sign of a legitimate self-distrust. Who can deny that in obedience, duty and calling we Germans have again and again excelled in bravery and self-sacrifice? ... The trouble was we did not understand his world. He forgot that submissiveness and self-sacrifice could be exploited for evil ends.

He then discusses the ethics of success as no better for understanding where one fits in history.

All the time goodness is successful we can afford the luxury of regarding success as having no ethical significance. But the problem arises when success is achieved by evil means. It is no good then behaving as an arm-chair critic and disputing the issue, for that is to refuse to face the facts. Nor is opportunism any help, for that is to capitulate before success. We must be determined not to be outraged critics or mere opportunists. We must take our full share of responsibility for the moulding of history, whether it be as victors or vanquished.

Bonhoeffer points to a responsibility that is ours given to us by God. The question that I have is what does it mean to be responsible in our time. What does it mean for the church to bear the responsibility for history as he describes it?

To read Bonhoeffer is to be struck hard with the reality that this is a man whose engagement with the world was so complete that his relationship with Christ had come to replace his relationship to the church. For most of us, the church serves as the place where we find God. Without the church there is no faith that is secure and real. This is why, I suspect, that the early Calvinists were so adamant about the place of visual and sensual representations of Christ. That these worldly objects could easily come to replace the living God in Jesus Christ as a result. Is this what has happened in churches? This is what I believe lies behind Bonhoeffer's discussion of folly.

Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than malice. You can protest against malice, you can unmask it or prevent it by force. ... There is no defence against folly. Neither protests nor force are of any avail against it, and it is never amenable to reason. If facts contradict personal prejudices, there is no need to believe them, and if they are undeniable, they can simply be pushed aside as exceptions. Thus the fool, as compared with the scoundrel, is invariably self-complacent.

Folly, Bonhoeffer writes, is a moral rather than an intellectual defect.

The fool can often be stubborn, but this must not mislead us into thinking he is independent. One feels somehow, especially in conversation with him, that it is impossible to talk to the man himself, to talk to him personally. Instead, one is confronted with a series of slogans, watchwords, and the like, which have acquired power over him. He is under a spell, he is blinded, his very humanity is being prostituted and exploited. Once he has surrendered his will and become a mere tool, there are no lengths of evil to which the fool will not go, yet all the time he is unable to see that it is evil. Here lies the danger of a diabolical exploitation of humanity, which can do irreparable damage to the human character.

But it is just at this point that we realise that the fool cannot be saved by education. What he needs is redemption. ... the only cure for folly is spiritual redemption, for that alone can enable a man to live as a responsible person in the sight of God.

This redemption is not simply joining a church, becoming a member and joining a program. Rather this is the transformation of the whole person to be one who is totally available to God. This is what it means to be responsible and free. It also means that many of the "things" of this world become constraints or entanglements that rob us of our freedom. The problem with many prophets and ministries that call for absolute discipleship accompanying vows of poverty is that they are like the rationalist, the fanatic, or the moralist who intellectually or emotionally tries to change the world by sheer will. It rises from that sense of duty that gets confused and clouded in the multitude of motivations that rob us of our freedom.

What my reading of Bonhoeffer leads me to see that this responsible, spiritually mature person is simply a whole human being. We aren't to be some super-heroic super-spiritual being whose accomplishments and failures are on some grand scale. Rather, we are to live our human lives as the beings God created us to be. All the things I've quoted from Bonhoeffer above have pointed to how our human lives become diminished in so many ways. The problem with these various paths to perfection is that they result in de-humanizing us and therefore affecting our attitude toward others. Here is what Bonhoeffer says about those who hold such a contempt for humanity.

There is a very real danger of our drifting into an attitude of contempt for humanity. We know full well that it would be very wrong, and that it would lead to the most sterile relation with our fellow men. ... The man who despises others can never hope to do anything with them. The faults we despise in others are always, to some extent at least, our own too. How often have we expected from others more than we are prepared to do ourselves! Why have we until now held such lofty views about human nature? Why have we not recognised its frailty and liability to temptation? We must form our estimate of men less from their achievements and failures, and more from their sufferings. The only profitable relationship to others - and especially to our weaker brethren - is one of love, that is the will to hold fellowship with them. Even God did not despise humanity, but became Man for man's sake.

For Bonhoeffer, as we well as it should be for each of us, how we relate to the other individual is where the practicality of our faith is formed. From this simple, basic approach to our relationships with people can grow the ability to demonstrate the kind of civic courage that he practiced in his own ministry. It simply becomes how we act in love towards others, regardless of who they are.

With a matter of a few months of Dietrich Bonhoeffer writing this letter to friends in 1942, the Gestapo came and arrested Bonhoeffer, and within two years he was hanged for his leadership of the church in Germany. Eberhard Bethge, friend and biographer of Bonhoeffer, in the introduction to Letters and Papers from Prison, tells the story of what the man was like during his emprisonment.

Bonhoeffer's last weeks were spent with prisoners drawn from all over Europe. Among them was Payne Best, an English officer. ... Best writes: "Bonhoeffer ... was all humility and sweetness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and of deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive. ... He was one of the very few men that I have ever met to whom his God was real and close to him." And again, "The following day, Sunday, April 8th, 1945, Pastor Bonhoeffer held a little service and spoke to us in a manner which reached the hearts of all, finding just the right worlds to express the spirit of our imprisonment and the thoughts and resolutions which it had brought. He had hardly finished his last prayer when the door opened and two evil-looking men in civilian clothes came in and said: ' Prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready to come with us.' Those words 'come with us' - for all prisoners that had come to mean one thing only - the scaffold.

"We bade him good-bye - he drew me aside - ' This is the end,' he said. 'For me the beginning of life,' ... Next day, at Flossenburg, he was hanged."

We live in a time of great change and ferment in the church. We have church schisms in our own denomination. We have Megachurches that are questioning methods and whose leaders are examples of moral failure in tragic ways. We have churches emerging as communities and communities that are emerging as places of hope and love in cities. All the foundations of the church are being shaken to see what will remain.

What I am finding as I travel this journey of spiritual and ecclesiastical change is that the Christ that gave Bonhoeffer joy and peace at the time of his execution is real. The church is not the whole faith, but one place where we meet God, find nurture and nourishment, focus and replenishment for the lives we are to live outside. While I am a realist, it is my faith and the experience of it that teaches me to be an optimist. Thank God for the life and legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

RandomKid and Rebuilding the Gulf

2007-11-03T22:21:10-04:00

This weekend I am in Gulfport and Biloxi, Mississippi with my daughter, Shelby. She is a member of the RandomKid National Taskforce on Rebuilding the Gulf. Our gathering this weekend is to bring these young social entrepreneurs together for the first time. There are kids 10-15 years old from Louisiana, Iowa, North and South Carolina, and Massachusetts. Much of their work has gone to benefit Habitat for Humanity here on the Gulf. Today we flew in, and spent the afternoon with Habitat meeting families who have received or will receive homes, and at home sites. More about them in a later post.

Tomorrow we go to New Orleans and Slidell, Louisiana to see conditions there. Monday we visit a school in Gulfport and spend part of the day at a Pro-Am golf tournament benefiting Habitat. I'll say more, and post some pictures, and soon as I can. I'll also update you on conditions along to Gulf from previous postings over the past two years.

UPDATE: Pictures from Day 1 on the Gulf.

Here the kids are interviewing a family that is about to move into a Habitat for Humanity house in Gautier.

These are two Habitat houses being constructed in Biloxi. The one of the left was actually built in Somerset, Kentucky by volunteers from two Presbyterian churches there. Then boxed up, and shipped in a WalMart truck to the Gulf coast. This is increasingly going to be the pattern of construction. Build locally, ship it to the Gulf.

In the afternoon, the kids did some landscaping at a completed Habitat house. Because their ages are 10-15, they are not permitted by Habitat rules to actually do construction work. So, they did some landscaping. Later, a reporter from WLOX in Biloxi came and interviewed some of them for the evening news.

Lastly, the kids of RandomKid are committed to raising $75,000 for Habitat's efforts on the Gulf. The picture on the left is a presentation to Kent Adcock, head of the Habitat operation along the Mississippi Gulf Coast of RandomKid's commitment to Habitat.

One of the ways that RandomKid raises money is through the sale of these house-shaped key chains. You can order them through the RandomKid online store here.

More pictures and stories to come. Stay tuned.

Day 2 is in New Orleans and Slidell, Louisiana.

The Church at the Intersection of the Sacred and Profane

2007-10-28T16:12:59-04:00

I started writing this post this morning on my phone sitting in the library at church waiting on our worship service to start. This is a greatly expanded and edited version if you caught the original.

There's a lot conversation taking place about the true nature of the church. Part of the discussion is about the human dimension in conflict with the institutional. From my vantage point, I think this is the wrong conflict to address. These words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's book The Cost of Discipleship help me to see more clearly that the issue is really how we know Christ. Is he real or a program? Is he a theological construct or a living presence discovered in the daily-ness of life?

Reflect on these words of Bonhoeffer's.

"Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace.

Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like the cheapjack's wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the Church's inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings form generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost! The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing. Since the cost was infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite. What would grace be if it were not cheap?

Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian "conception" of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins. The Church which holds the correct doctrine of grace has, it is supposed, ipso facto a part of that grace. In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God.

Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything they say, and so everything can remain as it was before. "All for sin could not atone." The world goes on in the same old way, and we are still sinners "even in the best life" as Luther said. Well, then, let the Christian live like the rest of the world, let him model himself on the world’s standards in every sphere of life, and not presumptuously aspire to live a different life under grace from his old life under sin. That was the heresy of the enthusiasts, the Anabaptists and their kind. ...

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without person confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grass without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate."

I find this an accurate description of the church as we know it today. Our debates about ecclesiastical forms misses the point. Here's a diagram that I use with churches. Regardless of the church or the person, I find that the principal emphasis is on the line between ideas and organizational structure.

What is missing is the relational dimension. By relational, I'm not talking about community. Community can be just as much an abstract concept as church, grace or Jesus Christ. The discussion of community is often about the structure of community. I'm not even talking about the concept of human relationships. We relate to the idea of each, rather than to their reality. What is the reality of grace, or Jesus or our relationships with people?

I'm not talking about the concept of reality that is open to debate. Rather, I'm talking about what people experience. What is the experience of the church, community, Christ or relationships?

This reality that all humans experience is the co-mixture of sin and goodness. It is the awkward, frustrating combination of loving kindness with violent self-centeredness. It is the reality we received with Bonhoeffer's costly grace. Here's what he says.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son ...

As Christianity spread, and the Church became more secularized,this realization of the costliness of grace gradually faded. The world was christianized, and grace became its common property. It was to be had at low cost.

What precisely does this mean? What does it mean in terms that the average person can understand? What does it mean in relationship to what the church is to be?

What I am about to say will sound odd, but I find the greatest evidence of God's grace in those places of greatest need. Those places of the greatest rawness of life. Here's an example of what I mean.

My son introduced me to a southern rock band named Drive-By-Truckers. One of their early songs - Living Bubba - is a homage to Gregory Dean Smalley, an Atlanta guitarist who died of AIDS. During his last year of life as he was being eaten away by the ravages of his illness, he played over a hundred concerts. Living Bubba is a tribute to this man. Here are some of the lyrics.

I wake up tired and I wake up pi..ed
wonder how I ended up like this
I wonder why things happen like they do
but I don't wonder long cuz I got a show to do

I'm sick at my stomach from the A.Z.T.
Broke at my bank cuz that s..t ain't free
but I'm here to stay (at least another week or two)
I can't die now cuz I got another show to do

Don't give me no pity don't give me no grief
Wait till I die for sympathy
Just help me with this amp and a guitar or two
I can't die now cuz I got another show to do

Don't give me no preachin' no self servin'
I ain't no angel but nobody's deserving
I can dance on my own grave, Thank You!
but I can't die now cuz I got another show...

Some people keep saying I can't last long
but I got my bands I got my songs,
liquor, beer, and nicotine to help me along
and I'm drunk and stubborn as they come
chain smoking, guitar picking, til I'm gone

I ain't got no political agenda
Ain't got no message for the youth of America
...
and come see me next Friday cuz I got another show...

Some people stop living long before they die
Work a dead end job just to scrape on by
but I keep living just to bend that note in two
and I can't die now cuz I got another show...

lyrics by Patterson Hood
music by Drive-by Truckers (Cooley, Hood, Howell, Lane, Neff)

To hear DBT play this is hear the intersection of all the desires of human life mixed with all the pain and disaster that can come with it. It is the intersection of the sacred and the profane. (Here's a recent DBT concert play of the song. Listen to both links. The intro to Living Bubba is at the end of the first song. Intro, Song. You find more of DBT at www.archive.org. Also, these guys are crude and profane, but also wise and understanding about the hardships of life.) The stories they tell in their songs point me to people who need to know God's love in some real, tangible way. Abstract theology is no use to them. They need to know love with some reality. Oddly, the grace of Christ seems more real in the face of songs of drunks, whores, drug addicts, pimps, pushers and people whose self-destructiveness knows no boundaries. Oh, but for the grace of God go I. You can read Patterson Hood's telling of Gregory Dean Smalley's story here.

The other day in a comment at Bill Kinnon's blog, I offered three analogies of the church in our time. Here's what I wrote.

I'm constantly amazed at how different my world is from this world you shine a light on. So, I've decided that there are three paradigms operating. Two are dysfunctional and the other is not yet emerging, but is creeping into view.

The first is the mainstream world I inhabit where the governing paradigm is the church as MUSEUM. Pastors are curators, and members docents.

The second paradigm is the church growth world where the governing paradigm is church as ENTREPRENEURIAL ENTERPRISE. Pastors are entrepreneurial marketers and members are customers.

The third paradigm claims to be community, but I'm not sure community is actually possible in our culture at this point in time. So, the governing paradigm may be more, church as COFFEE SHOP. Pastors are baristas and members are visitors connected wirelessly to a wider world than the shop and receiving some modicum of nourishment through their coffee and pastries.

As I have been driving the past two days, I'm wondering if the real problem is that we have traded life for religion. I like this quote from Bonhoeffer.

"During the last year or so, I have come to appreciate the "worldliness" of Christianity as never before. The Christian is not a homo religiosus but a man, pure and simple, just as Jesus became man... It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, a converted sinner, a churchman, a righteous man, or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one... This is what I mean by worldliness -- taking life in one's stride, with all its duties and problems, its successes and failures, its experiences and helplessness... How can success make us arrogant or failure lead us astray, when we participate in the sufferings of God by living in this world?"

In this sense, our quest to be religious becomes a block to community and to our commitment to follow Christ wherever he leads.

Bringing this full circle back to what is the church to be in our time. As Christian believers, we find ourselves debating church structure, community and theological purity. What this suggests to me is that we have lost our connection to the depth of need that people have for knowing the grace and love of God. We are lost in the church thinking that we already have it together, and therefore we must defend the church against those who would change it.

The Coffee Shop motif may be more apt that I originally suspected. For there, everyone comes, everyone is different, and our needs are simple and commonly shared. There is no great investment in the advocacy of one type of drink from another. We gather, sip coffee and share stories. We find support, maybe friendship, and we go on with life.

The reality is that church structure is both essential and irrelevant. We each can exist without the church. Yet, at the same time, we need it because of what we commonly share, our need for love and grace.

Let me end with a simple prayer: Help us to love so that we might understand just how great and costly is your grace for us. Bless us so that we may be a blessing to others. Lead us to be the church wherever we are. Amen.

Dealing with the people who want to throw you out

2007-10-25T04:44:11-04:00

Every pastor has critics. Some of them become advocates for your removal. The social environment of many churches is such that these people are behind the pattern of short pastoral tenure.

If that pattern is to change, then how we handle toxic people has to change. Two recent interviews helped me to understand what I intuitively understood. The key is in how the leadership manages the social environment of the church.

The first interview is of Robert Kaplan by radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt. Kaplan is a journalist with The Atlantic Monthly who writes about global conflicts and the American military. You can read the transcript of the interview here. I wrote about him a few weeks ago here.

The second is an interview with David Kilcullen by Charlie Rose. Kilcullen is an Australian military advisor to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq. You can read that interview here.

I've written about the relationship of this to organizational leadership here.

In a socially divisive church context, people turn passive very quickly when a group forms to challenge the leadership of the pastor. Most pastors I know don't want to address these challenges publicly. They don't want to be the focus of conflict. So, they ignore it, try to accommodate the critics, only making matters worse. In an attempt to be fair minded, they set the stage for their departure.

What I see in the interviews with Kaplan and Kilcullen is an approach to organizational leadership that is instructive for pastors. Kaplan points to the humanitarian mission of the US military as provide a safe, secure, healthy environment for people to address their country's problems. Kilcullen points to the nature of counterinsurgency as providing a social environment that is protective of the people, and inhospitable to cynical, divisive individuals and groups.

The social environment of many churches is just like the command and control management structures of businesses. Businesses end up with the same problems. Toxic people who are destructive of the social fabric that is necessary for the organization to meet its goals are problems that must be addressed. How you address them determines whether they are neutralized or made to be martyrs for a cause.

The equipping function of church leadership extends beyond being prepared to minister. It is also being equipped to function as a full member of the congregation. This means taking personal responsibility for the welfare, health and security of the whole congregation. In a command and control pastoral leadership structure, the critics have an easy target for their anger. However, if the church's leadership learns to empower the membership to be fully engaged, then the toxic people are surrounded. Let me give you a couple examples.

Recently, I was working with a church. The pastor was under fire from a couple groups. Individual elders may have known a little about the situation, but nothing substantial. The pastor, still in his first three years at the church, was feeling like maybe it was time for him to go. Between meetings during a Saturday retreat, he told me he was going to resign that afternoon when the Session met with me. I persuaded him that he first needed to discuss the situation with the Session. So, he did. He told them what was going on and how he felt. Each member around that table affirmed his ministry, told him he was fulfilling what they had asked him to do when they called him, and that they didn't want him to leave. Even those elders whose family members are part of the "insurgents" group seeking to run him off affirmed his ministry to them. Weeks later, the critics have died down, he is in a much better situation, and the church is beginning to address the real issues that confront them.

