Culture

Consumerism & the American Church

August 29, 2011, by 1 comment

Following is an excellent excerpt from Renovation of the Church on the stranglehold consumerism has on the church in the United States:

I don’t know how to say this in a gentle way, but we should not assume that those people who are attracted to our church have been captivated by the message of Christ and his alternative vision of life. In truth, most North American Christians are not riding courageously on warrior steeds with swords waving wildly in the air, crying out, “Let’s change the world for Christ.” Rather, they come in the air-conditioned comfort of their SUV or minivan with their Visa card held high in the air, crying out, “Let’s go to the mall!”

We should be more truthful with each other here. They come because their high-school kid likes the youth program, or because their children don’t get bored, or because they like the music, or because the pastor preaches the Bible the way they believe it should be preached, or because they happened to be greeted by a smiling face one day, or because the worship leaders looks like Brad Pitt.

This is the hard, raw reality of life in the North American church. The people who come to our churches have been formed into spiritual consumers. This is who we are. It is our most instinctive response to life. And you can hardly blame us. Almost everything in our culture shapes us in this direction. But we must become deeply convinced that this is contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ, the one who invited us to deny ourselves and lose our lives in order to find them. If we do nothing to confront this in our churches, we are merely putting a religious veneer over consumerism and nothing is changed. We offer no real, viable, attractive, alternative way of living. And what is worse, our churches become part of the problem. By harnessing the power of consumerism to grow our churches, we are more firmly forming our people into consumers. Pastors end up being as helpful as bartenders at an Alcoholics Anonymous convention. We do not offer what people really need.

From Renovation of the Church: What Happens When a Seeker Church Discovers Spiritual Formation by Kent Carlson & Mike Lueken

Church in a Broken World

April 13, 2011, by 1 comment

You don’t have to leave your office or home to participate in Michael Frost’s One Day events April 13 and 18 in Prague and Budapest during the upcoming JetSet tour.

View videos posted soon after each discussion led by Frost about “Church in a Broken World.” Then share you input and ask questions by commenting on this site or on the Upstream blog, as well as via Twitter (#js2011) and Facebook.

Register now for the One Day events and look for the first videos later in the day April 13 from the Prague One Day hosted by The Upstream Collective and Bridge Community Church.

The Marginalization of the Church

March 25, 2011, by No comments yet

This past weekend I conducted a workshop on transitioning existing churches in a missional direction. We began our time together making sure the group was on the “same page” in regards to the state of the church in America. For a portion of that discussion I shared the following article on the marginalization of the church. This section of the document comes after a brief discussion on the shift into a period of Post-Christendom taken from Douglas John Hall excellent little book The End of Christendom and the Future of Christianity.

The magnitude of the marginalization of the church during this time of post-Christendom has been expressed by many. In the introduction of The Church Between Gospel and Culture, George Hunsberger writes about the crisis in the life of churches in North America: “The crisis, most simply put, is that the social function the churches once fulfilled in American life is gone.” [1] Eddie Gibbs in the book Church Next argues that “mainline denominations are facing an avalanche of problems that place question marks over their future. Some of these problems are so pressing that they may even threaten the denominations’ survival.” [2] In the book Death of the Church author Mike Regele offers a concise summary of the multiple issues involved in the marginalization of the church when he writes:

At the brink of the twenty-first century, the king who knew not Joseph is the collective culture of which we are a part. The combined impact of the Information Age, postmodern thought, globalization, and racial-ethnic pluralism that has seen the demise of the grand American story also has displace the historic role the church has played in the story. As a result, we are seeing the marginalization of the institutional church. [3]

The marginalization of the church that these and other authors [4] speak of can be validated in an array of church statistics and trends. In 2005 Sally Margenthaler painted this picture of the American church landscape:

Despite what we print in our own press releases, the numbers don’t look good.   According to 2003 actual attendance counts, adult church-going is at 18 percent nationally and dropping. Evangelical attendance (again, actual seat-numbers, not telephone responses) accounts for 9% of the population, down from 9.2% in 1990. Mainline attendance accounts for 3.4% of the national population, down from 3.9% the previous decade.  And Catholics are down a full percentage point in the same ten-year period:  6.2% from 7.2% in 1990. Of the 3,098 counties in the United States, 2,303 declined in church attendance. [5]

More recently David Olsen, Director of the American Church Research Project [6] and author of The American Church in Crisis has compiled comprehensive data on the state of the church in the United States. The research provides reliable attendance numbers for each of the 3,141 counties in the U.S., for each state, and for the nation as a whole. [7] One of Olson’s most significant findings is the apparent “halo effect” [8] that has been evident in the majority of polls on church attendance. Polls conducted by organizations such as Gallup and The Barna Research Group have consistently reported weekly church attendance in the range of 40 to 47 percent over the past four decades. However, Olson and other sociologists [9] effectively argue that church attendance numbers are in reality much lower.

