Video Interview w/ Brian McLaren

Good video interview w/ Brian McLaren….touches on emerging church; analytical thinking vs. holistic thinking; individual faith vs. corporate faith; orthodoxy vs. orthopraxis; disintegration vs. reintegration; church decline; importance of Jesus and his core message of the Kingdom of God; top global crisis: poverty, war, environment , war, religion; bringing new questions to presidential election; role of the cross in peacemaking; inter-faith relations; following Jesus vs. Christianity. Great intro to Brian McLaren.

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.

1. Felt uncomfortable, fidgeted, averted their eyes, offered to pray, and wished them luck.
2. 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

• Leslie Newbigin | The Open Secret
• Howard Snyder | The Community of the King
• Robert and Julia Banks | The Church Comes Home
• Gareth Icenogle | Biblical Foundations for Small Group Ministry

on the vine

If you’re sitting around right now wondering what in the world to watch online while you procrastinate something important, why not choose one of these edifying options rather than wasting your time on silly youtube monkeys?

Eddie
The MTN crew I kick about with have posted all four sessions from the recent Day with Eddie Gibbs, in Vancouver. Edmund is a prof at Fuller Theological Seminary, and he has lots of great stuff to say with his delightful British accent. He may be best known in pop Christianity for his book on Emerging Churches.

MTN.: A Day with Eddie Gibbs

Shapevine
Shapevine’s latest schedule for free live webcasts just hit the mailing list. I might hang with Len this afternoon, just because I like him. The site has been upgraded to a slick new look, and they’ll be adding resources for interactive learning soon. I’m holding out to see whether this really will become a hub for interactive learning, or whether it’s just an online “conference in a can.” So far the chat and blog stuff they’ve added is all available to me in better formats elsewhere, so I’m not that interested in doing more than sucking resources from them. Mayhap the fault is with me?

review.: alan hirsch’s “the forgotten ways”

Alan Hirsch’s The Forgotten Ways picks up where The Shaping of Things to Come left off. I ought to review Shaping one of these days, because it was much more groundbreaking for me, but I’ll start with where I’m at and go from there (as is the way of Jesus). Shaping argues for the need for missional church, and does a great job of defining it theologically and of offering some examples of what it might look like. Forgotten Ways is instruction on how to create the conditions for us to arrive at a missional expression of church.

I’ve already covered some important ground on this book here. Make sure to check it out for a great diagram (and a really bad one).

This isn’t a book to outline chapter by chapter. Rather, I want to engage the really great ideas that have been kicking around in my head since I finished it. You’ll also notice that I’m a network thinker: I can’t talk about a book without talking about a few others, because I’m more interested in tracing the idea than I am in critiquing the work. Do try to keep up, won’t you.

What next
I read this right after Kester Brewin’s book, Signs of Emergence, a book that begins an idea that Hirsch finishes. Brewin argues that we’re headed towards something new, but that we have no real idea of how to get there from here; nor can we. Like Abraham, we must leave and go to a land God will show us. What we can do is create the conditions for that thing to emerge. His two great metaphors are mountains and binary code.

Of mountains he writes that we are realizing now that we’ve climbed about as far up the mountain we’re on as we can, and looking about us we see that there are actually much higher peaks. The only way to get to one of these higher peaks is to venture back down into the valley and explore until we emerge on the other side. In a sense, we won’t know where we’re going until we get there, and we can’t get there from here. Now amount of effort on our part will accomplish that for us, and of course the reason we don’t like the sound of that is that it requires risk from those safely up the mountain, and sacrifice from those who have spent a lot of effort climbing this peak.

Of binary he tells the story of a programmer attempting to break the record for code speed (something I know nothing about, except that faster is better). Nobody had come close to the last record in some time, and so rather than try himself, he creates a program that randomly generates code, and another that works as a predator, eating code that doesn’t perform. The result? He breaks the record by several steps. But here’s the kicker: after he does it he isolates the blazing fast code, and he’s got no idea how it works, even though he’s responsible for its creation. He never could have made the next thing, but he could create the conditions for it to emerge.

