lifeasmission
exploring the mystery of life and mission as one and the same
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Archive of "gospel" Category
Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Contextual Training
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.
Idolatry, Desire, & the Lion’s Roar
We interrupt this series to being you an important service announcement.
OK, not so much an important service announcement, but a few streams of thought have come together for me and I needed to get them down while I was thinking on them.
A few months ago I listened to a message on the gospel and idolatry. The speaker was talking about how our living and proclaiming of the gospel always confronts the idols in our culture, the places we live, and of course, in our own lives. How are we to give ourselves completely over to God and his mission in the world unless the things we love more than that are unmasked?
I think this is a helpful corrective for those who would define or even emphasize the gospel as social justice. To the extent that local churches rightly strive to be a blessing to their communities and make a place for any and all, these ought always to be seen not as ends in and of themselves, but as a means of exposing idols on the road to full participation in the mission of God in the world.
A few weeks ago, listening to another message a different speaker had this to say…
What we want… has a massive control on what we can believe. If you want something badly enough and believing the truth will take it away from you, you will see the truth as error and remain enslaved to your want.
This I think, is a helpful corrective to those churches who would spend the bulk of their time and energy trying to get people to believe the right things. This is a dead end. The real task of the Body of Christ is to live and love in such radical ways that the world yearns for a taste of it. It is only then, when people “taste and see that the Lord is good,” that they may have eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to obey all that God calls Good.
Currently, Amy and I are reading through The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Ashamed to admit it, I have never read them before. We recently finished The Magician’s Nephew and I thought it was amazing. I’m sure I’m not the only one, but one of my favorite part is when Aslan sings Narnia into existence.
The Lion was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song. It was softer and more lilting than the song by which he had called up the stars and the sun; a gentle, rippling music. And as he walked and sang, the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the Lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the little hills like a wave.
The connection between this and what I’ve written above comes when Lewis provides us with Uncle Andrew’s perspective…
It had not made all the same impression on him… For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are. Ever since the animals had first appeared, Uncle Andrew had been shrinking further and further back into the thicket. He watched them very hard of course; but he wasn’t really interested in seeing what they were doing, only in seeing whether they were going to make a rush at him… he had disliked the song very much. It made him think and feel things he did not want to think and feel… And the longer and more beautifully the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear noting but roaring. Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you already are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song. Soon he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he had wanted to. And when at last the Lion spoke and said, ‘Narnia awake.’ he didn’t hear any words: he heard only a snarl.
If you’re not already seeing how these things come together, let me try and summarize.
What’s really wrong with humanity is that we want the wrong things – this is the result of sin. When we think, speak, and act in ways contrary to how we were designed to think, speak, and act, we cultivate the wrong desires. Subtly, silently, deceptively, those desires create idols in our lives. There’s no shortage of options of what we might idolize; money, acceptance, friends, family, work, material possessions, even our cherished versions of truth. When things like this get a grip on our hearts, it effects what we give ourselves to, what we love, what we worship. And our worship of those things dulls our hearts and minds to competing desires. Thankfully, this cuts both ways. The more we give ourselves to, love, and worship God, the less appealing the things of the world seem.
Can Megachurches be Missional?
That is the questions that Ed Stetzer and Dave Fitch are addressing in this video interview (26:44).
The video is worth your time, but there’s in inherent flaw in the question. Asking if megachurches* can be missional is sort of like asking if a diesel truck can run on unleaded gas. Or if someone with type A blood can receive a donation from someone with type B blood. On the surface, it might seem like a legitimate question, after all, diesel and unleaded are both automobile fuel and unless you have the right tools, A blood looks just like B blood, but that’s just the problem – the superficial appearance is where it stops.
Megachuches and missional churches, while superficially similar in some regards, are so intrinsically different that the question loses all meaning.
The model of the megachurch relies upon Christendom as a cultural context while missional churches (as I said my last post) see Christendom as a debilitating cultural condition and therefore seek to subvert it.
The very medium of megachurch so distorts the message of the gospel, that it’s left virtually powerless to shape a people for fully and authentically participating in the mission of God in the world – the hallmark of missional ecclesiology. Note: I am not saying that God cannot or does not impact and change peoples lives in the context of megachurches.
Another version of this question is probably more worthwhile. Can megachurches become missional? Maybe, but we need more people who are willing to be honest about the full scope of what a shift like this will mean. There is just too much money and and too much popularity to be gained from going around and telling megachurches that they too can hop on the missional bandwagon without monumental shifts in identity and practice. Like telling those who are wealthy, happy, healthy, and powerful that they are in fact poor, confused, sick, and weak, most people who lead “successful” megachurches simply don’t have ears to hear or eyes to see.
So, my experience tells me not to bank on it. But my wife tells me that if I believe in the power of the gospel to restore the world, I might not want to be so quick to discount its power to transform churches! Good thing she’s around
*my comments on megachurches are limited to a Western context. I simply don’t know enough about megachurches in non-western contexts to speak intelligently about differing cultural factors. However, I’d be quick to ask, “Who taught them to do church like that anyway?!”
Church as Revealer
A week ago today I learned that my Uncle Dick Hammond had passed away. He was 70 and had been fighting cancer for the last 5 years. Since well before I was born, the Rozko’s have been good friends with the Hammonds. Uncle Dick and Aunt Judy invited my family into their lives at both Longboat Key, FL a frequent vacation spot of my adolescence and Pelee Island, Ontario, which became more permanently ingrained into our family when my grandparents bought a cottage there several years ago.I was honored when the Hammond family asked me to conduct Uncle Dick’s funeral. Amy and I traveled to Cleveland last Thursday, met with the family that night and gathered the next day with more than a hundred people to both morn our loss and celebrate Uncle Dick’s life.
