Missional and Emergent, Part 5

When I try to explain missional church to people, I often begin with the distinction between church as a place where things happen and church as a people sent on a mission. Often, this description evokes the response, "Oh, then we're already missional." Indeed.

Here mission is typically being understood as "outreach," or any activity or program the church does outside its own walls. And many churches do impressive things in their neighborhoods and communities. This, however, in and of itself does not indicate that they are missional.

First, a missional church understands all of its life as mission, not just those things that typically count as "outreach." That is, a church's primary horizon of interpretation is the world, not the congregation or the interior life of the individual. This horizon applies even to those things the church does "within." For example, when worship maintains this public horizon, it participates in God's mission for the sake of the world. When congregations practice simplicity in the name of Jesus, they resist the spiritual power of consumerism that dominates our culture. This is mission as well. These are aspects of its sent life that typically get privatized or individualized.

The missional impulse is a synergistic impulse. It moves toward a holism, seeing all the aspects of a congregation's life as being intimately interrelated around mission. A congregation that has banners in its auditorium that distinguish mission, worship, and fellowship as separate categories in the congregation's life, do not yet possess a missional imagination.

Second, most churches see outreach in fairly paternal terms. It is something we do to or for others. Often, we view outreach service primarily as a door to possible evangelism or church recruitment. This turns others into prospects, people who exist only at the end of our agenda for them. Even when, however, we see outreach as an end in itself, it can still be paternalistic. We represent God and they represent those in need of God. We have the goods, they have the need. We are still seeing mission as something we do for or to others. This is different than seeing mission as something we do with others.

To see mission as a partnership with others, we have to believe that God is active outside of the church. We have to believe that the Kingdom is bigger than our institutional advancement. We have to believe that there are others who serve the interests of the Kingdom without having pledged their lives to that Kingdom. We have to believe that the Spirit of God proceeds us into the world, so that it is possible that we might truly discover something about God with others. We have to believe that we need the other to know God, even others who do not honor or worship God. In this sense, mission is not taking God to others, but finding God with and among others.

Third, and related to number two, churches invest a lot of imagination in figuring out exactly how to get new people to belong to them. I am currently working with a church who think of themselves as possessing a wonderfully thick community life. And they do. No doubt about it. They can tell story after story about how amazing their congregation is. Who wouldn't want to be a part of them? They can't figure out, in light of this, why they are declining. They're scared to death that in a few years they might not exist. This is not an unreasonable fear.

Truth is, we live in a culture where "becoming one of us" is an increasingly difficult thing to do. First, the "if we build it they will come days" are long gone. With a few exceptions, using an attractional strategy for church growth simply will not work. But even more fundamentally, in a culture that is no longer steeped in the grammar of Christianity, becoming a Christian is truly a cross-cultural enterprise. In most cases, we simply aren't equipped to help people do what is necessary to cross the ever-widening cultural gulf.

But even if we could come up with better assimilation processes (and we must), we still expect the persons least likely to do so to do all the boundary crossing. The question, "how can we get them to belong to us?" needs to be traded for the mission question, "how is it in the name of Jesus that we belong to them?"

Most churches haven't a clue about their neighbors. They haven't even begun to ask the question, "how in Jesus' name do we belong to these people?" They may have all kinds of outreach programs aimed at people like so many targets. But they have little idea how God might be calling them to give up their sense of privilege, cross cultural boundaries, and find themselves in mission with new partners.

This is the beginning of missional wisdom.

The Spirit and Three Dimensions

I was with a group of ten congregations this weekend from the Pacific Northwest who are working together toward missional innovation using a three year process, Partnership for Missional Church. This work is particularly satisfying to me for several reasons. It gets the word missional out of the textbook and into the real lives of congregations. It allows me to engage the concrete challenges faced by these congregations. And it takes me back to the Pacific Northwest, the epicenter of my life's geography--spiritual and otherwise.

(I just feel better when I can smell a fir tree).

These congregations have been working together for a year now, and this parituclar gathering allowed time for each congregation to tell stories from the past year. I was listening to one congregational storyteller tell how the various groups of new leadership required to complete the process was causing the congregation to rethink its understanding of the role of women in leadership. Their new experience of women in a leadership role was the occasion for a reassesment of how they were reading particular texts to support particular habits. I'm interested here, not at what they eventually conclude about the role of women in leadership within their congregation, but how change actually occurs.

