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Chuck Colson

This podcast from the Fermi Project, is worth listening to.  It is an interview with Chuck Colson about the state of the church in America.  For those prone to bashing conservative evangelicals, I think his message needs to be taken seriously.  While I don't agree with everything he says, his ideas have a strongly missional element to them and a prophetic message for the church with respect to culture.

Here's one rough quote to tempt you to tune in:

We have succeeded in making Christianity tepid…a poor substitute for the real stuff. The excitement will come back when the vibrancy and vitality of the gospel returns…not through happy clappy music, but through announcing the reign of God, reaching out to the poor and suffering.

http://www.fermiproject.com/audio/colson.mp3

Socially Responsible Church Planting remixed

Thanks to Jim Mann for his thoughtful comments on the post, Socially Reponsible Church Planting.  After reading it, I realized that post was a little too heavy on the polemic.  I have revised that post to present a less strident, more reasoned argument.  Let me respond to some of Jim's comments:

That post created the impression that I was knocking certain models of church (e.g. house churches).  The intention wasn't to do that - the intention was to ask the question about whether numerical goals for number of new church starts are reasonable.  I do believe in a diversity of church models - as long as those models faithfully reflect the Biblical vision for the church.  But, I worry that in the name of church planting we are blessing things and naming them churches, without serious reflection on the nature of the church.

Jim also rightfully so took exception to my comment about the lack of women church planters.  Many church planting teams in B.C. are made up of a husband and wife.  What I should have said was that I dream of the day when a solo women or two women or a group of women might set out to plant a church.  It would be fascinating to see what emerges and how what emerges might be different from male or couple initiated plants.

Jim also bashed on me for criticizing the denomination for not reflecting seriously on the nature of the church.  He claims that they have been wrestling with this question.  Maybe they have, but those conversations haven't been brought to the wider church body.  There has been no significant engagement with the constituency around creating a common understanding of what constitutes a church and what makes a church different from a Bible study or a discussion group or a club or a social gathering.  There are no apparent rules for the acceptance of churches into the denomination.  This creates a major accountability problem, I think. I have watched 6-10 year old church plants eat up pastors (many of them my friends) because they weren't held accountable by the denomination to set up structures and systems that encourage health.  We have to realize that churches will have a tremendous effect on people, so we would do well to plant churches that will be healthy and life-giving to their members.

In order to plant a church, we need to seriously reflect on what a church is.  And in this day and age where we tend to want to bless everything and curse nothing (except Americans, George Bush and the Religious Right).  We need to involve Biblical scholars, theologians, missionlogist AND sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and other social scientists into the conversation.  I would call our denomination, and all denominations to this project.

Additionally Jim asked me a number of questions.  I think it's worth responding to them:

Some of the statements in your post would lead me to think that your view is that a) our gathering of believers and seekers should not really be considered a church because we are small

My answer is a question: how is a house church different from a Bible Study/Home Fellowship group?  And the corollary: how is an "institutional church" different from a Bible Study/Home Fellowship group?

I think we have become stuck searching for the "perfect model" for the church when there isn't a perfect model.  I'm not saying a church can't be small or a church can't be large.  Rather, I'm asking what constitutes church?

b) that the BCMB Conference should not have accepted us into fellowship because we are small and did not have a previous relationship with MB churches

This is a restatement of a)...again, what stops us from calling Home Groups churches?  If our goal is 100 churches in 10 years, I would take a large church, bust it into a network of small groups, call each small group a church, and bingo, I've met my goal in a year.  We are chasing the wrong goal.  We ought to measure our success as churches against how well we as a family of churches are embodying God's Reign in our world.  Our mission isn't to plant churches.  Our mission is to be Christ's presence in the world, however we structure it.

For me, I recognize the church at the denominational as important.  We should accept churches into our denomination who resonate with our confession of faith.  If a church identifies with our confession, then by all means, come on in!

c) that because we are not paid a salary but are 'tentmakers' is somehow a negative thing

It is popular to bash on instiutional churches, paid pastors and traditional models of churches.  However, in many places, the New Testament makes clear that churches should pay their pastors/preachers/shepherds.  We witness in the Pastoral Letters a drift from loosely organized house churches to increasingly organized quasi-institutional systems.  I think we need to seriously consider that drift and think about the implications for us today.

I also worry about applying the term "tentmaker" to individual church leaders.  Paul's model was to plant churches, but he didn't lead or pastor them. He gathered a group, he trained leaders, and he left to establish a new thing.  "Tentmaking" is about establishing indigenously lead churches, not about pastoring a congregation long term, at least in my mind. 