In another situation where I was a member of the church's staff, the senior minister, a kind, loving person who deferred all decisions to the Session was under fire because his leadership style was totally opposite of the previous pastor who had been there 33 years and served like a corporate CEO. In this situation, there was competition between groups as to which one would be successful in running him out of town. He was a deeply spiritual man who believed that God called him there, and that God would call him away when it was time. He survived five years of intense criticism and then he resigned and left town.

In the first situation, because the pastor had been open with them, the Session was empowered to communicate to the congregation by word-of-mouth that the pastor had their support, and they were not interested in his leaving. Opposition melted away. In the second instance, the Session had never been developed to be a deliberative body. It was a command and control structure that worked with a particular type of leader. As a result, the Session was ill-prepared to address issues of conflict within their midst, and by extension in the congregation.

If Kaplan's humanitarianism and Kulcullen's insurgency analogies are instructive, it means that an important aspect of pastoral leadership is providing safety and security for members to act responsibly. When there is no openness, nor a clear sense of what unifies the church, then divisive, toxic people find an opening to establish a destructive presence.

Openness, respect, responsibility and trust are key elements of a healthy church social environment. Consider what is required for the man or woman who sits on the back row to become a vocal supporter and contributor to the church. When the membership is empowered and equipped to take responsibility for the church, then they can address within their midst the critics who are destructive of the social environment of the congregation. This is all part of why churches are not really membership associations, but communities.

Why the Human Dimension matters

2007-10-23T00:15:00-04:00

There is great ferment happening in the church. Those that are trying to hold on to the old ways are going to find themselves increasingly isolated. The move is away from thinking of the church as an institution to thinking of the church as a community. Plenty of people are writing and speaking about this. Let me encourage to participate in those conversations. However, there is an element in this discussion that is not sufficiently addressed.

I've reached the conclusion that one of the great impediments to change in society, and I include within that realm, the church, is an understanding of the human dimension. When the time comes I write some sort of critique about modern/postmodern attitudes toward humanity. But not right now. Instead, I want to say something simple and theological.

I have the sense that the church as well as society has lost an understanding of humanity that is based on purpose. Most of what we believe about human beings is based on the tension that exists between the person as an individual and as a member of a social gathering point, like a church or a family. In the church, this tension is compounded by our doctrine of sin that virtually envelopes our total understanding of humanity. As I've reflected on this thought over the past 15 years, since a paper I wrote on human creation and leadership, I'm coming to the conclusion that we have failed to understand sin because we fail to understand God's goodness embedded in his human creation. Or, to say in reverse, we cannot fully understand the nature of sin without fully understanding God's purpose in creating humanity.

Because we are out of touch with the human dimension, we find ourselves failing to understand what the church is to be. And in particular, failing to understand what human community is for. For me, the last few verses in Acts 2 are a key-hole view of human community. It is such a complex and fantastical picture, it is virtually impossible to understand how in the world did they make it happen. I think it is simple. They didn't try. They didn't institutionalize it. They didn't try to create a formula. For a brief moment in human history several thousand people were genuinely transformed by the power of God, so that they became the example par excellence. And once we began to try to control it, we lost it.

For us individually, what it means to live as a human being is to no longer to live for self, but to live in the moment of dependence upon God. As soon as I wrote those words, I realized that I don't really know what that means. That to say it is to claim some sort of control over my life. All I can say is that living in response to what is presented to me has meant not simply a more peaceful existence, but also a more stressful one. The stress is the recognition that to respond to our opportunities brings conflict to how we manage our time.

Let me give you an example that I'm living with right now. I have three client projects ongoing. Two will take the better part of the next eight to ten months to complete. The other five to six. Other projects will come along to add to that work load. On top of that, I have three other projects that are all volunteer projects, and are as big as the others. One is the planning of an event to recognize a community leader who is in his last months of life. It is a big event because it involves coordinating involvement with people from across the country. The second one is the leadership, planning and preparation for our church's senior high youth group mission trip next summer. And the third, is the planning involved in taking 25 Boy Scouts to Yellowstone National Park next summer for a week-long backpacking trip. Each of these projects require time, thought, and both communication and coordination with lots of people. Each one has a budget. Each one deadlines. Each one is critical to the functioning of their respective organizations.

This relates back to my thoughts about the human dimension in this way. The success of all six of these projects is dependent upon the interaction of people. In essence, for any of these projects to meet their goals requires community to be built. It is not simply a set formula that is applied like mixing ingredients to bake a cake. Here's why I think our perception of human creation needs to change.

If we take a sin-centric attitude toward people, we end up with cynicism. We look for reasons to blame project failure on their sin. If, however, we are to take a creation view, then we'll see that each person is God's creation. Each with gifts, strengths, talents and expertise that can contribute to the success of a project. If your view of humankind is cynical, it is hard to love human beings. It is hard to see them as human persons rather than examples of an abstract conception of sin.

The reality we each face is two fold. One is that we must live as human beings in the moment of dependence upon the grace and love of God in Jesus Christ. And second, that we must live with people, in relationship with those person who are both created in the image of God, and are sinners. So, the last word, on what was to be a brief statement, is that human community requires us to live in the healthy tension of the loss of control and with human beings who are both good as created by God and sinful as their willful acts of rebellion demonstrate daily. There is every reason to be cynical, if you factor out the perspective that we find in a creation view of God's purpose for each of our lives.

So, the next time you face a person who is contentious or cynical, difficult to deal with, just try to imagine what is the goodness that God endowed them with at their creation. Then you may be able to see behind their anger and negativity to see what it is that they truly love. Find that out, and human community is possible.

Maybe it is time for us to take back the term "humanism" from the secular humanists who, I suspect, only believe in humanity as a concept rather than in the tension-filled specificity of human relationships.

Understanding God’s Call to the Church

2007-10-22T18:16:51-04:00

It has been three weeks since my last posting. It doesn't mean that I have nothing to say. On the contrary, I've been thinking about the relationship between pastors, Sessions, members, the past, the present, the future, history, mission, passivity, activism, generations and how all this relates to our relationships with Christ. The following essay is a work in progress that I wrote for one of my client churches. It is not intended to be a final word, or even a complete word on the topic of God's call. The passages that I reflect on are one's that I have been using in my work with this particular church. I hope it is helpful.

Understanding God’s Call to the Church

The following essay is my reflection upon a few biblical texts that help me to understand God’s call to the church and its members. My thoughts are directed toward believers in Jesus Christ who are members of a local congregation. This is not a complete theological statement on the nature of call. It is simply a few ideas offered as way to talk about our call from God.

There six texts, some short, some long, and these texts help me to understand that God’s purpose is to take us, his human creation, and live through us. What they show me is that church membership is not an accurate understanding of what it means to be a Christian. Instead to be a member is about how the love of God comes alive in us and through us touches other people. In other words, the genius of God is that he both sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to be God in the flesh in our world, and to die so that we may live, and that he now uses us as that same representation of his grace and love in our world.

Before you go any further, take a few minutes to read through the texts. Don’t try to think about them too deeply. Just read them. Get a basic sense of what they are saying. My comments will direct you back to reading them more specifically.

Abraham’s Call
Genesis 12:1-9

What amazes me about this story is that this guy in his later years is called by God to go and start something new. It is not only a statement about call, but about what God believes our potential is throughout the course of our life. Abraham and his extended family go as God called them. And we are the beneficiaries of their obedience.

I also see that God’s call is specific. He didn’t come asking for volunteers. He came to Abraham. He picked him out. I wonder what it is that God would pick us out to do?

Reflection Question: Of all the things that you’ve done through the church, what has been the most meaningful? Which one do you feel made the most difference? Make a note of this here.

The Great Commission
Matthew 28:16-20

This Matthew text comes as Jesus is preparing to enter heaven after his Resurrection. He tells the disciples that he is sending them out to share the Gospel with the world. What is interesting about this call to go? The Scripture calls them disciples, which simply means that they are followers or students of a teacher. They have spent their time preparing, without knowing they were doing so. If you read through the Gospels, the disciples were never very insightful about what was happening. They just responded in the moment to what Jesus was doing and saying. So, now Jesus sends them out, and from here on they are referred to as “apostles.” An apostle simply means “the one who is sent.” In this sense, Abraham was like an apostle. He was sent.

To be sent implies that we are being sent some place for a reason. Many of us have no experience with this idea. We have grown up and lived in the same place all our lives. We have been a member of the same church; maybe lived in the same house, know the same people all of our lives. This may well have been Abraham’s experience. And yet, he was sent to a place that was alien and strange.

Reflection Question: The question is not “Where is God sending you?” Rather, are you willing to be sent? Not are you willing to be sent to China or Africa, but are you willing to be sent? Discovering God’s call starts with a willingness for God to use us as instruments of his grace and love. If you are willing to be “sent,” what do you feel you’d like to know first?

The Fellowship of Believers
Acts 2: 42-47

God’s call doesn’t come in a vacuum. It isn’t just an idea disconnected from the life we live here in this world. It is real and practical, and it is worked in relationship with people. This picture of the early church is compelling to me. It is because I’ve never known a group like this. Never know a group this generous and open. Yet, this new fellowship of Christ believers is caring for one another. It leads me to realize that our individual call is a part of the church’s call. God reaches us through other people, and the church exists as a place where God communicates to us what he wants us to know. It may be through a sermon or a Sunday school lesson, or more likely through the interest and kindness of another person towards us.

Reflection question: Think back over the past few months and try to remember what people have said to you about your impact upon their lives. If you can’t remember any specific instance, think instead of those who have made a difference in your life. What was it they did? How did it affect you? What can you learn from this situation?

Unity in the Body of Christ
Ephesians 4:1-5, 7-16

These verses from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians are some of my favorite in Scripture. I see two important messages here. The first is that how we live matters. Paul asks us to live our lives in a way that is worthy of our faith in Christ. This is a responsibility that we each have. This leads to a question of what it means to live a life worthy of the call we have received. It seems that there is a two-step process. First is a call to faith and devotion to Jesus Christ. That call is followed by a call to make our faith real and tangible in how we live. The call that we receive, just like Abraham’s, is a call to live in Christ, doing things that are worthy of our call to be apart of God’s family.

The next question is also in two parts. What am I to do as my call? And then, how am I to do it? Paul is presenting us the idea that the church is a place where we discover our call and are equipped to follow our call wherever it leads. When we do there is a specific impact that comes. “… so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming.” There is a two-part benefit to our receiving and following our call. First, the church grows in strength, and secondly, we do too.

Reflection question: If you were to feel stronger about your faith and service to Jesus Christ, what do you feel you need to learn or develop in order to be stronger?

Spiritual Gifts and Love
1 Corinthians 12:1-31
1 Corinthians 13:1-13

These last two texts address two aspects of our call that need to always be kept together. The first is our spiritual gifts, and the second is how love needs to always be at the center of our lives.

My experience has shown me that we discover our gifts and strengths through two sources. One is experience. We participate in an event or activity, and our contribution matters to the outcome. We make the connection between what I did and the success of the event. Then we realize that I can do something that makes a difference. We feel good about ourselves and look for other opportunities to participate. This is the tangible, doing aspect of discovering our gifts.

Think of our call from God like we are learning a craft. We have an inkling of an idea that we’d like to learn something. If maybe woodworking or playing the guitar, but something deep inside of us connects with the idea of doing that specific thing. As we practice and grow in ability, we discover that we may like the idea of doing something, but don’t have the talent for it, or we find that we are actually good at it. Then we want to do more. Our call from God is a discovery process. We don’t know everything at the beginning. We learn what we need to know as we proceed along the path of growth.

The second way we discover our gifts is through the advice and encouragement of others. It isn’t necessarily a close friend or family member. In reality, it probably isn’t. That encouragement typically comes from someone who thanks us for what we did.

Reflection question: Over the past year, what have you done that really made the difference in a situation or in the life of someone, whether in the church or elsewhere? Whose life was touched by your? What situation was made better because of your contribution? And, who benefited from the difference you made? Write these thoughts down because they are indicators of where God’s call may be leading you.

In Addition: I realized later after posting this that this is not a very profound statement of God's call to the church. It isn't suppose to be. Rather, it is intended to be basic and simple. It is basic and simple where are the hardest because they exist within the realm of our own abilities. So, may God grant you the courage to fulfill your call, whatever it may be.

History or the future

2007-10-02T22:56:45-04:00

One of the great assets of Presbyterian churches is our history. We see the history of our congregations as one of our great strengths. And it is, but it can also be a great impediment to being the church we need to be in the future. While there is much to say about this, I want to be brief.

When the history of the church takes prominence in the life of the church it creates an environment of preservation. The expectation by the membership is to not change, but to preserve the past in the present. Often pastors get into trouble because they have insufficiently protected the past. I often speak of the pastor as "the curator of the museum of memories." One of my client churches actually has a museum in their church, and they are justly proud of their 200 years of ministry.

However, they are like many churches. Their honoring of the past has hidden liabilities in it.

1. It assumes that new people want to share that history at the level they do.
2. It breeds a passivism that is critical and defensive.
3. It is a selective memory that provides a basis for no change or even the addressing of potential change. The only change is to return to the golden days of the past.
4. It assumes that the current strengths of the church are the same as the good old days or that those strengths or practices of the past are still relevant for today.
5. If they know that the church is decline, then the answer is to return to a time with the church was strong.

This phenomenon is no respecter of theology, culture or region. Even new church developments quickly develop this behavior. So, what is the answer?

1. Whatever your past strengths are, they still matter. They just need to be interpreted for a contemporary time.
2. The preservation of the history of the church cannot be the church's mission. That mission needs to be a call from God to be a loving, redemptive force in the world. Most likely, the strengths of the past were built on a foundation of a vital, healthy church life.
3. An honest appraisal of the church's current situation is essential if the future is to become a realistic aspiration. Except in certain situations, I don't find that reliving the issues of the past are productive for creating a hopeful vision of the future.
4. Membership identity needs to shift from the church to the church's mission from God. It is a shift from membership to call.
5. You need to honor the past by looking to the future. This requires a change in mindset to determine what should be the impact of the church in the future. Whatever that impact is functions in the same way that the impact of the church in the past did to create the love, devotion and commitment of people to the church.

The key to making this shift of perspective lies with the pastor and the Session. You are the leaders of the church, and if you can honestly address this reality, then you have made the most important step forward. All subsequent steps will be easy compared to the one that admits need.

If you want to know more, just give me a call or send an email.

A Place for Asking the Big Questions

2007-09-29T21:18:08-04:00

Question: Have all the Big Questions been answered? If they have, does that mean that we are not suppose to ask them any more, just accept the answers and go on with life?

This is what I thought when I read the exchange in Comment about whether colleges are letting students ask the Big Questions any longer.

Start with Gideon Strauss' posting, and follow the links.

The other question that came to mind is whether the church is a place where people can ask the Big Questions.

I find question asking essential to life. It is like breathing air. My leadership blog is entitled Leading Questions for a reason. Here's what I think.

People who don't ask questions don't have answers. People who think they have answers and don't ask questions don't know what they don't know. And in a world of rapidly expanding knowledge, this is a dangerous proposition.

This is part of the reason why I focus so heavily on asking questions in my client work.

The other day, in a meeting with the Session of a church, I asked rhetorical questions. The only reason they were rhetorical was because I knew they had never asked these questions and therefore didn't have answers. I was trying to provoke them to think about their church and their faith in a different way.

Too often when the Big Questions are invoked, the discussion becomes an intellectual debate about truth or logic or historical theology. When the Big Questions are asked, we also need to ask, "What am I supposed to do?" In many of these discussions, it seems all that matters is being right, or having the correct answer.

So, I'll concluded with this question, "Is it possible to have a complete and final answer to one of the Big Questions, and not be able to practice it in real life?

For example, "Is there a God?" That is one of the Big Questions.

If we answer yes, then what sort of life does that lead to, and for those of who do believe, are we living it.

If the answer is no, then what sort of life should we need live?

What this really shows is that every answer leads to another question and so forth.

Ultimately, our mental, emotional and spiritual health is a product of the questions we ask and the answers we live.

So, do you think the church is a place where the Big Questions should be asked?

Worship and Mission - The Ground-Zero of Change

2007-09-28T04:26:08-04:00

This brief post by Virginia Postrel opened up a window to a world I had not considered, the pre-Reformation world of England. She points to an Atlantic Monthly article by Ben Schwartz on the historical writings of Eamon Duffy. Until this posting, I had never heard of Duffy. I now want to read him.

What this suggests to me is another reason to believe that we are at a transition point in both the Reformation era and in Christendom at large. Here we have an affirmation of the church prior to the Reformation that, seemingly, is not simply an advocacy of Rome. Instead, it is something simpler, less political, less institutional, more personal, maybe more spiritual, and that is the practice of worship as experienced by Christian believers.

What is provocative about this notion is the contrast between pre-Reformation and Reformation worship. One is sensory and the other more intellectual. Is it any wonder that out of the Reformation ethos, the Enlightenment was born. An intellectual movement that essentially believed that life could be ordered by the mind. Is that also not what transpired in much of the church as "systems" of theology were developed that intended to encapsulate the whole of the Gospel in a systematic order. I can't help thinking of my theology professors' use of Louis Berkof's Systematic Theology as a prime example of Reformed systematic thought. Is this not the source - not Berkof, but this mindset - of much of the controversy that afflicts us today - a belief in the rightness and purity of our systems of theology? Is this not at the heart of the schism that is dividing our denomination once again?

