The End of the Road for AOL?

Fast Company has a good article on what happened to AOL.  This paragraph from the article seems to sum it up.

In April 2005, he launched AOL Internet Phone, an entirely new product that he spent millions developing. To recoup costs, the monthly fee was set at almost double what competitor Vonage charged. "The rationale they told each other internally was that, 'Oh, well, we have all these extra features customers want,'" says a former executive. "In fact, people didn't want features. They wanted a phone, cheaper." And because of tangled billing systems, at first only AOL's ISP customers could subscribe to Internet Phone. This was no small glitch: Internet Phone ran on broadband only. So AOL's dial-up subscribers would need a separate high-speed connection to make it work. As if that weren't farcical enough, sources say that just before the launch the company's board refused to let the service compete in cities where Time Warner Cable was offering its own VOIP service. In the end, Internet Phone had a mere 2,000 subscribers when it was canceled in October 2006.

I don't read the amount of business books that I used to but this was painful reading.  How can a company this large be run so poorly?  Well then again they aren't alone; GM, Ford, Air Canada, ABC, AOL, and at different times, Apple.  via

Technorati Tags: AOL,Fast Company,business

Manager vs. a Leader

John Maeda wrote this today

A manager is the person that designs the construct of a line, sets the expectations for the line to form, thinks through how the line might be best composed and prioritized, and ensures that the queue is executed per spec. On the other hand, a leader is the person that is able to take the line forward in an orderly fashion by setting the example for others, providing the vision for how the line fits into the larger scheme of things, and engages the line-followers in a respectful manner. The manager sets up the win with perfection for her team; the leader executes the win with passion. What is common across these two different roles is that both people need to implement or execute their plans in a participatory nature, otherwise they will surely fail. Because in the end, a manager never manages alone; and a leader surely cannot lead alone either.

So in conclusion, to become the hybrid leader/manager is an important goal in life. My own philosophy of do both continues to make sense to me. Sometimes I wish it were all a bit simpler. But then I think it would be less of a challenge and I would be bored instead. So for today, complexity in life wins as the guiding principle.

Organic Community by Joe Myers

A couple of weeks ago Baker Books sent me a copy of Joe Myers second book, Organic Community. A book in which he builds upon the ideas of a Search to Belong. I finally got around to reading it yesterday while sitting under my patio umbrella. I am not sure how long it took me to read it but no longer than a couple of hours which is an endorsement of Myers' writing style. Despite being a quick read, it had a lot of good stuff in it and made me rethink some ideas about Church of the Exiles, Resonate, and some other organizations I am apart of and I have several pages of notes and ideas that I took from the book and want to put into practice.

While in Search to Belong, Joe deconstructed the thinking that goes into small groups and gatherings in the church, he expands his thinking and looks at the impact of sacred cows like "vision casting" and planning have on church communities and how a change in the questions we ask can change the results. In the end, Myers is describing a community centric vision of a church (or business) rather an a hierarchical centric generated vision of the church which demands conformity with the vision about all else. By using real world examples from the church and his own business, SETTINGPACE, Myers shows that it is not only plausible theory but is happening in practice.

As I glance over my notes, the following thoughts hit me.

• While not taking anything away from what was written, I think this is a lot easier to do in new communities rather than old ones. As Pete Ward talks about in Liquid Church, churches do have certain expectations of their leaders (Ward uses the illustration of prisoners and guards acting a certain way in prisons because that is what is expected of them by each other) and do expect others higher up the org chart to lead in a certain way. For some reason, many men cling to the idea that their pastor needs to be a visionary leader, perhaps to justify their involvement in the church.
• True community and traditional churches are incompatible. Part of the problem is the idea of a pastoral calling being a career and also the view that church leaders are interchangeable parts that can be swapped in and out for the good of the community. In both ways, the commodification of those who are a part of the community destroys it and makes it not much different then any other profit driven company.
• Speaking of profit driven companies, some official and many unofficial church vision and mission statements are variations and spiritualizations of the old axiom, "maximizing shareholder value" rather than existing as a community.
• As good as Joe Myers book is (and it is excellent), it is a minority voice in a crowded market of people trying to sell the exact opposite of what Joe is writing. The leader/pastor has been so ingrained in how we see the church and we have spent so much time building him or her up, it is going to take a long time and a lot of discussion for the church to move away from it. Ironically, for the first bit, it may even take a strong leader to have the church to stop thinking in terms of heirarchical leadership and start thinking in terms of community (rather than just blather on about it).

Related Links:

• Language of Belonging: Joe Myers personal site and weblog
• Purchase at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca
• Download a sample chapter from Baker

Richard Dawkins as an "enthusiast"

On Becky's blog she is quoting Richard Dawkins who makes the claim that he may be passionate but is not a fundementalist.

No, please, do not mistake passion, which can change its mind, for fundamentalism, which never will. Passion for passion, an evangelical Christian and I may be evenly matched. But we are not equally fundamentalist. The true scientist, however passionately he may “believe”, in evolution for example, knows exactly what would change his mind: evidence! The fundamentalist knows that nothing will.

First of all, I might as well just say this. I am an evangelical but I am not an fundamentalist.

The confusion of these terms is irritating and until George W. Bush became President, they did mean separate things. Jimmy Carter is an evangelical. Tony Campolo is an evangelical. Jim Wallis is an evangelical. At the same time James Dobson, John Hagee, Ralph Reed, and Jerry Falwell all claim to be evangelicals as well. It is an awfully large camp but not all evangelicals are fundamentalists and to be honest, we don't all believe the same things like evolution, only male leadership, or Biblical literalism. I grew up in an evangelical household and I don't even remember discussing these things growing up. I think my mom may have been a closet literalist but the lack of moat and parapit around our house meant that she was too ashamed to being it up much :-)

Secondly, I disagree Dawkins insistence that science is somehow pure in its pursuit of knowledge. One of the better books I read last year, 1491 (Amazon.com) is a tale of scientists refusing to give up on their theories and attacking other theories of the origin of civilization in North America. It is a story of people not changing their minds in face of evidence. I am not saying all scientists are fundamentalist, just that fundamentalism can be found in all fields. If you have ever listened to Joe Morgan call a Oakland A's game, even baseball has people who can't see something that is outside of how they see the world and this is a game which is supposedly all statistics (and yes I am killing the metaphor by calling Joe Morgan a fundementalist but his closed mind approach to sabremetrics shows an awfully closed mind).

Also, in one of my favorite blog posts of all time, AKMA, writes to incoming seminary students about the pursuit of truth in theology and the Christian life.

I start from the premise that everything about discipleship (and ordained ministry is in many respects simply an intensified mode of discipleship) grows out of the practice of truth. All the different theological disciplines, all the techniques and skills and habits you learn, derive their importance from the Truth you live; whatever facts you memorize, whatever devices for handling parish (diocesan, academic) organization, if they do not contribute to articulating a Truth that goes deeper than your personal preferences, your family’s habits, your community’s prejudices, those learnings amount to nothing more than gilding on a goose-egg. sooner or later, the egg will rot, and a pretty exterior won’t take away the stink.

The Truth will sustain your discipleship, even the intensified kind, with a nourishment, a light, a harmony, and a sense that do not depend for their validity on buzzwords, platitudes, fads, simple answers or correct answers (whether of the popular or academic sort). It’s not for nothing that Acts shows us the earliest followers of Jesus calling their fellowship as “the Way.” Ours is a Way entrusted to us from saints who knew it much better than any of us is likely to know it. That Way grows in us by the work of the Spirit, but we ought to make room for the Spirit to form us in the Way and cooperate with the Spirit in bodying forth the Way in our lives.

