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:

“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

Re-imagining Christendom

Recently my friend Jason Clark has been hosting a series on his blog, Deep Church, called, “Re-imagining Vineyard Values,” wherein several of us have been trying to engage with the classic ten core postures of the Vineyard Movement.

Today it was my turn to re-imagine value #6 (“Come as you are but don’t stay as you are”) and my response takes the form of a parable. Click here to read “The Parable of the Royal Invitation.”

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

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

After SVS 2010: Doug Erickson, Advice To Vineyard Theologians

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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Doug Erickson: “Advice to Vineyard Theologians (and Philosophers, and Scholars…)”

Abstract
Due to the diversity of interests and shall we say, the “complexity” of the short Vineyard history, there is some variety of opinion as to just what the “center” of our center-set movement is. For some, the center is our commitment to social justice issues: caring for the poor, and bringing the kingdom of God to the last, the least, and the lost. Other options could be a renewal movement, a signs and wonders movement, a power evangelism movement, a church planting movement or a pneumatologically orientated movement. I argue in my paper that while these elements are all important as to what it means to be a Vineyard, the true “center” is our enacted, inaugurated, eschatological vision of the kingdom of God. I really like the way people like Derek Morphew and Don Williams have expounded on this. We say enacted because we are committed to not only talking about the kingdom, but doing the works of the kingdom which includes things like social justice and evangelism, but much more: praying for the sick and demonized, bringing hope and restoration to hurting people, and doing our best to tend the garden- that is, taking care of this amazing creation that has been entrusted to us. We say inaugurated because this kingdom mission is established, inaugurated and primarily understood through the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. This picture of the kingdom is Eschatological because we see in the inauguration, the in-breaking of the powers of the future, into the present. When we pray for a sick person, and the Holy Spirit comes to heal, that is a prolepsis event: a “down payment” if you will, on the future age when there will be no sickness or suffering. This kingdom ideal can be loosely defined as the effective range of God’s rule, that is, it is encompassed by those places where God’s will is done on earth, as it is perfectly expressed in heaven.

This theological self-identification is important for a young movement like the Vineyard as we, more and more often, are engaging in dialogue with Christians from other theological traditions. As Christ’s prayer “that they shall be one” calls us to ecumenical dialogue, we must, and can, enter into this dialogue from our decidedly Vineyard presuppositions and commitments. I contend that we have a unique and significant contribution to the larger body of Christ, but we are just beginning to discover what those contributions may be.

Interview with Doug:

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: I became interested in this topic because although I haven’t been in the Vineyard that long, less than 17 years, even in that time that have been several twists and turns as we have struggled to identity ourselves. The question of “what does it mean to be a Vineyard” has been answered many different ways. To some extent, there are different answers to this related to the issues of theological commitments or praxis, although the two are obviously related. So in this paper, I wanted to re-establish what I, and many others, consider to be the central theological distinctive of the Vineyard: our commitment to the practice and proclamation of the already-not yet conception of the kingdom of God. In my view, our eschatology drives other theological commitments, so rather than being a pneumatologically driven movement, I see that eschatology conditions our pneumatology, especially the work of the Spirit.

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

A: I think this paper has some import on the movement especially as pastors and structural leaders are increasingly moving into discussions and dialogue with Christians from other traditions. A base element of ecumenical dialogue is answering the question, “what makes you tick?” or, what theological doctrines do you ground yourself in? How do these grounding beliefs affect other areas of theological reflection, such as the doctrine of God, anthropology, soteriology, or ecclesiology? At the conference, I was quite amazed and encouraged by the breadth and depth of theological reflection ongoing in the movement. We are just now probably entering into a stage where we can began some significant constructive theological development, so understanding our central theological distinctive is absolutely crucial as we move into this type of work.

