From Seeker Sensitive to Seeker Generating

“Seeker-sensitive” churches made a big splash in the 1990′s, lead by Willow Creek, with a great concern and care for helping people find God. This was generally accomplished by creating a worship atmosphere that was relevant to contemporary culture in order to provide a seamless transition from the secular world to the sacred world. The motto, via Donald McGavran, was “Nobody should have to cross cultures in order to find God.” Thanks to Willow Creek, and its clones, people were able to come and see God in a way that added sacred meaning to their beloved secular forms of soft-rock music and the corporate-marketing culture of success. It was church the church of Madison Avenue. Of course, during the 1990′s many of the more traditionally-minded churches and leaders vilified this approach, seeing it as a kind of “watering down” of the gospel message.

What the traditional churches and leaders didn’t realize was that seeker sensitive churches were the logical extension of the very form of Christendom they had passed down. Both traditional and seeker-sensitive churches assume that Christ is at the center of cultural and that God is to be found within the gates of the central palace (so to speak) that is the walls of the church. Hence, people must come to church to find God.

But during the early years of postmodernism the markers of Christendom were being rejected – religious heritage, religious symbolism, and Judeo-Christian socio-political norms – which resulted in a cognitive dissonance between those who might still want to “find God” and the keepers of the message who were still primarily speaking through the liturgies, music, and symbols of a rejected culture. In other words, “church” in it’s older forms no longer made sense. The emerging Church leaders – that is, the baby-boomer children of the traditionalists – still essentially wanted what the traditionalists wanted: God at the center of culture (perhaps even more so), but they realized that emerging generations were rejecting those symbols and traditions (as were they). Therefore, they created churches that stripped these symbols away. Seekers of God, then, could go to church to “find God” in a friendly and accessible culture that utilized recognizable idioms like soft-rock inspired worship music, entertainment-based media, and corporate-styled cafes.

Missional churches reject the most fundamental assumption underlying all of this; that Christ is the center of human culture and power. Eddie Gibbs has referred to this turn as “seeker generating churches.”

We are no longer in the business of welcoming “seekers,” or even stimulating the latent “seeking” tendencies in the otherwise pluralistic population, Rather, we are the seekers. We are not the custodians of the Kingdom. Rather, the Kingdom is the reign of God produced by a missionary God who is “at work to this very day” in the world around us. Therefore, our task is to go out and seek to find where God is already “at work” in the community and the world around us and, wherever we find God at work, to join God in that work.

Our task is to be seekers of the Kingdom and to generate new seekers of the Kingdom among us.

Questions:

1. To what extent has our culture in North America already rejected Christ at the center of culture? To what extent is Christ still at the center?
2. What can we do to most effectively generate seekers of the Kingdom among us?
3. To what extend should we still be prepared to receive “seekers” in the Christendom sense?

Technorati Tags: Donald McGavran, missional, Seeker generating, Seeker Sensitive

The Parable of the Royal Invitations

(This parable was originally my contribution to the discussion of re-imagining Vineyard values over at Jason Clark’s blog, Deep Church. My task was to re-imagine the value, “Come as you are, but don’t stay as you are.” I’m re-posting it here just to add it to my own archives.)

Once there was a royal family who loved their people and ran their city as best they knew how.

They were generous, so they threw regular parties at their royal mansion in the center of town with all the best food, wine, art, and music. It was quite a spectacle. Because most people were fairly poor compared to the royals, everyone wanted to come to rub shoulders with the powerful elite and be influenced by them and, perhaps, gain a little power for themselves. Pretty soon, these parties were so popular that only certain people, from certain families, and dressed in certain fine clothes could gain entrance.

In time, however, the royal family fell on difficult days and lost some of their wealth. The local economy changed, and many of the “common” families made their own fortunes. Many still respected the royals for their heritage, but being royal wasn’t as prestigious as it once was, and truth be told, many resented them for their power. And so, fewer and fewer people wanted to come to their parties. There were other parties being thrown by newly-wealthy families and people seemed less interested in queuing up or wearing pretentious clothes.