I also worry that the tentmaking model taxes church leaders too much.  It creates a situation where it is difficult for leaders to manage work, family, study, prayer, administration, and connection with other churches.  This can create an isolated, insular church.

d) that we cannot be effective as a church or be sustainable because we are small.

Sustainability is a vital question for house churches to ask.  I believe that churches ought to be sustainable.  This doesn't mean they last forever, but it does mean that they are around for enough time to develop a deep rootedness in their communities and in the lives of their members.  I never want to lead a church that would disintigrate if I  left.  Too many people depend on the church for community and connection with God.  My question for house church leaders is always: "if a bus hit you tomorrow, would you church continue."  And the smaller the churches, the more this problem becomes pronounced.

If this is what you are implying, I believe that you are mistaken. We have purposefully chosen this house church model in order to connect with our immediate neighbours who would otherwise never come near a traditional church. So far, that is exactly what we are doing.

And this clearly is the power and promise of the house church model.  But, I think that just as larger churches need to create small groups to develop community, house churches need to create "large groups" to provide accountability, a broader range of opportunities, to fight isolation, and to help keep leaders connected to a bigger conversation.

I find it encouraging that in the first century, there were only a couple of large churches and many small churches. I am grateful that in God's economy, success is not measured by the size of our churches, but by our faithfulness in loving God, loving others and responding to Jesus' call to make disciples.

We can't go back to the first century and simply say that "churches were small then, so churches should be small know."  That is to ignore two millenia of church history.  We need to look at the first century and at Scripture, yes, but we also need to be attentive to the way church has been conceived of and organized by humans in history.   Church history clearly demonstrates that churches tend to get larger and institutional over time.  We need to hold this in tension with the image of small, networked house -based communities in the New Testament.

Also, we need to realize the 1st Century urban life was very different for 21st century urban life.  We cannot replicate the 1st century model because we aren't in the first century anymore.

I appreciate people who will take radical steps for Jesus, like starting a missionally engaged house church.  And I appreciate the way they challenge me, as an established-church pastor, to rethink the way I/we conceive of the church.  Keep pushing back Jim!

 

Socially Responsible Church Planting

Something has caused me to ask some questions lately - and it's our denomination's approach to church planting.  As a denomination, we will spend over $400,000 next year on church planting initiatives.  I have two questions: Is the $ doing what we want it to (i.e. meeting our objectives)?  And two, are our objectives sound?

Our goal as a denomination is to plant 100 churches in 10 years (2001-2011).  So far, we have managed to "stay the course" and plant the requisite number of churches each year.  If things continue to go in the same direction, then yes, our 3 point whatever million spent over 10 years will accomplish our objective.

But is our objective sound?  Is a 110 in 10 years a useful objective?

I'm not so sure.

Let's take a serious look of the implications of this sort of approach.  With this goal you would want to plant churches with as little money per church as possible, so as to maximize the number of churches you can produce.  This is a problem in simple marketing.  This has a number of pratical implications:

• Salaries, being the biggest expense, will be as small possible, and as short-lived as possible.  You will hire a single church planter, and eliminate their salary after 3 years.
• You will work to create a system where there are little to no criteria or accountabilities around how and when churches are accepted into the denomination, because you need to accept as many churches as possible into the denomination to meet your goal. This has the potential to bless churches that haven't done the hard work of creating long term stability and maturity.
• You may end up calling things a church, irrespective of any serious reflection on the nature of the church, what constitutes a church, and whether or not a group demonstrates long term sustainability. 
• The focus of church plants can become consumer-oriented because that's what gets people in the door quickly.  We can lose the Biblical pattern for the church because we need "bucks and bodies" (to borrow Dallas Willard's phrase).
• Church plants will focus on the middle and upper classes, because they can relieve the burden of salary ASAP.
• Churches will often be small and stay small, because you've given them limited resources.

Problem being that in each of these 5 areas, these factors can work against the long term health and stability of the churches:

• You put enormous pressure on the church planter to get his financial support base created;
• you accept churches into the denomination that may end up causing all sorts of problems in the future for the denomination because they weren't forced to do the hard work of solidfying themselves as a church before they were accepted;
• you may end up accepting churches that really may not be (yet) be churches;
• you forget the Biblical command to have mercy, seek justice and walk in humility with the poor constitutes a faithful congregation;
• you create more small churches, which in todays world, are very hard to sustain.

There are better objectives.  How about planting 10 churches in 10 years that will try to model themselves faithfully after the biblical/missional patterns in Scripture?  I like that goal WAY better.  Enough heresy for one post.

