Mercy, Not Sacrifice: Brueggemann Comes to Rochester College

When I was just beginning in ministry, I received the book, The Land, by Walter Brueggemann as a Christmas present. I had a big chair in the corner of my office that was my reading spot. I got comfortable, opened the book, and didn't move until I was finished.

Now, that's quite a statement coming from a guy like me given my tendencies toward attention deficit. But I read the book through in one sitting. I was deeply moved. At various points, tears came to my eyes. I was moved by several things. I was moved by this vision of God and his relationship with Israel. I was moved by the way Brueggemann allowed the biblical text to speak directly to our world. I was moved by the prose, by his writing, by the passion that moved through the ink on the page into my heart and mind.

After reading the land, I quickly bought David's Truth, the Prophetic Imagination, and Hopeful Imagination (my favorite). I probably have over twenty Brueggemann titles on my bookshelves. No biblical scholar has impacted me more. When I was preaching in Oregon, I had a member approach me after a sermon. He asked, "Is this Brueggemann guy available so that we could just cut out the middle man?" Yeah, I'm that guy when it come to Brueggemann.

So, I'm thrilled that I received an email from Walter Brueggemann yesterday accepting an invitation to be our featured speaker at Streaming: Biblical Conversations from the Missional Frontier, June 18-20, 2012, at Rochester College. Our theme for the conference will be "I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice."

The following sentences were part of the invitation I extended. I hope they will entice you to attend as well.

This coming year’s theme will be “I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice.” We can think of no one better to address this theme than you. In your work you have emphasized the tensions between justice and purity traditions in Israel’s response to Yahweh. You not only demonstrate the priority of the justice or mercy strand, but you do so without jettisoning the purity dimension as an ordering response to “an unsettled residue of ache.”

This work has been picked up by many in fruitful ways beyond the areas of biblical interpretation. One recent work is Richard Beck’s fascinating study, Unclean. Beck is an experimental psychologist who is particularly interested in the psychological dimensions of disgust, contagion and their relation to mortality. He proposes a radical notion of hospitality as a response to our tendencies toward socio-moral disgust. Along the way, he dialogues with theologians including Volf, Heim, and yourself.

This large conversation related to justice and purity is very important to the emerging missional church conversation. This literature encourages a new engagement for congregations within Western cultures—an engagement not beholden to the powers that sponsor a life defined primarily by economic interests related to consumption. Churches that serve the broader society as “vendors of religious goods and services” do so at the cost of a reduced significance. The missional impulse, in contrast, invites the church to consider its life once again from the margins, as a people sent, or as an outpost for the reign of God. This move to the margins is impossible apart from a searching and probing conversation on the tensions between justice and purity—a conversation that has not yet appeared prominently in the missional church literature.

I'm Religious, Not Spiritual, and I Like it That Way

I know, it's usually said the other way. It's pretty fashionable these days to claim spirituality, not religion. Spiritual is deep. Religion is mechanical and superficial. Spiritual is authentic. Religion is foppery. Spiritual is of God. Religion is a human creation. I get it.

There certainly is a critique to be made concerning religion. There is such a thing as bad religion and plenty of examples to go around. I would even say that there are few things more dangerous than bad religion. The fact that most acts of terror are done under the shade of some religious tree is nearly enough for me to quit the whole thing.

But there's also such a thing as bad spirituality. And the examples are plentiful here as well. When someone tells me that they are spiritual, but not religious, I usually suspect some sort of idiosyncratic and wildly syncretistic view of what that means, and I'm often not disappointed. My experience in congregational ministry has been that the most difficult people are often the ones who present themselves just a little ahead of everyone else on the spirituality scale.

Let me be quick to say that there are good spiritualities. This is less a complaint about spirituality and more a way of commending religion. Religion can be good as well. And given its power, evident in the easy targets of our scorn, it seems to me that it is particularly important not to give up on religion.

Jesus didn't. True, he attacked bad religion. But he also encouraged the saying of a set prayer, taught his followers to fast and give alms appropriately, and to keep the law as an expression of God's good ordering of life. We could probably find this kind of understanding of religion throughout the New Testament. I will simply add that James had a definition of good religion--to care for widows and orphans in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world. Too often, I find this definition of pure and undefiled religion missing from the lives of self-styled spiritualists.

I know this is not what most people have in mind when they critique religion. When they claim being spiritual over being religious, they are often being critical of the "formal" aspects of religion--liturgies, especially set liturgies, that suffer from lack of spontaneity or feeling. So, I want to say a good word for religion here as well.

Religion says my experience of God is mediated. It doesn't begin and end with me. Religion says that my relationship with God requires others. It requires words that aren't my own, and times and spaces that I don't designate. It involves a story that didn't originate with me, that is being passed down to me.

What passes for spirituality often says just the opposite. Spirituality says my relationship with God is direct and unmediated. Its just about me and God. This is why I don't need a religious community or times of worship or sacraments.  Or if I do, they are only necessary to the extent that they support my personal relationship with God. Spirituality, in this sense, deepens the very thing we need to overcome--the conviction that the world begins and ends with me.

Now, I think I could define religion and spirituality in ways so that they are seen as complimentary and not as things that could be divided into choices. But if you had to push me into a choice, am I religious or spiritual, I think I'd go for religious.

Synchroblog--The Missional Conversation and Churches of Christ

Michael Hanegan, a student in our missional leadership program at Rochester College, has invited several of us to synchronize our blogposts this week to topics related to the missional church. And since I have a missional church lunch box, I feel it is my duty to participate. So, today, some reflections on why the missional church conversation is important to Churches of Christ.

When I was young, I used to hear preachers say things like, "the New Testament is a seed, that when cultivated in any soil produces the same plant." This was our way of saying we had restored the NT church. To do that, we had to flatten both the Bible and our understandings of culture. The cultural soil made no difference in what kind of plant was produced, either in the NT or in the contemporary world.

Beyond the massive naivete concerning the ways even this reading of the NT is culturally conditioned, this approach yields a bucketload of problems when it comes to mission. For now, let's just point out that it makes the tasks of reading and responding to cultures a fairly insignificant enterprise. And if I'm convinced of anything these days, it is that we live in a time of rapid and discontinuous cultural change. A church that marginalizes cultural engagement is setting its feet in concrete.

So, the missional church conversation is important for Churches of Christ because it takes seriously the need for a new and ongoing cultural engagement. Now, the missional church folks are not the only ones who are sounding the "cultural" bell, but I think they are doing it in ways that are not only theologically informed, but that also line up with our best lights in Churches of Christ. And here are three reasons why I think that.

First, it pursues a robust ecclesiology. In other words, the missional church conversation is serious about the church. And for better or worse, we've been very interested in the church. I found the missional church literature when the seeker movement was really booming. That "renewal" movement, like many evangelical impulses, runs thin on understandings of the church.  In most evangelical theology, all the freight runs through the encounter between God and the autonomous individual. If this is your starting place, then cultural engagement will always look like a consumer science. By emphasizing the church, the missional conversation has the potential of charting a real alternative that nevertheless takes the various cultures in which we move seriously.

Second, when the church is emphasized, so are the Lord's Supper and baptism. In a tradition that has little in the way of theological scaffolding (we have no formal creeds, confessions, etc), practices serve as placeholders for theological reflection. And baptism and the Lord's Supper keep us close to a potential theology of the cross. I'm for any renewal impulse that would strengthen these emphases.

