Books

The Church Has An Image Problem

April 20, 2012, by 2 comments

The church in the United States has a major “image” problem. Now I don’t mean the kind of problem that might be solved by hiring a marketing firm or image consultant. I am speaking of the kind of image, or metaphor, that comes to mind when people think of the church.

What are the images that come to mind when you think of church? What images do people envision when they think of the nature or essence of the church? What images do you hear people use to describe and define the church in America? Complete the phrase: “Church as…”

I recently asked that question on my Facebook page and I received a variety of thought provoking responses:

Church as hospital
Church as civic group
Church as social club
Church as fortress
Church as election headquarters
Church as moral compass
Church as singles’ pickup joint
Church as daycare

Michael Goheen, in his book A Light to the Nations: The Missional Church and the Biblical Story, offers a few images of his own that illustrate how we often think of the church from a consumerist perspective.

Church as shopping mall
Church as food court
Church as motivational seminar
Church as classroom
Church as theater

The point of this discussion is that we must offer alternative images and stories to capture the missional imagination of people. Otherwise, we continue to allow non-biblical, consumerist ideas to rule the day. How can we better present a picture of the church as the sent, missionary people of God? What alternative images can we offer to create a more accurate vision of the essence of the church?

One possible alternative comes from Reggie McNeal when likens the Church to an airport terminal, which is meant to connect travelers to their destination, but it is not the destination. Using another flight analogy, McNeal has compared the Church’s mission to an aircraft carrier. It’s not how many planes are stacked up on the flight deck, he said; it’s the kind of missions that are being flown.

The Disappearance of Biblical Hospitality?

April 3, 2012, by 3 comments

The past few months I have been doing research on the topic of “biblical hospitality” for a workbook that my friend Lance Ford and I are doing with The House Studio. I use the adjective “biblical” to help differentiate it from what usually comes to mind when people hear the word hospitality. Most people today picture entertaining around meals or inviting family and friends into their homes for a night of fun and games. Some may think of the “hospitality industry” that includes hotels, restaurants, or cruise ships that work judiciously to create an atmosphere of friendliness and welcome. However, neither of these examples speaks to the richness of biblical hospitality, which focuses on the love of strangers by the opening of our homes and our hearts. When we understand the depth of hospitality, it is hard to deny that over time the Christian community has lost touch with the transformative realities of true biblical hospitality.

After a wonderful historical survey of the complex tradition of hospitality, including the words and activities from Jesus, to the Apostle Paul, to John Chrysostom, Martin Luther, and John Calvin, Christine Pohl, in the excellent book, Making Room, writes:

Even a superficial review of the first seventeen centuries of church history reveals the importance of hospitality to the spread and credibility of the gospel, to transcending national and ethic distinctions in the church, and to Christian care for the sick, strangers, and pilgrims. Granting that the practice was rarely as good as the rhetoric, still, we pause to wonder, if hospitality to strangers was such an important part of Christian faith and life, how did it virtually disappear?

Here is my question for you. When did we lose the capacity to give and receive hospitality? Why has it virtually disappeared from the life of the church and from those who make up the church? I will share in future posts some of the reasons I believe we have moved away from hospitality, but for now I would like to hear what you think. What keeps you from opening your home (and life) to others?

This post was first published on The House Studio blog.

The Permanent Revolution

March 3, 2012, by No comments yet

Following is a challenging excerpt from the introduction of the new book by Alan Hirsch and Tim Catchim titled "The Permanent Revolution."

The church is equipped by Spirit and gospel to fulfill whatever tasks the Lord has set for us to do: evangelism, discipleship, church planting, servicing the poor, worship, healing, and much more. We are designed to be the world-transforming agents of the kingdom. We are meant to be a permanent revolution, not one that came and went, leaving a codified religion in its wake. That we only seldom realize this truth can be attributed to a bad case of recurring theological amnesia, one that has some seriously detrimental consequences on our capacities to get our mission done. . . .

Part of the amnesia comes for the way we conceive of, and subsequently configure, the church and its ministry. We create a paradigm — a way of perceiving our world, of filtering out what is considered real and unreal, of creating mental models of how things should be. Once established, paradigms in many ways do our thinking for us; that is their purpose. They in turn comprise clusters of what creative thinking expert Roger Martin calls algorithms. An algorithm is a predetermined formula that will produce reliable outcomes when it is consistently applied. Although paradigms help us make sense of our world by giving us ways to interpret it, they also create what is called paradigm blindness: an incapacity to see things from outside that particular perspective or paradigm. And this can account for how people fail to see certain important things that might be glaringly obvious to others. It can also account for many of the problems we in the church now face. But there is another serious downside to algorithms, as Martin so effectively articulates: "What organizations dedicated to running reliable algorithms often fail to realize is that while they reduce the risk of small variations, . . . they increase the risk of being overpowered by the various cataclysmic events that occur, situations when the future no longer resembles the past and whatever algorithm one has used is no longer relevant or useful.