This transition point begins with changes in worship. First, religion became personal with the charismatic movement, rising out of the older Pentecostal revivals of the past century. Worship became personal. Then following came the shift in worship style. Contemporary music, casual dress, liturgical dance, narrative dramatic presentations all shifted the focus of worship away from the centrality of the sermon. That second shift has taken place as the ministry of the church moves from the pastor or professional staff to the people as they discover their own personal call to mission. This is the medieval order slipping back into the life of the church.

As I lay in bed tonight, I was thinking about how this fits with what I am seeing as the challenges before traditional mainsteam Presbyterian churches.

The image I have is of a congregation who is essentially passive in their church participation. Everything is focused on the pastor. There is a not-so-benign belief that the church is about the pastor, focused on the performance of Sunday morning. Because it is passive, it is also critical.

In so many of my church projects, there is an undercurrent of disaffection with the pastor. Is it warranted? It depends. Depends on what your expectations are. If your expectations are for perfection and a vicarious uplifting spiritual experience that lasts for seven days until your next spiritual fix is administered, then you'll be disappointed. The result is isolation and alienation of the clergy from the people and the people from a genuine faith lived out through the church.

Hear me in what I am saying. What we now have is a church of spectator/critics who are alienated from the kind of genuine experience of Christ that is more indicative of pre-Reformation medieval worship. They are not only alienated from the experience, but also from the assurance of Christ's love that comes through the transformation of one's life from passive spectator to active servant of Christ.

The huge question in my mind is how can a church change, and change before it is too late. It would seem, that it begins with how worship is experienced leading to a change in understanding not primarily the role of the pastor, but rather what God calls me to be and do through the church. As I worked with a church that is in this transition, the trick has been to shift the emphasis away from the pastor to the people. And this is done first with the Session. Here is the ground-zero of change for the church. It starts here. If there is no true experience of worship, then it is much more difficult to understand our individual call within the context of the church.

Ministry of Hope - A Malawi mission story

2007-09-24T17:12:56-04:00

Jim Skidmore, a long time friend, sent me this letter from Nancy Dimmock. Nancy and her husband, Frank, are Presbyterian missionaries, just recently relocated to Lesotho from Malawi. This letter tells a story about the Ministry of Hope in Malawi. that I find is a great encouragement to God's spirit alive in the church. I hope you will share it with your friends, families and churches.

July 21, 2007

The Honourable Deputy Minister of Gender, ChildWelfare and Community Services,

The Board Chairman of Ministry of Hope; The U.S. Ambassador; The Ambassador from South Africa; The Director of Social Services; The staff of Ministry of Hope; Foster and Adoptive parents; All children; Ladies and Gentlemen

I am so moved and honoured by this wonderful occasion. What pleases me most is that it is an occasion which honours and values Children. We lift them up and acknowledge that they are indeed a blessing. They are a blessing to our families; they are a blessing to our nation; they are a blessing to our world. They enrich our lives. They teach us about love and joy and wonder and responsibility and challenge and hope. It is a privilege to serve them.

I do want to correct one misconception. The real founder of Ministry of Hope is Fletcher Matandika. This is important for the sake of truth and for your encouragement. This ministry is local and grass roots. It was started by a Malawian and is being run by Malawians. God gave Fletcher the original vision and motivation to reach out to the needy children in the Matapila area – TA Mazengera. That first Saturday in April 1999 when he had a small tea party and Bible study there were 60 children registered. It has now grown to 6 community based child care centers in villages north and south of Lilongwe, caring for almost 3500 children on a daily basis. And it really is a model of care that can and should be replicated throughout the country. It is a day care program which is commited to meeting the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of children, supported by volunteers in their communities and giving support and encouragement to their caregivers as well. It is my prayer that God will raise up more young men and women like Gift and Shadrach and Jimmy and William and other center supervisors, who will establish these centers of care for children, both in the villages and the cities of Malawi – teaching them that they are precious and full of potential and teaching them to honour and serve the God who loves them so much.

It was in September 2000 that God brought me to the ministry. I had been helping Fletcher behind the scenes with prayer and some occasional typing. One Saturday he asked my husband Frank and I to come and see what was happening. We went and saw him caring for several hundred children. We saw in their faces the simple joy of a full belly and a place to belong, surrounded by people who care. And we also saw an extremely malnourished infant sitting on her auntie’s lap. My husband, who has been working in health and nutrition in Africa for 20 years, realized at once that the baby’s life was on the line. We returned to town and couldn’t sleep. First thing Monday morning we went to the District Social Welfare office and told Amai Chisala the story. To her everlasting credit, she was willing to go at once and see what could be done for the child.

It turned out that the child’s mother had died the previous February of a suspected AIDS related illness. The husband had disappeared. The grandmother was very elderly and infirm. No one wanted the responsibility of the care of the infant left behind. Her auntie had stepped forward at the last minute, but was struggling with her care. She agreed to release the child to the government and Mrs. Chisala brought her to us.

I took the infant to the doctor immediately. He was not encouraging. She was 2 ½ years old and weighed 5.5 kg! He said she had a 50% chance to live. So I said, OK, what do we have to do to give her that 50% chance? And he inserted a nasogastric feeding tube down her nose and into her stomach and told us to feed her every hour around the clock with a rich soya phala. We did this, and after one week, she had regained some energy and interest in life. One day while sitting on my lap during a meal, she reached out and began to eat by herself. After two weeks we were able to take the tube out and she was on her way back to health. She was quite stunted for a couple of years, but now has completely caught up with her age mates. She is a beautiful and healthy 9-year old.

The extended family released her for adoption through Social Welfare and she became a part of our family. Her given name was Alifa. We kept her name. She was the first-born of her birth mother. And she was the first-born of what became the crisis nursery. Through Alifa we learned about the plight of infants when they lose their mothers in various ways. We also learned how to care for them and learned about the processes and caregivers and government structures and procedures in place for their care. We became connected to the police and the hospitals, working in partnership with them, to provide crisis care for these very youngest in our nation.

The Crisis Nursery was officially established under the Ministry of Hope with the blessing of the Department of Social Welfare in October, 2002. Since that time, we can all proudly take credit for saving over 300 babies who would otherwise almost surely have perished. The wonderful, committed, loving mothers and fathers at the Crisis Nursery, The Department of Social Services, the Victim Support Unit of the police, the hospitals, community-based care center supervisors, Community service organizations like the Rotary Club, the women of the church, lawyers and the judicial system, embassy personnel, many volunteers and of course, the families that have taken these babies into their hearts and homes have all been a part of giving these children a chance at Life. Each of these babies has a story of miracles and hope like Alifa’s. What a privilege it is for each one of us to be a part of those stories.

I hope you’ll bear with me for a few more minutes. While I have the ears of this esteemed audience I have a few words of admonition as well. Those of us gathered here have been given both a privilege and a responsibility. The responsibility is to be the voice for the children in places of policy and power. They cannot petition Parliament on their own behalf. They cannot make policy on their own behalf. They cannot protect themselves or act in their own best interest. We are the ones who must do that. Please, my friends, make their best interest your aim. It can be your justification and your source of courage. Yes, laws need to be established to protect the children, but also to facilitate their care. There needs to be flexibility. There needs to trust and collegiality between us. The needs of infants are acute and need to be met in a timely manner. Their sense of security and identity are at stake. When a mother is carrying a child in her womb, there are many unknowns and some insecurity. She longs to hold the child and get to know her child and help her child know that she belongs and is loved and protected. This is very much like the fostering period. There are uncertainties and insecurities. The foster parents long to protect their child with their name and their resources and help her know that she belongs and is loved. To prolong the pregnancy by even a few days is agony to the mother. Could we not consider this natural time frame of 9 months to be our working frame to determine the best care for an orphaned child? It is certainly possible if we work together. We can share information and transportation and facilitate each others’ work in a variety of ways to make this happen. The children need for us to make them a priority and to make our decisions in their best interest.

Thank you for your attention to my few remarks. Thank you for all of your hard work on behalf of the babies and children of this great nation. Please be encouraged now with the words of 1 Chronicles 16:8-12

“Give thanks to the Lord and pray to him.
Tell the nations what he has done.
Sing to him; Sing praises to him.
Tell about all his miracles.
Be glad that you are his;
Let those who seek the Lord be happy.
Depend on the Lord and his strength;
Always go to him for help.
Remember the miracles his has done,
His wonders, and his decisions.”

Thank you and may God bless us all.

Nancy Dimmock

If Nancy's letter moves you to contribute, you can do so at,

Ministry of Hope, Inc.
P.O. Box 1462
Black Mountain, NC 28711

The shifting ground under the church

2007-09-16T11:05:49-04:00

Roger Nishioka, Columbia seminary professor, has been looking at trends in what he terms the "post-denominational young adult" cohort. Leslie Scanlon in Presbyterian Outlook reports on what his research is showing.

“Pay attention to trends,” Nishioka advised the Presbyterian Communicators Network, meeting in Louisville in early August. “Fads are what toss us to and fro,” often as a way of marketing new products. “But trends are worthy of your attention.” His research, for example, has investigated why so few young adults stay with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), even if they have been baptized and confirmed in the denomination and, in many cases, were involved in their high school youth groups.

“They’re saying they’re post-denominational,” Nishioka told the Presbyterian communicators. “That denominations really and truly do not matter.” In many ways, the religious distance among Protestant denominations is collapsing, he said. Fifty ears ago, a Presbyterian marrying a Methodist “was a big deal. Now we’re just glad they’re getting married.”

So for many young adults, the issue of denominational affiliation is insignificant. Instead, as they consider whether to become involved in a church, the question is, “Is the Holy Spirit active in this place?”

Roger notes the following trends.

From tribal education to immigrant education

"... congregations would do better off to consider new folks as immigrants — people unfamiliar with the landscape — than as people already familiar with the tribal ways ... So if someone stands up and says, “Let’s open the Bible to this familiar story” or “Let’s sing this familiar song,” that can come across as saying, “You don’t belong. The gospel’s not for you. This is just for the tribe,” Nishioka explained. The good news is just for “people who think like us, who are at our income levels, our educational attainment levels, all of that.”

But that leaves out so many."

From mission out there to mission right here

“it is so clear that there is a weariness and a wariness among these young adults that mission is always somewhere far away, out there. … They’re wondering … ‘Do we have any impact right here where we live?’ ”

From reasoned spirituality to mystery-filled spirituality

Many young people today are drawn to a sense of mystery, awe and wonder — to an approach to spirituality that’s based on more than reason, which can make some rationally-leaning Presbyterians nervous.

From official leadership to gifted leadership

... the use of commissioned lay pastors in the PC(USA), a program that bubbled up from the grassroots. At first, some involved with the national levels of the church were skeptical.

But Nishioka thought as the proposal flew through the General Assembly: “Good grief, is it possible that the Holy Spirit is at work in this place?”

What he sees there — and what Nishioka says he sees young adults expecting — is a shift from leadership in the church based on credentials alone to leadership based on gifts among all who are willing to serve.

From long-term planning to short-term planning

In a world in which change comes so rapidly, an important question is how agile the PC(USA) can be, Nishioka said. For example, he recounted how his father, a retired pastor, once served on a presbytery planning committee that took seven years to draft a 10-year plan.

From mass evangelism to one-on-one evangelism

... congregations want to learn “how to talk to people about Jesus Christ in a way that isn’t coercive or manipulative, that isn’t oppressive, but that engages them,” Nishioka said. His friend told him: “We are besieged by these requests” for such training.

From "traditioning" to experience

“This is the most image-conscious and image-driven generation in history,” Nishioka said. “If they don’t see it, they don’t know it.”

And the author Sharon Daloz Parks, in the book Big Questions, Worthy Dreams, says “we owe young adults when they come to worship three images,” Nishioka said. “In worship, young adults should see an image of hope. They should see the image of what cannot be allowed. And they should see an image of life in Jesus Christ.”

From duty and responsibility to "What's in it for Me?"

There’s no question: this is a consumer age. “The influence of consumer culture means we’re looking for what meets our needs,” Nishioka said.

And that poses questions for religious institutions — from seminaries trying to decide what are necessary amenities to include as they build new residence halls, to congregations setting priorities for what to do next.

Recently I gave a presentation to the leadership of a large Presbyterian church where I was asked to speak about current trends that I saw happening in the church. Reading Roger's list was helpful because I realized that I wasn't too far off his perspective. Here's what I presented. Our perspectives are different however. He is looking at this from a generational perspective as a seminary faculty member more embedded within network of the denomination. My perspective is almost that of an outsider, consultant to churches, whose vantage point is not from the inside out.

For this presentation, I was asked in particular to look at trends in the four areas that were most significantly affecting their congregation - Membership, Stewardship, Worship & Communication. Here are the trends that I see. It is a shifting landscape that requires pastors, members and churches to learn to how to manage the transition that is now taking place.

Transition from 1^st Generation (20^th century) renewal/change movements to 2^nd Generation (21^st century) movements: *This is a representative list, not an exhaustive one.

1st Generation Movements 1940’s to 1990’s

Jesus Movement
Fundamentalists
Non-Fundamentalist Evangelicals
Charismatics
Lay Renewal
Mainstream Schismatics
Neo-Orthodox
Liberation Theology
Social Gospel

2^nd Generation Movements 1990’s to Today

Post-modern
Post-liberal
Post-evangelical
Post-charismatic
Post-Christian
Radical Orthodoxy
Generous Orthodoxy
Emergent
Missional

MEMBERSHIP Shift

From Member to Personal Call
From Institution to Community
From Consumer to Contributor

Shift to Personal Call

Faith Experience Needs To Be Personally Meaningful & Socially Fulfilling

WORSHIP Shift

Shift away from a Sermon-centric, Music-centric, Sunday-centric & Performance-centric Worship

Shift to an Ancient/Future Liturgy

Music, prayer, scripture, sermon and congregational response are integrated for an experience of God’s presence and communal unity.

Shift from Consumer to Contributor

Consumer Mindset:

Church Serves Me.

Contributor Mindset:

I serve Christ through participation and contribution.

STEWARDSHIP Shift

From a Budget Focus to a Whole Life Focus.
From Annual Campaign to Year-round Program.

COMMUNICATION Shift

From a One-Way, Formal Distribution of Information to a Two-Way, Informal Conversation as a Community.

Communication Technology

Newsletters
Worship Bulletin
IM: Instant Messenger
Websites
Email
Weblog
Podcasts
Live-Streaming Video
Social Network Sites
Parking Lot

Communal Communication

Small Groups
Conversational Planning Projects
Social Gatherings
Stories and Testimonies
Service and Outreach

Other Trends

The Role of Mission

Faith and Personal Call
From a Sending Church to a Church that is Sent

Global Christianity as the Future of the Church

Africa
1900 – 10 million Christians 10% of population
2000 - 360 million Christians 46% of population
Source – Philip Jenkins, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life

Leonard Sweet - Church in 21^st century

EPIC:
Experience
Image-rich
Participatory
Connecting

It is important to understand the changes that are happening in the church. Where there is a lack of understanding, there is also resistance to change. However, if you look through these two trends lists, you'll find that where the church is changing is in many ways validating through fresh means the values that older generations have had about the church.

We are in the midst of the greatest shift in the church of the past 500 years. These observations are hints at what is to come. I like Roger am very hopeful and confident about the future of the church.

Note: if you have gotten this far, you may be curious about the reference to the parking lot as a communication technology. Watch what happens in the parking lot after church. Listen to the conversations. When communication is poorly developed in a church, the parking lot is where the real honest communication is taking place. Therefore, it is my contention that we need to bring the parking lot conversation into the church.

The Intellectual Gulf

2007-09-09T21:25:42-04:00

There is an intellectual gulf that exists between the church and the business world. It is deep and wide, and has served to ghettoize the church and marginalize the business world's contribution to God's mission in the world. Complaints that churches are too consumerist or too business-like is not an argument against the church applying business ideas, but about the poor way that business ideas are applied. That is a leadership character issue along with the intellectual one.

The same could be said of businesses that place profit over everything else. They have narrowed down the essentials to financial numbers. As a result, you get Enron at the most extreme. The problem, like in the church, is an intellectual one. It is not seeing the nature of the organization in large enough terms to understand the context in which it functions.

The issue isn't that business ideas are some how better than church ideas, they are not. The issue is the nature of ideas and their appropriate application. This is a problem for both churches and businesses. Another reason why the actual gulf doesn't have to exist.

This problem in the church is an intellectual one at its core. Our conceptualization of the church, for the most part, predates the emergence of the modern business. There have always been small business owners, and a wealthy class that were church goers. Many of these people served on church boards, and brought their business expertise for organization and financial management to the church. The problem is not with business people serving as church officers. It is their ideas of what it takes to operate a successful business, which often are inappropriate or simply mistaken.

For example, take a business owner who is a poor marketer of his business. He becomes an officer of the church, and immediately becomes an expert on all aspects of the business of the church. This is why this intellectual gulf is serious. Because there is no accepted common ground, the business person subjects the church to the same mediocrity that he provides his business. The problem isn't the difference between churches and businesses, but the intellectual ground upon which both operate.

There is little, if any attention, given to organization and management in seminary, we have multiple generations of pastors who lack any background in business ideas. Just working in a business prior to going to seminary or an undergrad business degree is no guarantee that a pastor will have the intellectual grounding to bridge the intellectual divide that separates the business world from the church.

My experience working with churches is that this divide exists, and is widening because the business world is changing. We have today a growing entrepreneurial society whose rules for business are different than when my father finished college in 1949, and went to work for the only company he ever worked for. If you have been out of school for 5 years, and have read little during this time, then you are way behind the intellectual curve. However, if you are a blog reader, then you are probably on the cutting edge of ideas. If you are twenty years out of graduate school, your education needs to start all over again. It was one of the reasons that I wrote a series of book reviews, available as a PDF, entitled Innovative Business Ideas for Churches.

This posting germinated as I read two PDF's from Tom Peters.

