Jim Belcher, the author of Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional, and I have much in common.

We both did masters degrees at Fuller Theological Seminary.

We both have a heart for church planting.

I teach a class on the Emerging Church based on the intensive that he references in his book. (35)

We get frustrated when people talk past one another, defaulting to caricatured stereotypes rather than embracing a posture of openness.

And we both value looking for a “third way” to approach dichotomistic thinking.

He is right when he says,

It seems that every time someone criticizes the emerging church, they pick the worst-case scenario or the most extreme statements. (49)

He is also correct in noting,

It seems the emerging church, for rhetorical purposes, uses sweeping generalizations about the traditional church that are unfair. (76)

The larger Body of Christ would indeed be served well by discourse that is deeper, more specific, and marked by a sense of humble openness.  Belcher’s chapters on Deep: Truth, Evangelism, Gospel, Worship, Preaching, Ecclesiology, and Culture, are essentially his attempts  to facilitate just that – a worthwhile enterprise in my opinion.

While Belcher’s book is truly helpful in this regard, I’m not sure he really hits the mark in terms of articulating a true “third way” as a means of engaging these topics.  Very often, his conclusions in these chapters are a combination of a chastened version of the EC position he articulates and an expanded version of the traditional position he articulates (usually w/ reference to Tim Keller and his church!).  I suppose this is a kind of “third way,” maybe even precisely the one Belcher desires, but I’m not certain it’s the most helpful kind of third way for the Church to pursue.

The mistake, I believe, comes in the assumption that one can simply pit the positions of the EC against the positions of the traditional church.  The main problem here is that many in the EC camp are themselves trying to articulate and maneuver a “third way” between the modern categories of conservatism and liberalism, a feature that Belcher seems to either overlook or discount w/o comment.  An indication of this is his quick dismissal of the Anabaptist tradition from which many in the EC draw as one which is able to circumvent many of the dichotomies addressed in this book on account of its fundamentally, Christendom-rejecting, stance.  Belcher never seems to ask, “How might people in the EC camp already be searching for a third way in response to classic approaches to these issues?,” but assumes that their positions are simply reactions against the positions of traditional churches.

Belcher sets himself on this course in stating,

We need to define it [the emerging church] as a movement, particularly its theology.  The best way to do this is to look at what the emerging church movement is against – the things they are protesting and the rasons why they are calling for change. (38)

For the life of me, I can’t grasp why someone would want to define a movement by what they are against (even it it is a protest movement) rather than what they are for.  We certainly regard what the classic reformers were for as far more more important than what they were against!  But more than this, Belcher fails to identify missiology as a core motif for the EC.  For many, if not most, in the global EC movement, it is an attempt to participate with God and God’s mission in the world that is reshaping how they understand the sorts of topics that Belcher raises in his book, not vice versa.

These criticisms notwithstanding, I am glad that Jim wrote this book and don’t doubt for a second that it has an will continue to help many.

**Jim has recently decided to resign from his position as lead pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, CA.  You can read a letter he wrote to the congregation regarding this transition here and some additional discussion about this sort of trend here.

This is a piece that my friend Jason Coker wrote recently.  I linked to it in other places, but it’s so good that I wanted to repost it in its entirety.  Visit Jason’s blog for more of his excellent insights and writing.  You might even consider supporting him and his family in terms of the ministries and projects they help lead by becoming a member of his blog community.  Here’s the post…

She sank more and more into uneasy delirium. At times she shuddered, turned her eyes from side to side, recognised everyone for a minute, but at once sank into delirium again. Her breathing was hoarse and difficult, there was a sort of rattle in her throat.

~ Fyodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment

Dear Fyodor,

It’s getting rough for the old girl. Despite the rattle of death in her chest, there’s still a hint of the former beauty and dignity behind those eyes and, as anyone would tell you, she’s as feisty as ever. Still, the truth is she’s dying and there’s nothing to be done about it. As we sit around her bed praying and waiting, her moments of lucidity come with rapidly decreasing frequency.

Everyone here is dealing with the ugliness of her death in their own way. My sister refuses to let her go. She stands just beyond the door, arguing in harsh whispers with the doctors and nurses. She won’t believe the facts of the case, and it’s easier to argue over the interpretation of charts and data than to look straight at the old girl herself. I don’t blame her. Looking is hard.

My older brother looks but doesn’t see. “She’s just a little out of shape,” he says optimistically. “If we can get her up and out she’ll be back to her old self, ruling the roost!” And so he hangs a dress on her and rolls on rouge and glides her round the ward in a wheelchair festooned at the handles with curly ribbon and helium balloons so she might speak with the people. I tell you it’s horrible. Such a thing would be bearable (commendable even!) if compassion was his aim, but it’s not compassion he seeks from her fellows in the ward. No, it’s her rulership he hopes to re-animate and so he props her up like some animatronic relic – a broken-down ecclesiastical Chuck-E-Cheese promising fun-and-games for all the good little children.

Sadly, she scares the children. They weren’t around when she was bright and beautiful. They never attended her grand parties. They don’t know who she was (and let’s face it, as good as she might have been she was also a hard taskmaster, perhaps taking her job of keeping us safe too seriously and – I think – secretly hoping we would never grow up). So the children shrink and shriek and their lack of piety (or pity) has fermented my brother’s optimism into a swill of bitter insistence, rendering him defensive and defiant and refusing the temporary inebriation of grief.

