imagining how the church can reorient around mission

“Church planting is not an end in itself, but one aspect of the mission of God which churches are privileged to participate”

Stuart Murray

Church planting is a dynamic and purposeful endeavor that involves establishing new Christian communities within specific cultural and social contexts. There are three ideas that will prove to be very important as guiding principles for success. read more

I do many things as a Pastor. In my mind, on most days, it is the best job in the world.

What other job has a healthy rhythm yet allows for tremendous flexibility within that rhythm. My normal week has some fixed stuff, like the obvious, constructing a liturgy for worship, including preparing a sermon. read more

This is part 2 of Immanuel’s Theological Vision. You can find part 1 by clicking here.

We live in such a fragmented society. At this point, almost every element of society is responding as a victim. Everyone is slighted to one degree or another. Everyone is polarized. As a matter fact, in my 59 years, I have never seen a more volatile moment in our culture’s history. Here are a couple of examples.

The first one is a bit silly. A year ago I was watching football on TV and in the LSU game, the former Hall of Fame basketball player Karl Malone was in the stands. Apparently, his son plays for LSU. The picture they kept looping back to confirmed Malone was using a flip phone in the stands. Pretty innocuous, right? Not so in today’s age. As a result of him using a flip phone, the Internet went wild, accusing him of being an archaic buffoon. There was tweet after tweet and Facebook post after Facebook post talking about how ridiculous it was for him to use a flip phone. It got so intense that it could be called “crowd pounding.” Fortunately for Karl Malone, he probably could care less.

Another example is from my own life. It occurred during Pope Francis’ visits to the US. While I have no intention of converting to Catholicism, it is no secret that I have a serious man crush on Pope Francis. I think he is remarkable and have not been shy about sharing my admiration for him through my social media outlets. The sad part is, there’s a certain fundamentalist element of my history that is quite offended by me liking the pope,errrrr, “antichrist” I have had numerous people write me questioning my integrity as a Christian leader in showing my approval of Pope Francis’s trip. One even said, quoting from the Apostle Paul in the book of Acts that there will be many wolves coming among you, inferring that Pope Francis was one of the wolves that we should be aware of. Sheesh!

There are many other volatile issues where folks are separated such as racial tension, political angst and national cynicism.

Paul talks about this type of brokenness and estrangement in Ephesians 2. He talks about people being broken, separated, and estranged without God in the world. But he also goes on to say that Jesus himself is our peace and he has broken down every wall that separates us. In fact he goes on to say that God has created a new humanity. Everything that separates us from other humans; Jesus has provided a way for us to experience peace. God’s shalom. Paul even says that Christ does more than provide peace, he himself is our peace. This new humanity, Paul goes on to describe in the next chapter as the church.

So what does it look like? What does this new humanity look like?

Paul describes it for us.

“So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, 27 for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:26-28

Paul says no more Jew or Gentile, which refers to ethnic separation. He says there is no more slave or free. In other words, no more economic elitism. He also says no more male or female, eradicating gender inequality. But Christ remedies each and all of those points of separation.

OK, this passage is the catalyst for my dream. It is that we would become a community of difference, a diverse community…wealthy and poor, men and women, married and single, from various racial backgrounds representing Christ in the world. See, the gospel doesn’t call us to give up our differences, but to subordinate them for the sake of the Kingdom of God.

Why? Because the church is to be as Lesslie Newbigin has said, a sign, foretaste, and instrument of the kingdom. John Durham uses a different word picture. He calls the people of God “…a display people.” Our community is to act and look like what the consummated kingdom is in reality. It is to show the world what the new creation is to look like. In a word we are to be new creation people.

German theologian, Gearhart Lofink wrote,

“It can only be that God begins in a small way, at one single place in the world. There must be a place, visible, tangible, where the salvation of the world can begin: that is, where the world becomes what it is supposed to be according to God’s plan. Beginning at that place, the new thing can spread abroad, but not through persuasion, not through indoctrination, not through violence. Everyone must have the opportunity to come and see. All must have the chance to behold and test this new thing. Then, if they want to, they can allow themselves to be drawn into the history of salvation that God is creating.”

I was speaking to someone this recently about our church community. They asked how it was going. My response was, “Well, we are not there yet, but Immanuel is emerging into God’s dream.” I can sense it; if you were a part, I think you could as well.

Peace,

r

“Being missional means moving intentionally beyond our church preferences, making missional decisions rather than preferential decisions.” ― Ed Stetzer, Comeback Churches

I got the privilege of meeting with a young church planter from a mainline denomination yesterday. She is charming and passionate, though somewhat doe-eyed, seemingly not completely sure what she was getting in to (though, she is quickly arriving there).

I met her last week while teaching a track on the Missional Church at the Whitworth Institute of Ministry. While during the introductions, I came to find out about her dream and calling to church planting (got me excited) and how she was an embedded planter in a mainline church here in Spokane (got me even more excited, because I believe an embedded approach is the healthiest model to embark on the challenging journey of planting).

Anyway, that all led to us connecting yesterday. After some small talk, I began to ask into the “why?” and the “how?” of this new project. While I was thrilled to hear the church plant was being initiated, I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my gut that those who were helping her hadn’t fully calculated the cost, nor were they clear on how to pull it off.