Finally, this missional church conversation is about social location. While other conversations, e.g. the emerging church, emphasize postmodernity, the missional church conversation is focused on post-Christendom. This makes a pretty big difference, and again points us back to our best lights in Churches of Christ. What's the difference? Discussions about postmodernity focus on how we know things (epistemology), which in turn tends to move the conversation toward aesthetics, usually related to worship styles. When you start with the issue of post-Christendom, the churches social location comes into view. If we're no longer in charge, and clearly in most places we're not, then what is our appropriate social location? This question holds the possible answer that we will identify with those who are not in positions of privilege or power--that we will learn to be culturally relevant by finding the Kingdom of God with the "least of these."

I'm a big fan of that part of our tradition. Call it the old Nashville strain or whatever. But it brought together the Kingdom of God, eschatology, grace, and ministry with the poor. We are quickly losing that  part of our story. My Lutheran friend, Pat Keifert, who admires us in many ways, used to say when he would drive onto ACU's campus, "Humility didn't build this campus." He wasn't saying that we didn't have persons of humility. He was noticing that we had crossed the tracks culturally, that we were pointing to where we were headed culturally, not where we had come from. The missional church conversation has a chance to at least give pause to this enticing way of imagining ourselves.

So, the missional church conversation holds the promise of both continuity and discontinuity. By overcoming our naive understandings of gospel and cultures, it can point us to a new future. But it can do that without stripping us of important and life-giving aspects from our past.

We See in a Glass Darkly

So, what's my dissertation about? Thanks for asking. And I'll try to tell you without your eyes rolling back in your head.

First, its about theology, or how we think and talk about God. If God is living and active, engaging the world, then there should be some evidence of that. From this perspective, theology is about God, not just the history of ideas about God. And if this is the case, then theology should be done in the world and for the world, not just in a library. That's one thing my dissertation is about.

Second, its about salvation. God's engagement with the world, from a Christian perspective, is a saving engagement. Thinking of salvation this way requires a larger view than what we typically have, and in my estimation it requires a more biblical view. Salvation in the Bible is bigger than an individual's status or eternal destiny. If we expand our view, then we will look at what God is up to differently. That's another thing my dissertation is about.

Third, its about what counts as data. Talk of God's involvement in the world is tricky business and much harm is done in the endeavor. An earthquake in Haiti or a hurricane in the gulf or the prosperity of a particular person or group are too casually assigned to God's agency in the world. We have, for a long time now, been conditioned to think of the world in relation to strict causation. If "a," then "b." This is a good way to think about some things, but not everything, and especially not complex things. As Paul says, we see in a glass darkly and need to develop both a particular perception and some modesty about our claims. How we attend to the world conditions what understandings we develop. I am suggesting that Paul's phrase "being saved" represents a particular way of engaging the world that produces a unique wisdom. It represents a particular type of practical reasoning that both uncovers and enacts a particular way of being with God in the world. This is another thing my dissertation is about.

Fourth, congregations are not typically good at this. Other kinds of practical reasoning tend to dominate congregational life--like problem solving or strategic planning. And these get in the way of an imagination rooted in God's saving engagement with the world. How would congregations actually develop competence in this way of viewing the world? So, my dissertation is about the work I'm actually doing with two congregations as we kind of experiment along these lines together. This is another thing my dissertation is about.

How's that sound? Thanks for asking.

Missional Musing: We're Not Afraid of Strangers

My friend, Cheryl, in talking about the missional journey of her congregation says, "we're no longer afraid of strangers." This is the mark of a community in mission.

One of my favorite ways to distinguish missional churches from others is that they're learning to ask a different question about others. Instead of asking the question, "how can we get others to belong to us?", missional communities are forming their life around the question, "how in Jesus' name do we belong to our neighbors?"

The first question tends to sort "prospects" around their fit with the members who are already there. We tend to look for people who will be attracted to who we already are. The rub here is that if they're already like us without being a part of our church, why would they need to belong to our church? Or, it requires people not like us to do all the adjusting.

In contrast, the question of to whom do we belong puts the "other" in the place of priority. And it requires on my part the challenge of boundary crossing. And this is the Christian story, that Christ gave up the security of heaven for our sake. And if there are Christian gifts of the Spirit, boundary crossing surely must be a part of that.

Cheryl's church is now two years into a commitment to being with strangers on their terms. They have found people of peace, developed new skills, found new partnerships in the mission of God. And in the process, they are no longer afraid of their neighbors. This is the beginning of missional wisdom.

Missional Musing: Narrating the Transformation

In working with over 20 congregations over the past few years, I've been thinking a lot about why some of them experience "missional" transformation, and why others go through the process we offer and stay roughly the same. There are no doubt many factors, and none of them in and of themselves guarantee a shift in congregational imagination. Still, there are some things that seem to be predictive.

Here's one: congregations that have someone who can faithfully narrate a coherent story in the midst of the confusion of change fare better than others.

I think there are several reasons for this. Venturing a narrative with plot and characters brings a congregation closer to naming God as an actor in their midst. This is huge. The act of narrating also brings together a useable past with a promised future. If there is no narrative, then the past is simply a mistake, something to be discarded, and people need to hold on to aspects of their past to be able to imagine a habitable future. One more. A faithful narrative has to ring true. All narratives are selective, some details highlighted, others repressed. The ring of truth comes when the worst can be admitted out loud without foreclosing on the future. Hope.

This kind of work is an art. I am wondering whether it can be taught.

Missional Worship, 4

Haven't been here for awhile. Other things got in the way. But one more post in this line of thought.

A missional impulse for worship would make clearer the connections between God, church, and world. As we've seen in worship practices like the Lord's Supper, worship enacts God's care for the world through hospitality. This rehearsal, this anticipatory dinner, is also the way Christians learn their vocation in the world. The same hospitality they receive in worship, they extend to their neighbors.

So, there is not a wide gulf between what happens in worship on Sunday and the kind of life we live on Monday. To the contrary, there is a seamlessness. The way we are in worship is precisely the life to be lived among others.

This includes the way we speak in worship. We praise God not only because praise is due him, but also to learn praiseworthy speech. We bless to learn to bless. You get the idea.

Christianity is a Word religion. God creates through his word. Jesus is a Word incarnate. The Holy Spirit provides for us the words we use with others. God creates, sustains, and transforms his world through speech. What Christians bring the world is a gospel--a speech-act, that brings new worlds into view.

It is striking to me how often speech ethics are the focus of the biblical writers. The psalmist tells us that the throats of those who oppose God are "open graves," while the righteous have the fruit of praise continuously on their lips. Ethical sections in New Testament letters are peppered with admonitions about speech. We are to put away boasting, slander, gossip, unwholesome talk, etc, and instead to speak the truth to one another in love.

I am struck in 2 Corinthians how often Paul's self-identification with the death and resurrection of Jesus is coupled with a statement about his speech. Because he has experienced the power of death and resurrection, he speaks differently. "We have behaved in the world," he writes, "with frankness and godly sincerity." Or, "we are not peddler's of God's word..., but in Christ we speak as persons of sincerity." Again, "We have renounced the shameful things one hides; we refure to practice cunning or to falsify God's word; but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God." These statements could be multiplied. The point is, Paul's encounter with the God who raised Jesus from the dead has changed the way he speaks to others.

We learn this way of speaking in worship, or at least should. This is one thing I like about highly liturgical traditions. We speak to one another in worship. The words of Scripture are not simply the set-up for the sermon. They become the church's dialogue. We say them to one another and we respond in certain ways when we hear them spoken to us. We have blessings spoken over us and we respond in kind. We are learning to listen to one another, and speak in ways that offer life.

It is true that the significance of this is often lost on parishioners. I think this is due in part to the fact that we have thought of worship as space and time separated from the world. The world is not present to us in worship in any kind of constructive way. We are often told in worship to leave the world and its cares behind so that we can focus on God, as if God only shows up in the world when we gather to worship, as if God is uninvolved in the cares of this world.