(Can I tell you the truth? I fear her death is more than he can take. He always seemed the stronger one growing up, but I’m not sure he can keep his sanity without her strict order around the house – without her barbed-wire fences to separate the wild vines from the cultivated ones. I don’t think he realizes it was always her intention that we harvest the whole field, and I think all these years later she might even be happy to see us tear down those fences if keeping them meant letting the whole field go to waste.)

For me, it’s her delirious rants that are the most heart-wrenching. She’ll stubbornly hoist herself up to rebuke people who aren’t even in the room – resurrected memories of conflicts and passions long dead and gone to everyone but her own cruelly vivid memories that now, in her mortal distress, seem to have taken on a quality that simply overwhelms her present reality. Perhaps it’s for the best – perhaps it’s mercy – but for better or worse I find I’m not just grieving her death, I’m grieving the robbery of her chance to see the transcendence of death by the legacy she leaves in us. I think she would rejoice in that. I think she would look us in the eye and say, “It’s good to grieve me, but celebrate too. If I live on like this then death wins by making me into a mockery of life. But if I die then the life I lived will be victorious by passing on to you. Now take the best and go.”

She deserves that moment; it’s her birthright. But we won’t let her have it. We insist on preserving her because somehow we think our life is in her, when actually her life (all life!) is a gift that grows in the giving, until one day it grows so fat it swallows every one of us whole, death and all. Who would have thought, Fyodor, that the nihilism you so strenuously decried would lead not to the depraved insistence on rationalized death, but to the dogmatic insistence on irrational life?

You must be wondering how she can possibly endure for so long. It’s the machines that keep her alive. Pray for a death rattle in the chest of those monstrosities so she might finally be free from our obsessions, and enjoy a long night of rest in a well-deserved sleep.

As a guy who used to swim in this world, this is simultaneously the funniest and saddest thing I have seen in a long, long time.

Granted, this is apparently a piece of self-deprecating satire by Northpoint Community Church (as others have noted), but sometimes the easiest way to get people to overlook what is most obviously wrong, is to make light of it.

Some comments on the video here.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Alan Hirsch.  The book he co-authored with Mike Frost, The Shaping of Things to Come, was the first I read that began to help me understand the angst I felt with the attractional model of church so prevalent in the US.

This is why I was so thrown a few days ago when I read that Alan Hirsch had asserted that American Christianity is the great hope for the Church in the West.  He made comments to this point in the opening remarks of his talk at a conference called “Verge” in Texas.  You can view the video (Session 2) here.  At one point he said,

If we don’t win the battle of the decline of the church here in the states, then it’s not going to come from anywhere else.  We will win or lose the battle over here in the states.

His rationale seemed to be that 1) the Church is the rest of the West is all but dead and 2) that Americans have a built-in entrepenurial (apostolic) sort of spirit.

On this count, I was surprised and disappointed on 2 levels.

First, he seemed to communicate a latent assumption that “the West” maintains a position of superiority in terms of global Christianity.  He admitted that Christianity is growing in non-Western parts of the world, but never suggested that our hope might lie in learning from what God is going there.

Secondly, he referenced the American entrepreneurial spirit as the key factor in our ability to “win the battle of the decline of the church.”  I was blown away!  I was immediately reminded of a quote by Einstein, which, even more surprisingly, he referenced later, but totally misused,

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

It is American entrepreneurialism that got us into the mess of creating a church system predicated on the cultural values of individualism and consumerism.  Relying on the same characteristic is hardly a promising solution.

Over and above all these disappointments comes a more biblical/theological one, namely, that putting our hope in anything except for a willingness to sacrifice what is most dear to us, to listen to the voices of those on the margins, and to trust God with our future (which may very well mean the increasing marginalization of the church), is, in any sense, in keeping with God’s desire for the Body of Christ.

There was a 2nd major part to Hirsch’s presentation that really made me nervous.

He made the claim that the dominant expression of church in America, that of the seeker-sensitive/attractional model, has a market appeal to about 40% of the American population.  This yields what Hirsch called a “strategic problem” and a “missionary problem.”

The “strategic problem” is that 95% of the churches in the US are seeking to become the kind of church that appeals to this same 40% of the population.

The “missionary problem” is that 60% (and growing) of our population is being virtually ignored.

So far so good, but at one point Alan was commenting on attractional types of churches that are “reaching” the 40% of the American population and said, “Those who do this well should strive to do it better.”  Not change what they are doing, just do more of the same, better.

In affirming an attractional (or what he is now calling ex-tractional) model of church simply because it succeeds in drawing a crowd, he fails to critique the most devastating reality, namely, that these churches, on the whole, don’t make disciples. By and large, they facilitate the already pervasive nominal christianity that pervades at least 40% of the American population.

Let me try to summarize my push back on what I am hearing and seeing from Alan Hirsch as of late.

1) Putting our eggs in the basket (Easter week!) of the American church is futile, if not sinful.  This is exactly how we got where we are and trying harder ain’t gonna cut it.  It may very well be that God is at work killing off a defunct ecclesial trajectory and we would do better to repent and ask for mercy than to rely on any ability we think we possess to save the day.

2) Alan is right, there is a descent portion of the American population that has some natural affinity with the sort of church which thrives in Christendom.  But, merely because people will respond to an attractional model of church does not make it ok.  A pragmatic victory is almost never a biblical one.  Attractional models of church are built on the cultural values of individualism and consumerism and, save for the grace of God, are incapable of yielding the sort of disciples the world desperately needs.

I have a serious and growing concern regarding the temptation to make missional marketable.  The temptation is especially seductive to those who, like Alan, have a deep love for the church as the Body of Christ and want to see it thrive.  But, if God means for missional theology/ecclesiology to benefit the church, it will remain an invitation to repentance, sacrifice, and death.  This sort of invitation has never had much market appeal, especially in the US.

