quote.: relational web

A few years ago, when doing research for The Shaping of Things to Come, I contacted a Christian faith community in California and asked if I could meet their leadership team and attend their weekly gathering. Their reply initially confused me, but today makes perfect sense. They said that they would allow me access to their community and its leaders only if I agreed to live for four days with them. I wasn’t sure I had a spare four days and was annoyed that they would be so uncooperative. I just wanted to look at their worship service and interview their leaders, but reluctantly I agreed. It was a profoundly important time because it taught me that a genuinely missional community operates at multiple levels and different times, as any organic, dynamic web of relationships would. Their corporate worship times, when viewed in isolation, weren’t that big a deal (neither are the worship times for smallboatbigsea), but having spent several days with them, I found their corporate gathering to be a rich and fulfilling time of connection with God because it was representative of the interconnections between the members and their ministries. In a very real sense, if a missional church has a public worship service, it is literally the tip of an iceberg - a very small, visible part of a much larger body.

Exiles | Michael Frost

True community requires both frequency and spontaneity. That is, people must be around each other often, without planning to be around each other often. Thus true communities resist definitions and labels based on planned meetings, and resist defining membership primarily by attendance at them. This is important to understand because there are a lot of people talking about new ways of doing church that are primarily new ways of doing weekly services. Missional church is a way of being the church together. The biggest impact it seems to have on the weekly gathering is not to hype it up and make it more tech-savvy and action packed, but to de-emphasize it by putting it into its rightful place as a piece in the life of the community. We’ve had people join us from other churches who find themselves a bit surprised that what we do on a Sunday really isn’t all that different. Let me assure you that this has never been our intent. Our prayer is that what is done in our lives and in the world will be very different than what they’ve seen before.

quote.: ancient stories

For exiles trying to live faithfully within the host empire of post-Christendom, the Gospel stories are our most dangerous memories. They continue to fire our imaginations and remind us that it’s possible to thrive on foreign soil while serving Yahweh, but it’s the kind of thriving that often rejects popular wisdom. These stories are the standard by which we judge all other stories, all other descriptors of life today. If, after reading these dangerous biblical stories, you can’t imagine Jesus the Messiah as a televangelist, strutting around on stage in a flashy suit, playing it up for the cameras, then you are forced to reject this image and seek another mode of being Christ today. If you can’t picture Jesus driving a tank [onto stage for effect during a sermon] or pouring millions of dollars into new church building projects, then you are forced to allow the dangerous ancient stories to judge the insipid contemporary ones.

Exiles: Living Intentionally In A Post-Christian Culture | Michael Frost

quote.: worship

The forces of the culture industries act as technologies of desire, forming and shaping us into desires that then must be satiated by the market. Global economic forces order the cities into the production of desire and ways to satiate it. Even experimental psychology reveals the complexity of human emotions that form in relation to appraisals of reality. Different emotions are formed deep within alternative interpretations of reality. Postmodern writers question whether psychological notions of well-being are not really the disguised constructions of the marketplace or society for effective adaptation to consumer life. According to all of these thinkers, the ways in which the self and its emotions are constructed socially are out of power interests residing in a given culture. In short, any illusion that we can trust our experience as innately given has been undermined by postmodernity. Our experiences and emotions are being formed by the cultures and histories we find ourselves in.

This demise of modernity sounds the alarm for contemporary worship leaders because they can no longer count on self-expression alone to produce a truthful experience of God in worship. We can no longer safely assume that truthful emotions and experiences will automatically be awakened when we sing “praise and worship” songs long enough for an emotional catharsis in Christian worship. Many worshipers after all come into worship having been shaped by a post-Christian culture. Perhaps in the past, congregants came to worship with a repertoire of emotions and experiences already formed in the church or Christian cultural influences. In the past, worship leaders could awaken or even revive emotions that were already formed in the congregation. But today, many worshipers enter the sanctuary with emotions and experiences formed in another world. In the post-Christian cultures, we can no longer assume that our people’s emotions and experiences have been formed out of a righteous past or culture that recognizes Jesus is Lord.

The Great Giveaway | David Fitch

I really do like this quote. It’s a good reminder that not everyone having a strong emotional response to worship is being formed by it into a follower of Jesus. When we come into worship with preconceptions that aren’t changed, indulging them in a worship experience doesn’t make them better. Worship was always supposed to be transformational and immersive more than merely experiential. When the Hebrew people came to worship God, it always cost them something, and they never left the same as they had come.

My frustration with this quote (and with the whole chapter on worship it’s part of) is that it doesn’t even try to address Imago Dei: what it means that we are all, to some extent, bearers of the image of God. Yes, we come into worship pre-formed by many things other than Jesus, but if it’s in Him that we live and move and have our being (as Paul said), then isn’t there something in all of us to awaken?

Quote.: Evangelism

This is part of why I’m so excited about the simple practice of talking about Jesus: telling His stories, quoting His teachings, and asking what it is a given person needs to know about the One with whom I am so very impressed. It has a certain integrity to it. So does He. I’m learning that I can trust Him, that people really don’t need as much help figuring out what to do about Jesus as I’d thought they did. If they just know Him.

. . . evangelism is so easily distorted as a practice. Once an external good (such as the quantitative growth, power, and influence of the church or the number of conversions one is able to produce) has come to be substituted for the internal good of the practice, and precisely to the extent that the church becomes skilled in achieving those external goods, the church ceases to have any good reason to practice evangelism well or virtuously. All Christian practices are, of course, subject to perversion, but as McClendon rightly points out, “the perversion associated with evangelism is potentially the more demonic, becomes demonic just to the degree that in a crass way it succeeds.”

Evangelism After Christendom by Bryan Stone

church, missiology

Soul Graffiti

I’m reading a new book by my friend Mark Scandrette from San Francisco. The cool thing is that I found my name in the book. Page 99 reads…”On rue Ste-Catherine in Montréal, I am seated in a café frequented by students from McGill (actually all students). I’m in the French-speaking province by invitation of David Brazzeal, a musician and curator of Curieux: une communauté de foi (a community of faith). Friends from this artist’s collective trickle in one by one, shedding winter coats to join our afternoon discussion over soup, bread and … We talk for a while about what various people study (literature, photography, musical composition) and discuss favorite philosophers and writers and their contribution to the quest for integrative spirituality.”

I hope to blog more about Mark’s book Soul Graffiti….what I like most about Mark is his ability to mix with all kinds of people and know how to inject conversations with the perfect comment or question that cuts through superficiality and confronts people with spiritual issues. The book is full of examples. Check it out.

Seeing the Sacred in the Secular

There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the incarnation
(Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water)