Sensing they were losing their power, and desperate to revive their status, the King struck upon an idea: They sold all their fancy furniture and bought affordable Ikea tables and chairs just like the common folks and dressed in jeans and un-tucked Hawaiian shirts. Then they sent out party invitations to the whole city. The invitation read:

“Come as you are, but don’t stay as you are.”

The idea was that everyone would feel perfectly “at home” in the royal residence, and in so doing could, in a way, become like a royal family member too and be changed for the better by the influence of the royal family.

It worked beautifully.

Some still wanted to be like the royals, so wearing the same clothes and sitting on the same affordable furniture made it seem, for a time, like everyone actually was royal. Many people flooded back into the royal mansion and everything returned to normal.

Or so it seemed. In reality, the economic and political landscape was still steadily changing – and with it, the royals gradually lost all their political power until one day the family was overthrown and evicted from their mansion at the center of the city. To some, these seemed like the hardest times they had ever experienced.

At first the old King was determined to gain back their status because he thought that was the only way to continue taking good care of the city. “How can we do what’s best for them if we’re no longer in charge?” he asked. So he decided to keep throwing their once-famous parties right there in their ramshackle hut on the outskirts of town. He rallied all the sons and daughters and aunts and uncles to paint the plywood walls and sweep the dirt floors and they sent out invitations to the whole city, which still read: “Come as you are, but don’t stay as you are.” And they waited.

But nobody came.

For most folks, going to a party on the poor outskirts of town was plainly absurd. And what was all this about “Don’t stay as you are”? People thought it arrogant that the family still believed they had something to offer. Truth be told, they thought the royals were merely trying to win back their place of power and prestige.

Then one night the old King was struck by a realization. So he gathered the old party invitations, scrawled something inside them, and addressed one to each member of his family. The next day at breakfast he carefully handed out the invitations and said, “Our family has been called to care for this city – wealthy or poor, powerful or weak – and there has never been a better time to do so.” At that, everyone opened their envelope and saw that the old invitation, now given to each of them, had been changed:

“Come Go as you are, but don’t stay as you are.”

And with that each member of the royal family understood that the time for asking people to come had passed, and that it was they who would now be changed.

Technorati Tags: Deep Church, Jason Clark, missional, Parables, Vineyard Community of Churches

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

What Does The Gospel Really Look Like?

What does the gospel really look like in practice, on the ground, in the city, walking the streets, in the boardrooom and the legislative session, among the neighborhoods and schools of North America?

That was essentially the question asked by JR Woodward last year of 50 missional church practitioners, including myself. What would you write about the good news in your local paper if given the opportunity?

The 50 responses have now been collected and published in a wonderful little book called ViralHope: Good News From The Urbs to the Burbs and Everything In Between. It was humbling to contribute my small chapter to this book as many of the other men and women featured on the pages are people I have admired and emulated for years. Others I’m just discovering and getting to know. As Alan Hirsch writes in his endorsement of the book:

“ViralHope is a unique and enticing collection of postcards from a veritable who’s who of the missional church from across the Western world. It provides us with articulate and varied perspectives on how missionaries to the West are conceiving the good news in and for their various contexts. A worthy read.”

ViralHope would make a fantastic 50-day personal devotion, small group study reflection, or church-wide reading series. You can click here to get your own copy from Amazon.

Technorati Tags: Books, Christianity, Good News, Gospel, JR Woodward, missional, Missional Church, ViralHope

The Danger of Worship: Untamed, Chapter Two

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

Your sincerity is not enough. Everyone is sincere, but there is a real-live God, with real-live thoughts, values, and expectations that exclude other thoughts, values, and expectations as possibilities of goodness.

If the first chapter of Deb and Alan Hirsch’s latest book, Untamed, concerned the re-affirmation of a personally accessible God, then the second Chapter wants us to know that God is dangerous. Moreover, as history’s slew of cult leaders and televangelists attest, it is also dangerous to miss the truth about that God. Such false prophets are very sincere about their faith, as Martin Buber has noted:

“False prophets are not godless. Rather, they adore the god “success.” They themselves are in constant need of success and achieve it by promising it to the people. But they do honestly want success for the people. The craving for success governs their hearts and determines what rises from them. That is what Jeremiah called the “deceit of their own hearts.” They do not deceive; they are deceived, and can only breathe in the air of deceit.”

