On Jack White, Worship, and the Marketplace of Art & Spirit

Jack White is a performer – no ifs, ands, or buts about it – and yet he has the audacity to expect a relationship of mutuality from his audiences. If you’ve ever preached, given a speech, or performed on stage in any capacity then you know exactly what he’s talking about here. There is a kind of reciprocal relationship that can exist between artist and audience, giver and receiver, wherein the gift is nurtured and grown between them.

The problem, according to Jack, is that American audiences are increasingly “spoiled,” by which he seems to mean lazy or entitled. Referring to the rock concert, Jack says, “It’s supposed to be a sharing experience.” Is it just me, or is he describing something we see happening in churches too?

For my part, I would say that Americans have increasingly lost the imaginative realm of the gift as the locus of relationships. Hence, we’re less able to conceptualize our relationships as anything but marketplace exchange; a tragic loss that has crippled institutions of art and spirit as sacred spaces of human formation - largely because we’ve thoroughly saturated those realms with the metrics of the marketplace. Consequently, I tend to think that by purging gift-space of marketplace dynamics we might be able to re-appropriate the role of artists and priests as performers in an appropriate sense.

Thoughts?

Technorati Tags: art, Charlie Rose, Church, Jack White, Preaching, Reciprocity, The Gift, The White Stripes, worship

What (Four) Teenagers Think About Religion And Our Biggest Problems Today

As part of a grad school class I’m taking I asked four teenagers three questions about their main concerns in life and how religion or faith impacts those concerns. I thought it would be fun to ask Pastoralia readers those same questions. So first, here are the questions and the responses I received from 4 teenagers:

1. What 3 issues stress you out most?
2. What are the 3 biggest challenges facing our world?
3. Does religion/faith help you deal with these concerns better or make them more difficult? How?

Respondent #1:

1. Figuring out what my priorities are, figuring out how to discover myself, and figuring out how to maintain grades without going crazy knowing that next year is going to be tough and that I procrastinate. I also dislike how my response to having a ton of things to think about is not thinking about any of them. I’m a very relaxed and mellow person… See more though, stress doesn’t get to me too much.
2. Disregard for the environment, poverty/greed, and parochialism.
3. Religion and faith do little for me. I see and respect how faith motivates people and gives them a sense of purpose, but it would be stupid to say something like “We are God’s instruments.” That belittles free will and extraordinary individual morality. What I mean is no because putting things in the hands of some unknown might make you feel better, but it does little to help your problem. Religion does get in the way of the global warming challenge though because some people deny science and endorse the supernatural.’

Respondent #2:

1. School, Grades, finding a job
2. Global warming, america doesnt care what other people think of them, the global and national economy
3. I don’t know, i would say neither. to say that i think religion helps in MY opinion wouldn’t be how i feel but i have this guilt feeling that if i say no it doesnt it would be wrong. i think saying that religion helps … See moreis something we have been accustomed too and for the most part is accepted by society. i dont think i could say yes or no though in regards to religion/faith

Respondent #3:

1. Thinking about college, self-image, and excelling at what is important to me.
2. Realizing the worth of a human being, disreguarding race or gender. Finding more diplomatic ways to solve world issues if possible. Letting go of selfish natures to benefit those in greater need and those with less opportunities.
3. My faith helps me because it gives me hope that someday these issues might be solved or improved. it pushes me toward the direction of helping make a change.

Respondent #4:

1. Future, Family,
2. World Hunger, Religious Conflicts, Environmental damage.
3. No it does not help me, religion tends to create conflict, especially in today’s world. We don’t need religion to solve our as well as the world’s problems or challenges.

Does this tell us anything useful about the worldview of these teenagers? In your experience, to what extent are these responses typical of American teenagers? What does this mean for churches and church leaders?

And, finally, how are their responses similar or different from your own?

My brief thoughts:

• Teenagers today (or, these teenagers at least) are way smarter than we give them credit for.
• Their concerns are more or less exactly the same as mine.
• With the exception of one, there is very little connection between daily concerns and religion/faith and the connection between religion/faith and global concerns is mostly negative. I myself have a great deal of hope for how faith can impact global concerns, but quite frankly I share the disconnect between my faith and my daily stresses. If anything, being a person of faith has only increased by level of concern and responsibility.

