While Amy was away I had the chance to read some books that has been on my hitlist for a while.

Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional by Jim Belcher

Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge by Dallas Wilard

Free for All: Rediscovering the Bible in Community by Tim Conder and Daniel Rhodes

I plan to offer some thoughts on all three eventually, but I was wondering if there might be some lifeasmission readers out there who have read any of these and were anxious to have some discussion on one in particular.

(Books link to BetterWorldBooks.com, my book supplier of choice).

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?

Amy and I are both networkers through and through.  Each of us has enjoyed cultivating networks and communities of friends in the various places we have lived across the US and abroad.  These are people who have helped, encouraged, shaped, and loved us.  Because we want to do what we can to stay in touch with these people (you?), we’ve decided to compile a 1-page letter about every other month that highlights what’s been going on, what’s coming up, matters in which we hope you will rejoice with us, and others in which we hope you will support us in prayer.

We got our first one out in the last few days.  If you didn’t receive it, there are 2 possible reasons.

1) We had no idea you might be interested in receiving it.

2) We tried to send it to you, but must have had the wrong email address.

In either case, if you didn’t receive our letter and would like to, leave a comment or drop us an email via the contact page and we will add you to the list of folks that we email these letters to.

Thanks for continuing to allow us to share our lives with our – nothing means more.  We’re also hopeful that this might be a pathway to more of you sharing what is going on in your lives as well.

Click the image below to download our first letter.

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.

Not too long ago I offered a post on, “Preaching in the Missional Church.”  Basically it was an excuse to pimp this awesome paper by Ervin Stutzman of Eastern Mennonite University.  Apparently that wasn’t enough for my good friend Wess, who asked what missional preaching looks like

To try and do justice to Wess’ question, the importance of the topic and to make space for better discussion, I’ve decided to divy this up into three posts.  I’ve got in mind to describe three unique attributes of preaching in missional churches and then illustrating them by way of examples from Life on the Vine, the missional community Amy and I are a part of. (Dave Fitch, one of the co-pastors of LOV, offers some reflections on this same topic here.)

In missional communities, preaching is a communal activity which seeks to proclaim biblical truth that calls for and invites a real response.

In most churches, the task of preaching is the responsibility of one individual – 9 times out of 10, a man.  Not only does the task of preaching often remain unshared, but the scope of preaching does as well.  This reality conflicts with the communal nature of missional theology and ecclesiology.

In missional communities, one of the central aims would be for a team of teachers, whose giftedness is affirmed by the congregation, to share responsibility not only for preaching and teaching, but for giving their time and attention to identifying and equipping other gifted teachers in the body.

Life on the Vine is shepherded by a 3-person team of bi-vocational pastors.  Not only do they share teaching and preaching responsibilities, but they also facilitate what we call a “College of Preachers,” every summer.  This gives those who have (or at least want to discover if they have) the gift of teaching, the opportunity to use and explore this gift in a guided way.

In addition, we follow the church calendar.  This means that we are all aware, well ahead of time, of those texts which will be preached each Sunday.  Whoever is responsible for the preaching portion of our liturgical service also facilitates a time of teaching and dialogue for an hour or so before the worship service.  This time gives the entire body the opportunity to speak to the text for the morning and it gives the preacher the opportunity to (re)shape their sermon in light of the insights, questions, and concerns of the body.

I’ll speak to the issue of missional preaching proclaiming biblical truth next time.  For now, what are your thoughts on preaching as a communal activity?  Is this important to you?  Why or why not?  What might be other ways to achieve the same goal in different ways?

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.

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.

Previous Posts in this Series:

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

A hallmark of theological education within Christendom is the primacy of the individual.  Individual choice, individual abilities, and individual achievement; these are the prized marks of Christian leaders within systems of coercive power.

This conflicts however with a missional vision of Christian leadership in which community is the most basic point of reference and choices, abilities, and achievements are all products of the Holy Spirit’s working amongst a community of people on mission together.  Thus, I am firmly convinced that the most faithful and helpful forms of theological education will be those rooted in missional communities.

Think for a moment about how our current system of theological education favors the individual.

1) While others may be consulted, basically, individuals make up their own minds to pursue theological education.  They choose the school they find most desirable and go through the academic motions as individuals (a class does not a community make!)

2) More often than not, whether by working, soliciting random scholarships, or taking out loans, individuals are on their own to fund their education.  They bear enormous amounts of responsibility for not only their finances, but their own decision to embark on an often terrifying and difficult educational venture.

3) These individuals have only their individual experience and knowledge as a grid through which to process the new information being thrown at them.  They may enter into dialogue with other at a superficial level, but again, this is a personal choice with no real consequence if not practiced.

4) Once students have made it through the process of theological education, they are once again basically on their own in terms of deciding what they want to do with their degree (mine is hanging on my bathroom wall!).

That theological education favors the individual is only 1/2 of the issue.  The other 1/2 is that those leaders who go through this process are formed by it – they will have a bent toward leading individualistically and lack the skills to help form missional communities.