This means getting the “fundamentals” about God right, but before you make the mistake of hearing a re-hashing of fundamentalism here, you must understand what the Hirsch’ mean by this term; for them, the fundamentals refer to being like Christ:

“We easily lose focus on what is essential. We miss the fact that discipleship has to do with becoming like Jesus, living the Shema, and not forgetting that the “more important matters of the law,” namely love, mercy, forgiveness, justice (Matt. 23:23–24), are nonnegotiables in the equation.”

This is in sharp contrast to the fundamentals of fundamentalism, which are unquestionable, universally certain  doctrinal propositions of truth that must be consciously affirmed. For the Hirsch’s this is too abstract, and this places them squarely in postmodern territory (though, not lost in its wilderness). Indeed, it’s likely that many sectors of Christendom will dismiss the these ideas as legalistic because some of the focus is being shifted to include what we do (what they call, “living the Shema”), as well as what we believe (i.e. “believing in Jesus”).

The authors indirectly reject fundamentalist conceptions of legalism as a false dichotomy, instead seeing legalism as too much emphasis on doctrinal purity. They affirm that, “The reality is that what we believe about God does have consequences. History is full of people who have wreaked enormous damage and even killed for what they believe in.”Our theology dictates our conception of what it means to be good and right, and how it will look to build a just society.

For the authors, this is where the Shema – the core Jewish prayer, taken from Deut 6 – comes in. For the Hirsch’s, Jesus’ placement of the Shema (or what Scot McNight calls “The Jesus Creed“) in Mark 12:29-31 as the central explication of faith is his remarkable distillation of right theology and praxis in one simple statement, a statemnt which holds the two concepts of belief and action firmly together – making his “way” into a concrete, bodily faith:

“The follower of Jesus broadens his or her knowledge of God through living truth, not just believing in it. True knowledge of God must be expressed in practice or action—that’s why the Bible is one-third ethics. Obedience— body and soul—is part of the condition of God’s covenant (for example, Exod. 24:7; Jer. 11:3) as well as the momentous parting words of commission under which we live (Matt. 28:18–20). As C. S. Lewis says, “Obedience is the ‘holy courtesy’ required for entering into the divine relationship.”

This is how we truly come to know God: by faith, which means believing Jesus’ teachings to the extent that we put them into bodily practice and learn how, through trial and error, to become like him through the enabling grace of God given by the indwelling Holy Spirit. The teachings and actions of Christ, including the Shema, are not only the starting point for our theological conception of God, but also our guide for whether we’re getting it right or wrong.

Another distinctively postmodern aspect of this chapter is the Hirsch’s insistence that such a life simply cannot be lived individually. While we all can know God, no one individual can know God completely. Rather, because everyone is wired differently with a variety of temperaments, strengths, and weaknesses, we must pursue the knowing of God in community. That is the place of proper theology.

The rest of the Chapter explores some of the ways that people are derailed in their discipleship – with emphasis on the big three of sex, money, and power – but the core message remains the same: we recapitulate what we worship, therefore we must endeavor to know God as God really is. For the authors, this means that the first order of Christianity is a full-orbed, holistic worship (not just singing), which they call “dangerous” because it has the capacity to put us in contact with an untamed God who transforms us beyond our meager lusts.

Some Questions For Reflection:

1. Do you agree that we imitate that which we worship? Can you think of examples from non-religious life?
2. What is your concept of worship? What are the most effective ways you engage in worship?
3. What are you thought on the proposition that we can only know God in community?

Technorati Tags: Alan Hirsch, Christianity, Deb Hirsch, discipleship, God, missional, Postmodernism, Scot McNight, The Shema, Untamed, worship

Are Mega-Churches The Healthiest Churches in America?

I have a friend – “Pastor A” – who is phenomenally gifted as a minister. He’s a skilled musician and speaker, funny, sincere, and “naturally supernatural.” He could grow a mega-church if he unleashed his gifts, but instead, he’s engaged in a form of missional ministry that involves intentionally dialing back the up-front nature of his gifts in favor of a more egalitarian approach to leadership and discipleship, which, in our American setting, means his latest church plant is growing more slowly and will probably never be very big.