Missional thinking would recover the public horizon of Christian worship, and in turn heighten our awareness of how the various things we do in worship form us for vocation in the world.

Missional Worship, 4

Beginnings and endings matter. The first movement in worship should do more than simply gather the attention of talkative members. A call to worship should invite those gathered into the unique world created by the gospel. And part of that call should be a recognition that the gospel story is public, for the benefit of all, in the presence of all, for the sake of all.

Many of our worship spaces suggest that we not only do not worship for the sake of the world, but precisely to escape the world. Many church buildings in my tradition do not have windows. This closed environment is matched by our language in worship. Often, we are asked to leave the cares of this world aside so that we can focus on God, as if God cannot be found in the world or in the midst of the cares of the world. I understand that often what is being indicated by "world," is a way of seeing that is contrary to the way God views things. But our worship should not lead us to escape from the world, but to honor God's place in it and lament those places where God's presence seems less than fully present.

Worship should be framed by this public horizon. The call to worship is essential to establishing this frame.

Endings are important as well. George Hunsberger tells of a congregation that has above its doors the word "Welcome" as you enter. Above the door as you leave are the words, "Servant's Entrance." I love that. There should be some notion of sending. The church doesn't exist for its own sake, but for the sake of the world. It's helpful to be reminded of that at the end of worship. A sending or a charge is more appropriate here than a benediction or closing prayer.

My experience with congregations in the free church tradition is that this kind of practice has to be taught. It's not part of our current muscle memory. Intention and focus are required for developing new worship muscles.

Missional Worship, 3

Smack dab in the heart of the missional impulse is hospitality. By hospitality, I mean making room for the other. This is different than welcoming visitors to church. In fact, God's hospitality is often on someone's else's terms. In the gospel story, God is simultaneously host and stranger. Disciples are sent into the world proclaiming the peace or welcome of God--that is, they proclaim God's welcome on someone else's home court.

Christian worship is rehearsal for this kind of life. This is the drama lived out each week around the table of the Lord. The table is where we learn to welcome one another, to make room for one another. It is the Lord's table, his guest list. We do not choose with whom we eat. All of us alike receive our place by God's gracious welcome. This is our vocation in the world. Making room for the other.

I've told this story before, but my friend Carrie Bonneau heard me present this material at church a few years ago and now has stenciled above her kitchen table, "This do in remembrance of me." Her table is now an extension of the welcome of God she experiences in worship.

In contrast, I once had a visitor tell me that singing was the mutual edification portion of worship from his perspective. But the Lord's Supper was his alone time with God. A time to be alone with his inner thoughts and feelings.

Two very different views of the Lord's Supper. And in many congregations, the practice of the Lord's Supper would better represent the second story, not Carrie's. We have so individualized the Lord's Supper that it is hard to understand it as a practice where we learn how to welcome one another. And because of that, we fail to realize its missional implications, or the connections between Sunday and Monday.

I'd love for people to have the words "This do in remembrance of me," stenciled inside their desk drawers at work, to remind them every time they get a staple or paper clip that their office space might very well be the occasion for God's hospitality. To remember that the person who empties their trash is welcomed as much as the person who signs their checks.

Missional Worship, 2

Missional worship would recover the public dimension of Christianity. What does that mean?

First, let's notice the very public words that the earliest Christians used to define their relationship with the larger culture. Gospel is not a religious term. They could have found plenty of religious terms with an insider orientation to name what it is they offer to the world. But they chose a public word, good news, which suggests a universalism. The same is true for ecclesia, "church." This is not a private affair, but a public gathering. It suggests perhaps that the earliest Christians saw themselves as an alternative polis creating a new public space, one open to Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. The earliest Christians imagined their life as public and open to all.

I like to associate public-ness with the image of a priesthood of believers. This means more than just that Christians serve as priests for one another. In fact, the term is consistently used in Scripture to define the relationship between the people of God and the world. What does a priesthood do? It stands between parties. The church in worship stands between God and the world. It offers on behalf of all the world what is due God. The church, in this sense, worships in proxy for all who will eventually bow and kneel. And the church, in its public witness before God, represents the conditions of creaturely existence to God. Priestly worship includes lament and complaint, supplication and confession. As a priesthood, we represent the cries of all creation to God.

But we also represent the blessings of God to the world. In worship we enact God's good intentions toward his creation. The church extends to the world the offer of participation in the life of God--forgiveness of sins, healing, sharing of goods, peaceful community, words of blessing, the Word of God.

The church's worship is public because the relationship between God and the world is the primary concern of a priesthood of believers. The world is always in view and is the primary horizon of worship for God's chosen people. Worship is not first for the benefit of the individual, but for the sake of the world. It is not simply for the sake of its members, but for the sake of the stranger.

Don't overreact here. The individual does benefit from worship. We are the world as well. It surely benefits us to hear that our sins are forgiven, etc. We enact these realities, however, in the presence of and for the sake of the world.

I'm always looking these days to see what a particular worship service is aiming for. And in most congregations I attend, it is hard to imagine an outside world, except perhaps as a menace from which we are finding temporary escape. Often there are no windows in the worship area. We sit in theater seats and drink from individual cups. The focus of the sermon is typically about our personal walk with God. Many of our services are more like a private family gathering than an ecclesia. (We have modern understandings of the family, which are far more private and intimate than biblical understandings).

A missional impulse framed by a robust notion of a priesthood of believers would, in my opinion, make a much more dramatic difference in our worship than what style of music we use.

Gospel and Cultures, 3

So, here's the proposal. Gospel has hermeneutical significance for the relationship between church and world. In other words, how does the church define its relationship with the larger world? Primarily around notions of gospel. Gospel frames a certain kind of engagement around the category of news. How does the church remain in the mode of gospel?

To answer that question, it is good to have a sense of what passes for gospel in the NT. I've blogged about this before, so won't go into great detail here, but I want to briefly notice three things. Whether in Jesus' announcement of the good news of the kingdom of God in Mark 1:15, or in Paul's summary of the gospel in 1 Cor 15, three things seem to characterize the use of this word. First, it is the announcement of an event. It is not first a theory of atonement or a set of explanatory images or metaphors. It is first the announcement of an event--something newsworthy. Second, this event has to do with the coming of God in the person of Jesus, and particularly the event of his death and resurrection. Third, this coming is a coming of the future. That is, what is being enacted is God's future. The gospel is fundamentally eschatological. The coming of Jesus marks a dramatic turn of the ages. The way of life ordered by the principalities and powers of this current age have been judged and found wanting in light of the coming future of God made manifest in Jesus. It is possible for humans to belong to, receive, and welcome this coming day of salvation.

These things all go together and are necessary for the the church to remain in the mode of news. The event, or story, nature of the gospel makes it news, as long as the event continues to unfold. If the event is a one and done, then it is yesterday's news. This is where the eschatological nature of the event becomes important. The Kingdom of God is near in Jesus, but it is still coming. The church always prays, "your kingdom come," expecting that God's future will continue to appear in the events of human history. The church is a community not looking backward to a golden past, but forward to God's coming future. It is a discerning community, constantly in search of the discovery of the inbreaking Kingdom. It always has news to report.

It is not always easy, however, to discern the work of God among other events. A good journalist knows where to look for news, and this is true of the church as well. Here, the particularity of the story of Jesus becomes important. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are not simply variables in a formula that results in forgiveness of sins. The death and resurrection of Jesus becomes a way of attending to the world, a story to enact through faith, hope, and love, whereby those things that will endure in the age to come become manifest, or observable. Paul calls this the "logic (logos) of the cross" (1 Cor 1:18) which, for those who are being saved, is the power of God. It is a mind (Phil 2), or a renewing of the mind, that allows us to prove what is the will of God, what is good, acceptable, and perfect (Rom 12).