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

A: It’s a tautology that theological commitment influences praxis and visa versa. So there is an obvious connection between what we teach, train and preach and what we practice. For those of us in the academic community, understanding our theological grounding should assist us in dialogue with believers from other traditions. Practically as a movement, we can think about how the various areas of  cultural engagement intersect with kingdom grounding. We are a movement known for caring for the poor and seeking justice, and that should continue. We are not however, primarily a social justice movement; we are a kingdom movement, who sees caring for the poor as an essential feature of the kingdom message. We embrace evangelism and power ministry, but again, centrally we are not just an evangelistic movement; we do evangelism because we see that a central feature of the kingdom conscription is to “go and make disciples”. Many of our churches and structural leaders have embraced the challenge to creation care, but we are not primarily an ecological movement, we are a kingdom movement that sees the call to tend the garden as an element of the kingdom message. So as we enter in to all of those areas, our engagement should reflect our central belief in the enacted, inaugurated eschatological kingdom of God.

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

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Doug Erickson is from the Duluth Vineyard in Duluth, Minnesota, where he makes constant supplications to St. Columbanus, the patron saint of motorcyclists. He is currently writing his Ph.D. dissertation from Marquette University on the relationship between eschatology and pneumatology in the Vineyard movement. He teaches for the Vineyard Biblical Institute in the U.S. Doug is married to Sandi, they have three kids and the entire family enjoys the outdoor lifestyle that Duluth offers.

Technorati Tags: Doug Erickson, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS, Vineyard Community of Churches

Schedule Changes to the After SVS Series

For everyone following the “After SVS” we’ve had a slight change to the schedule. Doug Erickson’s profile – originally scheduled for yesterday – was pushed due to a delay in posting Jon and Jamie’s profile. Doug’s piece “Advice to Vineyard Theologians” will now appear Monday. Also, I’m glad to announce that Matt Croasmun’s excellent paper, “The Cross, Eucharist, and Imitation in the Gospel of John,” has been a late addition to the schedule and will appear on Tuesday.

Thanks for all your dialogue and comments in this series, and please continue to jump in!

Technorati Tags: Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS, Vineyard Community of Churches

After SVS 2010: Jon Bialecki and Jamie Wilson, Social Science Analysis of the Vineyard and a Theological Rejoinder

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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NOTE: Today is a unique profile because it involves two people – Jon, an anthropologist, and Jamie, the Vineyard pastor whose church Jon has studied for the past several years. Consequently, this profile is much longer than the others, but well worth the extra effort.

Jon Bialecki & Jamie Wilson: “Surprise, Return, and Futurity: Social Science Analysis of the Vineyard’s Temporal Imaginary of the Kingdom and a Theological Rejoinder”

Abstract
This paper presents a conversation that arose from an anthropological participant-observer study of Southern California Vineyards, and consists an initial secular social-science reading of limitations to the Vineyard’s capacity to imagine its own future, and then concluding with critical theological reflections on the central claim that is presented, from the point of view of a pastor who was part of the study that gave rise to this argument. Observing that the Vineyard is at a moment of anxiety over generational change, and to a degree rethinking its future as a movement, Jon Bialecki argues that it has two ready choices. Working on implicit logics of temporality and representation that can be identified in the phenomenology of the Charismatic Gifts, Bialecki claims that these modes of figuration also informs the Vineyard’s attempts to imagine future directions. The mode of picturation that results in informed by a logic of surprise that sees the Kingdom as that which is not a part of the current social order, and hence that which cannot be anticipated; this in practice limits the capacity for coalitional and institution building. Alternately, the Vineyard could make use of another modality of thinking that is dependent on a logic of return to a (possibly phantasmatic) past, but which has its own dangers. Responding to these claims, Jamie Wilson probes to what degree they are constant with the Vineyard’s articulation of Kingdom theology, whether an orientation towards surprise is supplemented by a legitimate expectation of eschatological presence of the future in contemporary grace, and how theologians (such as Moltmann and Yoder) and historical figures (such as Booth and Wilberforce) can provide ways for the Vineyards to take up the difficult task of imagining its own future as an instrument of the Kingdom.