A New Kind of Christian - final remarks

Finishing McLaren's book and talking about it as a group, I'm struck again by how many of McLaren's ideas resonate with people today.  Many of the themes he explores - especially a narrative approach to Scripture and re-evaluating what we believe about hell and the extent of salvation - continue to be themes that people want to explore, question and challenge.

His book sounds a little dated, though.  Especially his talk of a New Kind of Christian.  To picture a New Kind/A Better/A New and Improved Christian sounds a whole lot like the modern approach that he is fundamentally questioning.  I hope that we can take a more discerning approach and recognize that being the church isn't about finding the perfect way of being a Christian.  Rather, it is giving permission to experiment with different ways of being, believe, and doing as Christians in response to our contextual realities.

I also left disappointed by the writing quality.  I am thankful that this book was able to communicate so powerfully inspite of its awkward and contrived plot line.  However, I wish that it was a better piece of writing.  It reinforces the negative perception of evangelicals as unappreciative of good art. 

But I realize that this book was the first stumbling attempt to get these ideas out there.  In terms of the movements that this book spawned and the people that it changed, I think this book is a testament of the Spirit's ability to work through our often rude offerings.

McLaren, Individual Salvation and Hell

I'm still working through A New Kind of Christian. Again, I am appalled by the literary style.  His plot and character development is horrible, and he has such a tendency to overwrite.  As the book has moved on, the character of Neo has become less and less convincing.  By the later chapters he's sounding too much like an evangelical.  Especially when he recounts hearing his mom sing that hymn - a hymn which seems to proclaim many of the things he's arguing against.

But that's not why I want to write.  I want to interact with his ideas around personal salvation.  In chapter 14, Neo begin to challenge what he calls the heresy of individual salvation.  He claims that "accepting Jesus as your personal saviour" has more to do with appealing to Western consumer tastes than to the gospel. I can't agree more. The implications of this idea, though, for anyone who lives within the confines of the evangelical world are difficult, at best.

To question the doctrine of "personal salvation" is to question the foundation of evangelicalism. Dan seems to think he can do this and remain within the fold.  In my experience, even in a congregation that is open to different ways of believing, I've found that challenging this belief is an exercise in religious hari-kari.  In several sermons I've poked at this beleife (I think I called "accepting Jesus into your heart" an evangelical Shibboleth - not my most discerning of remarks).  Without fail, I get push back.  Deep within the heart of evangelicalism is this belief.  I personally don't feel that you can remain within the evangelical fold if you throw individualistic salvation into question.

The whole "accepting Jesus" thing is being seriously questioned by many folks.  What I think will be interesting to observe is if the movements that adopt these critiques will remain within evangelicalism, or if they will become something else.

McLaren Musings Continue

I've been slowly working our way through A New Kind of Christian this summer as a part of a small group, and I've promised to continue to offer my reflections.  I was hard on McLaren on the whole post-modern/modern thing.  I think he's oversimplfying the issues.  But, as I've moved on I have found some very helpful ideas.

In chapters 6 and 7 he moves out of the modern/postmodern discussion and turns to discussing the Bible.  I, and our group, found a lot of very interesting ideas to chew on here.  McLaren remarks:

What if the issue is not the authority of the text...but the authority of God, moving mysteriously...at a higher level...p.51

McLaren is on to something very important here, I think, incredibly controversial, but important.  The Bible is not authoritative as words on a page or stories about people or letters to churches.  The Bible is authoritative in so far as it reveals God's will/desires/kingdom to people.  I've been reading about early Anabaptist approaches to Scripture, and interestingly some early Anabaptists expressed hestitation about buying too heavily into the Sola Scriptura concept.  For the word of God is not contained in the Bible, they argued, the word of God is contained in a living person, Jesus Christ.

And I believe that McLaren is right to say thatthe Bible still deserves respect and reverence as a story that reveals God and Jesus Christ to us.  I believe that we must allow the text to challenge us, confront us, change our understanding and praxis.  I think latent in the conservative Christian tradition is still a desire to allow the text to shape us (and I think McLaren bashes on conservatives a little too much).  I think that by and in large, the liberal tradition has decided that the Bible is a text to be treated with suspicion and endlessly challenged by our understandings, rather than vice versa.  Sure, we ought to read Scripture critically.  But at some point we have to stop arguing with it and let it shape us, too (see 56-57).

He conversation about story I also appreciated.  I believe that story does have tremendous shaping power.  Using the narrative in the text, or unpacking the narrative that sits behind more discursive texts is critical in shaping disciples.  If we don't enter into the stories of the Bible, and the stories behind how the various Biblical passages came to be, then we loose any sense of God's activity in the world and thus in our lives.

