Below is the fourth and final article that we’ve submitted to Patheos as a contribution to their forum on “The Future of the Seminary.”  I don’t believe it’s actually up over there yet and it seems like that forum has sort of run out of steam, so I thought I’d go ahead and post it here.  If it does make it up over at Patheos, I’ll update this post.  If this happens to be new to you and you’ve got some interest, here’s where you can find the first three articles:

Shaping Students w/ the Character and Competency of Jesus (lifeasmission | Patheos)

Missionary Pastors for a Missionary God (lifeasmission | Patheos)

Ministers are Mobilizers, Not Managers (lifeasmission | Patheos)

As I’ve noted in previous posts, this is some edited content from a more comprehensive white paper that I worked on.  You can find the whole paper here as a resource at thefutureoftheologicaleducation.com.

I hope to round this all out with a (more brief!) summary post soon.  Thanks to those of you who have been following along and weighing in.  Engagement is the only way to refine these sort of ideas toward the creation of something truly new, helpful, and concrete.

This is the 4th and final article in a series that we have been happy to offer related this Patheos forum on, “The Future of the Seminary.”  For our part, we have sought to call attention to the idea that inasmuch as theological education seeks to locate its purpose and aim in the missio Dei, its shape and future can be most helpfully understood from a missiological perspective.  This is the fundamental point of the white paper from which these few posts have emerged, The Missiological Future of Theological Education.

We first offered a video, which summarizes the issues surrounding the way in which Christendom obscured our view of God’s missionary nature, thereby mis-shaping not only our theology, but our ecclesiology and the systems of theological education that we constructed to prepare leaders for these Christendom-shaped churches.  The video also suggests that…

as we seek to re-imagine theological education along missional lines, the most important ‘accrediting factor’ for our schools lies in their ability to do their part in producing leaders who are able to demonstrate having taken on the character and competency of Jesus.

If you haven’t seen it yet, the video is embedded below:

After this initial post, we offered two more that sought to outline the missiological principles that we believe best contribute to creating processes of theological formation along these lines:

1) Missionary Pastors for a Missionary God, in which we suggest that missional approaches to theological education will be praxeological – geared toward the training of theologically reflective practitioners.

2) Ministers are Mobilizers, not Managers, in which we suggest that missional approaches to theological education will be mobilizational - geared toward the training of missionary leaders.

In this final post, we’d like to outline a final missiological principle that we believe will guide a faithful re-imagining of theological education, that of being spiritual – geared toward the training of kingdom citizens.

Spiritual, of course, can mean many things. For us, it simply means that everything about what theological education is and does, ought to be predicated on the centrality of a vibrant and growing relationship with the triune God and his work in the world.  In other words, just as Jesus’ efforts to train and form his disciples would have had no ultimate significance apart from their connection to God and God’s work in the world, so too are the efforts of seminaries wasted apart from this same connection.

Having lost its proper missiological shape, theological education within Christendom made it possible to separate ones intellectual development from ones spiritual maturity. This is a dichotomy that our centers of theological education must repudiate if they hope to lend any support to the shaping of leaders for Kingdom ministry.  Moving forward will call for, at the very least, processes of theological formation that shape convictions, impart spiritual knowledge, re-frame our relationship to Scripture, and embrace the irreplaceable role of the Holy Spirit.

Shaping Kingdom Convictions

As theologian James McClendon once said, “Convictions are not so much things that we have but things that have us.”  As important as we believe Christian doctrine and truth are, if we fail to cultivate leaders who are as convicted by them (as evidenced by life transformation) as they purport to be convinced of them, we will only continue to contribute to the collapse of Western Christianity. If seminaries are to make any sort of meaningful contribution to the mission and witness of the Church in Western culture, they must show primary concern, not only for the information that their graduates possess, but for the convictions that will shape, drive and sustain them through all the trials and tribulations of not only ministry in a Post-Christian context, but amidst the sort of suffering and persecution which the Bible tells us always accompanies faithful witness.

Imparting Spiritual Knowledge

Seminaries and churches are full of people who know plenty of things about God. What our seminaries and churches seem in desperate lack of are people who truly know God in the way the Apostle Paul speaks of when he says, “I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death…” What we have to accept is that this kind of “knowing” cannot be manufactured or controlled. The impartation of spiritual knowledge is finally the work of the Holy Spirit as we live in relationship with God and participate in his mission in the world in the way of Jesus. Thus, it is incumbent upon seminaries to create environments where God can do this kind of work in shaping Kingdom leaders.

Re-framing Our Relationship to Scripture

It should go without saying that in the endeavor of theological education to contribute to the shaping of Christian leaders, there is no text more important or sacred than the Bible. Unfortunately, the experience of many a seminarian is that the Bible is reduced to little more than an object to be examined and dissected. However, when you abstract an engagement with Scripture from a predisposition towards inviting the work of the Holy Spirit, we miss God’s intention for this discipline. Therefore, in terms of truly honoring a spiritual disposition towards theological education, not only will the Bible occupy a primary place throughout the whole of our programs (as opposed to being confined to individual courses), it will increasingly need to be seen as the very story out of which seminaries derive their own identity, purpose, and function.

Embracing the Irreplaceable Role of the Holy Spirit

Our prevailing systems of theological education train and equip people to be leaders in such a way that they assume an ability to succeed based upon their own intellectual capacity and/or skill-set rather than upon their ability to discern the Holy Spirit’s leading and therefore upon the Holy Spirit’s power rather than their own. We suggest that to the degree that centers of theological education want to contribute to preparing leaders for faithful service as Kingdom citizens, they must re-imagine theological education in such a way that the work and role of the Holy Spirit in the theological formation of leaders, as well as in the world, will be given primary attention.

