TheBolgBlog

Breaking the Missional Code Part II

Yesterday I posted the first part of a review on Ed Stetzer and David Putman's Breaking the Missional Code. I will briefly wrap up that review today. In yesterday's post, I celebrated the large amount of missiology that found its way into a book on church renewal and church planting. I had a couple of critiques yesterday as well -- the conflation of church marketing with cultural exegesis, and two, the whole church/unchurched typology.

Technorati Tags: book review, Ed Stetzer, missional church, David Putman

Breaking the Missional Code by Ed Stetzer and David Putman

Ed Stetzer and David Putman’s Breaking the Missional Code gives church leaders the tools needed to become a missional presence in their community. In down-to-earth style, the authors take complex missiological concepts and translate them into achievable church practices. The book covers a lot of ground, addressing how to overcome the barriers to mission within existing models of church. I consider Stetzer and Putman’s work to be a valuable conversation partner in all things missional. I couldn’t be more pleased that so much contextualization material made it into a North American church- planting book.

Technorati Tags: book review, church growth, David Putman, Ed Stetzer, missional church

What is the Difference between Missional and Emerging Churches?

Allelon just posted a video where Alan Roxburgh interviews me. In this clip, Alan asks me about the missional church, the emerging church, and about the differences between the two. I describe how I teach missional church material, and I also tell a bit of my story as well -- how I became involved in the missional conversation.

Technorati Tags: Allelon, alternative worship, Emerging_Church, missional church, video

What does a Missional Evangelical Seminary look like?

Last November I was asked the question, what would it take to move an evangelical seminary in the direction of missional church thinking and practice? Writing with my friend Mark Lau Branson, we offered some first thoughts towards an answer. This paper was one of five distributed at the Allelon Missional Schools Project in Dallas, serving the discussions as a conversation starter.

Technorati Tags: Allelon, Mark Lau Branson, missional church, seminary

Missional Seminary Project

In February, I participated in the launch of the Allelon Missional Seminary Project, a three-day conversation on transitioning seminaries to a missional paradigm. Twenty-four seminaries participated by sending a team of five people respectively. During the three days, Alan Roxburgh, Pat Keifert, and Craig Van Gelder (among others) invited us to re-imagine our seminaries for life after Christendom. Time was spent in large group lectures, small focus groups, and in-house seminary discussions.

It was quite an ambitious agenda, given the differing starting points of the seminaries. Some seminaries were over two hundred years old, a few were less than five years old. Some were very well versed in the missional conversation over the last ten years, and some didn't understand the missional conversation at all. There were a fairly diverse set of schools included in the conversation including liberal, evangelical, conservative, Catholic, and Anabaptist traditions.

Five writers were tapped to present discussion papers to get the conversation going. Each of the writers were to write from their particular tradition: one Nazarene, one Evangelical, one Mainline, and one Mennonite. I co-wrote the evangelical paper, and I will share that on the blog tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: Allelon, Leadership, missional church

Ghandi and Mission

I just read Jonny Baker's post last week on Ghandi's mission advice to Christians. Wow. Live more like Jesus, do not tone down your faith, make love central, look for the good in other faiths so that you might be more sympathetic. What a challenge! We could plan a whole curriculum around that advice!

Jonny goes on to write about E. Stanley Jones and his advice to the Indians - Make Christ your own -- read the gospels afresh -- do not take on our Western forms. We expect you to add to our understanding of Christ by what you put together to follow him. This moves away from a modern perspective of mission, one that states that a particular cultural expression of Christianity is most valid for the rest of the world (usually developed in 16th century Northern Europe) and moves to a missional (and non-modern) model: each distinct people, when following Christ within their cultural forms and developed theologies, adds to the collective understanding of God and brings about the celebratory worship that culminates in Rev. 5:9.

In an interesting aside, Jonny closes with conversations between a Hindu and a Christian about trading holy books -- Christians read the Bible, where the NT teaches peace, yet they advocate war, and HIndus read the Bhagavad Gita, a book that gives reasons for war, and yet they are generally peaceful.

A really challenging set of writings -- thanks Jonny!!

In one of my classes at Fuller, we talk about a good deal about post-colonialism and mission.

