I never thought I would celebrate the day that a church got sued and lost! But yeah to this one!

After introducing the pilgrimage experience (chapter 1), and preparing for the pilgrimage (chapter 2), Hudson takes the third chapter to flesh out the first of three essential ingredients of the pilgrimage experience.

When discussing the importance of truly encountering our suffering neighbor, Hudson writes:

For over twenty-five years I have pursued the call of being a pastor. This daily work includes the daunting responsibility of enabling others to grow as disciples of Jesus. In responding to this vocational challenge I lead Bible studies, host silent retreats, offer spiritual counsel, conduct teaching seminars, participate in small groups, and engage in countless pastoral conversations.

While all these ministry endeavors are definitely worthwhile, without the specific ingredients that the pilgrimage experience offers, these efforts at spiritual formation lack a vital ingredient. Arising from careful observation of the changed lives of those pilgrims who have opened themselves to their suffering neighbors, this conviction shapes significantly the way in which I now encourage others along the Christ-following path.

I encourage the pilgrimage experience as a method for personal transformation and change not only because of what I see in others’ lives. In my personal experience, my suffering neighbor is where I meet the crucified and risen Christ. Each day I am given privileged access into the lives of persons who suffer greatly.

These daily encounters with the terminally ill, the depressed, the economically poor, the retrenched, the divorced, the childless, the addicted, the elderly, the bereaved, and other suffering men and women affect profoundly my understanding and experience of the Christ-following life. The Spirit has used these relationships to foster my ongoing conversion.

Hudson believes that when we really open ourselves up to those who suffer, the Spirit of God will do three things. He will open blind eyes, uncover our own inner poverty, and reveal our hidden riches. Read the rest of this entry

Rick Meigs at Blind Beggar debriefs a bit here from the Allelon Missional Order gathering earlier this month.

Just started reading Red Letters: Living a Faith That Bleeds by Tom Davis which is the foundation for 5 For Fifty.

Billy Calderwood gives a personal reaction to Announcing the Kingdom by Arthur Glasser that made me move the book closer to the top of my reading stack.

Be sure to check out Metamorpha, a very interesting collection of resources and discussion opportunities in the arena of spiritual formation.

Have you outsourced your brain?

Interesting article from The New York Times on The Evangelical Crackup. Much of the article deals with the evangelical life in Wichita, KS. Wichita was my home town up until about two years ago, therefore I know many of those involved in the issues highlighted in the article. There are several great quotes in the article from the likes of Scot McKnight, Jim Wallis, Rick Warren, Bill Hybels and friend Paul Hill.

Here is another excerpt from my favorite chapter of Searching For God Knows What by Donald Miller. In this section of chapter 10 Miller is discussing the dominant metaphors used to describe our relationship with God. He argues that many of the attempts we make to explain the gospel somehow miss this crucial relational dynamic.

Miller writes:

“Biblically, you are hard-pressed to find theological ideas divorced from their relational context. There are, essentially, three dominant metaphors describing our relationship with God: sheep to a shepherd, child to a father, and bride to a bridegroom. The idea of Christ’s disciples being His mother and father and brothers and sisters is also presented. In fact, few places in Scripture speak to the Christian conversion experience through any method other than relational metaphor.

Contrasting this idea, I recently heard a man, while explaining how a person could convert to Christianity, say the experience was not unlike deciding to sit in a chair. He said that while a person can have faith that a chair will hold him, it is not until he sits in the chair that he has acted on his faith.

I wondered as I heard this if the chair was a kind of symbol for Jesus, and how irritated Jesus might be if a lot of people kept trying to sit on Him.

And then I wondered at how Jesus could say He was a Shepherd and we were sheep, and that the Father in heaven was our Father and we were His children, and that He Himself was a Bridegroom and we were His bride, and that He was a King and we were His subjects, and yet we somehow missed His meaning and thought becoming a Christian was like sitting in a chair.”

If the church takes seriously the fact that North America is now a mission field, this has tremendous implications for congregations. One of the most important implications is that many of the assumptions that have guided the development of the church over the past several centuries are now in need of critique and redefinition (e.g., denominations, individualism, and success).

Another implication is that the church will increasingly need to recognize that its own location in the present culture is no longer at the center, but at the margins. Being on the margins, however, can provide fresh opportunities for thinking about offering confident witness as the church.

- Craig Van Gelder in Confident Witness – Changing World

One of the things I have always admired about Willow Creek Community Church is their willingness to question what they are doing and admit when something isn’t “working.” If you haven’t already heard about the Reveal Study I would recommend (when you have an extra 13 minutes) watching this short video by Greg Hawkins, Executive Pastor at Willow as he talks about what they have been learning recently.