Part of the dilemma is that the local church she is embedded in and will supposedly send her out is in somewhat of self-protected posture. In other words, they like they idea of birthing a new church, but they don’t want it to cost them anything. There is already an apparent pulling back of support because they fear they will lose members.

Ok, listen carefully to this next part: You cannot do any form of mission, particularly church planting, without risk. Because the denomination she is a part of is dying, and the church that wants to send her is an aging congregation and apparently not robust, there is a contraction of resources…which is the very worst thing a denomination or a local church can afford to do.

If you want your church to flourish, you must have the courage to release resources – both money and people. It is not the churches job to try to keep people. If a church goes into protective mode, the very people the church wants to participate will not stay. The people who correctly see “life as mission” will go somewhere, where the church is not trying just to stay alive, but to a place where the church will give itself away for the sake of the Kingdom.

What happens is, to keep from dying, all resources flow toward vital systems, which seem logical and even natural. Yet, in the Kingdom, there is a counter logic. We hear Jesus say all of these crazy, counter-intuitive things like, “If you want to live, you have to die. If you wanna be great, you have to submit and become a servant.”

If a church, or a denomination for that matter, cannot transition its identity from a “container” for Christian people (Christendom orientation) to a missionary community, it will eventually come to an end. I know, those are hard words…sorry. Why? It will come to an end because the church is living counter to what God intended it to be…a community on mission.

r

Do you wear skinny jeans or pleated pants?

Kind of a funny question, but those are the metaphors theologian Scot McKnight uses to describe two prevailing and popular views of the Kingdom of God in his book, Kingdom Conspiracy. The first view, skinny jeans, predictably represents a more current approach that frontloads public sector social justice activism, while often times bypassing the church. He writes, “Kingdom means good deeds done by good people (Christian or not) in the public sector for the common good.” (p.4) The second picture is, again predictably, a perspective that is more represented in “traditional” Christianity. He describes this group’s view by saying, “…the Kingdom is both present and future, and the kingdom is both a rule and reign.” (p. 9) read more

I promise that I'll stop dropping these Nouwen excerpts in here, but I have been so moved by this string of his thoughts about the church that I have not been able to stop myself. I have posted two other: Here and Here.  I hope you are both as encouraged and challenged as I have been.

"When we claim our own poverty and connect our poverty with the poverty of our brothers and sisters, we become the Church of the poor, which is the Church of Jesus.  Solidarity is essential for the Church of the poor .  Both pain and joy must be shared.  As one body we will experience deeply one another's agonies as well as one another's ecstasies.  As Paul says:  "If one part is hurt, all the parts share its pain.  And if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy" (1 Corinthians 12:26). read more

Today's post is by Julie Jones.  Julie is a collegue of mine at Christian Associates. Her and her husband, Darrin have ministered in France and Morroco and are amazing people.  

Brennan Manning in his book, Lion and Lamb takes a look at two views of life and theology. As I read this chapter I was struck with the powerful reminder that the way we see life and interpret theology greatly influences how we plant churches, what kinds of churches we plant and ultimately what kinds of lives we lead. read more

I was reading last night while lying in bed from the book entitled, Jesus, Paul and the People of God (I know,
nothing like a little light bedside reading). It's a dialogical or responsive book that has to do with the theology of NT Wright. One of the chapters is called “The Shape of Things to Come? Wright Amidst Emerging Ecclesiologies.” In the chapter, contributor and theologian, Jeremy Begbie discusses the interesting notion of how NT Wright has been generally embraced by so many corners of the church, in particular the emerging church. Begbie writes, “Significantly, Wright’s heavy institutional involvement is largely ignored by the young ecclesiologist drawing on his work. Along the same lines, Newbigin’s claim that the local congregation is ‘the hermeneutic of the Gospel’ can be quoted enthusiastically in emergent writings, but his decades of work for visible church unity (sometimes in the most barren institutional settings) receive rather less attention.”

It is as if many people love NT Wright when he is talking about issues that they want sorted out, but look the other way when he talks about the church or his ecclesiology.  It should be noted that Wright thoroughly, albeit with caution, endorses an organized, even centered version, of the church.  read more

Too frequently the church morphs into the dominant culture in its values, while adhering to a sub-cultural external expression (a Christian ghetto mentality and appearance). The very opposite must happen. Howard Snyder addresses this nuance when describing the differences between being counter-culture and sub-culture stating,

“A sub-culture is in fundamental agreement with the dominant culture on major issues and values, but has distinct secondary values and characteristics. By contrast, a counter-culture is in tension with the dominant culture at the level of fundamental values, even though it may share many secondary characteristics with that culture. The church functions as a sub-culture, not as a counter-culture, when it fails to oppose the dominant culture at those points where the culture pays allegiance to alien gods rather than to the Kingdom of God.” (Howard Snyder – Liberating the Church) read more

"We need to stop giving people excuses not to believe in God. You've probably heard the expression 'I believe in God, just not organized religion'. I don't think people would say that if the church truly lived like we are called to live." — Francis Chan, Crazy Love