Love Has Many Stages

Here’s an inspiring and jolting quote:

Love has many stages. The highest level is when you cannot decide whether to love or not love because there is no room for hatred. The love of your neighbors comes naturally in response to obeying Jesus and God. Loving the neighbor is proof that you heart is full of love. When we say neighbors, we mean all of humanity. All people are brothers because we all come from God.

~ Sheik Nabil, The #2 leader in Hezbollah, excerpted from Tea With Hezbollah by Ted Dekker and Carl Medearis

Technorati Tags: Hezbollah, Jesus, Love

Holy Week, Day 6

Today is our final reading before Easter, and much like yesterday’s chapter, today’s is packed with action as Jesus approaches the climactic moment of his earthly ministry. Take time to read through Matthew 27 today and reflect on the questions below:

Questions for Reflection:

1. What scene or character in this chapter do you most identify with? Why?
2. Imagine you were one of Jesus’ disciples, and expected him to be the anointed one who finally overthrew the Roman oppressors and vindicated you and your people. How would this series of events impact you? How might you have made sense of it all?
3. There is a tension that runs throughout Jesus’ ministry between him and his followers: they want him to conquer with power but he typically serves and sacrifices instead – including giving the ultimate sacrifice. That is, Christ’s strength always looked like weakness. How does this tension continue today between Christ and his followers?

Technorati Tags: Easter, Holy Week, Ikon Community, Jesus, Matthew

Holy Week, Day Four

Today’s reading is a little longer, and introduces us to Jesus’ teachings about the end of the age – a subject we don’t often hear about during the Easter season, but one that is obviously tied to his resurrection. So, read Matthew Chapter 24 and 25 and reflect on the questions below.

Questions for Reflection

1. How would you sum up Chapter 24? What is the main thing Jesus seems to be trying to say?
2. How would you sum up the teaching of the three parables in Chapter 25?
3. Why do you think Jesus might be discussing this during the week leading up to his crucifixion and resurrection?
4. How do you think this subject of the end of the age might be relevant for us today?

Technorati Tags: Easter, Eschatology, Holy Week, Jesus, Matthew, Parables

Holy Week, Day Three

Today read Matthew Chapter 23 and contribute your thoughts to the comments below.

Questions for Reflection

1. What single saying in this long list of “woes” strikes you most or which one best sums up the whole list? Why?
2. If Jesus were to come today and give a modern version of the “woes” for Christians, what kinds of hypocritical behaviors do you think he would be condemning?

Technorati Tags: Easter, Holy Week, Jesus, Matthew

Holy Week, Day Two

Today read Matthew Chapter 22 and Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and contribute your thoughts to the comments below.

Questions for Reflection

1. In this passage Jesus quotes part of the Jewish Shema from Deut 6, the most important prayer practice in Judaism (you can read more about the importance of the Shema here). How do you think reciting Deut 6:4-9 three times daily might affect your thoughts and life positively?
2. How can we know if a religious practice, like reciting the Shema three times daily, is effective for good spiritual formation or if it is merely an empty religious ritual? How are Jesus’ words in Matt 21-22 helpful in making this distinction?

Technorati Tags: Deuteronomy, Holy Week, Ikon Community, Jesus, Matthew, The Shema

After SVS 2010: Matt Croasmun, The Cross, Eucharist, and Imitation in the Gospel of John

Today is our final installment. 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.
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Matt Croasmun: “The Cross, Eucharist, and Imitation in the Gospel of John”