Concluding Thoughts

One of the great travesties of our current Christian landscape is that emerging leaders often feel like they have to make a choice between “going to seminary,” because it will provide the sort of “accreditation” that many denominations and organizations require, or “going into ministry,” in order to give themselves fully to the sort of life & labor they feel like God has called them to.  As we re-imagine theological education along the lines of God’s Kingdom and God’s mission in the world, our hope and prayer is that these emerging leaders wouldn’t feel like this is a choice they have to make. Instead, we envision truly missional systems of theological education, so radically committed to a Kingdom vision of accreditation and to commissioning Kingdom leaders on account of their character and competency rather than their GPA, that ministry becomes the context for all our education and formation as we train reflective practitioners, that the aim of our education would become the mobilization of God’s people for loving and faithful service as we train missionary leaders, and that all of this emerges out of a vibrant and growing relationship with the triune God as we train Kingdom citizens.

As part of their forum on, “The Future of the Seminary,” the 3rd of 4 articles that I’ve contributed to, Ministers are Mobilizers, Not Managers,  went up the other day.  You can find the previous articles both here at lifeasmission as well as over at Patheos…

Shaping Students w/ the Character and Competency of Jesus (lifeasmission | Patheos)

Missionary Pastors for a Missionary God (lifeasmission | Patheos)

Again, this is some edited content from a more comprehensive white paper that I worked on.  You can find the whole paper here as a resource at thefutureoftheologicaleducation.com.  Hope to see some helpful conversation emerge there, here, and over at Patheos as well.

In terms of our particular contribution to this forum, we began by suggesting that while we passionately affirm the important role that seminaries play educationally, from a Kingdom perspective, the more important ‘accrediting factor’ is their ability to graduate students who have increasingly taken on both the character and competency of Jesus.   Given those aims and the ways in which our systems of theological education have been corrupted by the (non-missional) assumptions and characteristics of Christendom, we suggested that the central task before us is identifying educational principles guided by a theological vision of the missio Dei as it relates to both the Gospel and the Church that can help us re-imagine and re-shape our processes of theological formation.

In our second post we sought to outline the central features of the first of three of these educational principles, that of being praxeological.   This praxeological orientation to theological education would result in the cultivation of reflective practitioners – leaders for whom the practice of mission and ministry and critical theological and missiological reflection always go hand-in-hand.

Here, we’d like to provide a sketch of a second educational principle, again drawn from the life and ministry of Jesus, that we feel must inform our processes of theological formation, that of being mobilizational – geared toward the training of missionary leaders.

One of the most disastrous effects of Christendom upon our systems of theological education has been the unhelpful assumption that the Church does and should exist at the center of our society.   Under this vision, seminaries have equipped leaders who would excel at managing and maintaining this system.   However, as the missio Dei and its implications for the Gospel and the Church come back into focus in Post-Christendom, we submit that our systems of theological education must be re-imagined for the purposes of training missionary leaders.  These will be leaders whose concern and skill-set revolve not around managing churches as part of a culture believed to be “Christian,” or even further, around church growth, but around mobilizing the people of God for participation in God’s mission in the world.  We submit that a truly mobilizational system of theological education will be, among other things, affordable, accessible, designed to prepare leaders as cultural pioneers, and judged on its ability to cultivate leaders who are competent to make disciples and mobilize others for faithful participation in God’s mission in the world.

Affordable

Unless you happen to live in a certain place, going to seminary requires the time and expense of uprooting your life and moving to another location.  In addition, the vast majority of seminary students are completely on their own to figure out how to pay for a seminary education.  A staggering number of students carry an enormous amount of debt for years, if not decades, following the completion of their program.   Not only is this problematic because of the current costs of seminary education, but increasingly, attaining a seminary degree does not translate into a proportional ability to get any job, let alone one that will alleviate students of their debt.   Moreover, because seminary degree programs remain, in large part, shaped by the assumptions of Christendom, students may quickly discover they are ill equipped to faithfully engage with the practical realities of ministry in Post-Christendom.  In order to be truly mobilizational, it is incumbent on us to re-imagine systems of theological education that are vastly more financially sustainable.

Accessible

Lack of proximity to the kinds of formational education that we are talking about isn’t just an affordability problem; it’s also an accessibility problem.  While we applaud the efforts of the increasing number of seminaries that value distance and
distributed learning opportunities, we would suggest much more innovation is required.  Increasingly, seminaries need to embody in themselves the kind of character they should be instilling in their students.  In other words, just as we need to mobilize leaders, we also need to imagine what it might mean to mobilize theological education itself.  Institutions of theological education that are truly mobilizational will happily release power and control as they give their time and energy to initiatives that make quality theological education more accessible even if they don’t directly benefit.  The future of theological education belongs to those groups and institutions who care more for the work of God’s Kingdom than they do their own.

Prepare Cultural Pioneers

The ecclesial vision of Christendom provided for a system of theological education that mainly had in view the creation of Christian leaders who might well be described as managers or custodians of the church at the center of culture.  But, with the significant shaking occurring as we move from Christendom to Post-Christendom, the maps we previously used for theological education prove unhelpful and misleading.  In direct juxtaposition to a Christendom-shaped reality, a missional understanding of God and the Church compel us to give our time and attention to the equipping of missionary leaders capable of pioneering in a world without maps.  This will require the re-imagining of structures and programs that are designed to impart to students, missionary, as opposed to managerial, skill-sets.