Technorati Tags: Church, Culture, Religion, Surveys, Teenagers

Why I’m Reluctant To Tell People I’m Planting A Church

Because this is what “excellence” looks like.

“Sunday’s Coming” Movie Trailer from North Point Media on Vimeo.

UPDATE: A nice little conversation has sprung up around this video over at Bill Kinnon and Dan Kimball’s blogs. Bill wrote a classic piece on the subject a while back titled, What Is What, that I would highly recommend.  If you don’t already know my thoughts on the use of media in the church, you can check out these recent posts:

• 5 Arguments Against the Use of Media and Marketing in Church
• Church As Screen Time and Pastor as Parasocial Personality
• The Prostitution of the Gospel Through Marketing

Technorati Tags: Attractional, Bill Kinnon, Church, Dan Kimball, Hype, video

The Death Rattle of Christendom

She sank more and more into uneasy delirium. At times she shuddered, turned her eyes from side to side, recognised everyone for a minute, but at once sank into delirium again. Her breathing was hoarse and difficult, there was a sort of rattle in her throat.

~ Fyodor Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment

Dear Fyodor,

It’s getting rough for the old girl. Despite the rattle of death in her chest, there’s still a hint of the former beauty and dignity behind those eyes and, as anyone would tell you, she’s as feisty as ever. Still, the truth is she’s dying and there’s nothing to be done about it. As we sit around her bed praying and waiting, her moments of lucidity come with rapidly decreasing frequency.

Everyone here is dealing with the ugliness of her death in their own way. My sister refuses to let her go. She stands just beyond the door, arguing in harsh whispers with the doctors and nurses. She won’t believe the facts of the case, and it’s easier to argue over the interpretation of charts and data than to look straight at the old girl herself. I don’t blame her. Looking is hard.

My older brother looks but doesn’t see. “She’s just a little out of shape,” he says optimistically. “If we can get her up and out she’ll be back to her old self, ruling the roost!” And so he hangs a dress on her and rolls on rouge and glides her round the ward in a wheelchair festooned at the handles with curly ribbon and helium balloons so she might speak with the people. I tell you it’s horrible. Such a thing would be bearable (commendable even!) if compassion was his aim, but it’s not compassion he seeks from her fellows in the ward. No, it’s her rulership he hopes to re-animate and so he props her up like some animatronic relic – a broken-down ecclesiastical Chuck-E-Cheese promising fun-and-games for all the good little children.

Sadly, she scares the children. They weren’t around when she was bright and beautiful. They never attended her grand parties. They don’t know who she was (and let’s face it, as good as she might have been she was also a hard taskmaster, perhaps taking her job of keeping us safe too seriously and – I think – secretly hoping we would never grow up). So the children shrink and shriek and their lack of piety (or pity) has fermented my brother’s optimism into a swill of bitter insistence, rendering him defensive and defiant and refusing the temporary inebriation of grief.

(Can I tell you the truth? I fear her death is more than he can take. He always seemed the stronger one growing up, but I’m not sure he can keep his sanity without her strict order around the house – without her barbed-wire fences to separate the wild vines from the cultivated ones. I don’t think he realizes it was always her intention that we harvest the whole field, and I think all these years later she might even be happy to see us tear down those fences if keeping them meant letting the whole field go to waste.)

For me, it’s her delirious rants that are the most heart-wrenching. She’ll stubbornly hoist herself up to rebuke people who aren’t even in the room – resurrected memories of conflicts and passions long dead and gone to everyone but her own cruelly vivid memories that now, in her mortal distress, seem to have taken on a quality that simply overwhelms her present reality. Perhaps it’s for the best – perhaps it’s mercy – but for better or worse I find I’m not just grieving her death, I’m grieving the robbery of her chance to see the transcendence of death by the legacy she leaves in us. I think she would rejoice in that. I think she would look us in the eye and say, “It’s good to grieve me, but celebrate too. If I live on like this then death wins by making me into a mockery of life. But if I die then the life I lived will be victorious by passing on to you. Now take the best and go.”

