Church & Culture Pt. 5

"How is Christianity to be distinctive in a culture where everyone assumes themselves to be Christian?"

This is a very important question for us. I wasn't faced with this question near as much in the bay area as I have been here. I'm discovering that even in our neighborhood, this question has to be asked.

The following are excerpts from a post I read this morning that deals with this question.

This was the context in which I grew up. To put it charitably, most folks in my home town thought of themselves as Christians. Some evidently were by their profession and their lives. Some, no doubt, were not. But, most people didn't condemn themselves or think so poorly of themselves to self-identify as "practical atheist" or "unbeliever." Even the poolhall hustlers and the alcoholics claimed they knew God, "always said their prayers," and the "God knows their heart."

Many assumed the label "Christian" because they were certainly not practitioners of any other religion. They were not, for example, muslims. In fact, until I returned home during my sophomore year in college as a professing muslim, very few people had ever seen a muslim. No, everyone at least believed in some way, and that made most everyone "Christian" since that was either a family or community legacy bequeathed to all. Nominalism.

The more I think about the situation, the clearer it is to me that in trying to reflect genuine Christian distinctiveness in a nominal Christian culture definitions are critical. The root problem might be described as a failure to define "Christian" and Christianity in terms that bring into sharper contrast regenerate and unregenerate life, in terms that stress spiritual conversion, faith, grace, love and hope over and against moralism, patriotism, and spiritual relativism.

Church & Culture Pt. 4

I'm learning more and more about the church's role in shaping culture. Mark Batterson, a pastor in Washington, DC, has a good post on this subject. He gives four ways that the church engages culture.

1. Ignore it
   The more we ignore culture the more irrelevant we’ll become. And if the church ignores the culture, the culture will ignore the church.
2. Imitate it
   We can imitate culture, but imitation is a form of suicide. Originality is sacrificed on the altar of cultural conformity. If we don’t shape the culture, the culture will shape us.
3. Condemn it
   We’ve got to stop pointing the finger and start offering better alternatives. If the church condemns the culture, the culture will condemn the church.
4. Create it
   We can compete for culture by creating culture. In the immortal words of the Italian artist and poet, Michelangelo: criticize by creating. At the end of the day, the culture will treat the church the way the church treats the culture.

We've all seen these first three ways of engagement, and have come away wanting something more, something different. You can read his entire post here.

Marks of a Missional Church

This guy is a prof at Fuller Seminary. This appeared in his blog over a year ago, but I just now stumbled upon it this morning (at about 4:30 - I couldn't sleep!)

1. What are the marks of churches (people) who live missionally?
They no longer see the church service as the primary connecting point with those outside the community. Connecting with those outside happens within the culture, by insiders to that culture who express the gospel through how they live.

If that question and response got you thinking, check out the rest of the post.

Church & Culture Pt. 3

Catalyst just posted a link to the article I blogged on last week. There are some other pretty good articles as well. Here's the link.

Church & Culture Pt. 2

"...over the next decade, the two most effective expressions of the Gospel will be through social justice and environmental justice."

This statement was made by Clint Kemp, the pastor of New Providence Community Church. Yesterday Jason and I were talking about both of these issues. As I've said before, there was a time when neither of these issues were even on my radar. I'm thankful to God for changing that.

I've often wondered what it would be like to gather a group of friends together and imagine what it would be like to begin, as a community, making a difference, both here in our neighborhood, as well as throughout the world.

In today's paper, there was an article in the Life Magazine pullout section called "What I Prayed For." A fourth grader wrote this: "I'm praying for Darfur. For the people there to get clothes and food and beds. I learned about Darfur on Oprah, and I read books about Africa." Yeah Oprah, and yeah fourth grader. As a side note, I don't remember what kinds of things I prayed for when I was in fourth grade, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't for anything like this.

