The Sky is Falling

I've been working my way through Alan Roxburgh's The Sky is Falling. Here are some salient quotes from the first half of the book.

"America's religious history has been deeply shaped by the nation's history and social formation. Beginning with the massive suburbanization of the nation in the mid twentieth century, a deep conviction has developed (particularly among white, Protestant congregations) that individualism and economic opportunity are the highest expressions of Christian life."
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Speaking of change:

"The need for control and predictability still assert themselves in powerful ways. Oddly enough, congregations and organizations that promise people a return to stability will thrive in this period, even though they can't truly provide it. Since everyone is looking for stability, when these churches say they can provide it, people flock to them like moths to a flame. Then, to make it worse, the promise seems validated because certain types of congregations do thrive (and they are generally homogeneous, middle-class, and suburban). Other leaders then see them as signs of hope and choose to copy their tactics, though doing so only pushes them even farther from embracing the transition around them and honestly addressing its demands."
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"At a recent conference focused on church growth and seeker-directed leadership, a Mennonite pastor walked into an elevator I was using. Bemused by the discrepancy between the theological and ecclesial imagination of Mennonites and the nature of the conference. I asked him, why a Mennonite was at such an event. His response was quick and direct: 'Because it works!' In the midst of massive discontinuity, disembedding, and transition, leaders desire to find something that 'works' rather than stopping long enough to understand what is actually happening...They seek external resources that promise ways of reinstating control without changing the substantive nature of the system. There is little thought put into the question of fundamentally reinventing the system itself."

The Cusp of Riches

My wife, Rochelle and I have been talking and thinking a lot about missional living and radical giving. The world is such that there are people in need no matter where you look and everywhere you turn, which means there are myriad ways to offer gifts to those in need.

Truthfully, I have always struggled with giving. Part of the reason for this has to do growing up poor and feeling as if you didn't keep as much as you could, then you would run out. Increasingly though, I'm learning that that kind of scarcity thinking is antithetical to the gospel of Christ.

I'm not the only one, though. Many of us have trouble giving, don't we?

Two weeks ago Rochelle was leading a Bible study from the book of James. The apostle James has a lot to say about taking care of the poor, orphans and the widows, showing favoritism, and pure religion. One of the women in class, who is very generous and very wealthy made a few defensive comments about the rich and giving. But, what Rochelle wanted to say was "Wait, don't get offended because you're rich. You're one of the good ones, you're one of the few people who are working to get this right."

And, in my experience with the wealthy folks at my church, that has been largely true. It's never the wealthy or the poor who have difficulty giving, and even giving to the point of sacrifice. It's most frequently those of us on the cusp of riches that are most resistant. It's those of us who aspire to more cash and comfort that always want to be stingy, who want to know where every dollar we give to someone or some organization is going, it's those of us whose chief sin is lacking trust in God to be faithful and to care for us that secretly hate to give and consider giving a kind of divine stick-up.

Many folks, I'm finding, resent giving. I can tell because they add all sorts of qualifiers to their giving. I've seen families in need have to undergo a full-on financial anal probe to get 200 bucks from the church, and I've seen people have to account for where every dollar given them by the church . Now, in our highly competitive, capitalists-driven America, we call these questions and qualifiers "accountability." But is it really?

Jesus says this curious thing in the Sermon on the Mount. He says, "Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you." He adds no qualifiers. He never says that we need to know where the gift goes or if the person is "worthy" or "needy" enough to receive it. I think the Lord is saying, "Your job is to give. Don't worry about what happens next."

Interestingly, the next topic Jesus tackles is loving our enemies. Perhaps the two are connected. Perhaps we sense that those who ask of us are somehow our enemy, as if they are taking something from us that we don't want to give away. Perhaps as we learn to give, we are also expanding our capacities for love--to the point of loving those who are stridently opposed to us.

How might this re-thinking of giving reignite the churches' vision and mission in the world? How might a church bent on giving without expectation or question help us reflect the Kingdom of God?

Reading, Reading and More Reading.

Each summer I select a slate of books to work through. In fact, I'll spend a good bit of my vacation - if and when I take some - reading. This summer I am delving more deeply in Missional Ecclesiology and Emergent literature. By "Emergent" I mean Emergent Village's recently published "An Emergent Manifesto of Hope."

