State of the mission – one year later

Fellow San Diegan Jason Evans wrote a thought-provoking piece the other day on missional discernement. It’s good stuff, as usual, from a talented leader. You should read it.

I do have some thoughts on what he wrote regarding being missional, but I’ll share those in more depth later. His post comes at an interesting time for me: today marks one year since announcing the close of our missional church plant, Ikon Community, and that has prompted me to conduct a little ‘missional discernment’ of my own:

What is the status of our ‘mission’ one year after closing our official ministry?

I’ve finally settled into a post-ministry career

Unlike a lot of planters, I didn’t seek to be bi-vocational. For better and for worse I decided to become an entirely non-professional minister. I was (and still remain) convinced that the future of professional ministry in the United States is grim at best, and problematic for trying to connect with post-Christian groups.

But for 2.5 years, and all during our church planting effort, I worked feverishly in vain to find a new career after 12 years in professional ministry. It was more than frustrating, it was humiliating.

Then, not long after closing Ikon, a new opportunity presented itself at my workplace. I’ve been in that new role for 7 months now and I’m hopeful about our family’s fiscal prospects for the first time in years.

Another funny irony is that I am now, essentially, a professional fundraiser – exactly the task I dreaded most while trying to plant a missional church. I went from struggling to raise $40,000 a year for the church plant, to being responsible for raising $9 million a year for a local nonprofit.

(As an aside, what I have learned about fundraising in the last 17 months has immensely impacted my perspective on how we could be funding missional work. There is a great deal missional leaders could learn from the nonprofit sector. Moreover: there is a gigantic window of opportunity to capture massive amounts of wealth as it is transferred from one generation to the next. And that window is rapidly closing; that transfer is happening right now. Churches in particular are doing a poor job of securing that wealth, and by all accounts the next two generations won’t have nearly as much disposable wealth to give.)

We’ve finally settled into our local community

For 2.5 years we really struggled to connect with people. But almost immediately after shutting down Ikon, local relationships began to open up to us in a remarkable way. In fact, in this past year, our family has somehow gained a larger and deeper network of friends than we’ve ever had in our entire lives – mostly with people in our neighborhood.

I recently had lunch with a local church planter and I mentioned this curious development. He asked, “Why do you think this happened immediately after closing your church plant?” I answered, “Because we don’t have an agenda for people anymore.”

And it’s true, we really don’t. At least, not a one-sided agenda for enlisting them into our own little fiefdom. I definitely have a personal interest: I want their friendship, and I want to give them mine. I deeply desire the fraternity and equality reciprocity brings to neighbors.

Almost none of them attend church – certainly none of them are committed to any kind of faith community – and, to be honest, I have no interest in converting them. The idea alone feels like a form of betrayal.

Also, I’ve been humbled by the quality of their community. By and large, Jenell and I agree that these people do friendship and community better than any church we’ve ever been in. I’ve come to realize it is a conceit of the church that we are the authority on ‘true community’, and it may very well be a particular conceit of the missional/emerging church. Just as with nonprofit fundraising, I think Christians have a great deal to learn from secular communities on this matter.

I am starting to gain an interest in Jesus again

In my conclusion to the missional postmortem, I said I needed to learn how to be a Christian without getting paid for it. Well, I still haven’t. My personal faith has been radically stripped. I could write whole books on what I don’t believe anymore, but would struggle to fill a fortune cookie with what I do.

Yet, recently I’m experiencing an interest in Jesus again. In fact, I work with people of all kinds of faiths, and I’m more convinced than ever that we could all learn a great deal about life and love from Christ, regardless of our creed.

Along those lines, our family has started sporadically attending a local Presbyterian church. The place is so uncool it makes me want to weep for joy. Like Lewis once said, a good liturgy should be like lacing up an old shoe; you hardly notice it’s there – which is exactly what I need right now.

So, what is the state of our ‘mission’?

Well, in some ways, I suspect, it’s better than ever. In other ways, not so much. I successfully transitioned out of the professional side of ministry, but dropped ministry along the way. We’ve connected with an unchurched community, but have no desire to get them ‘churched.’ I’m more committed to Jesus, but less committed to Christianity.

