Counter-cultural

In case you thought that retirement had settled upon me in such a way as to make me a bit like Rip Van Winkle, asleep while the world passes by, let me assure that I've actually been busy enough this week to keep me going most of the time. Okay, occasional rests have been the order of the day, and walks with the dog, but in general I'm still keeping an eye on what's going on.

Hence, links to a couple of blog posts. The ubiquitous David Fitch wrote one, and is featured in the other. Don't let that put you off; to me he speaks some pretty good sense, if we're prepared to listen.

The first is Fitch's own, a post on the kind of leadership needed for the postmodern world. It looks pretty much like the servant leadership Jesus espoused - so that's a good thing (!)

The second comes from another old favourite on this blog, Len Hjalmarson. In this one he quotes Fitch a good deal as he draws up a list of ways to 'instill missional habits.'

This post is as countercultural (at least counter church-cultural) as the first. Both worth chewing over while you're having your morning cuppa.

It may seem obvious, but...

Mission is so easy if only....

Len Hjalmarson has written in his latest post about being neighbours....there's more to the post here.

In January of 2009 a group of pastors gathered to think and dream about what it would look like for the churches in their area to come together to serve the community. They asked the mayor to join them and talk about his dream for the city. They also asked him to talk about hindrances to that dream coming true.
He came with a list of pervasive issues and problems: at-risk kids; elderly shut-ins; decaying housing; hunger and homelessness. Before he started speaking he shared this: “it occurred to me that what our city really needs are good neighbours. The majority of the issues we face would be eliminated or drastically reduced if we could just become a community of people who are great neighbours.”
The pastors left convicted. Here they were asking the major what areas of the city were most in need, and he was telling them that the city could be transformed if Christians would simply live out the second half of the Great Commandment.
The plan they forged is simple — a teaching series on the art of neighbouring. They found that people don’t build relationships with their neighbours because,

1) they don’t see the value in it,
2) lack of time, and
3) lack of trust.

So they came up with this teaching series for this group of churches:
Week 1. taking Jesus seriously – what if Jesus really meant we should love our neighbors?
Week 2. Time: creating space to build relationships with neighbors
Week 3. Trust – embracing the messiness of relationships
They are then equipping their people to actually enter their neighbourhoods and live in them and build relationships.

Len also mentions an essay written by Todd Hiestand, which has apparently been unavailable for a while (it was written in 2007). It's called The Missional Church in Suburbia, and appears on Todd's site. It looks at mission in the urban society, and takes some similar approaches to those of the Australian, Simon Carey Holt.

V.I.M.

Len Hjalmarson's latest post summarizes an article written by Dallas Willard in which he puts forward an approach to spiritual growth that's worth thinking about. It's not a 'method'; however the three stages are all necessary for any kind of change or learning, as Hjalmarson shows.

Vision – Intention – Means – this is the pattern that Dallas Willard uses to talk about a framework for spiritual growth. He defends this frame very well and it's a convincing bit of work. I discovered on the weekend that he has a lengthy article online that pulls much of the core material from his book “Renovation of the Heart.”

Perhaps these things don’t interest you greatly – one more system to try to work through. But consider for a moment that this same framework can be applied to the formational agenda of a faith community. Do you know where you are going? Do you understand the working of the system you are attempting to change? Are you ready to commit to going there? Will all your key leaders commit? Do you have a means worked out, step by step, to practically move forward?

Hjalmarson goes on to give some good examples of how Willard's framework works out in ordinary matters, like learning a language, or overcoming addiction.

Discipleship + Salvation

The sad reality of discipleship in our time is that it is divorced from mission. Discipleship is often divorced from mission because it is divorced from the awareness of who God is and what it means to claim that Jesus is the Christ — the living Messiah of God. Discipleship grows out of the awareness that salvation begins a process of submitting our lives to the Lordship of Christ. When this process does not follow the event of salvation, then we fail to follow Jesus in life.

This comes from a blog post written by the prolific Len Hjalmarson, in which he says that the Gospel isn't just 'Jesus saves' but also 'Jesus is Lord.'

He also notes:
Our practice of discipleship is often lacking because we have separated a personal event from a public process. But discipleship is never a private process; if it was a private process the early Christians would not have been martyrs.

The Goodness of Stuff

Circuitously, (that is, via three interlinking paths) found this video this morning. Doug Wilson, minister at Christ Church, Moscow, Idaho, talks with good humour on the way in which we get just a little bit gnostic at Christmas. Only two and a half minutes long, so it won't take up much of your precious spiritual time....

Christmas and falling into sin from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

While it relates to Christmas specifically, the point Wilson is making is worth considering beyond that particular feast. You might also like to make a note of this from Len Hjalmarson: A couple years back I discovered William Cavanaugh and his lucid thinking. Cavanaugh’s book Being Consumed helps us recover the meaning of the Incarnation = God made flesh.

Hindrance....

Len Hjalmarson notes six out of seven ways in which growth and expansion in church life can be inhibited. He's taken these from Roland Allen's 1920s book, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church, and the causes that hinder it.