Church & Culture Pt. 1

I recently read an article about a church in the Bahamas (the island of New Providence) . A few years ago this church, New Providence Community Church, decided to get involved in their community. Before this time they had spent most of their time, energy and money on designing an excellent Sunday morning service that people could bring their friends to. After a few years of doing this, though, they realized that it "was not creating the kind of Christ-followers that could revolutionize the island." They first opened their building up to the community, and began offering Taekwando classes, gymnastics, art lessons, etc. They then decided that they needed to begin doing something about the AIDS crisis on the island. (Nassau has one of the highest concentrated areas of AIDS cases in the first world).

Next, they adopted a section of beach that had been turned into the island's dump. "They believed that as followers of Christ, they had a responsibility to redeem this hideous, corrupted area of the island." They spent two years cleaning it up, then invited local artists from the island to come and help transform this space into something beautiful. They call it Sacred Space. (You can see pictures, along with a five minute video, here). "The breathtaking sunset views create an amazing spiritual experience - but more than that, it's a testimony to the leaders of the Island of how a community can be a significant part of th restoration of all things within their society."

This article was written by Gabe Lyons. It's not currently online, but hopefully will be soon.

Here's one final quote from the article:

"New Providence Community Church is shaping the culture of the Bahamas because they have approached their mission with the belief that they are called to be the Gospel in the context of their community. By deciding not to make their church a place for people to come and see, they have pushed their people to go and do. And they clearly illustrate the influence one church can have when it takes this mission seriously."

National Community Church

I just heard about these guys. They are a church in Washington D.C., and are one of the most innovative churches I've come across in a long time. They are a multi-site church that meets in movie theaters throughout the city. I heard about them through the most recent Catalyst podcast. (By the way, I have to plug them again. If you haven't subcribed to this podcast you should. Here's the link to their podcast).

Here are a few of their values:

• Expect the unexpected
• Irrelevance is irreverence
• Love people when they least expect it and least deserve it
• Playing it safe is risky
• Everyone is invaluable and irreplaceable
• Everything is an experiment
• You cannot out give God
• Maturity does not equal conformity
• It's never too late to be who you might have been

Here's the pastor's (Mark Batterson) blog, and here's a link to their site.

How Does God Plant a Church?

Barb and I moved into our first home eight days ago with a small army of family and friends volunteering. We are absolutely and totally grateful for the love, effort, and sweat of so many people.

Home ownership is a whole new arena of life for the two of us. It is great to be able to work on something that is theoretically mine--to add value, to think about what the future might hold, and see something that needs improvement and to tackle that problem. So last night I went to the Memphis Library. I made my way up to that sacred corner called "Home Improvement." As is my custom, I sat in the isle between the bookshelves with all of the books I could possibly be interested in scattered around me. After sifting the best for my next project I made my way through the check out and into the section of the library where they sell books no one loves anymore. I came away with several how-to books. Old books are great for old houses.

I met a woman there at the library who lives only a few blocks away from us. Her husband died in the summer. She seemed like she was in a fragile state and still trying to regain her footing, which is quite understandable. She saw my books and asked where I lived and what kind of house I was hoping to improve upon. In the course of this conversation she expressed her deep love for Cooper-Young and how it was filled with great, caring people. She also expressed her joy over seeing someone "young" like me move in. We agreed that it was good speaking to one another and that we'd see each other around at the alley cleanups or neighborhood association meetings.

That conversation stuck with me as I traveled home, had dinner with Barb, flipped through the books, went to bed and woke up to this day. It was early as I stepped into the office and I sought ways in which God was affirming our work here and ways in which he would have us go. The topics focus around hope, healing, the place of Jesus in our city and our place in this neighborhood. How will this happen? What are the next steps? Are we missing anything? And all of this sits before me like a pile of unread books. But this book is about redemption, about taking something that is tired, worn out, and dying and then restoring it to its original purposes. Page after page I see possibilities and I also see the thumbprint of God. He has read this book before because he has written it.

We believe that God has called us here to plant a church and to do whatever we can to help that church flourish. It's a mystery as to how it will come about, and I love that. But beyond the mystery, we as a team know some things. We believe that there are people here who are searching for purpose, hope, healing and unconditional love. An enduring Gospel is good for enduring problems and that is what we are sharing.