But the story of Jesus not only tells us how to look, it tells us where. Part of the eventfulness of the coming of God in Jesus is related to social location. It is not enough to know that God became flesh, it is important also to know where he did. The Jesus story is full of mangers, backwater villages, sick and suffering people, and crosses "outside the camp." The continuing eventfulness of the gospel is likely to be seen more at the margins than at the centers of human power. It is more likely to be found in a hospital room than a board room.

We've made some pretty big shifts here for most Christians. Most define gospel as a message, not an event, the death of Jesus as a theoretical transaction with limited ongoing significance, salvation as a private possession, and the future only related to reward or punishment. Not much in the way of news.

These fairly static understandings also tend to deliver a fairly static view of the world, and therefore of mission. In the next post, a view of cultures.

Giving up Missional for Lent

I preached this sermon the opening night of the Missional Think Tank hosted my Church Innovations a few weeks ago. It's a sermon on John 12, the lectionary text for that day.

Giving up Missional for Lent
A Sermon from John 12

“Now when the great crowd who had gathered for the festival heard that Jesus was coming, they took branches from palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting

Hosanna!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord
The King of Israel

Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, as it is written:

Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion,
Look your king is coming sitting on a donkey’s colt!

His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him. So the crowd that had been with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to testify. It was also because they had heard he performed this sign that the crowd went to meet him. The Pharisees then said to one another, ‘You see, you can do nothing. The whole world has gone after him.”

Which they say to their dismay. They have, after all, been seeking to destroy Jesus. Twice John tells us that they sought to arrest him, but failed because “his hour had not yet come” (7:30; 8:20)

And now it appears, this has gone too long. The genie is out of the bottle. The road map has been unfolded. The whole world has gone after him. This is no longer a Judean thing, or even a matter for the diaspora. This thing has gotten too big. There’s no way to stop it or put a lid on it or hope it will simply lose steam. The whole world has gone after him.

And because the narrator knows that nuance is often lost on a listener, we are told in the text’s very next breath:

“Among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks.” Greeks!

And the Greeks found Phillip, who, in case we forgot his introduction in chapter one, is from Bethsaida in Galilee. Galilee! You can pick these guys out at the festival, these Greeks and Galileans. They’re the ones holding maps of the city with digital cameras hanging around their necks. The Greeks told Phillip they wanted to see Jesus. And Phillip found and told Andrew. And together Phillip and Andrew found and told Jesus.

And Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified!”

Oh, we’ve been waiting for this line for a while. Ever since the wedding feast at Cana when Jesus questioned his mother, “What business of this is ours. My hour has not yet come.” And John has reminded us at strategic points throughout this story that there is an hour coming—an hour of glory. And now its here!

In this moment. When the Greeks have come to Phillip, and Phillip has gone to Andrew, and Phillip and Andrew have gone to Jesus, this story has changed lanes, crossed a rubicon. It’s crossed the tracks and is no longer controllable by the religious authorities. The whole world has gone after him! The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I am from a liturgically challenged tradition (Churches of Christ). But I am aware that John 12 is the lectionary text for today, and that today is the fifth Sunday of Lent. And I have practiced Lent with some regularity for a while now.

This year, I considered giving up missional for Lent.

It is just too hard. I’ve determined its no way to make a career.

It’s a little like that bit that Letterman does on his show now and then: Is This Anything? Have you seen the bit? There’s some act behind the curtain, no one knows what it is. The curtain is raised and between scantily dressed women—one twirling multiple hula hoops and the other creating sparks with what looks like a portable sander—you have a juggler or a fire eater or a guy doing handstands using an exercise ball. And the question Dave and Paul answer is “Is this anything?”

That’s what being a recognized advocate for missional church feels like—some kind of novelty act connected to the question “Is this anything?” (Perhaps it would be easier if we had scantily clad girls). There’s hardly a place I go where this isn’t the question. Is missional anything?

My spell checker doesn’t think so.

I spent six years teaching in a seminary trying with mixed success to convince my colleagues.
“The word mission’s not even in the bible.”
“This isn’t real theology.”
“It’s just the latest fad, like purpose driven church.”

And now I’ve come to Luther Seminary to get a PhD in missional, because surely if you can get a PhD in missional it’s got to be something. But I fear this will be only slightly more persuasive. Am I missiologist, a theologian, a systematic theologian, a Christian leadership prof?

And it gets only a slightly better reception in congregations. My Aunt Beth asks me, “I hear the staff at church using this missional church phrase. Can you tell me what this means?” And I try. And these conversations typically go one of two ways: My explanation is met with a blank stare, or they happily respond, “oh, then we’re already missional.” Either way, it’s not anything.

I’m willing to accept that I may not be a very good spokesman for all of this. Maybe its just that I can’t make a career out of this. I suspect, however, that I’m not alone. It’s a hard way to make a career.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

The whole world has gone after him. Now that’s way to make a career. That goes in your tenure portfolio or on your list of faculty accomplishments. That’s a blurb on the back cover of your book, right between the endorsements from Oprah and Bono.

You’ve hit the tipping point. Big momentum is on your side. The crowd is behind you. Your enemies have conceded. The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.

The next line of this story holds so much promise.

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth, and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit. Those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.”

He missed the moment. He took everything he had going for him—palm branches, hosannas, public support, the resignation of his enemies—and buried it in the ground.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Look, we’ve been reading this text a long time. And I know that no matter how well I set this up this evening, you would not be surprised by what Jesus does with this moment. You expected him to say, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies… “ Most of you have preached sermons against triumphalism and know that Jesus’ hour of glory in the gospel of John involves his death. I would assume that you would hear Jesus’ saying as gospel tonight.

But this is a scandal nonetheless and we make peace with it at our peril. This is a saying about death, and not Jesus’ impending death, but an invitation to follow Jesus through death. “Where I am my servant will also be.” This is about our lives as well. And I fear that we’ve washed over these words so many times that they have become smooth stones with no more rough edges. And with that, they have lost their capacity to turn our lives in a new direction.

And so, I would invite us into their scandal again by focusing on two phrases in the text. The first is the phrase, “it remains just a single grain.”

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains a single grain.”

I have become increasingly aware in my life of the pressures toward the single grain strategy. How forces conspire to make my life a single grain, and how I associate single grain-ness with glory.

I mean by this that I think of my life as something I accomplish, sustain and maintain through my individual effort. I imagine that most of our strategies for glory are of the single grain variety—that is, an accomplishment perceived as my own doing. Something that makes me stand out from the crowd.

Some of these pressures are internal, pressures I place on myself. But some I’m squeezed into. And a lot of that for me revolves around this notion of career. Processes of tenure and promotion, the pecking order within a faculty, the specialization of knowledge, all push me toward seeing my life as a single seed.

And if I can turn the image a little here—they encourage me to see my accomplishments as fruit, not seed. As the finished product. As something to be admired and tasted by others. And I worry about the lasting benefit of my work, its capacity to remain fruit. These issues have come into focus for me because I’ve just turned 49 and I feel the pressure of making this next move count, not losing my momentum, not letting my work to this point fall to the ground and die. My life is all too explainable by the single seed strategy.

And Jesus has something bigger in mind. He knows that a single life—not even his—is adequate for the work of God related to the world. He tells his disciples a few verses later that it is better for him to leave, to no longer be present, so that the Spirit might come. Indeed, his followers will do greater things than Jesus himself becase of the multiplying impact of the Spirit. It’s better than the single grain strategy.

The second phrase hardly seems worth noting. It’s this business where Phillip goes to find Andrew. Why does Phillip go and find Andrew. Why not just take the Greeks directly to Jesus? Is Phillip not a self-starter? Is he afraid to take initiative?

