The Presbyterian Polis - Connecting Churches to Churches

Emergent and Traditional

I've felt for some time that the traditional mainstream church has the potential to be the place where real transformation in Western Christianity can take place. For this to happen, all sorts of changes need to take place. One is the end of the battle royal between the left and right, between progressives and fundamentalists, and for the middle of the church to move out of a survival mindset into a open, more missional one. There are lots of people writing on this and are pushing the envelope of Protestant thought and culture in ways unforeseen just a decade ago.  I find it healthy, and leading to a stronger church in the future. However, we are going have to go through a season of turmoil as the traditional middle comes to see that it can accept new perspectives and changes in how the church functions without diminishing its historic foundations.

One of those who are writing with great intelligence is David Fitch, a pastor/ theologian from Chicago, author of The Great Giveway.  In a post today, Fitch publishes an interview with two twenty-something guys who are from the Emergent church world that is worth reflecting on.   Fitch, whose church is attempting to challenge every notion of how a church is to be led and organization makes the following comment about these guys.

... an interview with two twenty-something emerging church type guys. They were leading a house group at Jack's church. They were also teaching a class and talking about church in ways that was all new to the rest of the more traditional Baptist church. Their words really illustrate the deep cultural shift taking place among the sons and daughters of evangelicals. ... Yet it continually shocks me how many churches are unaware of the depth of this shift taking place. ...  If you are looking for some clarity on these issues, I offer this somewhat lengthy interview ...  And if you have time, can you answer this: How would your local church receive these two guys, Matt and Jose, and what they have to say?

These ideas are not necessarily new. What is new is the commitment to let these ideas transform the church as an institution. For this reason, I believe these ideas that I've heard for over thirty years, will finally take root in new forms of the church.  Here's a portion of the interview.

MATT: …In the evangelical world…we throw terms like repentance around and how we just try to sell the gospel to people… going door to door, using the four spiritual laws, which are half-truths anyway. They are ridiculous. They’ve only been around about 10 or 15 years anyway…selling the gospel becomes like selling fire insurance. You just have to believe, intellectually that Jesus is God, and that he died for your sins, and then you are saved and can just sit around for the rest of your life. And I think this is all just so ridiculous because God wants us to move, and go, and do something. It has nothing to do with simple belief. Your beliefs may start something, but actions come out of your beliefs and that’s the point. The evangelical system says, “believe the right things, adhere to the correct intellectual things and you are going to be saved.” And “saved” to evangelicals is the idea that you are going to heaven later— then life becomes a kind of a waiting room. But they don’t realize that God wants to save you from traumas of the past. God wants to save you from what’s going on inside you right now, psychologically, physically, emotionally, spiritually, it’s every part of you that God wants to renew you. And evangelicals forget about this. They make an empty system where all you have to do is have a little bit of faith—whatever that means—and then you will be saved. And it’s just like becoming a mere shell of a Christian and totally miss the point.

JACK: Do you see decisions to follow Christ as connected to the background of the seeker?

MATT: Right, it’s about the filters we all have. It’s the parents we grew up with, the culture, the time, the atmosphere, just everything about us. And these filters move into our theology too. Moderns think, “We’ve got it! ! It’s been over 2000 years and we finally have a good grasp on the Bible and what it means, and we have archeology and all this other evidence and facts and we’ve now finally got it!” Unfortunately, they don’t realize that maybe their idea of God and how to understand him and their theology, is like just one way. They don’t understand that it’s not the only way but just one way of thinking which came from somebody before, right. Their idea isn’t the best one, it was just a new one when it came out for the first time—when they had to fight against the modernist interpretation of scripture. And now, we’re doing it in the postmodern age. And people today are saying, “No, you’re just wrong, and you’re heretics” and stuff. But the modern viewpoint and how they interpret scripture isn’t the only way or the best or the most evolved. The world is changing. I mean, God doesn’t change, but He is changing us, right.

And here's there take on the intersection of their emergent/postmodern perspective with a more tradition church .

