‘Leaving the Church to find God’: an excerpt from Tin House’s conversation with Paul Harding

Former rock-band-drummer-turned-author Paul Harding shocked the hell out of lit-types recently by winning the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel Tinkers. Published by an indie, non-profit press at the NYU School of Medicine (no joke), Harding’s fictional account of a dying man’s hallucinatory meanderings has become the darling of struggling, art-minded authors everywhere.

My review of the book is on the way. In the meantime, take a moment to enjoy this surprising quote touching on theology, atheism, and quantum mechanics from his recent conversation with Tony Perez from Tin House:

TP: There’s a quiet spirituality to your work that I think is lacking in a lot of contemporary fiction (your old teacher Marilynne Robinson being an obvious exception) and I’ve heard you’re a big reader of theology. I wonder if you could talk about how your work or your thinking is influenced by people like Karl Barth, or Martin Luther. Or even someone like William James?

PH: All the people you’ve just described I think you can sort of line up in parade formation, they all come out of the same tradition—reformed Protestant thinking. I grew up here in Boston kind of a neutral atheist. I read my Nietzsche and what not, but I wasn’t a dogmatic atheist—I wasn’t doctrinaire; I didn’t have anything against religion. And then after having studied with Marilynne Robinson for a number of years, it occurred to me that if I asked her where the source of her aesthetic, and intellectual, and soulful kind of integrity and sophistication came from, she would tell me that it was her religion. She would tell me that it came out of her reading in this tradition. Given that I respect her so much, I would be inclined to respect her answer, her own accounting of herself. So I just started to read these things and I found them to be incredibly beautiful— deeply concerned with narrative and cosmology. It was so much more than the popular sand kicking you hear in the press between Richard Dawkins and Creationists—the crummy little cartoon versions of these things. The more deeply I read into them, the more I realize that if you isolate yourself from these traditions of thinking, you’re isolating yourself from most of Western intellectual history, up until, almost post-World War II thinking. It almost feels like a type of censorship, like “religion’s bad for you, don’t bother looking at theology.” I read someone like Karl Barth and it’s just the most beautiful, aesthetically pleasing human thought I’ve encountered. In Tinkers, since it’s fiction, I’m not under the obligation to engage in apologetics or offer proof, but I can explore things. I can play around with them dramatically and aesthetically, and sort of see how these people account for themselves in terms of spiritual conceptions of who they are in the Universe.

If you look at Emerson, he was a Unitarian minister and he left the church. The common rap about that is, you know, he left the church for greener pastures. But if you look at the tradition out of which he came, there’s a strong argument to be made that he left the church to find God. That’s the Protestant tradition—at least the writing and thinking with which I’m familiar. There’s a built-in anti-authoritarianism, the presumption that the institutional church is a human construction; it’s always going to ossify, and it’s antithetical to truly pious thinking. For them, really what it comes down to, is you and scripture. The Unitarians broke away from the Calvinists; the Calvinists broke away from the Lutherans; the Lutherans broke away from the Catholics; the Catholics broke away from the Jews; the Jews broke away from the Babylonians. That’s a beautiful tradition, and seems hardwired into this understanding of what pursuing religion and that kind of thinking is. The best theologians, for example Karl Barth, view the Bible as a work of literature, and that does not demean its normative or holy authority. He’s a close reader of a text. It’s a much more sophisticated use of the imagination and the intellect, and just makes you think about what we talk about when we talk about God. When you go back to someone like Dawkins, he just perverts all that stuff by saying, “if you believe in God, you believe in an old man with a white beard sitting on a throne.” Of course that’s ridiculous. But then you realize that people like Dawkins have never read a word of theology, they rely on popular prejudice—or all this material positivism that they misheard in their, you know, Wittgenstein 101 class. If everything is made of matter, and there is no such thing as the spirit, then all that means is that we have no idea what the nature of matter is. I’m perfectly willing to grant that everything is made out of stuff, but that just means that we don’t really know what stuff is. To me, theology and poetry and art go hand-in-hand with physics. That version of materialism is totally antiquated, out-dated, Newtonian mechanics. They’re always complaining that it’s not testable, it’s not falsifiable, but the most sophisticated quantum mechanical experiments only make the nature of matter more ambiguous than it ever was before—it’s all observer dependent. If you’re a writer, there’s a very cool anti-realist strain in quantum mechanics. Supraluminal influence and observer dependent reality—all of that speaks to the experiential and participatory nature of human consciousness. When translated into fiction, it’s part of character. There’s a passage in Tinkers where Howard is walking through the woods, and when he turns around to look at his wagon, he’s certain that every time he turns his head, everything behind him disappears or changes. In a way, that’s just fooling around with quantum physics, just in a narrative sense.