This question is bigger than just a question about Phillip’s role. Look at the progression of this text. The crowd cuts palm branches and shouts hosanna and Jesus’ enemies give up, “Look the whole world has gone after him.” Why not right here? Why isn’t it in this moment that Jesus recognizes his hour of glory?

It’s in the next verse. The Greeks go to Phillip. Phillip goes to Andrew. Phillip and Andrew go to Jesus. It’s here that Jesus says, “Now has the hour arrived for the Son of Man to be glorified.” It is in relation to this connection of human lives.

I’ve looked for some deeper significance. I got my concordance out and did Phillip and Andrew searches in the Gospel of John. I read the commentaries. Is this some Andrew source that lies behind the gospel that insists he be recognized? I got nothing.

So, because I’m the preacher tonight, I’m just going to say that this is the way of the kingdom of God. There is no seeing Jesus that is not mediated by another. There is a necessary Phillip to Andrew movement that gets this is crucial to both relationship with God and mission with the world.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

So, is this think tank on missional church anything? I hope so.

I have evidence that it could be. I wouldn’t be here tonight apart from some Phillip to Andrew movement.

But I also think it might be too early to say. The jury’s still our. We’re between the hula hoop and grinder girls, and Dave and Paul are still trying to decide.

Is this anything? It won’t be if it’s just another incident of a single seed strategy. If its just another way for us to make our careers or distinguish ourselves from others. If its just something in our tenure portfolios or books we publish or articles we author.

Is this anything? It won’t be if missional becomes a private little brand, a designation only for those who get it, a word whose meaning we control, a movement that we direct.

Is this anything? It won’t be if it becomes balkanized by the survival instincts of institutions where we’re always protecting our little piece of the action. If ACU or Princeton or Fuller or Luther or the GOCN or CI or Allelon become single seeds. It won’t amount to anything.

Is this anything? It could be if we learn to see our lives as seed and not fruit.

Is this anything? It will be if we see the other as the end of my project, as an occasion for dying, as opposed to seeing the other as someone I can absorb into my little corner of the action.

Is this anything? It will be if we learn to trust the Spirit of God, and the power of the resurrection. If we can let this moment and other like them be a burial so that much fruit might be born.

Maybe giving up missional for lent is not such a bad idea after all.

Missional Think Tank, an Observation

I mentioned in my last post that I participated in think tank concerning missional church that involved a very diverse group of about 70. I learned a lot from the conversation.

The two day conversation was built around small group conversations and big group reporting. I noticed an interesting in the big group reporting. Some of us valued the messiness associated with the word missional, that it couldn't be easily defined or categorized. Others of us felt acutely the need to find more precision in the use of the term. What does the word actually mean? And to what does it point?

This tension kept rearing its head through our discussions which led me to another observation. Those who valued the messiness were by and large academics. Those who valued clearer definition were typically people working in congregations. I have a theory about that.

One of the impulses of the missional conversation as it relates to the seminary is a critique of the hard and fast silos that have defined our work for a long time now. Even though a seminary's faculty are all about the training of ministers, they have prior commitments related to their specific fields of study--New Testament, Church History, Systematic Theology, Homiletics, etc. In that context, missional functions a little like a hand grenade blowing up silos, blurring the lines between disciplines.

This is in part because those interested in the missional conversation are typically missiologists or ministry professors who have been relegated the back end of a theory-praxis divide. In other words, biblical scholars, historians and systematicians are those who say what, and ministry folk are those who say how. I will admit to this feeling a bit like the sound end of a horse as it jumps over the fence. We like a little silo busting to create a little more room at the the theory end of the table. Missional has to remain a little disorienting to sustain its viablity.

Church leaders, on the other hand, experience congregational life these days as chaotic and disorienting. They see missional as a way to organize the chaos into something a bit more orienting and purposeful. They are typically frustrated by academicians who tell them that missional is something, but to tell you exactly what it is defeats the very premise of missional--that it looks different in every context.

My mentor, Pat Keifert, following his mentor, Paul Ricouer, invites us into these kinds of tensions less as a problem to be solved and more as a polarity to be managed. Both impulses are necessary for the health of any social imagination. Both impulses have to be understood in relation to the other. And both have to be strengthened over time. This is hard work, but meaningful, and should be at the heart of any notions of missional leadership.

Missional Think Tank

I have spent the past few days with about 70 other people who are all interested in missional church. It was a diverse group. There were pastors and other church leaders, denominational execs, seminary faculty and administrators, and students. We were from all over the world: Naga, Myanmar, Korea, South Africa, Malawi, Kenya, Germany, England, Texas, and other foreign countries. We were young, young-ish (my category, of which I pressed the upper limits), and seasoned. We were Church of Christ, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Charismatic, Baptist, Mennonite, Episcopal/Anglican, and probably some unaffiliateds (perhaps like George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou). There were founders of the GOCN and persons who only recently have discovered the conversation.

The most moving moment of our time together for me was when the young cohort (leaders under 35) blessed the founders, those who have been at this for a long time. The under 35's were our most international cohort, representing at least five languages. They stood around the founders in a circle and each offered a blessing in their native language. After all the sharing and struggling that had taken place in our interactions, this was a profoundly moving act. It struck me that it only made sense liturgically. I recognized only the English words offered, but I comprehended the meaning of the others given the setting, the circle, the occasion. Their words did not need to be translated to be understood.

I was asked to preach in the opening worship Sunday evening. (I'll post the sermon here in a few days). One of the images I used was the Letterman bit, "Is This Anything?" You know the bit. The curtain comes up with the hula hoop girl and the grinder girl (how else would you describe her?) doing their thing and between them is an act. The act could be anything--fire eater, juggler, contortionist--and Dave and Paul decide whether or not this is anything. Being a representative of missional church can feel that way. Sometimes missional can feel like a novelty act, minus the hula and grinder girls, with people wondering "is this anything" as you perform.

Truth is, I still don't know for sure the answer to that question. Obviously, I think it could be or I wouldn't spend so much of my energy on it. And I do see enough and hear enough stories to be encouraged along the way. And this gathering falls into that category. Whatever the merits of various arguments or theological planks, this appears to be something, at the very least because it possesses a massive and productive ecumenical impulse. We are not trying to figure out how this brings us together, or if it could, it just does. And those who gathered had no problem calling this the work of the Spirit.

I have some hunches about this. I think most of it is because the focus of the missional conversation is about God's mission, his acting in the world. This is both more productive theologically than asking how God is related to a set of philosophical categories (though this work has an important place), and more open ended, leaving room at the table of theological discernment for people as diverse confessionally as Church of Christ, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic. And it does not privilege the tradition of Western philosophy that has governed theological discourse, leaving Asia, Africa, and Latin America always as junior partners in the discussion. It was pretty clear at this meeting that the Africans in particular had much to teach us.

So today, I think this is something.

God, World, Church, 2

All of us have an imagination related to God, church, and world. That is, we have imagined a world that accounts for the relationships between these three realities and this imagination authorizes any number of practices. Paul Ricouer (a moment of genuine respect at the mention of his name) sees the imagination as a productive human capacity that mediates the relationship between beliefs and practices. And people like Graham Ward and Charles Taylor argue that this imagination is a social thing. It is something that communities share, a repertory of sorts, that makes us competent in a common life.

The question then is what elements are being tied together in our shared imagination. And here's the thing, the most powerful things in a shared imagination are the things we can take for granted, the things we can assume. For instance, I assumed that all the cars on the road today had a basic respect for red and green lights. It allows us all to function together. We simply assume it. Can you imagine how terrifying it would be to drive to work if you couldn't assume that shared repertory? And these assumed things tend to be the last things that we question.