Technorati Tags: culture, Hindu, mission

Continuing Jesus' Mission into the World (Part Two)

Piggy-backing on my last post on Continuing Jesus' Mission into the World, I wanted to further describe the final project I gave to my students this quarter. Again, I wanted to be as concrete as possible, both in the description of the project and in their rootedness in the practices of Jesus. So, after studying the kingdom of God in the life of Jesus, we named those specific practices that Jesus performed as he was non-conformed within the culture.

Here is the list of Jesus' practices we worked from in class:

-- acts of liberation, healing activities, working for justice (econ, racial, gender), solidarity with those care for the poor, inclusion of the marginalized, redrawing social boundaries

-- communicating the good news of the kingdom, mediators of grace, forgiveness, mercy, telling stories of another reality

-- acts of hospitality, generosity, joy

-- love of enemies, no enemy but Satan, peacemaking

-- egalitarian community, egalitarian, non-coercive leadership, voice for all

-- announcing/denouncing, engaging, seeking

Soooo, given these activities of Jesus, what does it mean to continue Jesus' work in the world? Here is the students assignment:

1) Describe a context (be it a church system, a neighborhood, a refugee camp, Starbucks) in terms of kingdom language (above). Give examples, what is like the kingdom, and what is not…Describe where you see the kingdom and where you see the opposite -- is there freedom or oppression, a voice for the marginalized, or is the system itself marginalizing? Look for the kingdom but note where you see the opposite.

2) Describe what kingdom mission might look like in your context. Dream what the kingdom would look like in this context. What  does liberation look like here -- where everyone gets a place at the table? Remember there is no sacred/secular split, so the church system is just as much a candidate for redemption as the Fortune 500 corporation.

3) What does the community of believers need to do to foster kingdom expressions in the context? Given the context, given some of your dreams, what must be fostered to move in that direction? Remember, the means to the given end must be consistent with the kingdom -- no coercive leadership, everyone given a voice, dialogue, etc.

I see this as one possible step forward in moving a given social system, be it a relationship, a network, an organization, a neighborhood towards the reign of God. This week I'll be reading 74 students' efforts in moving in that direction. What I have read so far has excited me and keeps me going as a teacher
...

Here is another post on the topic...

Technorati Tags: Fuller Theological Seminary, Jesus, kingdom of God, mission

Continuing Jesus' Mission into the World

"It is the decision to carry on the mission of Jesus’ kingdom that remains the basis of the church" says John Fuellenbach in Church: Community for the Kingdom. In my Church and Mission class this last quarter, we discussed this idea -- continuing the work of Jesus as the primary task of 'church'. We talked about Jesus' central message, the proclamation of the kingdom of God. We talked about how the church finds its true identity when it continues this proclamation, both in their corporate life and in the story they tell about God. We talked about how the kingdom is not an abstract concept -- Jesus' proclamation created a space that included the outcasts and the sinners and invited them into community. It gave voice to the voiceless, the enemy a seat at the table.

I asked my very big class (74 students!), what would it look like if our sole mission strategy was to  continue Jesus' ministry? And what if it had to stay pretty concrete, staying pretty close to the actual things Jesus did in community with his disciples? What if that was the stuff we had to get right, the central stuff, and that the other stuff, while important, was peripheral? In our jobs at Starbucks, or in our neighborhood groups, or in our church systems, what if hospitality, including the marginalized, overflowing generosity, giving voice to those without, were the essentials? Could these sorts of communal practices point to God and change the world?

In our class, we replaced the church rubric (how many are in or out?) with kingdom rubrics -- how are our practices, anywhere, like the kingdom (or not)? Are our activities that we participate in moving in that direction? How might we foster, through our conversations, positive moves towards the kingdom at Starbucks, in our neighborhoods, and in our church systems? It was an engaging conversation that lasted all quarter -- both in small groups and in our large discussions. They are questions I hope they will continue to ask the rest of their lives. 

Here is Part II

Here is another post on this topic...