Interview With Jon

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: I hope you will excuse me for being long-winded on this point, but my particular position as a secular anthropologist means that any discussion of my interest in this topic also necessitates folding in a discussion of my interest in the Vineyard itself as a movement. Shortly after 9-11, I became concerned about the possibilities for political engagement and mutual understanding between secular and believing Americans, and so I set aside plans for an anthropology PhD fieldwork project on Islamic modernism in Malaysia to study the Vineyard. My initial question was the nature of the relationship between two aspects of Christian practice and thought that are often treated as analytically distinct by anthropologists who study Christian populations; the areas were (on one hand) understandings regarding, and phenomenological experiences of, Neo-Charismatic/Third wave spiritual practices such as prophecy, deliverance, and healing, and (on the other hand) the economic and political imaginaries of believers. While I am still interested in this topic, I’ve since become captivated by transformations that the Vineyard, as a movement, is itself undergoing – its own internal debates and attempts to chart its future.

When SVS was announced, long-time dialogue partner and Vineyard pastor Jamie Wilson suggested that we collaborate on a project, and of course I accepted. In the last two decades, cultural anthropology has been experimenting with collaborative attempts at producing and presenting material, so there was a lot of enthusiasm on my part for this project. We ended up splitting our paper into two parts. I presented what was in part a bird’s-eye view of my dissertation project, framed as an analysis of what I feel is one of the core antinomonies in the movement today; and Jamie presented a theological re-framing and critique of my material, and a reflection on how the Vineyard, as a movement, might go forward.

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

A: Again, as a friendly outsider, but an outsider nonetheless, I’m hesitant to discuss either the relevance or implications of what I have to suggest, though it seems to me that a tension between picturing the divine as either utterly other, or as foundational and as the known, seems to lie at the core of the early- to mid-period Vineyard, and does have some important implications.

If the Kingdom is to a degree structured in the way that charismatic experiences like ‘hearing from God’ is structured, and if one of the chief indices of hearing from God is the surprising nature of the communication, something that must be divine because it could not be seen as being a part of quotidian thought and sensory experience,  then it seems to me that the Kingdom as a social/political project also will always be something that could not be anticipated – and the organizational and political challenges that follow from collectively planning for that which cannot be anticipated seems obvious; this may be in part why there is such a vogue for spiritual formation these days. Also, this yearning for a truly different order seems to effectively preclude a large swath of possible coalition partners, in as much as most of these partners might be grounded in a politics of this world and of the known.

On the other hand, an alternative politics of ‘the known,’ which might ground itself on some paradigmatic real or imaginary past, seems to me to be potentially toxic – that is the kind of logic found in many kinds of contemporary political and religious fundamentalism, desiring to return to a fantasized previous order of things situated in some halcyon vision of the 19^th or 18^th century, or even earlier. Neither approach, though, seems like it can be entirely rejected – it is hard for me to imagine any kind of contemporary Christian movement that does not at least harken back to some kind of Christian primitivism, and in my discussion of a nostalgic fundamentalism I think I’ve already suggested the dangers inherent in that approach. In short, neither approach alone seems salutary, but creating a dialectic between the two could very well be either unstable, or simply result in a ‘bad infinity,’ an endless vacillation between two poles.

This, by the way, is a problem not limited to the Vineyard alone, though I think that there are historical reasons why this tension might be seen in particularly sharp relief in the Vineyard (think of the oppositions captured in the phrase “Empowered Evangelicals”). By coincidence this morning I attended some sessions of the “Nurturing the Prophetic Imagination” conference at Point Loma Nazarene, and the poet Kathleen Norris, one of the plenary speakers, gave a talk that could be read almost in its entirety as an attempt to work through the same series of oppositions that I see running through large segments of the Vineyard. You can even see traces of these oppositions in non-Christian formulations, such as fair-sized portions of contemporary critical theory – works that may have a genealogical link to Christian, but works that all the same certainly present themselves as predicated on an atheistic, if not agnostic, ontology.

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

A: Again, as an outsider, and as someone who is perhaps constitutionally incapable of being practical in the first place, I’ll have to demure, though it seems to me that for those who feel that my picture here isn’t entirely a misrepresentation of the Vineyard, and does bring up concerns that have to be thought through, Jamie Wilson’s discussion might be an excellent place to begin.

Interview With Jamie

Q: How did you become interested in this topic?

A: Several years ago, Jon approached me with some questions about our church in the context of his doctoral research.   That has led to a rich friendship, some fun mental sparring, and a greatly expanded reading list for me.  We have spent years talking about God, politics, anthropology, and culture. When SVS got started, I asked Jon about doing a joint paper, and I would have been happy to respond to any of his numerous observations on the Vineyard. That being said, it was a particular pleasure to get to think together about how our understanding of the kingdom plays out in practice at a grassroots level.