While Brewin talks about some of those conditions, things like freedom to experiment, and support from the establishment for new ways of doing and being the church, he leaves his readers with an incomplete picture. Hirsch picks up where Brewin leaves off, not by defining where exactly we’re going (again, impossible), but by pointing out all the different components that need to come together in order for the new thing to begin to form.

Brewin draws heavily on James Fowler’s stages of faith development, and Hirsch’s picture of the Emerging Missional Church shares much with Fowler’s depiction of Conjunctive Faith. It embraces where we’ve come from, holds differing movements in tension, and avoids an antagonistic stance by keeping Jesus at the centre. It is more concerned with walking in the way than having it precisely defined, and so is open to journeying into the unknown.

As he is wont, Hirsch defines this shift graphically (click for larger).

Like the internet, Hirsch argues, the future of the church can only take shape when enough people are plugged into it. 10 networked computers is alright, 1,000 is kinda cool, but once you get millions all plugged into the same network, things like Flickr, Facebook, and the blogosphere emerge. There’s no way Al Gore could have planned the shape of social networking from his desk while inventing the internet, but once the conditions exist and enough participants are connected, these things take shape on their own.

The reason I love this so much is that it embraces where we’ve been whilst looking to the future. Alt Worship convinced a lot of us that creativity and expression belong in our corporate worship, and gave us permission to do some incredible stuff. But by itself, it tends to become a bit of a love-in. The radical discipleship movements of the past few years are invaluable and Spirit driven, but by themselves they’re not the new thing. However, when all these things take their place at the table, and enough people become disgruntled with the status quo and plug into where we’re going, the next thing will emerge. As with the missional training conversation, it lacks the negativism of many who are calling for change, and embraces and affirms what has come before without leaving us there.

Discipleship

. . . but my own experience and observation indicates that perhaps this element, namely that of discipleship and disciple making, is perhaps the most critical element in the mDNA mix. This is so because it is the essential task of discipleship to embody the message of Jesus, the Founder. C. S. Lewis rightly understood that the purpose of the church was to draw people to Christ and to make them like Christ.

It is interesting that when we really look at the dangerous stories of the phenomenal movements, at the most uncomplicated level, they appear to the observer simply as disciple-making systems. From Hirsch 102-03.

I’m deeply involved in western world missions, alt worship is swanky, urban mission is appealing, and house church is cozy, but discipleship is where I cut my teeth, and it remains my greatest passion in all this. Spiritual formation must be the measure of our success, and I am well pleased to see this be the defining component of mDNA (missional DNA). In case you wanted to know all 6 components of Apostolic Genius, here they are.

• Jesus is Lord
• disciple making
• missional-incarnational impulse
• apostolic environment
• organic systems
• communitas, not community

For more on the first item, see my earlier comments on the book.

APEPT
APEPT is shorthand for the five gifts of leadership Paul lists in Ephesians 4: Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors/Shepherds, and Teachers. Keep in mind that the ability itself is not the gift (evangelism), but the person (the evangelist) is God’s gift to the church in order that it might grow up into the fullness of Christ. Hirsch (and Mike Frost in Shaping) both go too far in claiming that everyone in the church can be filed away under one of these five giftings. However, Paul’s words do imply that you need the full APEPT matrix in place to see a church grow up into the fullness of Christ. The tragedy of this is that we have elevated Pastor Teachers to the central and often only role in church leadership, and we’ve no good idea what to do with APEs, so we run them off, or make them campus ministers, or send them oversees, or pat them on the heads and tell them to do their thing so long as it gets people to church. All of those are great places for APEs to be, but when we give them no place in our churches, and specifically no voice in the leadership makeup of the church, the whole church suffers. Of course, it’s easier to have a church led completely by pastors/teachers. They aren’t nearly so likely to make us uncomfortable, to challenge heretical teachings, to insist that we measure ourself by our impact on the world, or to call us to plant churches when we have plenty of things to do in our own church, thank you very much.