Love, love, love that bit about Wittgenstein 101. So funny. Seriously, read the whole article. And the book.

Book Review: Unprotected Texts, The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire

Jennifer Wright Knust is bound to be stoned in the courtyard of conservative Christian public opinion this year, thanks, at least in part, to the bang-up job someone is doing on her PR team.

I mean that with all sincerity and admiration.

Newsweek’s Religion Editor, Lisa Miller, picked up on Jennifer’s recent book, Unprotected Texts, The Bible’ Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire and parlayed it into an article, titled, “What the Bible Really Says About Sex.”

Sensing God needed someone to defend the bearded old man’s sexual honor, Al Mohler drew his pistol with “What the Bible Really Says About Sex…Really?” Sadly, yet predictably, Mohler’s argument can be boiled down to “Librals are stoopid.”

Though clearly biased, Jennifer Wright Knust is anything but stupid. More importantly, she never condescends to the personal attacks so prevalent among theological populists like Mohler. In Unprotected Texts she provides an accessible survey of the complexities of sexuality, family, gender roles, and the sexually charged political power struggles found in Jewish and Christian scriptures. Her writing is crisp and energetic, instructional and engaging, and even, at times, personally touching in a way that scholars often attempt, yet rarely accomplish.

It’s a good thing too, because if you lean towards a conservative hermeneutic, Knust is likely to ruffle your feathers. She attempts to dismantle virtually every pillar of conservative family-values, including the ideal of the nuclear family (a modern myth), the exclusivity of male-female marital sex (the exception, not the rule), the high value for marriage (Jesus and Paul barely tolerate marriage), male and female roles (the bible contradicts itself depending on the cultural milieu), and the sinfulness of homosexuality (it’s complicated).

In fact, that pretty much sums up Knust’s arguments about the Bible and sexuality: it’s complicated:

The Bible does not offer a systematic set of teachings or a single sexual code, but it does reveal sometimes conflicting attempts on the part of people and groups to define sexual morality, and to do so in the name of God (p17).

Mohler is right about one thing: these arguments are nothing new, and proclaiming so is where Lisa Miller, in particular, stumbles in her Newsweek article. Still, while this perspective of scripture as a complicated and conflicted dialectic may be old news to scholars, it is still frighteningly rare among everyday folks.

Frightening, I say, because a divergent hermeneutic – where the bible is acknowledged to be a variety of irresolvable divergences – is almost certainly correct. One simply cannot take scripture seriously (as Knust puts it) and fail to notice that it often argues vigorously with itself. Historically, it’s the attempt to force scripture into a seamless and systematic convergence of unquestionable control that leads people to malign and maim others in the name of God.

As I’ve argued before, being intellectually honest enough to live in the tension of irresolvable divergence is an important means of reflecting genuine Christian humility, or, what Leslie Newbigin called a “proper confidence.”

That doesn’t mean I’m with Knust on everything in this book. Her bias leaves little room for a nuanced interaction with opposing views and the overall effect is that certain speculations appear to be well-grounded facts when, in fact, they’re little more than modern academic fancy (i.e. the assertion David and Jonathan’s relationship was sexual).

Moreover, internal conflict in scripture doesn’t necessarily preclude congruence. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine having a proper confidence in Christ, much less Christianity, without a sense of congruence within certain themes. Yet, Knust offers almost nothing to identify the internal congruences of scripture (except the congruence of conflict). She seems content to commend the golden rule as the highest expression of scripture without explaining exactly why this ethic warrants preservation in the midst of so much textual excising.

Still, Knust’s book represents an important perspective in a world that seems to be increasingly prone to religious extremism in the form of sexism, misogyny, and violence. There are practical, real-life implications at stake: people still get literally and figuratively stoned in this world for speaking or acting in ways contrary to entrenched social and religious mores.