I think their findings speak to a variety of issues, including: what is at the core of spiritual transformation, the topic of “revolutionaries” as describe by Barna, and the implications for living a “church-centered life” rather than a “Christ-centered life.” I also think it has a few things to say about the need for a “missional order,” a topic that has gain a lot of traction of late.

In chapter two of A Mile In My Shoes, Trevor Hudson talks about preparing for a pilgrimage by cultivating a pilgrim attitude. Developing such an attitude is not only crucial for a week long type of excursion illustrated by the Pilgrimage of Pain and Hope but it is equally important in our daily lives. Hudson writes:

How, then, do we go about cultivating a pilgrim attitude? Applicable to every apprentice pilgrim, whether embarking upon a planned pilgrimage experience or not, the question deserves careful attention. Otherwise our lives run the risk of becoming characterized by aimless drifting, smug self-concern, and bland superficiality. Based upon the biblical witness, insights from mentors, and my personal experience with the Pilgrimage of Pain and Hope, I will outline three interwoven ingredients of a pilgrim posture.

So what are these three ingredients?
Read the rest of this entry

With increasing urgency pastors, missiologists, and theologians have called for redefining the Church’s nature, its mission, its reason for being, its relation to the Kingdom of God, and its calling in the world. It has become increasingly difficult to separate the “visible” from the “invisible,” the hope from the reality. These modern Bonhoeffers have convincingly demonstrated that the Church must live out its missionary nature in the here and now.

A new missiological paradigm in ecclesiology is needed so that we might see the missionary Church as an “emerging” reality which, as it is built up in the world, becomes in fact what it is in faith. By grasping and internalizing this new paradigm we will find our thinking about the Church and its mission becoming highly contextual, radically transformational, and powerfully hopeful, exercised with eternity in view.

- Charles Van Engen, God’s Missionary People: Rethinking the Purpose of the Local Church

In chapter one of “A Mile In My Shoes: Cultivating Compassion” Trevor Hudson describes the birth of a Pilgrimage of Pain and Hope, an eight day pilgrimage experience for his largely middle-class suburban congregation. Hudson describes it as an “immersion into the struggles and joys of our suffering neighbors.” 

Illustrating that Christian groups have not always approached such attempts with the proper posture, I appreciated that Hudson shared the concerns of friends and colleagues who ministered in possible pilgrimage sites with comments like “come as pilgrims, not tourists; as learners, not teachers; as listeners, not as talkers.”

After the first Pilgrimage of Pain and Hope Hudson committed to three things: (1) He would plan for his congregation an annual, week long pilgrimage; (2) he would try to shape the pilgrimage experience into an effective means of spiritual formation; and (3) on a personal level he would seek to become a “pilgrim” in daily life. Throughout the remainder of the book Hudson provides very practical and insightful encouragement on each of these points.

After reflecting on almost a decade worth of leading his congregation on Pilgrimages of Pain and Hope, Hudson concluded that the concept rested upon three essential ingredients: Encounter, Reflection, and Transformation. While Hudson explores each ingredient more fully in later chapters, he introduces each in chapter one with a brief explanation.
Read the rest of this entry

Over the weekend I finished reading A Mile In My Shoes by Trevor Hudson. The book is published by Upper Room Books. I really like this little book and plan to post on each of the six chapters over the next several days. Hudson serves on the pastoral team at Northfield Methodist Church in Benoni, South Africa. The book is primarily about cultivating compassion but I believe it has much to say about spiritual formation and living a missional life as well.

Most of you are already familiar with Scot McKnight over at Jesus Creed but here is an interesting three part interview with McKnight posted by JR Woodward at Dream Awakener.

McKnight on blogging – Part I
McKnight on blogging – Part II
McKnight on Jesus

The church is the bearer to all the nations of a gospel that announces the kingdom, the reign, and the sovereignty of God. It calls men and women to repent of their false loyalty to other powers, to become believers in the one true sovereignty, and so to become corporately a sign, instrument, and foretaste of that sovereignty of the one true and living God over all nature, all nations, and all human lives. It is not meant to call men and women out of the world into a safe religious enclave but to call them out in order to send them back as agents of God’s kingship.

- Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks

Here is a very good post by David Fitch over at Reclaiming the Mission. If you are not familiar with Fitch he is author of The Great Giveaway and pastor of Life on the Vine.  I have a short review of the book here. 