Are there fundamentalists out there that fear a truth outside of their worldview? Absolutely. Some of them are listed above and proclaim their fundamentalism proudly. Even among the GOP presidential candidates, some believe in a young earth seven day creation of the earth in face of overwhelming scientific evidence (This undermines my argument but last summer at Arlington Beach during the Free Methodist camp, there was a display up that linked people like me who don't accept a seven day creation/young earth to secular humanists and homosexuals who are destroying the faith - I thought I should let you know what a heretic I am). While there are Christian fundamentalists out there that can not or will not accept new information outside of a specific framework, there are many of us whose pursuit of truth lead us to faith. For others it was witnessing the supernatural (in my case seeing a miraculous healing in response to prayer growing up) while for others it was a personal encounter with God or as Plantinga has written over the years, some of us just have "faith in God" and it is logical to do so. I don't see that as a contradiction to evidence. In the end, I have to disagree with Dawkins, he is as much of a fundamentalist that he claims to be against.

Related:

• Alister McGrath on Richard Dawkins :: McGrath contends that the aggressive rhetoric of Richard Dawkins' books masks a deep insecurity about the public credibility of atheism.
• Philosopher Alvin Plantinga's review of Dawkin's book in Books and Culture

Harambee's Mission

I was surfing the websites of some friends tonight and was checking out Harambee's website. If there was ever a reason to exists, their about page sums it up.

In 1982, the neighborhood surrounding Harambee Center had the highest daytime crime rate in Southern California. The corner of Howard and Navarro, where we are located, was called “blood corner” because it was where the most drive-by shootings and failed drug deals occurred. Residents were held captive in their homes and there was little hope for change.

We believed the only legitimate way to become change-agents in this community was to become a part of it. Led by our founder, Dr. John Perkins, we moved into the community and became neighbors. For 20+ years we have served a 12-block target area, working with African American and Latino children and families.

“Harambee” means “Let’s get together and push” in Swahili. We seek to nurture and equip leadership that will wholistically minister to the community by sharing Biblical truths, in order to achieve the re-building of urban neighborhoods through relocation, reconciliation and redistribution.

That works for me.

Technorati Tags : Harambee, Pasadena

Ecclessial Mercenaries

Soon after the Church of the Exiles website went live, I started to get some e-mails in asking me who was funding our little church plant.  I think everyone assumed that either Resonate or the Free Methodist Church in Canada (through the Life Cycle Project) was funding it.  They were shocked to find out that Resonate doesn't fund church plants (neither does Emergent Village as far as I know) and we never applied for funding from the Life Cycle Project (although that is an option).

 

Why no money?  I am not opposed to the idea of outside funding and we do have some needs (a small soundboard would be great) but we don't have that much financial needs right now.  We don't have permanent office space or salaries and our technical needs can be met by modest (cheap) means rather than expensive ones.  While some of us in leadership have had staff positions at churches, we are all working outside the plant.  People call us bi-vocational but that seems to suggest two paychecks.  We are doing it out of passion and fueled by coffee.  I could say that we were lucky in finding affordable space but it also came through Wendy probably making 100 phone calls to pubs, schools, businesses, churches, and other third spaces trying to find a space that would work.  It wasn't so much luck as perseverance and desperation :-). In some ways we have taken on the business philosophy of bootstrapping.

 

During that time as I have shared that with other prospective planters, the response has been disbelief but I am not that sure why.  My grandfather pastored a small Free Methodist church in Davis, Saskatchewan (Rural Municipality Number 461, just outside of Prince Albert, neither the church or the town exist today) during the Great Depression.  There was literally no funding as Saskatchewan was bankrupt and he was paid in potatoes, turnips, and wild game meat which was all that many in the congregation had to give.  From his records, the only money seemed to come from his atheist father who would send up money for train tickets home at Christmas.  Now that was a different time and context and seems like worlds away from today but a quick read of most of the churches in Saskatoon show very modest and humble beginnings and a character that was created out of the shared struggles as a faith community.

 

For some of the people I have talked to there seems to be a desire of instant success.  I am not sure where it comes from, whether it be from the instant churches of 200 that get planted out of larger churches who hit the ground running with a building, staff, and mature congregation and leadership or if it is just part of the church culture that worships size and success (whatever that is) and 10 people getting together and praying and worshipping in a rented room isn't success.

 

A while ago I asked someone why they needed so much funding.  Earlier in the conversation that couple had described themselves as "ecclessial mercenaries" - people who would church plant for whoever would pay the bills.

 

Of course they had their list of needs.

• A Macbook so they could run both Windows and Mac software
• Essential software, MS Office, Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, and After Affects, Dreamweaver.
• Projector, Sound system
• Web host that can handle streaming audio and video.
• Comfortable office space with a street front access
• Rental space for worship in a historical location.
• Salaries for him to be high enough so his wife would not have to work.
• Operational funding for two years at least.

The one thing that work has taught me to do is question statements by people.

• What do they need a Macbook to do that my Compaq Armada m700 won't?  Not picking on Mac users here.  The same question could be asked about what does he need a Macbook for that a G3 won't do either.  Yes the Macbook is a far superior notebook and OSX is a better OS than Windows 2000 but for the money (1/10 of the price) that you don't have, something cheaper may work pretty well.
• What are they using Premiere, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator  for that Premiere Elements, Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro , Ulead Video Studio, or even Microsoft Movie Maker (shudder) software won't do.  Again, I worked with an excellent and talented digital media creator for years that can do things that would make some movie makers blush.  He also does great stuff with crappy tools as well.  My point is that there is cheaper alternatives to professional grade software that creative people can still make things look very good with. It may be a pain in the neck (and other places at times) but if the money is tight, you have to make do. If you have someone with professional talent, it is a great investment, if not, it is a waste of money.  One church I know of bought the same animation software that they used to create Jurassic Park with.  Even if someone was capable of mastering the interface, they would have needed a server farm to render their creations.  In the end it was a massive waste of money.  I have loved Microsoft Office since 4.x under Windows 3.x  but again, it comes down to is there anything I really need that Open Office and NeoOffice can't do? 
• Had they not heard of Google Video or ODEO?
• They had talked of their respect for Wendy and I so I asked, if it is okay for Wendy to work and for us to raise a child (however poorly we are doing with it), why can't other church planter spouses work?  Don't get me wrong, I have nothing wrong with stay at home parents and Wendy and mine schedule stinks right now where we go weeks without a full day off with each other but if the money isn't there.

I was being a pain and it was a good conversation but I think one of the things that church plants need to figure out is cash and how to do things without it. 

I am not that sure if it is any different than it has always been.  You need to start something before it you know if it going to turn out.  I can't think of too many startups that were guaranteed instant success but they just kept working towards what they knew they had to do.  Kind of like the graphic from Andrew Jones old post on How Do You Build a Cathedral.

Another way of looking at it is from this interview with a designer turned wine maker, Courtney Kingston (of Kingston Family Vineyards)

One of the biggest challenges for me was going from a job that was reactive (e.g. a highly scheduled day managing other people) to starting a business with a blank slate every morning. Every day, there were a thousand things that seemed urgent that I needed to do to get things going. It was a little paralyzing and I didn’t know where to start. My friend Rob gave me a great piece of advice: decide what *one thing* is critical to your concept’s success. Write “ONE” on a little yellow stickie, and stick it on your computer monitor as a daily reminder to accomplish one thing–no matter how small—that will get you one step closer to that goal each and every day.

