Missional Postmortem: Complicating factors and personal reflections
I started this postmortem with the timeline of our missional church plant and then covered certain unorthodox decisions that I thought should be taken into consideration. Today, I want to cover some factors that weren’t illuminated by those posts.
I don’t offer these as excuses. They didn’t cause us to fail. But they did contribute to the complexity of trying to establish a missionally-minded, post-Christendom community of faith.
1) We started from scratch in a town where we had no roots or relationships
I could rattle off a list of “missional” and/or “emerging” churches that are established and succeeding after several years on the ground – but a large majority of them were birthed in familiar contexts. Many were kick-started from an existing congregation. Many were started by a small handful of disgruntled ex-pastors and church leaders who already knew each other. Some merged with existing, struggling congregations.
We didn’t know anyone in Oceanside. We have some family in Carlsbad and Vista, but we’d never lived in this area before. I am now asking myself this important question for the first time: “Why would anyone in this town be interested in walking down some alternative church path with me?”
Answer: “Because I’m a pretty good communicator.” That’s it. Let’s face it, that’s not enough.
2) North San Diego County is a relatively conservative context
The strongest churches here extoll conservative evangelical tenets: the inerrancy of scripture; the submissiveness of women; the threat of evolution to the faith; God’s divine blessing on capitalism and Western democracy; an understanding of salvation as the assurance of heaven after death for those who confess specific boundary-marking tenets.
In my observation – precisely because our culture is in a liminal time – one of the best ways to carve out a market niche for new churches in America right now is to preach the revival of Christendom values over-and-against the evils of culture and dress it up as “missional.” As far as I can tell, San Diego is a great place to do that.
Good missionaries adapt to culture. I’d just prefer to adapt to the future of our culture rather than it’s past. That’s a tough gig and I still haven’t figured out how to connect effectively with people on the fringe. I do know this: It’s easier to build coalitions for restoring former glory than it is to lead people into the uncertain possibilities of what could be. I’d rather fail at the latter than succeed at the former.
3) We were a geographically scattered group in an overly busy culture
For the first year or so Jenell and I followed a series of organically occurring relationships that eventually became the group we gathered. That’s was always the plan. So far so good.
However, as Modern suburban Americans we don’t live in the neighborhood – we just sleep there. We live at work, at school, at family gatherings, and at recreation spots. Americans also live incredibly busy lives, so these are the places we tend to meet people “organically.” Consequently, the community we gathered was scattered. Our people lived in Oceanside, Vista, Bonsall, Escondido, Carlsbad, and Encinitas (we only had 7 households!).
This not only contradicted our vision (neighborhood-based missional communities), it made it tough to cultivate a strong sense of community. I think it also placed an implied pressure on our people to move toward becoming leaders in their own neighborhoods. I don’t think it was wise to do that.
4) We mostly tapped into a network of existing Christians
Because we didn’t have deep roots in the community, the few networks we could tap (mostly family and denominational connections) yielded connections with people who were already Christians and (very often) already attending church somewhere.
I’m grateful for these relationships. They’re people exploring different perspectives of the faith, or coming out of difficult situations with a previous church. It was valid to gather with these folks and they’ve become important friends to us.
But, among other things, this meant we quickly took on the nature of being some sort of rogue small group in the area – and Jenell and I could never be reconciled to that. We weren’t interested in wresting people away from their churches and we weren’t interested in remaining a house church either.
We did a fair amount of work in the community that exposed us to new people, but probably because we were so scattered and busy we were never very good at folding people in.
5) De-institutionalizing did not solve the attractional problem, it just informalized it.
If you have any kind of gathering (and I think you must) most people will default to a passive mode. Most people still want to hear from the most inspiring person in the room. Most people still cling to the shelter of silence or anonymity.
Getting out into the community helps. Setting the room up differently helps. Telling the right stories helps. Asking the right questions helps. Food helps. I think this patron/client posture is a challenge that can be overcome and I think it’s imperative to overcome it. But we are swimming against a very strong tide.
And.
Someone must take responsibility for the work of creating that safe, enriching, more egalitarian environment. Because it is work and it requires gifting, character, time, and most of all, willingness. If you don’t want to call that someone a “leader” because you can’t find that word in scripture, or because it’s too laden with corporate/power baggage, fine (I’m sympathetic). But you’re still going to need those people, they still have to shoulder a weight of responsibly that most folks eschew.
In order to avoid the attractional tide, no one person (or couple) can fill this role. You must refuse to do it, and you must establish some form of plurality early on – even if it’s a small plurality that others can observe for a time.
This is what we failed to do and, in the end, it’s why we shut down Ikon. We had people with the gifts and the character, but not the time or the willingness to bear the burden of responsibility alongside us. Probably because we didn’t have deep enough relationships.
