PastorTodd.net

It recently struck me that a misional community of faith, espeically an emerging/embryonic one, does not have the chutzpah to draw people into it becuase of events, size, or money. When relationships are the prioirty, events and their measurement (size, money, fame, flash) lose their dominating influence. The down-side to this, however, is that such a relationally-focues community will be overlooked by many (most?) people who tend to be drawn by size, fame, or scale.

Let me be specific. Tonight, my wife, daughter and son went to a “worshp concert” at one of the larger churches in our town. This church recently built a new worship center (out by the Walmart by the freeway) with all the bells & whistles any good, new church venue should have. Hey, it makes sense to me, or I can understand this dynamic, even if my ecclesiology has changed and will not permit me to pursue this type of “church.” (There’s that word again, “church” – rife with all of it’s cultural baggage. Oh well, one battle at a time.)

Back to my story. I found myself grieving a bit because our misisonal community of faith, Common Ground, can’t “compete” with that type of event with that sort of venue. Our context is smack-dab in the middle of the Lutheran bible-belt in out-state Minnesota, and youth groups and Christian high schools are drawn to these events in these places like bees to honey. I can’t blame them. If it was David Crowder, Jeremy Camp, or Chris Tomlin, I’d be there, too.

But a relationslly-focues missional community of faith cannot be driven by events or facilities. People are the priority and how they relate/belong together in community – not observers or low-level participants at a “worship concert.” We need to let our interactions dominate so that we may love one another with the love God has poured out on us. This can happen at a big event at a new venue, but it occurs more likely between conversations in the bathrooms, hallways, and rides to and from the event; it is not the primary occurance at or purpose of the event itself.

A relational community is much harder to comodisize than an event or a venue; it’s easier to count people or money than to ascertain the depth and redemptive caliber of interpersonal relationships. Relationships are also messier than events; if an event goes wrong, oh well, we’ll get it right next time; if a relationship goes wrong, it spins-off all sorts of subplots that can lead to either a redeptive or a destrcutive force. But that’s our calling: people – loving people as God has loved us; living in sacrificial and redeptive ways with each other, accepting one another as God has accepted us through Jesus Christ; living in authentic Christian community as our hermaneutic and witness for the good of the world.

So, enough self-pity tonight. I’ll just dream of our few dozen folks who are learning to meaningfully relate and care for each other, and let the worshp concerts be enjoyed by others. But can I give myself permission to go to one of them sometime?

This post is connected with “In or “Out” from a few days back. It’s like a part two to that post that dealt with centered & bounded sets relating to a misisonal ecclesiology. Thought you should know.

The bounded-set ecclesiology prevails in the church in America today. It is so ingrained into the fundamental understanding of what the purpose of a church is that it is difficult to identify it, let alone move away from it. It’s prevalence is best seen in the widespread promulgation of the famous “Purpose Driven Church” strategy, made popular by Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California.

The core strategy of Purpose Driven Church method is to move people across five concentric circles in toward the center. The five circles are: the Community, the Crowd, the Congregation, the Committed, and the Core. The goal is to move people in toward the Core. People within the circles are known as: the unchurched, regular attenders, members, maturing members, and lay ministers. Boundary-crossing events are best defined in the four training sessions called C.L.A.S.S. (Christian Learning And Service Seminars). The first boundary crossing occurs when a casual attender (of the public worship service) becomes a regular attender (Community to Crowd). The next boundary crossing is best seen in Class 101 that results in someone becoming a member of the church (Crowd to Congregation). Class 201, which focuses on spiritual growth, educates people in how to read and study the bible, pray, give, and become involved in a small group (Congregation to Committed). Class 301 is all about spiritual gifts (S.H.A.P.E., actually: Spiritual Gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, Experiences) and how these five dynamics combine to reveal how best you are to serve within the ministry of the Purpose Driven Church. These reveal your “purpose” for being part of the body of Christ. It even includes an interview with a “ministry advisor” who will help point out the best possible “fit” for you to be involved in serving the body of Christ (Committed to Core). Class 401 focuses on mission, and should result in those in the “Core” to go back out into the “Community” to help someone else travel through the concentric circles, thus repeating the process, multiplying themselves, making disciples.