Wherefore The Impact Of Superior Management Practice on Increased Human Welfare and the Pursuit of Happiness and Excellence? (Blog Link / PDF Link)

Why Else Get Out of Bed in the Morning? (Blog Link / PDF Link)

Tom Peters is different than every other management speaker/thinker there is. He is an idea person who uses the world of ideas as motivational fodder to shake business people out of the self-imposed intellectual slumber. I like his passion, his expansive reach, and for all his over-the-top eccentricity, he is an intellectual who understands that he doesn't know everything. To read through one of his PowerPoint presentations is like traveling on a bullet train at 150 miles per hour. No way you can catch all the scenery, but to be able to see the landscape change from plains to mountains to rainforest to coast provides a context for further trips to specific places he highlights.

Read these two thought pieces. The value to the church may or may not be immediately accessible. What I find is that Tom Peters' passion for business is equivalent to Paul's declaration of the church's organizational mission in Ephesians 4. If you think that the church's purpose is to provide each person the training and opportunity to serve Christ through their individual gifts then you'll understand that Peters sees business in much the same light.

The link between churches and businesses is not management structures or financial accountability. The link that bridges the intellectual divide is the question as to what it is that people are to do as a member of this organization.

Here's a sample of Peters' thinking. Read this as if he in front of a crowd of 5000 people.

Passionate servant leaders, determined to create a legacy of earthshaking transformation in their domain (a 600SF retail space, a 4-person training department, an urban school, a rural school, a city, a nation), create/must necessarily create organizations which are no less than Cathedrals in which the full and awesome power of the Imagination and Spirit and native Entrepreneurial flair (We are all entrepreneurs—Muhammad Yunus) of diverse individuals (100% creative Talent—from checkout to lab, from Apple to Wegmans to Jane’s oneperson accountancy in Invercargill NZ) is unleashed in passionate pursuit of jointly perceived soaring purpose (= win a Nobel peace prize like Yunus, or at least do something worthy of bragging about 25 years from now to your grandkids) and personal and client service Excellence.

Such Talent unbound pursue Quests—rapidly and relentlessly experimenting and failing and trying again—which surprise and surpass and redefine the expectations of the individual and the servant leader alike. The collective “products” of these Quests offer the best chance of achieving rapid organizational and individual adaptation to fast-transforming environments and provide the nutrition for continuing (and sometimes dramatic) re-imaginings, which re-draw the boundaries of industries and communities and human achievement and the very conception of what is possible.

In different words, this is discipleship.

If you find the two essays appealing, then let me suggest that you read his book, ReImagine!

When people in the church say the church isn't a business, I wonder what they actually think a business is. If Tom Peters is right, then what churches are going to find in the future, are not people who are used to being intellectually disengaged, are simply compliant in a passive aggressive way or who have segmented the church's role in their lives into something disconnected from their daily existence. Instead, the church is going to find people who are more entrepreneurial in the approach to life, and expect the church to be that way. If your church isn't then they are going to go elsewhere. And this is precisely why so many mainstream traditional churches are not able to sustain the level of membership that they had in the past. They are operating on an inappropriate business model, that of the old line bureaucratic corporation of fifty years ago.

Where does one start to bridge the divide? It starts with being intellectually curious. Turn off the TV. Stop reading the same stuff that you been reading since you last sat in a class room. And most importantly, be tremendously bothered by the fact that what you don't know is going to matter in the future. Start asking questions, and don't rest until the answer leads to a specific action step that your church or business can take. Foster this environment in the church, and the intellectual divide will narrow and close for the benefit of all.

Is this the way you feel about your church?

2007-09-07T21:36:21-04:00

As I watched this video, I felt that it did a good job of describing the problem that many churches have in communicating with their members.

She is going to leave and when she gets to the parking lot, she's going to call someone so she can ventilate her anger. The most important church conversations are taking place in the parking lot. Its time to bring the parking lot conversation into the church.

Communication is a conversation, not an ad campaign.

HT: Terry Heaton at POMO blog

Theory-based or Experience-based

2007-09-05T05:45:00-04:00

Sunday:
For a long time, I've been uncomfortable with the dualistic, neo-Platonic thinking that has characterized Christianity since the days of Augustine. Recently, I've begun to think about the issue in this way.

The Christian faith began as a movement of people in response to Jesus ministry and his sacrificial death and resurrection. The first Christians came to faith in the context of the proclamation of that message and a community of people who found one another. I'm thinking of Acts 2 here, the whole chapter.

It seems to me that not long after the first generation of "Christians" passed, that a shift was made to a Christianity that was more theory than experience. Was Jesus ministry on earth a theory-based one, or was his ministry one where people experienced God incarnate. Did Jesus have a formula for how he was going to prepare the disciples for their work after he was gone? Or, did he relate to them at their point of need, so that he mentored to them to be prepared to be apostles?

A Platonic theory-based religion starts with some pure, perfect notion of who God is, what the church is and what it means to be a Christian, and then tries to conform experience around that theory. It is a Platonic thing because Plato saw the things of this world as imperfect representations of the perfect world of the ideal. What this creates is a dualistic world where we live with the ideal always pressing in on us that we are just not good enough, so to speak.

I'm coming to the conclusion that this dualistic conception is an inaccurate picture of what God has created. First, what God created was good. That stuff is still here, and still good. The impact of sin is through we human beings as agents of sin's corruption. Second, when sin entered in, I'm not sure it bifurcated (nice word) all of creation into good and evil. Instead, I think it obscured a complete knowledge of the world, so that we never see the whole, and even the parts are not absolutely clear. But that is not the same as saying this world is evil and that world of ideals is good.

This dualism is prevalent in the church as some churches are unable to deal with imperfection. They demand of others which they cannot provide for themselves, absolute idealistic perfection. What ends up happening is that things like the Bible become idealistic icons that lose their connection to the real world because we must see them in some idealistic state. Pastors suffer the same dualistic fate as they are unable to be real people with real feelings and real needs, and it is worst for their spouses.

I've concluded that much of the church lives in an unrealistic realm of espousing one thing and living another. It creates anxiety and anger. The psychological damage from this religious/philosophical schizophrenia is serious. It forces people to treat those who are different, as subhuman. In this sense we see people in Flannery O'Connor's words as "artificial niggers." Pardon the phrase. It is also why we shoot our wounded in the church. They represent what we cannot allow, an imperfect and a flawed humanity. And because we know in our own hearts that we are the same, but can not admit to it, it makes our vengeance towards those who are broken that much more troubling.

So, the conclusion I am reaching is that the church has been victimized by idealized theories about Jesus, the Bible and the church. It is not a new thing, but an old thing, and a reason why Christianity thrives in cultures of low literacy. (Clarification: It's not a theory to them; it's real, until someone intellectually manipulates them to think otherwise.) Theorizing does not feed your family when you live at a subsistence level. The idea suggests that there is a golden mean that we all must approach, or we are considered to be outside of the norm. It is seen in the idea that denominations and differing traditions are examples of disunity in the church.

What I'd like to suggest to people is that there is no idealized theoretical world. We live in the only world that exists. In spite of what we read in Revelation, I have the sense that the new heaven and the new earth will be like the earth we already know. There is no pie-in-the-sky. There is only a beneficent God who loves his creatures even as they fail to love him in return. And that we come to understand this, not through abstract idealistic systems of theology, but through the kindness and interest of average people who care for others out of their own experience of receiving God's love. Theology works when it is submitted to the test of experience, not vice-versa.

Does this mean that all theology is wrong-headed. No. It simply means that theoretical systems are idealistic human creations that seek to create a coherent perspective based on a selection of ideas from Scripture and the history of the church.

If you look at the conflicts that afflict us, at the heart of them are claims of truth that start as an idea in search of scriptural justification and end up as a tyranny upon unsuspecting people.

If all this seems far fetched, I encourage you to read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan where he addresses this topic in a very different context. I'm convinced that he is right. His perspective is a great challenge to all those for whom the church is some idealized image derived from the Scripture. The reality is life is messy, and it is far more dependent upon God's grace and our daily receptivity of it than any preacher can imagine or express. And I would not have it any other way.

In Addition, the next day: After a 400 mile trip today, thinking about this issue, what I also want to add is that when we trust in our theories, we are putting Christ one additional step removed from us. Christ has to fit into the theory, whether that theory is Reformed, Wesleyan, Pentecostal, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or eclectic. As I have moved away from the theory-centric faith - its taken about 15 years - what I've discovered is a capacity to live in the moment, being able to tell where God is in that moment. In so doing, I'm more relaxed about doing that which is placed before me. I don't have a formula that I'm trying to conform to. Instead, I'm trying to understand what believers in non-Western cultures understand, how God is a direct, immediate presence. By living in the moment, I am basically saying that I trust that God meets me in that moment. I cannot predict what will happen, or what I must do to follow God's lead. All I can do is commit to being present at that moment.

Part of what I'm reacting to is the multiple times I was taught in seminary that experience is bad and sola scriptura is the only norm. I trust the Scripture. I have a high-view of Scripture, but what I find is that many on both the right and left treat the Scripture as a proof-text for their theories about God, Christ, the church and the faith. To deny the validity of our experience is to deny our essential humanity. I'm far from being an anti-intellectual. I'm spent the last 35 years challenging myself intellectually, and where it has taken me is away from theory toward experience.

What I'm trying not to be is a dualist who separates reality into the ideal and the shadow of the ideal. When we do so, we essentially are saying what we do here has less value because it is less than ideal. All I know is that the faith that remains as an intellectual construct, is a faith that has not received its just validation. Faith is different than belief. It is the intersection of belief with life, and where we find the Spirit of God meeting us.

What will the church be like if it suddenly gave up the theories and focused on experience. We'd have less religion and more reality. When someone claims that their life is in Christ, it wouldn't be a subject of intellectual scrutiny, but rather a testimony to how they live each day.

I said above that I believe that the new heaven and new earth will be much like what we have here now. My reason for saying this is two-fold, first it affirms the essential goodness of God's creative act "in the beginning." Second, it affirms the lives we live now, and that we live by faith. Instead of faith being a future insurance policy, it is a transformative experience of grace, changing us from what we were to what we will be. This is partly why I see all of life as in transition.

In Addition 2, a week later: It occurred to me after rereading this a week later, that a good example of what I am talking about can be found in the Boy Scout approach to leadership development. Scouts is a confessional religion. Each week we recite our creeds - the Boy Scout oath and law - because it is by these values and principles that scouting is founded. The boys learn the oath and law just like Presbyterians learn to say the Apostles Creed. However, ask a boy what the last principle of the law is, and he'd have to recite in his mind the whole thing. Same with confessional Christians for whom the Apostles Creed is so familiar it isn't.

As a scout progresses through the early ranks of Tenderfoot, Second class and First class, one of the requirements is for the boy is to demonstrate how he lives the Spirit of Scouting through the Boy Scout Oath and Law. What we do in our troop is ask this question: "Tell me how the oath and the law matter in your daily life. Give me examples of what you are doing that you can directly connect to a principle in the oath and law. I don't want to know what you think you could do. I want to know what you are doing."

What we are fighting is the tendency to rest in an intellectual adherence to theory and formula rather than active application of principles to life. Life is basically a process of decision and action, followed by reflection, decision and action. The Ten Commandments were not given as a formula, but as a tool for analyzing how I am living. The Sermon on the Mount isn't a formula. The Boy Scout Oath and Law isn't just a good theory. The Apostle's Creed not just an affirmation of faith. These intellectual concepts are intended to be utilized as tools for decision-making and action. With that comes experience, and with experience, wisdom.

Thanks to Pastor M (see comments) and to Bill Kinnon for their kind comments.

The story of the missional church - Steve Hayner

2007-08-29T07:32:47-04:00

I've heard Steve Hayner of Columbia Seminary speak a couple times on the missional idea. Here's a article from the Presbyterian Outlook that he wrote that sort of sums his perspective.

He writes:

This way of thinking about how to “do church better” hasn’t worked. The Church in the West is dying. Europe is now “post-Christian.” The Church in the U.S. has not grown (in percentage) in more than 100 years. And many denominations, including our own, are falling precipitously. People are no longer inspired by or attracted to institutional religion. The church is being pushed to the margins.

The question is what model or methodology is best suited to turn this around. I'm skeptical of many of the contemporary models that seem to be based on old models, just restyled for a new generation.

I believe the missional idea is a key one for revitalization of the church. That said, I don't think it is as simple as it might appear. After all, you may say that your church has supported missionaries and local outreach missions for years. Isn't that what missional means? Yes and No.

Yes, in that it is about reaching out beyond the circle of the congregation. No, because it isn't really about doing another program. It goes deeper to the church's whole orientation to what its purpose is.

It is analogous to those churches of a traditional form that took the radical step of adding contemporary praise music with a rock band to the service. In the end, what they did was slap a "new traditional" veneer on what they had always been doing. It was a reorientation. It was Extreme Makeover: Worship Edition.

The missional concept has strengths for the mainstream church because it is about the church turning from an inward focus to an outward one, and being open to where the Spirit of God will lead when they begin to see opportunities that they missed in the past.

The Joy of Work and a Joyful Workplace

2007-08-21T17:04:08-04:00

If you read enough of me, you know that I am not a dualist. I don't like drawing a line and dividing things into simple categories. The sacred and the secular is one of that dualisms that I don't find helpful to Christian discipleship.

Dennis Bakke, co-founder of AES, author of Joy at Work and brother to Christian urban missiologist, Ray Bakke, gives an excellent presentation about the nature of work and joy in Jesus Christ.

Listento his podcoast at the Work Research Foundation's website.

I don't separate sacred and secular into two separate containers. I see them as the contexts where one's call and discipleship are lived. Share this audio presentation with young people.

Schism and change in the global church

2007-08-21T00:41:08-04:00

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life held a forum for journalists entitled: Global Schism: Is the Anglican Communion Rift the First Stage in a Wider Christian Split?

Philip Jenkins, a history professor from Penn State, and maybe the most in tuned scholar on Global Christiain, was the featured presenter. it is a fascinating discussion about the schism that is taking place in the Anglican communion. It is a kin to the kind of division that is happening in Presbyterianism. So, far, in my presbytery, Western North Carolina, two churches, Montreat and Murphy, have petitioned the presbytery to leave. Negotiations continue. A third church, Marion First, has filed suit and been given an injunction to keep the church from stepping foot on church property. It is a real mess, and is totally ignorant of the kind of global developments that Jenkins' discusses.

From Jenkins opening remarks:

Christianity is going south very rapidly in terms of numbers. I've give you a quick overview, and I'm going to talk about Africa a lot. Simple reason: back in 1900, Africa had 10 million Christians representing 10 percent of the population; by 2000, that was up 360 million, to 46 percent of the population. That is the largest quantitative change that has ever occurred in the history of religion. A rising tide lifts all boats, and all denominations have been booming. The Anglicans have done very well, and the Anglican Church is going to be overwhelmingly an African body in the near future.

There is much to digest in this discussion, and is worth sharing with some members of the congregation.
A couple reactions.

1. Jenkins writes about the difference between Global North and Global South in regards their understanding of biblical authority. Here's what he says.

The more fundamental division is about the authority of the Bible, and there are a lot of reasons for this. If you have ever read Akinola's statements, he makes clear throughout: "I know all this biblical criticism stuff; I know all these arguments made about homosexuality." But there's a more basic thing: if you're in a new church in Africa or Asia, the Bible speaks to you as a more immediately relevant, more direct text, than it does for many Global North people for whom the Bible is basically part of the wallpaper.

One big reason for that is the biblical world makes sense [if you're in the Global South]; the Bible reads like it is describing the world you know immediately. But for most Americans and Europeans, if somebody cites the prohibitions on homosexuality in Leviticus, the immediate answer is: "Leviticus also says you can own slaves from neighboring countries; why can't you own Canadians?" It's a good question. If you're reading a text like Leviticus in the Global South, the bigger problem is this: you have to be warned constantly not to take the Old Testament as more important than the New.

You're dealing with people who live in, in many ways, an Old Testament world. Many Africans may not know themselves a world that practices nomadism and polygamy and blood sacrifice, but their parents did. You don't have to go far down the road to see people who are still doing these things.

Just one example out of a great many: I was once talking to some West Africans about the bits of the Bible that made sense to them in ways that could not make sense to Westerners. They said, "We live in agricultural societies, so things like the Parable of the Sower made great sense." Just talking about it, they started getting teary eyed. Then they mentioned Psalm 126. Psalm 126 is a psalm that is widely quoted, and it goes like this: "The man who goes forth into the fields in tears weeping to sow the seed will bring the sheaves again in joy." You understand perfectly well why a farmer would bring the sheaves again in joy; he's celebrating harvest time.

But why do you weep while you're sowing? "It's obvious," they said to me. "Whoever wrote this psalm was writing at a time of famine, like we had a couple of years ago. You've got the corn that's left, and you can do one of two things with it. You can feed your family with it, but if you do that, you're not a farmer anymore [because you have no seeds left] and you have to migrate to the city and become a beggar, and what's going to happen to your children and so on. Or you can take the corn literally out of the hands of your hungry children and use it as seed corn and sow it. That's why a farmer weeps while sowing the corn. It's obvious."

He talks about how the Bible is direct and immediate. This quite different than in the West where the bible is more on a symbolic intellectual construct. We can relate to the stories, but the stories not born from our culture. This is true for both liberal and conservative Western Christians.

The directness of the Bible in a rural, tribal culture was made clear to me 26 years ago when serving a refugee internship in Pakistan during the Afghan-Soviet war, we shared a recording of the Prodigal Son with the matriarch of a village. After listening to the Gospel story, she was in tears. It was clear to me that the Gospel is universal, and based on what Jenkins is saying, may be more suited to the culture of Africa.

2. Throughout my adult life the Presbyterian Church has been in schism. The great attempt at reunion never really reached its fulfillment. We are sit seeing schism because as Jenkins says,

Schisms are like revolutions: they're easier to start than to stop, and once schisms start rolling, they do tend to split further.