The person who helped clarify this for me was Guy Kawasaki in his book, Rules for Revolutionaries and his idea of starting out with what you have and going from there making it better and working towards your final vision.  The vision and ideas for Exiles are a lot more than what we have no but slowly we are making out way there as a community and no it doesn't take a lot of money to start.

Technorati Tags : church+planting, money, emerging+church, Church+of+the+Exiles

Review of The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch

Published by Brazos Press :: Purchase at Amazon.com or Amazon.ca
294 Pages
Website: www.theforgottenways.org which also has an excellent weblog which is published by Alan Hirsch
Disclaimer: Publisher (Brazos Press) sent me a free review copy but I would have purchased the book regardless.

Before you start into the review, my initial thoughts on the book topped 9000 words which testifies to how good of book I thought it was but it was a little depressing to think that I needed to edit that long of a review (Wendy says that any review that long is not a review but a sequel). The book is divided into two sections so what I plan to do is review the first section now, take a week or so break from it and review the second section. I will put it all together for a single review when I am all done. As is the blog policy, all typos and spelling mistakes are mine and we will blame the spell checker in Google Docs and never speak of them again.

A couple of months ago now I started reading Alan Hirsch's latest book, The Forgotten Ways. Along with Michael Frost, he wrote The Shaping of Things to Come, one of the most important books in the area of the church and missiology that many of us have ever read. Not only can they write good books together but they can write solo as well. Michael Frost's book Exiles came out last year and Alan Hirsch's book, The Forgotten Ways showed up in my mailbox in early 2007. For the last two months every free moment has been spent with the book or thinking about the consequences of what has been written. It's a book that I will read more than once but here are some early thoughts that will do the book justice.

The book is divided into two sections. Section One is “The Making of a Missionary.” Hirsch tells his own story. It is a path that many of us would recognize that starts with him in the "come to us" attractional model of doing church that has defined evangelicalism since it became part of the establishment to moving towards a missional incarnation. Section Two is titled “A Journey to the Heart of Apostolic Genius.” There we explore what Hirsch calls Missional DNA. Methodists will recognize the work of Howard Snyder who has used the DNA analogy in the past. For us Canadians who read a lot of Alan Roxburgh, you will recognize the concepts of liminality and "communitas vs. community".

Forward by Leonard Sweet.

Sweet opens up with a great forward that was quite helpful to me in dealing with the frustrations I have talking with those in traditional churches and especially those that have been schooled in church growth thinking. He uses the metaphor of occasionally having to defrag our computers and get all of the bits and pieces put in their proper places. Not only do we have to do it with our computers but also with our minds.

Sometimes our hard drives need fragmenting. Data entered on our hard drives isn't always done neatly. The more files you have, and the more programs you download, the more your hard drive gets scrambled by confusing, scattered, random inputs that get sprayed over lots of space. Computer crashes, power outages, and stalled programs just add to the fragmentation.

The harder your hard drive has to work to retrieve the original information, the slower it becomes, the more blurred the pictures are, and the more resistant everything is. As a serial procrastinator, I tend to put off my defragging until the computer almost grinds to a halt. Defragging requires I dedicate the computer to doing nothing but cleaning up the confusion my messes and misses have caused. This housecleaning can take hours. But once I got through the defragging process, my hard drive recovers its speed, and my images once again snap, crackle, and pop with clarity and conviction.

Christianity has undergone untold crashes and clashes in the past two thousand years. In the last five hundred years its original hard drive has wiped out so many times, especially in the West, that it has almost ground to a halt.

I appreciated Len Sweet's forward to the book as I can't remember how many discussions I have had about the emerging church and people bring up the measuring points of Christendom. There is a desire for something different but we drag along all of this clutter from what where we have come from.

The discussion starts with a good question. How did the early Christian movement go from roughly 25,000 members in 100 AD to roughly 20 million by 300 AD? More importantly, it did it without all of the things that today's church defines as vital for ministry. Buildings, a defined Scripture, professional clergy, John Maxwell seminars on leadership, Hillsong worship CDs, Christian radio or television (I may be embellishing his list but you get the point). Not only was the church "deprived" of the "essentials", it was also under persecution. It isn't just a discussion of the early church, the church in China had a similar growth rate under the same kind of persecution and also the Methodist revival in England is touched on. So how do they do it. Hirsch identifies six elements of what he calls Missional DNA or mDNA.

• Jesus is Lord
• Disciple Making
• Missional-Incarnational Impulse
• Apostolic Environment
• Organic Systems
• Communitas instead of community

Chapter One :: Setting the Scene

He notes the same thing that many of have been saying (probably because we read it in his first book) that great missionary movements begin on the margins.

In the study of the history of missions, one can even be formulaic about asserting that all great missionary movements begin at the fringes of the church, among the poor and the marginalized, and seldom if ever at the center. It is vital that in pursuing missional modes of church, we get out of the stifling equilibrium of the center of our movements and denominations, move to the fringes, and engage in real mission there. But there's more to it then just mission; mist great movements of mission have inspirited significant and related movements of renewal in the life of the church. It seems that when the church engages at the fringes, it almost always brings life to the center. This says a whole lot about God and gospel, and the church will do well to heed it. (page 30)

For the longest time, I have been saying that churches can't or won't go through tremendous change. I gladly eat those words when I read about Hirsch's community, the South Melbourne Restoration Community (now called Red). At some very frustrating times in my pastoral journey, I would have loved to have read there story of transformation from the holding pattern that most churches are in to becoming missional was worth the price of the book for me (disclaimer, I didn't pay for the book, I got a review copy but you know what I mean). A particularly jarring part of the book is his mention that only 10-15% of Australian culture is attracted to the contemporary church growth model.

A combination of recent research in Australia indicates that about 10-15 percent of that population is attracted to what we call the contemporary church growth model. In other words, this model has significant "market appeal" to about 12 percent of our population. The more successful forms of this model tend to be large, highly professionalized, and overwhelmingly middle class, and express themselves culturally using contemporary, "seeker friendly" language and middle-of-the-road music forms. They structure themselves around "family ministry" and therefore offer multi-generational services. Demographically speaking, they tend to cater largely to what might be called the "family-values-segment"--good, solid, well-educated citizens who don't abuse their kids, who pay their taxes, and who live largely, what can be called a suburban lifestyle.

Not only is this type of church largely made up of Christian people who fit this profile, the research indicates that these churches can also be very effective in reaching non-Christian people fitting the same demographic description--the people within their cultural reach. That is, the church does not have to cross any significant cultural barriers in order to communicate the gospel to that cultural context. (pg 35)

Since almost all churches in typical western cities are working from this model, they are all competing for the same demographic. I started flipping through Michael Adams book, Fire and Ice and I would say our percentage is 15 to 20% of is in that "family values segment" versus 35% for the United States. To make this simple for everyone, the way we do church in Canada manages to avoid 75-80% of the population. Not are the vast majority of churches competing for the same segment, according to George Barna, it is a shrinking segment which by 2025 is expected to decrease by half. Despite the fact that doing the same thing and expecting a different result is a definition of insanity, it is what we do. As Hirsch says on page 37

What is becoming increasingly clear is that if we are going to meaningfully reach this majority of people, we are not going to be able to do it by simply doing more of the same. And yet it seems that when faced with our problems of decline, we automatically reach for the latest church growth package to solve the problem--we seem to have nowhere else to go. But simply pumping up the programs, improving the music, and audiovisual effects, or jiggering the ministry mix won't solve our missional crisis. Something far more fundamental is needed.