A study published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion compiled data from more than 300,000 Christian congregations in the United States and found that the churches totaled 52 million people in attendance, or 17.7 percent of the American population in 2004. [9] The research of the American Church Research Project showed that 17.5 percent of the population attended an orthodox Christian church on any given weekend in 2005. [10] The total percentage was broken down into three major church categories including; evangelical at 9.1 percent, mainline at 3 percent, and Roman Catholic with 5.3 percent. [11]

One addition insight gleaned from Olson’s research is the simple fact that the growth of the American church is not keeping up with the robust growth of the American population. From 1990 to 2006 the population of the United States grew by 52 million people, which happens to be the same number of people who attend church on any given weekend. “In 1990, 52 million people attended worship each week – in 2006 the number remained unchanged. However, because of the sizable population growth, the percentage of Americans who attend church is declining.” [12]

While population growth and church attendance figures vary in different regions of the country the numbers are alarming regardless of location. Olson writes:

America’s population is growing at dissimilar rates throughout the nation. The Sunbelt states (the southernmost states from Virginia to Southern California) continue to grow most rapidly in population, while the Great Plains region and the Rust Belt (the industrial cities bordering the Great Lakes) have stagnant growth rates. The rate of population growth creates a major impact on whether the church can keep up with the increase in the population. In Arizona, for example, church attendance grew 7.3 percent from 2000 to 2005, robust growth by any standard. However, the population grew by 15.3 percent during that same period, producing a new attendance percentage decline of 7 percent. Typically, the faster a region’s rate of population growth, the more difficult task the church faces in keeping up with those increasing numbers. . . [However] in no single state did church attendance keep up with population growth! [13]

Paralleling Olsen’s finding on those who are moving away from religious affiliation the 2008 Religious Landscape Survey conducted and published by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life discovered that the fastest-growing segment of religious affiliation in the county is the nonaffiliated (16.1 percent of adults age eighteen and older). [14] Furthermore, those moving into the unaffiliated category outnumber those moving out by greater than a three to one margin. Throughout the previous two decades, this percentage of unaffiliated Americans had held between five and eight percent, meaning that the unaffiliated group has more than doubled in the past ten years. In the face of such startling statistics some researchers are predicting that if current trends continue, sixty percent of existing churches in America will disappear before the year 2050. [15]

Specifically focusing on Southern Baptist Churches, Ed Stetzer has written on the concerning trends of evangelistic impact in the vast majority of SBC churches in North America. [16] Stetzer cites statistics from the Leavell Center at New Orleans Baptist Seminary that “tell a disconcerting story – 89 percent of churches in the Convention are not effectively reaching the lost. According to the study, only 11 percent of the churches are experiencing healthy growth. [17] Stetzer goes on to describe the criteria used by the Leavell Center to measure church growth health as the following:

*  10 percent total membership growth over five years
*  at least one person baptized during the two years of the study
*  a member-to-baptism ratio of 35 or less in the final year of the study
*  for the final year of the study, the percentage of growth that was conversion growth must be at least 25 percent

Furthermore, when reporting on membership trends in SBC churches Stetzer contends that if current trends continue, over the next 50 years “projected membership of SBC churches would be 8.7 million in 2050, down from 16.2 million in 2008. . . . Using U.S. Census projected population figures, SBC membership could fall from a peak of 6 percent of the American population in the late 1980s to 2 percent in 2050.” [18] In The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, Christine Wicker offers a troubling summation of the wide variety of statistical data when she writes:

Evangelical Christianity in America is dying. The great evangelical movements of today are not a vanguard. They are a remnant, unraveling at every edge. Look at it any way you like: Conversions. Baptisms. Membership. Retention. Participation. Giving. Attendance. Religious literacy. Effect on the culture. All are down and dropping. [19]

———————————————————————————-

1 George R. Hunsberger, “Introduction,” in The Church Between Gospel & Culture, ed. George R. Hunsberger and Craig Van Gelder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), xiii.

2 Eddie Gibbs. Church Next: Quantum Changes In How We Do Ministry (Dover Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000), 66.