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

A: In the general sense, I hope that this paper can help encourage interdisciplinary critical reflection within the Vineyard.   Our theology and biblical studies will be stronger if we can engage in conversation with social science disciplines like anthropology, sociology, or history, and vice versa.  Likewise, I hope that our movement can build a robust tradition of discourse with scholars who are not Christians.

In the specific sense, the Vineyard would do well to hear Jon’s point that our culture of valuing surprise as an authentication of God’s activity could in practice deter the formation of coalitions that combat injustice.  We should note the potential eddies that develop in the current of our thoroughly eschatological understanding of the kingdom.  This is precisely the sort of observation that we are unlikely to see without outside help.

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

A: The paper addresses Jon’s argument that the importance we place on surprise may hinder our participation in social justice coalitions. Does our understanding of the kingdom encourage us to work arm in arm with others for the sake of the common good? The road forward begins as a matter of the imagination. What does our theology enable us to image in the future?

I submit that his point is very well taken, and I proceed to suggest three resources to strengthen our ability to work in coalitions.  First, we must keep the cross at the center of our theology of the kingdom. To the extent that our theology becomes a theology of glory rather than a theology of the cross, we lose not only our historical mooring but we also compromise our capacity to imagine coalitions which undertake the hard work of suffering with the oppressed. As we understand that the gospel of the kingdom is the gospel of the suffering king, we are empowered to engage in suffering.  Second, I point to Jesus’ jubilee reference in Luke 4 as a Biblical resource.  I think we have tended to use a strong already/not yet hermeneutic with the first part of the Nazareth question but then dropped the ball on the announcement of the “year of the Lord’s favor.”  Finally, I suggest that we undertake more serious historical study of people like Booth and Wilberforce. At a popular level, it is already the case that they have been admitted to the Vineyard hall of heroes.  Now is the moment to take the next step toward more serious historical analysis.  We need to explore the ways that these leaders understood church and state relations.  We need to explore how they understood the advance of the kingdom of God in their own contexts.

May we do the theological, biblical, and historical work necessary to better position ourselves to work arm in arm with others for the sake of the common good. These three resources suggested at the end could all be put into practice at the local church level.

Jon and Jamie will be available for questions and interaction in the comments below

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Jon Bialecki is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, and has just finished a three-year posting as a visiting assistant professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His recently completed UCSD anthropology dissertation, “The Kingdom and its Subjects,” focused on the interrelations between Charismatic religious activity, economics, and politics among Southern Californian Vineyard believers; he has also written on the anthropology and ethnography of global Christianity.

Jamie Wilson lives in San Diego with his wife Michelle and their three children. He pastors Coast Vineyard together with Michelle, and he is the Area Pastoral Care Leader for San Diego. He holds an M.A. in Biblical Studies from Fuller Seminary. Jamie is passionate about coaching fully committed risk takers to advance the kingdom of God, and his ideal dinner party would include Augustine, Conrad Grebel, John Wesley, William Wilberforce, Jurgen Moltmann, Peter Xu, several homeless people and the woman who broke the alabaster jar full of perfume and poured it on Jesus.

Technorati Tags: Anthropology, Jamie Wilson, John Bialecki, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS, Vineyard Community of Churches

After SVS 2010: Steven Schenk, Examining The Contradictions Between Theology and Praxis

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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Steven Schenk: “Power and Purpose in a Cross Shaped Community: Examining the Contradictions Between Theology and Praxis”

Abstract
We are haunted. In spite of literature, conferences, and personal exhortations to ‘administrate yourselves into mega-churches;’ we cannot shake the nagging suspicion that God’s Church could be revolutionary in beauty and purity.  In every denominational stream are those who have grown weary of a Church that feeds on high-dollar advertising, well-funded ministry teams, and the greatest technologies.  We are haunted by suspicions that our notion of ‘success’ might be an idolatrous distraction from God’s true purposes. This suspicion is fueled by the disconnect between theology and praxis.