So what do we do about this? Well as Hirsch shares his experiences, changing the system does have some effect. As he diagrams out, on pages 43 and 33, moving from a pulpit ministry (5%) to a platform and programmed ministry (10% active in ministry) to a alternative worship gathering (20% of people involved). While 20% is a sizable improvement, it still leaves 80% as pew potatoes.

In his discussion about this on page 45 he offers up this interesting footnote.

In a dialog between Michael Frost, many members of the faculty of Fuller's School of World Mission, and me, it was generally acknowledged by all there that church growth theory had, by and large, failed to reverse the church's decline in America and was therefor somewhat of a failed experiment. The fact remains that more than four decades of church growth principles and practice has not halted the decline of the church in Western contexts.

So how do we reach out to the remaining 80% of people who don't have the church on their radar if church growth principles aren't the answer? Hirsch draws a correlation that I don't think I have read before but makes a lot of sense. Hirsch concluded that the fundamental issue was that they had been ineffective at making disciples, and so were failing at living missionally. This coincides with what Ron Sider wrote about in The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience and what Robert Webber writes in Ancient Future Evangelism, we don't do a good job in making disciples which undermines everything else we try to do as a church.

The phrase, “we cannot consume our way to discipleship" hit me hard. For years I proposed that if we could give people enough opportunities to learn, they would. While I worked at Lakeview Church we tried to expand our offerings which overlooked the consumeristic nature of what we were trying to do. Christians come to church to be fed and we are just feeding the idea of a consumption based faith reinforces the church shopping ethos at the expense of undermining our efforts at discipleship before we can begin.

The alternative according to Hirsch is to move away from the idea of choices that come from consumerism and take a covenantal approach to discipleship which reminds me of some of what Stanley Hauerwas has written as a response to capitalism. How does that happen?

1. Structural changes :: To address the problems of passivity, they became a cell church so it made it harder to be a pew potato.
2. Instead of core values and statements, they adopted a covenant and some core practices. Most core values in churches are all the same anyways but what they wanted were something that would cause movement. So instead of appealing to the head, they appealed to the feet.

3. Each cell group had to practice spiritual disciplines. The model they came up with is called TEMPT.

Chapter Two :: Setting the Scene

“Nothing is more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than achieving a new order of things.” Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

“Strictly speaking one ought to say that the church is always in a state of crisis and that its greatest shortcoming is that it is only occasionally aware of it… This ought to be the case because of the abiding tension between the church's essential nature and its empirical condition.... that there were so many crisis centuries of crisis free existence for the church was therefore an abnormality... And if the atmosphere of crisislessness still lingers on in many parts of the West, this is simply the result of a dangerous delusion. Let us also know that to encounter crisis is to encounter the possibility of truly being the church.” David Bosch, Transforming Mission

Hirsch starts the second chapter with this from Edward de Bono.

...if there is a known and successful cure for an illness, patients generally prefer the doctor to use the known cure rather than seek to design a better one. Yet there may be better cures to be found. He rightly asks how we are to find a better cure at each critical moment we always opt for the traditional treatment. Think about this in relation to our usual ways of solving our problems. Do we not constantly default to previous patterns and ways of tackling issues of theology, spirituality and the church? To quote another Bono, this time from the band U2, it seems like we are "stuck in a moment and now [we[ can't get out of it."

The follow up thought to this is “most efforts at change in the church fail to deal with the very assumptions on which Christendom is built and maintains itself.” ( page 51) In part, this is why we are “stuck in a moment and can’t get out of it” (U2).

Hirsch then uses an analogy from the computer world. Apple Inc. is synonymous with innovation. In that world innovation translates into reworking three components: hardware, OS, and software. We saw that with the iPhone where Apple asked that Cingular change their wireless protocol to accommodate the innovation of the iPhone. To take advantage of new hardware, you need a new operating system. If you don't have new and great software ready to go, what's the need for a new operating system. Working at one and not the other doesn't always make a lot of sense (somewhere Bill Gates is sitting on top of a pile of money disagreeing with Hirsch but we get the point) without the other.

As Hirsch continues on page 52 that many efforts to revitalize the church aim at simply adding or developing new programs (Alpha in many churches comes to mind) or sharpening the theology and doctrinal base of the church without changing the foundational understanding of Christendom or how the church operates. Leadership needs to develop new assumptions on which more missional expression of the church can be built.

How do we do that, Hirsch quotes refers to Ivan Illich on page 53

Ivan Illich was once asked what he thought was the most radical way to change society; was it through violent revolution of gradual reform? He gave a careful answer. Neither. Rather, he suggested that if one wanted to change society, then one must tell an alternative story. Illich is right; we need to reframe our understandings through a different lens, an alternative story, if we wish to move beyond the captivity of the predominantly institutional paradigm that clearly dominates our current approach to leadership and church.

He sees the system story at the center of who we are reaching out to affect everything else we do.

Church consultant Bill Easum is right when he notes that…“Following Jesus into the mission field is either impossible or extremely difficult for the vast majority of congregations in the Western world because of one thing: They have a systems story that will not allow them to take the first step out of the institution into the mission field, even though the mission field is just outside the door of the congregation.” (Unfreezing Moves, 31) He goes on to note that every organization is built upon on “an underlying systems story.” He points out that “…this is not a belief system. It is the continually repeated life story that determines how an organization feels, thinks, and thus acts. This systems story determines the way an organization behaves, no matter how the organizational chart is drawn. It’s the primary template which shapes all other things. Restructure the organization and leave the systems story in place and nothing changes within the organization. It’s futile trying to revitalize the church, or a denomination, without first changing the system.” Drilling down into this systems story, the paradigm, or mode of church, is he suggests one of the keys to change and constant innovation.

Easum notes that most theories about congregational life are flawed from the start because they are based on an institutional and mechanical worldview. Or what he calls the “Command and Control, Stifling Story.” This is particularly marked when you recognize how different the predominant forms of church are from the apostolic modes.

After a conversation with Scripture he concludes that "we realized that Bible sustains a thoroughly consistent warning against the centralization of power in a few individuals and concentration of it in inflexible and impersonal institutions (pg 55)

Reinforcing his view is Martin Buber and C.S. Lewis. (pg 55) .

...[Buber] warns us about the dangers of religious institutionalism when he notes that "centralization and codification, undertaken in the interests of religion, are a danger to the core of religion." This is inevitably the case he says, unless there is a very vigorous life of faith embodied in the whole community, one that exerts an unrelenting pressure for renewal on the institution. It was C.S. Lewis who observed that "there exists in every church something that sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence. So we must strive very hard, by the grace of God to keep the church focused on the mission that Christ originally gave to it."

For those of you who have read Brian McLaren, the name Ralph Winter may be familiar. Basically he gives us the concept of cultural distance. It is a good guide to help a church conceptualize the barriers it must cross in order to be effective missionally.

As one moves along the scale each step from left to right it indicates a barrier one must cross to demonstrate the Gospel.

• m0-m1 Some concept of Christianity, same language, similar interests, same nationality, same socio-economic class to yours and your church's. Most of your friends are in this bracket.
• m1-m2 Stereotypical non-Christian. Little interest in Christianity and suspicious of the church or had a bad experience with Christians. Just go to the local pub to find these folks.
• m2-m3 No idea about Christianity or antagonistic towards Christianity as they understand it.

• m3-m4 The most distance and active resistance. Major cultural and/or worldview obstacles exist.

As Hirsch points out, the Edict of Milan and Constantine’s deal with the church provided a uniform context in the western world for about 1600 years. As Rodney Stark puts it on page 60.