Have You Become Jonah-like?

February 29, 2012, by No comments yet

Here is a post that was recently posted on the Sentralized blog.

In preparation for some teaching I was doing, I recently revisited Dan Kimball’s book, They Like Jesus but Not the Church. One section of the book that I think is helpful (and amusing in a sad kind of way) is titled “The Transformation from Excited Missionary into Citizen of the Bubble.” In this section of the book, Kimball shares his observation concerning what happens to many believers as they “mature” in their Christian walk.

Phase 1: We become Christians

In this phase Kimball reminds Christians of the time they first placed their faith in Christ, understood the grace of God, and experienced the excitement and joy of learning new things from the Bible. He writes, “Remember that burst of understanding God’s grace and joy in Jesus as you told your non-Christian friends about your faith? Probably this occurred in a natural way, since you were friends rather than strangers. . . This is only natural because generally everyone in a new Christian’s circle of friends is outside of the church.”

Phase 2: We become part of church life

As we get involved in the life of the church, we make Christian friends and participate in all kinds of church activities with them. New believers tend to slowly lose touch with non-Christian friends and become more and more immersed in Christian activities. The reality is that the longer we are Christians, the fewer the number of friends we have who are not Christians. Again Kimball writes, “Even though Christians often work alongside non-Christians or have non-Christian neighbors or sit next to non-believing students in class, we generally tend not to actually befriend them, or pray regularly for them, or get involved in their lives so they trust us and we can be salt and light of Jesus to them.”

Phase 3: We become part of the Christian bubble

Here, Kimball writes:

As we slowly withdraw from ongoing relationships with those outside the church and focus on relationships with those inside the church, something happens. Once, it was more natural and even exciting to share life with people at work or at school, with relatives, or with neighbors. But slowly we begin to see evangelism as something the church does, primarily through events. We get more excited about going overseas to the mission field on summer trips than about the mission field we live in every day. We start to see evangelism as inviting people to go to a church, where the pastor will do the evangelizing and explain Christianity, instead of spending time with people and talking with them and being the church to them. . . . During this phase, we stop praying daily for those who don’t know Jesus and instead pray for our church’s latest building project or latest program.

Phase 4: We become Jonah

After being citizens of the bubble for several years, we begin to complain and point out the terrible things happening in the culture. Like Jonah, we don’t want anything to do with those who aren’t following God as we are. Like Jonah, we may even have a secret sense of delight thinking about how God will one day punish all those sinners in our towns and cities. “And like Jonah, who, even after God gave him a second chance and he saw the people of Nineveh repent and cry out to God, complained about not having shade over his head and being uncomfortable, we complain about how well the church is providing what we want and grow numb to the fact that people all around us need the love and grace of Jesus.”

At this point Kimball makes reference to the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime” when David Byrne cries out “My God! What have I done?” Or in our case maybe “My God! What have I become?”

Can you relate to any of these four phases?

 

Start with Spiritual Formation

January 29, 2012, by 1 comment

When considering what it will take for an existing congregation to move in a missional direction, I believe one of the key starting points is to begin with discipleship, or spiritual formation. Now having said that, I also believe we have to be careful not to think it is a purely linear process.

In other words we need to realize that we can’t, or shouldn’t, see discipleship as something that has to be “complete” before we engage in God’s mission. I would much rather view the process as a cycle of discipleship and mission, where intentional apprenticeship to Jesus (discipleship) leads to mission and mission compels us to intentional apprenticeship (discipleship).

The main point that I want to make here, however, is that we cannot neglect the formation to Christlikeness if we are to be a sent, missionary people.

I was humbled to discover recently that Len Hjalmarson quoted from one of my blog posts on this topic in his and Roger Holland’s excellent new book titled Missional Spirituality:

God calls the church to be a sent community of people who no longer live for themselves but instead live to participate with Him in His redemptive purposes. However, people will have neither the passion nor the strength to live as a counter cultural society for the sake of others if they are not transformed by the way of Jesus. If the church is to “go and be” then we must make certain that we are a Spirit formed community that has the spiritual capacity to impact the lives of others.

How do you understand the interplay between discipleship and missional living? What do you do to ensure that you have the passion and the strength to live for the sake of others?