As Knust herself says in the introduction: “sluts should live” (p17).

(I received a galley copy of Unprotected Texts free of charge by the publisher in return for agreeing to review the book. I was not asked to offer either a positive or negative review.)

The Lord’s Prayer as Political Manifesto

“This, then, is how you should pray:

“‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.’

Matthew 6:9-13

Recently a friend posted this question on facebook:

What does it look like when the Kingdom comes “on earth as it is in heaven”?

This is a question Christians often find difficult to answer. In the tradition I hail from (Charismatic/Pentecostal), it usually sends us into speculative reveries about “heaven”, or worse, about bringing the “power” of God into our lives to combat the devil.

But – typical of ancient Jewish rhetorical forms – the question inherently posed is answered by the prayer itself: The “kingdom” (or God’s will) will come “on earth as it is in heaven”:

• When there is daily bread for everyone (v11),
• When the practice of forgiveness routinely breaks the cycle of retribution (v12), and
• When people faithfully do what is right because evil no longer makes sense (v13).

Very simply, Jesus’ prayer evokes a life of goodness for all. Set within the context of a prayer, Jesus names goodness and shows that it springs from an overall posture of reliance upon God.

It helps to know that, like much of what Jesus said, his prayer is an echo of the great eschatological passages in Isaiah like 2:1-5 and 65:17-25. The future hope Jewish prophets spoke of was a redeemed earth, finally free of the evil caused by foolishness and vanity. Look at how Isaiah describes this great end-times hope in Chapter 65:

20 “Never again will there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not live out his years;
the one who dies at a hundred
will be thought a mere child;
the one who fails to reach a hundred
will be considered accursed.
²¹ They will build houses and dwell in them;
they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
²² No longer will they build houses and others live in them,
or plant and others eat.
For as the days of a tree,
so will be the days of my people;
my chosen ones will long enjoy
the work of their hands.
²³ They will not labor in vain,
nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune;
for they will be a people blessed by the LORD,
they and their descendants with them.
²⁴ Before they call I will answer;
while they are still speaking I will hear.
²⁵ The wolf and the lamb will feed together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox,
and dust will be the serpent’s food.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,”
says the LORD.

What’s being depicted here is a good life on earth, involving the joy of birth, the blessing of a long life, the dignity of work, the pleasure of eating, and the love of family and community. We see true peace, in the Jewish sense of shalom; completeness.

Now, it is patently obvious to me that these passages (both in Matthew and Isaiah) are about down-to-earth problems and down-to-earth solutions; not earth-bound problems we escape by flying away to an ethereal plane of existence, or “spiritual” problems combatted by the genuflections of a voodoo Christianity. Yet that is often what Christians have in mind when they speak of “heaven” and “the kingdom” and it tends to imprison us in abstract conversations and ridiculous theatrics.

Meanwhile, a couple thousand years later, the earth is still groaning for this good future to become a present reality.

It’s time to grow up. As long as the religious concept of evil remains limited to the personification of a mythical creature and our ability to imagine better possibilities remains limited to a mythical place, we will be forever relegated to the individualized realm of dualistic pietism.

We must follow Christ and the prophets in moving beyond our childish metaphors and concretely name evil for what it really is – starvation, exploitation, exclusion, vengeance, violence, and the like – so we can name goodness for what it really is: equality, provision, peace, and so forth.

Moving toward the reality of such things is extremely difficult, but not impossible. Not only is there is no theological impediment to God’s will being done “on earth as it is in heaven”, it is, in fact, our theological imperative to cooperate with this effort, inaugurated by Christ in earnest over 2000 years ago. It will not happen except through us.

That is what the Lord’s prayer is really about. We don’t pray so God will do something for us, we pray so God will do something to us. We don’t pray to pass responsibility on to an invisible other, we pray for the stuff that will get us off our knees and cause us to roll up our sleeves.

The Lord’s Prayer is the prayer to end all prayers because in it, Jesus not only teaches his disciples how to pray, but how to stop praying.

The Lord’s Prayer is not a protective charm. It’s not about magic, voodoo, or “spiritual mapping.” It’s about naming the concrete goodness of God, discovering a gift of faith for that goodness, and then bringing that goodness into reality by the sheer political will that such a gift empowers.