Each new sidewalk I step down, every new door I enter through, and every new story that is etched upon my mind is affirmation that this is the way of the kingdom, this is the way of endless possibilities, that this is the way God plants his church.

Four Phases of Organizational Decline

I read this in Driscoll's book, but it originally came from Rich DeVos.


Four Phases of Organizational Decline (141)

1. Creative, the dream stage
2. Management, the reality stage
3. Defensive justification, the failure stage
4. Blaming, the death stage
   

The comfort zone is the place a church commonly falls into once they have learned how to survive. This is the state of most American churches, with between 60 and 80 percent of all churches in America either plateaued or declining in membership and/or attendance. In the comfort zone, often there is no longer a visible immediate crisis since the bills are paid, most of the big jobs are being done by someone, leaders are officially in place, a permanent facility has been secured, and the people in the church have generally grown to know and love one another. At this stage, the propensity is for the church to settle in, accept its size, and slip into a mode of maintenance. At some point, people will move away or die, others will get bored, and slowly the church will begin a cycle of decline unless it intentionally reinvents itself missionally to continue to grow by taking risks in an effort to reach lost people for Jesus (141).

I noticed that each time we were in a creative phase, our church attracted more entrepreneurial types of skilled leaders who were excited about the opportunity to try something new and make a difference in our city. This indicates that chaos and crisis can be leveraged to a church’s benefit (142).

The hope for every church is that they work through their management issues, thereby enabling them to return to the creative phase, where they dream up a new project and enthusiastically undertake it and raise a whole new set of management issues to overcome. Therefore, the goal of the management phase is not to get the church organized or under control. Rather, the management phase is needed to eliminate the inefficiencies and barriers that are keeping the church from refocusing back on the creative phase and creating a whole new set of problems to manage (142).

In the defensive justification phase, something has gone terribly wrong and has failed at the management phase. Or the church succeeded at the management stage but never returned to the creative phase and got stuck with a bunch of well-organized managers running the church but no creative and visionary new ideas to move the church forward. Because the church is in a defensive posture, people start to leave the church, and the best and brightest people are no longer attracted to the church because it has lost sight of any risky mission that calls people to rise up in faith (143).

I feared that deconstructing and essentially restarting the church would kill us. I had found it a bit easier to take a risky gamble when we had nothing, but now we had something to lose (144).

What comforted me most as I was prayerfully thinking through our next season was a lengthy study through the New Testament in which I searched for what God promises to do for the church. As I studied, I learned that God promises to grow his church, select elders, save people, bless the teaching of his Word, gift people with exactly the abilities the church needs, and providentially make up for human mistakes if people are repentant of their sins. By the end of my studies, I was confident that our future would be fine because the heavy lifting would continue to be done by Jesus and that we just needed to trust him with obedience and keep going (144-145).

Maturity is the point at which the senior leaders again call the church to the mission that Jesus has called them to accomplish. As a church reaches maturity, it in some ways returns to a relaunching phase, in which the church organizes itself for growth but in a very thoughtful and wise way, seeking to maximize all their resources to achieve their goals (167).

Confessions of a Reformission Rev

I finished up Mark Driscoll's newest book a few weeks ago. Here are some great quotes from the book.

Characteristics of the emerging and missional church (19-20)

• Missions is every Christian being a missionary to their local culture
• The church accepts that it is marginalized in culture and holds no privileged position of influence but gains influence by serving the common good
• The primary culture to reach is postmodern and pluralistic
• Theology ranges from ancient orthodoxy to heterodox liberalism built on postmodern denials of true truth and known knowledge
• Churches are the people who love Jesus and serve his mission in a local culture
• Churches grow as Christians bring Jesus to lost people through hospitality
• Community means the church is a counterculture with a new kingdom way of life through Jesus
• Pastors need not be ordained or formally educated in theology and are trained in the church
• Pastors are missiologists who train Christians to be effective missionaries
• Lost people are saved by the Holy Spirit when and how he determines
• Faith is lived publicly together as the church and includes all of life
• Worship services blend ancient forms and current local cultural styles
• Church buildings are sacred, as is all of God’s creation