Given the “success” and prevalence of this model, it would be easy to say that this process makes sense and works, and to then encourage more and more churches to pursue this strategy. One key dynamic for the model to work, however, is the need for people to keep crossing all of the boundaries, something becoming more difficult as local church cultures become increasingly foreign to mainstream culture. The gulf between social realities within congregations and the local culture has been growing for so long that fewer and fewer people are willing to jump the cultural chasm between their life as they know it and what they observe contemporary church culture to be. Churches today that go by the tag of “contemporary” focus especially on getting people from the community into the crowd, resulting in many congregations “being a mile wide and an inch deep” (large numbers of people but shallow spirituality). Many churches now are adapting the strategies of “contemporary” or “purpose driven” without allowing the approaches to become part of the essence of the people or paradigm of the leadership. They walk about in the armor of King Saul oblivious that the watching world around them knows something doesn’t seem to fit.

Part three in an ongoing series musing on a missional theology of ecclesiology…

A cultural and ministry shift is occurring in the Church in America. Beginning in the late 20th century and growing in this new century, a re-focus is occurring from church membership to discipleship as the goal of congregational ministries. While the call of the Great Commission is to make disciples of Jesus Christ, for decades now, the measurement of Great Commission engagement has become interpreted as a call for churches to make members but not necessarily to make disciples; the measurement is membership at best, and lately, more often than not, the metric has been reduced to attendance at public worship services.

In the first nine years of my own ministry I fully believed that one of the most significant measures of fulfilling our Lord’s command to “make disciples” was to bring individuals and families into my church membership. Over time, it became increasingly clear that something was tragically wrong with this model of ministry. Let me explain.

Is church membership a meaningful measure of making disciples? If so, it becomes quite easy for church leadership to come to view church members as a means to an end. Think about it. When we encourage new people to become part of a church, how do we consider them? Too many church folks intimate – and I have felt this way far too often – that the joy of new members is as much about helping to pay the bills or filling programmatic positions as it is a celebration of extending the kingdom of God through His church. Now we would not admit this in such a direct manner, but this undercurrent is quite easy to sense and far too common. We need to be willing to reconsider our attitudes and actions about membership and discipleship.

The cultural content for the word membership has changed. Membership means privilege and entitlement – perspectives that have nothing to do with the Gospel! Membership means such an open-ended commitment today that many people have come to act like members but will avoid becoming formal members. Ongoing, non-renewable membership is difficult for people to consider; it is quite foreign to their thinking. Membership as a term of spiritual discipleship lost its meaning.

Although we hear much in the Protestant movement about a priesthood of all believers, we have come to live something else. There has become a clear division between the sacred work of the church (the pastor’s job) and the secular business of the church (the lay leader’s job). How we engage in ministry as pastors and lay leaders has less to do with the gifts God has given and more to do with formal positions of leadership or service. Nor are there clear expectations for spiritual living for non-ordained leaders. Basically, if any person, and even a church leader, avoids breaking the fifth, sixth, or seventh commandments, there is little concern about their life and manifestations of spiritual formation at the hand of the Holy Spirit. The difference between congregational expression and the Church that our Lord started with his disciples seems to be not a growing gap but a gaping chasm.

There is a dark side to church rosters and membership: It can create a competition-model for ministry that is quite unchristian. Rather than seeking the lost, we more frequently are shuffling the moving or the disgruntled between congregations. This can lead to a great un-confessed sin: pastoral jealousy. Whenever a pastor or church “does well,” others pastors or churches can become resentful instead of celebrating the advance of the Kingdom of God. On a personal level, whenever a family or individual leaves one church and joins another, especially within the same town or metro-area, pastors and church leaders may feel personally wounded — instead of assuming that the Holy Spirit of God had led the people elsewhere.

Reggie McNeal compares the attitudes of church membership to a club house mentality. In his book, The Present Future, he writes:

“As he hung on the cross Jesus probably never thought the impact of his sacrifice would be reduced to an invitation for people to join and to support an institution.”

Are we more concerned about God’s kingdom and making disciples or are we consumed with supporting an institution by increasing its membership? This is a sobering question. The church with which I am involved practices confessing membership. Jesus calls for cross-bearing disciples.

Disciple-making ministry addresses these issues head on. Jesus knew what he was doing when he called us to make disciples not members. The result of growing a disciple-making ministry is the release of missional energy — in the pastor as well as the people. An underlying confidence emerges when we step out of the competitive model into which most of our congregations have unconsciously stepped. We discover a God of abundance and a people willing to give more time and energy than we ever imagined.

This is part two of a discussion on a post-Christendom context for Christian communities of faith.