Last night Amy and I joined a friend for a presentation at Harvest Bible Chapel on the topic of, “What is the Emergent Church?”¹ as part of an ongoing apologetics series they are doing.

As someone who gets to teach the course, The Emerging Church in the 21st Century, once a year, I was looking forward to attending and seeing what was said and discussed; especially considering the speaker for the evening was Dr. David Finkbeiner, a professor at Moody Bible Institute.

I mean, if you want to get a balanced understanding of what the “Emergent Church” is all about, who better to ask than a professor of systematic theology at a school that officially, “does not endorse the emerging/emergent church” right?!

Harvest would have done well (though from what I could tell – would never so much as have considered it) to have invited at least one person who could have spoken as an insider to the EC discussion.

It was clear from the get-go that the tenor of the evening was going to be critical, bordering on condemnatory.  And this, even after Dr. Finkbeiner admitted that there is no simple way to define the EC as a whole.

Dr. Finkbeiner’s focus for the evening was theological method.  His premise was that what undergirds the “Emergent Church” movement is a post-conservative theological method.  His aim was to critique this theological method overagainst a more traditional conservative evangelical one.

Essentially, here’s what that meant…

1) Post-Conservatives err in their non-foundationalist approach to epistemoplogy which takes things like history, context, and culture seriously, where as conservatives rightfully embrace Scripture as the objective and sole foundation to all knowledge.

2) Post-Conservatives err in asserting that absolute truth, while real, may often times be beyond our ability to fully grasp.  Conservatives rightfully assert not only the reality of absolute truth, but affirm our ability to, “with a little hard work,” objectively know it.

3) Post-conservatives err in not championing the inerrancy of Scripture.  Conservatives rightly hinge all their hopes on Scripture having been verbally and inerrantly inspired.

So, here we have a guy who is doing a masterful job of towing the line of modern conservative evangelicalism, lambasting those who dare to think, “There might be some stuff we’re missing here.”

As I listened to him describe some of the perspectives and viewpoints of post-conservative evangelicals I found it hard to believe that he wasn’t converting himself!

He quickly and coyly dismissed a broad range of the most helpful aspects of post-conservative theology…

– The idea that we need one another in the pursuit of truth because all of our perspectives are bound by a host of factors

– The notion that theology loses its character when not born out of an embodied witness

– The view that the authority of Scripture lies not primarily in its abstract character, but in its function in the life of the Church

– The insight that biblical propositional truth derives its meaning and significance from the narratives in which they’re embedded

– That post-conservative theology is, at its core, a prophetic call to revisit some of our modernistic assumptions

In each and every instance, the speaker noted that these are the hallmarks of post-conservative theology and then attempted to show why they ought to be rejected.

OK, so that was the presentation and as enlightening as it was, the Q & A time was even better.  I quote.

“Is Willowcreek an Emergent Church?  I heard they sell Brian McLaren books.”²

“Is the Emergent Church a cult?”

“I’ve heard that Urbana and InterVarsity are becoming more Emergent.  Should I keep my kids away from those groups?”

I actually had the opportunity to ask the last question of the evening…

With a little trepidation, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I teach a course on the Emerging Church at the seminary level and I need to say that I think there have been some pretty unfair characterizations of the movement here tonight.  I was hoping that before we go you might offer a positive comment about the role the EC has had in the recovery of the importance of the Missio Dei or incarnational approaches to ecclesiology.

Dr. Finkbeiner commented that, “Yes, there has been some focus in those areas, but they still are wrong in how they do theology.”  So, no, he didn’t have one positive thing to say the entire evening about the EC.

Left completely aside from the discussion of the evening was the historical evolution of the EC movement, its place in the scope of the collapse of Christendom, and the most relevant bit of information given the scope of the talk, namely, that theological method simply isn’t at the center for 90% of the people who are in any way affiliated with the movement.  For the vast majority, what is central is joining God in his mission in the world and finding ways to make the church, not culturally relevant (as too many assume), but incarnationally faithful in the pattern of Jesus.

Between the tenor of the presentation and the questions and comments of the audience, it’s little wonder that conservative evangelicals are so often characterized by fear and close-mindedness.  There are many in the EC community who are trying to carve out a way of being the church and doing theology that doesn’t fell prey to these charges.  I was really hoping to come away pleasantly surprised by the event.  Sadly, I didn’t.

1. There is no such thing as the Emergent Church. This is a classic conflation of the terms Emergent Village and Emerging Church offered by those who aren’t all that familiar with the topic
2. Someone from Harvest was quick to announce that Harvest doesn’t!

I regret that I’ve never med Ed Stetzer face to face.  I’d like to believe we’d be fast friends who share a mutual passion for people coming to know Christ and joining in God’s mission in the world.  At the same time, we’d disagree about a lot.  For starters, a blog post he published yesterday critiquing the need for missional (among other) conversations.

Ed seems worried about missional conversations that don’t…

involve men and women being redeemed, changed [sic], and transformed by the gospel.

I read that and think to myself, “What?  Where in the flip is he getting his definition of missional and who is he talking to?  These are the things that are at the very center of missional theology and ecclesiology.”  I have worked hard over a healthy number of years to stay involved in every way I can imagine in the missional conversation and outside of the very fringes that you find in any population, I simply don’t know of any missional people or groups that would merit this kind of concern.

Ed says,

It is never a good thing to be defending our lack of converts to Christ while we are busy converting people to our cause. To me, it is the difference between complaining and creating a new (and better) way.