Cultivate Disciple-Makers and Mobilizers

A final aspect of theological education that is mobilizational is the central importance of equipping leaders to be disciple-makers and mobilizers of God’s people for mission.  However, a particular person might be individually gifted, their ability to leverage that giftedness in concert with the biblically unifying commission to “go and make disciples of all nations,” is a fundamental marker of their fit for Kingdom ministry.  Said another way, we suggest that a profound understanding of one’s giftedness and a correspondingly profound track record of the exercise of that giftedness as a means of making disciples and mobilizing people and communities for mission ought to be seen as a basic requirement for the completion of any seminary program.

In short, as the Church is increasingly pushed to the margins of society, it has (we have!) the opportunity to rediscover the missional nature of God, the Gospel, and the Church that was eclipsed within Christendom.   Among other things called for by this rediscovery is the complete restructuring of our systems of theological education as we seek to equip leaders who can serve the Church out of missionary rather than managerial perspectives and skill-sets.   We offer additional thoughts along these lines in the full paper, available here and check out the video and other resources at thefutureoftheologicaleducation.com.

The post below (edited slightly) was offered as the 2nd in a series of 4 articles on the “Future of the Seminary” forum over at Patheos (1st article here).  If you haven’t already seen it, this video will give you a good introduction to the basis for the perspective being offered.

Based on this perspective, we suggest that the task before us is to identify educational principles guided by a theological vision of the missio Dei as it relates to both the gospel and the Church that can give shape and substance to processes of theological formation that are able to help students develop Kingdom-oriented character and competency.

We will explore two additional missiological principles that we believe ought to guide this vision of theological education in forthcoming posts, but here we would like to suggest that a vision of theological education that is guided and shaped by a missional vision of God, the Gospel, and the Church will be praxeological – given to the training of reflective practitioners.  While other changes are surely called for, we suggest that theological formation that is praxeological calls for elongated programs, training by missionary theologians, diversified learning environments, a high degree of attention to contextualization, and an emphasis on creating learning communities.

Elongated Programs of Theological Formation

Whereas many seminaries seem to be spending their energy trying to find ways to help students achieve degrees more quickly, a praxeological orientation calls for more integrated, and therefore elongated, programs. Obviously an elongated program delays the conferral of a degree, but under the vision of theological education suggested here, the idea isn’t getting a degree so that you can begin to do ministry, but beginning to do ministry so that you are rooted in the proper context for theological education and formation in the first place. If the end goal is not the conferral of a degree but actually becoming a certain kind of person, there simply are no shortcuts to be taken.

Training by Missionary Theologians

A praxeological orientation toward theological education will require a faculty composed not mainly of traditional academic scholars, but of missionary theologians – those whose ability to guide and shape others flows from their own praxeological formation. Again, we are not suggesting that scholarship does not have its place; we are simply saying that the right kind of scholarship will always be driven by and focused on its implications for the life and ministry of the Church. As Karl Barth has famously said,

There would be no theology if there were no ministry specially committed to the witness of the word… If we abstract its origin in the ministry of the community, all its problems are either irrelevant or they lose their theological character… (CD 4.3.2, 879)

Thus, we are compelled to ask whether or not those who are trained and formed by traditional PhD programs are the best candidates for the kind of mentors/teachers needed to equip those who embrace this vision of theological education.

Diversified Learning Environments

Learning theory suggests there are three ways we learn: the passing on of information, apprenticeship to learn certain skill-sets, and immersion. The best learning experience occurs when there is a dynamic interplay between all three. Driven by Christendom presuppositions, our current systems of theological education are designed to do the first, pass on information, but give no real attention to issues of apprenticeship or immersion experiences. A praxeological orientation to theological education will require that our seminaries create all three kinds of learning environments for their students. The issue here isn’t merely the lack of second and third environments, but the fact that that apart from them, the relevance of time spent in the first environment loses the impact it ought to have.

Issues of Contextualization

Ministry never occurs in a vacuum. Students don’t just need to learn what to apply to their ministry context, which under the current paradigm of theological education they may not even have; they need to learn how to apply it to their ministry context, which we are suggesting as a prerequisite. This implies not only the need for missiologically-driven advances in models of distributed learning, but calls for a greatly enhanced focus on the part of instructors and the designing of programs with regard to the application of theological learning to specific ministry contexts.*

*Living into this sort of vision will mean that increasingly, centers of theological education will see having a ministry context as a prerequisite for admission into its programs. In addition, this value should compel centers of theological education to put significant amounts of time and resources into establishing truly meaningful relationships and partnerships with local churches and ministry organizations in which students who don’t have their own ministry context might not just do occasional internships, but root the entirely of their educational process.

Learning Communities

A core component of a praxeological orientation to theological education is the importance of learning in community. Whereas we wholeheartedly agree that there is a unique and important place for those regarded as experts in their field who can offer their wisdom, experience, and insight as they guide students in their formation as Kingdom leaders, there is an equally important and formative dimension to theological education that is rooted within a community of learning. In line with the realities of Kingdom ministry, which always call for a collaborative approach to tasks and problems, seminary students should increasingly develop a capacity to embody an open and discerning posture towards the insights and critiques of their peers. Flying in the face of traditional assessment criteria that are nearly exclusively predicated on one’s individual academic performance, a core component of assessing the formation of Kingdom leaders will have to do with their posture toward and interaction with others in a learning community.*

*We suggest that where theological schools continue to offer residential options, they will do well to structure them around a more monastic model where students come to be immersed in an integrated program of sharing life, resources, learning experiences, and diversified endeavors in ministry and mission.

At the heart of the particular suggestion is the simple observation that, “this is how Jesus did it” – calling disciples to him “that they might be with him and that he might send them out…” (Mark 3:14)

Read the full white paper, The Missiological Future of Theological Education, here and join in the conversation below and over at thefutureoftheologicaleducation.com.

