Missional

Mark Driscoll - Emergent No

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(This post has been adjusted out of respect for Carla at E-No)  Carla over at Emergent No has emailed Mark Driscoll to ask a few questions.  He didn't really respond to the questions because he's busy, but he did say that some great things are on the way...

I've got a book coming out with Zondervan on thehistory of our church and our involvement in the emerging church, finishing a counterpoints type of book for Zondervan on emerging church theology with Dan Kimball, Karen Ward, Doug Pagitt, John Burke and myself that will hit the atonement, trinity, and scripture to be edited by Robert Webber. I have also compiled a team of very solid evangelical theologians who are largely younger for a new network that will be launching a web site with blogs, articles, mp3s, podcasting, national theology conferences across the country, and a line of theologically oriented books for missionally minded emerging leaders. So, I hope to make a contribution to the broader church in a big way very soon. You are free to post any of this you like on your site.

Man, I'm pumped.  Good stuff is on the way. 

Read the whole E-No post.

Residential SUV's

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Erich Bridges offers some helpful reminders of why bigger houses aren't always "better" in today's Baptist Press article.

Once you buy or build it, of course, you've gotto fill it with stuff, lest you occupy an empty castle -- and you'll need to park a nicer ride in the garage. Many evangelical Christians who can afford it (and some who can't) seem to be following this trend like sheep.

Alan Hirsch Podcasts

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Alan Hirsch, co-author of The Shaping of Things to Come (with Michael Frost) and National Director of Forge in Australia, has agreed to do some podcast blogging through interviews with Stephen Said. 

You can listen to the first podcast here or go to Stephen's site and access it there.  Very helpful, especially when thinking about missional-incarnational shifts needed in the SBC.  We are in a similar context as Forge is in Australia, as best I can tell, and need to hear his ideas.

By the way, Alan told me recently that he has a new book coming out in the spring (Brazos).  It is about the "missional DNA" in Jesus movements in history and translating those things to our 21st century context.

On Drawing Lines in the EC

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Okay, let me openly say that I don't get it.  And things are changing fast with this situation, so let's think this through.

Frost and Hirsch of Forge have an internal paper that basically says, as far as I can tell, that the emerging church contains various groups and is very diverse.  They want to make clear that what Carson is dealing with in his book is not what they are dealing with in Australia.  They want to make it clear that they are more conservative and more strategic in their pursuit of church planting (CPM's).  I get it so far, but Emergent seems very uncomfortable with drawing lines inside the emerging church and have very aggressively/defensively told everyone to "stop it."

My question is, What's wrong with drawing lines inside the emerging church?

I have great respect for Brian McLaren, and things he has written (I've read a few) have helped me realize that people in the ec are asking the same questions as I have for the last couple of years.  I've realized others see the same problem issues in evangelicalism as I have.  It's connected me to a larger crowd and helped me be challenged beyond accepting what I've been told "just because."  I think there are some in evangelicalism who need to be confronted by his writings and realize where we are failing.  In that sense I am very sympathetic to the emerging church and McLaren.  He's one of those guys who challenges you by offending you.

But I also realize that McLaren and others are asking some questions that I'm not asking.  They are doubting some things I'm not doubting.  And I don't get that from Carson's book, but from my own reading and understanding of him.  So because of that, I think it's helpful and even necessary for people inside the ec to say that we don't agree with all that is being said inside the ec.  I think there is a need to draw some lines, even when we want to remain sympathetic to the ec as a whole.  Is that considered unacceptable?

I think Frost and Hirsch and Forge have acted in wisdom.  To go after them for drawing lines is, I think, to deny them the goal of being missional.  To be missional means to be incarnational in your context and culture, to understand local needs and issues and deal with them as the context dictates.  Incarnational ministry is not only incarnational to the world, but also to the Christians around us.  And if being incarnational in Australia means drawing a few lines inside the emerging church to show that Forge is different than Brian McLaren though they are all a part of the same conversation, so be it.  I think being incarnational in the U.S. may mean that for many of us too.

That seems to make a lot of sense to me, and it seems heavy-handed for Emergent to say that drawing lines for the sake of incarnational ministry (while still holding to a unity of faith and even of ec values) isn't good enough. 

Am I all wet or what?