So, as a theologian (I'm a certain kind of theologian), I'm interested in how our beliefs and practices are tied together in congregational imagination.

One of the beliefs I'm interested in is our functional understanding of God. A congregation's shared imagination is different from what its individual members might believe. There might be a 1,000 different understandings of God in a congregation, but there is a shared life that assumes a common understanding., or at least a range of understanding. So, the real theological question is what view of God best accounts for the practices of a congregation.

Much of a congregation's imagination is not deliberately cultivated, but inherited, and from many sources. It takes something of an archaeology, what cultural anthropologists call a thick description, to uncover the various layers of a congregational imagination. That's what I'm trying to do with regard to our understandings of God, world, and church. Here's the thing: once it rises into view, it can be addressed.

All that to say...

Our practices in mission are embedded in certain understandings of God, and those understandings have to do in part with how we view the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit. And even if we have an allergy to the word Trinity in our congregations or rarely talk about it in our congregations, we have functional understandings that have been in the water of Western Christianity since Augustine.

Last time I mentioned that Western views of Trinity tended to emphasize God's oneness (the shared being between the three), while Eastern views tended to emphasize the three persons. Both emphases are susceptible to distortions. The Western view can turn into modalism where Father, Son, and Spirit are thought of as just different modes of the same single acting subject. The Eastern can so emphasize each person that you end up with three gods.

These are more than just ideas to fight about. These differences have practical implications and tend to form a different kind of imagination about things like mission. Western views of God tended to focus on the mode of sending. How do you describe the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit? Mainly in relation to the activity of sending. The Father sends the Son, the Father and Son send the Spirit.

The Eastern views of God tended to focus on the relatedness of the three persons. They are one through an interpenetrating communion, what is referred to as perichoresis. God is less a series of movements, and more a model of social life.

At the risk of a massive oversimplification (which is what I do best), we can at least begin by observing that these traditions produced very different notions of salvation and mission. The history of mission in the West often falls under the word, "expansion." It's how we think about things. The church is on the side of God in a series of sending. We're conquering, expanding the borders of the Kingdom. Eastern mission was thought of more as getting people to church, to experience the mystery of communion.

I want to come back to both views in more detail, especially as the Eastern impulse has been further developed in more recent Trinitarian thought. But for now, I want to point out that in both views the view of the world is problematic. In Western mission, the world is just a target. It's simply on the receiving end of a series of sendings. It has little impact on God's relational identity and plays no positive role in the story of redemption. The church here is both enlarged and reduced. The church is on the side of God and the things of God in the sequence of sendings. It has all the goods. But the church is also reduced to an instrument of God, a way for God to get things done.

It is interesting in light of this to think about Protestant missions in the 19th and 20th centuries (well, maybe intersting is too strong of a word). Mission was thought of almost exclusively in terms of sending to preach to individual souls. The question of establishing congregations was clearly secondary. We've experienced this with crusade evangelism (think Billy Graham or Louis Palau). It's always been a problem to think about how these individuals who have welcomed Jesus into their hearts belong to a community of God's people. And for most mission endeavors in this period, mission was not done by congregations, but by mission societies. Mission was a mode of the church's existence that could actually be done better outside of the congregation by a mission society. Mission is not the church's relational identity to God and world. (Yeah, interesting is really too ambitious for this paragraph).

In Eastern Christianity, everything that counts happens within the mystery of communion and communion happens only within the church. The world can only observe. The gulf between God and world is so wide and massive, that God can only commune with the world in Jesus, and by extension through baptism, the eucharist, and the bishop.

What both of these views of God hold in common is a certain understanding of being itself, an ontology, that has a stake in keeping God safe from the imperfections of the world. This hasn't always been the case in Christian theology, and more recent explorations of Trinity have proceeded from different understandings of God and being. But that's for another day.

God, World, Church

Theology matters. And everyone does theology. Might as well be good at it. Especially if you want to do anything connected to the word missional.

What you think about God is inescapably connected to what you think about the church and the world. This is obvious in some ways. If you think of God as a wrathful judge, than you tend to treat your neighbors one way. If you think about God as merciful and loving, you treat your neighbors another.

What is less clear is that how you think about God as Father, Son, and Spirit is connected to how you treat your neighbors. But it is connected, and because its less obvious, may be far more powerful and determinative. The things we take for granted are the things that control us the most. And because the Trinity is a complex matter, it tends to be something we assume.

Making this tougher is that Scripture nowhere uses the term Trinity and is not interested, it seems, in defining the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit. And because it seems to have little interest in defining these relationships, the various pieces don't always fit that well together.

Further complicating matters is the fact that once the church did become interested in defining these relationships, finding agreement proved to be a problem. There are two things, at least, that have to brought together in any doctrine of the Trinity--unity and personhood. The Western tradition (think Roman Catholic, Augustine, Aquinas) tends to emphasize unity, while the Eastern tradition (you can't even think about this, but if you want to try, think the Orthodox church and the Cappadocians) emphasizes the three persons. This is a complicated deal. Its enough to make you throw up your hands and give up, which is precisely what churches in my tradition did.

But here's the deal. We have been profoundly influenced by the Western tradition, like it or not, and it has influenced our understandings of mission. This is a complicated story, but let's just begin by saying that the challenge of seeing something as a unified subject is that it turns the everything else into objects. And mission practices tied to a subject-object view of the world tend to be imperialistic. One can't tell the story of Western missions apart from words like imperialism and colonialism (aka, the White man's burden).

Trinity is important in defining mission. In fact, the birth of the missional church conversation coincides with a rediscovery of sorts of Trinitarian theology. (Trinity had fallen on hard times under the rational gaze of the Enlightenment). The roots for the term missio Dei (mission of God) are often traced to Karl Barth who begins his theological writings with a return to Trinity. The conversation has moved beyond Barth, but he demonstrated again that the way forward in mission depends to a large degree on what we think about the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit.

I hope to spend some time the next few weeks inviting you into this important conversation.

Believe the Good News, 6

So, what is the good news?

In the last post we suggested that for both Paul and Jesus (in the synoptic gospels), the good news is the announcement of an event, a dramatic turning of the ages. God's future day of salvation has broken into the present, and it is possible for us to belong to that day now and participate in its reality, even if only partially.

Let me note here two things about this before I move on to another aspect of the gospel. Salvation here belongs to God. It is his realm in which we participate, not a status that we own as our private possession. This is a pretty big distinction, the implications of which would change the way we do a lot of things in Christian practice. Tied to this is the idea that salvation encompasses more than just individuals. Salvation is intended for all of creation. As Paul points out in Romans 8, "for the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious freedom of the children of God." The salvation of God is big, and includes more than just my skinny rear end getting to heaven.

But back to our question, what is the gospel? While both Mark 1:15 and 1 Cor 15 see the gospel as the announcement of an event, they use different language to talk about it. In Mark, Jesus proclaims the "gospel of God," namely the nearness of God's kingdom, or his reign. In 1 Cor 15, the event Paul proclaims as gospel is the death and resurrection of Jesus. Are these two different things?

Let's start on the gospels side of things (and here I mean the synoptics, John's gospel being yet another expression). The kingdom of God is a different way of ordering reality, and specifically it is another way of understanding power. It is a way of establishing order through self-giving, not through the politics of preservation and privilege. The way of the kingdom, the path on which it emerges, is precisely the way of the cross.

Think about this. It is possible to tell the story of Jesus without telling an infancy narrative. Neither Mark or John include one. But it is not possible to tell the story apart from the death and resurection. Several have referred to the gospels as passion stories with introductions. In the case of Mark, the narrative is brisk and spare until we get to Jerusalem for the final episodes in Jesus' life. Luke leaves no doubt that Jesus is going to Jerusalem, that this is the payoff of the story. His death and resurrection is not simply an event on his horizon, it is the event that allows to understand everything he does.