It’s been a few weeks since I posted about the groundswell of conversation that seemed to be happening around the topic of the state and future of theological education. Since then, a lot has happened.

1) I joined Doug Paul and Mike Breen of 3DM in hosting a forum on this topic at Northern Seminary.

2) We’ve launched a website that is hosting the white paper and video we produced as contributions to the conversation.

3) A number of people have begin conversations in the discussion forums on that site.

4) Dr. Craig Blomberg, Professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary, offered a response to the paper that is posted on the resource blog

5) A slew of new posts, including the 1st of 4 from our perspective, have appeared in the online forum over at Patheos.

6) And we have received a couple dozen emails from people who are asking everything from, “Can you keep me informed on how this goes forward?” to “Can you come and help lead a discussion on this in our context?” Which we are more than excited to do! (inquire here).

I am actually quite a bit more interested in driving traffic over to thefutureoftheologicaleducation.com as a place where we can try and centralize some conversation and garner insight from as broad a population as possible, but just to generate some interest, I thought I would try and peak your interest with a few words from the introduction of the paper and the video that goes along with the initiative…

The American Church finds itself in a precarious position. Based on current statistics, each year 2.7 million people cease to be part of a local church community and 4000 churches close their doors. Beyond this, 85 percent of all our churches are classified as stagnant and dying…

…while we wholeheartedly agree that we are indeed in the midst of a cultural earthquake, we believe that these statistics are better read as symptoms of a deeper problem. Rather than working toward solutions aimed at helping the Church maintain or regain its position of power and privilege at the center of society, our contention is that a more faithful posture, in the midst of this cultural earthquake, is pausing to ask what God is saying and doing and how God is calling us to respond?

The missiological crisis of Christendom not only affected the Church, but also bore corresponding implications for seminaries and indeed our systems of theological education in general. As such, we believe that a massive re-imagining of the nature, purpose, and practice of theological education is in order. Simply put, the guiding thesis of this paper is that to the extent that our current systems of theological education have been shaped by Christendom presuppositions, they have lost their missiological bearings and are wholly inadequate to prepare Kingdom leaders. Incremental changes and clever adaptations to these current systems only serve to distract from the opportunity we have before us to develop a Kingdom, and therefore missional, vision of theological education. At the heart of this vision is the conviction that the proper telos of theological education is an “accreditation” of students based not merely on the degrees they earn, but on the development and fit of their character and competency for life and leadership in the Kingdom of God.

A couple weeks ago now I said that a few blog posts had caught my attention and driven me to some refelction.

The first ones were by Mike Breen – about the relationship b/t discipleship and the missional movement.  You can check out his thoughts in Part 1 and Part 2.  My reflection on these posts came out here.

The other post was by Ed Stetzer – a return to the whole “can mega churches be missional” debate. He still says they can, I still say they can’t.  But, as I’ve reflected more on this, here are the things that have become clearer to me, what I’ll call the “mega-problems” of mega-churches.

I think it needs to be acknowledged that the problem isn’t size in and of itself. Who would possibly be against a huge church of fully devoted follower of Jesus on mission with God?! Not this guy. But here’s the thing, those of us who have icky feelings in our stomachs about mega-chuches do so because they tend to be built on characteristics and practices that actually work against this vision.  Here’s a few that came to mind…

1) Consumer-Oriented Structures

Very often mega-churches are mega because they emphasize meeting the needs, or at least captivating the interest of religious consumers of all stripes.  This will strike many of us as unfortunate right off the bat, but to take it a step further, I would highlight the even greater harm that is done when church leaders come right out and acknowledge that they do this (even if they prefer different language), but believe it to be in the service of the Gospel.  Here, we have baptized a market-driven strategy that treats people like objects and leads them to believe that they, rather that God, are what is of ultimate significance.

2) Celebrity-Driven Culture

Mega-churches tend to be personality driven.  There is generally one (almost always male) leader who leads as if they were a CEO of an organization rather than as a humble servant.  These are people who reflect our culture’s desire and drive for upward mobility while leading a community whose character is to be predicated on its downward mobility – becoming less and less so that Jesus might become more and more.  This aspect of mega-church culture is perpetuated as we get lulled into believing the cultural lie that a bigger platform is always a good thing for the kingdom.  Sadly, in baptizing this mentality, we have failed to remember that we follow Jesus, who refused exactly this temptation.

3) Sunday-Cenricity

Mega-churches tend to put the vast majority of their time, attention, and resources into weekend services.  Nothing wrong with gathering.  Nothing wrong with gathering with hundreds, even thousands of other believers.  Very much something wrong (from a missional perspective) with these gatherings becoming the driving point of our ecclesiology and the aspect of community life that eats up huge amounts of resources.  It doesn’t matter how compellingly you preach or teach on “being missional;” so long as that message is coming through the medium of a context that engenders passive involvement, it is rendered useless.

4) Inward-Focused Financial Structures

Related to the point above, mega-churches tend to create financial structures that are designed to “keep the machine running,” thereby inhibiting a community’s ability to leverage financial resources that will benefit others – who may or may not ever be part of your church community.  Mega-churches require mega-staffs, mega-facilities, and mega-ministry budgets.  Once you have these things in place and people’s livelihoods become contingent on church growth, moving in a truly “missional direction,” becomes all but impossible.  If it does come, it will be at tremendous cost.

5) Seating over Sending

All of this works itself together to result in an ecclesiology that is more disposed to a focus on seating over sending.  And when I say sending, I mean sending – raising people up as mature disciples and skilled Kingdom leaders and releasing them… really releasing them.  Most of the “sending” that mega-churches do is about continuing to build their own little empire – multiple locations, video venues, franchises, etc.