 

JACK: Do you see a need to try to bridge the gap between the young postmoderns and the older traditional members of the church?

MATT: Yes. It would be really bad if we had this group of people who were postmodern and emergent and this group modern and traditional. This would be divisive. This is why people often leave churches. Some people feel unwanted and just leave. We have to have an understanding at some point. And we don’t want another denomination. The emergent church is not a denomination. It’s a new way of understanding church within every denomination. This is huge. It is something about the faddish aspect of the emergent movement that it becomes a denomination.

This perspective is worth hearing and discussing. In response to Fitch's question, I think these two guys would definitely find a place in our church. 

Technorati Tags: David Fitch, Emergent

Blogger for Moderator? Yes, of course

Here's a sure sign the church is entering a new era. Bruce Reyes-Chow, pastor and blogger from San Francisco has been nominated by his presbytery to run for GA moderator. 

Understanding that the Moderator is “to be a sign of the bond of unity, community, and mission in the life of the church; and that that Moderator serves as an ambassador of the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace, telling the story of the church’s life and upholding the people of God through prayer”, (OGA Document H–1.4) we believe Bruce Reyes Chow is the one called to this position because: 

• The church needs an infusion of positive energy.  Bruce Reyes Chow (BRC) brings an active and engaging presence that draws individuals from all sides to the Table and that encourages the building of trust.

• The church needs empowering, Christ-centered leadership.  BRC’s pastoral style and personality draws individuals into a deeper relationship with Christ that empowers leadership of all backgrounds, racial-ethnicities, age, and theological persuasions.

• The church needs someone who understands the many facets of ministry in the PCUSA.  BRC has given 20 years to the church – 8 as an elder and 12 as a Minister of the Word and Sacrament – serving with excellence on presbytery committees, GA committees, GAC committees, ecumenical groups, planning teams, consultant panels, as a speaker, as a preacher, as a teacher and more.

• The church needs someone who is not afraid to speak the truth. BRC is authentic in his role as a Minister of the Word & Sacrament and is eager to engage in open, honest conversation about the state of the church, the cultures in which we live, and the world.

• The church needs a Moderator who can be a healthy presence to our congregations throughout the denomination.  As the organizing pastor of a congregation in the ‘.com’ world of urban, San Francisco, BRC has a much needed perspective about the past, present, and future of the church.

• For more more information about Bruce’s opinions and convictions,you can also visit his personal/pastoral blog at www.reyes-chow.com.

 

Go read his blog, sign up for his RSS feed, and engage him in conversation. Tell you friends and colleagues about him, and send a link to his blog to your commissioners. Let's see what a Moderator 2.0 looks like. 

Technorati Tags: Bruce Reyes-Chow, Moderator, Presbyterian Church (USA), General Assembly, PC(USA)

Len Sweet's 10 Paradoxes for the Future

Len Sweet offers up some thought provoking ideas in The Top Ten Paradoxes that Will Rule The Future in the latest Next-Wave Ezine.

He starts with a trip back 55 years to Crick & Watson's discovery of the Double Helix.  He sees this image as a metaphor for the paradoxical nature of everything, including Christianity.  He speaks of orthodox Christianity as filled with paradoxes.

The Double Helix as the "secret of life" applies as much to our spiritual life as to our physical life. In fact, in book after book I have argued that the essence of orthodoxy is paradoxy, and that every Christian must learn how to put on the spectacles of paradox and become a paradoxalist.

His point is more than valid, yet our dualistic cultural of harden categories of right and wrong, truth and untruth, don't fit into a paradoxical perspective. Yet, Sweet makes an excellent case for this perspective.

*The 5 biggest stories of the last fifty years are still playing themselves out: 1) the demise of Marxism-Leninism as a potent ideology outside of China; 2) the rise of the Internet as the primary delivery system for communication and information; 3) the discrediting of Freudianism as a reliable guide to human choices; 4) the slow death of postmodernism; 5) the resurgence of political Islam or what is called Ïslamism. Any one of these can reassert itself at any time.

