quotes from Reggie McNeil

The church in North America is not like the Pharisees–we are the Pharisees, and Jesus does not like Pharisees.

The Pharisees clumped together and built a parallel culture–refuge theology is Pharisaical. When dealing with Pharisaism, we are dealing with a religion that has nothing to do with Jesus. They have a heart for religion, but not a heart for God.

People who live by a missionary set of values cannot abide those with a “club member” set of values.

The missional church is the most radical resorting of Christians since the reformation. Those who are missional have more in common with those in other tribes than with those in their own tribe who don’t get it.

Kingdom growth is profoundly anti- what we have typically been doing.

These are quotes from Reggie McNeil that I ran across here. What do you think? Agree? Disagree?

Creating content: a church that benefits a community by producing

So bare with me on this thought…as it isn’t totally thought through yet, but have we ever thought of church as a group of people gathering together to produce something?

I think the first place I heard about this was in Steve Taylor’s book Out of Bounds Church, but while out for breakfast today in Victoria I started reading this local free magazine called the metropolitan and I was overwhelmed with some ideas.

Now currently our little experiment called the open house (I have my reasons for using “experiment” and they have more to do with the nature of our community, not the commitment levels) is once again rethinking our role, space, and existence in east Vancouver and I find it stressful, yet incredibly exciting. We have so many open, flexible and creative people that the possibilities are endless for what we can become. And as I dream about what we can be, and think through what we have become I am beginning to dream about what it would mean for our church to be a creator of content for our community.

This was seriously spurred on through this magazine i read today, mainly because the content of this magazine was simple, to the point and free and even though I have counter opinions to the actual substance I read, I really appreciated how they have provided for the Victoria downtown community. There is something special about a group of people who come together to produce something, to dream ideas of what to produce and then passing it on to their neighbors for free. One might call that a “church experience”, purely in the nature of the community (producing, working, sharing all these things together).

Now what if our church ceased to gather for the sake of gathering, ceased to worship just to worship, but instead gathered together each week to dream, learn from each other, imagine and the produce something for the benefit of our community. And I mean something seriously tangible, not abstract. I mean a magazine, or a business, or a __________, you fill in the blank.

These ideas get me excited, and I hope I can continue to dream in this way with our church, because there is something powerful in creating beautiful, free, beneficial content for our neighbourhood, and I want to be a part of that kind of church.

Buildings

Throughout the city, houses of worship built in the last century for Jewish and Christian immigrants from Europe are now home to congregations with roots in Latin America, the Caribbean or the American South. Some are grand palaces that occupy a regal spot in a neighborhood, while others are modest halls nearly indistinguishable from bland storefronts. They sustain communities by helping slake spiritual and material thirsts.

Many of these buildings are under threat, crumbling from years of neglect and deferred maintenance in the case of impoverished congregations, or becoming targets for acquisition by developers in neighborhoods where choice real estate is scarce.

Preservationists have begun to sound alarms, warning that rich urban traditions of art, religion and community service are imperiled. From Once Synagogues, Now Churches, and Ailing Quietly - New York Times

I don’t have much use for church buildings, especially not in a city like Calgary, where getting together the funds to build or buy one would waste a lot of time and money that could go towards more important things.

There was a time though, when church buildings, rather than being warehouses in an industrial park where the faithful drive to gather, were architectural gifts to the communities they inhabited, as well as places of refuge and solace. They added something special to a neighbourhood, and now that they’re failing, people are beginning to understand that they’ll miss them.

At Friday’s Missional Training event, it was said that churches actually seem to produce the best effect on the world per member when they stay below 200 members. Could the same be said of church buildings, that they will give the most back to the world when they’re small structures at the end of the block instead of huge and out of the way? Buildings are great when they’re not only for us, but for the world around us. They can actually help accomplish both proximity and presence. But when they’re just for the faithful to gather, when they add nothing to the world around them, they’re not very Christian. If we must build, let us build structures that the neighbourhood will think worth saving.

church, church starting, western world, architecture, ecclesiology

Michael Frost

Nick posted these videos on Symbiosis but I think they should be shared here as well. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, IMO, have moved us beyond deconstruction, rethinking and experimentation into the realm of birthing something that can spread like a virus in the emerging cultures.

If you get to the 39:20 minute mark, Frost starts a story about an encounter in Montreal with my best friend, Ron.

Quote on the future of Western Christianity

“Experimental groups seeking to engage the Christian faith in a postmodern context will often lack the resources, profile or success record of the Boomer congregations. By definition, they are new, untried, relatively disorganized and fearful of self-promotion. They reject the corporate model of their Boomer forebears, and thus do not appear, according to existing paradigms, to be significant. But don’t be fooled. Somewhere in the genesis and genius of these diverse groups is hidden the future of Western Christianity. To dismiss them is to throw away the seeds of our survival.”

- Gerard Kelly, RetroFuture: Rediscovering Our Roots, Recharting Our Routes

Programs

Willow Creek takes an honest look at themselves and concludes that program participation does not equal spiritual formation. You have to hand it to them, it takes guts and honesty for Hybels to stand up and say, Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back it wasn’t helping people that much. Other things that we didn’t put that much money into and didn’t put much staff against is stuff our people are crying out for.

Out of Ur.: Willow Creek Repents?