Recently he had a conversation with “Pastor B,” a friend of his and another phenomenally gifted minister whose church is rather large (over 5000 I believe) and engages in some exceptionally good ministry to the community. It would be a mistake to dismiss this church as just another pragmatic, attractional sellout. They preach the word in an expository way, work hard to disciple people, and serve the community in highly innovative ways.  However, they do intentionally appeal to the “mall mentality” of Americans (his words, not mine). In that sense it is  very much an “attractional” church.

Presumably, they were talking about the missional vs attractional debate, or perhaps Pastor A’s intentionally small, slow growth approach, when Pastor B simply turned to him and said, “You have to understand, mega-churches are the healthiest churches in America.”

Is that true?

It seems to be that this is the point on which much of the debate hangs. What does it mean to be a good church, a healthy church?

In my own recent conversation with a prominent leader in my association whose church is larger and decidedly attractional we were discussing my own choice to adopt a more missional/incarnational approach. I wanted to be sure that would be welcome in our association. He assured me it would be, but added, “It is interesting, however, that it’s the mega-churches who are baptizing the most people.”

I just let it go, because more than anything his simple statement communicate a world of difference between us, and I knew we weren’t going to resolve it.

Still, it gets back to the basic questions: What does it mean to be a healthy church and what kinds of churches in America (if any) best reflect health?

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mega-Churches, missional

Should Missional Church Leaders Be Paid? (Prelude)

Next week I’ll be writing a few blog posts on the subject of vocation and leadership in the missional church. A number of others have posted on this subject recently – including JR Rozko, Todd Heistand and David Fitch – and as a missional church leader myself, I have my own personal struggles. I’ll be mashing all that raw material together starting on Tuesday.

But first, I want to hear from you. What are your thoughts on this subject? What questions should we be asking? Do you think being missional necessitates being non-professional? What problems do you foresee? If you’re a church-planter/leader, what are your struggles with vocation? If you’re part of a church – any kind of church – what are your thoughts on professional leadership?

Technorati Tags: Church, Leadership, Ministry, missional, Vocation

Vineyard Churches at the Crossroads

Yesterday, we all seemed to agree the Vineyard is alive and well, but in a period of stabilization that has resulted in some decline. We also agree this has been a healthy and necessary period of “house cleaning,” regrouping, and redefining in the wake of some damaging fringe elements (i.e. extreme pentecostalism) and the loss our charismatic founding leader.

This weekend I’m participating in a small round table discussion with a few other Vineyard leaders who are experimenting with a variety of alternative approaches to ecclesiology. Most of these folks have been shaped in some way by the sojourn that was the Emerging Church (though most probably wouldn’t identify with the EC). This gathering won’t be prescriptive. We’re hoping to learn from each other. I’d like to have a parallel discussion here on the blog for those who are interested.

First, one observation about why I think the Vineyard is both well positioned to reach our cultures and simultaneously at a variety of crossroads.

While the Vineyard is solidly orthodox, unlike other traditions it doesn’t have an entrenched theological heritage. Wesley was an Anglican; various Reformed traditions trace allegiance to Luther or Calvin; Baptists, I would argue, are so deeply entangled with the American exceptionalism of the era in which they were birthed that their entrenched dogma is a libertarian brand of Christ-driven patriotism (thoughts Caleb?). Even Calvary Chapel – though less so – is fairly strictly governed by the strong theological dogmas of its own charismatic founder (who is still alive, though reportedly ill). And so on.

But the Vineyard’s only strong theological heritage is the recent trajectory of “Kingdom theology” famously developed by George Ladd (via C.H. Dodd), and later expounded upon by a diverse group of theologians including Beasley-Murray (Baptist), Gordon Fee (Pentecostal), N.T. Wright (Anglican), and Scot McNight (Anabaptist) just to name a diverse few – and teased-out by highly influential thinkers like Dallas Willard and J.P. Moreland (both in the Vineyard). There is now a near consensus among the aforementioned traditions that Kingdom theology is true.