She deserves that moment; it’s her birthright. But we won’t let her have it. We insist on preserving her because somehow we think our life is in her, when actually her life (all life!) is a gift that grows in the giving, until one day it grows so fat it swallows every one of us whole, death and all. Who would have thought, Fyodor, that the nihilism you so strenuously decried would lead not to the depraved insistence on rationalized death, but to the dogmatic insistence on irrational life?

You must be wondering how she can possibly endure for so long. It’s the machines that keep her alive. Pray for a death rattle in the chest of those monstrosities so she might finally be free from our obsessions, and enjoy a long night of rest in a well-deserved sleep.

Technorati Tags: Christendom, Christianity, Church, Dostoevsky, Letters

Communities of the Spirit: Untamed, Chapter 3

(During the month of April I’m blogging through Alan and Deb Hirsch’s latest book, Untamed. Previous posts: Chapter 1 | Chapter 2)

Chapter 3: The Spirit’s Edge

This chapter came at an interesting time for me, because I’m thinking through some of the very issues they broach. Is it necessary to have a sense of direct contact with God? What is our normative form of relationship with God? For the Hirsch’s part of the response to these kinds of questions would be to re-affirm the necessity of a fully Trinitarian encounter with God. Hence, this chapter commends the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives as disciples:

“One of the foundational works of the Spirit is to usher us into the true knowledge and experience of God. Said differently: if there was no Holy Spirit, there would be no possibility of encounter with God, because it is the Spirit who mediates the knowledge of God and thereby leads us into truth and righteousness (John 16:5–11). And because the Spirit brings us into deeper awareness of, and conformity to, the one true God, he keeps us from becoming toxic.”

By “true knowledge” the authors don’t mean “secret knowledge.” Rather, they mean relational knowledge, or intimacy. For example, some people know things about my wife Jenell, but I really know my wife better than anyone – and that knowledge only comes from direct contact. The author’s point in this Chapter is the same: we cannot know God without contact with the Holy Spirit, for the Spirit is the point of contact in our relationship with God.

Moreover, we cannot have contact with the Holy Spirit without letting the Spirit be wild and unpredictable. It comes with the territory. To illustrate this, the Hirsch’s open this chapter with a story from Al’s early life as a Christian when some very Pentecostal new friends prayed for him to receive the Holy Spirit, complete with tongues, cursing of the devil, and shaking. All very strange stuff to someone not accustomed to such things. Indeed, Al wanted to run out the door.

But.

Something happened. Al made life-changing, perceptible contact with God through that encounter, and although he wouldn’t recommend the particular way that happened for everyone, he can’t deny the authenticity of his encounter with the Holy Spirit or it’s transformational effects on his life. That is what he does recommend to everyone. In fact, together Alan and Deb say it’s necessary.

And that leads me to a bit of an objection: Despite their characteristically strong emphasis on the Holy Spirit and direct contact with God, from my perspective it is precisely the excessively Pentecostal streams of Christianity that prove most “toxic.” I’m thinking here of the kind of Jesus-is-your vending-machine, there’s a devil-behind-every-door triumphalistic Pentecostalism that seeks to control both people and God. I can tell you from personal experience this kind of Christianity is quite rampant.

Granted, in this Chapter (and elsewhere in the book) the Hirsch’s warn against this form of Christianity as well, calling it “spiritual engineering.” In fact, one of the things the authors rightly point out is that both Pentecostalism and Cessasionist Fundamentalism are manifestations of the same desire for power and control (some would say they share a foundationalist heritage – one biased toward experience of God, the other toward the Bible). Still, I’m not sure they do enough to develop clear distinctions between classic Pentecostalism and the kind of Holy Spirit led, transformational pneumatology they seem to have in mind. My question is: How is it that your kind of focus on the Holy Spirit will lead to reliable Christlikeness when other kinds have not?

What they do say, very clearly, is that we need both the “light” and “heat” of the revealed word and divine experience, but we must learn to relinquish control to God, particularly as God pushes His mission forward through the wild, spontaneous, uncontrollable forays of the Holy Spirit. In this sense, their distinction seems to be twofold: an embrace of a peacemaking “radical middle” position that affirms the best of both, coupled with an emphasis on relinquishing control.

