• Archive of "modernity" Category

    Reviewing Deep Church by Jim Belcher

    May 19, 2010 // 6 Comments »

    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.

    Posted in bible, books, christendom, church, church planting, culture, doctrine, emergent, emerging church, evangelicalism, Fuller Seminary, gospel, kingdom, modernity, post-christendom, postmodernity, theology

    Transitioning Traditional Churches into Missional Ones

    January 29, 2010 // 24 Comments »

    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.

    Posted in christendom, church, community, leadership, missional, modernity, post-christendom, prayer, preaching/teaching, questions, spiritual formation, theology

    Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Cultural Pioneering

    December 31, 2009 // 1 Comment »

    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.

    Posted in christendom, church, community, creation, culture, God, Jesus, kingdom, leadership, missional, modernity, spiritual formation, theological education, theology, western culture

    Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Contextual Training

    December 16, 2009 // 2 Comments »

    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.

    Posted in christendom, church, community, gospel, Jesus, kingdom, leadership, missional, modernity, networking, postmodernity, spiritual formation, theological education, theology, western culture

    Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: Character Formation

    December 2, 2009 // 10 Comments »

    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.


    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.

    Posted in bible, books, christendom, church, community, conference, discipleship, Jesus, leadership, missional, modernity, preaching/teaching, spiritual formation, theological education, theology

    Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: New Soil

    November 24, 2009 // 12 Comments »

    Previous Posts in this Series:

    Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | Fruit of the Problem

    After laying what I consider to be some necessary groundwork for this conversation, I’m excited to begin moving us in a more constructive path of conversation as we try to get at what a missional vision of theological education might entail.

    A missional vision of theological education differs from our current one, not as a reaction to it – the classic pendulum swinging in the other direction sort of thing, but as a completely alternative paradigm.  For the same reasons that megachurches can’t be missional, methods of theological education rooted in Christendom systems of coercive power are not designed to equip missional leaders.  Thus, at least two different kinds of work are needed.

    One, binding up that which is broken and doing what we can to restore it to health.

    And two, planting new trees in new soil.

    To the best of my knowledge, in the first instance, centers of theological education are…

    1) Making missional adaptations to their curriculum: offering courses in missional hermeneutics, missional ecclesiology, missional theology, etc.

    2) Offering more creative program options: utilizing online methods of delivery, developing intensive based courses, moving to cohort-based programs, etc.

    3) Trying harder to actually partner with local churches to offer students more opportunity for in-service learning.

    These are all good, helpful, and necessary changes within the current system.  We need to see more and more schools moving in these directions.

    But.  These remain changes within a system that I am saying is flawed at its roots.  It’s kind of like painting the walls, fixing the plumbing, and replacing the electrical systems in a house that has been irreparably eaten by termites.  You may as well do what you can as long as the house is standing, but if you’re not also working on building yourself a new house, you’re gonna be in trouble.

    This leads us to the second sort of work that needs to be done, not so much mending, but tilling and planting.  To use biblical metaphors, I think of it in terms of wineskins (Lk. 5:36-38) and kernels of wheat (Jn. 12:23-25).  Now is not a time for repairing old wineskins, now is a time for new wineskins and new wine.  To go further, our current system of theological education (not unlike the dominant expression of church in the West) has a God-ordained opportunity to count its loss as gain in Christ.  If they would only spend themselves fully on behalf of those that are coming after by being wiling to die rather than move into survival mode at all cost (a patently un-Christian stance for sure), what an explosion of Kingdom power we might see!

    Whether this happens or not remains to be seen, but as we move toward a missional vision of theological education, I suggest that it will be marked by the following:

    1) Community Rootedness*

    2) Character Formation

    3) Conviction Shaping

    4) Contextual Training

    5) Cross-Cultural Pioneering

    In the coming weeks, I hope to deal with each one of these in turn.  I’m anxious for your comments and insights on this and future posts.

    *I changed this from Communal Discernment to Community Rootedness as a more encompassing term.

    Posted in christendom, church, community, culture, discipleship, kingdom, leadership, missional, modernity, spiritual formation, theological education, theology, western culture

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