3 Mike Regele, Death of the Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 182.

4 See David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission(Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991), Craig A. Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective (Grand Rapids: Brazo, 2006), Rodney Clapp, A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1996), Mike Erre, Death by Church (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2009), Michael Frost, Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture(Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2006), Darrell Guder, Missional Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) and Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986)

5 Sally Morgenthaler, “Windows in Caves,” Fuller Theological Seminary News and Notes (Spring 2005), Retrieved July 23, 2009 fromhttp://churchconsultations.com/resources/faqs-resources-and-info/a/apostolic-movement-in-the-emerging-world/windows-in-caves-by-sally-mogenthaler/

6 http://www.theamericanchurch.org/

7 David Olson, The American Church in Crisis (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008)

8 See Stanley Presser and Linda Stinson, “Data Collection Mode and Social Desirability Bias in Self-Reported Religious Attendance,” American Sociological Review 63, no. 1 (February 1998): 137-45.

9 Kirk Hadaway and Penny L. Marler, “How Many Americans Attend Worship Each Week? An Alternative Approach to Measurement,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44, no. 3 (September 2005): 307-22.

10 Olson, 28.

11 The division into evangelical, mainline, and Roman Catholic denominations is based on the typology found in the Glenmary Religious Congregations and Membership Study. All African American denominations are considered evangelical in this typology. Eastern Orthodox churches are included in the total number but are too small in attendance to receive their own category distinction. The classifications can be found at the Association of Religious Data Archives at http://www.thearda.com/

12 Olson, 36.

13 Ibid., 37.

14 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, U.S. Religious Landscape Survey(Washington, D.C.: Pew Forum, 2008), Retrieved July 1, 2009 fromhttp://religions.pewforum.org/

15 Norman Shawchuck and Gustave Rath, Benchmarks of Quality in the Church(Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), 12.

16 Ed Stetzer, “The Missional Nature of the Church and the Future of Southern Baptist Convention Churches,” in The Mission of Today’s church: Baptist Leaders Look at Modern Faith Issues (Nashville: B&H, 2007), 73.

17 Ibid.

18 Rob Phillips, “Southern Baptists Face Further Decline Without Renewed Evangelism Emphasis,” Lifeway Research, published July, 2009, retrieved August 4, 2009 http://www.lifeway.com

19 Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008), ix.

Attractional (or Extractional) Church & Cultural Distance

February 21, 2011, by 1 comment

When I posted the two videos last week from the AND conference I wanted to include a shorter, more concise, Q conference presentation that Alan Hirsch did on the same topic of cultural distance. However, the link to the Q presentation had been eliminated. After contacting the Q site they have reposted the video, titled “Post-Christendom Mission.” You can now view the presentation here.

I find this conversation to be crucial on two fronts. First, it provides a conceptual tool to understand the cultural barriers that exist in a Post-Christendom context. Second, it provides a nuance of language (“extractional” rather than “attractional”) that adds clarity to the missional conversation. You can find a brief written explanation on the topic in the final chapter of Alan’s and Lance Ford’s new book Right Here, Right Now. Below is a excerpt from that chapter:

When we use the term attractional, it is an attempt to describe how we conceive of our church in relation to our culture. In other words, it describes our missionary stance or the expectations we have about the role that church plays in our contexts.

To grasp the importance of this, consider the idea of cultural distance. This is a tool that we can use to discern just how far a person or a people group is from a meaningful engagement with the gospel. In order to determine this, we have to see it on a scale that goes something like this:

m0            m1            m2            m3            m4

l——————l—————-l—————-l—————-l

Each numeral with the prefix m indicates one significant cultural barrier to the meaningful communication of the gospel. An obvious example of such a barrier would be language. All would agree that if you have to reach across a language barrier, you have got a problem and it’s going to take some time to communicate meaningfully. But others could be race, history, religion/worldview, culture, etc. The more boundaries one has to cross, the harder meaningful communication will be. So for instance, in Islamic contexts, the gospel has struggled to make any significant inroads because religion, race, and a whole lot of history make a meaningful engagement with the gospel very difficult indeed. But this is not limited to overseas missions; it is directly related to missionality right here, right now. . . .

And remember the obstinate little truth that it is we who are the “sent” people of God, and whatever that means to our identity as God’s people, it must also sometimes mean we must go to where the people are. If we fail to “go” to the people, then to encounter the gospel meaningfully they must “come.” This is the inbuilt assumption of the attractional church; and it requires that the nonbeliever do all the cross-cultural work to find Jesus, and not us! Make no mistake: for many people, coming to church involves some serious cross-cultural work for them. They have to be the missionaries!