(As an aside, this “radical middle” approach has been at the core of Vineyard philosophy for over 30 years. For those who are interested I would recommend Empowered Evangelicals by Rich Nathan and Ken Wilson.)

While they don’t detail a distinctive pneumatology, they do outline some characteristics they believe would be present in any community of faith that was missionally engaged with the leading of the Holy Spirit:

• Serious creativity
• Risky mission
• Communitas (Community with intense common purpose)
• Lots of little Jesuses
• Love
• Learning community
• Miracles
• Spiritual maturity
• Discernment
• Unity around Jesus
• Ecstasy and intimacy
• Transformation and liberation

Each of these are briefly expounded upon in the book, but it’s clear the authors aren’t seeking an exhaustive list. Instead, they seem to be trying to sketch out a sense that authentically Spirit-led communities will have a depth and breadth about them that is often missing from current denominational sectarian streams.

Questions for Reflection:

1. What is your experience with the Holy Spirit?
2. Have you experienced versions of Christianity that seemed to seek control of others or of God?  How did you handle that?
3. What kinds of Christians have you encountered that most resembled Christ? What did those people have in common with one another?

Technorati Tags: Alan Hirsch, Christianity, Church, Deb Hirsch, mission, missional, Untamed

The Prostitution of the Gospel Through Marketing

A while back I wrote a post called 5 Arguments Against the Use of Media and Marketing in Church (I followed up with a related post about hologram pastors here). Not surprisingly I received some pretty irate feedback from other pastors. But today Eric Seiberling posted a very even-handed response disagreeing with me that is worth reading if you’re interested in this subject. I really appreciate Eric’s thoughtful response. Having said that, Eric and I definitely disagree:

Marketing and media is just another tool.  It changes the dynamics of reach, immediacy and immersion of a message, but it does not change it. The message is the message.

If tools are neutral then he’s right. We can put the gospel on a postcard and all we have to worry about is being faithful to the message. But there are two problems with that. First, tools are not neutral; hammers, televisions, and guns are all engineered for purposes and with technology which prejudice their use. At the very least tools participate in the shaping of their subject in ways that are beyond the control (and sometimes beyond the awareness) of the operator. At worst they dominate to the point of becoming the message and even transforming the operator (yes, like a ring of power!). Personally, I think the degree to which that domination occurs depends on the amount of power the tool facilitates (for example, guns prejudice their own use and shape the character of their operators more powerfully than, say, hammers). There are few tools more powerful these days than media.

But there’s a second problem beyond the prejudice of tools. If you think the gospel is a propositional message meant to lead people to an action (like the sinners prayer) then any delivery system will do – indeed, the more powerful and compelling the “call to action” the better. But the gospel is not merely information to be conveyed, it is a person who must be both proclaimed and demonstrated. And because that person is not physically available to us, the means of proclamation becomes a demonstration of his reality. Hence, there’s simply no way to proclaim the gospel of Christ without personally, locally, and relationally demonstrating him. Marketing seeks to bypass that inefficiency, and in doing so eliminates the presence of Christ from the gospel. Do we really want to personify Christ in the same way that Madison Avenue personifies, say, Oprah Winfrey or Colonel Sanders?

Is it even possible to represent Christ with postcards, television commercials, and propaganda films without irreparable misrepresentation (Ceci n’est pas une Christ? – HT: Chris Nelson)? As far as I know, there is only one ikon that embodies the image of Christ on earth – the Church – and that ikon is so obviously flawed that dressing it up in marketing lipstick just makes her look, to the rest of the world, like a cheap prostitute.

Case in point: is this really an accurate embodiment of Christ?

Or this?

Or, my personal favorite:

Each of these are real examples of church marketing products (mass-mailer postcards) from one of the largest and most successful church marketing companies in the U.S. (yes, there’s profit in this). I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that these postcards distort Christ in ways that range from mildly perplexing to blatantly idolatrous. Especially in the last two, the medium really is the message, and the message is most definitely not the gospel. Moreover, this is not just about the intent of the user or designer (although that clearly is a factor); marketing inherently tends toward expressions of leisure, affluence, and power in the same way that hammers tend toward expressions of blunt force. Otherwise they just don’t work because of the prejudice of their technology and design.

