August 2004 Archives

From Todd Hunter, found through Jordon Cooper, including these:

Lesson 1: Always stay light on your feet. Effective ministry does not require huge overheads from the costs of buildings and people. While I understand that Richard is a unique person, few have had his impact and done it “light on their feet”. It really can work.

Lesson 2: Always focus on being a movement: Avoid the forces of institutionalization that depersonalizes or at worst chews people up. Organism is to be preferred over organization; but organization is not “bad”. Just stay dynamic and nimble; only have the minimum structure necessary.

Lesson 3: Always attend to the soul’s growth in grace: Distractions to this abound; even religious distractions. Richard says “we evaluate everything with the simple question: will this help people grow in grace?”

There's been a lot of good writing lately cautioning against extremism in rejecting "the church." I'm sure part of the tension is that the word church means so many different things to so many people. Maggi Dawn writes:

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY LOVE, AND WHAT DO WE MEAN BY CHURCH? Love the Church? it means that whatever you do in following God neeeds to cash out in loving people, and loving what's already there as an expression of following God. It also means embracing and acknowledging ALL of our history - even the bad bits - because, like a genealogy, that's where we come from. The idea that we can leave the Church and start over from zero is a fantasy. To abandon any kind of contact with the church that already is (in its broadest sense) diminishes the validity of what we do...

With Church, the balancing act is one of making sure that we build new things in a spirit of love, not rebellion, without writing off or dismissing what (and who) is already there. We also need to examine our motives regularly - our visions are inevitably admixtures of calling and mission with a certain amount of self-seeking, and sometimes the desire to stick two fingers up at a Church we're fed up with. I guess for me, going back to Mary's analogy, loving the church is about constantly aiming to act as a grown up, not as a petulant child. None of us is born grown up. But it's like the calling to be a parent: you just have to decide to behave like a grown up, even when you don't feel like it. If we're honest, the wish to be petulant rises up in all of us from time to time. But we're called to be bigger and more gracious than that.

(found through Rev. Mike)

The latest 850 words of Relevant has a quote from a book with similar thoughts:

It is impossible to be a follower of Christ and not be part of a local church. There, I said it...

When defining the Church, I tend to defer to the Reformers, who themselves deferred to Scripture. A local church is a group of professed believers in Jesus Christ (and their baptized children) who gather at least weekly to worship in song and prayer, partake in the Lord's Supper, and hear Christ preached from the Scriptures. As a covenantal community, church members publicly vow to serve one another and to be accountable to the elected elders in matters of doctrine and purity of living. If at least something like this is in mind when we speak of the local church, then "going to church" in its fullest sense means participating regularly in gathered worship and committing oneself to some degree of significant involvement in the lives of others in that congregation. It's hard to read the pastoral epistles (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus) without this rough portrait of early church life coming into focus. Such a church body becomes a visible counter-culture-not just some kind of ad hoc gathering-a functioning community of potentially otherwise disparate people known for its mutual love and shared conviction that Jesus Christ is the Lord of the universe and hope of the world.

If any of this seems overly critical of churchless Christians, I admit that my own guild ironically deserves blame for keeping people away from its congregations. My private theory has been that many young people avoid churches these days because they sense a creeping cheesiness in the very way churches try to appeal to them...

So there's a tension here. Both authors are right, I think, that we should not be too quick to dismiss the church as it has been. At the same time, we should not settle for the way things are. I seem to remember that Martin Luther faced this same tension.

More to come.

From rix rantz ravz & revelashunz:

The efforts to "save the church" are, IMO, misguided and ultimately doomed to failure. God did not send us into the world to save the church. He called us to transform the world. If we see the church as a consequence of our activity and not an institution to save or organization to perpetuate, I think we would then begin to think radically and realistically about our mission. Jesus came to seek and to save that which was lost. Too many of us are here to seek and to save that which is found. What would happen if we would abandon our allegiance to institutions and instead sought to simply embrace the hurting, feed the hungry, comfort the grieving and shared the love of Jesus through genuine relationships? Church would then happen on its own. But as long as we seek to criticize the church, fix the church, transform the church, whatever.... we miss the Mission.

From Organic Church:

In conclusion, I cannot help but feel that the role of the Pastor has itself been subverted by culture. Spirituality has been removed from the priority list and replaced by programme management, driving towards an ultimately unspecific goal of ‘growth’. Within that it has been secularised to being systemised and dehumanising. The careful balance of avoiding syncretism with the world has fallen on one side to irrelevance and on the other to worldly, it should be the Pastor’s role to attempt to maintain this balance. Many models of a Pastor’s role are in full action today. Hopefully the above discussion has indicated that all of them have helpful aspects that Pastors should take on board. A Pastor’s genuine engagement with culture must however lead along the road of service of the congregation in their discipleship, equipping them for life in culture and interpreting culture for the world in the light of the Kingdom. That leaves the Pastor well placed to subvert culture at the crucial points within the lives of the congregation and in the culture at large.

I resonate with this. I want to die to self. Churches need to die to themselves. At the same time:

Sure, the Church has problems. But rather than "washing" the bride and helping her to clean up (Ephesians 5:25-32), I fear there are still too many of us who would rather "shoot" the bride and get a new one!

