When I was a grad student at Fuller Theological Seminary, I continued to serve in the world of high school student ministry as an interim director at yet another kind of church.

Later, after some time working in a seminary context, I launched into yet another pastoral position at a new church, this time working exclusively with college students and other young adults.

However, I haven’t really done much in the way of student ministry since the spring of 2009.  So, after nearly a 3-year hiatus, I was excited when my college buddy, Scott, who’s been a long time youth pastor at The Chapel in North Canton, asked me to come back into town and help lead a retreat for his high school student leaders.

As you might expect, the topic of the retreat was leadership.  There were to be three main sessions over the course of our time together Friday night and through the day on Saturday, plus a final sermon on Sunday morning.

The theme for Friday night was, “Leadership as Followership: Jesus’ Plan to Destroy Your Life.”  Here, we focused our discussion around Matthew 20:17-28 and reflected on how Jesus’ role as a leader was located not so much in clever skills and abilities, but a central focus on following where and how God was leading him.  We talked about how a relinquishing of our personal ambition and agenda is fundamental to receiving what it is that God might have for us.  I also sought to pass on a discipleship framework for leaning how to get better and better at recognizing where and how God is at work and responding faithfully.

On Saturday morning our theme was, “Leadership as Discipline: It’s Always Easy… Until You Have To Do It.”  We moved our attention to Matthew 26:36-46 and we spent some time talking about how, contrary to the aberrant Celebrity Culture that seems to mark contemporary Evangelicalism, Jesus-shaped leadership is anything but glamorous.  Rather, a commitment to lead like Jesus did will nearly always take you to a place of utter desperation, disappointment, and dependence upon God.  In terms of discipleship, we focused on what it might mean and look like to structure our lives around practices that intentionally root us in relationship with God, fellow believers, and others who are hurting and/or far from God.

The final session of the retreat on Saturday afternoon revolved around the notion of, “Leadership as Mission: Death as a Way of Life.”  As we spent time working through Matthew 28:16-20, we discussed what actually drove Jesus as a missionary-leader, namely submission to the unique role he was to play in God’s mission in the world.  We also reflected on Jesus’ commitment to equip and send others as opposed to keeping everything isolated to his direct (human) endeavor.  This led naturally into presenting a process for discipling others toward maturity and mission.

On Sunday morning, in sharp defiance to the notion the Piperian notion that, “God has designed christianity to have a masculine feel to it,” Amy and I preached the sermon, “Leadership as Partnership: Embodying a New World Order,” as partners who together, as male and female, reflect the imago Dei!  We spoke out of Acts 2 and Ephesians 4, calling attention to the primary role of the Holy Spirit in constituting a body of people who, against all worldly convention, seek to lead one another out of their unique giftedness in partnership for mission.

Seeing some family and friends was a highlight as always, but man, getting back around high school students for a while was a blast.  I was super-appreciative of just how seriously they took our time together and how much creativity and passion they brought to the discussions.

Shame on youth pastors (Scott’s not one of them!), who sabotage their opportunity to shape a generation of students because they are so focused on growing a huge, cool youth group.  Double shame on senior/lead pastors who, out of their own insecurity, put that kind of pressure on youth pastors to do it!

Related posts:

1. Bi-Vocational Ministry
2. Bi-Vocational Ministry & Theological Education
3. Bi-Vocational Ministry & Spiritual Formation

Shaping Students w/ the Character and Competency of Jesus (lifeasmission | Patheos)

Missionary Pastors for a Missionary God (lifeasmission | Patheos)

Ministers are Mobilizers, Not Managers (lifeasmission | Patheos)

As I’ve noted in previous posts, this is some edited content from a more comprehensive white paper that I worked on.  You can find the whole paper here as a resource at thefutureoftheologicaleducation.com.

I hope to round this all out with a (more brief!) summary post soon.  Thanks to those of you who have been following along and weighing in.  Engagement is the only way to refine these sort of ideas toward the creation of something truly new, helpful, and concrete.

This is the 4th and final article in a series that we have been happy to offer related this Patheos forum on, “The Future of the Seminary.”  For our part, we have sought to call attention to the idea that inasmuch as theological education seeks to locate its purpose and aim in the missio Dei, its shape and future can be most helpfully understood from a missiological perspective.  This is the fundamental point of the white paper from which these few posts have emerged, The Missiological Future of Theological Education.

