Elsewhere, I have railed against rogue ordinations, the ordaining of people who exhibit entrepreneurial skills sufficient to generate a “church-in-the-black” but not necessarily the character of servanthood necessary, or the depth of discipleship vital to live and lead among a people of God. And yet how are we to survive starting churches any other way? In a post-Christian culture, where a.) consumerism, b.) enslavement to big house mortgage, two cars, c.) commitment to the over-achievement for our children so they can compete in the marketplace, robs so many of us from being able to make the church the social center of our lives. How are we to start churches that don’t turn into consumerist businesses that distribute religious goods and services as George Hunsberger has so brilliantly described? It would seem entrepreneurship and lack of a serious call to discipleship might be the key traits of a pastor who could succeed in starting a church in this environment.

To this I merely suggest that to start churches, living communities of fellowship in Christ amidst the post-Christian cultures, we must have multiple leadership, bi-vocational leadership and servant leadership schooled in mutual submission one to another. Dwight Smith is one of many who have got on board with all this. Jordon Cooper, Bill Kinnon and other Canadian friends (I call all Canadians my friends because I was raised there in my childhood and early teenage years) are invigorating the discussion. This approach that I am proposing and seen lived in our own church plant starts with multiple men/women who have ministry talents all getting jobs in a community where they can get health insurance (important to us in the U.S.). Starbuck’s is a favorite place of employment for this where quality health insurance can be had for twenty hours of work a week. And Starbuck’s is a great place to meet and talk with people. Mike Clawson is the latest person I know around Chicagoland to begin this route. Instead of one person getting paid the bulk of church-plant funds, the funds are spread out. We have three, maybe four “pastors” working in the community meeting people. We continually invite other leaders/people gifted in ministry to join us whether we can pay them anything or not. When the ministry of somone grows among us, and we need to make room for them to increase their ministry among us, and we have some money, we help by paying them if we can. The pastorship grows, and provides leadership for the next church plant. There is a comradeship among us that supports us through the lean years it will take to establish a true community that in any way can resist the “ism’s” that barrage our church and keep us from forming our communal practices together. We spread the work load, we find and discover our greatest gifts and support one another in our weaker ones which need development. Most importantly, we purge ourselves of the success syndrome, that need to be an entrepreneurial success which can keep the church from being a true community, as well as infest our character with controlling, egotistical traits which undercut the very “ministry of Christ.”

All this I talk at length about in the Great Giveaway ch. 3.

Carl Raschke is one of the more storied teachers of continental philosophy on the N. American continent. In his book, The Next Reformation : Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity (Baker, 2004), he encourages evangelicals to look critically at their own commitments to Enlightenment Rationality as the basis of church, theology and life. I am certainly grateful to Prof. Raschke for this analysis and am in agreement with him on this point. I must admit, nonetheless, that I am puzzled by Raschke’s appeal to charismatic experience in the church as one way evangelicals can embrace postmodernity.

For one, I am not sure the response of the church to postmodernity should be to embrace it. Rather, I believe we must listen to its critique of modernity and look at the short falls we evangelicals have been left with because we have accommodated ourselves to the worst of modernity’s maladies, i.e. individualism, autonomous reason as the source of all truth, the subversion of life to technique, exchange, efficiency and science, etc. We must then seek ways to embrace being the church living the authentic narrative of Christ as a people in the world with an integrity in itself sufficient to witness to the truth in the power of the Holy Spirit.

But secondly, and this is the point of my post, I am puzzled by Raschke’s proposal that evangelicalism embrace charismatic worship experience as an engagement with postmodernity. He states:

Charismatic Christianity is emblematic of the new postmodern evangelicalism. It is multicultural, global in scope, and interracial. It is post denominational, not simply non denominational. It is post propositional and post theological. For the most part it is more biblically oriented than many of today’s so-called Bible churches. The dance with the Lord is the dance of the believer in the full presense of, and in full relationship with the Lord of heaven and earth, who is the Lord of the dance. Dancing, like genuine faith, is an intimate experience. (205)

I think I get what he finds attractive about charismatic churches from this quote. I find all of this attractive as well, including the multicultural interracial global nature of charismatic churches and the authentic self expression that is found in charismatic worship. But I doubt nonetheless that the charismatic church as traditionally concieved within modernity (say for example the Azusa revival p.180) is the answer to the “modernist” evangelical rationalists Raschke seems to target (p.197). I certainly have no great affection for the evangelical rationalist, but have we not all learned from the structuralists and the linguistic philosophers that experience and Cartesian rationality are two sides of the same coin? Have we not learned from Wittgenstien, Lindbeck, et. al that there is no “uninterpreted experience.” Have we not learned from Baudrillard, Deleuze, Foucault that all subjective experience is being formed by various forces or technologies of power and signification. Postmodern writers have exposed the constituion of our subjectivities within the linguistic worlds and the cultural semiotics of our day. Would not a simple resort to charismatic experience be as naïve as the evangelical rationalist's resort to autononmous reason? How can we return to Schleiermacher and the Romanticists at a postmodern time like this?