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)?

Missional Postmortem: Some personal struggles, part 1

After reading last week’s installment Jenell informed me that I hadn’t been honest. She’s right. The truth is, I failed to mention that we face two of the most difficult personal hurdles of our lives during the past two years.

So here goes. A bit more honesty.

The first struggle – my two-year long effort to find solid work – was the least significant of the two. I’ve written a bit about this already, but I’ll confess that I wasn’t prepared for the emotional toll of being in prolonged unemployment and the crisis of faith it would trigger. Until June of 2008 (at which time I was 37 years old), I’d never applied for a job I didn’t get. I took pride in that.

No more. For over two years I submitted hundreds of resume’s without a meaningful response. I cobbled together a part-time income doing freelance writing, web work, and other odd contract jobs and temporary gigs, but was never able to fully provide. This seemed to flatly contradict the deeply personal sense of calling and promise I felt God had given us.

There were legitimate complications – I was a part-time student, I was looking for work outside my established career, our relocation coincided with the onset of the Great Recession – blah, blah, blah (quit yer whining). But despite ready rationalizations, I took this as confirmation of the lifelong fear that I am utterly inadequate.

How do I express this?

The need to fulfill (to fully fill) the daily renewing void of hunger and desire in oneself and those nearest your heart is intrinsic to being a human animal; but the need to do so creatively and productively – and (let’s face it) to be recognized for it – is intrinsic to being made an image (or ikon) of God.

The void itself is a gift, which anticipates the gift that fills it. This what we are: empty begging bowls; that are periodically filled to overflowing; that fill others from our abundance; that do it again. This is literally our human vocation. It’s a noble humility.

Imagine, then, the agony of pushing one’s empty bowl toward God, in faith – day after day and year after year – only to bring it back still empty, or merely dribbled with the spittle of one’s own desperation (some of you don’t need to imagine, you know this feeling). Now, faith itself drives you to a fairly limited number of unpleasant explanations for this cosmic stinginess.

My temptation is to suspect divine rejection, the emotional by-product of which can only be God-loathing, self-loathing, or both.

Don’t worry, I’m not there anymore and I do have a theology that helps me reconcile this (insert parable here about blindness and sight). But it turns out that rational convictions and irrational ones are rival siblings that rarely reconcile. Besides, I know what you’re thinking and you’re quite right: this is bigger than vocational angst. I have been looking for the epistemological bottom-line for quite some time now and I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

So the loss of certainty is the price I’ve paid for a career in ministry, a theological education, and a long and painful walk of obedience to a God I seem habitually unable to disdain despite his apparent indifference. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to look people in the eye again and give easy answers. There’s no un-eating the apple. Yet that’s what most people want to hear from a pastor; the simple innocence of Eden before the fall, not the scarred wisdom of Jerusalem after the eschaton.

Still, I did gain something from the loss.

I’ve begun to see this sense of futility as one of the significant challenges to faith in the courtroom of postmodernity. Once you feel the agony of unrequited faith, I think you begin to apprehend the general perspective of atheism.

We tend to see Modernity as the age of anti-faith rationalism, but I think it was actually the age of mans most earnest supplications – risks of faith that largely went unanswered. ‘Postmodernity’ is the resulting malaise. Modernity’s bowl of faith was returned empty time and time again, and that emptiness indicts the cocksure certainty of our Janus-headed enlightenment cults of religion and science, which often conspired to deliver the emptiest promises of the past ‘Christian century.’

And I’ve begun to see that while atheists call religion a crutch, atheism itself is a big warm blanket, comforting its wearer from the bitter cold of an empty universe on the one hand and the horror of divine contempt on the other. I don’t mean that as a denigration. More than once this past year I begged for that blanket. But that bowl came back empty too.

In a world where the promises of gods and scientists fail to fully fill the empty ikons of the earth, what remains? For now it appears that ambition replaces creativity and entertainment replaces exaltation. I know because that’s what people I meet settle for. That’s often what I settle for. It doesn’t satiate, but for many it’s better than nothing.

And It just so happens these are the only two incarnations of science or religion that enjoy much popular currency today. Give them ambition and give them entertainment, for God or for profit, and you will earn a living.