We first offered a video, which summarizes the issues surrounding the way in which Christendom obscured our view of God’s missionary nature, thereby mis-shaping not only our theology, but our ecclesiology and the systems of theological education that we constructed to prepare leaders for these Christendom-shaped churches.  The video also suggests that…

as we seek to re-imagine theological education along missional lines, the most important ‘accrediting factor’ for our schools lies in their ability to do their part in producing leaders who are able to demonstrate having taken on the character and competency of Jesus.

If you haven’t seen it yet, the video is embedded below:

After this initial post, we offered two more that sought to outline the missiological principles that we believe best contribute to creating processes of theological formation along these lines:

1) Missionary Pastors for a Missionary God, in which we suggest that missional approaches to theological education will be praxeological – geared toward the training of theologically reflective practitioners.

2) Ministers are Mobilizers, not Managers, in which we suggest that missional approaches to theological education will be mobilizational - geared toward the training of missionary leaders.

In this final post, we’d like to outline a final missiological principle that we believe will guide a faithful re-imagining of theological education, that of being spiritual – geared toward the training of kingdom citizens.

Spiritual, of course, can mean many things. For us, it simply means that everything about what theological education is and does, ought to be predicated on the centrality of a vibrant and growing relationship with the triune God and his work in the world.  In other words, just as Jesus’ efforts to train and form his disciples would have had no ultimate significance apart from their connection to God and God’s work in the world, so too are the efforts of seminaries wasted apart from this same connection.

Having lost its proper missiological shape, theological education within Christendom made it possible to separate ones intellectual development from ones spiritual maturity. This is a dichotomy that our centers of theological education must repudiate if they hope to lend any support to the shaping of leaders for Kingdom ministry.  Moving forward will call for, at the very least, processes of theological formation that shape convictions, impart spiritual knowledge, re-frame our relationship to Scripture, and embrace the irreplaceable role of the Holy Spirit.

Shaping Kingdom Convictions

As theologian James McClendon once said, “Convictions are not so much things that we have but things that have us.”  As important as we believe Christian doctrine and truth are, if we fail to cultivate leaders who are as convicted by them (as evidenced by life transformation) as they purport to be convinced of them, we will only continue to contribute to the collapse of Western Christianity. If seminaries are to make any sort of meaningful contribution to the mission and witness of the Church in Western culture, they must show primary concern, not only for the information that their graduates possess, but for the convictions that will shape, drive and sustain them through all the trials and tribulations of not only ministry in a Post-Christian context, but amidst the sort of suffering and persecution which the Bible tells us always accompanies faithful witness.

Imparting Spiritual Knowledge

Seminaries and churches are full of people who know plenty of things about God. What our seminaries and churches seem in desperate lack of are people who truly know God in the way the Apostle Paul speaks of when he says, “I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death…” What we have to accept is that this kind of “knowing” cannot be manufactured or controlled. The impartation of spiritual knowledge is finally the work of the Holy Spirit as we live in relationship with God and participate in his mission in the world in the way of Jesus. Thus, it is incumbent upon seminaries to create environments where God can do this kind of work in shaping Kingdom leaders.

Re-framing Our Relationship to Scripture

It should go without saying that in the endeavor of theological education to contribute to the shaping of Christian leaders, there is no text more important or sacred than the Bible. Unfortunately, the experience of many a seminarian is that the Bible is reduced to little more than an object to be examined and dissected. However, when you abstract an engagement with Scripture from a predisposition towards inviting the work of the Holy Spirit, we miss God’s intention for this discipline. Therefore, in terms of truly honoring a spiritual disposition towards theological education, not only will the Bible occupy a primary place throughout the whole of our programs (as opposed to being confined to individual courses), it will increasingly need to be seen as the very story out of which seminaries derive their own identity, purpose, and function.

Embracing the Irreplaceable Role of the Holy Spirit

Our prevailing systems of theological education train and equip people to be leaders in such a way that they assume an ability to succeed based upon their own intellectual capacity and/or skill-set rather than upon their ability to discern the Holy Spirit’s leading and therefore upon the Holy Spirit’s power rather than their own. We suggest that to the degree that centers of theological education want to contribute to preparing leaders for faithful service as Kingdom citizens, they must re-imagine theological education in such a way that the work and role of the Holy Spirit in the theological formation of leaders, as well as in the world, will be given primary attention.