Simplified, Sweet's dominant stories are 1) political, 2) technological, 3) psycho-spiritual, 4) philosophical, and 5) religious.  I would add two more.  The Baby Boomer social revolution beginning in the 1960's.  The rise of science (genetics, environmentalism and biotechnology) as both a social and religious phenomenon.   

*The most predictable thing about the future is that it never conforms to our expectations.

This simple truth is why looking at the future through the lens of paradox may make more sense that one might think.  Here are his ten paradoxes.

1) Do little large.

2) To move up, move down.

3) Learn to fail so you can succeed.

4) Your only control is in being out of control.

5) It's more important to know what you don't know than what you know.

6) The more you think out-of-the-box, the more you need well-built boxes to think.

7) A graying globe requires greening.

8) Only locavores can globalize.

9) When fast replaces vast, go slowly with the holy.

10) Moore's Law makes Murphy's Law all the more relevant.

Some of these are not only paradoxical, but counter-intuitive. Here are my thoughts on a few of these.

3. Failure/Success: When success comes too quickly, it is quite possibly that you don't know why you have succeeded. Success without wisdom is empty.

5. Knowing what you don't know. All I can say is read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan. If, after reading them, you don't realize the importance of what you don't know, then you also don't understand #4. on being out of control.

6.  Box. No matter how much people hate institutions, including churches, they are necessary support systems for human community.

Sweet says he is going to write more about these paradoxes over the next several months. Stay tuned looks interesting.

Hope and the Character of Persistent Resilience

Hope. It is a theme that I hear increasingly discussed. 

It was the theme - Hope has a Voice - of the Montreat College Conference last weekend. 

I was there for part of it.  I was glad I was because I got to hear students from Virginia Tech who are involved with the Presbyterian Campus Ministry and the Blacksburg Presbyterian Church speak about the tragedy of the shootings last April. 

It was a story that was told with great finesse and pathos. It was as much the story of one freshman woman - Heidi Miller - who was shot and the people who are her friends at VirginiatTech and how they handled the tragedy.  She tells of how hope mattered as she faced her assailant.

“I learned that lesson for the first time in those first few moments I switched from being student at my desk to a student lying on the floor playing dead wondering whether I would ever make it out of that room in Norris Hall alive. Because that morning, as the smell of gun residue and blood penetrated my nostrils and blood seeped through my jeans and three bullets entered into my body, hope seemed far away — because he left the room, but came back in, he would run out of bullets, but then he would reload.” 

… “Evil was standing there embodied in this person standing four feet away from me, then it came -- hope found its way into that room.”  It first appeared when she began to move her left foot. “I realized that I wasn’t paralyzed and that my nerves still reached my foot despite the three bullets that had just entered my left side.”

Here's what I thought as I listened to their presentation.

1. Hope comes in human form. The stronger our care for one another is, the greater sense of God's care for us, and from that comes hope.

As Matt (Drumheller) stood around in the nearby hospital “waiting and waiting,” there came on a gurney “my friend Heidi (Miller), laying in a dazed, post-surgery state. She smiled at me.”  It was like “…God was standing right there beside me saying, ‘She’s alive.’”  Drumheller told the crowd, “God was right there beside me, beside all of us.”

2. Hope is a product of persistent resilience. What does this mean? We never give up. We never believe that all hope is lost. We continue to work and to strive for a better future.  Even at the darkest moments we believe that God is there.  I see this in these students. I see it in other people who have persisted in the face of disease, tragedy, disappointment, and all sorts of crisis in their lives.

From Heidi Miller:

 

During and following a hospital stay, the support of family and friends continued to renew her hope, along with the hard work of physical therapy.  “ …and my faith was there to remind me that somehow this was all going to find a way to work out, and inside myself I found a way to hang onto the person I was before but also make room for this new facet of my life.” ...

 

This past fall semester was an “emotional mountain” for her to climb, she told her peers. “There were times when things got hard, really hard, but I had to keep pushing along.  …  Hope was hard to find at the times when I found myself facing rock bottom.”