This is why followers are called to take up their crosses and follow Jesus. This way, the way of the last becoming the first, the least becoming the greatest, children being received and the rich sent away empty, is the way that the reign of God becomes visible, manifest in the world. This is not an abdication of power on the part of Jesus. It is the very demonstration of God's redeeming power. Humility is power. It makes things happen and in certain ways: the same for meekness, peacemaking, mourning, etc. The sign that this way of life will endure in the age to come is the resurrection. This is the life that God honors.

So, in the gospels, the kingdom of God and the death and resurrection are inseparably linked. But what about in Paul's account of the gospel? Is the account of Jesus' death and resurrection about a new ordering of reality?

in 1 Cor 15, Paul insists that the gospel he proclaimed is that which they "received, in which they stand, through which they are being saved." That's a lot to claim for the gospel. It is not simply a message for outsiders to "receive." It is also that which allows believers to "stand," a reality in which "they are being saved." This language of "being saved" echoes 1 Cor 1:18, "the word of the cross is foolishness to those who perishing, but to those of us who are being saved, it is the power of God."

Notice, this word (logos) of the cross is defined by Paul as the power of God. It creates a certain kind of world. It is operational. I like the language or Romans 5 where Paul compares the "dominion" of sin and death to the "dominion of grace." We tend to think of grace as simply God's willingness to overlook our shortcomings. But its much bigger than that for Paul. It is an environment, a dominion, a way of ordering the world, through which a whole new human community emerges. The logic of the cross, a script of radical trust in God, allows us to consider others ahead of ourselves, to love one another with deep affection, to contribute to the needs of the saints. These are the actions of those who trust in the power of God who raised Jesus from the dead. The fruit of the Spirit are not simply prerequisites for power: they are God's power and the produce a different kind of ordering where faith works itself out in love.

For Paul, the death and resurrection of Jesus is a continuing event. For those who participate in this event, there is a new creation, a new ordering of God's world established by self-giving love. It is a dominion, a reign, a kingdom.

One last word. It is important that we remember that this reign comes to us from the future. It is done. It is accomplished. There is nothing we can do to extend it, increase its borders, or put it at risk. As such, it is a gift. While it involves a way of life (repent and believe the good news), this is no works salvation. It belongs to God. It is his future. We cannot build it, we can only receive it. This is grace.

Notice here that we have talked about the gospel and salvation without talking about a theory of the atonement. Yet for many people, the gospel is equal to penal substitutionary atonement without remainder. I want to continue to push on this, because it's a big deal. I think without pushing on this, the attempt to become missional churches will falter. We define mission in relation to our understanding of salvation, and a theory of atonement, any theory of the atonement, simply won't get us to missional.

Believe the Good News

I teach an undergraduate course called "Teaching Good News." (I've written about this before on the blog, but I want to visit it again to preface a series of posts). I ask the students to write the same paper three times through the course of the semester, "The Meaning of Salvation." This turns out to be a challenging exercise. Many cannot form a meaningful set of paragraphs. This could be because the habits of college students do not exactly keep the brain in full firing capacity. But mostly, I think, its because for them salvation is the end result of a theory, or a formula, that is difficult for them to sketch with any confidence.

To the extent that they do have a coherent answer, they always give me penal substitutionary atonement--"He paid a debt he did not owe, I owed a debt I could not pay. . ." God's wrath demands punishment for sin. Jesus takes my place, takes my punishment, averts the wrath of God, and allows me to stand forgiven before God. It's a courtroom scene, complete with judge, verdict, sentence, and the like. With my students, this account is ubiquitous. It is the gospel without remainder.

There is a Baptist church in the area that evidently sees our Christian college campus as prime evangelistic real estate. They leave fliers from time to time all over our campus warning students and others of our impending doom. I've found them under the windshield wiper of my car, under the lid of a photocopier, even (I kid you not) strategically rolled up in the toilet paper roll in the bathroom. I guess they figure that's one place you're likely to be looking for something to read. The content is classic penal substitutionary atonement.

This makes for great classroom discussion. What assumptions are at work if this is how you do evangelism? What is the human problem if you can present this in a disembodied way--in a flier, not in a person or a community? How would you know if this worked? What would that look like? What view of God is assumed here? What is the significance of Jesus? For instance, why is his resurrection never mentioned? Why are the deeds of his life conspicuously absent?And what does this assume about the person reading this? What is our problem? What is this trying to do, to accomplish, with the person who finds it? And what do we make of this idea that forgiveness can only come through capital punishment? 

My students have no problem identifying the problems. Thing is, they can't imagine talking about salvation in any other way.

As gently as possible (and many of them don't experience this as gentle), I try to widen their horizons. They are stunned to find out that this is a fairly recent explanation of the meaning of the death of Jesus. While the historical development is long, their version is circa 19th-20th century. I point out that this is old as far as sea turtles go, but with theories of atonement this is a Johnny-come-lately.

More to the point, there is no detailed theory of atonement spelled out anywhere in Scripture. Nor did the church that decided what needed to go in the Bible feel the need to define atonement. While creeds like Nicea and Chalcedon go to great lengths to define the divinity of Jesus and the identity of God as Triune, they made no effort to explain the "how" of salvation.

This does not mean that theories have no place in understanding salvation or in helping others understand why Jesus' life, death, and resurrection bears saving significance. But these theories are always secondary. They came after something else. And no single theory can every explain the full meaning of salvation. It takes a multiplicity of pictures, sometimes in metaphor, sometime in theories, to get at all the dimensions of salvation. If we identify any of them as equivalent to the gospel, we are straightway into distortion.

It is interesting in this regard to see what passes for gospel in the New Testament. In 1 Cor 15, the gospel is the announcement that Jesus died in accordance with the Scriptures, was buried, and raised in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to witnesses. It is the announcement of an event.

Mark 1:15 also has a clear and concise statement about the gospel. Jesus comes proclaiming the gospel of God. Namely, "The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is near, repent and believe the good news." While there are differences in vocabulary between these two texts, they share one important thing in common (among others we will delineate in future posts). They both define gospel in terms of the announcement of an event.

Before the gospel is an explanation, a theory, or a metaphor, it is an event. And in light of this, my reading of NT texts indicates that the primary language of salvation is the language of participation. We are saved as we participate in this event. The implications here, I believe, are massive, and would change not only the way we do evangelism, but would also change our understandings of worship, doctrine, koinonia, ethics and morality, etc. Another way of saying this is that our practice of the Christian life is inextricably embedded in what we believe salvation to be. And by extension, our understandings of mission are tied to our notions of salvation.

I don't think that most churches who want to move beyond "a place where" church to a "people sent" church will make much headway without some shift in soteriology (the meaning of salvation). Missional travels on certain theological themes, and the missional church literature has opened up in essential ways the theme of Trinity, and to a certain extent eschatology. More focus needs to be given to soteriology. So, hang on, and let's see if we can do some thinking about this together. Are you up for it?

Missional Transformation, Part 6

Listening.

There is no more powerful action with regard to transformation. Listening.

Churches listen poorly. They talk a lot, but they seldom do a good job of listening. Most churches do not have active processes of listening. Few churches have the capacity, either with regard to skill, process or motivation, to have a congregational conversation. Communication takes place in the form of conclusions. Leaders tell others of their conclusions, and the others tell leaders what they think of their conclusions. In neither case, is there understanding. And often, there is conflict.