Concluding Thoughts

One of the great travesties of our current Christian landscape is that emerging leaders often feel like they have to make a choice between “going to seminary,” because it will provide the sort of “accreditation” that many denominations and organizations require, or “going into ministry,” in order to give themselves fully to the sort of life & labor they feel like God has called them to.  As we re-imagine theological education along the lines of God’s Kingdom and God’s mission in the world, our hope and prayer is that these emerging leaders wouldn’t feel like this is a choice they have to make. Instead, we envision truly missional systems of theological education, so radically committed to a Kingdom vision of accreditation and to commissioning Kingdom leaders on account of their character and competency rather than their GPA, that ministry becomes the context for all our education and formation as we train reflective practitioners, that the aim of our education would become the mobilization of God’s people for loving and faithful service as we train missionary leaders, and that all of this emerges out of a vibrant and growing relationship with the triune God as we train Kingdom citizens.

Related posts:

1. The Missiological Future of Theological Education – Training Reflective Practitioners
2. The Missiological Future of Theological Education – Training Missionary Leaders
3. The Missiological Future of Theological Education – Introduction

The first ones were by Mike Breen – about the relationship b/t discipleship and the missional movement.  You can check out his thoughts in Part 1 and Part 2.  My reflection on these posts came out here.

The other post was by Ed Stetzer – a return to the whole “can mega churches be missional” debate. He still says they can, I still say they can’t.  But, as I’ve reflected more on this, here are the things that have become clearer to me, what I’ll call the “mega-problems” of mega-churches.

I think it needs to be acknowledged that the problem isn’t size in and of itself. Who would possibly be against a huge church of fully devoted follower of Jesus on mission with God?! Not this guy. But here’s the thing, those of us who have icky feelings in our stomachs about mega-chuches do so because they tend to be built on characteristics and practices that actually work against this vision.  Here’s a few that came to mind…

1) Consumer-Oriented Structures

Very often mega-churches are mega because they emphasize meeting the needs, or at least captivating the interest of religious consumers of all stripes.  This will strike many of us as unfortunate right off the bat, but to take it a step further, I would highlight the even greater harm that is done when church leaders come right out and acknowledge that they do this (even if they prefer different language), but believe it to be in the service of the Gospel.  Here, we have baptized a market-driven strategy that treats people like objects and leads them to believe that they, rather that God, are what is of ultimate significance.

2) Celebrity-Driven Culture

Mega-churches tend to be personality driven.  There is generally one (almost always male) leader who leads as if they were a CEO of an organization rather than as a humble servant.  These are people who reflect our culture’s desire and drive for upward mobility while leading a community whose character is to be predicated on its downward mobility – becoming less and less so that Jesus might become more and more.  This aspect of mega-church culture is perpetuated as we get lulled into believing the cultural lie that a bigger platform is always a good thing for the kingdom.  Sadly, in baptizing this mentality, we have failed to remember that we follow Jesus, who refused exactly this temptation.

3) Sunday-Cenricity

Mega-churches tend to put the vast majority of their time, attention, and resources into weekend services.  Nothing wrong with gathering.  Nothing wrong with gathering with hundreds, even thousands of other believers.  Very much something wrong (from a missional perspective) with these gatherings becoming the driving point of our ecclesiology and the aspect of community life that eats up huge amounts of resources.  It doesn’t matter how compellingly you preach or teach on “being missional;” so long as that message is coming through the medium of a context that engenders passive involvement, it is rendered useless.

4) Inward-Focused Financial Structures

Related to the point above, mega-churches tend to create financial structures that are designed to “keep the machine running,” thereby inhibiting a community’s ability to leverage financial resources that will benefit others – who may or may not ever be part of your church community.  Mega-churches require mega-staffs, mega-facilities, and mega-ministry budgets.  Once you have these things in place and people’s livelihoods become contingent on church growth, moving in a truly “missional direction,” becomes all but impossible.  If it does come, it will be at tremendous cost.

5) Seating over Sending

All of this works itself together to result in an ecclesiology that is more disposed to a focus on seating over sending.  And when I say sending, I mean sending – raising people up as mature disciples and skilled Kingdom leaders and releasing them… really releasing them.  Most of the “sending” that mega-churches do is about continuing to build their own little empire – multiple locations, video venues, franchises, etc.

I fully recognize that you can embody all of these characteristics and not be, by definition, a mega-church.  This is precisely my point – it’s not really about size, it’s about the ecclesial characteristics and underlying theology that creates and drives this sort of church system. So when I say mega-churches can’t be missional, what I really mean is you can’t continue to be a sunday-centric, celebrity-driven church that engenders a consumeristic attitude toward Christian faith by creating inward focused financial structures and building your own personal church-brand empire.  Continuing to be this sort of church while using missional language and encouraging people to serve others more does not a missional church make!