Actually, I really am more keenly aware than ever that different Christian groups mean subtly but significantly different things by the word ‘mission’. For now, suffice it to say that our ‘mission’ is simply to be decent people; that is, good partners, good parents, good friends and good neighbors.

As far as that goes, I think we’re doing alright.

Technorati Tags: Ikon Community, missional

Missional postmortem: some personal struggles, part 2

This has been a tough post to write.

As I previously mentioned, the past two years have brought two of the toughest personal challenges Jenell and I have ever faced. Last time I wrote about my two-year struggle with joblessness. That was tough.

This was tougher.

On September 30, 2009 Jenell’s mother, Nolie, died after a multi-year battle with cancer. I wrote about her at the time and I don’t want to be redundant, but there are some things that haven’t been said.

Jenell grew up in southern California as an only child. She and her mother Nolie were quite close. Even after we married in 1991 (she was 19, I was 20) Jenell visited her mother nearly every day and if she didn’t actually see her, they at least spoke on the phone.

Then, in 1993 I abruptly moved our fledgling family to Utah in pursuit of a new direction for my life – and we didn’t look back for 15 years.

Jenell missed her mother badly. I remember how much my wife struggled those first few years in Utah and, to make matters worse, over the coming years we didn’t see her parents more than once or twice a year because we were always several states away (first Utah, then Ohio). Over time this contributed to a growing distance between Jenell and Nolie and I saw how it took a toll on my wife.

I didn’t do much about it.

In late 2005 Nolie was diagnosed with cancer – about a year after we moved to Ohio. Jenell struggled with the fact that her mother was coping with the illness after we’d moved even farther away. But Nolie fought the disease and, thankfully, went into remission. However, by November of 2007 Nolie’s cancer returned and we knew it was more serious this time. We’d already decided to move back to California, but now we knew it was more important than ever.

Of course, I wanted to plant a church. A crazy, grassroots, missional, quit-my-career, screw-the-system, it-will-never-pay-our-bills-in-a-million-years kind of church. So I bundled the two together (moving back near family/planting a church) and sold it to myself and everyone else as a package deal. We moved in the summer of 2008.

The first year was a Godsend. We settled into the Oceanside community, enjoyed the beach, and built new friendships. Jenell re-connected with her mother as much as possible. It was tough for Jenell to see Nolie’s health deteriorate, and, I think in an effort to protect Jenell emotionally, Nolie was rather guarded about her condition – but Jenell pushed through the awkwardness. It was a very good thing.

It was right smack in the middle of all this that we attempted to start Ikon Community.

Actually, Ikon went very well initially. Our group started heating up in the Summer of 2009 – right when Nolie took a turn for the worse. Jenell started spending more and more time helping her dad with Nolie, and I began to wonder if we could maintain both efforts. Jenell said we could, and I ignored my better judgement.

When Nolie passed away in September 2009 I thought to myself, Jenell is going to need at least a year to really grieve so we should probably hold off on moving Ikon forward. But again, I ignored that impulse. Instead, I tentatively brought it up to Jenell, but she quickly dismissed the idea. She seemed to be handling the loss extremely well.

But Jenell didn’t know what she needed and I heard what I wanted to hear. I should have known better. I should have pushed through her dismissals and really cared for her. But, mired in my own emotional crisis, I was desperate for some kind of win in my life. Jenell knew that and she suffered silently.

The truth is, Jenell was in emotional shock. Outwardly she remained the rock she always has been, but inwardly she was processing her grief in complete isolation. I wasn’t there for her and, to be perfectly frank, we hadn’t allowed ourselves to grow close enough to the Ikon group to lean on them like we should have in a genuine community of faith.

So, for the better part of a year – from the fall of 2009 to the fall of 2010 – Jenell and I were each struggling with our own very serious individual grief. We weren’t completely available to each other or to the people of Ikon. As our frustrations grew on several fronts (personal, professional, financial, missional), we increasingly withdrew.

