missional training 4.: intentional community
The last Missional Training was a treat. Bob Roxburgh, a man with more years of ministry experience than I have years of anything, came out from Vancouver to talk with us for the day. In addition, Cam told some of his best stories yet, Caireen is processing the call of God and some sound missional thinking, and Garth and Dave are cuter than ever (Garth’s dieting and Dave’s exercising). It’s a good thing they don’t let the three of us up front to teach, because the most insightful thing we said all day was I’m sure glad we didn’t get that tattoo before our theology changed.
The Stories
The stories told were great, and do a better job of communicating authentic community and true accountability than the rest of the discussion, so we’ll start with those, and then you can fill in the rest of your thinking with the more conceptual thoughts from the day.
Debt
Cam’s mission group had a young couple in it that had been overspending for years, and while the group had tried confronting them about the issue, they just weren’t ready to change their ways yet, and so they continued their debt-ridden Vancouver yuppie lifestyle. After a couple years of this, they showed up at the mission group one night, the husband hung his head, and finally they asked for help. They were $23,000 in debt, and it had gotten so bad that even making payments the debt continued to increase because of the rate of interest. They were renting and had no savings, so there was no cash in any of their pockets. They had stopped answering their phones, which rang day and night with bill collectors, and felt that they had no resort but to file bankruptcy. And of course, now that they had finally hit rock bottom, they were incredibly open to help and good ideas.
Many churches would have done one of two things.
- Felt uncomfortable, fidgeted, averted their eyes, offered to pray, and wished them luck.
- Given them money, offered to pray, and wished them luck.
Not being most churches, they instead proceeded into a long dialogue about whether Jesus would be cool with them going bankrupt when they had gotten themselves into the mess via greed and a lack of self-control. Cam then asked them if they were willing to change, and the man answered that he was of course willing to change; how could things get worse?
The next day Cam took them to see their church finance guy (I think his name was Scott, but I didn’t write it down), and told them to bring along all their books, statements, etc. He then explained that from that point forward, all the money they made would go to Scott, and he would tell them what they could spend. After a day of phone calls to creditors, promising to pay and setting up payment plans, Scott talked them down to $18,000 in debt. He then looked over their books and figured out that there was no way they could afford the place they were renting, and they needed to move. Cam had a basement sweet that would probably go for $1,000, but he rented it to them for $400, the guy got a second job, and for a year they tightened the belt as far as it could go. Lots of Mac and cheese. People from the mission group would stop by with meals, take their kids to do stuff, etc. as their way of helping. At the end off a year they owed $3,000, and in 15 months they were in the black. Now that’s accountability! Rather than passive and condemning, it was an active commitment to help them through the process of repentance and restoration.
A motorcycle
An extreme story, but intimately tied to a way of life grounded in the sure truth that we are not very good at discerning the voice of God by ourselves, as much as we seem to think that a quiet room with a Bible should be all we need. That’s important, don’t get me wrong, but we need one another to keep from making some really silly mistakes. Bob told a story that illustrates this way of living in the ordinary stuff of life.
Bob’s been around for awhile, and somewhere around mid-life crisis time he went out and bought himself a motorcycle. He laid it down once, then twice, but the third time he put his leg in a cast. At this point he began to wonder whether he was getting to be a danger and needed to give up riding. So, he thought it over, prayed about it, talked to his wife, and asked his mission group what they thought. They cared enough about it to pray it over for a week, come back together to discuss it, and tell him that they were fine with him still riding: it just seemed like he’d had an honest accident. This man who’d been leading and pastoring for many years was very serious about his trust in them. If they had said “no,” he wouldn’t have a motorcycle today, because he knows they love him, and he trusts them to make decisions in his best interest.
Accountability
Combined, these stories create a picture of accountability the way it should be, tied to a life that is truly shared with other believers, that recognizes our need for others in order for us to hear the voice of God in personal and family decisions, and that trusts them to keep our best interests at heart, even as we keep their best interests as our priority. Out of this comes the authority to challenge one another and help each other through the process of repentance and restoration. Imagine coming to a group of people who are committed to you, and you to them, and combining all your wisdom in making very personal decisions like whether or not to homeschool your kids, how much to give to the poor and how much to spend on vacation, whether to quit or keep your job, etc. It might mean you don’t always get what you want, but it might also keep you from looking as silly as Rehoboam.
Other points of interest
We began with a meditation on Isaiah 6, and discussed King Uzziah’s uncanny likeness to the former King Ralph in the land of Alberta. Though he left Israel in an incredibly good political and financial standing, but the spiritual reality Isaiah revealed was very different. Most importantly we focused on the inward and outward nature of Isaiah’s experience with God. It had to do with coming into God’s presence and being purified, but also with being sent out to take part in what God was doing in Israel and the world. We thus deduced that the clearest evidence of a Spirit filled church is its effect on the world.
We paused before beginning our study of intentional community to point out that community is not an end in itself, but is the byproduct of a missional, purpose-oriented life.
We looked at the differences between biblical and cultural community, noting that most of what is trendy right now, whether it be St. Arbucks, Facebook, or a hockey club, is primarily motivated by individual self-satisfaction. This cultural narcissism fights against the formation of authentic community.
Different groups looked at Genesis 1 & 12, Ephesians 1 & 3, Hebrews 10:19-25, and John 13:34-35 & 17. We got Ephesians 1, in which we found God sweeping us up in the purpose He has always had for the whole world: to bring everything together in Christ at the right time. We talked about the final verse, where Jesus fills both the church and everything everywhere, and we talked about the symbiosis between God’s purpose for His church and for the world.
We all looked at I Peter together, where Peter says that in Christ we have a new genos, eqnos, and laos, meaning a new origin, a new family/people, and a new family business (structured on the common life of the ancient world). The word genos (pronounced Guinness) set Dave off on an Irish beer tangent, but we brought him back around, practicing that Christian accountability described earlier.
Bob dropped a great line somewhere in the middle, when he warned that we shouldn’t expect any new way of being the church to be that terribly different from those churches that have come before us. As long as they’re full of people they’ll tend towards entropy and will be tempted by the culture, and as long as they’re led by people, so will their leaders.
The primary way (not only or even best, but primary) of being the missional church is the formation of missional tribes. Cam talked about their mission groups, explaining that they base them on geography and not on affinity because they want their only affinity to be in Jesus. They used to expect their mission groups to multiply every 18 months, but they let go of that because they were afraid of an overemphasis on numbers and growth. The result has been a sever decline in effectiveness and an increase in apathy towards mission. He now thinks that groups are more effective with a clear purpose and expectation held out in from of them.
Books recommended
May 8, 2008 at 5:59 pm
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May 8, 2008 at 6:03 pm
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog.
Tim Ramsey