3 Questions about Jesus: Jason Evans

Yet another installment of our latest series is provided by Jason Evans, who tackles 3 Questions About Jesus: Who is Jesus the Christ? What has he done? And why does it matter? (Previous installments: Jason Coker| Jesse Schroeder | Cari Jenkins | Jason Clark | Ben Sternke | JR Rozko | Amy Rozko | Steve Burnhope).

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I don’t think you make up a story like Jesus’ and hope it convincing. Gods aren’t to be born in barns, to peasant girls and laid in feeding troughs on the edge of empire. You have to really believe this to be true to write it down for others. And I guess that is why I believe. It is so ridiculous, that it just might be true.

There’s no pretense. There’s nothing trying to convince me. Yet, I’m convinced.

I think Jesus was on to something. Jesus got it. He saw how the world was intended to work. He could see that in our broken, feeble attempts we-meaning humanity-had missed the point. He knew what it would take to set us straight. The way he lived his life, the things he said and did showed us a way of living which would draw us back into a way we were intended to. Yet, I think he knew that the death we let enter into our lives had to be removed. And we couldn’t do that on our own. So, he defeated death for us.

I think that is something only God could do.

I have found this to be so in my own life. I look at the Gospels’ account of how Jesus lived his life, and I see a way to live my own. Yet, I quickly find that I am quite incapable of living as I want to. Jesus said he was “the way, the truth and the life.” And as mystical and ill-defined as that may seem I find it to be true. When I conclude that I cannot do it on my own, and I submit to this God-made-flesh I find life.

Some would call this, a crutch. I prefer, a stretcher.

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Jason is currently a student at Fuller Theological Seminary and has a certificate in Urban Ministry from Hesston College. Before joining our team, Jason was a church planter and church planting consultant. These efforts have been documented in several books. He and his wife, Brooke, have three children, Paige, Matt and Sam. They live in the South Park neighborhood.

Technorati Tags: 3 Questions About Jesus, Gospel, Jason Evans, Jesus Christ

The Marriage of Jesus and Jane Vella

I’ve recently joined a dialog with some other San Diego folks on the topic of leadership training. The common concern seems to be the development of a grassroots, trans-denominational, and locally generative alternative to traditional seminary. Recently Jason Evans introduced the work of Jane Vella as a catalyst, so today I want to briefly engage with how her work might be relevant to this topic by comparing it to Jesus’ leadership training methods and ask for your input.

(For an excellent orientation to this topic I’ll simply refer you to JR Rozko’s series, “Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education,” Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine. If you’re interested in this subject, it’s a must read.)

Jane Vella is one of the leading figures in the field of adult education. In Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach she reviews twelve principles for adult learning and demonstrates their effectiveness through short case stories. Essentially, Vella asserts that adults learn best when immersed in a learning environment that models equality, demonstrates relevance, and provides opportunity for hands-on discovery. I think there are some important and obvious ways the twelve principles converge with Jesus’ practices:

• Needs Assessment: A posture of “sympathetic listening” whereby the teachers meet the learners “where they are.” Teachers must learn student’s needs before knowing what and how to teach. The incarnation of Christ is the greatest example of sympathetic listening in human history.
• Safety: Adults learn best in an environment of grace. Jesus formed an environment of safety by assembled his community of disciples, going so far as to redefine their familial loyalties to himself, God, and one-another.
• Sound Relationships: Teachers and learners are committed to acting on each others behalf. Jesus included his disciples in almost everything he did, ministry, friendship, eating, sleeping, traveling, etc. His process was essentially deeply relational.
• Sequence and Reinforcement: Deliberately building chains of mastery. The Sermon on the Mount is sequenced from the simplest, basest human issues to the most complex relationships and struggles. Each teaching point (i.e. “blessing those who curse you”) depends critically upon and reinforces previous lessons learned (i.e. “letting go of anger”).
• Praxis: A learning feedback loop of action and reflection. Adult learners require concrete application not merely intellectual abstraction. The disciples were involved in ministry tasks from the beginning, starting with the simple and moving to the more complex.
• Respect for Learners as Decision Makers: Adults are decision-makers who need to determine their own learning path. By teaching in parables Jesus was providing open-ended stories and questions for his hearers to engage with, even honoring their choice at times to stubbornly misunderstand.
• Ideas, feelings, and actions: Adult learning must include the affective realm as a means of natural reinforcement. With Christ, the process of discipleship was hands-on and often involved powerful emotions, provoking ideas, and real-life situations.
• Immediacy: Adults need immediate relevance in learning. Jesus’ disciples they knew they were getting into something that had immediate, even urgent importance. As N.T. Wright has shown, to be a follower of Christ meant you were engaged with the most pressing matters of political life in first-century Palestine.
• Clear roles and role development: It’s important for adult learners to understand everyone’s role, especially their own. Jesus utilized the clear roles of rabbi and disciple that were inherent in ancient Jewish culture, and then redefined their roles at the end of his ministry, saying they were now his “friends.”
• Teamwork and small groups: Adult learning works best in a plurality of people focused on a unified lesson or task. Jesus sent out his disciples in teams to do their work. There were no isolated learners in Jesus’ community.
• Engagement: Adults need learning to be immediately hands-on. Jesus’ classroom was his ministry mission. He didn’t train his followers first, and then begin his mission; they were learning while doing in the midst of a lab environment.
• Accountability: Adult learning is reinforced by the support and positive pressure of peer expectations and feedback. The intimate relationships among Jesus and his disciples provided a natural setting for mutual accountability.