This past semester I did some reading in the literature on sensemaking, a fairly recent school of thought in the area of organizational theory. For the sensemaking folk, all human organizations are ultimately in the business of making meaning. To work or live together, we require shared accounts of what makes our association meaningful. This requires a shared narrative, or a shared set of authoritative texts, that allow us to make sense of our life together. Succesful organizations are those that continue to make sense of their life in light of new experiences, unsolved problems, or anamolies that simply refuse to go away.

Sensemakers refer to these anamolies as cues. A cue is something that calls into question our primary frame of reference, like the experience of women leading in ways not typical of a church's understanding of the public role of women in the church.

Often, the frame of reference in a church, or organization, is stronger than the cue and simply absorbs it or figures out a way to ignore it. When this happens, the organization has quite possibly fused its own understanding of the world with the world itself. There is no critical distance between perception and reality, and when this distance is closed an organization loses its capacity to learn.

The distance created by a cue allows for the possibility of newness. There is more than just the organization and its frame of reference. With a cue, there is a third dimension that creates the space necessary for transformation.

I've come to the conclusion that this kind of space is necessary for the movement of the Holy Spirit among God's people. Apart from cues, we are left only with the option of idolatry where we confuse reality with our own frame of reference. This is idolatrous even if that frame of reference comes from Scripture, Christian history, Fox news, or some other unimpeachable authority.

This does not mean that every cue, or every new experience, should be allowed to have its way with our previous frame of reference. But it does mean that apart from a third dimension, there is no opportunity to test the spirits to see if they are from God. There is simply no room for anything transcendent when the group and the frame are totally fused. There is no room for the Holy Spirit.

This means that categories of "otherness" are important for the church's spiritual vitality. The other may be a prophetic voice within the congregation, an experience of a member that doesn't coincide with the party line, a stranger who has no connection to the congregation at all, or the condition of our neighborhood or planet. This list could be multiplied. Churches led by the Spirit learn to attend to these cues, hoping to make greater sense of the Holy One in our midst. They learn the power possible with a three dimensional perspective.

Book # 3, Scripture and Discernment, Luke Timothy Johnson

I read this book under its original title, Decision Making in the Church (the current title is more descriptive of the focus of the book), at a time when I was searching for vocational clarity. Who was I in relation to the call of God in my life, and what did that calling require of me in relation to the people of God?

Three pages in that book gave me great clarity and still serve to orient my understanding of ministry. Johnson locates faith in the narrative structure of experience. We are always interpreting our life in relation to God and others. All of us, in this sense, are theologians. The church’s capacity to respond to God depends to a great extent on the recognition of every member of his or her role as a theologian.

While all have the responsibility of interpreting their life before God, some in the community of faith have the capacity to articulate more formally the theological implications being made by all in the community. These persons, Johnson describes, as practicing theologians. The practicing theologian is not simply someone doing theology in the privacy of an office and then working that theology out on the congregation. Rather, the practicing theologian is bringing to formal articulation what God is doing in the midst of the congregation.

This understanding of a practicing theologian has framed my understanding of ministry ever since. It removed from me the temptation of seeing the church as my own little theological chemistry kit, a place where I work out all my ideas, and with them all my neurotic little fantasies. It puts God’s leading back into play, and honors the experience of God among the people of God. It says, also, that theology is done within and for the sake of the congregation.
As is often the case, one good book leads to another by the same author. Scripture and Discernment led me to Faith’s Freedom. While I return to 3-5 pages over and over again in Scripture, there are whole chapters I read periodically in Faith’s Freedom. Johnson’s definitions of faith, grace, sin, and idolatry are so rich an practical.

I had heard that Johnson wrote Faith’s Freedom in a weekend in a hotel room. These people make me sick. A few years ago, I hosted Johnson at a conference and had the chance to ask him if this was true. He confirmed that it was, so I shot him in the leg. No, not really. The great thing, however, about meeting Johnson was how gracious and full of life he was. So, I decided not to hate him and continue to live out of the great pages he has given his readers.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Of all the things I never dreamed of accomplishing in my life, passing a doctoral exam on statistics ranks very high. Yet, here I am reporting that I have indeed accomplished this feat. It doesn't rank as high, however, on the list of accomplishments that I will boast about at a party. It ranks somewhere between being named Safety Patrol captain in fifth grade and making a perfect score on Minnesota driver's written test. I'm just saying...

