lifeasmission
exploring the mystery of life and mission as one and the same
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Archive of "midwest" Category
Reflections on the Missional Learning Commons
Amy and I had a great time at the Missional Learning Commons in Ft. Wayne two weekends ago.
The theme of the weekend was,”Deeper Church.” Essentially what that meant was having discussions about certain topics which surface when we stop thinking about church as a worship service with a host of corresponding programs and begin to embrace church as a way of life in which we are joining God in his mission of reconciliation and the restoration of all things. Some may want to try and explain how these are really two ways of saying the same thing, but for the vast majority of people who have been involved in this conversation for any length of time, the differences are too real and too important to dismiss with semantic gymnastics.
On Friday night there were maybe 30 people in attendance to discuss Soong-chan Rah’s book, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity. This conversation was continued as the topic of the final session on Saturday. Both conversations were engaging and helpful. While the book had clear shortcomings and oversights, it served as a springboard for us to ask the question, “Why are missional congregations so white?” We see this as a problem because implicit in missional theology is the value for listening to voices from the margins of society – something which should be a no-brainer to those of us who regard Scripture (a book authored by those speaking from the margins of society!) as our guiding text. Those who live on the margins of society have much to teach those of us who don’t and the longer our congregations remain socio-economically and culturally homogeneous, the more the Body of Christ, and by implication, the world to which we testify of an alternative reality, suffers.
In light of that, we had discussions about the practices of deeper churches, what sharing the gospel means and looks like for deeper churches, and whether or not these deeper churches should have paid staff. This session was led by a 3-person panel: Matt Tebbe one of the pastors of Life on the Vine who is bi-vocational, JR Woodward, who raises all of his support, and Bob Havenor, who was advocating for an up-paid approach to church leadership.
Thanks to Ben Sternke who put the missional commons site together, you can find audio from all of the sessions here.
If you are in the midwest and interested in the missional conversation, I hope you’ll consider joining us next year – details TBD.
Missional Learning Commons
This afternoon Amy and I are joining about a dozen others from our church community as attenders at a Missional Learning Commons in Ft. Wayne, IN.
At the invitation of Dave Fitch (who has blogged about this gathering here), I attended my first one of these in December of 2007 before Amy was in Chicago. Last year Amy attended without me as I was in Kenya. So, especially since we have committed as a couple to helping cultivate a new missional community in the next year, I am really excited for us to get to participate in one of these together.
Here’s what I love about this event.
A) It’s free. And that’s not because it sucks. It’s because the “business” of Christian resourcing needs to die.
B) It’s local. The people who attend these every year have a real chance to stay meaningfully connected.
C) It’s not about personalities. Those who speak, are more like conversation starters. There is much more time given to dialogue than monologue.
D) There’s no hype. No book sales, no t-shirts, no vendors.
It’s just a band of brothers and sisters who are trying get on the same page about the implications of a missional ecclesiolgy as Christendom continues to crumble here in the midwest. It’s a living example of what I meant when I blogged about “The Power and Promise of Regional Gatherings for the Equipping of Missional Churches.”
Looking forward to a great weekend of connecting, discussing, dreaming, and praying.
Cultural Gravity (Part 1)
Try to jump and hang in the air for 10 seconds. How’d you do? You either failed, cheated, or are reading this from the moon. You are a captive of gravity. It pulls at you, refusing to let you wander off.
Culture is a lot like that. The various elements of the culture we inhabit pull us toward some sort of center. Culture, in all of its various forms: language, architecture, customs, expectations, rhythms, etc., creates a sort of reality for those who live in it. This is what I am calling cultural gravity.
Cultural gravity cuts two ways – it simultaneously frees and binds. As regular gravity gives us the ability to walk around and explore our immediate surroundings, it also binds us there, making any desire we have to explore our not so immediate surroundings extraordinarily difficult. Analogously, cultural gravity is what enables us to authentically enter a particular time and space – to know it personally and deeply. But it can also trap our imaginations and stymie us intellectually and creatively. The longer we live with in a particular brand of cultural gravity (geography, tradition, denomination, etc.) the harder it will be to enter new ones with any degree of receptivity or discernment.
