lifeasmission
exploring the mystery of life and mission as one and the same
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Archive for December, 2008
Relational Gift Giving Ideas
I mentioned before that our church community is participating in Advent Conspiracy. While I have some of the same reservations that Ariah does, it has been incredibly encouraging to see how many Living Hopers have embraced this new approach to Christmas and I see a lot of potential for the values we have been discussing being carried forward beyond the Christmas season.
For all my LH friends (and anyone else for that matter), I stumbled across this small list of some relational gift giving ideas that, in correspondence with what Matthew said this past Sunday (check here for the podcast of “Give More” when it’s up), would help us to give more presence – as opposesd to presents.
Hello Africa
Remember the scene in Ace Ventura 2 where Jim Carey says, “Three darts is too much!”? That’s about how I feel today.
Aside from my shoulders feeling like Mike Tyson punched them for about an hour, I woke up this morning stiff as a board and with a fever. All thanks to the 5 vaccinations I got yesterday – Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, Typhoid, Yellow Fever, and Flu.
No, I am not a hypochondriac, I am heading to Kenya in a little bit more than a week with a small team of others to help put on a camp for an orphanage that a couple from Living Hope helped to start. I have been looking forward to getting to Africa for years and I’m about get to live that dream. We’ll be gone Dec. 25 – Jan5, so be looking for pictures and stories shortly thereafter.
The Probem of Church Shopping
Church shopping is an unfortunate reality of our time. Made possible by a Church divided and disunited, and complicated by a culture of hyper-individualism and hyper-consumerism, we tend to form our ecclesiologies around what will attract those who are looking for a church home.
We’ll put aside for a second the fact that those who are far from Jesus are the least likely to shop for a church so that I can ask your opinion on a question I have been wrestling with.
It can be argued that Christians, at least those of the evangelical persuasion and who have been shaped by modernity, shop for churches based on whether or not they “preach the gospel,” or “believe the Bible.” Therefore, these churches get evaluated based on peoples experience of attending a handful of worship services.
Conversely, younger Christians, who are more shaped by postmodernity are more inclined to shop for a church based on whether or not it is actually attempting to live out the gospel and seeking to enter the story of Scripture. The only way to evaluate a church using these criteria is to actually enter into community – to get to know, have conversations, and share life with the people who make up the community.
To me, it seems that this is not a good postmodern strategy, but is actually more in keeping with biblical faithfulness of what it means to be the church- that we want to attract people to how we live and not what we say. Some would say, “We need modern churches to reach modern people and postmodern churches to reach postmodern people.” It seems to me that this runs the risk of taking our cues from culture rather than from the gospel. Incarnation, in my estimation, is not an attempt to play by the rules of culture, but to enter into culture and subvert it with the ways of Jesus. Ok, please, your thoughts.
Forerunners of The Great Emergence
2 quick observations about the day…
1) The Emergent conversation is providing an opportunity to those whom no one else will listen (because they just don’t fit) to be heard and embraced.
2) A unifying characteristic of Emergent type people is their distrust of any version of Christian faith that leaves little or no room for complexity and paradox. They would rather be shunned than forced to conform.
The Great Emergence
With Memphis as the hosting city & St. Mary’s cathedral as a hosting venue, The Great Emergence conference is getting started.
A Risky Ecclesiology
The church is by nature a community which exists by faith and faith is inherently risky. Sadly, most churches are structured and run in a way that aims to minimize risk and keep people comfortable. Of course we do this with the best of intentions, like a mother who refuses to let her children go out and play for fear that they might get hurt, but all we are really doing is ensuring that they will get hurt when life finally catches up with them and robbing them of great joy in the meantime. Those who have aspired to positions of leadership in the church need to call and release our people to risk much and live by faith. We need to spark imagination, give away power like it’s going out of style, and embrace suffering and failure as normative. The call to follow Jesus is a call to die. It is a sin every time the church invites people to anything other than that.
These thoughts sparked by Neil Cole’s words which I caught over on Jonathan Dodson’s blog…
We ask for volunteers all the time. We offer spiritual-gift assessments to see where people fit best in our program, but we never really offer very challenging experiences for people. Handing out bulletins, directing traffic wearing a bright orange vest, chaperoning a youth function, or changing a diaper in the nursery may be helpful for the church program, but none of it is a task worth giving your life to. Many who struggle to do these things have a nagging unspoken question: “Did Jesus come so I can do this?”
We must transition from seeing church as a once-a-week worship event to an ongoing spiritual family on mission together. Then people will see church as something worth giving your life for. Honestly, people need one another more then they need another inspiring message. You would be surprised what people will do for Jesus, or for a brother or sister, that they will not do for a vision statement and a capital giving campaign.
Of course there is nothing wrong with serving in any of these ways above, but Cole here articulates a fundamental difference between attractional churches (oriented around ME and my desires) and missional churches (oriented around God and God’s desires).
Especially in cultures where “going to church” is the norm, we need to work overtime and go far out of our way to help people reimagine what it means to be the body of Christ in the world. And this is no mere intellectual exercise, “Here, let me explain this to you so you understand and then assume it will just happen.” No, we must decide to adopt the structures, patterns, and practices which will create an environment for this new reality to flourish. When we invite people to be on mission, to risk much and live by faith, we are inviting them to experience the fullness of life that Jesus came and died for. To deviate from this is compromise the very integrity of the body of Christ.
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