In chapters six and seven I found myself less bristle-ly and much more willing to engage.  When McLaren stops speculating about things he doesn't really know much about - cultural and philosophical shifts - and instead focuses on things he does understand - the Bible for instance - he does much better.

I need to say this before I close.  His narrative really stinks.  It is cheesy, contrived, and not very convincing.  Too bad he didn't get someone else to write the dialogue.  It would have been a much better book that way.

McLaren Musings Continue - the first five chapters

The good thing about McLaren's work, particularly for evangelicals, is that it it helps people think through issues of worldview and its relation to belief.  For a long time evangelicalism has been a religion that majors on absolutes, denying that truth (at least our appropriation or expression of it) changes.  In the first 5 chapters, this is what Dan is wrestling with: worldview makes a difference...essentially Dan is getting a good lesson in missiology.

I find the early chapters of ANKC a little too cut and dried, a little too simple.  Dan has crisis of faith.  Dan meets Neo.  Neo solves Dan's crisis.  Dan finds new way of thinking that solves his problems. I don't think that crises of faith resolve with such ease.  Changing paradigms is a much messier and difficult process.  It doesn't happen so easily.  It is painful to let go of ideas and approaches that we have used for years.  I guess it bothers me that McLaren chose to use the narrative format, but presented such one-dimension characters.  But maybe I'm asking too much from this book.

In my most cynical of moments I wonder if Dan is merely waking up out of his evangelical stupor to the world around him.  I inhabit the conservative Christian world, and I know how all-encompassing and insulating it can be.  I wonder if the "shift" that ANKC talks about is merely the maturation process that evangelical Christianity is going through as it comes to grips with the world around it.  If I read ANKC that way, I can read it more positively.  If I read it as arguing for massive shifts occuring in our time at the cultural level, then I'm not so sure.  I don't think the post-modern will come until global warming fries modern civilization to a crisp (see Ronald Wright, A Scientific Romance, for a wonderful novel about post-modernity in this form).

Just what age ARE we in?

Thanks to the alert commentators for their commentating on the cultural shifts going on in North America.  I'd like to clarify some of my thoughts and see if you groove with where I'm going:

1. I think it is misleading and unhelpful to categorize our current point in history as a dramatic turning point.  Dramatic turning points can never be discerned except by looking back.  Clearly, there is cultural change going on, but there always is cultural change going on!

2. I tend to think of history in a few broad strokes.  Any more, and I think we get into trouble and create too many "us and them" debates.  I don't much like the Victorian "Stone Age, etc." types of categories because they tend to link particular technologies to cultural advancement.  Reality is much more complex as the adoption of certain technologies doesn't necessarily imply levels of cultural advancement in other ways.  (Ronald Wright in  A Short History of Progress makes this point compellingly, if you are interested in tracking it down).  I would rather like to think of history in terms of several major transition points: One of the early major transitions for humanity (as far as we can tell) happened when agriculture was introduced and humans began settling in large numbers.  The next major transition doesn't happen until the Old and the New World encounter one another, spawning the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and increased globalization.

3. I think we still occupy this age of the Enlightenment, although perhaps we are entering its twilight years.  A significant point of change in our technological society I think came as a result of WWII.  The concentration camps and the atomic bomb I think chastened our view of progress, and helped us recognize that technological advancement has limits.  The major themes of the Enlightenement are still alive and well, I have no question about that, but I think we have realized that they, like all ideas have limits.  As we age, we recognize our limitations.  And as the Enlightenment has aged, so too we recognize its limits. 

4. We are slowly recognizing that our technological society could crash into a huge mess because of the problems it has created.  Global warming, nuclear catastrophy, environmental collapse, the drying up of oil supplies could all cause this to happen within our lifetimes.  The next major transition point in human history will occur at this point of collapse, I think.  Until then, I think we'll keep on keeping on with our same trajectory.  History teaches that humans, under their own will, do not change courses.  They need a significant outside factor (food shortage, discovery of new knowledge, disease, environmental collapse) to make that shift.

5. I don't think we should make too big a deal out of worldview.  It is important, but it can imply that humans are somehow evolving culturally.  We are changing culturally.  Evolving, I don't know.