Abstract
This paper consists of two parts. The first is an exegetical exploration of the “missing Eucharist” narrative and peculiar chronology of the passion narrative in the Gospel of John in a literary-canonical mode. Here, it is shown that the Gospel of John indeed includes a Eucharistic narrative and that this event takes when it does in the Synoptic accounts, though, in John’s chronology, Eucharist happens on the cross, as Jesus eats his food (bringing to completion the work of the One who sent Him) and drinks the cup which He obediently receives at Gethsemane. Using the foot-washing narrative as a lens through which to interpret this displaced Eucharist, the mimetic significance of Jesus’ death and His Eucharist is contrasted with the mnemonic function of Eucharist in the Lucan-Pauline tradition. The second part of the paper considers the systematic coherence afforded Vineyard theology as a whole in emphasizing the mimetic function of Jesus’ death. Here, it is noted that Johannine texts have long served as the source for the Vineyard’s basic mimetic stance towards the ministry of Jesus: that is, the Vineyard reading of the gospels has been a call to Johannine imitation of the Synoptic Jesus. The exclusion of the Cross from this exegetical program is a result of a confusion regarding the inimitable nature of Jesus’ death, understood exclusively as once-for-all atoning sacrifice. Receiving from John a Eucharistic theology that regularly invites us into imitation of Jesus’ obedience to the will of the Father and self-lowering love of others exhibited on the Cross promises to bring greater systematic unity to the Vineyard’s hermeneutical strategy in the gospels and to provide the Cross a more central place in the movement’s theology as a whole.

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: Several years ago, before I started Divinity School, I sat in on Harry Attridge’s course on the exegesis of the Fourth Gospel. Harry has substantial interest in the sacramental theology of this text. And, of course, the key problem with thinking about sacraments—especially Eucharist—in John is that there is no institution narrative. So we puzzled over this problem quite a lot in that course and I remember continuing to puzzle over it long after.

Around the same time, I was reading Bill Jackson’s history of the Vineyard church and noted there that the Vineyard had taken some flack for not teaching the Cross as much as the critics would have liked. I suppose it’s a sign of the times, but I’m really interested in the ways that larger narratives frame and in some sense control our theological reflection. So, in thinking about the problem Bill Jackson had highlighted, it occurred to me that perhaps integral to this problem was the Vineyard’s narrative of the Kingdom. Was there something about the way the Vineyard was understanding the Kingdom that left the cross on the sideline? When I went and read the Vineyard Statement of Faith, my suspicions only grew. Eventually, I stumbled upon the possibility that it is the radical imitation of Jesus (which is really the heart of Wimber’s hermeneutic of the gospels) that could provide the “hook” in the Vineyard’s meta-narrative on which to hang a distinctively Vineyard—distinctively “Kingdom”—theology of the cross.

The last piece of the puzzle for me is the methodological approach I’m trying to take in the paper. A mentor and friend of mine gave me Stephen Moore’s God’s Gym to read when I was in Divinity School. Of course, Moore’s conclusions are profoundly troubling—though, I think worth wrestling with. But I found his method of interpretation absolutely exhilarating. It was playful, it was deadly serious at times. It broke down the walls of historical criticism that have always seemed fundamentally out of touch with the ways that actual people of faith read the biblical text and encounter God there. So, I guess I wanted to try my hand at something that might skew toward the “literary” in approach. Interestingly, I was surprised at how little push back I got on this at the SVS conference. I thought for sure some large number of folks would want to skewer me for going right at the fissures in the biblical text, making much of them, and playing out their tensions exclusively in a stubbornly non-historical, literary way. Does this count as “exegesis”? Is “exegesis” a good description of what people of faith are actually after in their encounter with God in the biblical text to begin with?

Q: How do you think your paper is relevant to the Vineyard movement at large?

A: First, on the meta-level, I think the paper is relevant inasmuch as it might serve as a invitation to further reflection on the Kingdom and the Cross. How does the Cross fit into the Vineyard’s narrative of the Kingdom? I think I’ve offered a textual way into something like an answer to this question, but, presumably, there are others.

Second, in terms of the specific answer I offer, I really do think that it’s crucial when we talk about “doing the stuff” to consider Jesus’ death as an integral part of “the stuff” that Jesus was doing. We need to anticipate that imitation of Christ’s rejection, humiliation, and death is an integral part of imitatio Christi. I suggested in broad strokes in my paper that this mostly looks like self-lowering love of others; obviously, there’s so much more to explore there. A necessary caveat to that—the response I should have given to the excellent question posed from the feminist point of view—is that, of course, Jesus’ death is precisely also His exaltation—John uses the pun on Jesus being “lifted up.” So our imitation of Christ in his death is not fundamentally self-destructive; it is our salvation and access to true power and authority.

Q: What do you think might be the practical implications of what you’re exploring?