3. Hope is a belief that whatever the story is today, it is not the whole story. And much of the rest of the story is determined by our own attitudes, decisions and actions.

Again from Heidi:

 

Looking back on the whole experience she reflected, “That morning of April 16^th in my French classroom in Norris Hall I saw evil in its purest form. I faced someone who had no hope at all.” She has not tried to psychoanalyze the killer.  But, “the only way I can conceptualize it in my head [how] this happened is that he had no hope, no hope at all, and that is where his hopeless path led him.”  This is as close as she has come to an answer, she says, “and I’ve come to terms with that.”

Heidi closed her remarks by quoting from her first post-incident journal entry, 12 days after the shooting: I never thought that this journal would go from being about the frivolous trivial things that occurred during my super awkward freshman year to a journal chronicling my life as I recover from the physical and emotional trauma of being shot. I am glad I had at least one year of innocence in college.  I know that somehow it will teach me and has taught me way more about life than I ever thought I would learn by the end of the year. The rest of my life won’t be conventional. That could be viewed as a bad thing, but in my mind and one thing that I am not ashamed to talk about now is how I know now more than ever that I am destined for something greater in life, something else is out there for me to accomplish and I have more motivation than ever to seek out those goals.

 

Hope is not some abstract notion but a gift we receive from God. It is a portion of grace and love given as we face the future. As these students learned, and was affirmed to me, that God is with us, even at our most darkest moments.

Jack Haberer has an excellent article in the Presbyterian Outlook on their presentation. Share with people who will be encourage to have hope when everything seems against it.

The quotes are from Jack's article.

Everything Must Change comes to Charlotte

New Ideas. Fresh Perspectives. Inspiring Conversation.
Deep Reflection on the church today and the mission of Jesus Christ in the future.

I'm looking forward to hearing Brian McLaren speak when he comes to Charlotte next month. Register for the Charlotte event here.

Watched Brian interviewed by Allan Roxburgh on these Allelon videos here, here, and here.

Questions for the turn of the era

As a new year arrives, I've been reflecting back over the past year.  What is interesting to me is the amount of change that is happening in the world of the church. It isn't  the typical type of change. People joining. Pastors leaving. New programs starting.  Rather it is change at a more fundamental level.

What I'm seeing is an increasing level of questioning about the institutional nature of the church. What I find fascinating is the change in the question itself.  It is now less a matter of whether Roman Catholic/Anglican/Methodist forms are more biblical than Presbyterian connectional or congregational independent ones. Rather it is more a question whether any institutional form can be considered biblical.

As this level of questioning has intensified, it raises for me the question as to whether we are witnessing the end of Protestantism.  I know it seems silly as we see the proliferation of Mega-churches and huge Protestant denominations.  But I think this maybe more a last ditch effort to preserve Protestantism's prominence.

If you spend any time reflecting on churches, one of things that I believe you will see is that increasingly churches are diluting their message and programs to that which is the lowest common denominator. One of the phenomenon's that I see in the midst of this is a growing resurgence of a call to committed community. It reminds me of a similar line of discussion that was present a generation ago. Today, there is a greater degree of urgency, and much less obligation to traditional institutional forms of church. In essence, a purging of institutional forms is happening, and the preeminent form of the past 500 years, the Protestant congregation and denomination, is feeling the effects of it.

As I have reflected on this perception that I have, I keep returning to a line of questioning that developed in my work with leaders and organizations, including pastors and churches. Four simple questions that look beyond institutional questions to a more fundamental understanding of the purpose of the church.  I'm  not looking for a perspective that proof-texts Scripture to argue an abstract conceptualization of the church. No, I'm thinking more of a set of questions that will reveal what I'm to do in the minute after I've answered the question.

The Four Questions that Every Leader Must Ask focus on clarity of thought that leads to action.  If a church or a denomination were to ask these questions, they would ultimately find that institutional questions are secondary to those that identify the church's impact upon people.