It feels to me as if we emerging church leaders need to develop more passion for the bride of Christ. Do you agree or disagree?

Eugene Peterson on dying to our religious consumerism, as found at Prodigal Kiwi:

So, your friends are trying to turn you into a religious consumer, are they, inviting you to their wonderful churches where so much exciting stuff is going on? I would resist it. You’re better off sticking with what you started out with at your Christian re-entry – the “smallest and nearest church.” It’s still my standard counsel in churchgoing.” Of course, I admit exceptions, but not for the reasons your friends are setting out…

From Emergent Kiwi:

Church is a space and a resource to hack...A hack does not intend to destroy or alter data. Thus a hack respects the riches of the past. But a hack recognises that church is not monolithic. Rather church is a contextual response of a group of people, uniquely working with the strands of Scripture and culture and tradition in their context. Thus a hack takes the rich strands of past data, and seeks to re-work them to maximize to a highest possible level.

At least according to Alan Creech. I think he's right on.

From The Present Future:

Wrong question: How do we do church better?
Right question: How do we deconvert from Churchianity to Christianity?

Wrong question: How do we grow the church?
Right question: How do we transform our community (hit the streets with the Gospel)?

Wrong question: How do we turn members into ministers?
Right question: How do we turn members into missionaries?

Wrong question: How do we develop church members?
Right question: How do we develop followers of Jesus?

Wrong question: How do we plan for the future?
Right question: How do we prepare for the future?

Wrong question: How do we develop leaders for church work?
Right question: How do we develop leaders for the Christian movement?

The North American Church is suffering from severe mission amnesia. It has forgotten why it exists. The church was created to be the people of God to join him in his redemptive mission to the world. The church was never intended to exist for itself. It was and is the chosen instrument of God to expand his kingdom. The church is the bride of Christ. Its union with him is designed for reproduction, the growth of the kingdom. Jesus does not teach his disciples to pray, "Thy church come." The kingdom is the destination. In its institutional preoccupation the church has abandoned its real identity and reason for existence.

God did not give up on his mission in the Old Testament, when Israel refused to partner with God. God is a reckless lover. He decided to go on with the mission himself. We do not need to be mistaken about this: if the church refuses its missional assignment, God will do it another way. The church has, and he is. God is pulling end runs around the institutional North American church to get people in the streets. God is inviting us to join him on mission, but it is the invitation to be part of a movement, not a religious club. (Reggie McNeal, The Present Future)

Michael Gerber's book The E-Myth Revisited guesses at why most small businesses fail. Most people get into a business because they're good at what the business does - shoe repair, engineering, whatever. They excel at the technical requirements of the job. Start a business, and all of a sudden they're no longer doing what they're good at. Instead, they are hiring, filing returns, marketing - in short, they're running a business.

It's the difference between a practitioner and an entrepreneur.

Think about this with pastors. It seems that most pastors have a choice. You can stick with what got you pastoring. For most of us, it was probably a sense of calling and a desire to make a difference. I used to dream that pastoring would involve time in the Bible, praying, providing spiritual direction, etc. In other words, pastor = spiritual practitioner.

Another model has come into being. Instead of being a spiritual practitioner, pastors are church entrepreneurs. In this model, pastors read business books, attend leadership conferences, develop and execute a vision, and grow the church. In this model, pastor = entrepreneur.

Pastors as spiritual practitioners
Prayer
Bible
Equipping
Spiritual direction
Soul

Pastors as entrepreneurs
Vision
Leadership
Church growth and health
Institution

I'd hate to create a straw man, and I doubt it's all one or the other. This is worth thinking about, though. What should we expect from our pastors? Can a pastor reasonably be both a spiritual practitioner and an entrepreneur? If he or she does one, who does the other?

From liquidthinking:

Church...I mean believers, you mean a building or an organization

Worship...I mean a life lived sacrificially, you mean singing songs

Faith...I mean trusting God, you mean a set of agreed upon beliefs

Tithing...I mean giving to those with no inheritance, you mean supporting your version of church

Post-Modern...I mean a jumbled set of philosophical world views, you mean techniques and styles

Discipleship...I mean shared lives, you mean instructional classes

Should I start using different words?

Some good thoughts on the church being tame vs. wild.

From Thin~Spaces:

I don't think that the issue is institutional vs. Non-institutional churches ~ Emergent vs. Traditional churches ~ or even House churches vs. Mega-churches. The question becomes; Is the church being empowered by God's spirit daily or is it trying to conserve what God has done? One path is tame while the other is wild and dangerous. Give me a church with Claws and Teeth any day.

And this from Wes Roberts:

A friend once asked me, "If Jesus was half the revolutionary you claim, how come he is now represented by one of the most conservative, status-quo institutions on the planet?...

We get the Christianity we deserve--we just can't pass the buck. The Church in the West--with some notable exceptions--has a tame faith because it has been giving a tame message for centuries. You can't breed a radical, revolutionary movement on passive, middle-of-the-road rhetoric.