If you want to know what someone holds to be true, attend to their lives instead of their words.  The unfortunate truth is that our carefully crafted statements of theology say less about our understanding of God than our everyday decisions.  In the area of Church praxis this is most unfortunate, because our practices communicate a theology that is simply unorthodox. We will define Kingdom power and purpose as seen in the Cross, and then move to a more practical and more important purpose: calling Church practitioners to account for our complicity in ‘better business practices’ that largely ignore the implications of the theology we espouse. While practitioners give some thought to the implications for individuals, we are often ignorant of the ecclesiological implications of kingdom theology, and specifically the Cross.  The Cross reveals an approach to power and justice that threatens to shift our paradigm. We need this shift to happen in theology, but especially in praxis.  The implications of a cruciform Kingdom theology include:

• Power for Others
• Equipping Leadership
• Sending Leadership
• Outward Ministry
• Redeeming Trades
• Personal Transformation
• Deep Community
• Multi-Cultural Expression
• Social Justice
• Christian Storytellers
• Eucharist
• Carrying the Cross
• Identification with the Broken
• Necessary Failure

The Church crafts our praxis in ignorant contradiction to these Kingdom implications. Specifically, basic praxis, as simple as the language used to define terms and practices, how we measure success, what we prioritize, and what we display as our models for health.  We cannot continue moving forward with such an ill-conceived project. The ultimate subject here is praxis; others are better suited to exploring Kingdom theology, or the implications of the Cross on that theology.  Others will give a more comprehensive treatment to application. The aim of this paper is not to exhaustively detail the theology, or practice; rather to highlight the fact that our theology is contradicted by our practice, and few seem to notice.

Interview With Steven

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

Technorati Tags: Praxis, Society of Vineyard Scholars, Steven Schenk, SVS, Theology, Vineyard Community of Churches

After SVS 2010: Steve Burnhope, Penal Substitutionary Atonement and 21st Century Mission

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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Steve Burnhope: “Culture, Worldview and the Cross: Penal Substitutionary Atonement and 21st Century Mission”

Abstract
Evangelicals have customarily relied on the penal substitutionary understanding of the atonement in gospel presentations.  However, questions have recently been raised from within Evangelicalism as to whether this explanation is saleable in today’s world. In the Reformers’ day, judicial punishment through the infliction of brutal physical violence – such as torture, bodily mutilation, burning alive and drowning – was the normal sentence in criminal justice.  In today’s culture, though, where the judicial system no longer endorses these sentencing practices, is the message of a Saviour who took the brutal physical violent punishment we deserve (for even the smallest of sins), so saving us from God inflicting eternal conscious torment in Hell, still ‘good news’? “If the only gospel we’ve got solves a problem that nobody feels, then it’s no wonder our churches are shrinking” (Stephen Holmes).  Meanwhile, the Christian gospel is widely parodied. But do we have a biblical mandate to explain the ‘problem’ (of ‘sin’) and the ‘solution’ (how Christ dying ‘for us’ is efficacious) in other than ‘crime-and-punishment’ terms. Actually, throughout history, the Church has never insisted on a particular view of Atonement for Christian orthodoxy. In fact, Scripture provides sundry theories of the Atonement in metaphors, models, images or stories of salvation, congregating around spheres of public life (such as the law courts, commerce, personal relationships, worship and the battleground), all drawing on the life worlds of the audiences.  The ‘penal’, juridical view is but one. The Bible reflects a far broader understanding of ‘sin’ than the legal model to which Evangelicalism’s individualized telling has reduced it in Modernity.  The justice of God has been ‘too closely tied to individual sin and forgiveness and too loosely tied to the cosmic and social dimensions’ (Colin Gunton).  Sin affects humanity – as both perpetrators and victims (we are both) – and also, human society and the entire created order. Although penal substitution can be found in scripture, it lacks the exegetical support that any claim to hegemony requires.  This being so, we are not only justified in revisiting its central role in gospel presentations, we are compelled to do so.  To be effective evangelistically, our stories need to answer the questions people actually have, not the ones they ought to have or used to have.  A broader understanding of Atonement more authentically reflects the full biblical picture and enables the gospel to speak more powerfully in the cultural environment facing 21^st century mission.