He goes on to say,

I don’t want missional to mean attacks on mega and fast growing churches who are reaching people “wrongly,” while missional churches are reaching few “rightly.”

I think I get Ed’s heart here, but these statements are FAR too simplistic. One of the main reasons for the lack of converts in missional and emerging churches is the popularity of churches who are, in fact, “reaching people ‘wrongly’.” For those who embrace missional theology and are trying to cultivate missional communities, especially in contexts where Christendom still exists, we are fighting an uphill battle… and wearing a 100 lb. pack… and it’s raining… and we’re barefoot… and…  You get the point.  In a culture which still features the cheap grace of individualistic salvation and consumeristic church involvement, guess what – the message of dying to yourself, submitting yourself to a community and joining in God’s Kingdom mission that will, in all likelihood, threaten your identity and lifestyle is pretty unpopular.  When given the option, would-be converts will of course respond,

Thank you very much, I think I’ll just attend St. McDonald’s where I get saved by raising my hand, I can disappear in the mass of people, and the entertaining music & speaking gives me warm fuzzies every time I’m there.

The fact of the matter is that those who identify with missional theology engage in this fight for the very reasons mentioned above – because the converts made by the dominant expressions of Christianity in the US are in no meaningful way redeemed, changed or transformed. I doubt many people are more aware of the crisis of nominal Christianity in the US that Ed, so I find this a surprising oversight.  So, albeit with the character and concern of Jesus, I think this is very much a biblically justifiable fight for missional people to be engaged in – the fight for biblical faithfulness and fulfilling of the command to make disciples.

Ed goes on to say,

I am not willing to say that a lack of converts is a sign of unfaithfulness. But, I am willing to say that too many change movements are not seeing lost people’s lives changed.

Fair enough, but this reality is far more poignant and dire when we consider the lack of disciple-making happening in long standing traditions that aren’t thinking about change at all!

Stetzer rounds out his post by saying,

So, let’s continue conversations about being “missional” or whatever, but let’s not do so if it distracts us from the mission. Instead let’s talk about these issues but not let them distract us from our main focus–showing and sharing the love of Jesus to a desperately lost world that needs a message of hope.

To this I say a quick and hearty AMEN!  But I am also quick to resist Ed’s false dichotomy by pointing out that having “conversations about ‘missional’ or whatever,”  aimed at the faithful practice and witness of the church is VITAL to the manner in which we show and share the love of Jesus.  Not having these conversations, or having them poorly, is far more dangerous than seeing them as a distraction.

Between the promise I believe missional theology and ecclesiology hold for the trajectory of Western Christianity and how incredibly misunderstood both remain, I submit that we need WAY more conversations, not less.

A little over a week ago, my cousin-in-law Josh, asked how one might go about transitioning traditional churches into “something more missional at its core.”  Since I have banged my head against this wall for years in several different churches, my response will be a mixture of, “here’s where I failed,” and “here’s what I think is most helpful.”  For anyone who might have missed them, my posts on, “The Move: The Journey from Attractional to Missional,” and “What is Missional?” would be really helpful in understanding where I am coming from.

I should say a few things at the beginning to help frame my thoughts.

1) This is a wine skins issue (Mt. 9:17).  Anyone considering this topic who thinks (whether they realize it or not) that this is basically about getting new wine into old wine skins is destined for frustration and failure – I speak from experience!  Missional churches represent brand new wine skins, not just new wine.

2) This takes a long time.  The most experienced people will tell you 8-10 years minimum.  When we are talking about changing the core identity of, not just a person, but a community, we have to expect a long hard road.  An apt analogy – God got Israel out of Egypt in pretty short order, but it took another 40 years to get Egypt out of Israel.

3) No one person is capable of maneuvering this transition.  Solo pastors are dead in the water in this regard.  And this isn’t to say that the better way is having a team of top-down leaders – this will end up being damaging as well.  One of the keys to instilling missional DNA in a church community is inspiring and encouraging new imagination from the bottom.

Those things being said, what does it take?  What might the process look like?

My short answer is,

A Spirit-guided intermingling of communal practices, teaching, and prayerful reflection.

Here’s my slightly-longer expansion on those three things.

I take for granted that fundamental to the distinctions of “traditional” and “missional” is a vision of what it means to be the church in Post-Christendom vs. Christendom.  My personal opinion (others may disagree) is that there is no point in talking about what it means to be a missional church until Christendom has been rejected as a cultural value. Thus, transitioning traditional churches to missional ones is a non-linear process of deconstruction and reconstruction.  Communal practices, teaching, and reflection are the tools which assist in this ongoing task.  It would be a (classically modern) mistake to think of this as a mainly intellectual enterprise.  Instead, in the integration of these things, deconstruction and reconstruction happen alongside one another.

Since there is no universal model to apply to this topic, we are better served by asking general questions that need to be answered in specific contexts.  Here are some questions which I think would serve us well in maneuvering this sort of transition.

– In both small numbers as well as large, what are the practices we can engage in as a community that will shape us into people and “a people” who think and act like Jesus?

– As we try to be honest with ourselves, what things are we doing as a community that don’t seem to be contributing to our spiritual formation?

– How do we incorporate space in our times together (in homes, in meetings, in gatherings) to intentionally reflect on and respond to what we sense God is speaking and doing in our community?

– Who are those in our community who seem most gifted to teach (identified by the fruit of their teaching helping people become more like Jesus)? How can we encourage these people to engage with authors and speakers who are dealing with the subject of missional ecclesiology on our behalf?