This however DOES NOT require we forgo charismatic experience!!, or for that matter true authentic experience of God's presense in mystery and trasncendence. Rather, where we must go is to the deep, rich and historic liturgies of our history in Christ. Practice and participate in the ongoing linguistic worlds that emanate from the Scriptures and the Table of Our Lord. Instead of seeking spontaneous experince as if it were a core given pre-critical experience (Schleiermacher), let us return to the mystery centered around His Table, let us return to symbol, poetic prayer, liturgical participation, creedal affirmation, historic confessions, great responses in music and song all born within a arena of worship that is made accessible and beautiful by the liturgists, artists and curators of our churches. This then is where experience is shaped and formed out of our relationship to God, all He as done, is doing and will do. This does not mean we return to dry dead rote liturgy. Rather we make liturgy alive and accessible much as several of our emergent church brothers/sisters are attempting to do. This is where charismatic experience is produced faithfully and authentically in relation to God. As I tried to say in The Great Giveaway, “True worship shapes us mind, body and soul toward the glory of God in a community and thereby enables experiences hitherto unknown by the pagan soul.” In other words, as the emergent church seeks to take evangelicalism (and others) past modernity, we will only find authentic charismatic experience in these postmodern times through the passageway of renewed liturgical practices. I think the AMIA churches (Anglican Mission in America) are evangelical churches in our midst that are showing us the way in this regard. I think several emergent churches are doing the same.

At theology pub Friday, we all sat around and conversed on the issues of worship. I put forward the typology of "lecture hall" worship versus "rock concert pep-rally" worship as the primary modes of worship for evangelicals and suggested that both were inadequate for forming truthful minds and faith experience in Christians. This typology is found in chapter four in my the Great Giveaway. The people at our pub ranged in age from 16 to early 50's. Most seemed to agree that a worship service geared entirely towards a 55 minute sermon which seeks to dispense information information to Cartesian minds, is inadequate for formative worship. What was less obvious and hotly debated, was the legitimacy of rock concert style worship to form us into Christ.

I continue to assert that a sufficient theology of worship must come to grips with the epistemological shifts of the last century whereby we can no longer be naive that "religious experience" is an apriori given that affords immediate access to God. Rather experience is produced through interpretive frameworks, particularly linguistic. Experience is something learned and trained into. As Lindbeck would say, "there is no uninterpreted experience." After Wittgenstein, Lindbeck, Hauerwas and others therefore, we cannot avoid paying attention to liturgy, including language, symbol and sacrament all governed within the church's Scriptures given to us in Christ.

This is one of the reasons why the evangelical church must move beyond the "lecture hall" and the "rock concert pep rally" if we wish to recover a worship that shapes truthful minds and faithful experience.

In light of this I hope to say some words in posts to come about Carl Raschke's The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace PostModernity. Here Raschke argues that charistmatic worship and church experience is the way forward for evangelicals in postmodernity. I am all for a charismatic experience, a worship of God that includes emotions and the gifts and miracles, as long as it is formed out of faithful linguistic structures, as a response to God and ordered to God. I there hope to publish a few posts in the days ahead suggesting some qualifiers to Raschke if we evangelicals, and especially the emergent church are to take his book seriously for the way forward in these postmodern times. Also forthcoming, some notes on Kevin Van Hoozer's Book The Drama of Doctrine.

Many of my comrades both in the academic world and pastoral world have had it with evangelicalism and its proclivities towards modernism, individualism, evidentiary apologetics, half hearted social compassion, commoditizing of salvation and other modern maladies. As they have interacted with my book that is coming out next week, The Great Giveaway, they resonated with my critique of evangelicalism and its unhealthy marriage to modernity. Many asked me, if evangelicalism is so tied to modernity, why continue to be an evangelical at all? Indeed many of these colleagues have left evangelicalism in some way or another upon having similar epiphanies to my own. In the same way, many of my emergent brothers and sisters are dead set against being associated with the name evangelical for many of these same reasons and some better than these.