Stats satisfies a foreign language requirement in my degree plan. Seriously. No, really.

Some of you aren't surprised by this, because you've taken stats or lived with a person who loved stats (I report this in the past tense because these people tend to have an enmeshed relationship with inanimate objects that makes them less than ideal roommates). It truly is a world of its own, with a language of its own, and a citizenship of its own.

I'm no master in the language of stats. I've learned the equivalent of knowing how to ask where the restroom is in Italian or German, the difference being that I could tell you the odds of my being able to find the restroom in comparison to the population at large. I could also factor in a variable like prostate health, or, perhaps political party affiliation (one of these being far more important than the other to me at this stage in my life). Safe to say that stats doesn't qualify as one of the romance languages.

My sense of accomplishment, meager as it is, was enhanced, however, by the latest issue of Newsweek which contained an essay proclaiming this as the age of the statistician. While our essayist acknowledged the well deserved, maligned reputation of statistics in the world at large, she trumpeted the ways that stats has cleared up much of the fog created by overstatements related to dna and illness. We will owe a great deal to statisticians in the very near future. I'm sure that she's right, and I can see how some of the powerful analytic models used by statisticians are ideal for judging these types of things.

Still, I am struck by the fact that this counts as a foreign language for me. Some of my scientist friends, who "prove things everyday," enjoy some of the lingering luxuries of modernity. As my stats teacher muttered from time to time to help us cut through some of the complexity, "this is just math." As if math were this value free zone, the last safe harbor for those hoping to see the world as it actually is.

Still, at other times our teacher responded to our vacant gazes by telling us that some of these numbers didn't correspond to anything real. The formulas were kind of an invented language that allowed communication to take place across studies that varied in units of measurement. Even the number determining statistical significance was kind of made up. It could have been just as easily been drawn at another point on our vaunted bell curve.

Like all linguistic nets, it seems that stats has a certain inner coherence that makes it work. There is no place to justify the scheme outside of the scheme itself. Stats, it seems, is hermeneutical. It makes sense if you give up your need to have it make sense anywhere else.

Until I started treating it like a foreign language, I was scandalized by some of what you're asked to do in stats. Take for instance, how you are taught to treat an outlier. There is nothing like a big, fat, juicy, outlier to mess up your model, keeping you from attaining the holy grail of statistical significance. Now in theology we might call this outlier a prophet, maybe even a messiah (a highly significant finding in and of itself), but in stats you have to somehow eliminate the outlier. And there are several strategies available and acceptable for making an outlier insignificant. Sheesh. I felt like a character on The Sopranos, rubbing out all of these outliers.

Once I remembered, however, how rule based a language has to be to function as a language, I was able to relax a bit. I put my protest t-shirt, "Save the Outliers," back into the dresser drawer. After all, there are limits to every language, and none of them attain the power of precision to describe the world exactly as it is.

All that to say, "What language shall I borrow, to thank Thee, dearest Friend."

Book #4, The Word Before the Powers

I was sitting in a meeting a few years ago at the university where I teach, discussing the use policies of a new facility the university had just aquired. One of the university administrators in the meeting kept saying, "the institution requires... ." The institution requires? Are we not the institution? What is this entity that requires things from us?

Thing is, the institution is a power. It collects certain narratives and values within a particular self-interest that expresses itself in policies and procedures so that somewhere along the line it becomes a character, an entity. It becomes a power that shapes us, rather than just the other way around.

Charles Campbell's book, The Word Before the Powers, is a book on preaching. But its not a book on preaching technique. We won't find much here in terms of deductive or inductive strategies. What we have here is a view of preaching connected to understandings of the kingdom of God.

Jesus came proclaiming. He came proclaiming the kingdom, or reign of God. He came with a word, not a sword. His word announced and demonstrated a new ordering, a new constellation of powers, a new way of being in and with power. Jesus came proclaiming, a powerful but non-violent way of being with others.

This book brought a lot of things together for me. Tumblers fell into place and some new territory was opened up. The big thing for me was Campbell's suggestion that a word before the powers allows preaching to be prophetic and pastoral simultaneously. We have a word over/against. But it is a word over and against powers for the sake of people, not over against people in a display of power. This one shift had massive implications for my preaching. We are all pressed against, and potentially dehumanized, by the same powers. From that perspective, it is hard for there to be an us and a them in proclamation. There is only an us with a liberating word about the possibility of life under new management, the kingdom of God.

