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.

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.

“Too often the solution has been ‘How do we take what we have and reconfigure it, ‘pretty-up’ our programs to make them more attractive?’ The true missions enterprise as found in Scripture has never been about attracting people and bringing them to a building. The early church didn’t even have buildings.”

“Jesus Christ never said we should go out and invite people to come to a meeting; instead, He was attracting them to an incarnational lifestyle,  He was living out, among them, who God was and He them to live out that lifestyle wherever they went. Being a Christian in the First Century wa not about joining a social club like it has become today.”

“I think a big problem with reaching the lost world is that we project the image that to be a Christian new believers must come and be with us and act like us. We should spend less time trying to get them to adapt to our evangelical subculture and more time helping them live out incarnational lifestyle among their unchurched friends.”

“Today, most of our evangelism efforts center around inviting people to church to hear the gospel. In reality, all missions and evangelism should occur primarily in the community outside the walls of the church”

“We have to rethink how we do church…our ecclesiology, our doctrine, has to flow out of our missiology. We need to go back to Scripture and determine what church is really about. It’s not about buildings and budgets and programs, though those are good. It is about being a missionary people and equipping them to be missionary whether or not they are funded.”

- I read these words by Curt Watke, (Exec Director Intercultural Institute for Contextual Ministry) in a major Baptist newspaper… are these ideas becoming mainstream? Let’s hope so.

I need to thank Ian personally for this book (I received it as part of the Soularize experience) as once again a book came at the right time for me. I met Ian briefly on a boat in the Bahamas on our way to swim with sharks, but never knew this was his work.

To give you a run down, the book centres on a character (Pastor Chase) who is the founding pastor of a large protestant church in the New England area. Chase, as you find out early is going through a lot of questioning on what the church is to be and during a passionate moment, vomits these ideas all over his congregation. (Sounds like something I would do). This leads to a forced leave of absence so he can work through where he is at, and allow to elders to assess whether he should stay on.

After working through some of the issues with family (and getting hurt by a lot of church members) he decides to leave the country and go visit his uncle in Italy. In Italy he studies with a number of Saint Francisan monks and they begin to shape the way he sees the world and ultimately the church.

If I was to write a book in order to teach a way of life, this is how I would do it. The story was very well written and believable (more believable from an American stand point, as I have heard how churches are down there, but understandable as a Canadian). And for me it was a great way to get introduced to more of Saint Francis, a Saint I really only knew as a few famous quotes. Near the end when Chase is connecting back up with his old church, I felt that Saint Francis was given way too much credit in his speech, but other than that I loved this book entirely.

On my CP scale I give it a 4.5/5, and recommend it to any church planter, leader or whatever that needs a pilgrimage to work through how they feel they about how the church should be and the role they should play in it.

My friend mike made a short mention on his blog about this book as well.

Here’s a fascinating podcast: interview with John Polkinghorne, both a theoretical physicist, who played a significant role in the discovery of the quark and an Anglican priest. He handles many of the science/faith issues with ease.

I am sure Spencer (whom I met at Soularize) would be the first to tell you he didn’t author this book, so for clarity this book is a collection of articles from the ooze website that Spencer picked for his book.

I think sometimes we rank books, music or movies based on the time of life they touch us. And so I am quick to give this book high praise and CP marks (I give it 4/5 as a book for rethinking). I am at a serious stage of rethinking (I know I always seem to be at that point), and so this book was the perfect match to my time of life. I received this book for free from Spencer from my time in the Bahamas at Soularize and decided to pick it up a week or so ago. And to my surprise it was exactly what i was looking for. Every article (specifically the ones at the beginning and at the end) seemed to speak where I was at. Not in ways that would fix my problems, but allowing me to sit in the problem in order to work it out. You see there wasn’t one article that I would say I totally agreed with, in fact a lot of them I pushed back, but it was the freedom of thought that I enjoyed. It has inspired me to write more to, and to share my thoughts even though they are very incomplete at their best.

So if you have a moment pick this book up and read the first 3 articles. All three of these had me hooked and inspired. Inspired not to do, but to undo and detox, and move in a direction even if it isn’t the right one…although it could be the right one for now.

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

This article reminded me of my last missional training. Dr. Gramm is being fired for getting divorced.

“Why are college administrators better able to judge my divorce than I am?” Dr. Gramm, who has been married for 34 years, asked in an interview. “If I had thought this was the wrong thing to do, I wouldn’t have done it.”

He questions why the judgment of college administrators matters more than the word of a valued, longtime employee. “God won’t fire anyone because of their marital status, politics, theology or sexual preference,” Dr. Gramm said.

“I’m accepting the policy as it applies to me because I knew it was in place and I don’t expect anyone to make any exceptions,” he said. “But in the long run I think the policy is not a good one, because in a sense it’s saying that Wheaton’s standards are higher than God’s. That’s an upside-down world.”

It is unclear whether Dr. Gramm’s reasons for divorce would have allowed him to stay because he refuses to discuss any details. His wife, Lynelle, declined to comment. From NYT | At College, a High Standard on Divorce

Now, I know these things are always messy, and evangelicals have been far too condemning towards divorcees in recent years, especially considering that our divorce rate is no different from the rest of the world’s. This isn’t about divorce. What I’m interested in is his rationale. Look at what he says. Why should anyone else be able to hold me accountable or speak into my life? I don’t have to answer to anyone for my decisions but myself. If you try to tell me what’s right, you’re interfering with the voice of God, which I hear and discern all by myself. I’m only doing what I think is right. Reminds me of a certain rich man.

I don’t know Dr. Gramm, nor do I have any idea of whether he’s getting plenty of advice and accountability from his church or elsewhere, but I do know that this article makes it sound as if he has no interest in the sort of life Cam and Bob talked about living, one of mutual interdependence and submission that the scriptures urge us towards.

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

I have managed to down another Richard Rohr book, and Simplicity is another winner. He again builds upon many of the thoughts from “everything belongs” and challenges me over and over to get myself out of the way so that God can work through me. There are so many ways that we as Westerners have built up our own “kingdoms” so as to get in the way of what God is doing. What I really loved is how those “kingdoms” manifest themselves in not only our personal goals and ego, but also in the systems we have created. When we finally move ourselves out of the way we will see the corruption in our own lives and in the systems we work through every day.

As a church planter I give this book a 4/5, so consider it a must read, but you need to be in a good place…a quiet contemplative place to read it and really grasp what he is trying to say, because if you don’t you can let his powerful words slip by without causing any change in you. The main thing that this book did to me is open my eyes to see. I am not sure what i will see yet, but i know it will involve some action on my part. Those thoughts to come.

And yes to those who want those levels of maturity that Rohr has put together and presented in the Bahamas, I found them again and will post them sometime in May.