Far too long, historians have accepted the claim that the conversion of Emperor Constantine (ca 285-337) caused the triumph of Christianity. To the contrary, he destroyed its most attractive and dynamic aspects, turning a high-intensity, grassroots movement into a arrogant institution controlled by an elite who often managed to be brutal and lax.

The church has largely conformed to that mode and is comfortable working with the m0 to m1 regions. The other regions were largely "missionary" concerns until the end of WWII. as Hirsch pointed out early, the m0 to m1 zone is vanishing (Perhaps 15% in Australia to 35% of people in the United States). We are surrounded by people in our neighborhoods that have m2 - m4 barriers up. In Christendom “outreach” often worked as the barriers to acceptance were much less. In post-Christendom and the pluralistic environment, the cultural distance has increased and our local context has become missional.

Hirsch breaks down the move from Christendom to now with this important thought on pg 60

With the breakup of the modern period and the subsequent postmodern period, things have begun to radically change. For one, the power of hegemonic ideologies has come to an end, and with that, the breakdown of the power of the state (e.g. the Soviet Union) and other forms of "grand stories" that bind societies and groups together in a grand vision. The net effect of that has been the resultant flourishing of sub cultures, and what sociologists call the heterogenization, or simply the tribalization, of western culture...

People now identify themselves less by grand ideologies, national identities, or political allegiances, and by much less grand stories: those of interest groups, new religious movements (New Age), sexual identity (gays, lesbians, transsexuals, etc), sports activities, competing ideologies (neo-Marxist, neofacist, eco-rats, etc.) class, conspicuous consumption (metrosexuals, urban grunge, etc), work types (computer geeks, hackers, designers, etc.), and so forth. On one occasion some youth ministry specialists I work with identified in an hour fifty easily discernible youth subcultures alone (computer nerds, skaters, homies, surfies, punks, etc.). Each of hem taks their subcultural identity with utmost seriousness, and hence any missional response to them must as well.

Hirsch uses Alpha as an example which while over three million people in the UK have participated, they have not been integrated into traditional churches. He points out that it is most successful with the dechurched and instead of being a missionary tool for the unchurched, pointed out that we often don't reach very hard beyond our own walls (pg 63) Why don't they want to go to church? It is the "Jesus yes, Church no." phenomenon again where people come to faith in small informal groups but don't want the organized part of the religion to be part of the deal. Hirsch suggests that the prevailing expression of church (Christendom) has become a major stumbling block to the spread of Christianity in the West.

So for those of you who are feeling uncomfortable, the good news is that it hasn't always been done this way. Hirsch refers to Robert Webber and points out that we are probably closer to life in the early church than in Christendom (although being in a post-Christian society is radically different than being in a pre-Christian one of the early church). He quotes Loren Meed on page 66 who brings a healthy dose of reality to where we are at.

We are surrounded by the relics of the Christendom Paradigm, a paradigm that has largely ceased to exist to work. [These] relics hold us hostage to the past and make it difficult to create a new paradigm that can be as compelling for the next age as the Christendom paradigm has been for the past age.

From there is a discussion on the emerging church that has this great comment by Hirsch.

Another quite remarkable feature is that by and large this phenomenon flies under the radar of must church observers, because they are looking for the familiar features of the church as we know it through Christendom. As such it tends to be an underground movement. I have often had to field criticism of the EMC in the guise of pragmatic questions like, "Where is it working?" or dismissed in phrases like "When I can see some success, I might consider it". But it is working. The answer is right there under our noses, but we can't seem to see it because we are looking for the wrong things. If we look for certain features obvious in the Christendom paradigm (like buildings, programs, over leaders, church growth, organization, etc.), we will miss what is really happening.

That's enough for the first section of the book which for me is worth the price of the book. If you haven't read the book already, you need to purchase it. For leaders of Christian communities, the book is that good and that revolutionary. The second part of the book is even better and gets at the heart of what needs to happen in more theological and practical terms.

When is the next part of the review coming? I have a couple of days off this week and will have the second half of the book review online next Sunday. That way I won't be too far being in my effort to review 52 books in 52 weeks.

For more on the book...

• The official site and weblog
• Len Hjalmarson has a multipart review which I found helpful for this one. His reviews are always excellent.
• Scot McKnight has reviewed it as well.
• Don't forget Andrew Jones "cartoonish" review of the book.
• Download a PDF of the first chapter (I can't believe that I spent hours typing quotes from Chapter 1 for the review... when I could have just used this)
• There is also some online training to be had.

Technorati Tags : The+Forgotten+Ways, Alan+Hirsch, emerging+church, church+planting, book+review

Assumptions Made About Youth Ministry

Mark Riddle has a wonder rant on all of the things that the church has grown to accept about youth ministry.

1. Youth pastor turnover- That a youth pastor will only stay for a short time.
2. That the success or failure of the spiritual nurture of our kids is based primarily on the giftedness or lack thereof, of a person filling the youth position.
3. That the assumption by church leadership is that best youth pastors are young.
4. That a youth pastor can/will/should disciple themselves without the guidance of a senior pastor.
5. That a healthy gauge to tell when youth ministry is going well is when there are no complaints.
6. That Senior Pastors should not be involved in youth ministry.
7. That parents should not be involved in youth ministry.
8. That we give lip service to parents being the primary spiritual nurturers of their children, but do absolutely nothing to actually support parents in our church.
9. That so many youth pastors who feel called to ministry, leave vocational ministry before they turn 30.
10. That youth ministry is church for teens.
11. That youth have different basic needs than adults.
12. That youth have been systematically abandoned by adults within the culture and the church has done the same.
13. That having a youth pastor means the youth ministry is taken care of.
14. That the best youth ministries keep kids busy.
15. That it's a sin to bore a kid.
16. That kids don't think about theology or they aren't ready for it.
17. That we do very little theological reflection when it comes to why we have a youth ministry.
18. The assumption that kids just want fun and games rather than relationships and theological engagement.
19. That Christian Education is an answer to all our problems.
20. That parental involvement in the spiritual development of their children is optional.
21. That the systematic estrangement of adolescents in our church is best for the kids and their “age level appropriate” activities and living out the gospel.
22. That kids only receive the benefits of a youth ministry/youth pastor and do not need to contribute to make this ministry happen.
23. That youth ministry is something only some of us in the church do.
24. That youth ministry is something that happens in a program at the church.
25. That all problems can be fixed with a program.
26. The perception that once I’ve grown my kids into college that I no longer need to work with youth.
27. That the youth pastor is actually just a director of activities.
28. That we no longer remember what a pastor is in many local churches.
29. That youth pastors have forgotten the reason they got into youth ministry in the first place because they are burdened with responsibilities they are miserable at accomplishing.
30. That the Jesus himself could not live up to the wildly inappropriate expectations a church has for a youth pastor.
31. That there is no healthy way to manage the expectations of the church.

Technorati Tags : church, youth, Mark+Riddle

Cultivate Gathering :: Leadership

Over at Resonate Audio,Jared Siebert from the Free Methodist Church in Canada and the Life Cycle Project is talking about leadership at the Cultivate Gathering.  Jared learned his craft while planting Next Church in Kingston and now as life as a denominational stooge.

Technorati Tags : Resonate, Cultivate+Gathering, emerging+church, leadership, Jared+Siebert

It was fun while it lasted

Willow Creek is canning Axis.  Dan Kimball has some thoughts on "church within a church".