– How do we make incremental yet strategic changes in the percentage of money that goes to those things which ensure our security as opposed to those things which necessitate faith in the midst of great risk?

Over and above questions like these, I would also suggest these sort of biblical principles for those who shoulder the responsibility for a transition like this:

– Find people of peace who can be trusted and are willing to commit to the journey. Ask for their help.

– Demonstrate servant leadership by being open, transparent, and broken.

– Commit to structures of biblical conflict resolution.  Entrust to God’s care those who choose to leave (there will be many and this is not necessarily a sign of poor leadership).

OK, there’s some initial thoughts.  I’m sure I’ll have more so I hope to continue the discussion by way of comments.

Amy and I had a great time at the Missional Learning Commons in Ft. Wayne two weekends ago.

The theme of the weekend was,”Deeper Church.”  Essentially what that meant was having discussions about certain topics which surface when we stop thinking about church as a worship service with a host of corresponding programs and begin to embrace church as a way of life in which we are joining God in his mission of reconciliation and the restoration of all things.  Some may want to try and explain how these are really two ways of saying the same thing, but for the vast majority of people who have been involved in this conversation for any length of time, the differences are too real and too important to dismiss with semantic gymnastics.

On Friday night there were maybe 30 people in attendance to discuss Soong-chan Rah’s book, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity.  This conversation was continued as the topic of the final session on Saturday.  Both conversations were engaging and helpful.  While the book had clear shortcomings and oversights, it served as a springboard for us to ask the question, “Why are missional congregations so white?”  We see this as a problem because implicit in missional theology is the value for listening to voices from the margins of society – something which should be a no-brainer to those of us who regard Scripture (a book authored by those speaking from the margins of society!) as our guiding text.  Those who live on the margins of society have much to teach those of us who don’t and the longer our congregations remain socio-economically and culturally homogeneous, the more the Body of Christ, and by implication, the world to which we testify of an alternative reality, suffers.

In light of that, we had discussions about the practices of deeper churches, what sharing the gospel means and looks like for deeper churches, and whether or not these deeper churches should have paid staff.  This session was led by a 3-person panel: Matt Tebbe one of the pastors of Life on the Vine who is bi-vocational, JR Woodward, who raises all of his support, and Bob Havenor, who was advocating for an up-paid approach to church leadership.

Thanks to Ben Sternke who put the missional commons site together, you can find audio from all of the sessions here.

If you are in the midwest and interested in the missional conversation, I hope you’ll consider joining us next year – details TBD.

This afternoon Amy and I are joining about a dozen others from our church community as attenders at a Missional Learning Commons in Ft. Wayne, IN.

At the invitation of Dave Fitch (who has blogged about this gathering here), I attended my first one of these in December of 2007 before Amy was in Chicago.  Last year Amy attended without me as I was in Kenya.  So, especially since we have committed as a couple to helping cultivate a new missional community in the next year, I am really excited for us to get to participate in one of these together.

Here’s what I love about this event.

A) It’s free.  And that’s not because it sucks.  It’s because the “business” of Christian resourcing needs to die.

B) It’s local.  The people who attend these every year have a real chance to stay meaningfully connected.

C) It’s not about personalities.  Those who speak, are more like conversation starters.  There is much more time given to dialogue than monologue.

D) There’s no hype.  No book sales, no t-shirts, no vendors.

It’s just a band of brothers and sisters who are trying get on the same page about the implications of a missional ecclesiolgy as Christendom continues to crumble here in the midwest.  It’s a living example of what I meant when I blogged about “The Power and Promise of Regional Gatherings for the Equipping of Missional Churches.”

Looking forward to a great weekend of connecting, discussing, dreaming, and praying.

In a new book, Fresh + Re:Fresh: Church Planting and Urban Mission in Canada Post-Christendom, Dave Fitch offers an introductory chapter entitled, “Fifty Years of Church Planting: the Story as I See it…” in which he summarizes the dominant approaches to church planting over the last few decades and discusses some of the major differences within Post-Christendom.

In speaking of the differences in the multiplication of church communities in Christendom vs. Post-Christendom, Fitch says,

Among the new missional leaders, church is the name we give to a way of life, not a set of services. We do not plant an organized set of services; we inhabit a neighborhood as the living embodied presence of Christ.

In agreement, I’d say that “cultivating missional communities” might be a better way to describe what we have more often known as “church planting.”  In that vein, Fitch goes on to talk about the sorts of leaders necessary to cultivate missional communities suggesting that…

– they will be survivors

…the new missional community leaders must have patience, steady faithfulness and the ability to live simply. They must be able to get jobs and not see the ministry as a privileged full time vocation. They must have a mental image of how they are going to sustain their lives financially, relationally, spiritually and personally.

– they will be communal shepherds

They are not starting and managing an organization. They may not even be good at organization. Instead they are cultivating a communal sense of mission identity among a gathering people ‘for this time and place.’

– they will be interpretive leaders

Interpretive leaders do not dictate from the pulpit a list of do’s and don’ts and solutions from God for every problem. They interpret the Scriptures to open our eyes to what God is doing and where He is taking us. In other words, they cultivate other interpreters/listeners.

– they will be directors of spiritual formation

We must ever navigate against putting on a show that will attract; rather we must develop a liturgy that is simple, accessible and Scriptural and that guides our lives into Christ and guards us from the distractions that would take us away from Mission. …there will be no missional community of people formed and shaped for mission if we just preach Mission as a legalistic requirement. Mission requires patience, a sense of vision and a level of self-denial that can only be formed inwardly in living bodies, trained in the simple organic disciplines/liturgies of the historic church.