Well, I certainly have been tempted to leave. For one, I seek a worship that is more historical, liturgically ordered towards the glory of God and all he has done in Christ. I seek a worship that orders me towards His Holiness, His work, and His mission. Lecture hall worship or Rock-Concert pep rally worship is just not enough. But having said all this I nonetheless have chosen deliberately to stay within and submit to an evangelical denomination that I love and have great hopes for. I don't hold it against those who have left evangelicalism, but I believe we are all born into historical contingencies and I believe God calls us to work from within these contingencies until informed otherwise. God's calling starts with us where we are born. As Alasdair McIntyre stated

What I am, therefore, is in key part what I inherit, a specific past that is present to some degree in my present. I find myself as part of a history and that is generally to say, whether I like it or not, whether I recognize it or not, one of the bearers of a tradition (After Virtue 2nd ed. 221)

In other words we all cannot escape starting where we are born. And if that is where God put you work for faithfulness until you get told or forced to leave (this is not my experience at all BTW).
The past I have inherited is evangelicalism and the church I was born into is the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a decidedly evangelical denomination. And so this is where I must begin. And frankly, I believe evangelicalism still has some strengths to offer to the rest of Christ's church. I consider for instance the evangelical impulse to diligently seek to make the gospel accessible to strangers ("the lost" as we call them), the evangelical's commitment to world missions, (w)holy living and the seeking of the Holy Spirit for the life of following Christ, all to be strengths to offer to the rest of Christ's church, including the more high church traditions of the established European churches here in N. America. Much of evangelicalism is built on these elements albeit in a modernist sense. So, despite its many problems, I resist leaving evangelicalism. I pray somehow God uses the younger evangelicals (as Bob Webber calls them) and the emergent church people to bring about a new faithfulness to being the people of God in North America.
As always, to anyone who has somehow found thius new blog, I welcome your comments.

I have (participated in) planting a church (Life on the Vine)and I have recently finished a book. I can witness to everyone that there is simply no contest as to which is more difficult. Planting a church among the post-Christian cultures of N America (New York, East Coast, North Pacific Coast, big parts of Chicago, large parts of Canada) is so much harder than writing a book. It takes all the patience, discernment, diverse leadership, humility, perseverance one can possibly have and an ability to do it for other purposes and motives than financial reward. As I wrote in the Great Giveaway, Church planting requires many skills including the habits of prayer, loving people, and faith. Sometimes you can get away without these in the academy, but rarely can you get away without them in the task of church planting(p.26).Of course all this is not possible except out of the daily work of prayer, yielding and submission of one's work to Christ for his empowerment of the Holy Spirit.
So all of this leads me to the question, How is it we glorify writers and the accomplishment of a book but so rarely hear about the real soldiers, the church planters. I wish we could change that! I am open to hear from anyone on this. That is if anyone has found this blog yet.

For the furtherance of Christ's mission, DF

I have noticed (casually) an attraction towards the recent work of Jeffrey Stout among some of the emergent church crowd (see for example Tony Jones). And so I would like to discuss which strategy promises a more significant engagement with North American culture for the church going forward after modernity. For conversation sake, considering the challenges posed by postmodernity, should we hitch our wagons to Jeffery Stout or Stanley Hauerwas?

Stout’s Democracy and Tradition is a promising attempt to make way for religious voices in liberal democratic politics. His work is an advance over the prototype modern discourses which attempt to police theological substantive discourse out of the public's political conversation. In the end however, I believe his stratregy fails because I believe Stout’s account of democracy polices the church out of political discourse on her own terms which is all that really matters.

The question for me, after reading Stout, is that if he is right, and democracy is a tradition, and Hauerwas and McIntyre are right, that Christianity and the church are equally a tradition, why is it that he asks the one tradition,the church, to subsume its politics in order to enter discourse with the alternative tradition? Why do we not ask democracy to enter our discourse on our terms. Surely those aligned with Stout's project would suggest that such a posture misses the entire point of a politic which makes possible a pluralist society. But why, if Stout insists democracy is a tradition is this not an important question for Christians to ask?

Stout certainly tries hard to make way for the discourse of Christianity and the church to have a voice within the politics of liberal democracy. He does so by arguing for the adequacy of democracy and pragmatism as a tradition itself which need not exclude Christianity, the voices of religion or the church from participation in its political life. The problem here is that inevitably, as nobly as Stout might try, Stout cannot resist limiting the discourse of religious people when push comes to shove. Stout makes nice arguments about “immanent criticism” as the means by which we all may enter dialogue with those with which we have no agreed upon foundations. Here he sounds strangely like MacIntyre (p90ff). He makes many good cases for why Rawls and Rorty went the wrong direction and assumed too much in their arguments against religious language entering public discourse. But when push comes to shove, Stout himself wants all those who have religious convictions to argue for them on terms that other people, who do not believe, can make sense of. This may not seem so bad but we best look closer.