In this post Fitch discusses the struggles of planting missional communities and the importance of cultivating certain practices in the life of the community to ensure health and longevity. This leads Fitch to reflect on the development of a missional order. Something several of us have been discussing for sometime, therefore I find his common commitments particularly intriguing. Here is a sample of the post:

In chapter 2 of his book Simplicity [Richard Rohr] talks about the pain of seeing so many missional communities start up and then fold within two to three years of starting. He blames various societal pressures and internal character weaknesses that come with the territory of planting missional communities in North America. I too have seen many missional communities fold in the third year of their existence. I have witnessed burn-out, depression, and disillusionment among the leaders in the 3rd year (sometimes sooner but mostly by the end of the 3rd year).

Part of where this comes from is that certain swimming against the stream that every missional community organizer knows. It is the everyday grind against making people happy that comes with engaging the consumerism and narcissism of the average cultural American. But then even worse, there are these expectations that come from denominations and Christian institutions that derive from a Christendom mentality of church planting. Here numbers and attraction become the measures of success and when these things are subtly communicated, the self-worth of the church planters takes a dive. Even if the institutions are supportive (which mine has certainly been), the pressures and expectations of the past age haunt the average missional church planter. It is imperative therefore to have practices that support missional community cultivation!

Thanks to Rick Meigs at Blind Beggar and Andy at not yet finished for the heads up on this video of Michael Frost at the Presbyterian Global Fellowship Conference in Houston. Frost argues that for a church to be missional means that mission must be the organizing principle of the church, and when you “step into” a missional paradigm there will be a fundamental shift in how you see God, the church and the world.

Friends naturally enjoy intimate sharing. Friends make time to develop trusting relationships. Friends enjoy being in the company of each other. But then superimpose a Christian model of friendship over these qualities and you’ll get at least one more non-negotiable characteristic of Christian spiritual friendship:

Spiritual friends help each other pay close attention to God.

Is there a higher calling of relationships in the body of Christ? Not to me! Christians involved in spiritual friendship help each other delight in God and in his word. As a discipline of the Christian life, spiritual friendship is no different than other disciplines in its purpose: To connect friends to God or to be transformed into the image of Christ.

Name 3-4 friends that help you connect with God? Can you name 2? How about 1? Then thank God, you are in the lower 25% of those who minister to God’s people. 

I have read that 75% of ministers do not have any intimate friends. Can you imagine going through the hardships and delights of ministry to God’s people without someone to listen to us and help us see God in our ministry? O, to be listened to! What a gift awaits us. Read the rest of this entry

Today I finished reading a essay titled “Evangelical Conversion toward a Missional Ecclesiology” by George Hunsberger. The essay is chapter four of Evangelical Ecclesiology: Reality or Illusion? edited by John Stackhouse. Dr. Hunsberger is Professor of Congregational Mission at Western Theological Seminary. He is also coordinator of the Gospel and Our Culture Network in North America. 

I had the privilege of sitting between Dr. Hunsberger and Dr. Lois Barrett (also a contributor to GOCN) during dinner one evening last year when the GOCN annual conference was in town. I have since grown to appreciate Hunsberger’s insight and try to keep up on his numerous writings.

Here is a extended portion of the essay where Hunsberger presents a helpful summary of the continual stranglehold Christendom has on the church in North America. He then goes on to ask if evangelicalism’s emphasis on “missions” has made it more difficult for the church to grasp the “missional” purpose of why it exists. I urge you to carve out a few minutes to read his thoughts and tell me what you think.

Hunsberger writes:

The Reformers lived in what was still a Christendom world, and they continued to think and respond to issues of the nature and form of the church with assumptions inherent in that world. It should be no surprise that they did so. But it should surprise us that Christendom ways of thinking of the church still persist in our own time. Evangelicalism, no less than any other of the streams flowing from the Reformation, bears the stamp of the reduction of the church of the church to a place where certain things happen.

What was most lost to the church in the period of Christendom was its sense of missional identity. This pervasive eclipse of mission continued to be evident in the Reformational confessions. Wilbert Shenk summarizes (Write the Vision, p. 38):

Ecclesiologically the church is turned inward. The thrust of these statements, which were the very basis for catechizing and guiding the faithful, rather than equipping and mobilizing the church to engage the world, was to guard and preserve. This is altogether logical, of course, if the whole of society is by definition already under the lordship of Christ.

The gradual emergence of Protestant missionary ventures to newly discovered parts of the world (after a couple of centuries!) does not really contradict this assessment. What is new is that missions are organized apart from the magistrate’s initiative and sponsorship. From the time of the Reformation until the eighteenth century, this official direction and support were understood to be chiefly responsible for the evangelization of new regions. Read the rest of this entry