Anyone who has ever lived cross-culturally has experienced this tension. It is why new cultures can be hard to adjust to and why we may have a hard time (or outright fear!) returning to the culture we came from.
As one who has had some varied over-seas experience and has moved from the suburban mid-west, to urban So. Cal, to some blend of suburban/urban culture in the midsouth, and now lives outside of Chicago, these are some thoughts I have been having.
In Part 2 I plan to offer some reflections on what I think cultural gravity has to do with missional churches.
Suburban Discontent/Suburban Oppression
My friend Todd Hiestand recently posted, A Holy (Suburban) Discontent. It is partly a review of Tim Keel’s, Intuitive Leadership, and partly a reflection on the trappings of the suburban life style – something I have been feeling all too painfully since moving back from LA.One of the most ironic parts of the post is that Todd quotes Tim’s in his telling of a story not very unlike my own. Tim reflects “on how he had an intense and authentic experience of spiritual community in college. Then, post-college he entered into the world of suburban America.” Tim says,“I was able to see a number of friends with whom I had live so intimately begin to lose their faith following college. That sounds dramatic, and I don’t mean it in the way you might initially read it: I don’t mean they lost the content of their belief system or became apostate doctrinally. I mean that upon leaving college and entering the world of twentieth-century suburban Christianity, they lost their way of life. They entered a way of life that was compartmentalized, disintegrated, individualistic, sub-cultured, ghettoized, programmed and purpose-driven.”This was as true for me as it has ever been for any of my friends. Having had the freedom to remove myself from this for a time, to study and reflect, has, I beleive, given me a unique perspective on just how subtle this sort of co-option can be. With Todd, I feel a discontent deep within – wanting the rhythm and course of my life to be determined by the power of the gospel and not the power of the culture in which I live. Todd offers a few good suggestions at the end of his post regarding some of the personal implications. My longing, however (not that Todd doesn’t have this longing, check out his church community, The Well), pushes this beyond this to the desire to align myself with a community which feels this discontent and stands convicted that they most embody an alternative lifestyle, to be an alternative community.
On a related note, an article I wrote for Fuller’s Center for Youth and Family Ministry, The Other Side of At-Risk: Freeing Youth from Suburban Oppression, was selected to appear in Fuller’s global publicaltion, Theology News & Notes. You can check it out here.
David Fitch on Willowcreek’s REVEAL
Back in October I posted on the REVEAL project that Willowcreek has been working on. Part of the project involved a humble repentance of much that they realize has been wrong with their ministry philosophy. David Fitch, who wrote, The Great Giveaway: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch Organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism, and Other Modern Maladies, and who also blogs, has posted a much more thorough treatment of the REVEAL project that I wanted to recommend to you.
I am not aware of many other people who, like David, are working to sort out the issues of the Church in (Midwest) Western culture from both academic and pastoral (he is also a bi-vocational pastor at a community named Life on the Vine) vantage points, which is why I give his writing so much credence.
You can also check out the conversation in the comment section.
Midwest Missionary:Update
Just a short post to follow up with everyone who reads this blog and especially those who took interest in previous post about serving as a missionary here in the Midwest.
I need to thank many of you for your emails, phone calls, financial support, conversations, and prayer as I try to figure out what it looks like to live and help others to live missionally here in the Midwest. As you may have noticed from my blog, I haven’t been able to raise the necessary support to really invest in the ministry of Repeat the way I had hoped. On top of this, through further communication, it doesn’t seem like what I feel I can add to the overall thrust of the community is what is most needed. Consequently, while I will still be proactively exploring other options for missional connections, I will not be heavily investing my time in the way I originally thought.
For the time being, I have begun working at Starbucks on a part-time basis and am also working with the Salvation Army for the holiday season. I will be assisting with their Angel Tree and Adopt-A-Family programs. I look forward to writing more about these programs in the near future.
I really want to keep this conversation about missional living and engagement in the midwest, so please offer comments and ask any and all questions that you think of.
Peace.
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