I’m still not satisfied, but in a land of famine the one with a little eats like a king. So I keep pushing my bowl toward the sky, praying for a little to fill myself and a little to share.

What is the incarnational response to the Mount Soledad Cross controversy?

The Mount Soledad Cross has been declared unconstitutional by the Federal 9th circuit court of appeals. The controversy surrounding this cross has been hot for over two decades, but the cross itself has been present since 1913.

Here’s a quote from the court’s opinion:

Overall, a reasonable observer viewing the memorial would be confronted with an initial dedication for religious purposes, its long history of religious use, widespread public recognition of the cross as a Christian symbol, and the history of religious discrimination in La Jolla,” McKeown wrote. “These factors cast a long shadow of sectarianism over the memorial that has not been overcome by the fact that it is also dedicated to fallen soldiers, or by its comparatively short history of secular events…. The use of such a distinctively Christian symbol to honor all veterans sends a strong message of endorsement and exclusion. It suggests that the government is so connected to a particular religion that it treats that religion’s symbolism as its own, as universal. To many non-Christian veterans, this claim of universality is alienating.

Predictably, conservative Christian activists are decrying it.

Here are questions that bother me:

What are the truths, untruths, and half-truths of this case, and which truth is weightiest?

And, what public stance on this issue is required of Christians who adopt an incarnational posture?

Top 10 Least Popular Posts of 2010

It’s the last day of the year and bloggers everywhere are recapping their most popular posts. I figured I’d do something a bit different, so here are the top ten Pastoralia posts that touched a nerve this year.

They’re not necessarily the most visited or the most commented. They’re just the one’s that earned me a little ire, prompted stern private emails, and caused people to unfriend me on facebook. In no particular order.

Enjoy.

• Bonding vs Bridging Communities: Fear & Retribution in Fundamentalism
• 5 Arguments Against the Use of Marketing and Media in Church
• Men Are In Charge Because the Bible Says So
• Why The Bible Is Insufficient For Mission
• The Prostitution of the Gospel Through Marketing
• What About God As The Monster? An Open Letter To Brian McLaren
• Does It Matter If We Know Jesus?
• Al And Tipper Gore And The Advent of Term Marriage
• Pat Robertson Falls From the Ladder of Being (And So Do We)
• Vineyard Churches at the Crossroads

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.

Missional Postmortem: Intentionally unorthodox decisions that may have contributed to morbidity

There were some decisions we made in our failed missional church planting effort that were less than typical. Some may have been wise. Others, perhaps not. You be the judge:

We didn’t recruit a team
From the beginning we felt God was leading us to abstain from recruit a classic church-planting team. In some ways this made sense: We knew very few people from our home church in Columbus who would have affinity for a non-institutional, postmodern community of faith. Plus, I knew I’d likely never be able to pay people who came along. In other ways it didn’t: Jenell and I are very good at some things, but not, by any means, good at everything.

My belief was that we would be able to grow leadership in the first three years (building relationships for the first year before gathering a group, followed by two years of leadership development within the group). I seem to have severely underestimated the length of time it would take to do, well…everything. Two and a half years into this, we still have nobody to truly partner with.

We didn’t establish secular work beforehand
For years this was my excuse for not church-planting: before this experience, I wasn’t professionally qualified to do anything but minister – and church planter’s (even institutionally-minded ones) need to be bi-vocational. Well, it was even harder than I thought. It took me two years of scraping together a meager living in a variety of communications, management, and design-related gigs before I landed a full-time job (it didn’t help that I was in school at the time).

We didn’t wait until I finished school
With my school workload, freelance gigs, financial stress (not to mention a little blogging on the side), I wasn’t a very good leader over the past 18 months since starting the group.

I didn’t preach or teach
Most church planters want to get their people into pews (or whatever) as soon as possible on a Sunday morning so they can preach great sermons and create loyalty. I didn’t do that. I didn’t do anything that resembled classic preaching or bible study at our groups. We read a passage and I tried to facilitate a fairly open dialogue about it. Now don’t get me wrong, I still gave my two-cents – and as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I suspect lots of people came just to hear my relatively odd (compared to conservative evangelicalism) perspectives on scripture – so, in that sense, I did teach. But you know what I mean: I didn’t “bring the word” every week.