Things are better now.

Nearly 33 months after moving to California, 18 months after Nolie’s death, 6 months since I finished grad school and landed a stable job, and 4 months since closing Ikon Community, our lives are just now beginning to feel somewhat healthy. My perspective is better than it has been in a long time and Jenell has allowed me to share in the processing of some of her grief. I’m grateful for that.

I don’t know what lies ahead. But I don’t ever want to go back.

Technorati Tags: Church Planting, Family, Ikon Community, Missional Postmortem, Nolie

Fathering daughters in an age of fetishism

Recently a friend on facebook linked to this article (Prime Time TV ‘Objectifies and Fetishizes’ Underage Girls, Study Says) and asked the question:

For parents with daughters like me, how do you counteract this kind of cultural message? Is it important to?

For whatever it’s worth, here’s what I’ve tried to teach my three girls:

1. I am deeply, over-the-moon in love with them,
2. Being a woman is not a moral crime,
3. They have far more power than they realize and must wield it wisely.

I’ve noticed that kids often hold God responsible for the parents they are given (#1), the way they have been made (#2), and the destiny they see (or don’t see) unfolding before them (#3). If Jenell and I do a good job with all three above – which usually has more to do with asking the right questions than with giving the right answers – they will probably come to see God as good in spite of evil, see themselves rooted securely in that goodness, and see it as their responsibility to reflect that goodness in an uncertain world.

I think all this tends to make the inane superficiality of pop culture rather transparent.

Oh, and…

4. Boys are stupid and will say and do nearly anything to get what they want from a girl, but the decent one’s usually come to their senses sometime in their mid-to-late twenties.

Just kidding on that last one.

Sort of.

So, how do you counteract the message of fetishism with your girls (or boys, for that matter)?

Technorati Tags: Culture, Daughters, Family, Parenting

A prayer chain of faith, hope, and love

I’ve been making and using my own prayer beads for a couple of years now. I find the practice not only stretching, but somehow comforting. Jenell has picked up on the practice too, and we’ve each experimented with our own approaches to praying through them.

Recently Jenell created a set of prayer beads for a close friend. I thought both the beads themselves and the instructions were so beautiful I should share them here. The whole piece – more of a prayer chain really – is designed to be worn around the neck. The beads are turquoise and divided into three sets of ten – often called “decades” – with each set divided by little metal plates that say “faith”, “hope”, and “love”, respectively. The whole set clasps together at a wire cross, which divides one of the decades in half.

Here are the instructions Jenell wrote:

____________________________________________________________________________

First Decade
Start out with Hope. Stop and think about hope and what you truly need. Go from bead to bead and ask God for the things you hope for. Petition him for the things in your life you need and desire. Each request counts for one bead. These 10 beads are for you. You will have the chance to pray for loved ones in a minute.

Second Decade
Next move to Love. Stop at the love bead and think about whom you love and are thankful for. Ask God to be with these people as you move down the first five beads. You will then stop at the cross. Thank God that you only have the ability to love because He first loved you. Think about the cross and His willingness to die for you! Thank Him and then continue to move down the next five beads praying for, and thanking God for your loved ones.

Third Decade
Finally move to Faith. This may be the hardest set to pray through. Ask God to provide you with the faith and perseverance to act in accordance with his will. Pray for the things in yourself you need to change and don’t have the understanding, courage, belief to give up. Pray for the things in your life that you don’t think God can touch.

Stop at the Hope bead one more time and ask, pray for, hope for, peace in your day and finish by thanking God for giving Himself to all those who ask for Him.

A Few Notes

• You may or may not find it hard to come up with 10 things in each category. When you get stuck just wait a second and ask God to bring something else to mind. He will. Just wait.
• If you find yourself having more than 10 things to pray for, move on anyway. Remember you should come back to it in the next day or two and can pray about it then.
• Once you feel comfortable praying through the beads the way I have outlined start switching it up. Use the three beads as a jumping off point to pray for other categories, for example: Faith that the sick will be well (pray for 10 sick friends); Hope for the war to end and our soldiers to be safe! (pray for 10 soldiers you know); and so on.