Interview With Steven

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: Before I began theological study, the question of how Christ saved us always bothered me.  In fact, I began theological studies to answer a host of such questions that, for me, were never adequately answered by the standard explanations kicking around in popular Christianity.  I had faith that there were answers out there, but the Church didn’t seem to have them (and nor did it seem much to be aware that it didn’t!).

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

A: I wouldn’t claim it’s any more relevant to the Vineyard than to the Church-at-large, save insofar as Vineyard is at heart deeply missional.  And, at the heart of mission, is how we tell the gospel-story.  Jesus is the answer, but very often the presumed question, that evangelists are working to in the ‘telling’, is anachronistic. Penal substitution has claimed hegemony in Evangelical telling, but it’s not sufficiently supported scripturally for that, and nor is it culturally compelling any longer either.  For example, it requires a latent sense of guilt.  In the Western postmodern world, people don’t feel guilty that way any more, as we might wish them to, and as the penal explanation requires them to. It also requires an ancient world view of crime and punishment.

That said, atonement is not about inventing therapeutic soteriological ideas to order, to suit popular predilections.  That would be an assimilation of culture, not the critique of culture – all cultures, not just postmodern culture – that Newbigin says is inherent in the gospel. However, the Bible explains the mystery of Christ’s work in a whole ‘kaleidoscope’ of models, metaphors, theories or stories of salvation, each reflecting a different aspect of this very deep and far reaching problem of ‘sin’ in us and in this world.  The ‘legal’ view of problem and solution is but one aspect.  The Bible authorizes an expansive range of images for comprehending and articulating the Atonement.  Since each image also presumes a portrait of the human situation, some will be more attractive than others, some will feel more relevant than others, some will resonate better with people in one time, and others to different people in another time.  We need to tap into this biblical material for our gospel to touch people where they are at.

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

A: Getting me lynched, in some circles, is one of them! Stephen Sykes has made the point that in postmodernity, not all people live in, or are persuaded by, one overarching metanarrative.  This can seem like a major problem in telling the metanarrative of the gospel, if we think of it in those terms.  However, Sykes sees in Atonement one concession that can easily be made to Postmodernity’s ways of thinking, because of this biblical ‘kaleidoscope.’  I think this is right.  However, it’s not about choosing (and sticking to) your preferred model, granting that hegemony instead, because all of them have something to say to us, but let’s at least start scratching where our audience is itching. It does not – to anticipate one obvious criticism – mean going soft on sin as human wrongdoing, or on judgement as an ultimate accountability for our lives and our choices.  We can certainly find different language and concepts in this area, which may be more helpful to the unchurched than some of the ‘lazy’ ways we’re used to parroting, so I do think one implication is that we need to work harder in our gospel-telling, but these essential truths need not be left out.

I think the other implication is that we have to concede (and this is hard for Moderns) that at the heart of the cross is a mystery. We really don’t have a single, conclusive explanation for ‘how’ exactly Christ’s incarnation, life, death and resurrection (not just his death, in my view) is efficacious for us.  To the Modern way of thinking, saying ‘we really don’t know, in any complete sense’, sounds like an apologetic weakness.  In postmodernity, though, we can live with mystery; our epistemology (way of knowing) doesn’t need a foundational understanding based on one most basic truth.  We can say, ‘it’s like this’, and ‘it’s like that’, and we frankly grasp it only partially, like looking at a dim reflection.  Of course, that we don’t know everything doesn’t mean we don’t know anything, but for some, this more humble and less assertive approach will be hard to accept.

There’s another implication here, too, in “What does it mean to be ‘saved’?”, but that’s for another time.

Stephen will be available for further questions and dialogue in the comments

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Stephen Burnhope lives in Buckinghamshire in the U.K. and is part of North Thames Vineyard, High Wycombe. He was awarded the Master of Arts with Distinction by the London School of Theology and will begin PhD research in 2010. His MA dissertation was on the atonement and contemporary culture. Stephen is married to Lyn, a religious education teacher and fellow MA graduate of LST, with four children and one grandson.

