lifeasmission
exploring the mystery of life and mission as one and the same
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Archive of "post-christendom" Category
Discipleship in a Missional Context
I’m excited to be gathering tonight and tomorrow with some pastors and leaders from around the Chicagoland area and a bit beyond to talk about discipleship in a missional context. We’re gathering in Hyde Park where some friends from Life on the Vine are in the process of moving into and exploring how the Kingdom might take shape.
I think this is a topic that a great number of us have at the front of our minds, but aren’t always able to speak to as directly as we’d like so I am looking forward to the conversation and stuff the Spirit surfaces.
So, since everyone has been so gracious in offering input on my doctoral considerations,
I’m wondering what you might want to say or ask related to this issue of discipleship in a missional context – ie. how do we think of and go about discipling people to participate in God’s mission in the world.
I’ll chance in periodically and add your comments and questions to our discussion.
We’ll also be trying to pound out some of the details for the next Missional Learning Commons. Stay tuned for more details on that.
The Role of the Bible in Society
As Christendom continues to unravel and the Church loses its privileged role within culture at large, we live in an increasingly biblical illiterate society.
– Quoting Scripture will mean less and less.
– Bible stories will be increasingly misunderstood or forgotten altogehter
– And the battles that Christians wage with one another over the objective nature of Scripture will continue to damage our reputation in a broken world.
For these reasons and more, there is an incredibly important conversation to be had regarding the role of the Bible in society.
In contributing to that conversation, here’s a 40 minute panel discussion from the recent Q conference here in Chicago between Tim Keller, Alastain McGrath, Dempsey Rosales-Acosta, and Brian McLaren (you can find brief bios on all these panelists here) on that topic. I’m anxious to see what kinds of responses others might have to the questions and discussion here.
(For those reading in a feed reader, the video is flash and may not come through, so you might want to click through to the actual post to view or download.)
An Interview with N.T. Wright
The guys over at Homebrewed Christianity recently posted an interview they did with N.T. Wright. The interview was full of some really great sound bytes that I went ahead and divvied up to make your life easier
You can listen to or download the interview in its entirety here.
On being a bishop.
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On the unfortunate split between church and academy.
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On returning to fulltime academic work.
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On Bart Ehrman.
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On Marcus Borg & John Dominic Crossan.
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On Jurgen Moltmann.
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On E.P. Sanders.
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On Karl Barth.
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On Stanley Hauerwas.
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On his most recent book, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters and why he chose to write about eschatology before ethics.
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On the difference between Aristotelian virtue and Christian virtue.
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On the role of character and virtue in other religions.
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On cultural virtue.
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On the renewing of our minds when they have become largely detached from the rest of who we are.
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On Christianity Post-Postmodernity.
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On the after-after life.
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What NT Wright is reading, thinking, and planning for his “big book on Paul” as the next in his Christian Origins series.
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What we can expect from NT Wright in his new role.
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Reviewing Deep Church by Jim Belcher
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.
Missional Preaching Part 3: Preaching as a Call for Response
This is the third and final post in a brief series on the practice of preaching in missional communities. I’ve already argued that preaching in missional churches is a communal activity and that it aims at the proclamation of biblical truth. Lastly, I want to suggest that missional preaching calls for and invites a real response from its hearers.
It is a travesty of (quite literally) biblical proportions that we would gather as the Body of Christ, hear from the Scriptures, and not be called – in a meaningful and accountable way – to respond. This is where the theological rubber meets the ecclesial road. When the theological vision of a church is adapted to meet an individualistic and consumer-driven society, the practice of preaching is bound to the fate illustrated by the cartoon above. However, where and when a church embraces a missional theology, it sees little point in the practice of preaching if it doesn’t lead to a meaningful and accountable means of response. By this I don’t mean that we have some nugget of wisdom to try and apply to our lives once we leave, I mean right then and there, we respond. All of us. Not, “Respond if you want to get saved,” but “Here’s God’s truth for all of us to which we are all called to respond. Do it!Typically, at Life on the Vine, we do this through spoken prayer. The preacher will guide us in a way to respond to the truth and everyone has an opportunity to do so. For instance, this summer I preached from Genesis 49 and proclaimed the truth that, “Our hope in the promises of God rests on God’s character, not ours. We all responded to this by praying, “Lord, though I am/have _________, you are/have ___________ and so I pray, __________.” Those who pray conclude with the words, “Lord, in your mercy,” and the entire congregation, if they can, affirms the prayer by saying, “Amen!”
Because our community is an accessible and sustainable size, these responses are quite public, making them all the more meaningful.
Responding to the truth of the text for the morning doesn’t end on Sunday. At the center of our community are what we call “Missional Orders,” groups of couples and singles who are trying to share life and serve together. These missional orders carry the truth with them throughout the week and when we gather we continue to respond to one another by noting the effect the sermon is having on us.
Any thoughts on this? Are there aspects to the way preaching is practices in your church community that get at this vision or embody something different? Are there implications of a missional theology/ecclesiology for preaching that you’re thinking of that I haven’t mentioned here?
Missional Preaching Part 2: Preaching as the Proclamation of Biblical Truth
In my last post I was making the claim that given a missional ecclesiology, the practice of preaching is a communal activity. On top of this, I would like to suggest that preaching in missional churches seeks to proclaim biblical truth.
Now, don’t miss this. I don’t mean “proclaim biblical truth” in the fundamentalist, “The Bible says it, so that’s the end of discussion and you’re stupid if you don’t see it” sort of way that’s maddeningly common, but in the, “In faith, we proclaim this to be true about God and life in God’s Kingdom,” sort of way.
Because missional churches seek to shape a people for mission in a Post-Christendom world, every activity of the community, including preaching, is meant to be a formative practice in this regard. As Stutzman says in the paper mentioned previously,
Missional preaching deliberately draws contrasts between the gospel message and the practices and values of American civil religion, aiming for conversion from habits shaped by participation in American democracy to habits formed through Christian discipleship.
In preaching, missional churches seek to proclaim the truth of the reality of God’s Kingdom in the midst of every other competing reality. The point of preaching for missional churches is not anthropocentric/therapeutic - meant to make people feel emotionally better. Nor does it seek primarily to be relevant in order to captivate or entertain an audience. It is not even so concerned with being exegetical or expository – patently cerebral types of communication. Missional preaching is theocentric – it is a practice in which we look for God’s reality to intersect with ours and DO something in us and in our midst.
So, for instance, each and every sermon preached at Life on the Vine features a rhetorical phrase of some sort. This is a simple way to articulate the truth that is being proclaimed from the morning’s text. The rest of the sermon, normally about 20-25 minutes since it’s not seen as more central than any other part of the liturgy, is spent, not unpacking a text, but proclaiming a biblical truth from that text that addresses us and calls us all to some response.
For instance, this summer I preached from Genesis 49 and proclaimed the truth that,
Our hope in the promises of God rests on God’s character, not ours.
The aim in my preaching of this sermon wasn’t mainly to explain the text so that people could understand and try to apply it to their lives, but to proclaim the truthfulness of the text by calling out what it was DOING, namely, calling its hearers to believe, not believe by intellectual assent, but believe by ordering their lives around, this biblical truth.
And the only way to get at this, is to call for a real response. That’s our topic for next time.
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