This certainly true in our denomination. Now here's another fascinating comment he makes about the Episcopal church that relates to our situation.

You're getting some of these splits within the Presbyterian Church. They're looking at what's happening in the Anglican world partly to see what kind of precedent is being set but also to watch for very specific legal issues. The only reason why the Episcopal Church is surviving at the moment is the Episcopal Church has a set-up, which they erected in the late 1970s after a lot of splits over women's ordination, whereby the dioceses own the property, so that if, for example, a particular church wants to secede and place itself under the archbishop of Uganda, you're very welcome to do it, but you can't take any of the property with you.

In the split in our presbytery, property is an issue. But the deeper issue is that the two sides don't understand the other side, and the bad blood runs so deep, that it is virtually impossible to see a genuine reconciliation happening any time soon.

Concluding thoughts: What does Jenkins' perspective mean for the average church?

First, that our future as a church is South. It is not a matter of emulating the Global South's churches, but rather establishing relationships whether as a congregation or through a Presbytery, with churches. Let their unique life as a church impact your local church. And if you are too small for that to happen, make it happen through your Presbytery.

Second, learn what it means for the Scripture to be direct and immediate for your congregation. It is about how the Scripture speaks to the daily experience of people. It isn't the Bible as either a set of symbols that determine whose in and whose out, or an intellectual frame of reference that is used as some cultural filter to provide a perspective from which to speak. No, it is more about how the Bible through its stories and lessons, points to the immediacy of God's activity in the lives of people and churches. It is this experience that lies at the heart of the African churches dramatic growth.

Third, read Jenkins two books, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity and The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South. Then allow this perspective to influence how you read everything else that comes across your desk. Especially, the developments that will take place over the next few years related to church's leaving our denomination.

Bless Be The Tie That Binds ... our churches and communities

2007-08-08T22:47:55-04:00

Michael Spencer has an excellent posting - Christian Unity in Appalachia - about the collaborative relationship that churches in his part of the world have, primarily because they need each other. I spent seven years in the hills of West Virginia coming to understand the nature of the people and the culture of the region. Sure there is poverty, but they are not poor. They just don't have the financial wealth that other places have. They have family, tradition, church and community. What they have is instructive for those people and churches who are able to buy whatever church life they want.

Spencer writes,

Churches and the people in them are quite poor. A megachurch here is any church with a nice facility and more than 200 members. (We have two of these, by my count.)

Because of that poverty, churches do many things together, share facilities, pool their money for community projects and help one another out without many questions of doctrine.

Most pastors are eager to work with other ministers and churches in community causes. The sense of calling to the local community is strong here.

Of course this isn't limited to Appalachia. You can find places throughout the world where poverty and lack of development are met with human ingenuity, faith and sharing. I spent two years in southwest Oklahoma before moving to West Virginia, and the sense of camaraderie that the ministers had in our corner of the state was significant. Same was true in West Virginia.

Just remember, things are not always as they appear. Small is not necessary insignificant. Remote doesn't necessarily mean out of the way. And lacking financial resources doesn't necessary mean that your poor. What we have is God's spirit that unites us as the church, and sometimes even unites us across denominational, tradition and theological barriers. And yes, sometimes in communities. All because we need one another. I think this is where it begins, recognizing that we need others.

Thanks Michael for a reminder of the beauty of the church in Appalachia.

Wither the Mainstream

2007-07-26T23:04:05-04:00

A couple interesting postings about the mainstream church worth looking at.

The InternetMonk (Michael Spencer) Mainline Churches: We’re Having a Moment Here and Andy Rowell

A Former Pastor Goes Church Shopping.

So what's interesting here? Simply, the idea that the mainstream church has something to offer than independent, nondenominational, evangelical, megachurches do not.

I have felt for quite a while that the mainstream church will go through a resurgence as young people grow into middle age and desire greater diversity in their worship experience. Two anecdotes about the same church.

A pastor of a large and growing evangelical church near where I live told me twelve years ago as they were first getting started that they were a church for people burned out on church. They were casual and non-threatening in their approach. They followed the Willow Creek model and they grew. I have lots of friends who attend this church. In describing the church as designed for "people burned out on church", my initial reaction was that they were lowering standards to appeal to people who want a low-consequence faith experience. I may have been a bit judgmental, okay, quite judgmental in my opinion. They continue to grow and now have over two thousand attending worship services.

Their youth pastor is a great guy, and is doing some very innovative work with his program. We were chatting the other day about their Saturday night service. He said, "It was started to relieve some of the pressure of numbers on Sunday morning. Its more liturgical. Lots more responsive readings. We have about 200 people coming on Saturday nights." More liturgical.

I think the larger picture is not the numbers but the continuous shifting of the ground under the church. Just because megachurches work from a numbers perspective, doesn't mean that they work in all areas. I believe we will see a resurgence of the mainstream church as young people, people younger than 40 right now, come into prominent leadership roles. There is a Facebook group advocating for a young person to be the PC(USA) moderator. I certainly would be glad to see someone under 40 in that role.

If you are in the mainstream, take heart, you day is not over. Realize the strengths of your tradition and share that with people. A better day is returning. Thanks be to God.

Being Missional

2007-07-22T21:41:26-04:00

Bill Kinnon posted a wry send up of being missional called Missional Shampoo. He's rifting off of Leslie Newbigin's missional legacy. The reaction to this bit of nonsensical fun has been the appearance of an apparent dispute over the origin and meaning of the word. Read Bill's post to get the full story. I'm not really interested in the specifics of the dispute.

So, why I'm I writing about it?

Lately, I've been thinking about how we arrive at our theological beliefs. We read a scripture passage, and immediately jump to a generalize conclusion about how God works. In seminary, we called this proof-texting. We are trained to spot a proof-texter. What we don't realize is that most of us are pretty good at reading far too much into a text.

The same is true in reverse. Words like missional that are neo-logisms are open to a variety of interpretations. Hence, disputes arise over whether one interpretation is correct and another not. Or one the original idea and another a corruption of it. Is it okay for a word to change meaning over time? I don't know. It is the first time I've thought about it.

The reality is that we do not control the meaning of words. Words serve the people who use them. Some languages are more ambiguous, like English, and so create confusion. Take C.S. Lewis' famous tract on The Four Loves. One English word - Love, four Greek ones - Phileo, Storge, Eros, Agape.

Obviously, I don't have a dog in the hunt for the origin of the term missional. Rather, I'm more interested in what it means, and the range of meanings that can be derived from the word. If one interpretation inspires a person to venture forth to do poverty work in the name of Jesus Christ, I say, Go for it. If another, finds their call in the church, God bless them.

In other words, the term missional applies to both individuals and churches. And if I may use my Circle of Impact diagram to parse this out. Missional is a word, and all words are ideas. These Ideas, like Missional, influence not only our Relationships with people, but also how we create the organizational structures of churches. So, if Missional is an Idea that we together Value in our Relationships, then Missional becomes a key term for understanding our Mission as a church, and therefore the church organizes itself to provide people in relationship a way to be Missional through their Relationships in the church. When the Idea of Missional and the Value of Missional come together a Vision for the Impact of being Missional can be realized.

The problem with many of these ideological disputes in the church is that they are predicated on a belief that we know what we know, and we know it absolutely. I think it is safer to say I know a little, and you know a little, and maybe we should figure out what we don't know and go from there.

Let me close with a quote from Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan.

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a larger personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have your read?” And the others – a very small minority – who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of the competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head. Note that the Black Swan comes form our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously.

Let us call an antischolar – someone who focuses on the unread books and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device – a skeptical empiricist.”

What Taleb writes here applies to the church and we church people as much as to any person or human institution. We have all made grandiose statements about God, Jesus, the Spirit, the church and what is and what isn't biblical, Christian and worthy of the church. We have spoken way beyond our pay grade, and because we all do it we think that it is no big deal. It is a big deal because it goes to the heart of what it means to be an authentic person, an authentic follower of Jesus Christ and an authentic pastor, theologican, church member or, forgive me, consultant.

The real test of the word missional is the impact of the people who are inspired to service by the idea. So, we need more than shampoo, we need Missional Body Wash to bring the whole body into the Missional world.

Visioning

2007-07-18T13:39:41-04:00

Hamo reflects on Bonhoeffer's comment about visionary thinking. First the Bonhoeffer quote, and then a portion of Hamo's comment.

“God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.” (Life Together)

From Hamo,

How do you know if your vision is from God or is just something that you would like to achieve - especially when there is an element of pressure to keep on coming up with ‘vision’?

Read his whole comment here, along with the others.

The question of visions is an important one. A vision is inherently visual, unlike a mission which can simply be an abstract idea. But a vision is in essence foresight. It is seeing into the future.

I know a bit about this because I've spent the past dozen years helping churches and other organizations develop a vision for the future. I do agree with Bonhoeffer. His book Life Together provides a nice counter-balance to the muscular individualism of the health and wealth gospel that is so easily found in churches today.

Leadership Character and Visions
For me the issue isn't whether God hates visions, but rather human character in community. When through some occurrence we get a glimpse of the larger world of God's presence, it is quite easy to feel like we have progressed in maturity. We may think, "God has granted me this vision because I'm now prepared for greater things." I don't think that is typically the case.

Our Western individualism shields us from what I find is the real nature of the church. For example from the same Bonhoeffer book, Life Together.

But God has put this Word in the mouth of men in order that it may be communicated to other men. When one person is struck by the Word, he speaks it to others. God has willed that we should seek and find His living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of man. Therefore, the Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth. He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother, his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.

Note that first statement, the Word is not for me, but for you. We speak, not for our benefit, but for others. If I have a vision, it isn't for me, but for the church. I am a vessel, a simple container, who pours what has been poured into me out for others' benefit.

How this works in the life of the church in the context of visioning projects is simple. The church is not one person's voice, but the collective voice of the Holy Spirit speaking individually through the whole body. If we structure the church whereby there is only one authoritative voice, then you end up with Bonhoeffer's criticism.

All too often church leaders fall into the trap of thinking that our vision for the church is Godly, when it is simply the enthusiasm of ego rush. The counter-balance to the over-exercised ego is the humility of listening to the whole church for wisdom from God. I know, I know, God speaks through the officers of the church who are elected by the people. Its the same deal. A minority elite can just be just as egotistical about their vision for the church as the individual. And so can the whole church. It is a question of intentional recognition of our need for humility.

The problem isn't really individualism, but rather hubris. It is a character issue, and only in a structure where there is both freedom and discipline can balance be found. So, if I have a vision for the future of my church, I must be willing to let the collective voice of congregation test it and distill it down to what is truly by God's spirit. This is why it is so important to have formal, structured opportunities for informal conversation in the church.

The Place for Visions in the Church
The other thing I want to say about this is to describe precisely what I see as a church's vision. For a long time I have spoken of it as a picture of the congregation at the height of its impact. My thinking has progressed as I've tried to understand the relationship between a Vision statement and a Mission and a Vision statement.

A mission statement connects the Idea of a church's mission and all that goes into that, with the structure of the church. There needs to be an agreement between the conceptualization of your mission in a set of ideas of identity, purpose and impact, and the structure of the church. If you are becoming a missional church, and don't have a mission or outreach budget, then there is an incongruence between your mission and your structure.

A values statement is ideas that connect people together. Values act as the core beliefs of the culture of the church. They are the glue that creates the bond that enables the church to hold together through times of change and conflict. If you are not clear about your values, then most likely your church will have completing values operating.

A vision statement, therefore, brings the structure of your mission together with the community of your relationships. It is a picture of what is possible when these people committed to this mission working through this structure seek to have an impact as a church.

I see these three connectors as powerful tools for uniting a congregation for its ministry. So, you see visioning in this sense is far away from the egotistical vision that Bonhoeffer criticizes.

HT: Bill Kinnon

Voices of the Virtual World: Participative Technology and the Ecclesial Revolution - Pre-release announcement

2007-07-10T06:17:36-04:00

Coming soon - Voices of the Virtual World: Participative Technology and the Ecclesial Revolution

I have a chapter in the book entitled "The Technology of Congregational Conversation."

Here's the Press Release.

You can visit the book's wikidot site here.

Chapter titles are here, and abstracts of each chapter will soon be up.

All proceeds from the book go to support the Not For Sale Campaign.

When released on July 23, you'll be able to buy as an e-book at LuLu.Com.

How would your church be described?

2007-07-03T06:58:06-04:00

Drew Marshall is a radio host on Christian radio in Toronto. He is one of these guys who likes to stir things up. So what has done, but hired a couple non-Christian people to visit five local Toronto churches and blog about their observations. It is fascinating to read their comments.

Do you know what outsiders think of your church? Probably not. Probably don't want to either.

Daryl Dash, a Toronto pastor, blogs about this project.

I really didn't like the idea at first. To me it seemed like hiring two vegans to go out and rate five steakhouses.

Maybe I was wrong. So far they've visited four churches. I don't agree with everything they've written, of course, but they've made some very perceptive observations.

Here's an excerpt from one report. Listen for the criteria for judging the authenticity of the church.

I was most impressed when he said, by way of introduction, “We believe it’s important to do things the way that Jesus actually did. Jesus gave the Good News to the poor first; that’s where we start.”

Sanctuary is a church - but also an outreach centre to women, the homeless, alcohol and drug addicts; a vibrant community; an employment centre; a small medical office; an art/music/drama programme; a support group, and much much more. In the words of Greg, “We consider everything that we do out of this building to be ‘church’. And the people that come here, they may not describe it as being in a church setting, but that’s how we see it.”

I can’t tell you how absolutely refreshing it was to hear those words. I knew I was in for a rare vision - real Christians in action. I wasn’t wrong!

And then a few paragraphs later.

Walking into the sanctuary, you see a big room with chairs in a circle, with a keyboard and guitar set-up at the base of the circle. In the centre of the circle of chairs was an altar made of wood - looked liked it was hand-carved - with “In Remembrance of Me” carved into one side. On top of this was a loaf of bread and a cup of wine - with several little mini-serving cups! As someone who has endured the horror of sharing a cup of sacred wine during cold season, I couldn’t get over the simple brilliance of this!

Opposite the keyboard (at the “12 o’clock”, if you will) was a simply-made wooden cross draped with a red cross. There was a tremendous amount of power in the simplicity of the symbolism.

Did you ever see “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”? There’s that scene near the end where Indy is faced with choosing, out of many different cups, the one that is the Holy Grail. He’s looking carefully, and amidst all the gold and silver and gleam, he picks out a simple cup that really would have befitted a pauper. And of course, that’s the cup of Christ. The metaphor is obvious, right? Jesus was a guy who valued simplicity, because keeping things simple means you can focus on what you’re doing - in his case, “being there” for the outcasts of the world.

This place is like the cup that Indy chose. Amidst all the pomp and circumstance of the Christian world out there, here lies a simple, honest place that really means it.

Here's a link to the entries posted so far. It is worth reading through them to see how people outside the church view the church, and what they expect from us.

A couple comments.

1. Culture, whether material or social, is a carrier of the Gospel. When the Gospel and the culture of the church don't integrate well, outsiders see that as inauthentic and hypocritical. The confusion about culture comes from two misguided notions. One is that style is universal and trans-temporal. In other words, there is one style for all time and every culture, and it happens to be the one that my church has.

Two is that trying to be contemporary is often confusing and distracting to outsiders. Remember McLuhan's dictum, "The medium is the message." In other words, what people see and experience is communicating to them the meaning of the Gospel. When there is a lack of integration between church style and Gospel, it probably originates in an inadequate or shallow understanding of what the Gospel and the church is to be.

2. The problem with the church trying to be relevant to a contemporary audience is that it is always copying someone else. As a result, it is always late to the party, singing a song that was sung an hour ago. If you are familiar with Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point, you'll remember his discussion about how ideas get adopted into a culture. There are four stages of adoption: Innovators, Early Adopters, Late Adopters and Laggards. Unfortunately, in many, many areas, the church looks like a late adopter or worse a laggard. This is because we are looking at culture too superficially or as if it is really neutral when employed for Gospel reasons. It doesn't matter what you intentions are if the results are destructive or counter to the message you want to communicate.

I don't think there should be one style of worship or approach to being the church. The human race is quite diverse and the church should reflect that diversity. I have no problem with large churches, small ones, urban, rural, suburban, formal, casual, etc. I don't think that homogeneous diversity is the answer either. These stylistic distinctives need to be integrated with what we believe and how we live. This is where the authenticity of the church is found.

So, if an outsider came to your church, what would they say?

Thanks to the Master of the Generous Web, Bill Kinnon, for pointing to Daryl Dash's posting on Drew Marshall's project. I look forward to reading what Marshall has to say when it is completed. I'll update when that happens.

A Random Faith

2007-06-26T21:15:11-04:00

For most people my age, middle Boomer, we think of the dramatic changes during our lifetime as primarily social. We look back at the social revolution of the 1960's as a pivotal point in Western history. I'm beginning to seriously doubt whether the social revolution that we've experienced is as impactful as the intellectual revolution that is now taking place.

Western culture to a large part emerged on the back of the church, especially the Protestant church. If you step back and think about the theology of the past 500 years, it is marked by a couple things. One is the value of the individual and consequently, the freedom that the individual has to pursue his or her own course in life. The second impact was just as significant, and was dependent on Western individualism for a fertile social context for it to grow. That second development is broadly the impact of the Western Enlightenment. Now I don't want to go into a long description of the philosophy of the enlightenment. That isn't my point in the post.

Rather, what I believe is a significant result of the Reformation and Enlightenment is confidence and certainty in our understanding of God's purpose and how the world works. After reading Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness while on vacation, I'm convinced that the result of our confidence is an increasing retreat from reality into a world of abstract theory masked as an absolutist theology.