Technorati Tags: Atonement, Justification, Penal Substitution, Society of Vineyard Scholars, Steve Burnhope, SVS, Vineyard Community of Churches

After SVS 2010: Cathy Zellmer, The Divine Perichoretic Mission of Love

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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Cathy Zellmer: “The Divine Perichoretic Mission of Love”

Abstract
A review of the historical doctrines of the Trinity, perichoresis, and love reveals the centrality of these beliefs to our distinctively Christian understanding of God.  Current theological trends with regard to the three doctrines show that their influence holds tremendous weight in the formation of contemporary work which sees humanity injected vertically into participation in the perichoretic circle, and horizontally into sharing the passionate perichoretic life, love, and activity of God with other.  This is of particular importance if the church is to respond in God’s power to the missional call to love and justice.

My method entailed briefly showing the early theological origins and development of the Church’s thinking on the Trinity and perichoresis I move to current trends in Western Trinitarian and perichoretic thought, linking them to the Christian distinctive of ‘God is love.’  I show the centrality of love to the act of creation, Jewish belief, and Christian faith.  I finish by binding all of these streams of thought together discussing the believer’s participation in the divine life of love and relationship both vertically and horizontally.  Throughout the paper, the theologians I relied the most heavily on were Jürgen Moltmann and Joy Ann McDougall.

Interview With Cathy:

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: In my very first seminary class the professor made what I consider a providential comment about perichoresis being one of the hottest topics in current theological thought.   After toying with other topics for that first research paper, I finally went with it.  As I delved into learning about the Trinity and their relationship to one another, I was just as enamored with them as Gregory of Nazianzus was when he said, “When I say God, I mean Father, Son, and Holy Spirit…No sooner do I conceive of the one than I am illumined by the splendor of the three; no sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the one.  When I think of any one of the three, I think of Him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me.”  It brought me to worship, which I consider part of my identity and heritage within the Vineyard.

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

A: I think it’s relevant in that just as ‘God is love’ and ‘God is Trinity’ were foundational to the early church, those two truths should be intrinsic to us in the Vineyard as well.  My hope is that somehow we might again bring to our flocks a greater understanding of the mystery of the Trinity.  Absolutely everything God does is an expression of His/Their love, even things like judgment.   As well, the members of the Trinity do nothing without the involvement of the others in the Godhead.  This understanding adds depth of worship, as well as a greater understanding of God’s invitation to participate perichoretically with the Three—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—in their activity to redeem and restore the world. In addition, as we understand the great privilege of God living in us, the responsibility of housing Him in our human temples takes on a much more sacred weight(I Cor 3:16), adding greater depth, I believe, to our liturgical practices.

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

A: I’ll be really honest.  I don’t think there is anything in our Christian experience that perichoresis doesn’t touch on, whether we recognize it or not, as one of the earliest definitions for perichoresis is “to make room for.”  So take for example creation care.   In my estimation, the responsibility to care for creation becomes more serious as we come to understand that the Trinity made room for creation in His being, and all of creation sprang from the currents of love and life within the Godhead.^[1] Our relationship to the earth and other creatures should not be one of condescension or disregard, but of ensuring that its/their space is kept.

Or women in ministry, in particular in conservative Evangelical churches.  An understanding of that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit make room for one another in the dynamic movement of the Godhead, and that they make room for us—male and female—as they invite us into relationship, leaves me at a loss as to how some men can bolt the door to allowing women into church leadership.  That is an unfathomable position viewed from a perichoretic perspective, as within the Godhead the Three are the source of mutuality and egalitarian practice.

Or forgiveness.  It is our job to ‘make room’ for one who has offended us, or repeatedly offended us, rather than push them away.  Or—to make room for other church traditions through ‘a generous orthodoxy’ and embody the divine communion.  Or….I really think the list could go on for quite a while.  Making room is a sacred act and part of our identity as participants with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

[1] Paul Fiddes, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2000), 71-81.

Cathy will be available for further questions and dialogue in the comments

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Cathy Zellmer lives in Beaverton, Oregon, and is an MDiv student at George Fox Evangelical Seminar.  By far, the greatest majority of research that she has done to date has been on the perichoretic life of the Trinity.  Her passions are family and church life, seeing the conservative evangelical mold being broken by women in ministry, and concern for social and environmental justice.  She lives in a complex household enlivened by people and animals, including her husband, Paul, and five of their six children.  She has been part of the Vineyard for 27 years.