I fully recognize that you can embody all of these characteristics and not be, by definition, a mega-church.  This is precisely my point – it’s not really about size, it’s about the ecclesial characteristics and underlying theology that creates and drives this sort of church system. So when I say mega-churches can’t be missional, what I really mean is you can’t continue to be a sunday-centric, celebrity-driven church that engenders a consumeristic attitude toward Christian faith by creating inward focused financial structures and building your own personal church-brand empire.  Continuing to be this sort of church while using missional language and encouraging people to serve others more does not a missional church make!

Am I off here?  Where’s the pushback?  What else would you add to this list?

I am one of those people who happens to believe in the importance of words.  While it’s a good thing to have a broad vocabulary, that’s not what I mean.  I mean that I think words are powerful.  Words aren’t just symbols and they certainly aren’t neutral.  Words actually DO things when we use them or hear them.

Ever been called an idiot?

Ever made a verbal promise?

Ever double-dog-dared someone to do something?

Yes?  Then you get what I mean.  Words are powerful tools.  I would even go so far as to say that words contribute to the shaping of our realities.  Just ask any teenager whose parent has told them on a consistent basis for years that they’re worthless.

This is why I have abandoned the language of “going to church.”  This language reinforces a false reality.  A reality in which church is understood to be a place or an event rather than a Kingdom community or family of disciples.  I would submit that the idea of “going to church” is a chief hallmark of cultural Christianity, the sort of thing that, while having a ring of sincerity to it, actually reshapes our imaginations and our reality in ways counter to the biblical narrative and the purposes of God.  So, a few weeks ago, as Amy and I prepared to take our daughter to a gathering of our church community, she and I had one of our first father-daughter chats.

I began to speak the kind of words to my daughter that I want her to grow up hearing – words that I want to shape her into the sort of person capable envisioning and receiving the story into which she has been born and invited – words that I hope will instill in her the sort of sorrowful/sick feeling that her father gets when he hears people relegate the Church to something we merely “go to.”

I said to her,

Daughter, you are a part of our family and our family is part of a very special group of people.  This group of people has a long, long history, filled with incredible stories that you will get to hear as you get older.  But here’s what you need to know.  God loves this world – everyone and everything in it.  He loves it more than we can even possibly imagine.  He loves it so much that he actually gave himself up for it – can you believe that?!  He did.  But lots of things are wrong.  Not everything is quite the way that it is supposed to be.  But don’t worry, God is at work.  He will see to it that in the end, all things will be made right again.  And guess what, God has invited us to join him on this mission.  He wants us to be a part of it with him as his people.  With God’s help we try to live out God’s dream for the world.  And because God’s own son, Jesus, did this better than anyone else ever did, we always try to follow his example.  That means that in many ways, the way we live is very different from the ways that other people live.  In fact, and this is difficult for me to say to you because I love you so much, it means that the more you live your life for God, the more likely it is that some people will not like you, maybe even hurt you like they did Jesus.  Even still…

Like Jesus, we talk to God and listen as he speaks to us rather than living life on our own terms.

Like Jesus, when people do mean and bad things, we offer forgiveness rather than hold grudges or try to get even.

Like Jesus, when people are hurt or in need, we offer to help rather than let them suffer or assume that it’s their own fault.

Like Jesus, we go out of our way to be friends with people who don’t like or make fun of rather than ignore them or do the same.

Like Jesus, we give our money and things to people who need them even if they can’t pay us back rather than keeping everything for ourselves.

Like Jesus, we will lay our lives down for our enemies rather than try to injure or destroy them.

And that’s just the beginning!  These are just some of the ways that we get to enjoy God’s dream for the world.

Now listen, there’s a special name for people who live this way together, they are called “Church.”  They are the people who have been called out of the ways of the way the world is, in order to live out God’s dream for the way the world should be and will be someday.  Some people think that Church is some thing that you go to, like going to a movie or a restaurant, only religious.  But that’s not what it is, not at all!  I know you won’t really understand all this quite yet, but the Church is a group of people who embody a whole new world!  Nothing you ever do will be more important than being part of this people and adventure.  Now, let’s go meet some of the people we’re on this mission with.

The first of many more conversations I hope to have with my precious daughter along these lines.

An interesting thing was taking place when I began my graduate studies at Fuller back in 2004.  A surprisingly large number of students in the School of Theology, of which I was one, were either switching their degree program or restructuring it as best they could to take advantage of courses that were being offered out of Fuller’s School of Intercultural Studies, the school which has traditionally trained missionaries as opposed to pastors and theologians.  The reason was simple – more and more of us were realizing that if we wanted to be equipped for a future of ministry in and to Western culture, we needed to learn how to think and function as missionaries.

As Christendom continues to crumble and as the United States increasingly becomes a microcosm of the globe (it is predicted that by 2050 over 50% of our population will be comprised of minority groups), the work and supporting skill set of Christian leaders will undergo seismic changes.  Actually, I hate to say it that way.  It’s not that the work we should have been doing or the skill set we should have been operating out of all along will objectively change, but the shifting of our culture and context will smack us so hard upside the head that we will have no choice but to wake up to how we’ve gotten off track.

I want to suggest that the people we will most desperately need to help guide us into a faithful engagement with this sort of future are Missionary Theologians.

I say “missionary theologians” as opposed to “missional theologians” to differentiate between those who do theology out of their cross-culturally oriented lives and witness as missionaries as opposed to those who might simply articulate theology from a missional perspective (however masterfully).  The Bible, I believe, is the product of this sort of perspective.  The books, letters, and poetry of the Bible, and the theology they communicate, emerge from the missionary encounter of God’s people with God’s world.  We err when we read the Bible in any other way.  Our work is no different.  It is as we engage the world as the people of God that we actually develop the capacity to see God at work and the proper vantage point from which to do theology.