The questions can be framed in many ways.  We can ask the questions this way. What should be the impact of the institutional form of Protestantism? What should be the impact of a Christian community? If you look at the diagram to the right, you'll see that the impact question is focused on three separate dimensions that leaders must address. One is the dimension of ideas, another relationships or community and the last organizational structure. When you can answer what the impact of each dimension should be, then you'll begin to understand how to integrate the three so that each dimension's potential impact can be realize in coordination with the other three. 

Is this an impossible scenario?  Only if the church is unwilling to change, to adapt to a change in perspective. The value of asking these questions is not to get a correct answer, but rather to foster an environment where the Holy Spirit may speak through people to illuminate a church's potential impact.

Many churches are looking back to move forward. Many of my seminary classmates have left Protestantism to join Roman Catholic and Orthodox congregations.  Other people I know have left the institutional church all together and cling to a faith that finds no place in the contemporary church.

Myself, I love the church, but at the same I believe God drugged me kicking and screaming into it. I am both a traditionalist and entrepreneur who loves change to preserve tradition.  Make sense?

Much of the church's cultural baggage, the boredom of church services and belief systems, and the process-obsessed institutional structures lack relevance to contemporary life.  As I see how people I know deal with the institutional church, and how my client churches address questions about the future, I realize that we are at the beginning of an era of change that is unprecedented in the past 500 years.

I won't say that we are witnessing a new Reformation.  I really don't think that what is coming has any continuity with the past, except the past that is the eternal story of God's engagement with his creation.

Here's one example of what I'm seeing.  I'm in the midst of reading The Starfish Manifesto by Wolfgang Simson (HT-Bill Kinnon).   It is a free ebook written from a Pentecostal perspective.  Simson expresses many of the ideas about mission that I find in many, many places, including many Presbyterian churches.  I don't agree with everything he writes. We come from different traditions that are vastly different.  However, what seems to be an important thread in his work, as for so many people writing about the church today, is the separation of the individual believer in Jesus Christ from the institutional form of the Body of Christ. 

Here are two ways that I understand this change.

First, that the Christian church in the future will not be sustained simply by institutional forms, whether buildings, confessions, rules of order, seminaries or theological systems.  What will sustain the future of the church is the spiritual character of individual believers.  This is the hunger that is at heart of all change in the church today.  It is a hunger for an authentic life of faith.  Not just words or ideas, but faith that lives in our words and deeds.  It is not a joining impetus but a contribution passion.

Second, that the Christian church will be sustained by our common life, by our relationships of service and friendship. For example, at my old traditional downtown tall-steeple Presbyterian church, a men's ministry has begun.  The overarching desire of the men who have joined is for fellowship where trust and transparency live.  It is not an institutional program, but a coming together of men who desire authenticity in their relationships with other men. This is a window on the future of the church.

So, what do we do with the institution of the church? 

First ask the question, what should be its impact?  More than anything, the institution should exist to nurture individual calling and the fellowship that is needed to sustain it. No more, no less.

Second, we should ask who should the institution impact?  This isn't a question a planning committee answers, but rather asks of the congregation in a many that allows for reflection and vision creation.

Third, we should ask what opportunities for impact do we currently have with our present institutional structure. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. Institutions are human creations, and adapt to human initiative. If the impact that the church should have cannot be met with the current institutional structure, then change it.  Of course, this requires leadership.

Lastly, we should ask the hard question of the problems that our current institutional forms have created for us. When we understand what are the impediments to impact, then we understand where we start to change.  It may not be easy, may not be able to be accomplished overnight, may alienate and confuse people, but in the long run, the impact that the church have will be realized.

As the new year turns, we are presented with an opportunity to talk with people about these sorts of issues. Asking the Four Questions That Every Leader Must Ask is a good place to start.

If you do try, let me know how it goes.  If need to know more, just ask.  Asking question is where all the right kind of change starts. 

May God grant you and me the opportunity to have a greater impact than we did this past year.