I’ll admit there are many nuances to be explored in this topic, and I do think media can be used by churches in missional and educational ways. Perhaps I’ll explore some thoughts on that in the future, but in the meantime I think my friend Bill Kinnon says it best:

What we win them with, is what we win them to. Win them with entertainment, and you’ve created customers – who expect to be continually entertained.

Picking up our crosses and following Jesus is not particularly attractive. Buying into a worldview where the last are first, and the first are last doesn’t win us any earthly popularity awards – and seems antithetical to the North American Dream.

Death to self. Becoming weak and poor. Identifying with the marginalized. Relinquishing the American Dream. Try putting that on a postcard and see who shows up.

Technorati Tags: Church, Eric Seiberling, Gospel, Jesus Christ, marketing, Media

After SVS 2010: Jason Clark: Consumerism, Social Imagination, & Ecclesiology

After SVS 2010 is an extended dialogue with presenters from the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, held Feb 11-13, 2010. Monday through Friday until March 26th we’ll profile an SVS presenter and dialogue with them around their paper. Click here for a brief intro and link directory of the series. Full text of papers are available to SVS members.
_____________________________________________________________________

Jason Clark: “Consumerism, Social Imagination, and Ecclesiology”

Abstract:
This paper suggest that a previous freedom within mission for understanding the nature of church, has given rise to a situation where it is the imagination of consumer for life, that often determines the forms of church life. Where previous forms of church became captive to the nature of market forces, new emerging forms of church are seen as further captive to this logic. This paper, traces the emergence and nature of this western individualism and agency, and it’s self creating nature, seeing identity free from commitments to any others. Examples of this are shown with:

1. Blueprint Ecclesiologies:  where idealised models of church are made, that are never realised
2. Any understanding of Church becomes pathological, where Christians form church life around ideas of what is wrong with Church, with no confidence in Scripture or mission
3. The naive belief that church can be non-instutional, when what is needed is not the absence of institutions, but an articulate institutional imagination
4. The imaginations for any of these forms of Church are often taken from consumer culture
5. What is called ‘revolution’ is often not revolution at all, but a pandering to consumer ‘authenticity’
6. And the collapse of Church into the creation of private God spaces within which people make their own isolated meaning of God, that do not lead to new christian conversion

It is suggest that the solution to this problem is to re-discover the ‘giveness’ of church life, that Church is something that is necessary to Christian identity and formation.  And that is best found in a scriptured and traditioned understanding of Church organisation, life and mission.

Interview With Jason

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: Through the planting of a church, and by doing some theological reflection on the power of consumer imaginations of what life is about, and how that shapes what people give themselves to and expect the Church to support. Also through the day-to-day in pastoral life, seeing people have prayers answered and have experiences of God that seemed to lead to God becoming just one resource amongst many to get the consumer dream. In this way, you might have Oprah, but I have Jesus and he trumps Oprah to get me the life we are both trying to pursue: that is, the consumer dream. I wanted to explore what was it about consumerism that causes all of life, including the Christian life so often, to be bent around those ends. Finally, after 10 years of seeing many friends explore that dynamic by moving away from any form of Church at all, it seemed that the new post-church forms of church were pandering even more to that problem, and continuing to enable people to use Christian resources not for mission but for consumer life identities and constructions. I began to ask: Was there anything in theology and church history to help respond to this problem?

Technorati Tags: Church, Consumerism, ecclesiology, Jason Clark, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS

Church as Screen Time and Pastor as Parasocial Personality

Just a quick riff on a couple of news items coming out this week:

• First, the introduction of the hologram pastor.
• Second, research published in Pediatrics suggests that childhood obesity in pre-school age children is directly linked to dislocated familial attachments facilitated by too much time in front of the television and too few communal meals with the family.
• Third, a second unrelated research project coming out of New Zealand suggests much of the same conclusions with regard to teenagers. Teens with more “screen time” have significantly lower attachment to their parents and peers (HT: Kara Powell).

