What We Don't Understand

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Susan Srigley, author of Flannery O'Connor's Sacramental Art, in Mars Hill Audio Journal 73 quotes Flannery O'Connor in Mystery and Manners.  This is from audio, so punctuation may not be exact.

If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself.  His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward towards the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted.  Such a writer will be interested in what we don't understand rather than what we do.

Mere Moore Comments

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The Touchstone Magazine weblog, Mere Comments, first linked to my blog back in early March.  That's when I really started keeping up with their blog as well.  Then they linked to my post responding to an article by Russ Moore later in March.  Russ is a theologian at SBTS.

Now Russ Moore is one of the bloggers at Mere Comments.  I think that significantly raises the stock of the blog.  One of his first posts discusses a book on "manly dominion."  Don't miss the last line.

Nailing Jello w/o a Hammer

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There's nothing like a poorly written, poorly researched article on the Emerging Church to wake me up in the morning.  (Yeah it's almost noon, but I was watching Episode III at midnight).

I'm all for good critique of the EC, but this isn't it.  "McLaren" only has one "c," by the way.  And if one more person says "trying to define the Emerging Church is like trying to nail jello to a wall," I'm gonna scream.  Find a new word picture, please!  If there is anything that everyone should learn from the EC it's that creativity (instead of imitation) is a good thing.

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

Defense or Defensive

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I think apologetics is a very interesting issue for emerging generations.  I am a regular visitor to and reader of a few apologetics websites and have read much on the topic in the last 10 years.  And lately I've been starting to wonder if what many call "a defense" of the faith has really become about being "defensive" about the faith. 

In other words, has apologetics turned from being the work of defending the faith against error to being about feeling defensive about our position in the culture?

Less Predictable Popcorn

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Kettle_cornIn the active downtown of Woodstock, Illinois (where I pastor) they hold Fair Diddley every year.  It's basically a craft fair where people set up similar sized booths and sell things they make with TLC that are remarkably better than something at WalMart or World Market.  It's really a small collection of amazing and beautiful things alongside some of the typical craft fair cheese like wooden wall hangings that say "Kiss the Cook."

A staple of this craft fair (and most others around the country) is the kettle corn booth.  It boasted a line of no less than 10-12 people for hours.  You could watch them pour in the popcorn and sugar and salt and stir it with an imitation boat paddle.  We finally made our way into the line and shelled out six bucks for a bag of just made, still warm kettle corn.

I tried to pinpoint the reason that kettle corn is so beloved.  Why not buttered or something else?  My conclusion?  Kettle corn is the less predictable popcorn.  One bite is sweet, the next is salty, and the next is almost completely without added flavor.  Every bite is a surprise, and that makes it fun to eat.  I think I'll go grab some now.

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.

Incarnation and Social Fabric

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An incarnational mode creates a church that is a dynamic set of relationships, friendships, and acquaintances.  It enhances and "flavors" the host community's living social fabric rather than disaffirming it.  It thus creates a medium of living relationships through which the gospel can travel.  It emphasizes the importance of a group of Christians infiltrating a community, like salt and light, to make those creative connections with people where God-talk and shared experience allow for real cross-cultural Christian mission to take place.

Frost and Hirsch in The Shaping of Things to Come, p. 42

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

Kevin Cawley Doesn't Suck

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Cawley_2_cropCawleyblog is a great place.  I'm posting this to thank Kevin for his excellent posts, because he has become a personal friend, and because he is moving away and I want to keep the pressure on him to keep up the excellent blogging.  Plus, as of last check, he doesn't have nearly enough Bloglines subscribers per the quality of his work.  The inhumanity of it all.

I want to get the word out.  Here are some examples of Kevin's above average service...

Biblical Principles for Engaging Culture.
The Missional Church: A Beginning Reader's Guide
The Missional Church
Sam Storms' Appeal to Pastors

I hope that by visiting one or more of these posts you will see the good in making Cawleyblog a regular part of your diet.