1. when the church is dependent on paid leadership;

2. when the spread of the gospel is controlled out of fear of error, and both error and godly zeal are suppressed;

3.when it is believed that the church is to be founded , educated, equipped, and established in the doctrine, ethics and organization before it is to expand;

4. when emerging leaders are restricted from ministering until they are fully trained and so learn the lesson of inactivity and dependency;

5. when conversion is seen as the result of clever argument rather than the power of Christ;

6. when professional clergy control the ministry and discourage the spontaneous zeal of non-professionals. They may protect the new believers from charlatans (Acts 8:9-24) but they also block unconventional leaders like Peter the fisherman.

Allen's views are counter-cultural to the approach still taken by most seminaries and denominations. In other words, this prophetic voice is still not getting through to the majority of church organisations, or, if it's making any impact, it's v....e....r....y slow.

However, in the emerging church scene, this approach is certainly more common.

And another view of Church

The following is a quote from a blog which quotes another blog. The writer is David Fitch, and this is part of a post

It is stunning to me how many many people I encounter in a month who cannot even acquire even a modicum of mind space cleared of societal clutter to meet God. We live in a society where God is being organized out of our life experience (and this is most certainly true of our young people). If we don’t have the means to discipline our lives from societal noise, real living with God, listening and responding to his voice is lost from our horizon. God becomes an item to believe, an obligation to take care alongside the many others. And then, and I am dead serious here, other demons take over our lives. Our loneliness/our emptiness becomes filled by multivarious forms of fake pornographic substitutes. Demons take over. I see it everywhere.

In the midst of this, sometimes the best place (the only place) I can point people to is the gathering on Sunday morning. Go to the gathering. Not to get pumped up and inspired. Not to take some notes on the three things you can do to improve your Christian life. NO! Go to the gathering to shut down from all the noise..

Solitude

What is the single ingredient in the life of leaders that has the most potential to renew their work and enrich their character?

Solitude.

So says Len Hjalmarson. He adds that solitude is the ingredient most missing from the lives of active leaders, and a practice that would sustain most leaders in their life journey.

"Lately I’ve been thinking about the transforming power of solitude. I have had a great deal of experience with solitude over the last five years, and it has been wonderful, and at times challenging. But overall, solitude is a powerful means to spiritual growth and toward learning."

He intends writing more deeply on the subject over the next weeks, and is inviting people to offer their own thoughts on the topic. A conversation worth joining in on.

Photo from northbaywander's collection on Flickr.com

Get thyself a spiritual director!

Len Hjalmarson writes: If you are in paid ministry, or if you are overseeing a group of people and have oversight of their souls (you may be a CEO but your heart is pastoral), find a spiritual director. For your sake, for the sake of your family, for the good of the kingdom – do it.

He goes on to quote Henri Nouwen, (writing in Reaching Out):

“At least part of the reason for this lack .. is that we ourselves do not appeal to our fellow human beings in such a way as to invite them to become our spiritual leaders. If there were no students constantly asking for good teachers, there would be no good teachers. The same is true for spiritual guides. There are many men and women with great spiritual sensitivity whose talents remain dormant because we do not make an appeal to them. Many would, in fact, become wise and holy for our sake if we would invite them to assist us in our search for the prayer of our heart.

“A spiritual director does not need to be more intelligent or more experienced than we are. If is important that he or she accepts our invitation to lead us closer to God and enters with us into the scriptures and into the silence where God speaks to both of us… Often we will discover that those who we ask for help will indeed receive the gift to help us and grow with us toward prayer.” (p 98)

Hero to Host

Two quotes from Len Hjarmalson’s article on leadership - Post Modern Leadership: From Hero to  Host - in a recent edition of Next-Wave: 

Margaret Wheatley said “We need to move from the leader as hero, to the leader as host. Can we be as welcoming, congenial, and invitational to the people who work with us as we would be if they were our guests at a party? Can we think of the leader as a convener of people? [We need] a fundamental and unshakeable faith in people. You can’t turn over power to people you don’t trust. It just doesn’t happen.”

Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic.” And Henri Nouwen reminds us, The temptation of power is greatest when intimacy is a threat. Much Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love.

The rest of the article has some very good things to say about individuals and community, gentle and vulnerable leadership.

If you don't listen, you can't hear and if you can't hear, you cannot know.

In a kind of serendipitous morning, three posts arrived from various blogs I keep in touch with that all seemed to link together.   Maybe it's not so serendipitous given that all the writers are mission-minded in one way or another....


David Fitch wrote 
Neo-Reformed Theology is built on the same logic as evangelical theology. In fact this is also the same logic as the protestant mainline theology and for that matter the Emergent theologies. They all rely on the cultural foundations of the West and in particular the Enlightenment. And, for me, this means all of these movements will eventually fail to engage the new and changing cultures of Post-Christendom in the West for the gospel, they will fail at resisting the consumerist forces of modern American society, they will fail at transformational engagement (eventually). They will all end up repeating the fate of evangelicalism – i.e. being successful at harvesting those who are already in some way culturally inclined towards Christianity but not capable of inhabiting the new post Christendom cultures of the West for the gospel. This is why we need a third way!!