____________________________________________________________________________

What are your experiences with the use of tactile prayer tools such as beads, candles, etc? Does this practice help you? Does it concern you? If you don’t have experience with this kind of practice, are you interested in trying it out?

Technorati Tags: Jenell Coker, Prayer, Prayer beads

Taking the leap into non-professional ministry

For years I said I’d never plant a church. I said it publicly and I said it often. When people asked why, I always had a simple answer:

Church planters need to be bi-vocational and I’m not qualified to do anything else.

In a way it was true. I spent 14 years in professional ministry. Ministry is my passion, my main experience, and my only education. Yes, I’ve worked all kinds of jobs and have some good skills and experience, but the truth is I’d become accustomed to making a decent living as a pastor in a large church. I liked having a good paycheck, a car allowance, a cellphone allowance, a book allowance, and a 403(b). I liked preaching to a thousand or so people on the weekend. I was good at it.

Things began to change rapidly in 2005. I became convinced that putting on a good show for Jesus wasn’t the best way to teach people how to follow Christ (and that it wasn’t a good way to be a follower of Christ either). By the summer of 2008 this led me and Jenell to move from Ohio back to California to pursue a form of church that would probably never pay us a full-time salary. So, I determined to find a new career that would enable me to be more immersed in culture and foster a more egalitarian and decentralized form of church life.

Two years and three months later I finally have a job. Two, actually.

Okay, maybe that’s being a bit melodramatic. The truth is, I spent the better part of the past two years as a grad student at Fuller Seminary. On the other hand, I did take two quarters off school in order to pursue an opportunity that I thought would turn into a new career path for me. (Maybe I’ll share more about that little nightmare someday.)

Aside from that catastrophe, I dipped my toe in several part-time waters, always looking for a career foothold. I wrote for blogs, designed websites, developed marketing copy, ran real estate social media campaigns, designed product brands, interviewed Christian authors, produced audiobooks, developed sermon briefs for a Las Vegas mega-church pastor, and wrote youth coaching certification test curriculum.

It was an incredibly frustrating two years. I made very little money and there were times I knew we weren’t going to make it. We spent a sizeable savings (I’d be embarrassed to tell you how much), a retirement fund, and incurred significant debt in order to pay my tuition and generally make ends meet. I went outside at night and shook my fist at God a lot. He’d just stare back at me blankly and sort of shrug, which, you know, just pissed me off even more.

But we did make it. Somehow money always came.

I say that cautiously, because nobody should rely on unexpected checks for several thousand dollars to come from people one hardly knows. But that’s exactly what happened. Also, a couple dozen of our friends and family pitched in to help support us while we chased our insane little missional dream. There is no possible way to overestimate how much these gifts meant to our family. We wouldn’t have made it without them. To all those who have contribute to our mission, I thank you dearly.

The low point came about two and a half months ago. The bottom dropped out of another part time contract job. Maybe it’s that I was expecting this one to turn into a full-time gig. Maybe I was just overly stressed from going to school full time, working part time, and trying to get a church plant off the ground. Whatever the cause, I went home and suffered a kind of personal breakdown that turned me into a hysterical heap of flesh on the bed. It’s a strange thing to be split in two – one half of you crying-laughing uncontrollably at the hopeless absurdity of a life gone off the rails, the other half hovering above, just staring back at you blankly and sort of shrugging.

It scared Jenell. Hell, it scared me.

Then, two unexpected turn of events: First, a good friend named Roy asked me to help him with his small business start-up. We have great chemistry together and strong overlapping gifts and values. I’ll be ready to tell you more about this start-up after the new year, but suffice it to say I’m excited about being involved. However, as a startup, it isn’t able to pay me and probably won’t for quite some time. Even then, it will likely be a supplemental income for a while. So I still needed a long-term, full-time gig.