Another very important fact must be remembered here. We know from old research that within three to five years of a person becoming a Christian, they will have no meaningful relationships with anyone outside the church. So, assuming that we bring them to our church, and we happen to do a good job at it and effectively socialize them into our church community, we are in effect snapping the natural, organic connections that they have with the host community they come from. This is very problematic because we know that the gospel travels along relational lines. Sever the relationships and we effectively stop the outward movement of the gospel into the broader culture. In other words, attractional evangelism in missionary contexts results in extracting them from their previous relationships and cultural context.

Alan Hirsch on Cultural Distance & the American Missionary Problem

February 14, 2011, by 3 comments

Below are two very helpful videos presentations by Alan Hirsch from last year’s AND conference at Granger Community Church. The bulk of the first video is spent on the very important topic of cultural distance and the problem it creates for meaningful communication of the gospel. Building upon the cultural distance discussion, he then proceeds to examine the “missionary problem”, of having the majority of American churches attempting to reach the same population segment, that is 95% of churches in America are trying to reach the same 40% of the population.

This leads to what he refers to as the “strategic problem”, which recognizes that 60% of the population has no interest in identifying with the contemporary church that is represented by 95% of the churches. The last several minutes of the presentation is spent in a time of Q&A. When viewing the first video you may want to skip over the the opening song, as well as the goofy skit on the tension between missional and attractional that precedes Alan’s talk.

The second video deals with the five-fold ministry of Ephesians 4. Alan argues that we will never create or sustain a movement until the church recaptures the role of the Apostle, Prophet and Evangelist.

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Missional: Does the Word Still Have Value?

October 13, 2010, by No comments yet

Below is another helpful video produced by Bill Kinnon that captures a discussion between David Fitch and Gary Nelson on the value of the word “missional.” I particularly like how Fitch highlights four themes that need to be maintained for the word to continue to be valuable. Those themes include: 1) Post Christendom as the defining cultural position of the church in the West, 2) The Incarnational Logic of the church, 3) The idea of Witness as the primary mode of communicating the gospel in a post Christendom context, and 4) The concept of Missio Dei.

Most readers of this blog are already aware of Fitch’s work, but might not be as familiar with Nelson. I became aware of Gary Nelson’s work in Canada a few months ago as I read his excellent book “Borderland Churches: A Congregation’s Introduction to Missional Living” upon the recommendation of Len Hjlmarson. You can also learn more about Nelson on Bill’s post here. Be sure to check out additional videos from Bill on the Missional Channel page on Vimeo.

Nelson/Fitch – Missional – Does the word still have value? from Bill Kinnon on Vimeo.

Simon Carey Holt & God Next Door

July 12, 2010, by No comments yet

The videos below include two segments of a conversation between Alan Roxburgh and Simon Carey Holt. The videos are a companion resource to an excellent workbook written by Roxburgh titled “Moving Back into the Neighborhood.” The MBiN workbook can be downloaded here. As mentioned before, I initially thought the $30 price tag for a 77 page download was a little pricey, however I have discovered the workbook to be worth the investment.

In the videos Holt shares from his book “God Next Door: Spirituality and Mission in the Neighborhood.” His emphasis is that the neighborhood is a place where God is, and it is a place where God calls us to participate with Him. In the first video, Holt shares a tragic story that played a significant role in his journey towards an emphasis on the local context.

In the second clip, Holt speaks to the importance of fighting against the neglect of our neighborhoods. Even though most people live in a series of relational networks that function outside of the neighborhood context, we must recognize that neighborhoods remain an important piece of the fabric of society. While watching the second video, I was reminded of my favorite Eugene Peterson quote: “The way of Jesus is always local and ordinary.”

The Importance of Understanding the Post-Christendom Shift

April 7, 2010, by 8 comments

I attended a half day conference yesterday that dealt with trends that were impacting the American church. It didn’t take long for me to become frustrated with the “list” of trends seeing that it did not include what I believe to be the most crucial “trend” to understand – that being the shift towards a post-Christian culture.

Without a clear understanding that the church in America no longer sits in the dominant seat of culture, the church is totally incapable of making the necessary missiological and ecclesiological changes. Below are two short videos of Michael Frost speaking to the importance of this topic.

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For further study of the post-Christendom shift I still find Stuart Murray’s Post-Christendom: Church and Mission in a Strange New World to be a great resource. For a brief (23 pages) overview of Murray’s work you might also check out this article: christendom-murray.