A: In our church, we’ve changed some of the ways we do communion. First of all, we take communion every week—partly because we want to make sure that the cross is shaping everything we do and are becoming. We receive communion right after the sermon, which has given us the discipline of having to have every talk land us back at the foot of the cross. At the same time, because we do communion every week, we have freedom to let the invitation to the table look radically different from week to week. That’s been a great practice for us. And, certainly, a fair number of communion invitations in our church are invitations to imitate, rather than simply “remember.”

Matt will be available for questions and interaction in the comments below

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Matt Croasmun lives in New Haven, Connecticut and is a PhD student in the Religious Studies Department at Yale University. He is studying New Testament, focusing on mythological language in the Pauline epistles. He has been in the Vineyard for 12 years, serving in worship and youth ministry, and helped to plant the Elm City Vineyard in New Haven where he and his wife Hannah provide senior leadership.

Technorati Tags: Jesus, John, Matt Croasmun, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS, Vineyard Community of Churches

The Worker’s Wages Part 3: The Essence of Ministry

(This is the third part in a six-part series exploring the dynamics of clergy pay in missional churches. See previous installments: Prelude | Part 1 | Part 2)

In my last installment I tentatively proposed that the minister’s wage isn’t money, it’s community care. Now, practically speaking that care must manifest as money, or food, or housing (or perhaps other goods and services), but strictly speaking the wage itself isn’t any of these things.

What Kind of Work?
However, understanding the essence of the wage doesn’t get us all the way to understanding how to appropriately convert our care into food and shelter for ministry leaders, or how to appropriately frame our expectations of the kind of work they do (an equally important issue). For that, we’ll need an understanding of what kind of work a ministry leader does. To gain it, we’ll go back to our original passages.

1 Timothy Chapter 5:17-18
Again, we’ll use Paul’s words to Timothy as our starting point:

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.”

Paul is describing the gifts, and we have several passages concerning that topic (Rom 12, 1 Cor 12, 1 Pet 4:10). Indeed, the church is very comfortable talking about the roles of the people according to gifting, and there have been popular movements to identify the role of everyone in the church by gifting because, in a critically important sense, everyone is a minister according to their gifts.

However there is little exploration, that I’m aware of, regarding how the nature of “gift work” may or may not be different than other kinds of work. If it is different, wouldn’t that have some bearing on the “how, why, and what” of wages for those who require compensation? (We’ll have to hold off, for now, on why some ministers are worthy of a wage while others are not.)

Gifts Are Different Than Skills.
It’s my proposition that gifts are significantly different than skills (based largely on the ethnographic work of Marcel Mauss and the thoughts of Lewis Hyde). A skill is a kind of property. You earn it and you own it. Under normal conditions, the skill-worker has mastery over their skills, that is, they control them completely. Therefore, you can reckon compensation for your skills fairly easily. Skills serve best when they are accumulated like capital, and like capital, they affect a kind of return on investment for their owner. Hence, the skilled trades-person accumulates skills as a kind of wealth.

But a gift is not a property. It cannot be earned or purchased, only freely received. Nor can it be mastered because it doesn’t belong to the gift-worker. In fact, gifts, because they are given for the purpose of creating relational ties, must be given away again, and often fade (or rot i.e. Ex 16) when they’re not used-up or shared. They come and go, and are notoriously difficult to control. Because the gift-worker cannot master the gift, they can only be good stewards of what they have been given, while they happen to have it – and to be a good steward specifically means to give it away, leaving the gift-worker in a perpetual state of spiritual poverty.

Therefore, it is also notoriously difficult to reckon the compensation of gift-work, because it’s production cannot be controlled. Often long hours (or days, months, even years) go into waiting and supplicating for true gifts to arrive. Yet once they’re received by the gift-worker, they typically “work” in a frenzy of productivity, giving generously to all who benefit from it, and (in a way curiously distinct from skills) are multiplied in the giving.

(Of course, there is a very important sense in which skill-work and gift-work cooperate, but that is not the important point here. I think we must begin by understanding the prior distinctive essence of ministry as a gift-work, before we can understand how to appropriately re-integrate it with trade skills.)