But when these new worship gatherings within a church are only generational and not considering the worldview changes - what mainly happens is that they then cater to those who grew up in that church or another church. People come to where they have better music, cooler environment and be around people their age and can do the healthy single flirt with others. Because of the power structure, they report to the senior pastor or Executive Pastor at a church. To some degree, and I say this with respect, it is somewhat of a glorified youth ministry in most cases. So these are generational changes and catering ministry to a generational change. However, if the changes in culture are bigger than that though - then it is absurd to think that creating a different aesthetic environment and changing the music is really being missional.

If we are specifically looking at a mission - to our culture, then it means looking at community different, spiritual formation, evangelism, membership, leadership, communication etc. - the whole culture of a church will change. Not just what happens in a worship gathering. That is why only changing the worship gathering is not the answer.

Technorati Tags : Willow+Creek, Axis, church

An open letter to denominational leaders

The Free Methodist Church in Canada is pretty open to the emerging church.  They hired Jared Siebert to help church planters and support emerging churches, they are supportive of Resonate, and they put up with me.  I don't have any axe's to grind with them but not everyone is as supportive and when Charlie asked me to write something for Next-Wave, I wrote an open letter to denominational leaders.  If you have any comments, feel free to leave them over there and I will respond to them.

Technorati Tags : emerging+church, leadership, denominations, church

Is Emergent the new Christian Left?

Leadership Journal asks...

In December, Brian McLaren was arrested along with 115 other activists while peacefully protesting the federal budget that he believes unfairly treats the poor. As one of the most visible participants in Emergent Village, McLaren’s increasingly outspoken political views has some wondering—is Emergent a new camp for Christian liberalism?

Tony Jones responds

Honestly, I care little about these critiques. They come from those who either have no idea what Emergent is all about and/or could not possibly be persuaded from their position anyway.

On the other hand, I'm currently hearing and reading that Emergent is part of the "New Christian Left." Mark Driscoll, for instance, has recently drawn a line in the sand between "emerging evangelicals" and "emergent liberals." He places himself in the former camp, and I assume he'd assign me to the latter. Others, like Ed Stetzer, have similarly attempted to divvy up the emerging church. Stetzer gives three labels: relevants, reconstructionists, and revisionists. Again, I can assume that I'm among the lattermost, whose "prescriptions fail to take into account the full teaching of the Word of God," according to Stetzer. Yet another Christian leader has recently accused us of becoming one with Jim Wallis, Sojourners, and the Christian Left.

The problem with all of these critiques is that they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of Emergent Village. We are a group of friends—about 20 in 1997, and now in the thousands—who are committed to doing God's Kingdom work together, regardless of our theological, ideological, and political differences. Are we friends with Jim Wallis? Yes! And are there Bush-loving neocons among us? Yes! Emergent is a loose collection of folks who feel that true, robust conversation about issues that matter has been chilled out of modern Christian institutions (seminaries, mega-churches, denominations, and para-church groups, to name a few). We're trying to make a place to bring conversation back.

Thus, we have friends among us who think that small government, free market economies are the solution to poverty, and others who favor federal programs and higher taxes—honestly, this is an ongoing conversation within the Emergent friendship. But we all agree that something must be done about extreme poverty, especially in Africa.

Within Emergent are Texas Baptists who don't allow women to preach and New England lesbian Episcopal priests. We have Southern California YWAMers and Midwest Lutherans. We have those who hold to biblical inerrancy, and others trying to demythologize the scripture. We have environmental, peacenik lefties, "crunchy cons," and right wing hawks.

I suppose it's easy for those who stand outside of Emergent Village looking in to credit the politics or theology of a few to the whole group, but that's inaccurate. And I can understand the frustration of those who want to criticize us and box us in when we say that we don't play by the old rules, that we can't be categorized as "left" or "right," "evangelical" or "mainline."

But, I think those same critics will only be more frustrated as the tide of those rebelling against a commodified and domesticated Jesus gain momentum. If the mainstream media is a harbinger, then I'd say that recent columns by Gary Wills and Andrew Sullivan show that a tipping point is just around the corner. Jesus really wasn't a Democrat or a Republican, and he won't be domesticated by political agendas. I do, however, believe that he will inhabit the robust and respectful dialogue about ideas that matter.

The Ecclesiology of the Emerging Church

The Ecclesiology of the Emerging Church
by Jared Siebert :: Life Cycle Project

Jared gave this paper yesterday. The internal links aren't working yet but give me a couple of days...

Introduction

In this paper I hope to briefly sketch an ecclesiology of what I have come to know as the emerging church. This sketch draws from my own experience as a pastor of a so-called “emerging church” and my interaction with authors and church planters in the emerging church. From the outset one must recognize the difficulties in cobbling together a coherent, let alone authoritative, ecclesiology based on the ideas that constitute the emerging church. The wikipedia article, often held to be one of the best descriptions of the emerging church has this to say about emerging ecclesiology, “Reflecting its decentralized and local nature, the emerging church does not maintain a mutually agreed-on ecclesiology, or set of beliefs defining the specific role and nature of the church. Eschewing doctrine, the emerging church instead seeks merely to continue the mission of Christ, while deeply respecting the different expressions that the body of Christ may bring to that mission.”¹ An answer of that type may be irritatingly vague, but truthfully speaking, is quite typical for emerging church apologists. When discussing the emerging church and its culture one must adopt the stance of a poet or jazz musician rather than that of chess player or accountant. The culture and mind of the emerging church movement consists of tension between opposites and non-resolving ideas. It’s out of these realities that the truth and shape of emerging church ecclesiology will arise. Most misunderstandings of the emerging church movement arise from the curious expecting precise answers in which tensions resolve and ledgers balance.

In my experience the emerging church movement and the missional church movement are marked, primarily, by their goal of evangelism and a willingness to retool the church experience as necessary to be “culturally relevant”.² “Church experience”, in this case goes well beyond the Sunday morning service to encompassing the whole life of the church. The emerging church seems focused on making the whole church experience, including theology and ecclesiology “culturally relevant”.

Taking cues from Heitzenrater, I intend to describe the ecclesiology of the emerging church movement along the axis of what it is and what it does. Using these descriptive poles as reference points I then hope to suggest a course that will ultimately find the emergent church uniquely at home within the historic Wesleyan and Methodist ethos.

So What is the Emerging Church?

The emerging church, in this paper’s sketch of it at least, is several things. First and foremost it is a conversation among evangelicals that may or may not become an actual movement. Secondly, I believe that the emerging church is some form of corrective guidance, on the part of the Holy Spirit, designed to help us re-establish the direction and heading of our mission field and to form basic responses to that changing mission field. Thirdly, the emerging church seems to be a conscious desire, on the part of the church, to be permanently provisional. In such a state, we will no longer lose touch with our mission field and be free to formulate immediate or even pre-emptive responses to the changes in that culture.

A Conversation and Possible Movement:

The Emerging Church at present is a conversation. However, through significant numbers of church planting projects, in the past decade, the emerging church has shown signs of moving from conversation and movement of theological re-evaluation to an active church planting movement. With each new emerging church plant, with each new regional “alternative worship service” that is offered, the ecclesiology of the emerging church is being fleshed out. Some of the air of vagueness in emerging church culture is due to the fact that, at present, the emerging church is still made mostly of books, blogs and gatherings that suggest rather than practice of certain ecclesiastical models. These models, since they have not been widely adopted or used are still only caricatures of the whole truth of the nature, purpose, and activities of the church. These models are designed presently to point out inconsistencies in current church ecclesiology evoking responses of anger, scorn, and/or the desire to seek out and act out a more “biblical” way of being the church. These models are designed to help us to see clearly what we must do, how we must change, and some of the moral implications of our present course. Given these very provisional circumstances the ecclesiology of the emerging church is also provisional.