Technorati Tags: Fuller Theological Seminary, Jesus, kingdom of God, mission

McGavran and Global Information Culture

The 'back story' for my Fall quarter was a wrestling match with Donald McGavran.  As founder of my school, and as an inheritor of his church growth classes at Fuller (after C.Peter Wagner, Eddie Gibbs did their respective runs), I had to make up my mind about him. I read most all of his many books and I read what his adversaries said about him. I read him in his context (primarily in the 1950s and 1960s). I presented on him to my church growth class in October, to a conference on church growth in November, and I had many conversations with senior faculty over the last few months. All three of these venues were helpful to get a better handle on things. I also brought his material into conversation with some of my dissertation work on practices, Jesus, the kingdom, modernity, postmodernity, and global information culture. What served to bring all these perspectives together was a 5000 word article I wrote on McGavran for Missiology this coming spring. That paper gave me fits -- how to synthesize all these streams together to say what I thought about McGavran -- what ought to be brought into the new millenium and what ought to be left behind.

That 'little' paper took me over a month to write! I just couldn't bring it all together. However, in the end, I felt this assignment was more a gift than a burden -- it provided me the opportunity to weave together many threads that have been dangling there for at least ten years. I feel I found a way forward with McGavran -- a way to look at this man in light of our changed context. Here is the abstract for the upcoming article in Missiology:

LOOKING BACK TO MCGAVRAN AND FINDING A WAY FORWARD
This article explores Donald McGavran’s writings for resources that enable mission engagement today in the culture of late modernity. There is, indeed, much of value in McGavran’s 1955 classic, “The Bridges of God,” among other writings. With these resources in hand, the author situates McGavran within the socio-cultural changes of the twentieth century. Adding deterritorialization to people movement theory enables the formulation of a theory that maintains the dynamics of mission within spaces where people are no longer associated with particular places or cultures. If mission stations represent mission engagement in modernity, and people movements in postmodernity, the author proposes practice movements as a viable way forward for mission in global information culture.

Technorati Tags: Donald McGavran, Global Culture

The Church in Consumer Culture

Pete Ward, author of Liquid Church and senior lecturer at Kings College, London, spoke at Fuller last night on "All Consuming Liquid Culture, Liquid Church". In his talk, he addressed critics who said he was too positive on culture in his book "Liquid Church". Vincent Miller's book, Consuming Religion, served as his conversation partner.

Pete Ward asks if the dislocation of 'stuff' and symbols from the church is necessarily a bad thing? More importantly, we need to look at where these items are re-located in culture. For example, a CD of church music, recorded by a secular musician, and played by someone in their car, re-locates the sacred in new spaces. As another example, we know about Taize because of its products --
we might decry commercialization, but hasn't the re-location of their
music been beneficial? He asks if God can be in that? If the text mediated Christ at church, does it still mediate Christ in the culture? He wanted us to consider that possibility. He describes this movement as the stretching of "ecclesial being".

He talked about 'stuff' - that stuff means things, maybe more than we know. They often reveal or 'represent' the spiritual state of things. These 'representations' circulate, and we share a language talking about them (discourses). Because we buy certain stuff and not others, we become something, i.e. we form identities around the materials of our lives. Both those who oppose culture and those who embrace it form their identities in this way.

Ward discussed God's presence and how it is mediated in our culture. Episodically, God is 'represented' in our communications, in our discourses, provided this mediation gives rise to contemplation. These mediations stretch ecclesial being and relocate our sense of belonging and identity. In the Liquid Church, we might see Christ mediated through networks, brands, and products.

For Ward, the church is faced with two choices -- Pandora's Box or St. Peter's. We can try to keep all the spiritual things hidden and safe (Pandora), or we can re-think what we formerly thought was unclean and open up our faith to those outside our traditional boundaries (St. Peter's option). Pete votes with his namesake...

WARNING: This is my take on what Pete said, and I am not sure I was always tracking with him. Pete, if you read this, please forgive me for where I completely mis-represented what you were saying!! 

Pete is one of the best thinkers on church and culture, and I always love hearing from him. He asks the hard questions and refuses the pat answers. He pushes me to think through the most pressing missiological issues regarding the intersections of church and culture. I found myself in another world after his talk, trying to process all that I heard...

Technorati Tags: consumerism , mission