My Proposal:

If helping people learn how to make decisions, live their lives, and find their identity not on their own, but in the community of the Body of Christ, is central to the task of Christian leaders, then their training must take place in that same context. This has implications for how we identify potential leaders, how we commit to and support them, the nature and structure of how we train them, and for what follows the completion of the training.

Identifying Missional Leaders…

Rather than being self-selected, in this vision, our pool of missional leaders are identified by people who have known them over the course of years of personal experience and can affirm their areas of giftedness.

This is part of the reason that missional communities embrace sustainable sizes – for this to work, people need to be known.  When this is the case it is much more realistic for those entrusted with leadership responsibility to be looking for others that seem gifted and inclined toward leadership.  Once they are, they can be shepherded toward a more intentional process of leadership formation.

Commiting to and Supporting Missional Leaders…

I cannot underestimate the importance of local communities committing to and supporting leaders in training.  Leadership training is (if it’s any good!) hard.  There is just no substitute for a leader in training having the constant reminder that what they are a part of is no mistake; it’s not just their idea, but an entire of community of people has affirmed their giftedness and potential and they have said publicaly, “whatever you need, we are here for you.”

More than this, the local church should bear 100% of the responsibility for funding whatever aspects of theological education are necessary for the leaders they themselves have identified. It is a great sin that any church should say to a young man or woman that they God has placed a call on their lives to leadership in the local church and then not say, “we’ll do whatever it takes to help you pursue that dream.”  Please keep in mind I say all this in light of what I have already said about the practice of bi-vocational leadership.

Training Missional Leaders…

Leaders in training become part of a community within a community. There is the local church community that has done its job of identifying future leaders and committed themselves to those people, and a smaller community of gifted leaders, committing themselves to each other and the larger body that has committed to them.

The various aspects of leadership training within this vision would all be rooted in community.  From reading and writing to praying and serving, the point of each and every dimension of leadership development would be suited to helping those who participate in it understand its place in the formation of people in community.

Commissioning Missional Leaders…

Modern church leaders graduate, missional church leaders are commissioned.  At the end of the more intentional process of leadership formation, it is the discernment between the leader and community, not the desires of either alone, that serves as the vehicle through which the leader is commissioned into leadership.  Commissioning is inherently relational.  It is a community saying, “As we have identified you as a leader, committed ourselves to your formation and supported you, we now send you affirm a calling on your life and support you in it.”

In the next post, I aim to address character formation as a second central mark of a missional vision of theological education. Looking forward to your questions, comments, etc. till then.

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.

Previous Posts in this Series:

Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem

In my last post I made the claim that our current model of theological education, in assuming a Christendom context, is better-suited to train managers of Christian religious institutions than it is to prepare missional leaders.  If the root of the problem is Christendom, the binding of Christian witness and mission to systems of coercive power, we do well to ask what the fruit of the tree of our current system of theological education has been?

The version of Christianity which is bound to systems of coercive power within modernity has been powerless to resist the trajectory of that era.  Thus, features like individualism, consumerism, and reductionism have been uncritically adopted by local churches and systems of theological education alike and have had mutually related effects.  On top of this, there has emerged a rift between theological education and the ministry of the local church.

I’ve talked up a storm on this blog about what this has meant for the structure and ministry of local churches, but what about our systems of theological education?

Individualism.

For the most part, people make individual decisions to attend seminary and they are trained as individuals.  I’m not saying you can’t experience community in seminary education or benefit from peer interaction, but largely, you choose your courses as an individual, study as an individual, get assessed as an individual, and then decide where to go and what to do as an individual.  Not very good training for people who will then go on to be part of a staff team!  Even less conducive to a truly missional ecclesiology in which the theology, spiritual practices, and Christan life are all rooted in community.

Consumerism.

Seminary is freaking expensive!  I know I got some amen’s on that!  That’s because there’s a market for it.  Think about that for a second… There is a market (a system of coercive power if there ever was one) for being trained as a Christian leader.  Now, make sure you’re not hearing what I’m NOT saying.  I’m not saying it’s wrong for people to earn a living from educating others.  Nor am I saying that buying and selling is in and of itself a bad thing.  I am saying that this business of people needing to spend (or worse, go into debt) huge amounts of money to get a religious credential at an accredited institution is not only unsustainable as Christendom unravels, but has a negative effect on Christian leaders and those they lead.

Reductionism.

There are a number of ways we could go with this dimension of modern Christendom, but what concerns me the most is how we have reduced theology to information and the leadership of local churches to those best able to convey it.  How else are we able to account for a theological system so heavily slanted toward lecturing, book reading, writing, and testing?  It’s nearly all about the grasping and repeating of concepts.  I’m not saying at all that there’s no place for this, but this feature of Christendom-based theological education has resulted in a form of Christianity that lives as though it’s possible to really believe something without embodying it.  The Bible knows nothing of disembodied belief, but this is the very thing that our current system of theological eduction allows for.

These are a few of the most obvious fruits of theological education rooted in Christendom that I am thinking of.  Are you thinking of more?  What are the angles and nuances that you see from your perspective that I’m missing?

In my next post, I aim to take a stab how a missional vision of theological education differs from one rooted in Christendom.