– they will be leaders who give away power

Hierarchy is the product of Christendom. It hails to a day when Christianity still held power in society…  It is my belief therefore that missional leadership needs always to be multiple. Most missional pastors/leaders need to be bi-vocational (bi-ministerial) for their own survival. Such leaders must learn to mutually submit to the other leaders as they guide the journey of the community. They must mutually learn to mentor leaders and give away power.

A final insight from the chapter is this little gem,

This kind of leader often does not come from our (all too often) modernist seminaries. They are grown in a community which gathers to worship the Triune God so as to discern Him at work in our midst. (my thoughts on that here)

Beginning the year with this post is no coincidence.  Amy and I have committed to serve alongside others from Life on the Vine to help cultivate a new missional community in 2010.  There’s a lot more questions than answers at this point, but we’re excited to see what God might do as we make ourselves available.

While I am sure to offer tid bits on this process on the blog from time to time, if you would like to get the inside scoop on a regular basis as someone who would commit to be praying for us, leave a comment or let us know through the contact page. Peace to you in the New Year and thanks for your prayers & support.

Previous posts in this Series:

Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness | Character Formation | Conviction Shaping | Contextual Training

Christendom bore no real need for leaders who were cultural pioneers.  After all, if the culture is already Christian, what do we have to pioneer?  It would be logical to conclude then, that as Christendom crumbles, the need for leaders with the skills for cultural pioneering would increase.  This would be true and mistaken at the same time.  It’s true that we have a greater and greater need for cultural pioneers, but the crumbling of Christendom isn’t the reason.  Rather, a missional vision of the church carries with it an inherent need for leaders who serve as cultural pioneers which means we need a vision of theological education capable of equipping men and women for this task.

Allow me to offer just 2 basic points to support my argument for this need.

First, missional churches operate out of the assumption that mission is part of God’s very character and nature.  God sends the son, the Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit, the Trinity sends the Church as the Body of Christ.  Little wonder then that missional church leaders lament the modern phenomenon of churches playing the role of vendors of religious goods and services that spend the bulk of their time, energy, and money trying to get people to come.  Missional churches are not those who focus on offering the best “Christian” stuff (teaching, programs, groups, etc.), but those who focus on engaging with world’s darkest and toughest needs.

Second, missional churches tend to be marked by their attention to Jesus’ announcement of the good news of God’s Kingdom, the new reality inaugurated in Jesus.  Just as Jesus stood at odds with the culture of his day on account of his allegiance to God’s Kingdom, so too the missional church of today will find itself at odds with the culture of our day as we seek to embody God’s Kingdom through faith in Jesus.  To understand the local church as an expression of a new reality, however, means that we recognize the need for leaders capable of cultural pioneering.

Current models of theological education seem to come up short in terms of their fit to equip male and female leaders on both these counts.  How then are we to go about doing so?  I offer three ideas for the training of cultural pioneers.

1) Deep involvement in a missional community

There is no better way to learn how to be a cultural pioneer that to participate in a community that is seeking to do this very thing.  My hope and expectation would be that to a great degree, the various aspects of this missional vision of theological education that I have been describing would all serve to produce leaders who think and act in terms of cultural pioneering.  I have a hard time imagining that someone could give themselves to a process of formation that is rooted in community and centered around character formation through the shaping of Kingdom convictions and contextual training and emerge as someone who would rather manage a program driven group of individuals than lead a community into the world as an expression of God’s alternative reality.

2) Encourage Cultural Creation & Cultivation

I am indebted to Andy Crouch and his book, Culture Making, for my thinking (and language) on this.  The power and trajectory of Christendom resulted in a church that, at various times, thought of “culture” as some monolithic thing that it could condemn, critique, copy, or consume.  Only now, as we increasingly find ourselves on the margins of society, are we rediscovering the postures of creating and cultivating culture.  We create culture through values, practices, and imagination.  However, as Crouch says,

We cannot make culture without culture.  And this means that creation begins with cultivation – taking care of the good things culture has already handed on to us.  The first responsibility of culture makers is not to make something new but to become fluent in the cultural tradition to which we are responsible.  Before we can be culture makers, we must be culture keepers.

This leads us directly to the third ingredient in forming cultural pioneers.

3) Practicing Discernment

The need for skilled discernment is going nowhere but up!  Never before in human history has so much information and so many opinions been so easily accessible.  Add to this the pervasive individualism and relativism of Western culture and you are left with a cultural nightmare for those who believe in such a thing as contextual faithfulness to biblical truth.  As Jesus’ disciples were, we must be taught to see, hear, and feel with eyes, ears, and hearts attuned to the reality of the Kingdom of God in our midst.  How are we ever to create culture unless we can discern our way through it as followers of Jesus?  This takes years of practice within community and remains a lifelong discipline.

Are there other aspects of cultural pioneering that you think I’m missing?  How else might we equip others to this end?  Anxious for your (end of the year and end of the series!) thoughts.

Previous posts in this Series:

Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness | Character Formation | Conviction Shaping

I have tried to make a case that a missional vision of theological education is one rooted in community that emphasizes the formation of Christan character marked by Kingdom convictions. I would further suggest that a missional vision of theological education will seek to train leaders contextually.