Let’s return to our other central passage to illustrate gift-work among ministers:

Luke 10:5-7
Let’s start by revisiting Jesus’ instructions, to the 72 disciples:

¹After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. ²He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. ³Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. ⁴Do not take a purse or bag or sandals; and do not greet anyone on the road.⁵“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ ⁶If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; if not, it will return to you. ⁷Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.

⁸“When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is set before you. ⁹Heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God is near you.’

This is classic gift-work, with several prominent features of gift-exchange occurring:

1. The Gift Is Transient: The disciples can only give away what Christ has first given them, namely peace, power, and kingdom. Again, these gifts are not a property to be held as capital. They must be given in order to multiply, so the ministers, although they are givers, remain as dependent as those to whom they give.

2. The Gift Requires Personal “Poverty”: The disciples go with nothing, demonstrating the “poverty” of gift-work, because receiving the gift first requires the emptiness of poverty, prayer, and sacrifice. This is congruent with 1 Tim 5 and echoed in the Beatitudes.

3. The Gift Provides Community “Wealth”: The hosts are sustained by the gift and the ministers live off the reciprocity typical of gift-exchange. They give what they have and are, in return, given gifts of food, hospitality, shelter, etc. This kind of return, as distinct from payment, is a way of demonstrating the communal abundance of the gift-economy through the multiplication of the gift as it is passed from one empty hand to another.

4. The Gift is Fertile: Characteristic of other gift-cultures, we have an illustration of an agricultural motif (v2). The enthnographic data from such societies shows that the cycle of planting and harvesting becomes significant as an embodiment of the economic gift-cycle, with it’s dependence on the ultimate giver (God or the gods), its sowing and reaping reciprocity, its abundant multiplication via fertility, and its sustenance. All are images of “the gift” at work.

5. The Git is Consumed: The 72 ministers literally feed off of the abundance of the gift. In this way they are not only consuming the multiplied abundance of the gift, they are also literally consuming the return gift of sacrifice made by their hosts.

This last two observations, I think, connect this passage with the function of the priests of the Old Testament, who eat of the meat sacrifices brought to the temple and burn the grain sacrifices (Lev 6). By eating the gift/sacrifice the minister/priest is simultaneously included in the sacramental community and demonstrating the role of God in the gift-cycle by returning a portion of the sacrifice to God (burning accomplishes this same latter function, though with an emphasis on faith-dependence rather than sustenance). Ethnographic data depicts this same eating/burning practices in the religious rituals of other gift-cultures, for example in the Maori tribe (eating of sacrifice by the priest) and the North American Native practice of Potlatch (burning of excess wealth).

There are many other passages I could connect to this theme, but this is a blog not a book : )

I think there are also, obviously, very strong Paschal tones here as well, reaching backward toward passover and forward toward Eucharist. But that is not directly tied to the subject of leadership vocation and wage, so we’d better leave those explorations for another time, and perhaps for a better commenter (I’m looking at you Geoff).

So, what are your thoughts? Do you agree with the characterization of a minister’s work as essentially gift-work, rather than skill-work (or property-work)? If so, does it matter? Are there implications to be explored, particularly for post-Christendom missional leadership with regards to how we treat vocational leadership?

Technorati Tags: 1 Timothy, Christianity, clergy, Jesus, Leadership, Luke, Paid Clergy, Paul, The Gift

Why The Bible Is Insufficient For Mission

“Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)

For about seven months last year I worked as a project manager, creating branding strategies and building websites for non-profits and social enterprises. The business was built around code-writers, SEO engineers, and content writers, most of whom were basically the postmodern equivalent of pagans. They all knew my ministry background, which made for some really interesting interactions. One of the things I discovered there was how much I enjoy pagans.

So fun.

The owner, a Christian, brought in a local pastor to act as a “corporate chaplain.” He’s a great guy – young, warm, and very approachable. He has a Bachelors in Bible or music, I think, from a Christian college. He’d come by every Wednesday and chat it up with people.

So painful.

When our chaplain was introduced to the staff there was an awkward moment that basically determined his future there. After briefly introducing him, the owner turned the meeting over to the new chaplain. He very sensitively articulated his open availability to anyone who “just needed to talk” through any kinds of issues; depression, grief, anger, etc. He was there to listen and help. Everything would be confidential. Then he looked to the staff,

“Any questions?” he asked. People sort of looked around the room for a moment until one young woman raised her hand.