My friend Doug likes to say that “The Church in Western culture doesn’t primarily have a leadership problem or a missional problem, it has a discipleship problem.”  Inasmuch as a disciple is someone who seeks to know God by joining in on God’s mission in the world by following Jesus in the power of the Spirit, I couldn’t possibly agree more.  And who better to help us step forward into that future than missionary theologians?!

I don’t think my experience at Fuller was unique.  I think this guild is on the rise.  2 questions seem to stand out however.

1) Will we encourage and facilitate the rise of missionary theologians or stymie it by persisting in outmoded paradigms of education and formation?

This question will be answered, in large part, by whether or not schools increasingly make the field of missiology standard fare in terms of equipping Christian leaders for ministry in Post-Christendom.

2) Will we recognize and incorporate the unique contributions that missionary theologians can make in the equipping of leaders?

Here, I think we must look to whether nor not schools (or other training organizations) are making principle use of missionary theologians to train future leaders.

Bottom line, we still have a lot to learn from Mr. Lesslie Newbigin!

I learned a long time ago as a young Christian leader that the best way to learn how to become successful and great was to attend conferences led by high-profile, celebrity type pastors and authors.

I have been struggling to unlearn that travesty of a lesson ever since.

The most valuable lessons I have learned in ministry, have come by way of failure – mine, and that of others.  This isn’t meant to glorify failure in and of itself, but to remember and recognize that while we inhabit a culture that revels in the glory of one person/group triumphing over others, we worship a God who calls us to follow a savior who, from that same way of thinking, failed.  We are called to faithfulness not results, and very often, faithfulness will look like failure in the eyes of the world.

In that spirit, I am thrilled to let you know that a different sort of conference coming up in April, catalyzed by my friend J.R. Briggs, the Epic Fail Pastors Conference.

All the relevant information is available on the conference site so check it out there.  It’s unique, it’s inexpensive, and it very well may change your who outlook on ministry in the way of Jesus.

This was just too clever and well done to pass up.  Enjoy!

Curious to see what you would have added if you were the one who made this.

This week I am preparing a sermon for next Sunday, the day after Christmas.  The text for the morning is Luke 2:22-40.

I am going to focus in on verses 34-35:

Then Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother: ‘This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.’

Though this won’t be the focus of my sermon on Sunday, in light of my recent post about Missional Communities by Mike Breen and Alex Absalom and Mike’s excellent post in response, I did want to share a related, but tangential thought.

In terms of the debate over missional and attractional, it has become popular (and rightly so) for people to jettison the unhelpful term “attractional” in favor of the more favorable “attractive.”  As is evidenced by the comments on Mike’s blog, and plenty of other places as well, there is an assumption that if Jesus were around today or if his followers simply reflected his character to people and in places, that people would be universally attracted and would flock to him/us.

It can hardly be argued from Scripture that Jesus was anything if not attractive.  People were attracted to Jesus on account of his teaching, his miracles, and his love of others.

But, as is recorded for us in the passage above, Jesus was and is the cause of “the falling of many” and “a sign that will be spoken against.”

– People were attracted by his teaching, but also offended and cast off by it.

– People were attracted to Jesus’ miracles, but also abandoned ship quickly when they realized they couldn’t command more of the same.

– People were attracted to Jesus’ love of others, but there were plenty who simply couldn’t receive it.

As we wrestle with our philosophies of ministry, there is a great danger that we would simply exchange our quest to be attractive by means of facilities, programs, and styles for a new quest to be attractive by means of models, language, and activities.

My suggestion is that we must allow “the world” to be attracted to us (personally and corporately) secondarily – a result of what should always be primary for us, living out Kingdom lives in a faithful response to God’s work in and through us.

To say it another way, if in our rejection of attractional language and methodologies we simply ask, “How can we be attractive?” as opposed to, “How can we be attractional?,” we’re still sunk.  We’ve missed the point and are continuing down a most unhelpful path.

This is what I mean by the anti-attractionality of Jesus.  People being attracted to the work of God in and through us is something that we rightly hope and pray for, but never something we should feel compelled to focus on or strategize for.  Our sole commitment needs to be to participation in God’s mission in the world in the manner of Christ.  After this, we let the (attractive) chips fall where they may, thus giving evidence that our trust if firmly and finally in God’s work and not our abilities.

Inasmuch as politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions regarding the way in which life ought to be lived, the Church is a thoroughly political entity. Taken together with the biblical reality of God’s Lordship over all of creation, it’s unfortunate that so many professing believers would dichotomize between “church” and “politics.”  As Christians, those who pledge their allegiance to the Kingdom of God under the Lordship of Jesus, everything we do is political.

Lots of voting took place here in the US the other day and both in person and virtually, I found myself engrossed in conversations surrounding, not the issues/people which were to be voted on, but the practice of voting itself.

I devoted a more focused post to this topic a couple years ago, but I wanted to add another thought that came up in the midst of these conversations.  To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s flat out and always wrong to vote.  I am saying that we do well to recognize exactly what democratic voting entails for those of us seeking to differentiate ourselves from others as citizens of another Kingdom.

One of the reasons Christians may choose to not vote is that we are first and foremost part of a community that roots its identity in what I would call an invitational politics.  That is to say, following Jesus, our fundamental political posture toward the world is to invite people into a way of seeing and engaging life that is rooted in the good news of God’s Kingdom.

The democratic process of voting, on the other hand, is anti-invitational.  It is (at best) 51% of a given population mandating that the other 49% conform to their particular political bents.