This is missiology 101.  Urban ministry is different than suburban.  Ministry amongst the poor is different than ministry amongst the affluent.  Ministry with adolescents is different than ministry with senior citizens.  Traditional theological education, however, is not equipped to train people with these nuances in mind.  The dominant expression of theological education within Christendom has been training at geographically specific institutions.  These schools of course bring their own context to bear on the training they are doing, but are necessarily limited by that same feature.  Geography isn’t the only problem, the very model of education employed in the seminary environment distances, if not outright separates, theological education from contextual factors.  Some schools have begun trying to correct this problem through online education, allowing students to continue serving in their present context while doing intensive biblical & theological study.  As I said here, these innovations within the current system of theological education are helpful, but they aren’t aimed at the other aspects of missional theological education that I have already covered.  So, the question before us is,

Within a missional vision of theological education, how will contextual leadership development take place?

I can think of at least three aspects of a beginning answer to that question.

1) Networks

Church networks are the missional answer to the decay of denominations. For good or for bad, denominations are crumbling.  In an era of post’s (post-modernity, post-Christendom, etc.) you can add to the list post-denominationalism.  Springing up in their place are inter-denominational networks of churches.  In my opinion, the best of these are striving to make a shared vision of missional living more central than individual points of doctrine.  Besides always being rooted in a particular context, the realities of globalization and pluralism mean that no one congregation has the capacity to train leaders for the church of the future by itself.  It must look outside.  If leaders are to be identified by local communities and if these same communities are to take primary responsibility for their holistic formation and contextual training, then meaningful involvement in a healthy network of missional churches through the sharing of resources and common ministry is a big part of how we accomplish the contextual training of leaders.

2) Apprenticeship

The most valuable resources to the spiritual formation & training of leaders are men and women who offer years of faithful service within a given context. Reading, writing, and peer discussion all have a vital place in the formation of missional church leaders, but all of these dimensions gain their final value in terms of their practical implications in a given context.  Seasoned leaders are invaluable in helping to achieve this goal.  Cultivating missional church leaders who have the skills necessary to help a body of people understand the gospel and its implications in contextually appropriate ways calls for a mentor-apprentice(s) dimension to any process of theological education.

3) Civic Engagement

Civic engagement needs to increasingly become a hallmark of both missional church ministry and leadership formation.  Immersion has long been a defining mark of truly cross-cultural ministry.  Therefore, those churches who embrace the West as a mission field should immediately resonate with the idea that the best way to become incarnationally faithful is to immerse themselves in their context.  The reason for this is at least 2-fold 1) To discover where and how God is already at work. 2) To discern what incarnationally faithful witness to the gospel will mean and look like.

If it’s not already obvious, this aspect of a missional vision of theological education is tied directly to the centrality of the Missio Dei for a missional ecclesiology.  A big part of what makes missional churches missional is their abdication of attractional approaches to church and ministry in favor of incarnational ones. All that Jesus said and did was said and done in light of the people he was speaking to and the place he was speaking in.  In both ministry and leadership formation, we do well to follow this pattern of contextual wisdom.

What has your experience with contextual leadership training been?  Do you see other ways to accomplish this goal in or outside of traditional models of theological education?

In my next post, I hope to round things off with some thoughts on cultural pioneering as a final mark of a missional vision of theological education.

I get a huge amount of joy out of teaching & preaching.  I once took a spiritually oriented personality profile test sort of thing that articulated my bent toward preaching like this:

The Teacher leader focuses on the integration of truth into the personal and social elements of the community.

I’m thinking about this today because I just finished reading a brilliant paper, “Preaching in the Missional Church” by Ervin R. Stutzman, a professor of homiletics at Eastern Mennonite Seminary.

Quick Aside: If you want to get a truly helpful understanding of what missional is all about, listen to Anabaptists!

In the paper he unpacks a number of distinctives of a missionally-shaped (Post-Christendom) vision of preaching and also addresses the need for new methods of training these sorts of preachers which just happens to relate perfectly to this series I am doing on a missional vision of theological education.

Check out the article here and feel free to drop a comment if you have a thought or question.

Previous posts in this Series:

Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness | Character Formation

One of the greatest needs of missional churches is leaders who have been trained how to think as opposed to what to think, who are able to equip others for deep incarnational witness, and whose character and giftedness has been practiced and affirmed in the context of a local community. This was the point of my previous post – the centrality of character formation in a missional vision of theological education.

From here, I want to go on to say that a missional vision of theological education will emphasize the shaping of Kingdom convictions in leaders.

No one is more responsible for my appreciation of this dimension of a missional vision of theological education than the late Dr. James Wm. McClendon.  His work was the center of my masters thesis and continues to shape my life as a disciple of Jesus is all its forms.

The most admirable Christian leaders are not those men and women who have sought to do great, big things for the Kingdom, but who have faithfully responded to that which God has done in their lives.  They were and are men and women of conviction and as McClendon points out,

Convictions are not so much things we have, but things which have us.

Christendom, as a system of coercive power, naturally emphasizes control.  This emphasis has resulted in two dominant emphases in the shaping of leaders – the passing on of systems of belief and/or the training in particular models of ministry.  I am against neither of these things in themselves.  I am merely suggesting that they need to be peripheral, not central to the training of missional leaders.  I advocate for the centrality of conviction shaping for three main reasons.

1) The shaping of Kingdom convictions is primarily the Holy Spirit’s work.

We have fooled ourselves into believing that the passing on of right doctrine or refined training in ministry models are of prime importance in theological education.  When these are our emphases, not only do we create one-dimensional leaders, but we run the greater risk of making Christian leadership development primarily a human enterprise – like training a mechanic or a sales person.  The shaping of convictions in correspondence with the reality of God’s Kingdom is much more fluid and finally contingent on the work of the Holy Spirit.  We need leaders who not so much “get God,” but ones “God’s got.”

2) The shaping of Kingdom convictions is more in accord with missional theology.