“Uh, yeah,” she said, “Do you have any actual training for this sort of thing, like a psychology degree or grief counseling courses or something?”

“Well, no,” he said, “but like all of you I’ve lived life and as a pastor I have good experience helping people with…”

It really didn’t matter what came out of his mouth after that. He was done. Being a pastor meant nothing to them because as far as they’re concerned the Bible has little or no bearing on the actual knowledge required to help people deal with psychological pathologies. There are professionals for that. The chaplain is a great guy, but he has an impossible task if he relies solely on his credentials as a pastor.

This is the dominant cultural we enter as post-Christian missionaries. We cannot rely on an inherent respect for Christianity as a body of actual knowledge (a major point Willard makes in Knowing Christ Today). The Bible is generally seen as a collection of opinions – most of them hopelessly archaic.

That’s why it’s pointless to keep using Reformation debates as a distillery for producing the gospel we offer. Those are Christendom debates. Nobody in post-Christendom cares about the difference between Calvinism and Arminianism. Nobody really cares what you believe about Hell or the nuances of God’s sovereignty (unless it gives them a convenient excuse to dismiss you), because most of them don’t believe in Hell or a sovereign God in the Calvinist sense, and they couldn’t care less what a book of ancient opinions has to say about it, except from maybe an historical-literary perspective (and as T.S Eliot said, to take the bible seriously as literature is a sure sign that you don’t take it seriously at all). None of them cares about a grace vs. works debate because, quite frankly, despite what Reformed preachers and theologians say, nobody outside the church is trying to earn their way into heaven. Hard-core Reformed folks have an absurd habit of turning every human thought into Pelagianism because that’s what must be done to justify an archaic theological construct. If your orthodoxy depends entirely on a particular kind of heresy then your first task is to convert the world to your heresy before you can convert them to your gospel.

You have to condition people to care about this stuff. For most regular folks who don’t believe in Christ, seeing churches and Christians stake out rabid territory on these topics is like watching two Phrenologists fight for customers by arguing the finer tenets of their trade.

For people who haven’t been doctrinally conditioned yet, all they really care about is this: are you competent to help me solve my problems. If you’re a mechanic, can you really fix my car? If you’re a teacher, can you help me understand something in such a way that my life is better equipped to deal with the actual reality in which I live?

Who in Christianity today, has consistently demonstrated they possess a body of knowledge which produces people who actually resemble Christ himself? I’m not asking who is the most articulate preacher, or the most venerated scholar, or who leads the biggest church, or who writes the best books. Those accomplishments may constitute competency in leadership, logic, prose or marketing, but not necessarily competence in Christlikeness.

So, merely pointing to what the Bible says or being able to articulate the nuances of a theology are largely useless skills for a post-Christian missionary. That’s not the kind of knowledge people want or need. And yet, one of the curiosities of a dying Christendom is that entrenched factions are getting increasingly louder and more shrill about these very issues as they fight over a dwindling market share. The huge missiological problem that results from such public bickering is that it actually undermines our claims of authority in the very kind of knowledge people desperately do want and need – and which our grasp of the Bible is supposed to foster.

Ironically, then, the Bible alone is insufficient for this task. We can’t keep pointing to it and shrugging our shoulders as if to say, “Hey, I’m not the one who said it, He did.” We have to take responsibility for actually becoming competent practitioners of the vocation to which we have been called through the person we claim to have found within those sacred pages. This is why Jesus’ comments about the truth “setting us free” came not after a discourse on education or theological savvy, but after an exhortation to follow him obediently.

To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32)

Knowing and following Christ is the knowledge that liberates because it actually brings us closer to the Kingdom reality of God in which we live, much like a mechanic’s knowledge liberates us by fixing our car.

Who then, like Paul, is willing to look the world in the eye and say, “Imitate me. I know how to be like Christ,” (1 Cor 11:1) and then go out and prove it? Whoever does will have no trouble being taken seriously.

Technorati Tags: Bible, character, Christianity, Christlikeness, Dallas Willard, Jesus, Knowledge, Paul, Pelagianism, Reformed, T.S. Eliot

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

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?

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