Missional and Emergent

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Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, authors of The Shaping of Things to Come (I'm through some of it, good stuff) and leaders of a missional training organization in Australia called Forge, have come out with a paper (delinked, see updates below) responding to D.A. Carson's Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church.

I think this is a very helpful document.  It makes clear some lines between ec/Emergent stuff and missional.  I think I will have more to say about this at a later time. 

(HT: Andrew Jones- TSK and Andrew Hamilton, also read the comments on both as Tony Jones, National Coordinator of Emergent chimes in with an unfavorable reading)

UPDATE 7.21.05: Darryl over at Dash House indexes thoughts from Jordon Cooper, Alan Hirsch, and Tony Jones.

UPDATE 7.22.05: Andrew Hamilton has delinked the article and requested others do so while Forge rethinks what was said.   Curious.  My link is no longer available at this request.

Missional Book Lust

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A lot of people read. Harry Potter books don't sell at 250,000 an hour for nothing.  The growth of the publishing industry and the rate at which books are sold in general is pretty astonishing.

Similarly, the popularity of book reading groups is hard to miss.  They are all over the TV.  Oprah made the idea freakishly common, then the Today Show added one as did Good Morning America.  You read the book on your own and then discuss them with local groups and on the internet.

Book reading groups are also in nearly every city and neighborhood in the country.  You can look for them meeting in your local bookstore, public library, or coffee shop, and they are advertised in many of these places while meeting in another location, like someone's home.

This has led some organizations to start aiding these groups because it helps their business.  For example, Barnes & Noble has a book club section of their website that offers help on starting reading groups at B&N stores and learning how to run a reading group.

And all of this tells me a couple of things.  I'm restraining myself to these two ideas, but I hope you will add to them.

First, people are hungry for more than just reading.  They want some sort of community and desire to share common experience.  We were built for community as the special creation of the God in triune community.  It's no wonder people are finding it through books which draw us into experiences that often ring true to our own and desires we were made to desire.  I believe C.S. Lewis said, "We read to know we are not alone."  Reading groups push that experience beyond books themselves and on to the very communities in which we live.  In that sense, books not only help us know we are not alone, but connect us to people who share life and experience with us.  Reading can create community.

Second, books and reading groups provide us with a great way to get to know our neighbors.  To read and meet with a group can be a fantastic part of missional living.  Often we find it difficult to start gospel conversations because we don't know people very well, or because our conversations are rather superficial.  But reading groups are already dealing with issues of life and death, truth and fiction, myth and reality, love and hate, revenge and forgiveness, and so on.  We get think and talk with those who need Christ about the deepest of emotions and most difficult life questions because books tell us stories about ourselves.

If Christians will get out of our foxholes (where we are shooting at the culture) maybe we will be able to build relationships with people in our communities who love to read.  We need to find where people meet and join with them. 

A word of caution.  We also need to be careful not to find every slightly open door and start vomiting Jesus all over them so that they will hope we don't show up the next month.  We need to respect the group time, share honestly about the book which should naturally lead us to speak in redeeming ways, build relationships that grow outside the boundaries of the group and will lead to much more than book lust.

We also need to start creating reading groups of our own.  I don't mean Left Behind groups where we try to pawn off our "Break Glass In Case of Rapture" post-rapture kits.  I don't mean groups of just Christians.  I mean start groups reading and meeting with people around us.  Start one on your street, at your coffee shop, or wherever makes sense for you and your community.

How else can we make reading a part of missional living?

Missional Mann

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Terry Mann is doing some great blogging on missional living in the suburbs.  Go read him on this: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7.

From Part 1...

A good pastor friend of mine has a shirt that reads, “Don’t go to church” on the front. The back reads, “Be the church.” That is being missional.

From Part 2...

Most of the reading you do on the missional church has a distinctively urban flavor. But that is not the only place where missional should come into play is it?

From Part 3...

A major “third place” in our setting is youth sport’s leagues. They are absolutely huge....Why should I not offer to coach a team? I have no children of that age, but it would still allow me to give back to the community without asking for anything. Therefore I became the coach of a girl’s under ten soccer team....One of “my girls” was injured at home one day. When her mom informed me of the injury, I told her that I would pray for her. I later found out that that simple statement was HUGE for that girl. They knew I was a pastor, although I never did flaunt it, so she asked her mother if she thought I really would pray for her. Her mom said, “yes,” and well . . . I did. In so doing a relational connection was built. I may or may not ever see the fruit of that, but I am convinced it will bear fruit. After all, I am not the only instrument God has at work in this equation.