Am I off here?  Where’s the pushback?  What else would you add to this list?

Related posts:

1. Being Truly Missional
2. Transitioning Traditional Churches into Missional Ones
3. The Missiological Future of Theological Education – Training Kingdom Citizens

I’m an Anabaptist.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not Mennonite, Hutterite, Brethren, or Amish and my name is Rozko for Pete’s sake!, but I’m an Anabaptist nonetheless.  I may have been baptized in an Episcopalian church when I was a baby, baptized again in a Church of Christ in high school when my faith became my own, ordained in the Christian Church tradition, and I may be part of a church community that is part of the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination and work for an American Baptist seminary, but I’m an Anabaptist nonetheless.

“How’s that work exactly?” you ask.  Good question.  In fact, it’s the question behind this post which is itself the result of a conversation I had with my good friend Dave Stutzman (he’s my Anabaptist passport for those of you skeptics out there

Well, here’s my brief answer.  It works because I’m one of thousands of seminary-trained people between the ages of 25 and 35 who have been orphaned by the Christendom-shaped theology and ecclesiology that raised us.  Like many, many others, left to fend for ourselves among the cultural wilderness that is Post-Christendom, Anabaptism has provided me with the theological and ecclesiological shelter and nourishment that I needed to sustain and guide me as I’ve sought to make sense of the world and my personal and ministerial place in it. 

To be a bit more specific, as Christianity has moved (been pushed?) from the center to the margins of our society, by and large, the responses of the Church have come in two types:

1) Fight – here I have in mind the typical right-wing Christian response of scraping and clawing through powerful maneuvering and campaigning to “take back America for God” in order to regain a place of power and privilege believed to be, if not rightfully ours, God’s ultimate aim for his people.

2) Ignore – here, there is either a complete lack of awareness (especially in the South) of the growing reality of Post-Christendom or an apathetic attitude toward what is simply dismissed as an inevitability.

Anabaptism, I believe, presents a third way, a posture more faithful to a biblical (at least through the lenses of Anabaptist theology & ecclesiology) vision of what it means to be the people of God living under the reign of God in the midst of a world that, while fallen, remains deeply loved and addressed by God.  It was this humble and hopeful vision that drew me in.

My initial touch points with Anabaptism came through a handful of professors at Fuller Theological Seminary such as Wilbert Shenk (anyone else think Wilbert needs to start a blog already?!), Nancey Murphy, and Glen Stassen (though there’s a palpable Anabaptist current throughout much of the school) and some time at Pasadena Mennonite Church.  These opened me up to the world of Anabaptist theology and (missional) ecclesiology, which has worked to powerfully shape both my identity and the contours of my life.

Anabaptist theology has had a profound impact on my thinking and practice with regard to, among many other things, missional church, politics, preaching, theological education, and the Gospel.  In fact, it was these touch points and their consequent exposure to the unique features of Anabaptism that inclined me to further study with Wilbert Shenk and James Krabill as part of DMiss cohort at Fuller focused on Anabaptist Perspectives in Missional Ecclesiology.

Interestingly, the one thing that my exposure to Anabaptism didn’t do, and I suppose this might be the real point of the post since it seemed to be one of the things Dave and I talked most about in our conversation, was incline me to seek out and join a (traditionally thought of) Anabaptist congregation.  I think there are 3 primary reasons for this.

1) There are only a couple “denominationally-Anabaptist” congregations near me and they are all incredibly introverted and insular – a startling reality in light of the fact that the inherently missional dimension of all Anabaptist theology was one of the things I initially found so freeing.

2) I have experienced and continue to understand Anabaptism as a theological and ecclesiological paradigm that defies denominational hegemony.  This of course relates to the first point, but personally, inasmuch as I have come to see Anabaptism as a theological (as opposed to denominational) tradition, I actually feel like I would be close to betraying my Anabaptist convictions to not seek to live them out in whatever other contexts it seems God has and is directing me.

3) Lastly, I am surrounded by people who share my story – people who, while having no official exposure to or experience with traditionally thought of Anabaptist congregations, have discovered, through any number of different means (books, blogs, classes, friends, conferences, etc.), that Anabaptism is the theological tradition that best expresses their core convictions. Thus, I am far more inclined band together with these folks to see the Anabaptist vision carried forth and lived out across an array of denominational and other contexts rather than I am to isolate myself to one of the few traditionally recognized contexts.