Missional transformation is fundamentally a listening process, or we might say a discerning process. There are two reasons for this. First, we are listening for the Spirit who leads and empowers us with regard to God's mission. We are discerning God's mission, not solving congregational problems. Second, we believe that the Spirit of God is among the people of God. The wisdom of the Spirit of God is not the province of a few leaders, but of the entire congregation. At the congregation I served in Oregon, we had an expression, leaders don't decide the will of God, they discern it. One implication of this saying is that they couldn't determine what God was up to without listening to his people.

This bears some stress. Some people when they hear me talk about communal discernment worry about group think that overrides the voice of dissent. The heroic individual is the only cure for the communal discernment blues. I would simply respond that because we are seeking the voice of God, and not the will of the majority, the voice of dissent is particularly important to processes of discernment. Apart from a productive role for dissent, there is no Christian community.

Second, I would say that because we are humans discerning the will of God in something as messy as space and time, all of our judgments are provisional. We must decide and act, otherwise we cannot prove what is the will of God, what is good, acceptable and perfect. But this deciding and acting is always subject to further review. I like Luke Johnson's line here: We need modesty before the mystery. A congregation can never see itself as having discovered the final word.

So, I want to suggest four habits of listening toward missional transformation. First, Dwelling in the Word. I learned Dwelling in the Word from the folks at Church Innovations (CI), the organization Pat Keifert leads (http://www.churchinnovations.org). Basically, this is group lectio divina, a way of reading Scripture meditatively with others. The process is simple. Select a text to dwell in together over time. We always begin with congregations dwelling in Luke 10 for a year. Someone reads the text aloud. Silence is observed. The group shares in pairs, and then with the group as a whole. The sharing to the big group, however, has one stipulation. Participants are to share, not what they said, but what their partner noticed.

Dwelling in the Word emphasizes that Scripture gets first word in discerning the voice of the Spirit. It involves every member listening--the Spirit of God is among the people of God. And it models an engagement with Scripture different than what we typically do. We tend to use Scripture as a tool, as a way to solve a problem. We want to master the text. Dwelling is a more submissive practice, inviting Scripture to master us through a prolonged sojourn.

Second, I think leaders need to be constantly about the task of appreciative inquiry. Appreciative inquiry is a particular kind of listening that builds upon the actual stories of appreciation that already exist in a congregation's life. An appreciative inquiry question, always begins with the words, "Can you tell me about a time when..." Transformation is a narrative enterprise, and people have powerful stories to tell. And, the very act of asking a good question is already an act of change.

Third, a congregation should be in the practice of interviewing members on a periodic basis. Not everyone needs to be interviewed. The interviews do not need to represent the demographics of the congregation to be informative. They should, however, involve persons with different levels of involvement with the congregation (what CI calls family, inside strangers, and outside strangers). The questions should be in a direction decided by the leadership, but the questions themselves should not be determined by the leadership of the congregation. If discovery processes are sensed in any way to be tied to a predetermined outcome, you will not get honest communication.

Fourth, congregations should have regular conversations or forums. The goal should be something between a business meeting with a lot of reporting and an open mic gripe session. Neither accomplish much listening. I know of a congregation that gave a series of Sunday evenings (one a quarter) to listening around certain issues. One night they heard stories of families with special needs children, another the stories (anonymously reported) of what it was like to suffer from depression as a Christian. Sharing took place around tables. People got to share things that otherwise would never be known. They were powerful meetings.

The more practice a congregation gets having conversations like these, the safer people feel and the more likely authentic communication can take place in times of anxiety and conflict. And anxiety and conflict are just a part of any meaningful transformation.

This is the point. Listening as a way of life takes practice, the development of habits. These habits pay off big in times of transition and create the space necessary for discerning the Spirit of God.

Missional Transformation, 5

I know the pressures of leadership in a congregation. I know how bottom line thinking can dominate a leadership's imagination. I know that in spite of our best intentions to be other than this, we tend to equate success only in terms of numbers. I know how much energy is spent trying to attract more members. I know it like a nagging cough, like a limp or a birthmark. I've even known it like a cancer, like a siren's song.

MANDATORY DISCLAIMER: It is not wrong to want your church to grow, even numerically. It is not a virtue in and of itself, or a mark of faithfulness, to get smaller.

Having said that, there is a prior question that must command the attention of a congregation than the question, "How can we attract new members?" It is the missional question, "What is God's preferred future around here?"

Now, I know there is a way of understanding God's future so that those two questions yield the same answer. This perspective views the ultimate purposes of God in relation only to the destiny of individual souls. All God cares about is the tote board of who is in or out. Individual status is the only thing that matters under the heading of salvation. The only thing that matters for the church, therefore, is claiming individuals. The logical extension of this kind of individualism is to think of the church primarily as a support group for individuals. What kinds of programs will attract as many individuals as possible?

This view of salvation, however, is not the biblical view. Salvation is not a status conferred upon individuals--not primarily. Salvation is a reign, a rule, a way of ordering reality that makes it clear that the one who is crucified is Lord of all. The resurrection of Jesus and the presence of the Holy Spirit are God's guarantees that there is a day in the future when all things will correspond to the intentions of God.

There is nothing we can do about the kingdom of God. We cannot build it or add to it or diminish it. It has been established in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It's reality is secure in the future of God. This is God's salvation in which we are called to participate. We belong to that day and serve its interests in the power of the Spirit now.

If this is the case, then mission becomes larger than just evangelism. The question is not just how many people can we get in our building on Sunday. The question becomes, how can our life together show that we belong to the great day of God's salvation?

I've been working with a little meditation to help people get a sense of this. It's not complete by any means. More pictures could be added. The main point here is that our vision for mission is necessarily eschatological, and our view of that is typically way too small.

God has established a day in the future when all of humanity will gather around one table, will constitute one family all recognizing God as Father. This is our salvation. We belong to that day.

Because of Jesus and through the power of the Spirit we experience that future today…

not fully but in ways that are undeniably connected to that future hope…

and we live together a way of life that is only explainable by our belief that that day is real…


God has established a day when we will fully enjoy his presence. Sin and death will no longer separate us from God. This is our salvation. We belong to that day.

Because of Jesus and through the power of the Spirit we experience that future today…

not fully but in ways that are undeniably connected to that future hope…

and we live together a way of life that is only explainable by our belief that that day is real…


God has established a day when all of creation will be set free from its bondage to decay, when God’s good order will once again be seen in a new creation. This is our salvation. We belong to that day.

Because of Jesus and through the power of the Spirit we experience that future today…

not fully but in ways that are undeniably connected to that future hope…

and we live together a way of life that is only explainable by our belief that that day is real…


God has established a day when nations will stream to God’s holy mountain to learn only from him. His teachings will reach to the coastlands, filling all the earth. This is our salvation. We belong to that day.

Because of Jesus and through the power of the Spirit we experience that future today…

not fully but in ways that are undeniably connected to that future hope…

and we live together a way of life that is only explainable by our belief that that day is real…


God has established a day when there will be no more war, nor weapons of war. This is our salvation. We belong to that day.

Because of Jesus and through the power of the Spirit we experience that future today…

not fully but in ways that are undeniably connected to that future hope…

and we live together a way of life that is only explainable by our belief that that day is real…


God has established a day when each will be filled and satisfied, where hunger and want will be no more. This is our salvation. We belong to that day.

Because of Jesus and through the power of the Spirit we experience that future today…

not fully but in ways that are undeniably connected to that future hope…

and we live together a way of life that is only explainable by our belief that that day is real…



God has established a day when we will have rest, when toil and struggle will no longer mark our existence and our life can be a life for others. This is our salvation. We belong to that day.

Because of Jesus and through the power of the Spirit we experience that future today…

not fully but in ways that are undeniably connected to that future hope…

and we live together a way of life that is only explainable by our belief that that day is real…