Taleb's book is about his study of probabilities in financial markets and the random events that led very successful people to "blow up" and lose everything that had accumulated. He writes about the random events that take place without explanation. In fact, it is through our intellectual hubris that we in retrospect rationalize the ability to predict events that he calls Black Swans. This comes from the experience of Europeans who believed that all swans were white until they ventured below the equator to Australia and found black swans. Black swans are unexpected, inexplicable rare events. Rare events are like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and stock market crashes. Impossible to predict and revolutionary in their effects.

His thesis confirms what I have felt for a long time, but didn't have the right theoretical context to understand what I saw. What I realized was our human inadequacy to know anything absolutely. This means that whatever decision we make, we make with incomplete knowledge. As a result, our confidence in predicting the future is an illusion. This has been translated into my planning work by developing plans that provide more flexibility and a wider range of options for the future.

In the church, we describe rare events with words like providence or serendipity. In doing so, we are admitting that we lack a complete sense of what is happening around us. We throw the randomness of life back on God so that we can rest assured in the confidence that we have a God who is sovereign over all things. I know that is a biblical concept that gets wide use in the Scripture. However, it isn't the scriptural use of the idea that is the problem, but our absolute confidence in our grasp of what this means.

Because we find absolute ideas easy to hold, we also find ambiguity difficult to accept. Randomness is another way of understanding the ambiguity of life. Taleb makes a strong case for the random nature of life. I see that my life experience fits far more a random pattern than a logical, sequential pattern that I could have identified three decades ago. The meaning of life comes in reflection upon the past that we want to extrapolate into the future. But in my experience, all that I can predict is how I will respond to situations that I encounter.

As I read Fooled by Randomness, it occurred to me that it makes sense that God would create a world of randomness, rather than one of predictability. What randomness requires of us is choice. We must make decisions as to how we will respond to the rare and not-so-rare events as they occur. That choice occurs everyday, and at the heart of that choice is the choice to love God or not in the situations that confront us at every turn. That choice is our freedom, endowed to us by a God who created a world for free beings to live in free fellowship with their creator God.

This doesn't mean all creation is not connected and contingent, but simply, that it is impossible for any person to see it fully. Our security isn't in our understanding and control of a contingent world, but rather our faith in the God who created a world greater than our minds can manage.

If life were predictable, then our faith would be in the meaning that is derived from predictability. In reality, I believe this is exactly where the American church has ended up. We want security, low risk and no change. So, we resist ambiguity, and want an absolutist faith that is unchanging and dependable. We want a safe God who we trust because he is predictable and unchanging. In reality, God is inscrutable, not always doing what we expect. Sounds like Lewis' good and dangerous Aslan.

Taleb discusses evolutionary theory in his book and shows that evolution isn't sequential, but random with jumps of development that are inexplicable. So, an absolutist faith in evolution is no better an answer than an absolutist faith in a sovereign God who is in absolute control of everything. This type of absolutist faith cannot help but make God the author of evil.

I find Taleb's perspective a greater challenge to traditional Protestant theology than any atheist's rant. It is a challenge because it forces us out of the intellectual ghetto of the church where we all basically think alike. Because we are in general agreement, we are secure in the knowledge that our theology holds up under scrutiny, as long as we don't venture out of the enclave of the church.

So, what are Christians and their pastors to do with randomness as outlined by Nassim Taleb in Fooled by Randomness? Two suggestions, apart from reading his book.

First, understand that resistance to randomness is futile. We are not in control of it. We can only respond to it. We can respond negatively, or we can see it as an opportunity. I think this ultimately is what it means to live in the moment.

Without using this language, I realize that for twenty five years or more that I have lived a random life. What I thought I was doing was living in response to God's leading by the Spirit. When some random individual would walk into my life, I'd ask the question, "What does God want me to do with this person?" I know this came from the belief that every person is God's child, no matter what the course of life that they have traveled. I've had a very interesting life as a result, and my life has lacked the secure continuity that others have had. So in reading Taleb's book, I found validation for my life of faith.

So, welcome the randomness of life as a friend that brings new opportunities.

Second, realize that there is less continuity in life than we think. One of the prevailing notions that I encounter in churches is the belief that the future will be the same as the past as long as we avoid change. From this perspective, risk is seen as change, and not changing is how we manage risk in the church and life. The reality is much different. There is as much risk in not changing as there is in changing too aggressively. This is very hard for churches to understand because so much of our life as the church is predicated upon an absolutist theology and an unchanging sovereign God.

So, be open to change, respond to what God places before you today.

One last thought ... you may think that I'm abandoning a traditional faith in Jesus Christ. I am not. What I am addressing is our human tendency to create false securities because it relieves us of having to live in the moment with Christ. Defending my or our tradition's interpretation of the Gospel is far easier than living an authentic life of faith in the midst of a changing, random world. What I am doing is making a distinction between the Scripture's Gospel message and our theological interpretation of the Bible. Our human interpretation of the Bible's message is the source of this absolutist theology. The Bible in its simple testimony is far more universal in character and therefore a better source for our handling a random world.

In the end, it is not the intellectual content of what I believe that matters most, but rather my attitude toward what I believe, and how I live with integrity in my life with Christ. I find God in the random happenings that provide the church the opportunity to be the people of God during rare events that are both good and bad. That I believe is God's intention in the creation that he made.

Where the real change will come

2007-06-22T14:44:36-04:00

Just back from two weeks in Scotland. Time away to rest, rejuvenate and gain some perspective.

One of the thoughts that occurred to me while away is about the relationship of theology and organizational change. I know there are battlelines draw over theological issues. And there are those draw over styles of doing church. But all this discussion and debate is taking place within the context of what is assume to be the way the church really is.

All over Scotland there are Church of Scotland congregations that are small and diminishing, for whatever reason. The church pictured here is in the village of Timsgarry in the Uig area on the Isle of Lewis just up the hill from the guest house where we stayed. The CoS closed the church earlier this year. The Island has a very strong Presbyterian tradition, and some strong churches, like the Back Free Church of Scotland.

The guest house where we stayed is the old manse for this church. And along side it a cemetery that was built on the site of a chapel that exist in after St. Columba came through the area in the 7th century AD. The church still exists in the faith of the people we met, but not in an organized church.

It struck me that so much of our efforts at church revitalization are focused on the institution, not on the community of the church. I don't think this is a phenomenon of rural Scotland. It is true wherever the number of people diminishes to the point that the institution is not sustainable.

The conclusion this leads me to is that our focus needs not to be primarily on strengthening the institution, but rather deepening our relationships with one another. I know this sounds overly simplistic. What I realize though is that what institutions provide us is security, and with that security the need for me to take personal initiative to act to strengthen the community life.

When institutions decline, we automatically think that it means everything is in decline. Instead, it may be a conscious choice to refocus toward that those values and practices that are more beneficial. The key is in each member accepting their responsibility to lead and serve.

If the American church is to realize this approach, then it will come about through each member recognizing the own individual call and how the sum total of those calls in practice is what the church is.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against the institutional church. I am for making sure that our perspective and following actions are the right ones.

Practice leading theory, leading the church

2007-06-02T05:51:23-04:00

There's an old adage that says the church follows the culture by a generation. If so, then what Doc Searls is live-blogging from the Internet & Society conference at Harvard is important to notice.

Doc's listening and blogging about Karim Lekhani's presentation "Knowledge beyond Authority." This is a conference on the internet, something that the church has been slow to embrace in the way that the people at this conference understand. The perception there is that the internet is something new and different. It doesn't fit into any of the traditional communication or organizational categories. The church as an organization is a very traditional one, built upon hierarchy that is vertical. The internet, for better or worse, is built on a horizontal authority structure.

Vertical authority structures are built on theory, credentials and process. Horizontal authority structures are built on ideas, practice and conversation. The internet is the latter. The church is the former. The question is what should the church do about that?

Doc Searls is live-blogging about Lekhani's perspective on knowledge. Pre-internet, knowledge was what was contained in formal structures, ie: books, academic institutions, policy manuals, etc. With the internet, knowledge is what is communicated between people. It is a shift from a focus on the abstract nature of knowledge to concrete practice. And what Lekhani is saying, and to which I agree, that knowledge formation is now growing out of real world practice, not from abstract reflection. Here are Doc Searls notes on Lekhani's presentation.

1) The Net is a whole new environment. We live in it, we build on it, and we have no choice about taking advantage of it if we wish to be involved in the civilized world. The Net is not, as most phone and cable companies (and their invoices that arrive every month) would suggest, gravy on top of telephone and television. In fact, it's the other way around. Voice and video are forms of data that move on the Net: two among many others. "Content owners" and some universities may be opposed over what can be done by the former to protect the latter, but they will come to basic agreement about the nature of the Net for the same reason they have long agreed about the nature of gravity: it's an undeniable fact of life.

2) Facts of life in the new networked environment are radically different than those in the physical world. There are new rules around abundance and scarcity, among many other variables. Many methods of control that work in the physical world do not work on the Net, or work in flawed ways — and in fact insult its nature.

3) Knowledge is not a thing. What I know is who I am, not a sum of "content" that has been "distributed" to me. We may speak of "information" as if it were a commodity (or worse, "content"), but to inform is to form. We are shaped, and enlarged, by what we learn.

4) Authority is the right we give others to improve who we by expanding what we know. We are all authors of each other. That goes for any of us, not just professional educators.

5) Educational institutions need to build not only on their legacy advantages — buildings, libraries, faculty and so on — that give them high degrees of authority in all of their specialties. They need to take advantage of the fact that all these advantages now live on the Net and not just on the campus.

What relevance does this have for the church. Simply, the emergence of the internet as an environment of shared knowledge is analogous to the church as a community of believers who are connected by their common love for Christ through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

The church is built on an authority structure that requires experts to determine what is true or not. And this legacy of the past two thousand years constantly runs in conflict with the reality that the life of the church happens through the individual initiative of people responding to the leading of the Spirit.

If in the world of the internet, theory follows practice, then what we need to do in the church is provide a way to first involve more people in the practice of ministry. And then, establish systems of communication that enable others to learn from the practitioners.

What role do pastors have in this? Pastors facilitate the conversation. They keep the big picture in mind. The big picture? What is God doing through us collectively? This means that the pastor is no longer required to be the expert on all topics of theology and ministry. When the membership of the congregation is free to pursue their individual calling within the context of the community of Christ's people gathered in a particular place, then the dynamics of the church changes.

From an organizational and a spiritual perspective, what I see happening is the re-emergence of the kind of church life that we see in the early days of the church. This was a time before hierarchy. It was a time where communal relationships were the core of the church's life.

So, what should you do in your church to facilitate the adoption of this new culture of horizontal authority as seen in the internet? Lead people to recognize their own individual calling and contribution and equip them to lead through their own participation in the ministry of the church. Create opportunities for conversation where people can share their ideas that they have learned in practice. As this develops, they may find they need more ways to continue their conversation, and then all the tools of the internet become relevant.

The legacy advantage of the church is as a community of people. The theology and ecclesiastical traditions of the church are supportive of that community, not determinative. By supportive, they were created and exist as a product of that community. They exist in service to that community. The more we live out a Spirit-led community life in the context of the church as the organization as we know it, the more the theology and traditions will take a shape of living practices instead of abstract knowledge containers to be preserved. In essence, what we know, we learn by doing first, and in conversation, learning second.

I believe that this is the natural pattern of human spiritual advancement.

Hacker Candidates

2007-05-28T22:11:34-04:00

Two postings at presbymergent got me to thinking about where the church must go.

David Williams comments here about candidacy and its similarity to academic credentialing. Neal Locke writes here about hacker culture and its possible relevance to theology.

I'd like to take this a further step. I find freshly-minted pastors prepared for the intellectual and to a large degree pastoral demands of ministry. I'm encouraged, unlike I was ten years ago, by the quality of men and women who are joining the ranks of the clergified. However, what I think is missing is an understanding of the changes that are taking place in organizational theory. The candidacy question is just one area of many where a past form or structure is no longer adequate.

If we borrow the hacker/open-source paradigm, what we'll see is the theology of the church not determined by experts in the academy, but by practitioners in the field. They do so in conversation and collaboration with others, whether they are ordained or not.

I'm not opposed to ordination. I am opposed to seeing it as a privileged position of authority that elevates the pastor above the flock. In our tradition, we counter that with the equality of eldership. Yet, I think we have wound up with so many churches in decline because we have lost the essential meaning of the Holy Spirit speaking through individuals within the context of the church. We have chosen to set the standard as high-concept intellectualism.

An open-source hacker approach to doing church would mean that every member has a responsibility to be a theologian and a practitioner. That they are to speak and contribute to improving and changing the system that operates the church. As we have it now, that is left to the pastor and the elders. I'm sure many members are glad that they do not have to be responsible for changing the church.

That is not how I read the book of Acts. Everyone shared, and officers were elected to address specific needs. Apostles were commissioned to share the Gospel. And each believer was responsible for their own contribution to the community of the church.

For us today, the day after Pentecost, it is important to remember that the Holy Spirit indwells every believer, not just those who have been ordained.

Therefore, we are wise, as pastors, to listen. It reminds me of something Bonhoeffer wrote in Life Together. And I'll end with this.

But God has put this Word in the mouth of men in order that it may be communicated to other men. When one person is struck by the Word, he speaks it to others. God has willed that we should seek and find His living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of man. Therefore, the Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth. He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother, his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, Harper & Row, 1954, p.22-23.)

The Really BIG Picture - Alleviating Global Poverty

2007-05-25T15:09:34-04:00

Every time I come into some contact with WorldVision, I am reminded about how truly small are my aspirations and perspective.

Read this interview by Guy Kawasaki with Richard Stearns of World Vision.

When I hear World Vision people speak, like Steve Haas, whom I heard last year speak about Aids, I wonder why IS the church is in decline?

If we wait to create the perfect church, or purge the church of its impurities, we'll never realize that it is only by our actions of faith and compassion that we actually learn the meaning of the Gospel. We don't learn then do. We learn by doing.

Are Categorical Distinctions Helpful?

2007-05-23T13:22:56-04:00

Jan Edmiston writes about a presentation Glenn McDonald, pastor of Zionsville Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, gave at her Presbytery's meeting this week. He spoke about church transformation ...

... that those under the age of 39 are "natives" to the culture and those over 39 (that would include me) are immigrants. We are the foreigners who don't speak the language, share the same worldview, etc.

Jan was not pleased with the distinction.

Would I sound defensive if I said that it's not about age; it's about mentality?

Leonard Sweet wrote "the natives" are from the same "psychographic" instead of the same demographic. They want to be in touch with the culture while also being "in tune with the Spirit." Personally speaking, I love the culture and can only pray that I'm not totally out of tune with the Spirit.

Having said this, I worry about potentially embarrassing myself (not to mention my kids) by "not acting my age."

I find it fascinating how we try to separate people and churches into various types or market segments. Natives-immigrants. Traditional-contemporary. Attractional-missional. We end of living in the tyranny of categorical distinctives.

Hey, I want to make sense of the landscape too, but these categories are way too minimalistic. It all goes to the old game of who's in and who's out. These descriptions do say something, but they don't say everything.

From my perspective, we are still looking at the church in far too narrow ways. If we threw out all the terminology and all the categories and looked at the church and every other human institution as if we were from Jupiter, what then would we say?

I know that I sound like a crank or at best a contrarian. I'm not because I do think these categories have meaning. I just don't think that we should endow them with an importance that divides the church into haves and have-nots based on these categorical distinctives.

I know this will sound odd too, but as an organizational consultant, I think what we have done is essentially dehumanized the church. We have done so by trying to say the difference between the church and other organizations is how we are organized. We have a different mission, a different governance structure, a different this or that.

My experience with churches is the same as with non-profits and for-profit organizations. The problems are human problems and spiritual problems. Ironically, the solutions are often organizational solutions.

The church's problems aren't primarily theological. Instead, our problems are often due to knowing more theology than we understand how to live. From my perspective, that is a spiritual discipline problem that can be solved organizationally as we require practicality and application in our theological discussions.

The dehumanization of the church has meant that we have become more a socio-political institution that operates by a type of ideological correctness that says "You are in" and "You are out." This political/social correctness is based on subscribing to specific conceptions of the church and its theology. Wander too far off the prescribed path, and you are out. Stay intellectually compliant (ie: lazy or robotic), and you remain in, regardless of your categorical distinctive.

These categorical distinctions have merit as differing ways the church is addressing its place in a particular culture. So, to pit high-church against low-church, connectional against congregational, attractional against missional, traditional against contemporary is to miss the point. Our distinctives are born in the interpretation of Scripture within a human organizational context.

Churches are human institutions, no matter what theological rationale we attach to them. They are human institutions just like any other organization. The distinctive is not in the organization but in the people and their relationships to one another. What distinguishes the church from all other organizations is the endwelling of the Holy Spirit in the lives and relationships of its members.

What this means to me is that we human beings do not control the organic community of the church. When we confuse the church as a structural organization with the communal nature of a Spirit-bound society, we fall back on our tendency to draw lines in the sand and say who is in and who is out.

I can't tell you how many churches with whom I've conducted projects over the years whose whole identity was built on not being like another church. They were "In" and even in decline, they knew they were the "true" church. Their categorical distinctive blinded them to the realities of what it "truly" means to be the church.

Ultimately, what we need are criteria that transcend these categorical distinctives, that tell us how we can be a healthy community of God's children. The answer lies in both an understanding of the church as a spiritual society and as an institution. And the answer lies beyond these categorical distinctives.

An apologia for Gospel realism

2007-05-13T18:58:53-04:00

A while back, Bill Kinnon started a meme entitled, People formerly know as the Congregation. It's a conversation well worth partaking. So, it was with interest that I read the posting that Bill points to today by Michael Spencer at I-Monk about returning to his SBC church.