The point I suppose is this, there is a large and growing population of Christians who resonate with Anabaptist theology and ecclesiology.  It sure would be awesome if those who have been part of historically Anabaptist traditions were leading the way on this, but as of yet, that just doesn’t seem to be the case.  I don’t claim to have any divine insight or wisdom on this, but I think this much should be apparent: as Christendom continues to crumble, as denominational identity comes to mean less and less, and as more and more Christians/ministers have to figure out how to make sense of the world and their relationship to God and God’s work in it, there is a HUGE opportunity for those who espouse Anabaptist ideals to speak up and lead the way.  I represent a group of people who would gladly welcome the guidance!

Related posts:

1. The Future of Theological Education: A Groundswell of Conversation
2. The Missiological Future of Theological Education – Introduction
3. The Missiological Future of Theological Education – Training Kingdom Citizens

I am going to focus in on verses 34-35:

Then Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother: ‘This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.’

Though this won’t be the focus of my sermon on Sunday, in light of my recent post about Missional Communities by Mike Breen and Alex Absalom and Mike’s excellent post in response, I did want to share a related, but tangential thought.

In terms of the debate over missional and attractional, it has become popular (and rightly so) for people to jettison the unhelpful term “attractional” in favor of the more favorable “attractive.”  As is evidenced by the comments on Mike’s blog, and plenty of other places as well, there is an assumption that if Jesus were around today or if his followers simply reflected his character to people and in places, that people would be universally attracted and would flock to him/us.

It can hardly be argued from Scripture that Jesus was anything if not attractive.  People were attracted to Jesus on account of his teaching, his miracles, and his love of others.

But, as is recorded for us in the passage above, Jesus was and is the cause of “the falling of many” and “a sign that will be spoken against.”

– People were attracted by his teaching, but also offended and cast off by it.

– People were attracted to Jesus’ miracles, but also abandoned ship quickly when they realized they couldn’t command more of the same.

– People were attracted to Jesus’ love of others, but there were plenty who simply couldn’t receive it.

As we wrestle with our philosophies of ministry, there is a great danger that we would simply exchange our quest to be attractive by means of facilities, programs, and styles for a new quest to be attractive by means of models, language, and activities.

My suggestion is that we must allow “the world” to be attracted to us (personally and corporately) secondarily – a result of what should always be primary for us, living out Kingdom lives in a faithful response to God’s work in and through us.

To say it another way, if in our rejection of attractional language and methodologies we simply ask, “How can we be attractive?” as opposed to, “How can we be attractional?,” we’re still sunk.  We’ve missed the point and are continuing down a most unhelpful path.

This is what I mean by the anti-attractionality of Jesus.  People being attracted to the work of God in and through us is something that we rightly hope and pray for, but never something we should feel compelled to focus on or strategize for.  Our sole commitment needs to be to participation in God’s mission in the world in the manner of Christ.  After this, we let the (attractive) chips fall where they may, thus giving evidence that our trust if firmly and finally in God’s work and not our abilities.

Related posts:

1. Would Jesus Get Any E-Harmony Action?
2. Sweet Jesus Love
3. Jesus and (Social) Justice

Do you catch the underlying assumptions in this conversation?

– Where there is talk of missiology, it’s church growth, and not God’s Kingdom mission that takes center stage.

– Where there is talk of ecclesiology, it’s the (male) preacher/act of teaching, and not the call on a community to make disciples that takes center stage.

These are both hallmarks of a Christian system which thrives on the power and privilege afforded it by Christendom.  But I say, “woe to us” when we think that leveraging the kind of “influence” that is talked about here has anything to do with what God would have us be about.

Mega and Multi-Site (thinking here of the video venue sort) churches, “work,” on account of our infatuation with celebrity and our predisposition to the passive consumption of information.

We must, must, must ruthlessly rip out of our heads the notion that our supposed giftedness gives us license to build our own personal church-kingdoms around it/us.

Christendom is not a neutral cultural condition, it perverts and distorts and the theology which under-girds this conversation is evidence of it. With no regard for the way in which the message we mean to impart is always embodied in the medium through which it is communicated, we are destined to continually miss the whole point of Jesus’ call to make disciples whose lives are consumed by a desire to fully participate in God’s mission in the world.