Don’t get me wrong, Pastor/Teachers are essential, and the mission agency that lacks them is just as crippled as the church with no APEs. The point is that we need all 5 wherever we’re the church, and where we don’t have them, we ought to be praying and searching to fill those roles in the lives of our churches.

Who should read it
You, probably. It’s not a devotional book, but if you put energy into starting or leading anything that has to do with following Jesus, this book is well worth your time.

alan hirsch, church, church starting, ecclesiology, kester brewin, kingdom of god, kingdom of heaven, leadership, missiology, technology, theology, western world

Missional training

Friday’s Missional Training was really good, so I thought I’d do the Christian thing and share. No live blogging because the church wi-fi where we met was locked, and because I mostly find live blogging annoying and reflective summaries useful, which is what I intend this to be. I’m just going to list the pertinent content pretty much straight out of my notes, and I’ll do some thinking about it at the bottom of the post.

Notes
We began with a meditation on Ephesians 4:1-16, with special attention to vv11-13.

After this we looked at the different ways people are responding to the rapid and discontinuous change that marks this time in world history. Almost everybody is willing to admit that the church isn’t getting the job done the way we’d like, but people are responding different ways. Here are a few.

• Return- A longing for a return to the days of Christendom, when the church commanded respect and wielded political and monetary power.
• Revival- The “spiritual” answer. The task is so great that there is very little we can do but pray and wait.
• Evangelism- The best solution is to become more intentionally evangelistic. Often the response of Evangelical churches (thus the name).
• New forms- New ways of doing and being the church are the answer. Community and authenticity are buzz words that typically accompany this view. Indicative of the emerging church.
• Renewed theological vision- The least sexy sounding of all the options, but the one that best defines the missional church.

We were asked to discuss this statement from a news article.

These days a church has to decide how it’s going to serve it’s congregation.

My answer: To the world, on a platter.

Dave was thoroughly impressed, and he adds some much more insightful thinking to this pithy statement in his review.

Three questions for a church to ask are:

• What is the gospel?
• What’s going on in the culture?
• What does this mean for the church?

We looked at this definition of missional church. I think it’s from Ringma, but I didn’t write that down.

A biblical and theological re-centering of the church as sign, sacrament, and servant of the Kingdom.

Not bad if you’re looking for brevity. I like sacrament if it means a foretaste of what is to come, but I don’t like it if it means the church mediates between the world and the Kingdom, as that would stand in opposition to the essential theology of Missio Dei. Mike Frost has done a great job of defining missional church, which I’ve already posted on.

Since the pizza hadn’t come yet, we went ahead and defined it in more detail. Here are some more marks of a missional church.

• Members have an awareness of the purpose and nature of the church.
• It’s small - This stuff is hard to do with churches larger than 200 people.
• Great thought and effort is put into worship.
• Preaching focuses less on application points and more on who God is, what His mission is, and what we are to be and do.
• Clarity about identity and purpose and a knowledge about the neighbourhood and subculture to which you are sent.
• All members are part of ministry and mission.
• Acceptance of and active identification with a marginalized position in the world.
• Regular tension between resisting and embracing culture.
• Focus on spiritual formation and discipleship, often via practices.
• Community/neighbourhood transformation. The world outside the church is changed by their presence.

A lively theological discussion on missional church then broke out. Alan Hirsch (he wasn’t there) says we do things christology->missiology->ecclesiology. Cam Roxburgh (he was there) pushed for theology->missiology->ecclesiology. Anthony mentioned missiology->theology->ecclesiology, because everything we know about theology is the direct result of God’s mission in the world. I understand Cam’s point, that there is more to the Trinity than Christ, but I also understand Alan’s, that as Christians, everything we know about the Godhead must be filtered through the person of Jesus. Right now I think theology might be the technically correct answer, but christology might communicate better what it is we’re really getting at.

We’ve got 5 more meetings left. We spent this one looking at what it means to be missional. The next 5 months we’ll look at:

• Passionate spirituality
• Incarnational living
• Intentional community
• Transformational discipleship
• Radical stewardship

This event is not, of course, the end all and be all of our missional journeys, so at the close authors and websites were recommended.