We all see and interpret things through various lenses depending on our background, experience, education, culture and so on.  Thus, missional theology is never fixed, but exists in constant interaction with Scripture, our community & its tradition, and our broader context & experience.

As I’ve said before, theological convictions are not the same as theological foundations.  Churches built on theological foundations and hell bent on being right are brought low when those foundations are assaulted. Missional churches on the other hand, more concerned with being faithfully responsive, embrace the notion that,

The convictions that cohere within any community are in principle always subject to rejection, reformulation, improvement or critical revision, and the church is no exception to this principle.

We desperately need leaders who are more convicted about a way of believing, living, and following, than they are a way of knowing or structuring.

3) The shaping of Kingdom convictions naturally flows from community rootedness and character formation.

Convictions are the result of the work of the Holy Spirit in the midst of our community-rooted character development.  As McClendon has shared, the shaping of Kingdom convictions are not

…so many ‘propositions’ to be catalogued or juggled like truth-functions in a computer, but are inextricably interwoven with ecclesial practices such as baptism and eucharist, hospitality and reconciliation, peacemaking and the mutual bearing of burdens, where they ‘give shape to actual lives and actual communities.’

They are,

generated by ‘a shared and lived story, one whose focus is Jesus of Nazareth and the kingdom he proclaims.

This is what we see when we look at the relationship of Jesus to his disciples.  The cultivation of a community of followers who, dense as they were, and prone to weakness, were convicted of Jesus’ Messiahship, his judgment and triumph over the evil powers at work in the world, and the beginning of the renewal of all things in his resurrection.

Think for a moment about the people who most inspire you and you enjoy following.  Chances are the reason is that something has gripped them, you sense it in all they say and do and you’re interested, if not desperate, to know it for yourself.  This is what I am saying, for the Christian leader, is the work of the Holy Spirit in accord with a missional theology that finds its home in the midst of community of people following Jesus on mission together.

Can you offer examples of this?  Anyone who has counter-examples?  How have traditional approaches to theological education helped or failed you in this regard?

Next up – the place of contextual training in a missional vision of theological education.

Some quotes and ideas stem from: Harvey, Barry.  “Beginning in the Middle of Things: Following James McClendon’s Systematic Theology. Modern Theology 18:2, April 2002.

Previous posts in this Series:

Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness

In my last post I tried to make a case for the necessity of theological education of missional leaders being rooted in missional community.  With this as a contextual prerequisite, I would further suggest that the ultimate aim of a missionally oriented process of leadership training is the formation of Christlike character.

more of this artist’s amazing photography here

It is too naive to suggest that Christendom was wholly uncritical of the character of Christian leaders.  It is more accurate to say that there’s an inherent assumption within Christendom that if we can only ensure that our leaders believe all the right things, their character will follow suit.  This has turned out to be a deeply lamentable mistake.

It may be necessary for me to reiterate at this point that I am no anti-intellectual.  You would never find me downplaying the importance of continuing study, exposure to new perspectives and ideas, or deep, thoughtful reflection.  Instead, I would suggest that a missional vision of theological education will only value intellectual dimensions of training inasmuch as they contribute to the formation of Christlike character in missional leaders.  Therefore, we might expect a missional vision of theological education to…

1) Train leaders how to think as opposed to telling them what to think.   This is only possible when we humbly buy into the reality that our systems of truth are all fallible and trust that encouraging leaders to follow Jesus is preferable to warning them of the dangers of venturing outside of a particular theological grid.  Thus, through books, articles, media, speakers, discussions, conferences, etc., we may freely (and wisely!) expose leaders to various biblical/theological traditions and perspectives.  Where the rubber meets the (missional) road, so to speak, is in the questions we encourage students to ask of what they are being exposed to.  I won’t go into them here,* but I submit that a missional vision of what it means to be the Body of Christ inclines us to ask different questions of all that we learn than that of Christendom.**

2) Conjoin all intellectual study with missional practice. Only given the assumptions of Christendom could we have divorced religious study from community based missional practice and witness.  A missional vision of the church and theological education is characteristically and relentlessly incarnational.  Missional theology is nothing if not that which we come to know about God as we participate in God’s mission in the world through the Body of Christ.  In this light, I would suggest that each and every aspect of intellectual study find its place within a structure of missional practice which includes both personal and corporate spiritual disciplines.

3) Develop a community based assessment of a leaders process of character development.  When character formation is the central issue in the equipping of missional leaders, time frames are perfunctory.  It’s not one’s ability to make it through a process that qualifies them as a leader, but the manner in which they participate and their holistic development from start to finish.  It takes a community to discern these things.  As valuable as having the commitment and support of a community is to a leader in training, their willingness to speak the truth in love regarding their development is every bit as essential.  Incorporating various means of mentorship and scheduling regular checkpoints between leaders and communities are key components of a missional vision of theological education.

What we know and what we can do as leaders isn’t just meaningless w/o Christlike character, it’s actually negative, destroying the very nature of what it means to follow Jesus and participate in God’s mission in the world.  As Jesus was only worth following inasmuch as he said and did as God said and did, so too are his disciples w/o power and authority if they are not leading out of this sort of Christlike character.

This is all relates to the subject of my next post, the shaping of convictions.  Hope to have some helpful dialogue before then though, so let’s have at it!

*You can find a very helpful article on this subject here.
**In proposing this I readily (and happily) admit that we will always be coming from a particular (hermeneutical) vantage point.  I will explore this further in a future post, but the notion of some completely objective posture in the formation of leaders is neither possible nor desirable.