The Emerging Church as Corrective Guidance of the Holy Spirit to the Church:

In the past year the Emerging Church has come under significant and rather sharp criticism. I believe this trend will continue and increase in the near future. What’s most surprising about all of this is not that there is criticism but that there is fundamental agreement with the emerging church among even it’s harshest critics. “ The fact is, most of us would agree with much of EC’s assessment of modern evangelicalism. I am equally turned off by many of the weaknesses EC identifies and agree that we need the Lord to rescue us and our churches from them.”³ DA Carson sees these as the strengths of the Emerging Church “reading the times; pushing for authenticity; recognizing our own social location; evangelizing outsiders; and probing links with the tradition.”⁴ Phil Johnson, of the “emergentno” a notoriously critical blog finds these points of agreement:

For one thing, they are right to reject the professionalism and big-business approach to ministry that has been popularized by most of the influential megachurches.

They are right to point out that millions of American evangelicals live lives of gross hypocrisy and narcissism, ignoring the needs of the poor while indulging themselves with entertainments and luxuries while the church struggles, and many pastors live barely above the poverty level (if that), and our Christian brothers and sisters struggle in many parts of the world because they don't even have clean water or basic medical care. We have the resources, and yet we are too prone to spend them on ourselves. I often think American evangelicals will have a lot to answer for when we are called to give account for our stewardship.

They are right when they complain about the way the evangelical movement has sold its birthright for a mess of Republican Party porridge. I obviously don't agree with those who think a commitment to left-wing politics would be the right remedy. But I do think the evangelical movement should cut its ties with all political parties, get out of party politics completely,and get back to the business of preaching the gospel.

And they are right when they suggest we have not done enough to reach the outcasts and counter-cultural people in our society. I think their approach to reaching those segments of society is all wrong and largely counterproductive, but to adapt a phrase from D. L. Moody: I like the way some of them are trying to reach those people a lot better than I like the way many evangelicals simply ignore the task of evangelism.⁵

Based on all of the widespread agreement, I would offer that the emerging church, whatever it is, may be the active and corrective work of the Holy Spirit in the Western Church. The emerging church is singular in its strength of conviction and energy/time spent exposing the problems of evangelicalism in the West.

Put another way, the emerging church may not become yet another branch of the evangelical church but simply part of a renewal of evangelicalism’s innate and original intent on effectively engaging world. The emerging church conversation may become movement, or it may be known as a significant recalibration in the life of the church.

The diagram above describes the typical features and path of change and adaptation among social units. The persons in the static phase “listen” for patterns and interesting ideas among the static. In the emerging church the signal of change came from persons like: Soren Kierkegaard (father of existential thought), further developed by Camus and Sartre (in response to Enlightenment ideals being complicit in atrocities), community experimentation in the Hippy Movement, Jesus People who spawned: Christian Rock, JPUSA, Jesus raps, alternative services, the worship wars, and writers like Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, and Tom Sine who began making a case for a new kind of Christianity. It is within this widespread and uncongealed static of thought, movement, and experimentation that the modern day definers of the emerging church were born. In the late 90s early 2000s definers like Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, and Jonny Baker began creating and defining the terms and conversation that we currently call the emerging church. At present networks like Resonate, Emergent, and Leadership Network are establishing the conditions that could transition the emerging church from a conversation to a church planting wave. As this wave gathers momentum and acceptance as an established form of church one could expect the rise of trainers and teachers who will instruct people how to be/plant emerging churches. After some years of instruction one could also expect that pastors will attempt to convince their established congregations to adapt to this new way of doing church. Most innovation breaks up on these rocks. However, not without taking a chunk out of the rocks with them. One other probable outcome of the a wave of emerging church plants would be that the static listeners and the definers abandon the emerging church project as it gets watered down and less “interesting” and begin to look for what the Spirit is doing next. One can see this pattern already beginning in the blogosphere. There is growing discontent among persons in the earlier flocks as emerging church is now a section in Christian bookstores.

So if the emerging church is, at present, the corrective guidance of the Holy Spirit designed to help us get back on track, what is the nature of their correction? What traits are they exhibiting that arise from their rejection of the enlightenment project?

Emerging Church groups are typically observed to emphasize the following elements:⁷

Highly creative approaches to worship and spiritual reflection. This can involve everything from the use of contemporary music and films to liturgy, as well as more ancient customs, with a goal of making the church more appealing to the unchurched, and those within the church.

• A minimalist and decentralized organizational structure.

• A flexible approach to theology wherein individual differences in belief and morality are accepted within reason.

• A holistic view of the role of the church in society. This can mean anything from greater emphasis on fellowship in the structure of the group to a higher degree of emphasis on social action, community building or Christian outreach.

• A desire to reanalyze the Bible within varying contexts with the goal of revealing a multiplicity of valid perspectives rather than a single valid interpretation.

• A continual re-examination of theology.

• A high value placed on creating communities built out of the creativity of those who are a part of each local body.

• A belief in the journey of faith, both as individual and community.

Much of what I observe in the emerging church is an honest attempt to recover the tension of Jesus’ prayer in John 17, in the life of the church. Jesus prayed,

I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. – John 17:14-16 NIV

The classic description of this tension is often referred to as being “in it, not of it”. The general contention of the emerging church is that currently “we are of it and somehow not in it”. Meaning we have taken on the worst traits of culture without finding any useful way to engage it. The emerging church in my experience is offensive because they challenge the deeply held “truths” of evangelical culture (our love affair with modernity) and actively engage in the world (thereby seeming worldly). There is a consistent pattern in emerging church’s unique skill for finding intersection points between the ancient (timeless not of it part) and the present (cultural relevance, retooling for the unchurched). If the emerging church is to have an ecclesiology, it will emerge out of the attempt to balance the perceived current imbalance of “in it, not of it”.

Common Features in Emerging Churches

While it is still somewhat preliminary to being discussing what makes a church emerging, never the less, there are some unique features that emerging churches tend to exhibit. The first is a serious attempt to keep structures and theology permanently provisional. The second, is the “if you come you belong” view of membership.

Permanently Provisional:

A strong undercurrent in most emerging churches is the recognition that change is the new normal. It is assumed that the current state of change is not merely a moment of great flux followed by a period of calm and settling but a state of constant change. The cost of the catch up fads of recent church history (introduction of powerpoint, use of drama, “contemporary” worship) is not sustainable in a culture of constant change. Under this system we fight way too hard to get nowhere near where we need to be. The emerging church seems to have in mind something much more radical. Through keeping structure and theology permanently provisional the emerging church is attempting to thrive not in spite of change but because of it. Like a surfer riding a wave, the emerging church, will use the dynamism of change to fuel it’s forward momemtum.

So how is this being worked out? Well this seems to be worked out in two ways: 1) A move away from systematic theology to what is often termed narrative theology 2) Fluid and temporal structures.

The theology of the emerging church is often misunderstood due to the acceptance of differences in belief and the stated goal of revealing multiple perspectives rather than a single monolithic perspective. These tendencies are often caricatured as a rejection of absolute truth or an entirely incoherent “anything goes” theology. Nothing could be further from the absolute truth. The emerging church sees theology’s purpose in refocusing the church and helping common people make sound judgments on spiritual matters or as Maddox puts it “to give expression to their aspirations, fears and concerns.”⁸ Theology then becomes a way for people to express their story and their part in the larger narrative of scripture. Modernity craved a theology that was prescriptive; right thinking produces right living. The emerging church of the post-postmodern era craves a theology that is descriptive; describing who I am and what I am here for. This sort of folk theology, a theology by and for people, is designed to the keep the church and her descriptions of God understandable and useful to the needs of common people.