I’m struck by how transferable the ideas of Vella and the practices of Jesus are to our current cultural climate. The twelve principles of dialogue education seem to mirror many of the value shifts occurring in the emerging post-Christian era:

• Rejection of hierarchy/embrace of equality: Hierarchy communicates dominance and supremacy to emerging generations; open dialogue emphasizes the equality of teacher/learner, and learner/learner relationships.
• Rejection of mechanistic/embrace of organic: In light of the conspicuous failure of some Modern systems, emerging people pessimistically reject strict cause-and-effect thinking. Dialogue education allows for an organic apprehension of learning.
• Rejection of monologue/embrace of dialogue: The dominance of one voice can communicate supremacy and simple-mindedness. Dialogue allows complexity.
• Rejection of certainty/embrace of uncertainty: Again, certainty communicates arrogance, a posture that post-moderns often mistrust. Uncertainty, however, communicates humility and the self-confidence to be authentic.
• Rejection of monism/embrace of pluralism: In an increasingly pluralistic world, dialogue embraces the truths that everyone brings to the table. This is a far reaching subject that not only impacts the way we interact with learners, but shapes how we interact as the church with the world becoming learners ourselves.

Some Questions for Consideration: How are these similar to current models of ministry leadership training? How are they different? How could these be used to create a discipleship and leadership training approach both effective and accessible to anyone? What are opportunities and pitfalls?

Technorati Tags: Education, Jane Vella, Jason Evans, Jesus, JR Rozko, Misisonal Leadership Training, Seminary

Weekly Link Round Up

My favorite posts from around the interwebs this week:

• Darryl Dash confesses to flunking Kingdom Economics. Nice job Darryl.
• My new Vineyard friend Ray Hollenbach asks, Is Obedience Possible?
• The digital Jason Evans practices walking as a spiritual discipline. Sounds like a Phil Dick novel to me.
• In the wake recent proclamations of the death of the Emerging Church, of Jamie Arpin-Ricci posts some very helpful thoughts as usual.
• On to the latest Missonal uproar. Bill Kinnon fired a beautifully snarky shot, Dan MacDonald claims Mercy = Missional and Vice Versa (and I largely agree), and Rick Meigs provides a nice running catalog of several good responses.
• JR Rozko stays out of it so far, be he did post an excellent piece on how existing traditional churches can become missional. A hugely important topic.
• On to a couple fantastic stories in a local rag, the San Diego City Beat: First, The $140 Million Foreskin and the (ahem) short follow up piece.
• Finally, a couple of excellent religion-related articles from Io9: First, the delicious little piece, Is Vat Grown Meat Kosher? and second, Digital Maps Reveal Hidden Geographies of Sex and Religion. Oh yes, you read that right.

Technorati Tags: Bill Kinnon, Dan MacDonald, Darryl Dash, I09, Jamie Arpin-Ricc, Jason Evans, JR Rozko, Links, Ray Hollenbach, Rick Meigs, San Diego City Beat

The Myth of Selfless Giving

Jason Evans posted an interesting piece today about the problem of giving to receive, based in part on a current NPR story about conscientious capitalism in efforts like The Red Campaign. He quotes Harvard professor Richard Weissbourd from the story, who laments,

“I do feel like, as a country, we have lost a sense of morality for its own sake,” says Harvard professor and psychologist Richard Weissbourd, who teaches about moral development. “You should just be generous to be generous. You should do what’s right because it’s right, not because of what you get back.”