McKnight on "Missional"

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Scot McKnight continues his good blogging with a post on being missional.

...it becomes clear that the purpose of the Church is not just a gatheringof Christians on Sunday "to be fed" and "to be warmed" and "to be blessed" but it is instead a time to worship and a time to plan how the community can participate in the work of God in its local neighborhood during the next week.

Local Community

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Lilian Calles Barger, author of Eve's Revenge, on Mars Hill Audio Journal 63...

When I say local church or local community, I mean local.  Local is not getting in the car once a week to drive 15 miles across town to a megachurch that's got 5,000 or 6,000 people where you spend 2 hours there and go home.  That is not a community, that is an association.

When I say "community," and I'm talking about "local community," I'm talking within a very small geographic space, because we are people that live in a small geographic space.  No matter how much we talk about going global, we live within a few square miles of where we live.  I think it's sad that we have gotten away from the neighborhood church, that people are now driving miles to go to a huge church for 2 hours.

The only way the church is going to be a redeeming community that is affective in the lives of people is when we get back to a very local model: smaller churches closer to where people live and work.  That way we can integrate all of life.

Missional Church: Suburbia

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Suburbia_2_450_100_mis

Pre-retirement suburbanites tend to get the city newspaper.  It has better news and sports.  Retired suburbanites tend to get the local, suburban or city paper.  It has obituaries of people they know.

Whatever your preference of newspaper, missional suburbanites should always get the local paper.  It has local events, when and where bands play, news on book clubs, and any number of things that provide opportunities to jump into the culture and enjoy and love and serve.

Rabid Dogs for Evangelism

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Danny Akin, President of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina (who once had an extended conversation with me while we peed in neighboring urinals in an SBTS bathroom, the topic was his seminary ethics class with Paige Patterson), is rightfully bemoaning the news that the stats show the conservative resurgence of the SBC has not made us more evangelistic. 

Unfortunately, his answer to the problem will never fix anything.  According to the ABP article on a talk from Akin, "In light of the downward evangelism trends, Akin urged North Carolina Baptists to become 'rabid dogs for evangelism' and defend 'the exclusivity of the gospel,' which contends that salvation comes only through Jesus."

While on the surface these things seem fine and all, I'm afraid it's just more of the same.  Don't you think the SBC President's bus ride for the cause of gaining like a zillion new baptisms should do the trick?  Maybe we need more SBC leaders to take more tours of the country in more unique vehicles.  Like Mohler in a new H3 looking for "Deeper Theology by 2133" and Akin on a train with his campaign "Riding Along Till Marriages are Strong." 

Sorry, I'm just a little frustrated.  Akin's a great bathroom conversationalist, a passionate guy, and a man of God.  But once the "rabid dogs" line doesn't really make a difference (like all the other lines before it) someone will just think of another, like "Let's crap the truth like a diarrhetic goose!"  You get the picture.

Hey SBC'rs!  How about this.  Maybe we need to be more missional.  Maybe our problem isn't that we should say the gospel more (and more like sick dogs), but that we should say it better.  Not with better words, but in better ways, like people and families and churches that are incarnated in the culture.  Healing and suffering and loving speaks!  We have too long divorced the spoken gospel from the lived gospel in the SBC.  That's the real key to fixing our statistical nightmare.  And that means we should just admit our cute sayings and bolder thrusts and clever tricks and canned evangelism just isn't good enough and actually encourage our people to live out the gospel.  We need to live redemptively, missionally, incarnationally.

Maybe we need more thoroughly missional people who live and breathe and eat the gospel.  Maybe we need more people joining book clubs or bowling leagues or knitting classes and building relationships there that will lead to helping and serving and loving and redeeming.

Missional Church: Storytelling & Storyliving

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Another messy post full of new thoughts...

The theme of Story and storytelling colors so much of the emerging church. I think the missional church will focus on Story. The Bible isn't a random set of stand alone texts, but is essentially the Story of redemption, the Story of God, the Story of the Son of God, the Story of sin and salvation. However we say it, it is Story. And much of what God communicates to us is in the form of Story. Whether it's the parables of Jesus, or much of Old Testament narrative, or the early church in Acts, we get a lot of what God wants us to know from the Story, not just the "bullet points of faith."