The irony here is that teaching/preaching is far and away my strongest gift. However, I was highly committed to avoiding a unidirectional flow of information entertainment in the group. Our dominant metaphor was a potluck, and I worked hard to try to cultivate that. In the end, I found it’s much harder than I thought to get people to contribute to the cooking.

We refused to provide a ready-made solution for kids
From my answer to a question from yesterday’s post: “As we grew initially there were a few incidents where kids were in conflict. Once we solved that problem it turned into parental stress over the perception that they “weren’t being discipled” – a concern I shared, but nobody really seemed interested in participating consistently to providing the solution. My biggest concern – again – was ownership. My bottom line to the group was, “I don’t care what the solution is, as long as we’re all pitching in.” I was willing to settle for a less than ideal solution as long as everyone, at least all the parents, were taking responsibility for it. People said they would pitch in, but more often than not they failed to follow through. Right or wrong, I interpreted this to be a lack of regard for others in the group, and therefore a lack of genuine commitment to the group.

I refused (it really was just me) to provide a musical worship experience
At first this decision was both strategic and pragmatic. Strategically, I wanted us to have a time of “fasting” from the typical white, contemporary, soft-rock concert experience that passes for worship these days. Pragmatically, we didn’t have anyone who could do it anyway. I believed God would eventually provide someone organically (silly me). After about 9 months the strategic value had long faded and the pragmatic reason had become a serious leadership deficiency.

We didn’t advertise
Not in any way. No logo or branding to speak of. No servant evangelism (which, in my opinion, is really just a PR stunt), no flyers in Starbucks, and certainly no paid ads on Google or facebook. If you don’t already know why, you can read my post 5 Arguments Against the Use of Media and Marketing in Church. In a nutshell: advertising is a function of the marketplace and faith is not a commodity.

Thoughts? Questions?

Missional Postmortem: Ikon Timeline

Our missional church plant failed. Now comes the autopsy. Bring your scalpels and a brown bag lunch. I’m counting on this being a group effort. Here’s the plan:

• A narrative timeline of the effort (Tuesday)
• Intentionally unorthodox decisions that may have contributed to morbidity (Wednesday)
• Complicating factors and personal reflections  (changed to after Christmas)
• Lessons learned (after Christmas)

Please note: The time has passed for condolences (if you feel compelled to share well wishes, please add them to my previous post). Ask questions. Make clinical observations. The patient can’t be any deader. This is a time for learning.

March 2007
Jenell and I launch twoshirts.org in Columbus (where I am the associate pastor of a 1500 member church). It grows very quickly and exposes us to people we normally wouldn’t have met doing typical church outreach. I’m in the midst of several rather radical theological and ecclesiological shifts that have been brewing since 2002.

May 2007
On campus at Fuller Seminary for a two-week intensive, I find myself fighting with God in prayer over an increasing sense of calling to plant a church. My experience with twoshirts.org has ignited my imagination for alternative forms of organization, but I’m struggling with a total lack of confidence in my ability to be bi-vocational and an increasingly strong distaste for evangelical ecclesiology in general and entrepreneurial church-panting methods in particular.

I experience what I believe to be the “voice” of God saying, “I don’t want you to plant a church, I want you to plant a network.” I interpret this to mean that God is calling me to start a network of discipleship groups rather than a more typical centralized, hierarchical church. I call my wife Jenell and tell her about my experience. She’s open to the idea.

I return home to Columbus, Ohio where – in a staff meeting – the senior pastor tells me that I am being called to plant the kind of church God has placed heavily on my heart. I am stunned. Jenell and I start making plans.

June-December, 2007
Jenell and I spend this time talking and praying about where to go for our planting effort. Ultimately we feel called to move back home to California, partly because Jenell’s mother enters into a second bout with cancer in December of 2007. We feel it’s important to be back near family after being away from California for 15 years.

October 2007-May 2008
We develop our strategy for planting a network of discipleship in the San Diego area: use twoshirts.org to meet people; start a missional group; multiply groups; share a public space for all-network worship one weekend per month and operate it as a community center during the week.

I begin to make contact with a variety of San Diego area pastors and leaders. By May of 2008 we have raised $3,300/month for our first two years on the ground.

June-October 2008
We move our family to North San Diego County. We plan to spend the first year connecting with people organically and looking for opportunities to transition into non-ministry careers. We settle in Oceanside in September. We love it.