(ht: Mark Berry)

Update.:
Okay, I feel like I need to add this because this is the only thing we’ve ever put on here about Willow Creek, and it looks decidedly negative. After all, this is a blog dedicated to incarnational ministry, and Willow Creek is the mother of all attraction. These guys take a lot of crap these days, especially from young upstarts who are pretty sure they have a better idea. I’m pretty sure I have a better idea myself, and I’m not too old yet, but I’m not after Willow Creek. If you are, perhaps my analogy will help. I think of them as I think of Starbucks. Starbucks takes a lot of crap these days too, because they’re not a local, independent coffee shop. They sell the same stuff in every store everywhere in the world. They define this generation of corporate coffee the way Folgers might have defined the previous (wow, spell check flags Folgers but not Starbucks; that tells you something). But Starbucks is the bridge that carried us across. Before Starbucks, this was coffee hell, packaged in pre-ground canisters and stacked on the grocery store shelf. After Starbucks we have not only the rich variety of products they offer, but a smattering of local coffee shops that produce very similar products, though oftentimes superior in quality. If you would rather find a local café than a Starbucks when you’re in the mood to imbibe (Thom’s favorite word), then I’m with you. Traders is better than Starbucks any day of the week. Even though they don’t accept plastic, and I never carry cash, I’ll make a special trip by the bank machine just to caffeinate in their warm, inviting, free wifi enabled log cabin. But without Starbucks, I’m not so sure there would be a Coffee Traders. Without Willow Creek taking that first step out of the mold, playing some rock and roll and preaching without words like “propitiation,” we might not have all these cool, local, independent startups I’m so fond of. So, the next time you end up at St. Arbucks’ (and I know you all do), say a quick prayer of thanks for Willow Creek. Without them we’d still be in canned coffee hell (spiritually speaking).

That being said, on with the incarnation!

Technorati Tags: church, leadership, Starbucks, western world

Celebrity culture

Found this in my readings, and thought it a question that begs an answer. Think of it as a warmup to the Starfish Thinktank.

The two places in the church that denounce celebrity culture the most are seminaries and emerging church/Emergent circles. Yet the role of big personalities looms as large if not larger in emerging/Emergent churches as in more traditional ones. In spite of all the talk of teamwork, can you name me one Emergent “team”? Can you name me one emerging church that is not pastored by a strong image or striking personality? In spite of all the egalitarian, communal ideals, when the rubber hits the road, Acts 4:32 crashes head-on with the power of celebrity dynamism.

Celebrity worship is a part of our culture - or should I say cult - and it’s not going away any time soon. So should the church learn to play the celebrity card?

Leonard Sweet, The Gospel According to Starbucks: Living With a Grande Passion

I believe it was an old church planting prof who once said to me that when you walk into a “leaderless” church and ask who the leader is, the person who starts telling you how they are decentralized and why they don’t need a leader is probably the one you were asking about. I love the idea of decentralized leadership, but am not sure the a truly “leaderless” organization is possible. Of course, Sweet’s solution to this dilemma is to make everyone a celebrity, which is what he claims blogs, facebook, etc. are all about. Obviously he hasn’t seen The Incredibles, or he would know how that sort of thing works out. Your thoughts?

Technorati Tags: celebrity, emerging church, leadership, len sweet

Transition

Here’s a question to get the conversation going. Alan Hirsch over at The Forgotten Ways (an excellent resource for missional thinking, by the way) poses this question:

If you were asked to steer a conventional, western church on a missional path and were given the freedom to utilize or reallocate all funds and resources in the best way you felt this could be accomplished, how and what would you do?

You have three staff members and a lien-free building. And the building is located in a neighborhood where few members actually live.

He suggests the following six Ps:

• You need to get the right paradigm. (Clearly getting our ‘idea/conception’ of church right before we start is critical–as per comments above)
• You need to be prayerful (It’s God’s work and God’s church, prayer is vital. Especially corporate prayer around these issues: we must come before the Lord of the Church)
• You need to be patient (it ain’t going to happen overnight, but if you stick in there, and be consistent in your activism, it will/might eventually happen.)
• You need to be very practical (Do something, don’t shout your mouth off. The best critique of the bad is the practice of the better)
• You need to have some power (in any institution, you had better have some form of social power to change things. Otherwise, frustration will become your food and cynicism will follow)
• You need to have a darn good plan (don’t just be a change agent, be a change manager. For large and complex organizations, this might take years. So buckle in.)

We’re blogging here because we’re trying to figure out how to be/lead missional churches. We’re determined to be the church in the world. But we’re in relationship, and hopefully good relationship, with many much more attractional churches that love Jesus and are trying the best they can within a different paradigm. Some of us hope that a side effect of what we are doing will be to move our attractional brothers and sisters towards these more incarnational ways of doing/being the body of Christ in the world. We may not have to deal with these transitions ourselves, but they are worth thinking about, because if we don’t, we run the risk of speaking to these fellow Christians condescendingly, or of being able to make no better recommendation to them than that they do something a lot like we are, when in fact they may not be in a position to do anything of the sort. Thinking through how we would transition a church with a steeple will help us dialogue with those under the steeple in a way that might just be constructive. No, they won’t go completely incarnational, but yes, we can help them begin to lean this way, if ever so slightly, and we all know what happens to a church on the “slippery slope” (to co-opt and redefine a term). Why begin with this question? I think it important to hold as a high priority the maintenance of healthy relationships with those who have come before us, whatever shape their churches may take. We still have much to learn from each other.

I’ve got some more on this I’ll post later, but for now . . .