Break the Habit

Len Hjalmarson suggests that churches are fixated on the wrong things. (HT: Brad Brisco). Actually, his point is much stronger than that. He's saying the things we spend all our time and energy on are of no importance.

Here are the things we must let go of:

1. The number of people who come to our church.
   
2. How "relevant" our style of worship is.
   
3. How many new people walk through the doors of our church.
   
4. The size of our building, staff or budget.
   
5. What any other church in the world is doing.

Instead, here are some suggestions for things that really do matter:

1. Actively looking for evidence of God's kingdom wherever that might show up.
   
2. Simple, honest worship.
   
3. Making friends with people who have no interest in our church.
   
4. Giving away money to people who need it.
   
5. "Go[ing] on a unique, unreproducible journey with a group of people and rejoice with other groups of people who do the same."
   

Of course, this would require enormous courage, and a fair amount of faith. We would actually have to start trusting God and seeking his kingdom above all else. We would have to live as if we really believed Matthew 6:33.

That'll never work. Let's just stick to business as usual.

Pastor Rod
"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Missional Order vs. Church Planting

In the introduction to this Allelon netcast, Pernell Goodyear says, "The way that we've done church planting for the past number of decades has been about moving rock stars into neighborhoods and marketing this big attractional thing that people come to, growing our division of the church as an organization."

David Fitch, pastor of Life on the Vine, talks about church planting in post-Christendom:

We are no longer living in a Christian society.

We used to plant churches as organizations. You pay somebody to go set up shop.

Now the issue is survival. I do not believe that you can plant a church in three years in post-Christendom.

We're going from extending an organization to survival.

A missional order says we will gather together people and we will commit to being a body and we will embed ourselves in this location. We will incarnate Christ in this location. We will build relationships with those—we will look for those who are hurting. We will look for the poor. We will look for the struggling. We will look for ways of connecting. And we can take forever, if we have to.

He has more to say. Check out the video.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Tom Peters, Missional Theologian

I just saw this post about missional Christianity by Tom Peters.

OK, so it wasn't really about that. But it seems to paint a pretty accurate picture of two philosophies within the church.

Strategy 1

• Go on offense.
  
• Give everybody a shot.
  
• Decentralize.
  
• Try a bunch of stuff.
  
• Make it up as you go along.
  
• Get some stuff wrong.
  
• Laugh a lot.
  
• Get some stuff right.
  
• Become a "success."
  

Strategy 2

• Extract "lessons learned" or "best practices."
  
• Thicken the Book of Rules.
  
• Become evermore serious.
  
• Enforce the rules to increasingly tight tolerances.
  
• Go on defense.
  
• Install walls.
  
• Protect-at-all-costs today's franchise.
  
• Centralize.
  
• Calcify.
  
• Install taller walls.
  
• Write more rules.
  
• Become irrelevant and-or die.
  

The first strategy sounds like a missional approach to Christianity. The second sounds like the institutional Christendom approach.

That's just what we need, taller walls and more rules.

May God save us from ourselves!

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Missional Marketing

What is the difference between a missional orientation and a seeker-sensitive orientation?

One significant difference is the motivation for adapting the message of the gospel to the culture.

First, let me make clear that we do not have the option of a culturally free expression of the gospel. The gospel is not “timeless principles.” It is an account of good news. It is a report about a specific event that happened in a specific place at a specific time. The story of the gospel is inextricably intertwined with culture.

But the gospel transcends culture. The Christian Scriptures can withstand translation into other languages and cultures. (It is radically different from the Quran in this regard.) In fact, the four accounts of the gospel in the Bible had already broken cultural barriers before they were even recorded.

We do not even have the actual words of Jesus. Jesus spoke in Aramaic, but his words are recorded in “street” Greek. Each writer sought to capture the sense of what Jesus said; he had no intention of being a human tape recorder.

Matthew tells his gospel in the framework of Hebrew culture. Mark recounts the same story in terms more at home in the wider Roman Empire. Luke seems to be working from a Greek foundation. John takes a different view entirely, focusing on the meaning of events in Jesus’ ministry.

Right from the start, there was never such a thing as a “Christian culture.”

In the past century or so, the Church has operated out of a culture that was distinct from the culture of its environment, but also different than the culture of the first Christians. This “Christian” culture was generally little different than the general culture, that is the general culture of a few decades before the current time.