When it was my turn to speak and offer words of pastoral comfort, I talked about the illusion of death’s finality. Like a good magic trick, death makes us think and feel something based on our immediate experience, but when we pause, step back, and really evaluate things, we just know that there’s something we are missing, something is hidden and we ache to know it.
It was a good reminder to me that it is the unique calling of the Church to pull back the curtain, to reveal that which is hidden, to spoil the illusions of this world with the reality of God’s Kingdom in all its forms. This is a high and lofty calling, but man, what a joy to say to those wracked by the pain of the illusions the finality of death (in all its forms) of this world, “I’ve got good news!”
Good News for Your City
My friend JR Woordward has put together a fun line up of people to submit brief blog posts answering the question…
If you local city newspaper asked you to describe the Good News – what would you write?
Here’s my submission and I encourage you to check out the other posts offered between now and Pentecost. Feel free to offer your comments here if you like, but there are already several good ones over at JR Woodward’s site that you can add to as well. I will be checking and responding over there too.
The Commercial Appeal is the place where countless Memphians turn for news – some of it good, much of it, not so good. We are a city divided by race, stricken by generational poverty, plagued by crime, and disadvantaged by socio-economic stratification. Good news for us usually comes in the form of an absence of bad as opposed to the presence of beautiful surprises. For those with eyes to see, these problems are far more than the result of individual human errors and failings; they also stem from firmly entrenched systems, paradigms, and powers, which create a broken culture that produces broken people. There is a cycle at work here more insidious than we realize or could hope to finally defeat on our own. But there’s good news.
I’m a Christian and Christians are good news people. In fact, a central manta of the Christian faith is, “Repent and believe the good news.” This isn’t about saying you’re sorry to God so you can go to Heaven when you die. It’s Jesus’ invitation to, by grace and through faith, escape the consequences of our capitulation to a world gone wrong by joining him in the ways he sees and engages the world.
See, God plans to recreate all that has been tainted and lost by evil and darkness. The sphere in which this happens is known as the Kingdom of God. Jesus embodied this Kingdom in his life and sealed it in his death and resurrection. That’s news, but it’s not quite good yet; cause news is only really good when it’s experienced. This news becomes truly good for us when God’s plan for the future intersects with our present. Ours is not good news that God will do, but good news that God is doing.
Jesus was the bearer of good news par excellence and those of us who bear his name but fail to similarly bear good news to the world around us have a share in the guilt and misery of the city and people we are called to lovingly serve. This is where the Church comes in. God means for the Church to be a unique body though whom Jesus actually continues freeing people from harmful things and reconnecting them with God and others. The Christian God is one of relationship. Therefore, God’s Good News to the people and city of Memphis is purposefully intertwined with communities of people gripped by it.
Fellow Memphians, if you’re like me, grieved over the many sad circumstances of our city, if you are desperate for a new start, for healing and wholeness, I hope you will consider the news of God’s desire and plan for the world including the tiny metroplex of Memphis. The news might not be the sort you’d expect, maybe not even the sort you’d prefer, but it’s good in the truest meaning of the word.
Virtual Community & Video Venues
It’s not a new conversation, but there has been some recent discourse & interest around virtual community and the use of video venues for church communities. I wanted to point you toward a few resources of interest.
© Oleg Gerasymenko | Dreamstime.com
Bob Hyatt has written a great piece entitled, Video Venues: The Death of Preaching. And I wholeheartedly agree with his thesis as well as closing remarks
…just because God honors our silly methods occasionally doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look for better ways, perhaps less silly, perhaps ones with fewer unintended consequences.
Shane Hipps, an acquaintance from Fuller, has caught some heat for his take on virtual community and in a recent podcast, “The Papacy of Celebrity,” had some good things to say about video venues as well. The great thing about the perspective Shane is coming from is that he doesn’t need to demonize anything, he’s just trying to be honest about the full scope of these things.
I wouldn’t presume to speak for Bob or Shane, but as I have followed the various discussions and listened to what is being said, it’s because of my heart for spiritual formation that I lament the idea that connecting with people virtually could ever be God’s full intention for community. More saddening, is the way in which we fail to see how the medium of video venues disfigures some of the most precious characteristics of the gospel and the Body of Christ – not because God can’t show up, but because of the adverse formative effect they have on people.
If my kid steals some money from my wallet, I can probably fix the problem by crushing his hand with a wrench, but the point isn’t just fixing the problem, it’s fixing it in the wright way. There is no room in the Christian faith for being connected in community “at all cost,” much less for, good preaching “at all cost.” That just misses the bigger point. The medium really is the message, they are bound up with one another, which is why, in terms of discipleship, it’s not just about doing the right things, but about doing things the right ways.
Perhaps for utilitarians, the means justify the ends, but for those who follow Christ and his invitation to “pick up your cross and follow me,” the means and the ends are indistinguishable.
Hi There…
Hey, I'm JR - welcome to the blog.
I'm just an average guy trying to shape his identity around God's dream for the world and his place in it. This blog is a place for me (and you!) to reflect on and discuss all that might mean. Looking for a bit more on me? Check out the about me. Peace.
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