Consequently, both because of the absence of a firmly entrenched dogmatic heritage and a commitment to a theological foundation that is fairly ecumenical, there’s a tremendous amount of freedom for Vineyard churches to explore what it means to be the people of God, embodying a foretaste of the Kingdom in our local contexts while valuing and cooperating with a variety of other Christian traditions. This is one of the reasons I’m convinced the Vineyard – as Jason Smith put it yesterday – is well positioned for a “post” culture (post-Christendom, post-evangelical, post-denominational, etc.).

Having said that, I think there are a number of crossroads facing Vineyard leaders as we depart the decade of the the “Emerging sojourn.” Those include:

Missional vs. Attractional
The Emerging conversation has very much given way to the Missional conversation, and now every church in the West wants to be seen as missional. Some see this as a polarity, but others see it as a continuum. In my observation, those who define missional as “outwardly-focused” see this as a both/and continuum, whereas those who define missional as “following God into a foreign culture” see this crossroad as an either/or polarity. I’ll tip my hand and say I see this as a polarity, and think it’s more accurate to refer to this choice as “Missional vs Christendom,” where the former is necessarily marginalized, subversive, and decentralized and the latter is necessarily empowered, enthroned, and centralized.

Institutional vs Organic
How is the structure of church best expressed in your area and culture? How are you handling the pitfalls inherent in hierarchy and professionalism? Are you committed to professional leadership or are you leaning ideologically toward some kind of bi-vocational or volunteer status as a leader? A related crossroads is liturgical vs. non-liturgical (I know, everyone has a liturgy… but you know what I mean), especially in light of Todd Hunters recent comment that he see’s a “revival of religion” coming.

Pentecostal vs. Reformed vs. Anglican vs. Anabaptist
Obviously this is a huge oversimplification, but these represent some of the dominant streams of theological thinking within the Vineyard, and Kingdom theology can happily coexist with each. You could include Catholic and Orthodox as well, but I think those are more sources for perspective and inspiration than genuine options for Vineyard folks. In some ways this is the first crossroads, since a pre-disposition here will heavily determine your ecclesiology.

So, what roads you are traveling and why? Do you feel the broader Vineyard leadership, either at the national or local level, is pushing in any particular direction on these? What other crossroads do you see?

I’ll be sharing your responses with the other Vineyard folks I’m hanging with this weekend.

Technorati Tags: Anabaptist, Attractional, C.H. Dodd, Christendom, Dallas Willard, ecclesiology, George Eldon Ladd, Institutional, J.P. Moreland, John Calvin, John Wesley, Liturgy, missional, N.T. Wright, Organic, Pentecostal, Reformed, Theology, Todd Hunter, Vineyard Churches

What We Can (un)Learn From The Apple Tablet

The tech world is currently enraptured by the possibility of a new Apple Tablet computer. Nobody even knows if it’s real or not, but that hasn’t kept the mere hint of it’s impending announcement from bumping Apple’s stock. Even though this as-yet-unannounced slice of personal-computing heaven may be nothing but vaporware, I’m going to suggest few lessons we should (un)learn from it anyway.

So here goes: 5 missional lessons we can (un)learn from the new Apple Tablet: Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: Apple, Church, iPhone, iPod, iSlate, Leadership, Mac, marketing, missional, Missional Church, Tablet

What Are The Boundaries of Mission?

If Hiebert reads my blog from beyond the grave, I may be in trouble.

I think there’s an important distinction between being attractional and being attractive. When we use the word “attractional” pejoratively we’re usually describing a philosophy of being event-driven. The goal is to attract as many people as possible, and the most expedient way to do so is to use the tools of marketing and hype. This allies the church with features of the popular culture that are inherently deceptive and manipulative and naturally leads to a consumer response.

But being attractive means others see something in us they want. That can be a very good thing. Isaiah 2:1-5 is a major paradigm for me in terms of mission, and it describes the Kingdom of God as attractive because of the presence of God and the pragmatic wisdom that naturally flows from God’s community. I don’t have any problem with people being drawn, my question is how do we draw them? By marketing savvy, or by power, wisdom, and character? Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: Attractional, Attractive, Isaiah, mission, missional