Len Hjalmarson began his post in this way:
In The Secret Message of Jesus (2006), McLaren devotes an entire chapter to contextualizing the concepts of the kingdom of God for the current generation.
Len's shorter post mostly offers a variety of ways of rethinking the way we view the kingdom, and by connection, God's mission. 

Paul Fromont, on Prodigal Kiwi(s) quotes another writer - Barry Taylor - who doesn't at first seem to be writing about mission...but is - note what he says about listening....

“…On the final day [of a two-week intensive class on Theology and Popular Music] I attempted to sketch out something of a beginning posture for the initiation of a conversation between these two elements. Posture, being the operative word, because for me, any act of theology requires a posture, an attitude, from which it springs, and for me, this is first and foremost, listening - to the other - if you don't listen, you can't hear and if you can't hear, you cannot know. All too often, in my experience, people begin with a pre-formed schema, which is then imposed over whatever it might be, and then, what fits is accepted and the bits around the edges are cut-off--negated etc. A bit of a broad dismissal of the theological enterprise I know, but I use that analogy simply to say that my approach is a bit different--I am interested in the surprising intersections that arise because of the rupture and disconnect as well as the congruity and synchronicity between various elements…”

 ...if you don't listen, you can't hear and if you can't hear, you cannot know. 

Clusters...hubs

Len Hjalmarson writes in a recent blog post:

One of the very large and looming questions we hear from churches is how to transition from inward and program oriented to outward in mission. As Mike Breen and Bob Hopkins point out so ably in “Clusters,” the question is not adding a new program, or shifting deck chairs, but a call for a shift in the very culture of the community. The most profound shift is from control to accountability: away from the centralization of ministry and the cult of leadership.

Our church has begun to work with these too, calling them 'hubs.' However, ours have begun for a somewhat different purpose. Being missional in our church wasn't so much our problem as building community, and this is what the hubs focus on. They also include mission, but for the moment that's a not the highest priority. Clusters or hubs usually contain up to fifty people, including children.

Clusters is a book that came out in 2008. It's subtitled Creative Mid-sized Missional Communities. Being a British publication it doesn't seem to have made the impact that an American title might have. However, you can read about Breen, St Thomas' Church in Sheffield, and more, at the St Thomas' site. The people at St Thomas have gone through several transitions, and detail them in the story. Their use of the word 'clusters' is explained on this page too.

Christ and Mission

Christology is not a sufficient foundation for mission. With Jesus alone, we see mission, but not the engaged body; love, but no community, so says Len Hjalmarson in his latest Next Reformation post.

Is he right? He certainly gives plenty of good reasons why he should be right, and brings in various heavyweights such as David Bosch, Lesslie Newbigin, David Fitch, and Charles Ringma to back him up.

Hjalmarson isn't in any way denigrating Christ - he's expanding the limited picture of mission that many of us have, one that focuses all the attention on the minister and makes him the sole 'expert' in ministry/mission; that makes individual ethics more important than communal transformation; that sees a Jesus and Me approach to the Christian life as the norm.

Check out his post for his full argument.

Intentional missional clusters

Len Hjalmarson on the NextReformation blog writes:

Friends in Edmonton are pioneering a new model for planting missional communities. They realized that in most communities in western Canada about one-third have some Christian experience, and between 5 and 10% are believers who are travelling some miles to participate in a church. Their idea: bring the church into the neighbourhood and leverage the existing relational networks. Invite the small number who are already in place to actually become the church in their neighbourhood, and invite those who have some history of neglected commitment to go on a journey in discipleship. They don’t ask those who are driving to “church” to stop driving away on Sunday, but rather to start living on mission where they are.

What is growing up are IMCs.. intentional missional clusters … and out of this are growing
neighbourhood churches: not the building and programs, but people loving God, loving their neighbours and transforming their world (Mark 12).The most surprising part.. the established churches that may lose members over this are not upset but energized, and some are asking for training to reconnect with their own neighbourhoods.

The post continues with some paragraphs from Australian Simon Carey Holt, who notes:
“the Incarnation is about much more than God revealed in human experience, but God revealed and encountered in place—and in the most domestic of places one can imagine.” He goes on to list three points about place and theology. [The three points appear to come out of Holt's book, God Next Door: Spirituality and mission in the neighbourhood]

Missional Church

Len Hjalmarson, who runs the Next Reformation blog (and writes for various other places, such as Allelon and Next Wave online magazine) beings his latest post, Missional Church, in this way:

Over the past two years, two convictions have been growing for me. First, that apart from a Trinitarian mooring, our attempt to rebuild a whole gospel and a foundation for mission will go astray. Second, the church is an alternative (kingdom) culture, founded on a new covenant. Frankly, these points have become so critical in my understanding of God’s kingdom purpose as storied in the Old and New Testaments that I can’t imagine a new reformation unless we take them seriously.

I admit that “Trinity” is not an easy theological concept, and also that the particular formulation rising from Chalcedon in 451 needs reinterpretation — but Triune is the nature of God and is reflected in our humanity. A right vision of God roots a right vision of humanity, and apart from that right vision we won’t get mission right either. The heart of God’s mission is in creating a new humanity.