And let’s lay aside the distorted paradigm in which this conversation is even taking place for a minute.  Is anyone else concerned about the stark distinction between the ways in which Driscoll and MacDonald come across and carry themselves when compared to Dever.  I don’t know a ton about Dever, but his humility in contrast to the arrogance of Driscoll and MacDonald is evidence enough that what he has to say is bound to be more meaningful.

I watch stuff like this and I wonder to myself, “What will become of us when our power and privilege is stripped away?  What happens when there aren’t enough church-goers to shuffle around and we lose the illusion of all the influence we once believe we had?”

Related posts:

1. Missiological Research: Missio Dei, Salvation & Discipleship in Post-Christendom
2. My (Ana)baptism
3. The Missiological Future of Theological Education – Introduction

You can listen to or download the interview in its entirety here.

On being a bishop. Download audio file (wrightbishop.mp3)

On the unfortunate split between church and academy. Download audio file (wrightpastorwriter.mp3)

On returning to fulltime academic work. Download audio file (wrightteacher.mp3)

On Bart Ehrman. Download audio file (wrightbartehrman.mp3)

On John Shelby Spong. Download audio file (wrightspong.mp3)

On Luke Timothy Johnson. Download audio file (wrightjohnson.mp3)

On Marcus Borg & John Dominic Crossan. Download audio file (wrightborgcrossan.mp3)

On Jurgen Moltmann. Download audio file (wrightmoltmann.mp3)

On E.P. Sanders. Download audio file (wrightsanders.mp3)

On Karl Barth. Download audio file (wrightbarth.mp3)

On Stanley Hauerwas. Download audio file (wrighthauerwas.mp3)

On his most recent book, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters and why he chose to write about eschatology before ethics. Download audio file (wrightafteryoubelieve.mp3)

On the difference between Aristotelian virtue and Christian virtue. Download audio file (wrightchristianvirtue.mp3)

On the role of character and virtue in other religions. Download audio file (wrightreligiousvirtue.mp3)

On cultural virtue. Download audio file (wrightculturalvirtue.mp3)

On the renewing of our minds when they have become largely detached from the rest of who we are. Download audio file (wrightrenewing.mp3)

On Christianity Post-Postmodernity. Download audio file (wrightchristianitypostpostmodernity.mp3)

On the after-after life. Download audio file (wrightafterlife.mp3)

What NT Wright is reading, thinking, and planning for his “big book on Paul” as the next in his Christian Origins series. Download audio file (wrightreading.mp3)

What we can expect from NT Wright in his new role. Download audio file (wrightfuture.mp3)

Related posts:

1. The Missiological Future of Theological Education – Training Kingdom Citizens
2. Tending to Eden: An Interview with Author, Scott Sabin
3. NT Wright and the Emerging Church

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?

Related posts:

1. Missional Preaching Part 2: Preaching as the Proclamation of Biblical Truth
2. Missional Preaching Part 1: Preaching as a Communal Activity
3. Preaching in the Missional Church

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.

Related posts:

1. Missional Preaching Part 1: Preaching as a Communal Activity
2. Missional Preaching Part 3: Preaching as a Call for Response
3. Preaching in the Missional Church

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?

Related posts:

1. Missional Preaching Part 2: Preaching as the Proclamation of Biblical Truth
2. Missional Preaching Part 3: Preaching as a Call for Response
3. Preaching in the Missional Church

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.

Related posts:

1. Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: Character Formation
2. The Power & Promise of Regional Gatherings for the Equipping of Missional Churches
3. Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Contextual Training

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.

Related posts:

1. Missional Preaching Part 2: Preaching as the Proclamation of Biblical Truth
2. Missional Preaching Part 1: Preaching as a Communal Activity
3. Missional Preaching Part 3: Preaching as a Call for Response

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

In my last post I tried to make a case for the necessity of theological education of missional leaders being rooted in missional community.  With this as a contextual prerequisite, I would further suggest that the ultimate aim of a missionally oriented process of leadership training is the formation of Christlike character.

It is too naive to suggest that Christendom was wholly uncritical of the character of Christian leaders.  It is more accurate to say that there’s an inherent assumption within Christendom that if we can only ensure that our leaders believe all the right things, their character will follow suit.  This has turned out to be a deeply lamentable mistake.