Many western missionaries in that same period seemed to be as focused on instilling western culture as they were in proclaiming the gospel. It could be argued that they were unable to conceive of the gospel in any other terms than the prevailing (or dated) western culture.

Along came some mission-minded people who were culturally literate enough to see the foolishness of this strategy. People were rejecting the Church, and Jesus Christ, for reasons that had little to do with the essence of the gospel. They were rebelling against elements that had little or nothing to do with Christianity—even though these elements came from the culture of many Christians.

And so these pioneers removed the artificial, cultural barriers. This development is generally known as the seeker-sensitive movement.

But, as happens with any “adjustment,” there was an “over correction.”

In the effort to remove cultural barriers there was generated a momentum that tended to remove (or weaken) all barriers, even barriers inherent in the gospel itself.

Partly in reaction to this over correction, a significant part of the Church has taken a new direction. These people seek to proclaim the gospel in terms that challenge the “powers.” They make no effort to soften the offense of the gospel, but they are scrupulous to distance themselves from the offense of Christendom.

This movement often dismisses the previous movement as “mere marketing.”

And this charge has substance. The gospel has far too often been packaged and sold as another product in the marketplace. Success has often been defined in marketing terms. Not only were the methods taken from the world of business, but the measure of success was defined in “bottom-line” terms, even when the bottom line was “souls.”

But we need to be honest here. Marketing is inevitable. We are always marketing, either intentionally or unintentionally. “Non-marketing” is simply another form of marketing.

So the question is not whether we should market the gospel. But the question is what the message should be and how it should be communicated.

The missional movement seems to be at once counter-cultural and culturally sensitive.

The seeker-sensitive movement appeared to be motivated by a desire to remove barriers to make the gospel more accessible. The missional movement seems to be motivated by a desire to make the scandal of the cross more prominent by removing all cultural “noise” that might be confused with that offense.

But this is not as straightforward as it sounds. Even the prevailing explanations of the offense of the cross are usually loaded with ideas that have more to do with the Enlightenment than with the gospel.

This “offense” is usually explained in terms of personal sin and divine power.

But I would suggest that it runs much deeper than this. The real scandal of the cross is that Jesus won his victory in weakness and defeat.

As it is usually depicted, the cross is little more than bowing to a superior power. Even a tough guy like "Dirty Harry" Harry Callahan admits that “a man’s gotta know his limitations.” When we recognize that God is the sovereign, we give up our pretensions of being in control. But this is simply a wise “business” decision.

Too many people “come to Jesus” to enhance their lives: to win more football games, to make more money, to sell more widgets. Taking up our cross is no longer a radical submission; it is now a calculated investment.

What the gospel calls us to is something much more difficult. It calls us to trust in a Savior who could not “save himself.” It calls us to a life of power that is manifested only in weakness. It calls us to abandon ourselves to God’s story without any alternative “plot lines.”

Jesus is not the ultimate warrior. He is the outcast, the reject, the “fool.”

We are not called to “take prisoners” for Jesus. We are called to become prisoners for the gospel. The gospel is not just a different insider game. It is a complete rejection of all struggling for position and power.

This is the scandal of the cross.

It is not giving up bad habits. It is not changing the way we dress. It is not engaging in a program of moral improvement. The way of the cross may involve these things, but they are not the essence of that way.

At least that is what I think. What do you think?

Pastor Rod

“Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be”

Objections 11–12

(The first post in this series of my responses to the pamphlet by Chaz Bufe called 20 Reasons to Abandon Christianity. The text in blue is from Mr. Bufe’s pamphlet. I have used ellipses to show where I have condensed the original.)

11. Christianity has an exceedingly narrow, legalistic view of morality. Christianity not only reduces, for all practical purposes, the question of morality to that of sexual behavior, but by listing its prohibitions, it encourages an "everything not prohibited is permitted" mentality. So, for instance, medieval inquisitors tortured their victims, while at the same time they went to lengths to avoid spilling the blood of those they tortured—though they thought nothing of burning them alive.

I can understand why some might react to Christianity with the superficial opinion that it is narrow-minded and legalistic. There certainly have been many people throughout history who have used the label "Christian" who fit that description.

But a serious critique of Christianity must address what it actually teaches.

Here is objection 11 in list form:

• Christian morality is legalistic.
• It does not take into account the full range of real life.
• The only thing that Christian morality is really concerned about is sexual behavior.
• Christianity is a rule-based morality.
• There is inherent in Christianity a tendency to hypocrisy.