Historically, theology has, at least to some degree, been folksy and narrative. Theological innovations are often made in response to the needs of the people trying to live out (and from within) the biblical narrative inside their own culture. The early church fathers hammered out the Nicene Creed to respond to contemporary christological controversies. These christological concerns where not merely the playthings of early academics but were discussed by the common folk of that time. The theology of the Reformation gave voice to growing and common concerns over the papacy, doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. Again this conversation was not held at a merely academic level but spoke to the common concerns and fears of the day. Even modernist theology, at the time, gave voice to the fears and aspirations of the growing enlightenment. The emerging church theologian has in mind the same goals and questions as the theological innovators of the past: “How do we live as people faithful to God given our present circumstances and the present state of the church”. At present the answer seems to be: remain flexible and faithful… permanently.

As some of the theology of the emerging church is provisional, many of its structures are provisional as well. The basic rule of thumb in structural design is “whatever works; whatever is easy to dismantle”. In the emerging church mind there are no structures that are permanent anyway. All institutions rise and fall. Why go crazy trying to come up with something that won’t fail? The church I planted in 1998 was called Next church; not because of our commitment to being ahead of other churches, but because of our desire to be onto the next thing. Nothing but change itself was ever to become permanent.

“If You Come You Belong” View of Membership

Traditional membership, among all kinds of churches, is increasingly falling out of favour. The emerging church, in its ecclesiology, seems ready to throw it out all together. Membership in an emerging church is fundamentally different in the modern church. I describe this distinctive as the fundamental difference between a driving instructor and a driving examiner. Driving instructors take great pride in being able to take in the worst drivers and put them safely on the road. The entrance requirements for a driving school are really quite low. Not even a basic understanding of a car is necessary. All that’s required is a vague desire to drive. A driving examiner, conversely, takes great pride in who they are able to take off the road. Entrance requirement into the licensed drivers club is much more rigorous. To belong one must be well beyond vague desires and possess concrete skills and knowledge. As a matter of fact one need not even possess a desire to drive safely to pass a driving test; just the raw skills and knowledge.⁹

This view of membership has significant influence over the view of accountability in a church. The emerging church has an accountability of engagement. The central question is “how do I safely engage with the world around me?”. This is distinct from a more traditional accountability of avoidance. The central question, in that worldview is “How do I avoid danger?” Sadly the answer is often “NEVER DRIVE! It’s a slippery slope and full of danger!”

The Emerging church conversation has evoked several ecclesial responses. Many emerging churches share similarities with more traditional church styles. In these church communities there are formalized and paid pastoral leadership, the services follow many of the same patterns of the traditional church, and the model is building based. The “emerging” aspects of these communities express themselves as an undercurrents and a distinct ethos within the community. Emerging church ecclesiology has given rise to the “new monastic” movement. Monastic communities often have the following 12 characteristics: “submission to the larger church, living with the poor and outcast, living near community members, hospitality, nurturing a common community life and a shared economy, peacemaking, reconciliation, care for creation, celibacy or monogamous marriage, formation of new members along the lines of the old novitiate, and contemplation.”¹⁰ In the UK and Saskatoon, the emerging church has expressed itself as “alternative worship” a term not be confused with “alternative rock”. “Alternative Worship is "what happens when people create worship for themselves," according to Steve Collins… Alternative Worship is defined by its planning method and approach rather than its format, as the format will be different each time. Alternative worship is very different to Contemporary Christian worship movement or "Youth" services. In fact it is (arguably) in part a reaction against evangelical or charismatic forms of worship. It tends to use popular (secular) music forms in place of hymns, and more casual talks in place of the traditional sermon. Alternative Worship often does not have an obvious leader or stage, and may not involve singing or lecture-style presentations at all.”¹¹ The participants do not necessarily leave their home churches to become part of these events. Often alternative worship groups form a connection between many smaller church communities, house churches, and area church members. Emerging churches also take the form of networks of house churches. Participants in these communities meet weekly in homes for worship. Several regular events bring all the house churches together for training, larger communal worship, or social events. These types of communities are often referred to as “Simple Church” or “Organic Church”.

The Emerging Church and Free Methodism:

To conclude my sketch of the ecclesiology of the emerging church I would like to show how the emerging church could find quite a comfortable home among Free Methodists. What follows here is what I consider to be several key points of intersection between the emerging church and historic Wesleyan and Methodist ethos and praxis.

“All for the Mission”

Wesley once said that, “You have nothing to do but to save souls, Therefore spend and be spent in this work. And go always, not only to those who want [i.e., need] you, but to those who want you most.” I believe the primary and controlling concern of the emerging church is this mission. To spend the church, it’s assets, it’s ideas, it’s energy, it’s culture, and it’s comfort in the saving of souls. It is clear that Wesley placed the concerns of the mission well above conformity to commonly held practices of Christian life. He preached in places not deemed proper to preach so that people could hear. He spoke in ways not deemed fit for a man of his learning and status.

I generally speak, ad populum, — to the bulk of mankind, to those who neither relish nor understand the art of speaking; but who, notwithstanding, are competent judges of those truths which are necessary to present and future happiness. I mention this, that curious readers may spare themselves the labour of seeking for what they will not find.

I design plain truth for plain people: Therefore, of set purpose, I abstain from all nice and philosophical speculations; from all perplexed and intricate reasonings; and, as far as possible, from even the show of learning, unless in sometimes citing the original Scripture. I labour to avoid all words which are not easy to be understood, all which are not used in common life; and, in particular, those kinds of technical terms that so frequently occur in Bodies of Divinity; those modes of speaking which men of reading are intimately acquainted with, but which to common people are an unknown tongue. Yet I am not assured, that I do not sometimes slide into them unawares: It is so extremely natural to imagine, that a word which is familiar to ourselves is so to all the world.¹²

The emerging church shows a similar commitment and priority to the mission of the church. We will spend all and change all to make ourselves and our faith plain and accessible to common people.

“Social Justice”

Another key intersection between the emerging church and Wesley is in a commitment to the poor. Much of the innovation in the emerging church has to do with retooling and refocusing the church as it alleviates poverty. One of the chief ways it attempts to alleviate poverty is to adopt a stance of profound identification with the poor by living among the poor. One can see a similar inclination in Wesley we he said "I bear the rich, and love the poor; therefore I spend almost all my time with them", he further said "in many of them I find pure, genuine grace, unmixed with paint, folly, and affectation." Not only did Wesley prefer the company of the poor but lived among them, identified with them, and sought to bring relief from within the poor community (through empowerment projects like factory co-ops) rather than through forces external to the poor community.

The Quadrilateral

Outler described Wesley’s system of “knowing” and theological reflection as a quadrilateral. Scripture being the primary beginning point supported by Tradition, Reason, and Experience. The emerging church demonstrates a similar model for theological reflection. This is evidenced by a serious commitment to Tradition (ie – return of liturgical services, use of lectionary, establishment of urban monastic communities, and the popularity of meditative prayer forms like labyrinth, lectio divina, spiritual direction), Reason (ie – prolific theological discourse and reflection in blogs, books, conferences, conversation groups, etc…) and Experience (ie – sensual worship, visual arts, interactive media, etc…).

Conclusion

In many respects it is just too early to write an accurate description of the ecclesiology of the emerging church. There is much yet to be defined and much more experimentation to be done before a defin