Therefore, if we are to vote in democratic elections, we must concede that we are participating in a political process which runs against the grain of God’s ultimate desire for us.

Jesus does not coerce or force people into his vision for the world.  He (and his disciples after him) live into that reality and invite others to experience it and do the same.  Like Jesus, we opt “to serve” others (and invite them to do the same) rather than “to be served” by voting our preferences so that others are compelled to obey.  Christians are those who are willing, in all matters and affairs to be counted among “the least” instead of using worldly power and influence to “lord it over” others.

There is a flawed logic at work in our dominant political vision.  It would have us believe that the future of the world and its peoples is in our hands and we therefore have a responsibility to vote to determine our future.  Sadly, this vision completely ignores the far greater reality held out to us in Scripture that God is in charge of the course of history and is at work in Christ to “bring everything under his control.”  Does this mean we just sit back and relax because God is in charge?  No!  Instead, the gospel of the Kingdom offers to us an alternative political reality and responsibilities.

In humility and weakness we die for that which is right before we ever dream of killing for it.  And we invite!

We speak with courage and boldness of the sovereignty of God and his righteousness.  And we invite!

We embody the truth we claim to believe – trusting that the truth itself and not our persuasiveness will win the day.  And we invite!

We run to the rescue of the poor and oppressed – we spend our lives on their behalf.  And we invite!

We invite, we invite, we invite!  And we pray to God that in the midst of our stumbling attempts to embody the sort of Kingdom reality held out to us in Scripture, that others see forgiveness, they see generosity, they see sacrificial living and a refusal to repay evil with evil and God draws them.  This is the sort of political reality and responsibility that God calls us in to as citizens of his Kingdom.

Looking forward to some discussion around this topic.  Let’s keep it civil and be open-minded with one another, eh?

Every so often I get an invitation to read and review a forthcoming book here at lifeasmission.  Ocassionally, I get really excited about the book I’m asked to take a look at.  That’s how I felt when I was contacted by Jason Derr (see some of his articles for the Huffington Post here) and asked to review his first book, Towards a Theopoetic of the Cross.

Most of that excitement stemmed from the fact that I had no idea what a theopoetic of the cross was!  Jason has helped me with that.

After setting the stage for what he intends in the book, Jason turns his attention to describing theopoetics before he applies them to the cross and discipleship.

I love theology, but I am no poet.  Few would find this to be a problem, but as Derr notes,

There is no theology without poetry. (37)

Poetry, like no other kind of writing, has the potential to enliven our imaginations.  As the author points out,

The theopoet is never safe to have at dinner parties, he will turn the whole thing into a Eucharist, s/he will remind us of the spiritual possibilities of the 6 o’clock news. (42)

Derr also points out that theopoetry is a realm of discourse for the “differently wisdomed,” a moniker which seems immeasurably more helpful in speaking of the theological contributions which might be offered by those we think of as having “learning disabilities.”

We are reminded by the author that,

The cross announces embarrassment to the church and to the world, that the unholy is holy, that it is revelation and that faith is not wrapped up in our neat moralities, our safe pleasantries. (58)

In a footnote to this text Derr acknowledges that this reality can be pushed too far, but it nevertheless reminds us that the cross, despite its evolution as a symbol and icon, was, and always should be, seen as a scandalous event to regard.

The cross, the author would have us remember, is an affront to our inclinations toward positions of power, be they “Christian” or not.  This idea flows into his final section on discipleship.

As only a theopoet might, Derr encourages us to envision a praxiological kind of discipleship through the metaphor of meal:

Te eat a meal, to be in love with its tastes is to enter into discipleship to it, to be transformed by it, to be driven into the school of the kitchen and to learn at its pots and pans, at its dirty dishes, at its spices and seasonings. (93)

This brief overview hardly does justice to the book.  Derr engages with the work of theologians such as Jugern Moltmann, Gustavo Gutierrez, Douglas John Hall, Martin Luther, and others.  He talks often of the manner of our incarnational engagement with the poor and oppressed and offers his take on how the Church ought to think of the GLBTQ community.

For those interested in sustained theological reflection and argumentation, this book will probably leave you wanting.  But, for those, not unlike me, who have to work harder to appreciate the nuances of what poetic language and thinking can do for our vision of God, this book is worth your time.

I love it when objects of two different worlds come colliding together.  Think “Say Anything,” “Bringing Down the House,” or “The Toy.”

In each instance people who have virtually nothing in common are thrust into one another’s lives creating the opportunity for, to borrow a phrase from my friend Geoff, “generative tension.”

This happened in my life recently.

To the list of ‘socially awkward misfit meets valedictorian,’ ‘lawyer meets convict,’ and ‘poor black adult meets rich white kid,’ I can now add, Dan Allender meets Eminem.

A few days ago I began listening to a series of talks offered by Dan Allender, a Christian counselor, author, speaker, and the President of Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle, WA.

In one of his talks, he offered this little nugget,

Evangelism is essentially sharing our stories long enough to discover a common ache and a common hope.

Now, as my friend Annie pointed out in a conversation about this sentiment, it doesn’t capture the full scope of what might qualify as evangelism (and I don’t think that was Dan’s intention anyway).  However, I do think it pushes us to a place of realization that, inasmuch as Jesus was God’s way of entering into the story of humanity’s deep aches and fulfilling its greatest hopes, we are called to do the same for others.

Somewhere in the course of listening to these talks, I came across a new music video by Eminem featuring Rihanna entitled, “Love the Way You Lie.” (ht: Jonathan Brink)

I’ll embed it below, but let me offer 2 things first, a disclaimer and a reflection.

Disclaimer: The video contains language and imagery that some might find objectionable.  If you can’t get past that, please do us both a favor and skip it.  I’ll say this though, the language and imagery is far from gratuitous.  I think it is used appropriately and poignantly to convey the weight of the issue.