A prevalent paradigm within most churches today is that of a bounded set. The traditional-attractional model seeks to have people cross over a boundary. You are either “in” or “out.” The concern is over who is “in,” who is “out,” and how to get those “out” “in.” So we have ministries for “outreach.” [Some have “in-reach” ministries, which are overtly directed toward those already “in” the congregational boundaries.] “Out”-reach precipitates another ministry called “assimilation” – how to get those who are now “in” to stay “in.” Assimilation is a result of an outreach mentality. We see ourselves (believers, the church), rather, as being the “sent ones” who are called to be “in the world but not of it.” If we are not “in” the world, how can our message be heard, especially in a time when the authenticity of the messenger is critical to gaining a hearing? One CLB pastor has told of his congregation comprised of people who love God dearly, are passionate about mission, but have completely lost the ability to connect with their local setting.

In their book, The Shaping of Things To Come,” Michael Frost and Alan Hirsh put it well:

“The traditional church makes it quite difficult for people to negotiate its maze of cultural, theological, and social barriers in order to get “in.”… and by the time newcomers have scaled the fences built around the church, they are so socialized as churchgoers that they are not likely to be able to maintain their connection with the social groupings they came from.”

Bounded-set thinking pervades deeper into social dynamics within the traditional congregation. Once a person is “in,” the next step is for the church culture to exert shaping impulses upon the individual that they become “committed” to the congregation and to serve and promote its functioning.

Think of this in terms of bounded- or center-sets. If you must stick with the traditional-attractional mode, then you are obligated to see your church as a bounded set. In that case, evangelism and outreach will consist of telling others that it’s better inside the set than out, and trying to get them over the line, into the church. Only when a community of faith is prepared to leave its space and enter into another subculture will it be able to effectively see itself as, and be, a centered set. In a centered-set, the concern is movement toward or away-from.

Think of these two dynamics as a cattle range. A bounded-set is pastureland that has a fence around it, where you can easily tell who is in and who is out. This fits with a Christendom model, where there are power structures that support this type of cultural oversight. But our culture has moved past Christendom; the world cares not what goes on within or, from the perspective of local congregations, outside of the walls of the church. Making the paradigm further irrelevant, the centered-set works within a system of control that no longer exists in the West. A centered-set, in contrast, is like range land in the Australian outback; the landscape is much too large for a fence, so the cattle ranchers dig wells that will keep the cattle near the source of water. In a centered-set, you can tell who is moving toward and who is moving away from the source of life, in this case, water; in our case, the water of life.

(to be continued)

This is part one of a multi-part set of musings exploring what it mean s to be a missional community of faith in the context of post-Christendom. You’ll need to read the post to understand what I mean, but it’ll be worth the read. Trust me.

Our journey is a courageous missional engagement where we seek to live out the gospel within its cultural context rather than perpetuating an institutional commitment apart from its cultural context. We affirm our deep commitment to historic, orthodox Christian faith, and we hope people will not be thrown by what might be viewed as a somewhat unorthodox approach to life, mission, and church.

It might be possible for an established church to plant a missional congregation within its broader church structures, but the inertia of our inherited church formations and functions tend to keep the focus of “ministry” upon those already inside of the church community. Our desire is to be missional as a central part of what it means for us to be disciples of Jesus Christ. It is our hope that existing congregations would sponsor and support by way of blessing new congregations from their doorstep to reach those not interested in the conventional church—or put more accurately, conventional church culture.

We hope to base discipleship and life in our postmodern world around a vital Christology and to reframe our ecclesiology entirely on missional grounds. This is an intentional movement away from Christendom, where the church is viewed as being in favor as part of the dominant culture. We desire to recover our ecclesiastic role as a subversive, missionary movement that operates not in the center but on the margins of society.

The advent of postmodernism has raised within the West many expectations for an experiential, activist form of religious, mystical experience. The Christian church has not met these expectations. The contemporary traditional church is increasingly seen as the least likely option for those seeking an artistic, politically subversive, activist community of mystical faith, which is becoming the primary posture of “spiritual seekers” within our western cultural context. We desire to establish a Christian community of faith that will engage people with a postmodern and post-Christendom heartbeat.

Our missional community of faith seeks to discern God’s specific missional vocation for the entire community and for its members. “What has God called us to be and do in our current cultural context?” The issue of cultural context is essential because the missional church shapes itself to fit that context in order to transform it for the sake of the kingdom of God. The content remains the same (5 solas); the form is what needs to be continually remade into contextually accessible modes of communication and meaning.

While in reality we are in a post-Christendom context, the Western church still operates for the most part in a Christendom mode. Constantine, it seems, is still the emperor of our imaginations. What is needed is the abandonment of the strict lines of demarcation between the sacred and profane spaces in our world and the recognition that people today are searching for relational communities that offer belonging, empowerment, and redemption. It is the “redemptive” dynamic of the Christian community that sets us apart from other cultural communities of belonging and empowerment. Christ makes all the difference.

(to be continued…)