It may be necessary for me to reiterate at this point that I am no anti-intellectual.  You would never find me downplaying the importance of continuing study, exposure to new perspectives and ideas, or deep, thoughtful reflection.  Instead, I would suggest that a missional vision of theological education will only value intellectual dimensions of training inasmuch as they contribute to the formation of Christlike character in missional leaders.  Therefore, we might expect a missional vision of theological education to…

1) Train leaders how to think as opposed to telling them what to think.   This is only possible when we humbly buy into the reality that our systems of truth are all fallible and trust that encouraging leaders to follow Jesus is preferable to warning them of the dangers of venturing outside of a particular theological grid.  Thus, through books, articles, media, speakers, discussions, conferences, etc., we may freely (and wisely!) expose leaders to various biblical/theological traditions and perspectives.  Where the rubber meets the (missional) road, so to speak, is in the questions we encourage students to ask of what they are being exposed to.  I won’t go into them here,* but I submit that a missional vision of what it means to be the Body of Christ inclines us to ask different questions of all that we learn than that of Christendom.**

2) Conjoin all intellectual study with missional practice. Only given the assumptions of Christendom could we have divorced religious study from community based missional practice and witness.  A missional vision of the church and theological education is characteristically and relentlessly incarnational.  Missional theology is nothing if not that which we come to know about God as we participate in God’s mission in the world through the Body of Christ.  In this light, I would suggest that each and every aspect of intellectual study find its place within a structure of missional practice which includes both personal and corporate spiritual disciplines.

3) Develop a community based assessment of a leaders process of character development.  When character formation is the central issue in the equipping of missional leaders, time frames are perfunctory.  It’s not one’s ability to make it through a process that qualifies them as a leader, but the manner in which they participate and their holistic development from start to finish.  It takes a community to discern these things.  As valuable as having the commitment and support of a community is to a leader in training, their willingness to speak the truth in love regarding their development is every bit as essential.  Incorporating various means of mentorship and scheduling regular checkpoints between leaders and communities are key components of a missional vision of theological education.

What we know and what we can do as leaders isn’t just meaningless w/o Christlike character, it’s actually negative, destroying the very nature of what it means to follow Jesus and participate in God’s mission in the world.  As Jesus was only worth following inasmuch as he said and did as God said and did, so too are his disciples w/o power and authority if they are not leading out of this sort of Christlike character.

This is all relates to the subject of my next post, the shaping of convictions.  Hope to have some helpful dialogue before then though, so let’s have at it!

*You can find a very helpful article on this subject here.
**In proposing this I readily (and happily) admit that we will always be coming from a particular (hermeneutical) vantage point.  I will explore this further in a future post, but the notion of some completely objective posture in the formation of leaders is neither possible nor desirable.

Related posts:

1. Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Contextual Training
2. Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Conviction Shaping
3. Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: New Soil

I used to want to be the next Rick Warren or Bill Hybels.  What student pastor in the late 90′s didn’t?  As I look back, my misaligned, youthful arrogance was fueled in large part by the national conferences I was attending.  Predicated on the modern notion that bigger is always better, these conferences communicated and celebrated the paradoxical and lamentable reality of “Christian celebrity.”

These conferences sprang up from and in turn sought to facilitate the modern megachurch phenomenon.  And, in my opinion, did/do more harm than good.  In the Christian world, when it comes to conferences, the national variety tends to capitalize on the “cool factor,” something that seems grossly out of place to me now for those who follow a crucified Savior.

At national conferences there are typically big name speakers, higher attendance and more bells and whistles.  (Maybe even a dude jumping into a foot of water from 35 feet up?)  National conferences, at least the better ones, can have value for inspiring people I suppose, but I would venture to say that regional gatherings possess far more power and value in terms of their ability to help shape and equip the church and her leaders.  Here’s just a few reasons why I say that.

• Relationships are more easily cultivated and sustained
• With greater ease and interest, topics of conversation move from the theoretical to the practical
• Traveling costs are much lower
• Conference costs are much lower (if not free like Verge LA which my friend JR Woodward (@dreamawakener) is helping to put together
• Conversations regarding context and culture gain more immediate traction
• The loss of the “cool factor” translates into a higher caliber of fellow attenders
• Virtually everyone gets to participate in meaningful ways
• There is greater access to gifted people who would probably never get invited to present at a national gathering because they are w/o book deals and cult followings
• There is no hype to distract from the more important issues being addressed
• Young and impressionable leaders aren’t made to feel inadequate or handed delusions of grandeur

For these reasons and still others, I am hopeful that we will see more and more groups who exist to strengthen the missional church and her leaders investing in regional gatherings.  And where and when national gatherings continue, my hope is that they will focus on supporting regional networks, leaving the hype behind.