I want to take Mr. Bufe's objections seriously. But these kinds of statements make that difficult. There have been many people who call themselves Christians who have been legalistic and hypocritical. And there have also been some who have acted as if sexuality were an embarrassment to God.

But anyone who invests a minimal effort in understanding Christianity would know that these are abberations. They are, in fact, the opposite of what Jesus taught.

The church must take charges of hypocrisy seriously. But these tendencies are not inherent in Christianity. They are an expression of the human condition. They are an illustration of the truth of Christian teaching, that there is something fundamentally wrong with all humans, something that can only be corrected by the grace and power of God himself.

The first mistake here is to reduce Christianity to a system of morality.

Christianity is not a guide for better living. It is the instrument through which God transforms broken, twisted people into whole, authentic human beings. It is how God remakes us into the people we were created to be. When some behave in a way that inconsistent with truth and justice, it does not invalidate the Christian enterprise. It simply demonstrates how much it is needed.

Christianity is exactly the opposite of a rule-based morality. A careful reading of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) should make that clear. Christianity is more even than a principle-based morality. Christianity is a character-based morality.

The strategy of Christianity is to make people good and then to let them do what they want.

Anyone who sees loopholes in the requirements of Christianity completely misses the point. Jesus systematically closed all the loopholes in the Sermon on the Mount. He said that it is not enough to keep from killing others. Now we must also avoid wishing bad things to happen happen to them.

But even this is not a new system of moral guidelines. Jesus said that a bad tree can only produce bad fruit and that a good tree can only bear good fruit. The goal is to make the tree good and to let the fruit take care of itself. (And this is a job that can only be accomplished by divine power.)

12. Christianity encourages acceptance of real evils while focusing on imaginary evils. Organized Christianity is a skillful apologist for the status quo and all the evils that go along with it. It diverts attention from real problems by focusing attention on sexual issues, and when confronted with social evils such as poverty glibly dismisses them with platitudes such as, "The poor ye have always with you." When confronted with the problems of militarism and war, most Christians shrug and say, "That’s human nature. It’s always been that way, and it always will."

Again with the talk about sex. I wonder who it is that is obsessed about this topic. With the exception of his favorite objection, Mr. Bufe makes some valid points in this section.

Much of what he says is true. But even here we must distinguish between Christianity and Christendom.

Christendom is the conflagration of Christian teaching with human power and politics. And the official Church has been guilty of many of the things Mr. Bufe mentions. The Church has often become a champion of the status quo. But Christianity is at its heart, and has been from its inception, a revolutionary enterprise.

When the Church "sells out" to the "powers that be" it violates its charter and renounces its founder.

That's what I think. What do you think?

Pastor Rod

“Helping you become the person God created you to be”

Christendom Shift

We generally are unaware of our own culture as culture. It’s not that we are not conscious of our cultural norms. It’s just that we usually see them as elements of something else, such as common courtesy, moral behavior, or even the truth.

Culture generally changes with time and place. If I travel to Europe, I quickly can tell that I am in a different culture. When we watch a period movie, we consciously experience a culture from the past.

But there is a particular culture that has been so widespread and longstanding that it is often hard to see.

When Constantine legitimized Christianity in a.d. 313, culture began to be transformed into what has come to be known as Christendom. Alan Kreider writes in the April 2005 issue of International Bulletin of Missionary Research that this shift involved eight factors:

1. Christianity moved from the margins of society to its center.
2. Christianity originally attracted new people by its appealing community and spiritual power; after the shift, the attraction was access to prestige and power.
3. Christianity moved from a reliance on spiritual power to a reliance on human power.
4. The Christendom shift changed Christianity from a voluntary movement to a compulsory institution.
5. After the shift Christianity became at home in society so that it no longer was able to make a distinctive contribution to society.
6. The role of Jesus shifted from the Good Shepherd, who was the teacher for all Christians, to the exalted Lord, whose teaching applied only to elite Christians.
7. Worship changed from a humble gathering for the believers to grand assemblies intended to evangelize outsiders.
8. The focus of the church changed from mission to maintenance.

While some bemoan the passing of Christendom, others see it as a blessing.

Living at the end of Christendom, we have been given the opportunity to distinguish between Christianity and a particular cultural expression known as Christendom.

If we are serious about being missional (that is serious about following Christ and taking his words seriously), then we must become experts in culture. We must understand our own culture and the culture of those around us.

This skill is not just for the elite.

Pastor Rod

“Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be”