Then, 3 weeks before I completed my final coursework, I stumbled across an ad for a Communications Coordinator at Interfaith Community Services. I applied on a Sunday night, was interviewed on Tuesday, attended their annual business meeting on Wednesday, won a second interview on Friday, and started the job the following Monday.

Crazy. In a few short weeks, my whole world changed.

After two years of struggling to make ends meet as a grad student and church-planter I had somehow landed two jobs, just a few weeks before graduating. I’ve been collaborating with Roy for about 10 weeks now and working at Interfaith for 6. Both allow me to be creative and catalytic, and both  are connecting me with some of the most remarkable ministry and social service opportunities I have ever seen. I’ll be blogging more about both of these organizations in the future. Most importantly, having this work and being out of school has enabled me and Jenell to pursue the ministry we feel called to, in the way we feel called to pursue it.

In the end I’ve learned that God really is good, but mostly in unexpected ways and through unexpected people. I’ve learned that faith/faithfulness means persevering through uncertainty, and I’ve learned that hope and love make that experience bearable, and even at times joyful.

Mostly, I’ve just learned.

Technorati Tags: bi-vocational ministry, Interfaith Community Services, Missional Church

Tea. Earl Grey. Hot?

Help me out here.

Jenell and I are currently embroiled in a hot debate. She claims that nobody out there understands my reference to “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” at the top of the right-hand sidebar. I’m quite sure that many of you know what it refers to and why it’s placed just above the search box. She says I’m a self-deluded geek.

What say you?

Technorati Tags: Miscellaneous

Fiction Friday: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

For me the title of this book has always conjured the image of a young Jack Nicholson in roughneck clothes grinning dangerously within the sterile ward walls of a mental hospital. It was a defining role for him and in many ways serves as a cultural landmark for America as well, signaling the transition of our society from the logical 50′s to the passionate 60′s.

In that sense, the film was a faithful rendering Ken Kesey’s watershed novel of the same name, which takes place not so much in a mental hosptial, but in that manic and medicated space between freedom and security, anarchy and order, organism and institution. These archetypal Modern nemeses are sketched in the characters of Nurse Ratched, the authoritarian dictator of the ward, and McMurphy, the new patient faking mental disorder in order to live a life of leisure among the harmless stooges.

The hospital ward is an extension of Nurse Ratched herself: cold, clean, hardened and impersonal. Everything is orderly, material, and tightly controlled. She wields power through punishment, provides safety by threats, gives comfort by means of control. Into this micro-culture McMurphy enters as the revolutionary, the anarchist, the agent of spirit and creativity which overturns convention. Like all freedom fighters he represents danger for both his rulers as well as himself and his compatriots.

As with the 60′s, the power struggle between McMurphy and Ratched is most powerfully symbolized by sex. Ratched is uncomfortable with her own sexuality – her large breasts strictured by uniformed sterility. McMurphy is sexually unfettered, introducing prostitutes to the residents and working to arrange a sexual encounter for Billy – the tamed and timid child of Modernity’s puritanical authoritarianism. This is the struggle of our era, one just beginning to simmer in the early 60′s when Kesey wrote this novel, and its tragic ending turned out to be remarkably prescient. We view this descent into violence through the narrative eyes of Chief Bromden, the bewildered native-American who stands, perhaps like most of us, off to the side pretending not the hear or speak, while the extremes of society battle for supremacy.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a mythological drama for the malcontented children of Modernity, a dramatic battle between the gods of our age: Eros, the creative Greek god of sexual love and beauty, and logos the neatly-ordered incarnation of Christendom’s version of Jesus. In this sense I don’t think the relevance of Kesey’s novel ended with the flower-children of the 60′s. Eros is still the god of loafers, poets, artists, and lovers and he still strives to liberate the repressed in a logos society dominated largely by cold calculation, dogmatic assertion, and quantifiable production. This struggle continues in various postmodern subcultures like Hip-Hop, Hackers, Freegans, Street Artists, Cybergoths, Polyamory, and hundreds of other North American neo-tribal groups who still can’t conceive of a brand of institutional authority rooted in anything but control, and toward whom the American church still largely projects the Jesus of logos.