Most of what is offered in Bill's meme is not my experience of the church, but it is the experience of a lot of people. It is not my experience because I've never had very high expectations for the church. I am pretty realistic about it. I take it as it comes. The church is the way it is because people are the way they are. We are sinners, whose sin gets exposed in our boredom, our distractedness, our childlike desire for the church to be our mommy. We are also God's children, God's creation, created for good works. We live with the complications of sin and God's goodness wrapped up in the same package.

My realism doesn't mean that I've lowered my standards. It just means that when people fail, I don't see it as the end of the world. I am not a pessimist. I don't believe that failure is inevitable. I simply recognize that no one's perfect, and that possibly by my own love and encouragement, my own belief in them, that they may rise above their own sense of inadequacy to greatness in their service to Christ.

So, I live with impossibly high standards, and pretty low expectations for people and their institutions. I'd rather be surprised by the nobility and goodness of a person than be disappointed when they fail to live up to their beliefs or commitments. How many times while I was serving college students did I hear their complaint that the church is filled with hypocrites. My response was always, "Well, what do you expect? They are human beings."

What this means is that we need to stop thinking of the church as different from other institutions. I hear this from pastors and theologians all the time. It sets up the conditions for disappointment. There is some perverse need for us to make the church so different that it can't be truly judged. As a result, it can never reach its true potential.

Theoretically, churches and other organizations are different at the point of purpose. The purpose of the church is different than that of a dairy or a school or a law practice. But the functioning is no different. Each are dependent upon people who are mixtures of sin and goodness working together to achieve their organizational goals.

Every organization functions with people organized to achieve something. Every organization has a mission and a structural design for that mission. Every organization has a collection of people who one way or another have decided to associate with this mission and organization. The relationships are bound by a certain set of values that give meaning, purpose and define how this group of people will relate to one another.

When a church or an organization is healthy, the mission is clear, and the values are also. As a result, the people working within that organizational structure can envision what the impact of their life needs to be. Regardless, every church needs to have a clear sense of mission, a clear understanding of what unites these people in mission and what their intended impact of their life together needs to be.

Is this a high standard for a church? Sure.

Is it impossible to achieve? No.

Can it be achieved by wishing, hoping with good intentions? No.

Does this means we should never leave a church? No.

Does it mean that we should accept unrighteous treatment? No.

It doesn't excuse the pain or suffering that people have experienced in churches. It simply points to the reality that healing is a choice we make that cannot be dependent upon someone else's apology or repentance. It means that we have a choice that even as we are victimized by the sin of others, that we choose not to be victims.

Is it pessimistic or realistic to not be surprised when people treat us like dung? Realistic.

Gospel realism ultimately leads to the recognition that we are responsible for the course of the church. We each stand before God asking for the grace to be better than our sin and circumstances would dictate. In this sense, Gospel realism is freedom. The freedom to lay aside our fear and pain and receive the grace, goodness and love of God that comes as we seek for greater things.

Gospel realism leads us to understand how God works in and through our lives. It's a concrete, tangible, realistic understanding of all that the Scripture tells us about human nature and the reality of what the church as a human institution filled with God's Spirit means.

This is not a view rising out of a reductionistic systematic theology. It is simply my observations from working with churches, listening to people, and trying to understand what is really going on in people's lives. The more I've embraced a Gospel realism, the happier, the more fulfill, the less fearful, the more "humble" (as I say in all humility) and more able to see God acting in and through my relationships in the church. I wish the same for those who seek to find a place to be in the church.

The Preacher as Entrepreneur

2007-05-04T17:06:41-04:00

Jan Edmiston points to an interview with Paul Borden that I find very compelling.

The primary challenges relate to the pastor's role. Seminaries have historically trained pastors to function as chaplains, responsible for preaching, counseling, and pastoral care. As a result, one of the reasons so few churches grew past 300 prior to the eighties was because that was the most a person in that role could deal with. The church growth movement, however, began to change the paradigm of the pastor's role. If the church is going to be focusing outward, touching an un-churched culture, then the pastor has to take on a different role: the role of leader.

Our churches have also assumed that a shepherd functions like a chaplain, caring for a group of sheep. The biblical model, however, portrays a shepherd as an entrepreneur, who led sheep by still waters and into green pastures so that he could eventually shear them or kill them. In other words, he moved the sheep into zones of comfort in order to prepare them for zones of discomfort.

Very few pastors hold this concept of shepherding. Yet that's the role of a leader. The leader communicates the vision, and then asks the community to take a risk.

Where does the vision come from?

For over 15 years, I've been involved with organizations at the point of mission and vision identification. Writing a mission or vision statement is a process of discovery. What do we discover? At one level, we discover the future. At least the future that requires effort to achieve. This is where the pastor as entrepreneur comes in.

Lately, I've been working on a project with a company to write a values statement. During the process, i was asked the difference between a values statement, a mission statement and a vision statement. These organizational statements all seem to have there perceived value by leaders. Typically it relates to where the organization is at this point in time in its history. For the group I've been working with, the values statement will serve to unify the organization for continued service to their constituents.

Let me explain how I see the difference between these statements. Let's use the following diagram as a guide.

A Mission statement is an organizational statement. It describes what the church does. It can include the four dimensions of every organization - Governance, Program, Operations and Resources. It essence it is like a snapshot picture. "We are Acme church serving the people of Acme and the world through ministries of worship, education, fellowship and outreach in the name of Jesus Christ." Or something like that.

A Values statement is a relationship statement. It describes what these people stand for and the values that govern their relationships. "We are God's children who through the love of Jesus Christ trust, honor, support and mutually serve one another by faith in God's sustaining Spirit."

A Vision statement is an impact statement. Its purpose is to capture a clear sense of how these relationships matter in the context of a church organization. It needs to capture the difference that is made by this gathering of God's people in this place at this time in history. In effect, a vision statement is a statement that illustrates change. Change being the effect of people living out their faith in the community of the church. If there is not change, then there is no difference made, and if there is no difference, then there is no impact, and if there is no impact, what precisely do these people envision God doing through them?

So, how does this fit into a pastor's role as entrepreneur?

Paul Borden identifies the following challenges for pastors.

1. "... the preacher's responsibility to communicate vision."

2. "... the leader's responsibility for the overall recruitment of lay people."

3. "Our responsibility to be stewards in every area necessitates the leader's regular attention to this theme."

He provides an excellent picture of the visionary aspect of being a pastor.

Vision is primarily communicated through stories, specifically the stories of the people in the church that are living the vision out. This is true because story not only communicates information but also volition and emotion. When I tell someone a story as opposed to an illustration, they not only understand the point but they see how other people have lived it out. It touches them at an emotive and volitional level.

Vision is also communicated through a positive persona. The pastors who are most successful are also the most positive. Negativity and guilt pour out of me like sweat on a hot day. I don't have to work at that. Being positive, however, is something I must work at. For people to buy into a vision that is bigger than themselves, there has to be communication from a positive leader.

Finally, visionaries preach to the community as opposed to the individual. This is contrary to how I was trained. Visionaries ask the larger questions like, "What does the community do for families?.What does the community do for prayer?. What does the community do for Bible study?" They ask the "so what?" question of the text, and then answer it in the plural.

So telling stories, being positive, and preaching to the community all relate to the preacher's role as a visionary.

Here the vision of the pastor is a picture of the community in action within the bounds of the church as a specific organization. It isn't just ideas, but something alive. That is why the relational or social dimension is so important, and why values need to be articulated as a part of the church's vision of impact.

Entrepreneurs are leaders who embody the values and ideology of their mission. They are not just an administrative functionaries. They live their vision with passion in front of people. Back in December I wrote about the importance of entrepreneurialism for the church in my series on Innovative Business Ideas for Churches.

I hope you'll read this whole interview with Paul Borden. I think he is saying something very important, and saying it in a gentle, simple way that makes a great deal of sense to me.

The Age of the Abundant Church

2007-05-03T23:27:00-04:00

Christendom is in transition. It is changing rapidly. The rise of the mega-church is an example of this abundance. However, for many of them, they are the continuation of an economic mindset that was more indicative of our grandparents youth than ours. That mindset is one that views all things through the lens of scarcity and prospertiy.

One of the ways the scarcity mindset permeated the church was in "the pie-in-the-sky," "I'll get my riches when I get to heaven" paradigm. It is embedded in the traditionalism and organizational conservatism of post-Depression era suburban churches.

This came to mind as I read Virginia Postrel post on Brink Lindsey's book The Age of Abundance.

Brink Lindsey argues that mass prosperity (by historical standards) fundamentally altered American political and cultural debates, shifting them from arguments over wealth distribution to more cultural/spiritual concerns. The "culture wars" are, in this view, a result of prosperity. I think he's basically right.

I see these same culture wars at work in the various battle-lines that divide the church in America. One of the battlelines Michael Spencer identifies in his post about Ron Martoia's book Static. In the post, he makes this comment:

At times, I wondered if Martoia understood what a fundamental upheaval it causes when you begin de-emphasizing a gospel about going to heaven, and emphasizing a gospel with social and political meaning alongside its personal eschatology.

A heaven-centric theology of the age of scarcity, rather than a this-world-centric theology, provided a way for people who knew they would never be wealthy to have hope in a better life beyond the grave. While this hope is Gospel, it is also a narrowing of the Gospel message. A social/political eschatology is equally narrowing.

What I'm saying is that wealth and poverty, and the prospects of escaping the latter and achieving the former, has fundamentally affected the church in different ways over the past century or more. It's effect is to either provide hope for a better life where there are no prospects or hope for a better life because there are prospects. The shift from a theology of scarcity to the health and wealth Gospel has come as our culture has become more prosperous.

I link the beginning of this trend to the return of the Greatest Generation following World War II and the benefits they received for a G.I.Bill funded college education. Ask the people in your church over 70 years of age, who have a college degree, how many of them were the first in their family to earn a degree. I suspect that you'll find the majority are the first. My father was the first in his family.

The affect of the rise of so many people out of poverty through government funded education in the late forties and fifties was to create the suburban culture and mass consumer economy that we have today. The church adapted to this shift in culture from the Depression era to an emerging age of abundance.

Even as the Dow has risen in value over the past weeks - virtually unprecedented in the past half century - I find that there is not a counterpart intellectual, ethical or spiritual perspective that can sustain it. Especially, in the church, we still have a mindset of scarcity and its twin prosperity theology. What these lead to is not personal discipleship in service, but rather a spiritual life focused on personal security.

If you catalog the issues that many churches face, they have to do with change and traditionalism. There is a strong drive to keep things as they were because of this mindset of scarcity. Even in the most contemporary of churches, this drive for personal security dominates. It is like the church is a zero-sum game. Change is destructive, not additive. Change only reveals our insecurity and the scarcity that exists. I see it as the remnant of an early age when the prospects for wealth were non-existent for most people. The church was a haven of peace and security, a place of caring and sharing and a reminder that a better world awaits in the next life.

The "emergence" of churches that are different is an indication that the vacuum created by the personal security, scarcity/prosperity paradigm is beginning to be filled. The difference will be startling I suspect as a generation that lacks all connection to the old pie-in-sky theology of earthly scarcity and heavenly abundance arrives.

To consider that we live in an age of abundance is to see that this idea is a two-edged sword. On the one hand there is abundance that makes it more difficult to appreciate one's individual need for God's grace. As a result, God becomes a source of entertainment and recreation.

However, on the other hand, there is recognition that abundance leads to the availability of resources that can be utilized to solve critical social/economic needs world-wide. This is where the Missional paradigm is impacting people and churches as they allocate more and more resources to mission projects.

From my perspective, what I actually see happening is the rebirth of what is simply a form of Christian humanism. It is a movement that is moving out of the abstract realm of a heaven-centric theology to a theology rooted in the reality that each Christian believer is an agent for the tangible expression of God's love and grace in the real world. This is a paradigm shift of Reformational proportions.

The paradigm shift is from a faith primarily focused on the biblical words and theological ideas of the Christian tradition to a faith primarily focused on what transpires in relationships between the Christian and the rest of the world. It is a shift from a focus on the abstractions of the faith to the concrete nature of the faith in action. It is clearly less dogmatic and more open. It is more ambiguous from the vantage point of the whole history of Christian thought. And its a shift from security to dynamism.

In this sense, it is change. Change that is occurring on a social and theological spectrum that widening. I suspect that my great, great grandfather who served as a Presbyterian minister during the middle decades of the 19th century would recognize the traditional churches that exist today, but will not recognize the churches that my grandchildren will attend in the future.

The age of the abundant church is upon us. The question is "What are we going to do about it?"

An Additional Thought:

A quick response is not warranted. A long, thoughtful conversation about how culture dictates the theological perspective that becomes the church's paradigm of identity and mission. Too much of the conversation assumes that whatever is the "standard" by which we judge the church is a universal, time-transcendent one.

And I'm saying that the social, economic and political paradigms of the past 500 years that have been the preeminent influence upon the church's development are also shifting in a dramatic way. This is more than from modernism to post-modernism. This is from an age of scarcity to an age of abundance, where during the next century, the tools of abundance making will be available virtually every person on the planet.

I'm I naive to think that this is going to happen without any downside. I'm I just an old progressive who believes in the perfection of humanity and society? No. Not at all. What I see simply is that old authoritarian paradigms that formed the ideological basis for many organizations and national cultures are fading. They are fading with the advent of the availability of low or no cost technology that connections people and cultures. If scarcity is the result of lack of resources and access, then abundance is the result of access to resources that open upon the world to those who have the drive and initiative to create new organizational paradigms.

This applies directly to the church as it therefore must shift from a focus on heavenly-security in an age of scarcity to fulfillment of divine calling in an age of abundance. In an age of scarcity, people did not have a great sense of personal calling to service. That however is changing as increasingly the force of missional calling to individuals and their churches takes root and transforms churches.

The age of abundance can be seen in the example of a high school classmate of mine - Wes Morgan -who recently died from cancer. We built a business upon completing college, and in his last years, before he knew they were his last years, became focused on a ministry to orphaned street kids in Haiti. Here's an article that describes some of the work that he did. By his example, people know about these kids, and soon will know about a capital campaign whose funds will build an orphanage in Haiti. His legacy of initiative and calling will live on.

Lastly, I see in this age of abundance is a shift from dependence upon governance structures to provide for me, even if it means provide from my spiritual welfare, to an interdependence on one another in the church and in other organizations that is born out of a recognition that I have something to offer that increases the abundance of resources available to make a difference. This is what is happening when people commit to a missional focus in the church, and why I see it as the most radical paradigm shift since the Reformation.

Hostmanship, not Hospitality

2007-04-22T22:55:47-04:00

Increasingly, I hear people talk about the church as a place of hospitality, about ministries to the stranger and about being a welcoming congregation. A book that I've just discovered challenges my thinking on this. It is called Hostmanship - The art of making people feel welcome. It is co-authored by Jan Gunnarsson and Olle Blohm, two veteran leaders in the Swedish hospitality industry.

I won't go into a full blown review here; that is what I'm doing at my Leading Questions blog. Here's the first of a series of postings on the book.

The danger that we court in the church when we emphasize hospitality is that we turn the people to whom our hospitality is focused into abstract objects of congregational activity. It is like friends who told me of visiting a church where the pastor preached on welcoming the stranger and no one talked to them after church. In essence, we have institutionalized hospitality as another program. That is not the idea behind Hostmanship.

Hostmanship is an attitude. It is how a person comes to understand how to serve another person. It comes from a maturity that has transcended the pettiness, the selfishness, the prejudice, the fear and the passivity that many people have. It is the ability to recognize in the moment what that other person really needs.

Gunnarsson and Blohm also show how Hostmanship transcends the personal to operate at the functional or departmental level of organizations, and then at the organizational, destinational and national level as well.

If you are familiar with servant leadership, you'll understand Hostmanship. But what I find is that servant leadership is much more an abstract idea when compared to Hostmanship. This little book would be an ideal one for a Session to read and discuss on a retreat. The implications of Hostmanship are far reaching. In many ways it is about how Christ's love actually lives in us as servants. It's an expensive book for the size, but worth ten books twice the size and half the price.

UPDATE: The full review is now available as a PDF file. Download here.

Clergy Satisfaction

2007-04-20T14:22:51-04:00

Dennis Scheibmeir passed along a link to an article on job satisfaction that showed clergy having the highest rating.

Here are the Top 10 most gratifying jobs and the percentage of subjects who said they were very satisfied with the job:

Clergy—87 percent percent

Firefighters—80 percent percent

Physical therapists—78 percent percent

Authors—74 percent

Special education teachers—70 percent

Teachers—69 percent

Education administrators—68 percent

Painters and sculptors—67 percent

Psychologists—67 percent

Security and financial services salespersons—65 percent

Operating engineers—64 percent

Office supervisors—61 percent

What do we make of this?

As I look at this list, I see some patterns.
1. Jobs where people serve people.
2. Jobs where there is a high level of personal autonomy.
3. Jobs that are easy to separate job from home life.
4. Jobs were financial rewards are potentially high.
5. Jobs that are artistic in nature.

It would seem though that the clergy only fulfills one of those five. Typically the ministry is not viewed as one of high personal autonomy, easy to separate from home, promising high financial rewards or an form of artistic expression.

It does not mean that it can't be, just that it traditionally is not this way.

So, where does the satisfaction come from?

I suspect it comes from helping people, interaction with colleagues, and being able to focus on ideas and values that are significant for one's identity and purpose in life. How many people enter the ministry hoping that it will improve their spiritual life? How many people find that they love the intellectual world of theology and biblical studies, but aren't academically oriented, so they enter the ministry?

Satisfaction comes from finding a balance in life, being an authentic person and doing things that are personally meaningful and socially fulfilling. This may be why the ministry for many people is such a satisfying experience. For those whom it is not, other issues may make it more difficult to find the conditions suitable to satisfaction.

The critic and the tradition

2007-04-20T09:13:39-04:00

As I read the FineArtsLA interview of classical music critic Alan Rich, I thought, this is the kind of criticism that church bloggers need. Let me give a couple examples of what Rich says and then show you how a similar approach could work in our criticism of the church.