I'm looking forward to all the non-definitions that are sure to be found in my fellow seeker's and friend's work. While I'm sure the book will light some of the path forward for many of us, I suppose others will be frustrated. Those who want all of life to be tidy and as unwrinkled as hospital corners, have a difficult time with those associated with Emergent Village. The reason is that we are all very different and that makes some people uneasy. Emergent Village is made up of conservative baptists and church of Christ folks from the south, Biblical liberals from the west, northeastern academics, mid-western radicals, staunch Republicans and vehement Democrats and that makes for an eclectic group that is no where near univocal.

Personally, that's why I'm engaged by it. I'm fascinated to meet and know other committed Christians who read Scripture differently than what I've been taught to read and hold to an alternative ecclesiology than I know. These people make my experience and knowledge of God richer. So I read them, praise them, disagree with them, and love them as the Father loves me - or at least I try to. And at the end of the day we're all trying to walk in the way of Jesus.

On the missional front, I've got a copy of Alan Roxburgh's new book, "The Sky is Falling" and Patrick Kiefert's, "We Are Here Now." In my book, the best emerging church practitioners are deeply and intentionally missional. The two should go hand-in-hand.

I'm also in an online group that's reading Rob Bell's "Sex God" and I've also got to finish BarackObama's "The Audacity of Hope." I had to Obama down recently as I waded my way through Jones' and Lakeland's Constructive Theology, the writings of Freidrich Schlieirmacher, Church Dogmatics by Karl Barth, Luis Pedraja's Teologia, and the sermon's of John Wesley.

So, what are you reading this summer?

Journey to the Future Church

Truth be told, over the last several years, my feelings toward the church have eroded. What once to me was a flawed but useful, necessary body, slowly became completely useless in terms of rehearsing the Kingdom of God.

The reasons for this disillusionment were myriad: First, I saw church after church make moves and decisions based on any reason you can imagine except for spiritual and theological ones. Effective, anointed, and gifted ministers were fired and/or otherwise replaced with cheap suited M.Divs with nothing to say, no vision for the future, and hungry bank accounts (this was the case with a friend of mine ministering north of Houston and another in San Antonio). Second, as is so often the case, power players with money and an affinity for the status quo, pressed their preferences into policies that ultimately made their churches less a reflection of Jesus than more of one. Third, though I had always suspected it, it was made clear to me that many of the church are more concerned with comfort and maintaining their spiritual country club than with ministering to the world and loving and accepting the irreducible other. Fourth, I continued to see churches -- particularly large ones -- mistreat their ministry staff, somehow expecting that they and their families could subsists on far less money than the average member of the community. Fifth, I witnessed some ministers and church leaders actively resist new ideas, emerging voices and fresh winds of the Spirit. Sixth, it began to dawn on me that my own spiritual growth was happening outside of the church. I don't simply mean outside of church services, but rather outside and away from the folks I worshiped with (the definition of church) on a weekly basis. Not only that, my friends at other churches were having the same experiences and thinking the same things. Something strange was happening.

It was during this time that I began to examine what was going on in the church. The period of searching led me to literature with fancy sounding words like "Missional Ecclesiology," "discontinuous change," "liminality," "post-modernity," "post-liberal," "post-Christianity," "post-colonialism," and others. It was almost enough to make me go postal. It was an education in itself just to understand the terminology. Because I was so desperately seeking, I suppose I never really gave up on the church, though. Rather, I had come to believe that many of us charged with her leadership were groping in the dark, yet because we were charged with leadership we had to act like we knew what we were doing.

It's not working though. We know it's not working. Those within and without our congregations know it's not working, yet because we have so long confused faith with certainty, church leaders frequently have to act like we are certain with this precious jewel which is the church lest we think it become faithless. Frequently my heart echoed the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.: "So often it (the church) is an archdefender of the status quo...If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned to outright disgust."

I confessed to a friend last week that I was deeply distressed about the future of the church. Ironically, I received an e-mail from my friend Mark Love at Abilene Christian University asking me to be a part of a panel at this year's Annual Lectureship about "The Future Church." Now you should know that I trust Jesus' words when he says that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church He built, but when I first received his e-mail about "The Future Church," my heart cynically asked, "Will there be one?"