6. Finally, humans, in broad strokes, think, act, organize, and operate in surprisingly similar ways across the ages and around the globe.  What I find incredible is that when the Spanish landed in the "New" world, they found a civilization that was recognizable.  These cultures had been separated for 15,000 years!  I can remember my surprise walking around the Museum of Antropology in Mexico and looking at Mayan art and Architecture, and thinking that it looks surprisingly like Ancient Near Eastern Art and Architecture.  That shows, I think, a certain level of predictability and predeterminism within the human family.  It explains why texts like the Old Testament can continue to communicate today.

7. Finally, philosophically, most "postmodern philosophers" rely heavily on the past philosophical tradition (Heidigger, the quintessential modern, for instance).  They see themselves standing in continuity with the tradition.  Most tellingly, Derrida himself developed a hatred for the term "postmodern" because it began to be employed to categorize a certain way of thought.  It is a classically "modern" move to want to define and categorize something as post-modern.  If Derrida is about anything (particularly late Derrida) it is that we cannot nail down the present.  Categorizing people based on philosophical outlook or worldview runs completely counter to Derrida's project.  This strengthens, I think, my argument that we still are generally "Enlightenment" folks.

Post-?

Brian McLaren in a recent post speaks of a trip to Europe where he spoke of the fact that church leaders are wrestling with "the cultural, philosophical and ethical issues raised in a post-industrial, post-modern, post-Enlightenment, and post-colonial context" (brianmclaren.net, Summer 2006 Update).

Lots of post-'s.  And it is these with which I feel less and less comfortable.  No one, looking at society from a global perspective can argue that we are in a post-industrial age.  The rapidly expanding economies of India and China can be described only in terms of a global industrialization.  The oil-driven construction boom in Alberta looks a whole lot like industrialization to me.  If anything, our age is hyper-industrial.  It is a simple fact that communications and computer technology has not replaced industrialism, but accelerated it.

Post-modern...that's another post...

Post-Enlightenement!?  Sure, we've run up against the limits of human reason and the abiity of science to fix our problems.  Yes, the notion of progress has been questioned (but even though who question it, live by its credo, don't you think?).  But, I cannot see how in a major way we have shifted out of the general Enlightenment paradigm.  The past four centuries has all been a slow refinement of Enlightenment thinking.  We occupy a worldview that may look different from that of early Enlightement heroes, but it stands in a general evolutionary chain with the major themes and thrusts of the Enlightement.  We live, I believe, in a more mature version of the Enlightenment.

Post-colonial???????!!!!!!!!  Come on Brian.  You live in the United States!  The colonization of the entire planet with Western market capitalism and democracy is perhaps the most incredible historical takeover of whole societies ever to have taken place.  The fact that 20 years ago I couldn't get a Starbucks coffee in Tokyo and now I can, says something about a new and more subtle form of colonialism that is alive and well.

McLaren lets these post-'s roll of is tongue too glibly, too easily.  He is at heart a pastor, a popularizer, not a historian or philosopher. But he too often poses as a historian/philosopher and people take him as such.  I don't think he is carefully examining our world and reflecting on where its been and where its going. 

He is locked in a culture wars approach where he sets of the modern against the post-modern, doing little good to help people find common solutions.  He ignores the dominance of technological thinking, new American colonialism, and a rapid dumming down of the citizenry in exchange for a rhetoric that declares of all these things are good as dead.  Sorry Brian.  The future ain't gonna be some great POMO shift.  The future is the Enlightenment all grown up.  (like MY rhetoric?)

A New Kind of McLaren

Our small group Bible study has decided to pick up McLaren's A New Kind of Christian and spend the summer reading and talking about it.  I had the opportunity to hear McLaren speak in the late 90's at a young leaders conference in California.  I was intrigued by his "postmodern" argument, but somewhat hestitant to buy it hook line and sinker.  When I read the book after it first came out I was more convinced that this shift from modernity to postmodernity was something real and required "a new kind of Christian."  I believed that this was especially true in Canada. 

That was the framework from which I entered pastoral ministry.  However, four years into my work as a pastor I am beginning to wonder if McLaren's work really is accurate or representative of the shifts going on in culture.  When I read his book now, oddly, it feels outdated and simplistic.  And in certain instances his work has been anywhere from unhelpful to downright dangerous in pastoral ministry. 

I want to spend the next few weeks responding to McLaren's work in detail, giving my impressions of it now, five years from when I first read it.  While I understand that McLaren's thought has developed and grown, as recently as two years ago I heard him give the same modern - postmodern transition argument.  I think I can still claim that this argument forms the basis of his thought.  I should say that I still appreciate the emerging chuch movement and McLaren's contribution.  But from its very inception I have been reluctant to jump into the emergent thing whole hog.  I'd like to explore the source of my reluctance a little more.

So, batten down the hatches!  This should be fun...