• Elton Trueblood
• Snyder
• Guder
• David Fitch
• Van Gelder
• Michael Frost
• Alan Hirsch
• Charles Ringma
• MTN
• Gospel in Our Culture
• The Center for Parish Development
• And, of course, Symbiosis

Oh, and we got homework.

Reflection
I’m really enjoying missional church thinking. I like a lot of things about the emerging church, but it’s a big umbrella, and there are enough people/things wearing the label that make me doctrinally uncomfortable to keep me from identifying with it fully. Acts 29 is doing some great stuff when it comes to intersecting culture, but I was not predestined to be reformed, and they tend to favor (or at least hold up as models) mega-church and multi-site churches. Missional church embraces what I like about both these things (new forms of church and evangelism), and rolls them all up into a renewed theological vision that is essential.

Sitting in a room with a bunch of practitioners was also great. Everyone there is attempting missional church right here in Calgary. We’ve all read the books and put some thinking into this already, but none of this is merely theory for anyone in the room. We’re trying stuff, finding out what works, and often what doesn’t, all in varying contexts in and around the same city.

Maybe that’s why this lacks the negativism of many others who are pushing for change. The church today in North America reminds me of Pigpen from the Peanuts cartoon: a cloud follows it wherever it goes. We don’t like ourselves, we’re often perceived negatively from outside, and what you end up with is a lot of people who know what they’re against, without knowing what they’re for. As we worked our way through the issues at hand, I was reminded that I really do love the church. That’s part of why I’m doing this. The conversation was full of hope, purpose, and the conviction that we’re not trying to get church right so much as to change the world by following the way of Jesus. We really can do this. Jesus Himself said that God delights to give us the Kingdom.

alan hirsch, church starting, ecclesiology, emerging church, kingdom of god, kingdom of heaven, missiology, theology, western world, missional training network

Meeting of the minds

Mike Frost and Alan Hirsh are soon to begin monthly online forums full of missional thinking and Australian humor. You’ll want to keep an eye on this.

alan hirsch, mike frost, missiology, shapevine, technology

Share the (ink) well

A quick look at IIB make it clear that I talk too much. Of course we all knew that, but I may not be talking as much as you’d think. All my latest entries here are copied over from my blog, Symbiosis. Since I use Ecto, this is as easy as opening the draft, choosing this blog from the drop down menu, and reposting it. It has dawned on me that even if you don’t employ this great little Mac app, another like it, a mediocre freebie, or the Windows wannabe, it still wouldn’t take too much to copy your latest post over to IIB.

So here’s my idea. Instead of feeling like we have to produce unique posts just for IIB, and thus writing very little for IIB, let’s make this blog an aggregate of all our greatest missional thinking. I read your blogs, and you post great stuff that never makes it here. From now on, when you post something to your own site, before you close the lid on that laptop, ask yourself whether this isn’t the sort of thing that fits our conversation. If it does, copy it over and share it with the world a second time! Posts like this and this.

sharing, blogging, ecto

Proost?

Hey there IIB friends, my wife (tentatively) bought me a year subscription to Proost, and resource for church ministry/worship, but before we actually put down the money, I was wondering if anyone here has used it and found it effective at all?

The urban church re-imagined

Steve Taylor has a rad presentation on the urban church re-imagined. check it out here.

via

Starfish conference

All of you taking part in the IIB The Starfish and the Spider think-tank will want to attend a free live web conference with Ori Brafman, one of the book’s coauthors. It’s part of the warmup to Soularize, and it will explore what a “starfish” approach to church might look like. I attended the first free roundtable discussion on the site, and it worked quite well. Live audio and video feed, with web-based attendees able to IM questions and comments via the website. They were asked and answered almost immediately, which made for great dialogue and interaction. To get in on the fun head to Soularize Feedlive, click preview at the top of the screen, and sign in at 6 pm EST PST 18 October. Hope to see you all there.

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