The Revolution of Jesus

December 19, 2011, by No comments yet

Jesus did not send his students out to start governments or even churches as we know them today…. They were, instead, to establish beachheads of his person, word, and power in the midst of a failing and futile humanity. They were to bring the presence of the kingdom and its King into every corner of human life simply by fully living in the kingdom with him….

Churches — thinking now of local assemblies of such people — would naturally be the result. Churches are not the kingdom of God, but are primary and inevitable expressions, outposts, and instrumentalities of the presence of the kingdom among us. They are “societies” of Jesus, springing up in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and to the furthest points on earth (Acts 1:8), as the reality of Christ is brought to bear on ordinary human life.

~ Dallas Willard in Renovation of the Heart

Mission and Presence

November 28, 2011, by 1 comment

God converts the nations by working in the midst of His own People. His interventions, and these alone, make Israel the light of the world. The Church does its work of evangelisation in the measure in which its Lord gives it life; when it lives by Him its very existence is effectual. In contradistinction to what has sometimes been believed, mission has nothing in common with any sort of political or commercial enterprise; it is entirely dependent on the hidden activity of God within His Church, and is the fruit of a life really rooted in God. The evangelisation of the world is not primarily a matter of words or deeds: it is a matter of presence — the presence of the People of God in the midst of mankind and the presence of God in the midst of His People. And surely it is not in vain that the Old Testament reminds the Church of this truth.

~ A Light to the Nations: A Study of the Old Testament Conception of Israel’s Mission to the World
by Robert Martin-Achard

The Insidious Power of Consumerism

November 26, 2011, by No comments yet

One of the most powerful religious forces shaping both the American culture (if you have any doubt just check out some of the stories of “Black Friday”) and the church culture in the West is consumerism. The desire to consume is so insidious that in most cases we don’t recognize the stranglehold it has on our lives and the barrier it creates to live missionally. In his latest book, Michael Goheen writes:

As a cultural story, consumerism exerts a shaping influence on virtually every aspect of life. Philip Sampson observes that “once established, such a culture of consumption is quite undiscriminating and everything becomes a consumer item.” Similarly, Don Slater notes, “If there is no principle restricting who can consume what, there is also no principled constraint on what can be consumed: all social relations, activities and objects can in principle be exchanged as commodities.” Even the gospel and the church can be overtaken by the consumerist spirit. When the church takes up the role assigned it within a consumer culture and allows itself to be shaped by that story, it becomes merely a vendor of religious goods and services. Clearly, the church must not accept this role in society; as Sampson argues, the “challenge for the church here is to take up its task in the reformation and renewal of all life, rather than becoming another isolated customer center.”

- A Light to the Nations: The Missional Church and the Biblical Story by Michael W. Goheen

One Day Gathering with Mindy Caliguire

October 28, 2011, by No comments yet

Join us for a one day seminar on the topic of spiritual formation and mission with Mindy Caliguire on Tuesday, December 6th. Mindy was a speaker at the recent Sentralized Conference here in Kansas City. She is the founder of Soul Care, a spiritual formation ministry, and Director of Transformation Ministry for the Willow Creek Association. Her books include Discovering Soul Care, Spiritual Friendship, Soul Searching and Simplicity, as well as Write for Your Soul: The Whys and Hows of Journaling, with her husband, Jeff Caliguire. The seminar will take place from 9:00am to 3:00pm, meeting at The Parish Center, at 2949 McGee Trafficway, KCMO, home of Midtown Community Church. The cost of the one day is $29, which will include lunch. You can register with Eventbrite here.

The Road to Missional

October 20, 2011, by 1 comment

In the introduction of  The Road to Missional  Michael Frost pushes back on those who suggest that “missional” is simply the latest church buzzword that is quickly losing its usefulness. He writes:

If the missional conversation is over, it occurs to me that it probably hasn’t really ever been had. That’s because “missional” is not a style or a fad. It’s not an add-on, the latest church accessory, the newest cool idea for church leaders. The fact that some are suggesting the conversation is over leads me to think that they weren’t listening in the first place. My call — and the call of may other missional thinkers and practitioners — was not for a new approach to doing church or a new technique for church growth. I thought I was calling the church to revolution, to a whole new way of thinking about the seeing and being the followers of Jesus today. I now find myself in a place where I fear those robust and excited calls for a radical transformation of our ecclesiology have fallen on deaf ears.

I think Frost hits on a key point here, namely, those who think “missional” is a passing fad — whose time has already “come and gone” — simply have not fully grasp the enormity or breath of the conversation. It involves no less than a complete reorientation, or recalibration, of the way we understand the nature of God, church, mission, and the gospel.