Technorati Tags: Cathy Zellmer, mission, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS, Trinity, Vineyard Community of Churches

After SVS 2010: Ryan McAnally-Linz, The Problem of the Contested Center

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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Ryan McAnally-Linz: “The Problem of the Contested Center”

Abstract
Over the last several decades, numerous churches have begun to think of themselves in the terms of ‘centered-set ecclesiology’. Based on the work of missiologist Paul Hiebert, this type of ecclesiology defines the sets ‘Christian’ and ‘church’ based on the orientation of individuals toward a common center, namely, Jesus. Centered-set ecclesiology is a conscious move away from defining Christian communities in terms of acceptance of particular doctrinal statements or participation in particular rites, such as the Eucharist. This move, I argue, brings with it a number of benefits. It reduces harmfully exclusive definitions of the community, emphasizes relational metaphors, accords with the biblical themes of following God and Jesus, and frames community membership in terms of process, rather than a once-for-all decision.

Centered-set ecclesiology does not, however, come without its own complications. Chief among these is what I term ‘the problem of the contested center’. Put simply, the center toward which a community orients itself has to have some content in order to be meaningful, and community members may well agree on the name of the center (e.g., ‘Jesus’) while disagreeing about its content. For centered-set Christian communities, this problem is inescapable. Because such communities claim to be oriented toward a person, and because persons are inherently mysterious, the center of those communities always remains in some sense surprising and unpredictable. Moreover, because humans are finite, our knowledge (even our knowledge of Jesus) is always finite, making incompleteness and error in our understanding inevitable.

In response to the problem of the contested center, I offer several counsels for churches that think in the terms of centered-set ecclesiology. First, the task of wrestling with the problem is an ongoing process of discernment, not a simple matter of logical deduction. Second, centered-set communities must seek to foster truthfulness as a way of life in order to mitigate the problems that arise from self-ignorance and self-deception in the pursuit of the common center. Third, this process of discernment should be a community process in which a prima facie commitment to remain in community in spite of disagreement is the rule. Fourth and finally, the community discernment process should return repeatedly to the foundational stories of its faith because Scripture is the most reliable witness we have to the character of the person who we want to make the center of our life together.

Interview With Ryan

Q: How did you become interested in your topic?

A: As a student at Yale Divinity School, I read Paul Hiebert’s chapter on set-theory for a class on Theologies of Christian Community. It just so happened that this assignment followed closely on the heels of a sermon at Elm City Vineyard that made heavy use of centered-set ecclesiology. In my reading, I found myself responding positively to the general idea of a centered-set approach to Christianity and the church, but I had the nagging feeling things were in fact more complicated than Hiebert made them look. Since the final paper for the course was meant to be an analysis of an issue relevant to a concrete Christian community, I decided to develop more fully that sense about the complexity of centered-set ecclesiology.

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

A: Since many Vineyard churches, following John Wimber’s lead, think of themselves as centered-sets, I would hope that my paper is directly relevant for their community lives.

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

A: As laid out in my paper (and the abstract above), I think any community that thinks of itself as a centered set faces the problem of the contested center. There’s no getting around it, and there’s no solving it once and for all. Consequently, the practical implications are a set of commitments and practices that, I think, will help such communities navigate the issue of discerning their center together.

Ryan will be available for further questions and dialogue in the comments

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Ryan McAnally-Linz is an MA student at Yale Divinity School and a resident of New Haven, CT, where he has attended Elm City Vineyard since January, 2009. He intends to pursue a PhD in Theology, focusing on the relationships between Christians’ theological/doctrinal beliefs and their social, political, and economic visions, as well as constructive political theology. Before moving to New Haven, Ryan lived for two years in Latin America and worked on a number of community development initiatives. His wife, Heidi, continues to work in international development.

Technorati Tags: Centered-set, Paul Hiebert, Radical Middle, Ryan McAnally-Linz, set-theory, Society of Vineyard Scholars, SVS, Vineyard Community of Churches