Reflection:  The song and video tell the story of a couple who quite transparently have deep aches and deep hopes.  The tragic irony of the situation is that they are trying to come to terms with both through a violent and endless cycle of love and hate, truth and lies.

I think the reason that I like this quote from Allender so much is that it asks us to be come alongside people as guides as opposed to stand at a distance and offer directions.  There is this great tendency we have to get so focused on telling people that they need to arrive at a particular destination that we completely neglect the more important matter of identifying the “You are here” spot at which they stand.  Directions, after all, are of little use unless you know where you’re starting from.

The last observation I’ll make as a result of the generative tension between Allender’s quote and Eminem’s video is that without the right direction, we create our own personal hells – something that is visually captured at the end of this clip.  As people of ache and hope, when we try to alleviate our aches and fulfill our hopes in ways that God never intended, we suffer.  All the more reason for those of us who have been met by God at the point of our ache and who place our hope in God’s salvific work in the world through Christ to listen to the stories of others as we share ours and allow God to do that same work all over again.

A few weeks ago I kickstarted a review of Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge, by Dallas Willard (part 1 here).

After a comment by my friend Josh on that post, I thought I’d hop back in with some further reflections.  Josh asked about Willard’s reflections on knowledge and their connection to virtue, to truth/Truth, and the works of Polyani and MacIntyre.  To my recollection, Willard is not interacting with other contemporary philosophers (at least not directly), but he does speak to the matters of virtue and truth/Truth.  Regarding virtue, Willard says,

We today live in a curious period when almost no one is willing to discuss the question of how one becomes a truly good person.  There is now a widespread tendency in American culture to think that everyone is already good.  This probably arises out of confusion concerning the dignity of the individual or the equality of all people.  It seems to many that all you have to do to be worthy is just to be.  They mistake worth for worthiness; the most unworthy of persons still has worth, value, a certain dignity to be respected.  On the other hand, as we shall discuss later it is now widely thought that there is no objective difference between a good and bad person, or at least that we do not know what that difference is.  So, if that is true, a method for becoming a really good person would be presumptuous and pointless.  (49)

Willard is saying that there is such a thing as objective virtue, but more provocatively, he is saying that we can know it.  Let me trace his argument briefly by noting his comments on Jesus’ answers to the 4 core worldview questions.

1) What is real? Jesus’ answer, God and his Kingdom.

2) Who is well-off, blessed? Jesus’ answer, Anyone who is alive in the Kingdom of God.

3) Who is a really good person? Jesus’ answer, Anyone who is prevaded with love.

4) How do you become a really good person? You place your confidence in Jesus Christ and become his student or apprentice in Kingdom living.

The key to Willard’s line of argumentation here, I believe is found in this passing comment he makes – one that I think he would ave done well to devote an entire chapter (if not a book!) to.

… ‘knowledge’ as the biblical tradition speaks of it is always interactive relationship.

If indeed the sort of knowledge that the Bible is concerned with is characterized by interactive relationship, then it, by nature, has a dimension of subjectivity to it.

The apologetic value of this sort of knowledge therefore is found not in intellectual argumentation, but in inviting people into a relationship with the risen Jesus, manifested (uniquely though not exclusively) in and through the Church as the Body of Christ.

Let me stop there for now and see if anyone wants to engage with what Dallas is doing/saying here.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I recently finished a few books that I think are worth discussing.  I started with a review of Deep Church by Jim Belcher and though I’d try to tackle Willard’s book next.

Reviewing a book by Dallas Willard is a formidable task.  The guy is nothing short of brilliant.  Add to this his personal humility and Christlikeness, and we have no choice but to take his words to heart and call ourselves, not him, into question if we think we disagree or have come to understand him fully.  Such is my stance as I offer my reflections on this excellent book.

The fundamental issue Willard aims to grapple with in, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge, is this,

In the Western world, a great historical struggle between what might be called ‘traditional’ knowledge, represented by the church, and modern knowledge, represented by science, has brought us to where many can only think of religion as mere belief or commitment. (23)

From here, Willard goes on to explain how both conservatives and liberals, in their own unique ways, managed to divorce knowledge from their versions of Christian faith and life.  To summarize, on the left, the removal of Christian teachings from the domain of knowledge “was largely a defensive move, designed to insulate Christian faith and practice from any possible negative impact of the results of scientific and historical studies.” (24)  On the right, “knowlege was pushed away as inessential to saving faith, having nothing to do with it.” (25)

What willard is after is a vision of Christian faith that ushers us beyond profession (what we say we believe, even if we’re not committed to it or don’t actually believe it), commitment (what we do regardless of its correspondence to reality), and belief (which doesn’t necessarily correspond to truth or knowledge – “we can believe what is false and often do” (16)), to the realm of Christian knowledge.  Of Christian knowledge Willard says,

We have knowledge of something when we are representing it (thinking about it, speaking of it, treating it) as it actually is, on an appropriate basis of thought and experience. (15)

He goes on to say,

Knowledge, but not mere belief or commitment, confers on its possessor an authority or right – even a responsibility – to act, to direct action, to establish and supervise policy, and to teach… Knowledge also confers upon belief and action a stability and communicability that other sources of action do not.  This is because knowledge involves truth: truth secured by experience, method, and evidence that is generally available. (18)

Let me go ahead and stop there for now.  I will jump back into what Willard is after in this book and its relevance for the lives of disciples and the Church in forthcoming posts, but at the outset, does anyone have initial thoughts on Willard’s project or observations at the outset?  Is “Christian knowledge” something you think much about and if so, for what purpose?