There’s a fascinating sentence in the last summary:

“However, it is also possible that adolescents with poor attachment relationships with immediate friends and family use screen-based activities to facilitate new attachment figures such as online friendships or parasocial relationships with television characters or personalities,” the authors write.

I’ve written about this before, calling it the “mediation of experience.” If “screen time” inhibits our social interactions and relational attachments by replacing the real thing with “parasocial relationships” with unreal characters can the same be said to be true of other instances where we replace real live relationships with unreal characters or personalities?

Obviously I think the answer is yes.

One of the problems with the prevailing mode of church in America is that it has turned the pastor into a celebrity personality, complete with a performance-oriented and technologically mediated relationship with an audience. Once the church reaches a certain size, the pastor’s interaction must occur as a performance by a character through media. Cultural expectations about church structure coupled with assumptions about the virtues of media nearly require this. The trouble is, the character that pastor portrays, in my experience, in never quite the real thing. Some pastors try very hard to “be themselves” on stage, but others intentionally slip into a very different persona. But even for the pastor trying to be genuine, it’s very difficult in my opinion – perhaps impossible – to avoid some level of acting when you’re a preacher on stage, largely because of the entertainment-based expectations we currently impose upon the notion of what it means to be a “good preacher.”

One of the bizarre side-effects of this mediated relationship between the pastor and congregation is that, because of the high level of mediated exposure to the preacher, many in the church (most, in the case of very large churches),  actually feel a personal connection to the pastor that doesn’t actually exist. They don’t really know the pastor, in much the same way they don’t really know Oprah or Dr. Phil. They only know your stage persona. This is greatly magnified in those churches who embrace the personality-driven church model and use a charismatic pastor’s performance skills as a means of growing the church.

Hence, the church gathering becomes just another version of “screen time.”

Now consider how “screen time” becomes literally true in the proliferation of video venue churches, where many congregations only interact with a version of the pastor that is literally unreal. Now replace the video screen with hologram which remains unreal, but magnifies the level of illusion.

Moreover, much like the teens in the second study cited above who talk to each other about the fictional characters they’ve mutually engaged as relational surrogates, church members will often interact around the pastor’s persona. In this way a false persona can become a means of false social relationships. This is akin to kids talking enthusiastically about what “happened” to Hanna Montana in the latest episode (nothing happened…she doesn’t exist!). In celebrity-driven churches much of the social energy occurs around the campfire of a false persona.

Does it matter? Is there harm being done by moving church toward just another version of “screen time?” What are the consequences of this to discipleship? Perhaps, like the studies above, the consequences are spiritually obese, socially disconnected and disaffected Christians.

Technorati Tags: Church, discipleship, Media, Mega-Churches, Pastors, Teenagers

The Worker’s Wages Part 2: The Biblical Lens

(This is the second in a six-part series exploring the dynamics of clergy pay in missional churches. See previous installments: Prelude | Part 1)

When I first posted my initial prompt asking whether clergy should be paid I received a quick response from an old family friend simply stating, “The worker is worthy of his wages,”referencing Paul 1 Timothy Chapter 5 and Jesus in Luke 10. That would seem to settle it then, wouldn’t it?

Well, not for me. My questions are: What kind of work? What kind of wages?

It’s too easy to read these passages through our Modern market-based lenses where work is a 40-60 hour a week assembly-line-optimized style of productivity and wages are either paid hourly blocks of labor or annual salaries with compensation packages. This is clearly how we’ve read Paul and Jesus, with most Pastors in the U.S. making between 70k and 97k per year. Some who identify with being “missional” believe this kind of professionalism is detrimental to mission, but most would probably at least agree it’s unsustainable considering our trajectory.