We connect with the local Vineyard areas pastors group and build some good relationships of support.

November 2008
The bottom falls out of our financial support when our two biggest supporters lose their proverbial shirts in the fallout from the recession. These two supporters alone constituted 60% of our monthly support. This begins a month-to-month financial crisis for our family that will last until September, 2010. We cobble together whatever work we can find.

March 2009
Twoshirts hasn’t gained any real traction in San Diego like it did in Columbus, but it does open all kinds of relational doors for us. We meet a few other people who seem to have a similar heart for a church that is deeper. We start to gather and get to know each other. There is energy and excitement.

June-August 2009
We gather every Sunday night in our home for a common meal, communion, discussion around scripture, and prayer. People bring friends and co-workers. We are highly focused on serving the poor, advocating for justice, and reaching into the community creatively. We organize the first Micah Film Festival in August and have over 200 attendees.

I land a good paying job and put school on hold so I can work full-time. Within 3 months they start paying me late due to faltering accounts and severe internal mismanagement.

September-December 2009
We start focusing on Jesus’ teachings. We use the website to facilitate daily “spiritual exercises.” We host a “progressive advent” in December (advent services held at a different home each week). We’ve grown to about 14 adults and 15 kids.

Jenell and I notice several problems: a) The kids (mostly ages 2-12) are a challenge to the group dynamic, b) we don’t have any kind of emotional component to worship (particularly music) and it’s wearing on some folks, c) I suspect the newer people come mostly to hear what I might say, and d) hardly anyone prays aloud in the prayer time.

By December my employer hasn’t paid me in nearly 3 months. I quit and go back to school, taking out loans to finish. I patch together more contract work. We are nearly out of savings.

January-April 2010
I begin a month-long series on “prayer.” Hardly anyone prays openly. We continue our weekly rhythm. I have my eye on a few potential leaders; one couple is relatively new, so I don’t approach them yet; one couple shows reluctance due to the overwhelming busyness of their life; one couple shows real interest, but travels 25 miles to come every Sunday. They start talking about moving to Oceanside.

May 2010
We lose three families including two of those we were hoping to see develop their own groups someday. Two of the three move out of state. The other family decides they can’t afford to relocate and can’t sustain participation from 25 miles away. Those who remain are only marginally involved outside of Sunday nights.

Jenell and I seriously discuss shutting Ikon down but we realize we’ve never attempted to recruit partners. We put the weekly gathering on hold for the summer so we can recruit, and so I can go to school full-time and work a new temporary half-time job.

June-August 2010
I find myself in conversation with two men who show interest in joining us. Both have a long history in ministry and are both in transition. Both have strong pastoral gifts that compliment mine. The first is in his 50′s. The second is in his 30′s. The second man and his wife are talented worship leaders. It feels like God is at work in these conversations.

At the end of August I finish my Masters degree and land a full-time job working for a local nonprofit. For the first time in two years it feels like things are coming together the way we envisioned.

September-November 2010
We begin gathering again, spending the first five weeks in a planned series of conversations about the vision. I do this for two reasons: a) I want to create a line of demarcation between casual attendance and definite commitment, and b) I want to give the two new leadership prospects an opportunity to engage.

The first man is cautious. He makes it clear to me that his family needs the stability of a steady income. He is interviewing for full-time senior pastor jobs out of state. I can’t blame him.

The second man is enthusiastic. He quickly builds relationships. However, his wife doesn’t attend and it becomes apparent that they are not in this together. By early November he regretfully informs me that his family is not ready to participate in a church-planting effort.

All of this happens in the weeks leading up to the second annual Micah Film Festival. This event is to be a funnel for our Advent gatherings where we planed to have worship lead by this couple. The man informs me that he and his wife are still willing to do so.

However, at this point I know we’re done. I’m not willing to bring in hired guns (even if they’re free) to make Ikon seem more impressive than it really is. I know that losing this person will make Advent anti-climactic and painful for the group. Mostly, I realize that Jenell and I can’t keep carrying the group alone and I know we have no new prospects for partners.

Jenell and I decide to make the film festival our final gathering as a group.

Time of death: 11/21/2010, 5PM.

Questions? Observations?