Missional and Emergent, Part 4

In the last post, I noted that many of the early voices in the missional church movement came from seminary professors related to mainline denominations. The critique came at some remove from congregations. This is not because the missional church is not interested in congregations. To the contrary, congregations are precisely the focus of mission in a new ecclesial era. The problem has less to do with interest and more to do with distance and experience. The missional critique has come from the seminary in the language of the academy and has only slowly made its way into the practicalities of congregational life.

I am often asked, "what would it look like to be a missional church?" This is a hard question to answer for two primary reasons. First, there is such an emphasis on contextuality in the missional church literature that generalizations are almost immediately a way of missing the point. Each congregation will understand its life in mission differently given both the unique gifts of the congregation and the unique challenges of its context. Having said this, however, we are already making a pretty big point about what it means to be missional. The world is not just the target of the church's activities. The world is potentially a partner in discovering what God is up to in the first place.

The second difficulty has to do with the nature of adaptive change. As I mentioned in an earlier post, much of the missional literature on change and leadership has seized upon Ron Heifetz's distinction between technical and adaptive challenges. A technical challenge is one in which there is some degree of predictability. The world is stable enough to engage in basic problem solving strategies. In an adaptive challenge, however, our world is in flux and change is discontinuous. We can no longer predict what the results of our actions might be.

What we once knew as a predictable range of solutions simply no longer produce what they once did. A common story among churches these days is that they are doing what they've always known to do, and in most cases better than they've done them in the past, with diminishing results. I am working with several churches who have great preaching, excellent worship, great facilities, wonderful programs for children, and they are still in decline. They've tried everything they know, every technical solution they can muster, and nothing has helped.

In a situation like this, we simply do not know what the next thing is. It requires a new imagination. And the one thing that shuts down imagination is a predetermined list of factors that make something missional. "What will our congregation look like if we become missional?" A reasonable question. But if we could answer that, we'd have a technical challenge not an adaptive one.

But in saying this we've made a point about what it means to be missional as well. Being missional means learning to trust our future to God.

I've been fortunate to discover some pioneers in helping congregations lean into discovering a new missional imagination. My friend and professor/mentor Pat Keifert (and his organization, Church Innovations) is bringing considerable resource to bear on helping congregations reinterpret their life in light of a missional imagination. I'm learning a lot and am impressed both by how stubborn 1,600 year old habits can be and by how brave congregations get when they feel they are discerning together God's future for their life together.

Others are also making strides on this frontier (and it is a frontier). Alan Roxburgh and Craig Van Gelder are also notable in giving considerable attention to how these changes actually come about in congregations. They are immersed in experiments with several clusters of churches and leaders.

It seems to me that the next layer of publishing and reporting in the missional church movement needs to come from pastors and other leaders who are experimenting along these lines. Leaders like those in the ermerging church movement. This is the burden of the missional church movement, and must be its growing edge if it is to achieve the promise of its theology.

Book #5--The Diversity of Scripture

I'm always interested in knowing what books changed things for people. Most books we like confirm what we already think or believe. Few have the power to lead us into new territories, altar our imaginative landscape. These may not be our favorite books, or the best written books. Some we may now have move past, but at the time they framed things in ways that changed things. So, I'm going to give you five that did that for me. I'm hoping you'll add to our list of books.

5. Paul Hanson, The Diversity of Scripture. I picked this up used in a bookstore in Portland, where I lived at the time. I read it on the two flights it takes to get you from Portland to Abilene, Texas, where I was working on a Doctor of Ministry degree. There are probably better books on the subject than Hanson's. It's all about the timing with this book. I had a budding diversity view, but this book was catalytic and constructive. It gave me structure for my intuitions, an argument not just about Scripture, but God and faith.

And it produced a little bit of a crisis within me as a minister of a local congregation. My hunch was that if people knew that this is what I believed about Scripture, they would be very concerned. I felt like a dangerous person. But I also knew that I couldn't represent myself as if this stuff didn't matter.

I taught a midweek Bible study while I was with this congregation that I called Bible Lab. I used this class as a way to let participants make sense of what they were discovering in the text itself. It was a wonderful experience and I gained trust in both patience and the theological capacity of the church.