We can’t simply graft isolated passages onto our contextual paradigms but we can’t ignore our context either paradigms either, so what I’m aiming for is an understanding of a church leader’s work and wage that is:

• Biblically Consistent: I identify pretty strongly with organic and anarchist approaches, however I’m troubled by the tendency to dismiss the OT model of leadership and place it in opposition to what is usually characterized as a more “organic” NT model.
• Genuinely Contextualized: I find there’s often a polarity being wrestled with between a Christendom approach characterized by professional clergy and a pre-Christendom approach characterized by non-professional clergy (please excuse the gross generalization). These both strike me as essentially restorationist approaches, with the former seeking to restore Constantinian supremacy and the latter seeking to go “all the way back” to a presumably pristine pre-Constantinian form. I think they’re both naive. You can never go back. We are in new territory, and the landscape grows curiouser and curiouser every day.

Personally, I need a biblically-informed way to think about and practice leadership vocation that makes sense for the future, not the past. We’ll start with trying to become biblically-informed, so let’s take a brief look at the aforementioned passages.

1 Timothy Chapter 5:17-18
It’s interesting to note that in this chapter Paul is giving practical advice about the general care of the neediest people in the community – namely, older widows – and out of that advice he suddenly switches gears to the care of the church elders who govern:

The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, “Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain,” and “The worker deserves his wages.”

In order to lend credibility to this advice Paul quotes Deut 25:4 and Luke 10:7. I think these passages are telling, so let’s look at them too, in reverse chronological order.

Luke 10:5-7
The occasion here is the sending out of the 72 disciples. Jesus has given them authority to heal the sick and drive out demons and now he is giving them practical instructions for the trip:

“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; if not, it will return to you. Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.”

By using the Greek word misthos (which generally to work-wages of some form) Jesus is clearly saying that the disciples ministry alone is worthy of being considered “work.” However, it’s interesting to notice that Jesus sent them out with nothing (v4), essentially making them itinerant beggars. Moreover, what he says they are permitted to receive, strictly speaking, is not payment – it’s hospitality. Jesus seems to be saying that their payment will come in the form of care, not that their care will come in the form of payment. (As a bit of an aside, it may also be that he is warning them against capitalizing on this care and hospitality by admonishing them to not “move from house to house.”)

Deuteronomy 25:4
Here in Deut. we again find practical instructions focused on the just care of people in the community. But strangely enough, sandwiched between negotiating conflicts and caring for widows we find this:

Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.

Apparently even beasts deserve to eat. Moreover, the ox’s sustenance comes from the work itself. That is, his care is tied intimately to his work. Here’s what I’m noticing so far:

1. Ministry is real work: Jesus and Paul seem to make this clear. Of course, everyone in ministry leadership knows this, but not everyone outside of ministry leadership does, and that seems to be a growing problem in post-Christian cultures. Every pastor has dealt with the question, “What exactly do you do all day?” But for some reason this was apparently enough of a problem in the first century that Jesus and Paul needed to reinforce it. Can this tell us something about the nature of ministry work?

2. The work of ministry involves the reciprocity of giving and receiving, not the transaction of buying and selling: The distinction is subtle but important and lies in the general lack of reckoning value and extracting profit. There is a recognition of the contribution people do or do not make (especially in 1 Tim 5), but no reckoning of specific value or profit. The ox gives work and eats of the grain upon which he treads. Jesus receives from the Father and gives to the itinerant disciples; the disciples give what they’ve received to the people of the towns; the people give the disciples food and shelter. This is a cycle of gifts whereby what is increased is the kingdom, not individual wallets (one could say it is the Kingdom that profits, not people, or even that they are “laying up treasures in heaven”). Along the way people extract from the increasing Kingdom for their own needs, but not for their own profits.

3. Christian leaders are part of the society of the poor: This is humbling, but I just don’t see any other way to understand these passages without recognizing that each is dealing with the care of those who are lowly. Paul’s “elders who govern” are mentioned in the same breath as old widows who have nothing left (1 Tim 5). In fact, it would appear that church elders are even worse off than young widows (v11-16)! Jesus sends out the disciples as beggars – which is appropriate, given that prior to Luke 10 Jesus is referring to “the least”as “the greatest” and turning away followers with a warning about the poverty of his own society (Luke 9:46-50; 57-62). It’s possible to read this as a deficiency in the early church (many have), but I don’t think so, for reasons I’ll address in Part 4.