Attractional churches need to transform their people from being consumers in the church to being missionaries outside of the church. Missional churches need to gather crowds to their church so that hard words of repentance can be preached in an effort to expose people’s hearts. Those whom God saves can then be trained to go back out into the culture as missionaries to gather more people to repeat the process. Simply, the goal of the church that is both missional and attractional is to continually follow Jesus’ example so that more people are saved for God’s mission and more influence is spread for God’s kingdom, without rejecting one aspect of Jesus’ ministry in favor of another (27).

One of the greatest inhibitors of keeping a church on mission is the erroneous spoken and unspoken expectations people have for church leaders and their families. In a missional church, the lead pastor is the architect who builds the ship more than he is the captain who pilots it, the cook who washes dishes in the galley, or the activities director who coordinates the shuffleboard reservations. The role of architect is incredibly important because most pastors have been trained how to work on a ship instead of how to build a ship (34).

Church = A Training Center for Missional People

I read this statement on Dan Kimball's site awhile back. He was quoting Scot McKnight. I've been thinking a lot about this, especially since moving to Memphis. There are many people here in Memphis who were raised in church. Whether or not they had a good experience in church is a toss-up, but the fact that many were raised in church is one of the things that separates this culture from the bay area. This means that there is an awful lot of baggage in people whose church experience was less than ideal. But it also means that there are a lot of people with a good foundation. I think there are many here who have been going to church (or who spent a lot of years going to church), but were never released into the culture as missionaries. I see one of our primary tasks here as empowering and releasing people as missionaries.

So how do we train missionaries? Over the next few months I'm going to be posting thoughts, articles, resources, etc. that will hopefully begin to bring some answers on this question.

This "Thing"

This is a great post by a guy wrestling with what this "thing" we call church is supposed to be.

What interests me is this: Intentionally Spirit-led communities of faith wrestling with message of the kingdom. Communities/churches that have really gotten the whole missional "thing" and see the message of the kingdom as the message to live out together. No doubt that I have a personal preference to see these communities be as grass-roots and/or organic as possible. But not because I think that those types of communities have it all figured out. But because my experience has led me to believe that this type of church is the one that is the most conducive to true disciple-making. But that's my preference … I don't arrogate to myself the perspective from which I can declare that one form of gathering is "better" than another … as a rule.

Continue reading here.

Ed Stetzer on the Emerging Church

This article came out a few months ago, but I just read it today. In it he separates emerging church leaders into three categories:

Relevants - those who are simply trying to contextualize the gospel in their communities
The churches of the “relevants” are not filled with the angry white children of evangelical megachurches. They are, instead, intentionally reaching into their communities (which are different than where most Southern Baptists live) and proclaiming a faithful biblically-centered Gospel there.

Reconstructionists - Here he is referring to those who think the models that have worked for so long but now no longer work. They therefore are trying to get rid of structures that prohibit the gospel from spreading.
The reconstructionists think that the current form of church is frequently irrelevant and the structure is unhelpful. Therefore, we see an increase in models of church that reject certain organizational models, embracing what are often called “incarnational” or “house” models. They are responding to the fact that after decades of trying fresh ideas in innovative churches, North America is less churched, and those that are churched are less committed.

Revisionists - those who, in trying to contextualize the gospel, have moved away from the gospel.
Revisionists are questioning (and in some cases denying) issues like the nature of the substitutionary atonement, the reality of hell, the complementarian nature of gender, and the nature of the Gospel itself. The revisionist emerging church leaders should be treated, appreciated and read as we read mainline theologians -- they often have good descriptions, but their prescriptions fail to take into account the full teaching of the Word of God.