Darrell Guder: Image of Temple vs Tabernacle

March 27, 2010, by No comments yet

Over the past couple of years I have been attempting to read through every book from the Gospel and Our Culture Series written or edited by such authors as Darrell Guder, Craig Van Gelder, George Hunsberger, Lois Barrett and others. My two favorites have been the ever popular “Missional Church” and the lesser known “Confident Witness – Changing World.”

In additon to the book in this series I have also tried to find writings by each author that were pre - GOCN. One such book is “Be My Witnesses” by Darrell Guder. In chapter ten, titled “Correcting The Church’s Course” Guder offers an excellent contrast between what the church is and what it should be using the images of the Temple and the Tabernacle. He writes:

With regard to the church’s interpretation of its role in history, I suggest that the church has developed, from early on, a “temple” interpretation of itself, whereas the biblical image of the church is more the “tabernacle” of the Old Covenant. The difference between these two images is profound.

The temple is an unmovable building, a center for religious activity, even a headquarters for a religious elite or massive building housing an organization whose commitment is to its continuation as it is. Temples often are walled compounds, separated from the world without, architecturally symbolizing a chasm between the so-called sacred and the secular. Temples can be places in which religion functions as an arcane discipline, reserved for the initiates. They are built to last forever, to resist change, to maintain their form and activity in as pure a fashion as possible.

Tabernacles, on the other hand, are a unique expression of a people’s faith. The “tent-church” of the Old Covenant was not permanent but moved with the people whenever they followed God’s leading into new territory. The furnishings of the tabernacle, and the acts of worship and community that took place there, constantly focused the people upon their God, his actions on their behalf, his presence in their midst, and his will and direction for their future.

Israel symbolized and celebrated her faith in this tent-church. It carried both the history and the future hope of Israel’s faith within it, and stood as a constant reminder of her identity as God’s chosen people. At the same time, it was designed and equipped to be mobile, responsive to change, and to provide what the people needed spiritually as they continued their pilgrimage from bondage to the promised land. . . .

My contention is that the tabernacle is closer to the New Testament image of the church than is the temple. We have mentioned earlier that Peter refers to the Christian community as the diaspora, the aliens or pilgrims, when describing their situation in the world in his first epistle. The early church clearly had that sense about itself. Its first self-denomination was “the followers of the Way,” which conveys the sense of movement and pilgrimage that we find in Peter and in the tabernacle.

But very early in its history, the church began to adapt itself to the temple mentality. We see this in its architecture, once Christians began to build buildings or adapt other religious buildings to their use. Gradually, the accoutrements of temple worship crept into the church (we really cannot sort out how and when), so that within a few centuries we have altars, priestly orders, and many of the features of the temple-oriented religions that thrived in the Mediterranean world.

As the Christian church became more and more woven into the fabric of society and government in the Western world, its temple self-interpretation expanded and hardened. The church became the central institution in the typical town or village, symbolized still today by the church steeple that dominates the skylines of Europe and America.

The distinction between secular and sacred developed into a system according to which all of social life, even the practices of calendar keeping, was regulated. Rather than being understood as a pilgrim people, following God through history, the church was seen as a great unchangeable and permanent presence in the world, guaranteeing those central and sacred realities that the haphazard course of human history could not affect. In that position, the church exercised great power. But we must regard that power as a threat in many ways to the church’s obedience to its primary calling.

From Christendom to Post-Christendom

March 20, 2010, by No comments yet

One of the key elements of moving an existing congregation in a missional direction involves assisting the church in understanding cultural shifts. The most significant shift for the church to consider is the one from Christendom to Post-Christendom. Without a clear grasp of the significant missiological and ecclesiological changes that are necessary in a Post-Christendom context, a missional posture will be impossible to develop. Following are seven such shifts taken from the Anabaptist Network Newsletter:

From the centre to margins: in Christendom the Christian story and the churches were central, but in post-Christendom these are marginal.

From majority to minority: in Christendom Christians comprised the (often overwhelming) majority, but in post-Christendom we are a minority.

From settlers to sojourners: in Christendom Christians felt at home in a culture shaped by their story, but in post-Christendom we are aliens, exiles and pilgrims in a culture where we no longer feel at home.

From privilege to plurality: in Christendom Christians enjoyed many privileges, but in post-Christendom we are one community among many in a plural society.

From control to witness: in Christendom churches could exert control over society, but in post-Christendom we exercise influence only through witnessing to our story and its implications.

From maintenance to mission: in Christendom the emphasis was on maintaining a supposedly Christian status quo, but in post-Christendom it is on mission within a contested environment.

From institution to movement: in Christendom churches operated mainly in institutional mode, but in post-Christendom we must become again a Christian movement.