Related posts:

1. The Power, Promise, and Potential of Stories
2. Transitioning Traditional Churches into Missional Ones
3. Missional vs. Attractional Equipping

Once I started to get into Podcasts, Piper’s was one of the first ones I subscribed (iTunes link) to.  I still listen to it with some regularity and commend it to you.

When I was contemplating resigning my role as a student pastor in 2004 to pursue more theological education, I decided to take some time off to think, pray, reflect, and ask questions.  I traveled to Minneapolis, visited Bethlehem Baptist Church where John Piper preaches, and had the chance to talk with him for a while after one of the services.  An alum of Fuller Theological Seminary, I expected him to be encouraged that this was one of my options.  He wasn’t.  He said that they had gone down a dangerous to path toward Christian liberalism.

I went to Fuller anyway and discovered that John was wrong.

My idolatry of Piper broken, I began to notice some other aspects of his theology that I had a really hard time with.

I think he gets the issue of God’ sovereignty wrong – not because I believe the opposite, but because I think the whole Calvinist/Armenian debate is flawed at its core.  Both positions assume that salvation is something one can have and therefore argue about who secures our having it – God or man.  With good intention, some will attempt a middle road and say it’s a both/and issue.  It’s not.  It’s a neither/nor issue.  When you begin to understand that “salvation belongs to God” (Rev. 7:10) and is therefore something we can only participate in, never have, the whole debate changes.

I also lament Piper’s view on women. Again, he will argue the “conservative” side of the complimentarian/egalitarian debate, which I think begins with flawed premises.  Do men and women compliment each other or are they equal?  That question isn’t nearly biblical enough to be of any real value.  A more important question, at least as the Bible is concerned, is, how do men and women, who only together image God, as couples and singles, function together in doing and equipping others for ministry.  And the plain answer is that they serve as co-laborers – that each and every aspect of ministry, from preaching and teaching, to caring for children, suffers when not practiced by both capable and gifted women and men.

There was much bally-who in the blog-o-sphere last week when Piper connected a tornado in Minneapolis to a meeting the ELCA was having regarding the issue of homosexuality (here’s the original article and a follow up one).  I have listened to Piper enough that I think what he meant to say was that whenever natural disaster strikes it is an opportunity for us to remember and turn to God, but he seemed to be saying quite a bit more than that and it calls for some accounting.

Lastly, he’s got a bad take on the woman at the well (John 4).  Like perhaps the majority of preachers, he is quick to assume the moral degradation of the woman Jesus encounters, frequently noting that “she’s sleeping with her boyfriend.”  As I take into account the cultural factors at play in this passage as well as the fuller scope of Jesus’ ministry, I find this interpretation to be maddening.

Women had not rights in Jesus’ day; they had not power to divorce a husband; they were property.  Unless they were from a royal or extremely well off family, they had almost no hope of being able to provide for themselves.  As the Bible makes clear, the ability to produce children more often than not determined a woman’s worth.

While we might trip over some of the translated language, I think it’s much more faithful to the text to understand this Samaritan woman, not as a whore (essentially what Piper and others tend to d0), but as a shamed and broken victim of injustice.  When Jesus notes that this woman had had five husbands, he’s not digging her for her sin – when did Jesus ever do that except for the religious leaders?!  And when he says that the man she now has is not her husband, he’s not some *&$%^&# calling her out for “sleeping with her boyfriend”  – again, just doesn’t fit the Jesus of the gospels.  He is calling out the source of her shame and injustice so that he can heal it – something he did all the time.

I love John Piper as a brother in Christ.  His passion and zeal for the supremacy of God captivates and inspires me.  But here’s the final thing about John and this gets me more than anything else.  I have never heard him say (and he’s really public!), “I might be wrong.  There are other followers of Jesus who believe differently than me and they just might be on to something.”  Even if he has said something like this at some point – it is quite definitely not a theme in his teaching the way I wish it was.  I’m not talking about being wishy-washy.  I am taking about some good ol fashioned humility and firm trust in God’s work over his theology.

I am not writing this to disparage.  Beginning with myself, I would ask anyone who has some theological issues with another brother or sister in Christ, to think first and foremost about who they really are and what they have done for the sake of the gospel.  I am no anti-Piperian. I consider John a true partner in the gospel and would run to his defense on most occasions.  But this is just some stuff that I really struggle with enough to hope that others would as well.

Related posts:

1. John Piper
2. Trying to Live John 17:21