So the missional church should be a storytelling community, where we take God's Story and retell it.

But one of the things I've noticed in the books by some in the EC is that when Story or storytelling is explained, it's often in the context of finding creative ways to tell the Story through experience. But this isn't typically explained as the personal experience of living it. It is the experience of imitating it. So we may create the retelling of a healing story of Jesus by having some people be the blind and others the crippled, and one is Jesus. Or we may use some sort of art to experience the Story.

I love art, and I do think it's an important part of life and God's community. I'm not saying it doesn't have an important place. But I wonder if there is an overemphasis on the creativity that aids the experience of the Story. I wonder if the missional church wouldn't be better served through the plain telling of the Story with exhortations to live it, and let the Holy Spirit drive it home as we do it. In other words, we could blindfold ourselves to see how it feels to be healed of blindness. Or we could serve a blind person an evening a week. It's the difference between faking experience of a story and storyliving.

We already have a canvas for experiencing Story, our own bodies and families and churches and community. We can act out a play about something Jesus did, but isn't it better to act it out in our community by living as Jesus lived? Won't that make the spoken story far more real for us and those around us?

I think the EC is spending a lot of time trying to think of creative ways to tell and experience spoken messages (or experience them without speaking). There's a lot of good in that. But the natural, normal way to experience the message is to live it and have it lived on you by others. That's missional, that's the truest art...to become the canvas of suffering and love and forgiveness for a world that needs to hear/see the gospel.

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Missional Church: Post 1, Post 2

Church and Coffee

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My next door neighbor in our apartment complex in seminary (Louisville, KY - SBTS) was a laid-back, no sugar eating guy who played a guitar and a ukulele, and had a bunch of daughters with hurt-your-eyes blond hair.  Matthew, near the end of seminary, really got passionate about theology, finally started buying some books, and started to feel the pull to plant a church in old Louisville.

Matt_huestedAt first I was skeptical, but he kept talking about it.  That was a few years back.  Today, Matthew is pastoring a missional church called Ekklesia and running an independent coffeehouse called Sunergos Coffee.

The longer I pastor, the more I think the way forward in the missional church is by getting into and investing in the community through "great good places" or "third places."

I have a feeling the topic of "third places" will come up again soon.

Missional Church: Driscoll & Emerging

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Mark_driscollA curious thing to post, but since I think it helps us come to a definition of the conversation/movement, I'll dive in.

I have thought for some time that some people are self-titled "emerging," others call themselves "emerging," and some are "emerging" though they don't care, or don't know it, or don't want to admit it.  Guys like Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller I put somewhere in that last category.

But Driscoll has been quoted as saying,

Let me agree that much of the church today is incredibly frustrating. Personally, when I hear so many young guys denying substitutionary atonement and the like after drinking from the emerging church toilet I turn green and my clothes don't fit. However, let me say though that we need to stay on mission.

Does this mean he is trying to distance himself from the emerging church and say he isn't a part of it, or that he is trying to pull the emerging church in his direction by distancing himself from parts of it (like notable authors), or something else?

Driscoll continues,

Sure, some pastors and churches are angry that I'm not putting my weight behind their mission but in the end...I won't stand before them for judgment and they won't stand before me, so I just let it go and keep pushing ahead until I see Jesus and he can separate sheep and goats and hand out rewards to the faithful. In the meantime, I refuse to get off my ladder but keep my sword close by and if a wolf shows up in my flock then I draw my sword but not until then.

While Driscoll seems to be doing much to not even use the word "emerging," it doesn't appear to me that he is abandoning the emerging church as worthless.  He is trying to be faithful in his context to lead his church and influence The Church in whatever way God gives him opportunity.  As he says...

What I'm finding is that if I stay on my mission eventually a platform gets big enough that you kind of just have permission to do your thing and others respect you even if they don't like you.

So it seems to me that Driscoll is "emerging" in the generic sense that he is missional to the postmodern (so to speak) culture, and in the sense that he still desires to influence (in some way) the conversation.  Whether he means to or not, there is no doubt he has influence in the emerging church conversation.  But he obviously isn't "emerging" in the sense that he doesn't care to push or carry the papers of a movement.

Mark, if someone points this out to you, I'd love you to set the record straight.

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Read Missional Church Part 1