Kesey provides no answers – no hopeful way forward. In the novel, this climactic battle wounds both sides irreparably, and as I set it down I couldn’t help but wonder just how prescient Kesey may yet turn out to be.

Technorati Tags: Fiction, Fiction Friday, Ken Kesey, Modernity, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Biblical Ethics and Gay Marriage in California

California has been in the news again recently concerning the topic of gay marriage. As I’m sure everyone knows, California passed Prop 8 last fall, a State amendment banning gay marriage, and its passage was widely attributed to a divers coalition of Churches and Christian groups.

For nearly two now weeks Prop 8 has been on trial with both sides arguing over the purpose of marriage. But what I find most interesting is that those bringing the lawsuit opposing it Prop 8 have continually asked witnesses defending the proposition whether or not the legalization of Gay marriage would benefit the spouses and children in gay families. In each case, these witnesses have conceded that it certainly would.

This, I think, is a bit of a coup for the plaintiff.

Also, last week a team of Sociologists from USC published the results of a five-year study and concluded that children raised by same-sex couples on average thrive as well as those of opposite-sex couples and better than single heterosexual parent households. Moreover, they claim the evidence suggests that children raised by same-sex women do the best of all.

There’s a great deal that could be discussed here, including the scientific veracity of the study. That’s very important but this isn’t a science blog and, for now, I’m more interested in another question.

So here it is:

If it can be shown that the legalization of gay marriage positively impacts the physical and emotional well-being of a minority group of men, women, and children then do Christians have a moral and biblical imperative to support it or would you say that, even though a minority group would suffer, that the protection of the traditionally practiced institution of marriage is the best way to support the well-being of everyone in general?

I’m interested in hearing a wide range of Christian perspectives on this, so whether you’re conservative or liberal, gay or straight, please feel welcome to contribute your thoughts. However, fair warning: Comments that I deem to be out of line will be deleted.

Technorati Tags: Ethics, Gay Marriage, Prop 8

Coastline Roadtrip at Sunset

I found this 7 minute video on my 8 year-old daughter Alannah’s iPod yesterday. I didn’t know she was recording this at the time. My favorite moments:

• Savannah singing along to John Mayer. Cute and disconcerting all at the same time.
• 0:39 - “Wow, an Apache helicopter flying into the sunset. That would bring a tear to any hard-core Marine’s eye.”
• 1:28 - “Judah! I am not putting that creepy face on tape!” (Odd. Why does she refer to it as “tape?” Never in her lifetime has any kind of recording “tape” been used in our house.)
• 3:10 - Classic roadtrip sibling bickering.
• 5:07 – “Let’s see if you can see the water…You can’t really, can you?…Well, at least you got to see the sunset…Be thankful for what you have!”
• 7:13 - “Let’s just film the sunset, again.” Followed by spectacular beach palms silhouetted against a distant nuclear fireball.

Technorati Tags: Alannah, Beach, Family, John Mayer, Judah, Roadtrip, Savannah, Sunset

Congratulations, You're Postmodern

About two years ago I was at one of Savannah’s softball games. At the time she was a freshman at a very conservative private Christian school in Columbus, OH, nestled affectionately in the lap of a very large Nazarene church. As a freshman she didn’t play much – except to pinch run from time to time – so, as I often did, I brought a book. On this particular day it was James K.A. Smith’s, Who’s Afraid of Post-Modernism?

At one point Savannah skipped over from the dugout and sat next to me for a few minutes so we could make fun of the other team. After a pause she snatched my book and looked over the cover.

Wrinkling her brow, she said, “What’s Postmodernism?”

“It’s a loose school of philosophy reacting against the underpinnings of the Enlightenment,” I deadpanned.

“What’s ‘underpinnings?’”

“Basic principles.”

“Ooh, Ooh,” she popped with sudden excitement, “I know what the Enlightenment is!”

“Oh?” I said, raising an eyebrow expectantly. Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: Books, Family, James K.A. Smith, Postmodernism, Savannah