... There was a story in the New York Times not too long ago called “Continental Shift.” It has to do with Esa-Pekka and concerts of new music, the management of the Philharmonic and at CalArts and other schools, and it has a little bit to do with Mark and me.

FALA: Why is new music important?

AR: That’s pretty obvious: You can’t play Beethoven and Brahms all your life.

FALA: But aren’t many orchestras content to do that?

AR: They might be content today, but sooner or later people are going to notice.

FALA: Does the audience want to hear new music?

AR: The audience doesn’t want to hear new music exclusively any more than we do. And it doesn’t have to be a piece copyright 2007, but it has to have a sensibility of novelty and intelligent programming.

FALA: So “new music” can include a piece of 200-year-old music that’s underplayed?

AR: Yes, or a piece of 200-year-old music that is well known but that be presented in a different light. When Esa-Pekka did the nine symphonies of Beethoven in his programming last year, he accompanied every one with a new piece of music that in some way, because of the contrast, said something about the Beethoven symphony.

And,

AR: I was the last classical writer for Newsweek. In 1987 I was in Houston covering the world premiere of John Adams’ “Nixon in China.” I filed my story, and got a phone call an hour later: They were killing it for a Bruce Springsteen feature.

FALA: What’s changed? Why did Time and Newsweek have so many writers devoted to classical music a few decades ago, and today have none?

AR: Probably a reader poll or something decided it.

FALA: Then why do readers not want to read about classical music?

AR: I’m afraid I can’t answer that.

FALA: In the early days when Johnny Carson hosted “The Tonight Show,” the last 30 minutes was always devoted to an author. Now there would never be a writer on a late-night talk show. Haven’t you noticed a cultural shift of serious art losing grip over the average citizen?

AR: How could I not notice? It’s my bread and butter.

FALA: Then characterize in your own words what has happened.

AR: I don’t know why it’s happening. It may have been replaced by another kind of access to high culture, it may be because people get their culture from Amazon.com or their iPod.

I have couple of friends who are in musicology at UCLA, and I’ve read some of their term papers and I’m distressed at what passes for studying musicology now because it’s not what I took under Joe Kerman. They’re reading aesthetics. It seems to be secondary whether they listen to music or not.

FALA: It’s theory driven.

AR: It’s totally theory driven.

What Alan Rich sees in classical music is not only the music as an object to be listened to, but a tradition of music making that continues to expand people's perception of what that tradition means. This is quite similar to what Alasdair MacIntyre writes about in After Virtue concerning the difference between tradition understood by Edmund Burke as something fixed, and the understanding of tradition that Aristotle characterizes as the mastering of a craft under the tutelage of a master craftsperson.

In the church, we have the same dilemma. There is the view of tradition that it is a fixed object to be studying and protected from encroachment. It exists as the singing of the same hymns every Sunday because they are the purest representation of this tradition that has been passed on. However that tradition is dead or dying. It is why those conservatives who are Burkean have lost the culture war to those who, unwittingly, have continue to take a new tradition and continue to build on and expand it.

Here Alan Rich is honors, respects and celebrates a thousand year old tradition of music making that continues to stretch its boundaries with new music. I've heard more than once that all contemporary Christian worship is the New Traditionalism. It is not an expansion but a replacement of what has been the tradition in the church.

What I also like in Rich's interview is the underlying notion that concert music in some sense must be difficult for it to be interesting. Not difficult in being intolerable, but difficult as a challenge to learn and experience what is being offered. This not what I find in the church. The challenge is to stay awake.

When Alan Rich describes what Essa-Pekka Salonen did with the Beethoven symphonies, mixing them with different music to put them into a different listening context, so that the audience would hear them in a fresh way, I thought of how this is what is missing in the church. Why is it?

Why is that we don't understand our tradition as something living? Why is it that we think of the church and the Christian faith as something fragile and so weak that it must be housed in the protective, hermetically seal container of the church as we know it.

What Alan Rich does as a critic is love the tradition without becoming a shill for it. He knows it, loves it, thinks deeply about it and practices a craft of criticism that elevates the perception and appreciation for the classical music tradition by all who come into contact with his words.

We are at an odd transition point in the life of the church. To a large extent, especially in my church tradition of Presbyterianism, we are dominated by my generation whose formative experience in the church has been a mixture of social activism and denominational schism. What has been lost in the midst of the past forty years of conflict is a larger picture of what our tradition truly is.

As critics, we need to celebrate the tradition and demand that it grow within its tradition. This is happening because a new generation of leaders are emerging that see something there that my generation has lost sight of. When I go to church on Sunday, I am brought into a tradition of music making that elevates my perception and appreciation of not only the past, but also the reach of the church. We sing the traditional hymns. We do call and response prayers. We hear music out of a global milieu of church music that wakes me up to the presence of Christ in the service. It has not always been this way, but it is now. And I suspect, in many churches, this is also beginning to happen.

The critic's job is love the tradition while never succumbing to sycophancy. To explore the inner reaches of the tradition to tell why it is and where it is going. Alan Rich is a good example of a master craftsman of the craft that we bloggers could all do well to follow.

HT:2Blowhards

Leading the People formerly known as The Congregation

2007-04-17T07:20:37-04:00

Bill Kinnon's series of postings on the theme The People formerly known as the Congregation has touched a nerve in the populace of the people of faith. There are links to all the postings on the right side bar of his blog. Check them out.

What Bill and others are expressing is not new. It is important to understand that they speak from their heart, from their experience in the church, and about things that matter to them. It takes me back thirty years to my post-collegiate days when I was involved in an evangelical youth ministry built around the idea of "friendship evangelism." I was in a training program where I would end up with my own ministry serving a community somewhere. I was let go because <quote> I was too intellectual. <unquote>. What it really meant was I wasn't cool enough. My ministry to high school students was just different than the other men and women in the training program. So, I moved on and like many people went to seminary searching for what it was that God wanted to do with me.

By going to seminary, I knew it implied that parish ministry was most likely the outcome. I wasn't sure I wanted to be a pulpit minister. So, my tag line in seminary was, "God drugged me kicking and screaming into the church." I always laughed when I said it because I'm just that kind of congenial guy. But I was really unsure about whether I could be a pastor of a church. Not whether I could be a minister, but whether serving in that sort of institutional setting was what I could stomach. At that time, in my mid-twenties, I felt that that path was very confining.

Years later, after serving as an urban community minister for a large Presbyterian church, I took on my own congregation to serve as pastor. It was an ill-thought decision. We left being close to home with a three month old baby to move to a community that culturally was totally different than either of our backgrounds. We lasted two years, two months, eight days and thirteen hours. In the end, I realized some things about my self, about the ministry, and about churches.

I realized that my orientation was toward growth, not numerical growth, but a different kind. The church I served was not committed to that. Instead, they wanted a curator for the museum of memories. The past were the glory years of the church, and the future was about holding on to those memories through a practiced pattern of behaviors and rituals. It was traditional, but not sufficiently alive for me.

So, as I left that church and went to work for a small church-related college as a chaplain, I began to find myself increasingly alienated from the church as an institution. It became harder and harder to find churches that fit with my perspective on what it meant to be the church. It is my nature to be a problem solver, so instead of abandoning the church, I began to serve them as a leadership consultant.

There is more to say about this than the few minutes I have now can provide. But let me capture it this way.

1. Recognizing and admitting the pain and hurt, frustration and disappointment that we have had with the church is good. It can be very healthy. But it won't change the church. It may change you, but it won't change the church. The church is an institution. It is an organization. In fact, it needs to be an organization if whatever good that is there can be sustained over time. So, I've come to believe in churches as institutions. The question is what kind.

2. I have found that the number one thing church people want from their pastor is for him or her to love them. This is a feeling that people have about the church that gets transfered to the pastor. The relationship they have with the pastor is the relationship that they have with Christ. It really is that simple for many, many people. I don't think pastors see this coming when they are in seminary. It is very subtle, and eventually destructive of the church. Many of the reasons for people's alienation from the church has to do with their relationship with the pastor. So, the pastoral role is critical to the future of the church. The question is what does it mean to be in pastoral leadership.

3. The church isn't a museum. It is a place of redemption, reconciliation and transformation. To redeem something is to save it from being lost. We tend to over-spiritualize this with a theology of redemption that is only seen in the cross. In actuality , the church is a place of daily redemption, where the lives of people find purpose and focus issued as a call to service. We are saved everyday through our acts of redemptive love.(I'm not talking about works righteousness. Only that we find reality to our redemption in action.) To reconcile something is to bridge the divide that exists, to bring them together, to unite that which was divided. We can do this intellectually and relationally. We can find our minds made whole as we come to understand the practical application of the grand abstract tenets of the Christian faith. We can see it in our relationships as we humbly ask for forgiveness and renew of friendship. To transform something is to change it. For the church, it is personal transformation as God's act of grace. It is to be changed from what we are to what we were created to be. And it takes a million tiny steps for that transformation to take place.

4. Leadership therefore, pastoral leadership, in particular, is not focused primarily on what is internally to the church, but what is external. It is as Paul writes in Ephesians 4 about equipping the saints for works of service. We are so used to hearing these words when new Sunday school teachers are commissioned, that we miss the fact that this is not describing a program of the church, but rather the purpose of the church as an institution.

5. What this implies is that church is not simply a place of refuge and security, but a place of redemption, reconciliation and transformation so that people are equipped, prepared, able to live out their lives of faith on a daily basis. We are not organized this way.

6. The question for leaders of the church is how do we instill into the experience of the church redemption, reconciliation and transformation. To lead the people formerly known as the Congregation is first to live a life of redemption, reconciliation and transformation, and then provide both the social and organizational environment for this to take place for others. The old line that Christianity is one begger telling another begger where to find bread has some merit. Unfortunately, we turned that into a marketing pitch instead of a life-sharing experience. The model is Jesus' leadership of the disciples and how he transformed them from a rag-tag group of students into the vanguard of Apostles who would change the world. To be an Apostle is to be one who is sent. How many people in the church or in the people formerly called the Congregation feel like God has called them to go to the uttermost regions in service to Christ and the world of his creation.

7. There is a line from the film, The Emperor's Club, where one of Professor Hundert's students reflecting on his influence in their lives twenty five years later says,

" A great teacher has little external history to record. His life goes over into other lives. These men are pillars in the intimate structures of our schools. They are more essential than its stones and beams, and they will continue to be a kindling force and a revealing power in our lives."

This is true of pastors and churches where the focus is on each person's outward manifestation of faith as people of redemption, reconciliation and transformation. It is a calling to be someone different than we were. In The Emperor's Club, Hundert begins his class on Western Civilization with the reading of a plaque over the classroom door. It reads:

"I am Shutruk Nahunte, King of Anshand and Sussa, Sovereign of the land of Elam. I destroyed Sippar, took the stele of Niran-Sin, and brought it back to Elam, where I erected it as an offering to my god. Shutruk Nahunte -1158 BC."

Hundert tells the class that Shutruk Nahunte doesn't appear in the history books along side other great leaders of the era. "Why?" he asks?

"Because great ambition and conquest without contribution is without significance. What will your contribution be? How will history remember you?"

This captures well what I see missing from the church. There are high ideals. There are great, successful churches. But what of their contribution. Contribution comes through each of us, one day, one moment, one relationship, one situation, one life at a time. It is being a person from whom redemption, reconciliation and transformation are the experiences that send us out to be the people now known as friend, servant, guide, mentor and sharer of the journey.

If you think that this makes leadership harder, you would be correct. It is easy to lead organizations. It is hard to be a person whose leadership is built on the integrity of a life still in the midst of being redeemed, reconciled and transformation. That is the life of faith. That is the way of leadership in the church.

Reclaiming the Human Dimension of the Gospel

2007-04-06T05:32:45-04:00

I find myself an outsider in the contemporary church. What I value as a Christian believer I find little resonance, whether left, right, or whatever. I find echoes in people who are missional, who are emerging, people who are postmodern, but I don't really feel that they see what I see.

What I see missing is the human dimension. I see the Gospel turned into words alone. Biblical words, even biblical stories, but words alone. What distinguishes one group, one church, one denomination, one tradition from another are our words, our ideas, not our living.

I don't even think people who desire greater community, better relationships, a deeper spirituality in the church quite see what I see.

We all still think of the Christian church, even the Christian faith, as primarily an institutional phenomenon. The desire for greater community is still within the paradigm that the Christian faith is foremost an institutional thing.

For the past decade, I've increasingly read the works of ancient wisdom. There is a strong wisdom tradition in the Scripture. It is a counterpart to that which we can find in ancient Greece and Rome. What I find in this rich tradition that is outside of either the Hebrew or early Christian tradition is an attention to the ideas that are about how to live out one's beliefs and values.

Even as early as the first generations after Paul, the clash of cultures, the war between world views, the press to institutionalize the Gospel began to emerge. I am not against organization or institutionalization. I believe it is absolutely necessary for the sustaining of the ideas and values that are a foundation for any community of relationships. A part of that is creating the organizational structure of leadership that will lead the church.

What happened was a shift of focus from the Gospel lived in community as the Gospel to the Gospel institutionalized into an organization focused on the defining what the Gospel is. The human dimension began to take second place as a result.

I've made the comment recently that I think what has happened in the church is that we have turned Christianity into an Abstraction. The clearest way to show this is how we distinguish ourselves as Christians. We don't do it by demonstrations of how the Gospel guides our relationships with one another, but rather the abstract ideas that distinguish one tradition from another.

I don't find the ancient wisdom tradition compelling from a religious point of view, nor from an institutional point of view. What I do find compelling is their understanding of human life. Heraclitus over two millennia ago wrote that character is destiny. In other words, how one lives matters. For us in the Christian faith, what one believes is all that seems to matter. We don't really believe that how one lives matters. We have twisted the notion of God's grace as undeserved favor into a belief that how we live doesn't affect the afterlife.

The loss of our humanity as a church is shown in our obsession with the afterlife rather than the present life. Somehow, we've allowed the content of the Gospel to be reduced to questions about what happens after death. Is that the ultimate question? I don't think so. I think it is a distraction from the Gospel. It is essentially a reformation of narcissism as spirituality.

The Gospel is about faith in Christ. To think it is only about what I get from God after I die is a corruption of the biblical narrative that we believe is God's Word to us. The biblical narrative is like a long documentary film about how God entered into the lives of people in their daily lives. It is about how they interacted with God on the way to the market, to the well, as they traveled, as they farmed and shepherded. The Gospel and the biblical narrative is a picture of the human dimension in the context of God's intervention in this world. To therefore turn the Gospel into simply about what I get in the afterlife therefore is a corruption of that historical narrative that continues to this very day.

There is much truth in the critiques of how the contemporary church is modeled after a consumerist culture. But that perspective is a good observation, but not a sufficient analysis. Because to critique it as consumerist doesn't mean that we understand that we see the loss of our humanity in the church.

There is a subtle shift of perspective taking place that wants to distinguish spirituality from religion. Look at this article by Emergent Village leaders Doug Pagit and Tony Jones - Goodbye Religion, Hello Spirituality. The article is taken from the new book - An Emergent Manifesto of Hope. I find this missing the point. The conflict isn't between spirituality and religion because what happens to spirituality is that it ends up another abstracted set of ideas that get institutionalized into another form of the Christian religion. I'm not against denominations. They serve a purpose of addressing the reality of human diversity. The problem isn't whether I'm spiritual or religious, but rather whether what I believe has any relation to how I live.

If character is destiny, then how I live is how I know whether my faith is genuine. To focus on character is to abstract it out of life experience and make it another topic of discussion and debate. So, it isn't whether I value personal character in my life. It is rather whether my life is emblematic of a certain character. The focus gets shifted from the theology of character to the action of character.

If character is our destiny, then my actions are the measure of my character. If that is true on a personal level, then it is true on an institutional one. It means that not only are my actions to be scrutinized, but my family's, my business's, my church's, my community's, and on-and-on. You can tell what I believe by what I do.

If character is destiny, then the proof of the Christian faith is not in our words alone, but in our actions. I was asked recently what I thought integrity meant. At the moment, I didn't have a sufficient answer. As I've thought about it, I realized that it is about being a true person. True in the sense that one has a clear sense of purpose from God and a clear set of values that guide my decisions and actions, and seeks to be true to that in how I live. It isn't about being perfect, but rather about being real or rather authentic. In the church, we've lost our humanity because we cannot afford to be real because it threatens the delicate balance of security that we've created.

What the church needs to do to reclaim its humanity is be a place where people can be real as they follow along their path the same journey of the biblical narrative that others have followed before us. I think about one of the boys in my scout troop who two years ago was awkward, geeky, an outsider, an outcast with his peers, more mature than many of his peers in some ways, much less so in other ways. He was lonely and frustrated ready to quit because he knew he didn't fit in. As the leader of the troop, I understood that I needed to insure that the troop provided room for this young man to grow. It required me to make a special commitment to him. To make it personal and to not treat him as an abstract problem, but internalize his life experience into mine, and be his friend for life. A part of this was making sure that the organization of the troop met his needs. Two years later he has grown up, his peers have caught up with him, he has earned their respect, and recently was one of only two out of eight elected to join an honorary camping organization. To go from outcast to insider is to travel in life through the same redemptive journey that God offers us in the Gospel. To lose the human dimension is to lose the safety of a community where I can be real and grow through the mess of my life. If it is true for this young man, true for me, then it is true for everyone.

Reclaiming the human dimension of the Gospel is to understand that the measure of the church's life is its ability to provide a place for sinners to discover God's goodness and grace to them in real life. In this sense, all our contemporary attempts to reform the church are misguided. The church doesn't need reform. It is simply needs to respond to the realities that people find in their lives, give them space to grow and change, and send them out to build relationships around that experience of God's grace.

Reclaiming the human dimension is to reclaim the Gospel as it truly is.