4. The fundamental driving ethic is a community of inclusive care, not an economy of exclusive transactions: Seeing the “wages” as payment sets these passages in opposition to other relevant biblical paradigms, especially Exodus 16, Acts 2, and 1 Cor 8, but also (IMO) including that of the Priests and Levites who are not so much functioning as a profiteering professional class but rather are key servants participating in the gift-cycle of sacrifice, particularly by the “eating” of the sacrifices (more on this in Part 3). Of course payment can be a kind of care and a kind of gift, but such gifts can all too easily become corrupted into something else such as profit, power, or status – especially, I would add, in market-cultures where profit often is the currency of power and status.

5. There is something qualitatively different about the work of governing, teaching, and preaching: I’m deeply uncomfortable with this statement, so please correct me if you think I’m wrong, but I can’t get away from it based on Paul’s words in 1 Tim 5:17: “The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching” and the more I rflect on the biblical paradigms as a whole the more I’m struck by the distinct role of certain people with these gifts. It would be easy to suggest that Paul’s “double-honor” is actually an upside-down term, but I don’t think that’s true to the spirit of this statement. I think it’s clear that Paul is saying there is something different about the kind of work these leaders do that must be honored through the intentional care of them, perhaps partly because they must “eat of the sacrifice” and perhaps partly because it’s apparently easy to forget that what they do is “work.”

This has gone on long enough. What are your thoughts? Disagreements, insights, additions?

Technorati Tags: Christendom, Church, clergy, Deuteronomy, Jesus, Leadership, Luke, Paul, Timothy

The Most Important Church Planting Book I’ve Read (Isn’t About The Church)

In May of 2007 I was on campus at Fuller for a two-week seminar with my cohort when I overheard one of my classmates recommend The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. For some reason -  despite the fact I had a stack of books to read over those two weeks – I found it at a local bookstore and read it that night (it’s a small book).

By the next morning I knew I was going to plant a church.

I’d been fighting this impulse for years and the books I’d been reading on church planting didn’t help. They all basically boiled down to, “10 easy steps for building a high-revenue, over-bloated, top-heavy, pastor-dependent bureaucracy.” I just wasn’t interested. But Brafman and Beckstrom were able to catalyze my imagination where a dozen church planting books had failed.

The authors claim that in the emerging world of the Internet-driven thinking decentralization – that is, the diminishing of hierarchical structure and formal leadership – has become a major asset. The authors call this a “starfish” organization, taking their cues from the decentralized biology of this curious echinoderm, and contrast it with “spider” organization which may look superficially like starfish, but are still essentially command-and-control driven.

There are several features of “leaderless organizations” that give them a major advantage: When attacked they tend to become even more decentralized making them difficult to kill; they spread their intelligence or authority throughout the system, making them easily adaptable to different contexts; and this adaptability makes them exponentially subversive, a dangerous factor in business since starfish organizations tend to decrease profitability. The authors take the reader on an entertaining and fascinating tour of various starfish organizations from the Apache Tribe, to Napster, to Al Qaeda, making a compelling case along the way.

Perhaps most interesting, according to Brafman leadership in a decentralized organization isn’t absent, it’s just earned rather than entitled. Authenticity is the only real qualification for leadership – good news for an institutional church whose leaders often fail staggeringly, and publicly for lack of character.

There are some obvious applications to ecclesiology, not least of which is how these kinds of organizations tend to empower people at the grass roots level and redefine leadership in terms of catalyzing and nurturing rather than dominating and controlling. This is where I found my sense of calling coming alive in response to this book. For me, reading it from a church perspective was both thrilling and terrifying. By and large, churches are clearly spiders: centralized, top-heavy, and leader-dependent.

Perhaps most challenging and frightening to Church institutions (and professional clergy like me!) is that in a world moving toward decentralization, the very institutional nature of the church is threatened, along with the institutionally protected artifacts…like professionalism itself.

So, some question for discussion:

• How have you navigated the tension between centralization and decentralization as a leader?
• What books have most influenced you as a church planter?
• Do you think decentralization is a technology driven fad or a genuine cultural progression?

Technorati Tags: Church, Church Planting, clergy, Ori Brafman, Rod Beckstrom, The Starfish and the Spider