I protested a bit in Jason’s comments, saying there’s no such thing as selfless giving, and he asked for a deeper explanation of my position, so… Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: gifts, Giving, Jason Evans, Jesus, Matthew, NPR, Self-Interest

Toward a Missional Economy, Part 3

In his excellent book, Walking With the Poor, Bryant Myers proclaims,

“The incarnation smashes any argument that God is only concerned for the spiritual realm and that the material is somehow evil or unworthy of the church’s attention.”

As we saw yesterday, Postmodern cultures seem to have already demolished this dualism and are experimenting deeply with economic practices that are compassionate, generous, and inclusive – thereby joining the material realm of economics with the spiritual realm of communitarian well-being. I’m convinced what we’re seeing are the fingerprints of the Missio Dei on these subcultures, especially with their embrace of an economics that bears a strong resemblance to the “rules of the house” found in passages like Exodus Chapter 16 and 2 Corinthians Chapter 8.

If this what God is doing, the missional Church will have to embrace at least three major paradigm shifts in order to join Him on that mission. Today I’ll touch on the first.

From Wealth Building to Gift Giving
The first major paradigm shift is from wealth building to gift-giving. Perhaps what is most scandalous about Exodus 16 is the total absence of individual wealth building. As hard as it is to believe, nobody was terribly rich and nobody was terribly poor. God simply provided for everyone’s needs. Every morning each family gathered their “wealth” and every night (having consumed it) they returned to relative poverty. In his beautifully meandering book, The Gift, poet and cultural scholar Lewis Hyde comments on this ancient Hebrew practice, saying,

“This is the ‘poverty’ of the gift, in which each man, by his generosity becomes ‘poor’ so that the group may be wealthy.”

The “poverty of the gift,” as Hyde puts it, is the economy of faith. Thomas Merton once said, “The essence of the Christian faith is the beggars bowl.” To put it brutally, we Christians are merely beggars. Each day we extend our empty bowl in faith and God meets our needs. Yet the economics of God’s house don’t stop there because the first rule of any gift-economy is that the gift must always move – and this is the rule in Exodus 16 as well. Gifts that are hoarded soon rot and decay like day-old Manna. So like the ancient Hebrews, as we encounter the needs of our friends, neighbors – and yes, even our enemies – we empty our bowls to enrich others, making ourselves, at the end of each day, merely beggars once again.

Here in San Diego, our friends Jason and Brooke Evans have embraced this shift by starting Make Something Day. Every year on the day-after-Thanksgiving – the largest annual shopping day in the country, also known as Black Friday – they refuse to buy anything. Instead, they make homemade gifts using stuff they already have. As friends, neighbors, and even strangers from all over the country have joined them they’ve discovered a surprising abundance of multiplied gifts in return – including creativity, gratitude, and friendship.

Questions:

1. Why do you agree (or disagree) with the Thomas Merton quote, “The essence of the Christian faith is the beggar’s bowl.”
2. What makes the shift from wealth building to gift giving so difficult? Why does is challenge our sensibilities so much?

Technorati Tags: Black Friday, Brooke Evans, Bryant Myers, Church, Economics, economy, gifts, Jason Evans, Lewis Hyde, Make Something Day, missio dei, mission, Wealth

Make Something Day, 2009

It’s the time of year when we start thinking about gifts. No, I’m not talking about Christmas. Friends Jason and Brooke Evans started Make Something Day a couple years ago as a way of practicing an alternative economy of simplicity and gift-giving on the most conspicuous consumption day of the year: Black Friday. Naturally, this idea appealed to me right away as it goes hand-in-hand with the gift economy approach of the Twoshirts.org Community.

Here’s a snippet from the MSD website: Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: Black Friday, Culture, gifts, Jason Evans, Make Something Day, TheOoze.com

Jason Evans on Christian "Rights"

On the heels of the recent home bible study controversy in San Diego, Jason Evans of the Ecclesia Collective in San Diego (of which our very own Doug Humphreys is a board member!) has posted some excellent and thought provoking comments about Christian “rights” and the separation of Church and State. Definitely worth the read.

Link: http://a51t15.blogspot.com/2009/05/convenient-separation.html

Technorati Tags: Advocacy, Church and State, Jason Evans, News, Rights, San Diego