I do not say these things about the church as some kind of agitator that is secretly hoping to see her fail. I'm a son of the church, a lover of who she is. I'm not one of those folks who can look around any church and undercut her good by pointing to what's wrong. Truthfully, I'm not even negative about the church. I'm optimistic about what the church can and should be and do, and therein lies my holy discontent.

I'm not too negative, I'm too positive!

I believe that faith-filled, God-centered, neighbor-loving people can actually change the world. I believe that folks like Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Billy Graham, Shane Claiborne, St. Paul and others who gave their lives for grand, beautiful pursuits in the name of Jesus are not the exceptions. They are snapshots of what God can do with any and all of us who are willing to give ourselves to Him. I believe that the folks in our pews who want to simply check in and check out of the local church to consume their religious goods and services were sold a lie by a church that promised them stability instead of adventure. And because of that, we've got a lot of work to do and undo!

It's hard for me to talk about the future church, because I don't know what it will look like, and I think that's a good thing. The church is God's, not ours, and He's under no obligation to consult us about her. But if I were to guess about the church's future, I would say that there are three primary options:

(1) More and more Christians will try the escapists' model. We will fortify ourselves in our own schools, churches and sub-culture, becoming evermore irrelevant to the world. This is one way the church can survive in the future. We will simply stand as a anachronism to the larger culture, accepting our new place in public life. Like the Amish, the evangelical church can pick a moment in time and say, "We will go no further."

(2) Churches will continue to simply try to do the same things we've always done, thinking we can be successful if we simply do what we do better. We will fail to see that some of the problem in the church is in the church. We will say the problem is that people don't want "The Truth" anymore and stand in rabid, blind opposition to the culture. The church will become judge and jury over the world, begging it to come back to the dominant days of Christendom and the culture-privileged church. Here, nearly nothing inside the church will change and our proclivities will become unquestioned and unquestionable gospel as the actual gospel goes unheard and unspoken.

Or

(3) The church, as it slowly and reluctantly has in the past, will change! It will take a rethinking of our assumptions about Scripture, people and culture. It will mean learning to re-imagine church, spiritual formation, and faith development. It will mean seeking God rather than political power, influence, image and ego. It will mean engaging the irreducible other -- the people that are not like us -- with a love and acceptance of them that seeks God's purposes in their lives more than their easy transformation into people who look, talk and act like we do. It will mean reconverting -- which will be painfully hard -- ourselves and others into people on a spiritual quest instead of folks who want a serving of Yahweh on the side. It will mean that the church as we know it must die, so that God can once again demonstrate the power of resurrection.

I, for one, think #3 is the church's best option. And I, for one, think language like "missional," "liminality" and "post-whatever" are useful for church leaders, but are not the point. The point is that the church -- the people of God -- are called to be God's Kingdom representatives on earth and what that looks like changes and adapts in time and through culture. Being Kingdom representatives is our primary vocation. Whether we are teachers, lawyers, accountants, maintenance personnel, administrators, students or whatever, we ARE called to enter into the Kingdom of God, to call others into it, and love the world as Jesus did. And each day, as more and more of us do this, the church has a future. And each day, as more and more of us do this, the future has a church.

Missional and other things...

I've been talking to a lot of people about Missional Church. The scope of the discussion is extremely broad, and the language itself gets used by so many people many so many different things that it's difficult to get your head around. Though I've been immersed in the literature for about 6 years now, I am always fascinated by the folks who are really put off by the concepts.

For those of you familiar with Missional Ecclesiology and Missional Renewal, please comment or e-mail me about what excites you about it, or what concerns / worries you about it the shift from churchianity to Christianity.

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Our family is off to Malibu this week. Rochelle and I will be teaching at the Pepperdine University Bible Lectures. I will also be doing a session for high school students called "The Pepperdine View." Our girls are going with us and my mom is flying from Georgia to join us on the journey.

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Our 3-year-old is struggling to potty train -- or rather her parents are struggling with training her. Any helpful ideas?

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Much love to you all!