I think this article is very good for someone who is trying to understand why there is so much controversy over the Emerging Church. I'm just not sure if it is this cut and dry. That would be my only hesitation with it. For example, many would not lump the nature of the Gospel and complementarianism into the same "heresy" category. I know he was just giving examples.

More About Project Mustard Seed

When we talk about Project Mustard Seed, we talk about three journeys that we are on.

1. The Upward Journey
This is the journey of spiritual formation. We have been created in the image of God, and for relationship with God. We follow Jesus as our King and our Teacher. We help others come to know and love this God. The Scripture that comes to mind is Matthew 22:37-38, which says, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment."

2. The Inward Journey
We were never meant to walk this journey of faith alone. Spiritual formation cannot happen apart from community. We need people around us who love us, encourage us, admonish us, and above all, urge us towards maturity. A key verse for us is John 13:34-35, in which Jesus said, "Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other” (The Message).

3. The Outward Journey
The outward journey is one of mission. Just as Jesus gave His life away for the world, so we are to do the same. The Church is the called out, sent forth people of God. The second commandment that Jesus gave in Matthew 22 fits well here: "and love your neighbor as yourself." The question, "who is my neighbor?" must obviously be asked. We are called to love our neighbor across the street as well as our neighbor across the world. We cannot afford to be ignorant of the world's problems. We believe that the Church is called to be on the front lines of ending poverty, disease, and injustice.


Even as I post this, I am excited to be a part of a community like this. Todd Hunter defines the church as this (I think he got it from Dallas Willard):
"The cooperative friends of Jesus, seeking to live lives of constant creative goodness through the power of the Holy Spirit, for the sake of the world."

I think this is a great definition of a community that I'd like to be a part of. I'll probably update this posting from time to time.

If you're at all familiar with the Church of the Saviour, you'll see that we've been influenced by their life and their writings.

Build it and they will come

Build it and they will come

This line was of course made famous in the movie Field of Dreams. However, it's also been a strategy (perhaps an unconcious one) of the church over the past few decades. It's one of the reasons why I was first attracted to the house church movement. The idea was that instead of trying to get the world to come to the church, we, the church, the missional people of God, would go to the world.

We've been working on a proposal for a church start over the last few months, and this morning I was reminded again of this principle. I first read Jesus For a New Generation, by Kevin Ford, during the summer of 1996. It was the first book that I had read on the subject of Generation X. It had a tremendous impact on me. A little over a year later I was helping to plant a church in Nashville that targeted this generation. This morning I was rereading the proposal that our pastor had written for that new church. In the proposal there is a quote from this book. Here's the quote.

"I have met very few Thirteeners (another term for Generation X) who actually hate God. When I meet someone who has an aversion to church, I sometimes ask why. With the exception of the few satanists I've encountered, no one says, I avoid church because I hate God.' Instead, they say, 'Church is boring.' Or 'Christians are hypocrites.' So I respond. 'Well, gee, I go to church, and that's not my experience. If you could go to a church that was not boring, and where the Christians were not hypocritical, where people talked directly and honestly about life, where you got a chance to see how God intersects with human lives - do you think you might be interested?' Without exception, they all answer, 'Yes.'

The idea at the time was that we had to make church relevant to this generation. They no longer fit in their parents' churches, and they were no longer going to go just because it was the cultural thing to do. So how did we make church more relevant? We replaced choirs and organs with drums and guitars; we encouraged people to take off their masks and be real with one another, believing that authentic lives were key to sharing the gospel; we sought to figure out how Jesus fit into our lives Monday through Saturday; etc. So where has that left us?

All of this is great, but my feeling now is that we didn't take things far enough. The paradigm was shifting, and we made part of the leap, but not all of it. The question was still, "If you could go to a church that was not boring...do you think you might be interested." This is not the problem. I think we're going to have to dig deeper as to why people do not come to our churches. I think we're going to have to go back to Scripture, as well as to history. How did the early church make such an impact on society. We won't find the answers until we first learn the right questions to ask.

My prayer is that we will have the courage to discover and then ask these questions.