According to Stout “Ethical discourse in religiously plural modern democracies is secularized … only in the sense that it does not take for granted a set of agreed-upon assumptions about the nature and existence of God.” (p. 99) Yet later Stout outlines a secular politic for democracy that must indeed take other assumptions even more for granted as foundational for common speech. Stout says ..”when Christians are considering the question of where truths - in the plural - are found, they must be prepared to look both inside the church and outside of it.” (p.110) Stout assumes that the truths Christians hold dear can be found both inside and outside church. But it is exactly Hauerwas’ and Yoder’s point … that we Christians simply cannot make sense out of the world and our lives in it without reference to this person Jesus Christ Son of God. For Christias, this is the true world. There simply is no truth that can make sense for us apart from Jesus Christ.

This may make Hauerwas and Yoder sound more like evangelical fundamentalists than the non foundationalists they are. But in the end, isn’t Stout the same fundamentalist who asks us to subvert Christian language to a more basic language, a secular discourse? I know, he does not ask us to give up our convictions but just “give reasons” for them that others can understand. Stout fears, as all good enlightenment political philosophers do, that if we don’t engage in this kind of discourse we will have a war over religion. (126-127) Yet we know we’ve have had more wars …and killing since this whole enlightenment banishment of religion to the private realm occurred (see Cavanaugh, Theo political Imagination). But I digress. The point here is that Stout cannot escape assuming there is a more fundamental mode of reasoning that can happen between any two individuals who do not share the same narrative religious convictions (Although for Stout, it might be different between each set of disagreements)

Maybe the issue here in Stout, is that this move (just described) inn essence denies “the linguistic turn” of which so much of the rest of us have already assumed. Language and culture are basic to understanding and forming experience. You ask us to give up our language to another default language and you change the nature of our convictions and the ability to experience the world and moral life in the terms of that language. Post Wittgenstein (Investigations), it is difficult to take Stout as seriously as he seems to ask us to when he asks us to seek a common denominator language in terms of what we all can agree on.
What is most worrisome is that Stout is asking Christians to join in and become part of a tradition that is democracy being willing to enter it with “reasons” for why we think the way we do that can be put in terms other than Scripture or the person and work of Jesus Christ. It almost seems that, in doing so, we implicitly are accepting that democracy is obviously the bigger, better and more foundational tradition (way) which offers more hope for future peace than Christianity.

Must the church be asked to subsume to democratic liberal discourse because it is smaller than, or maybe less foundational to our present democratic society? For Hauerwas, this is the very reason not to subsume. For if we were to give up on our language we would for sure be diluted out of legitimate existence. Being a minority is just one more reason to maintain our distinctiveness. And in the end, it is the only strategy by which we may hope to engage the world truthfully and for peace. But Stout subtly seems to be diminishing Christianity as the more viable tradition. Why else would he not ask democracy to subvert itself to Christianity? Indeed it seems as if the thought never crossed his mind that that is what he is asking. But even Stout, it appears, realizes democracy might not have the resources to survive its own implosion as late capitalism seeks to devour and destroy all other discourse within it. (p.305). The corporations of late capitalism are swallowing up all discourse. Could it be that the outworking of democracy and liberalism (according to Milbank) has only one end, nihilism? And that its ontology of violence can only be resisted by living an alternative ontology, one born out of the life of God through Jesus Christ?

If so, is there not another way which makes sense as the way forward in a fragmented non foundational world where there are multiple traditions and democracy has been revealed as one of them? Why not be content to let the two traditions live alongside one another each one posing new questions and poking holes in one another promoting the progress of truth. Democracy is the one in charge of government but seems to be under duress. There are those of us who follow Hauerwas and see it as flawed by the modern project. Let traditions live alongside each other peaceably and allow the work of truth to go forward under His Sovereign grace. If this is really the more honest proposal, it will demand that the church, and evangelicals and my emergent brethren work for the church being the church, and being more faithful in its own language and justice and ways of life.

I have no idea whether democracy and modernity are on its last legs. But I have no reason to see it as more foundational than Christianity and the church. So until Stout convinces us on that front, I ask emergent people, if you really are trying to grapple with post modernity, why not give up the ship of modernity, that of Western liberal democracy. Let us instead be the church, let us live faithfully and powerfully, peaceably and compellingly, doing humbly the justice that flows from the body and blood of the Lord’s Table. Let us live alongside democracy realizing it also is a tradition that teaches and imbues virtues and ways of life as powerfully (or ashamedly more powerfully) than the church.

In the end I believe Stout’s work is excellent in its own right. His defense of democracy and liberalism as a powerful and noble tradition is convincing. I have no problem with him bowing to his own tradition, pragmatic democracy and being a fundamentalist about it. I just do not see, why, Christians cannot act in exactly the same way towards our own history in Christ. WHY NOT ALLOW the two traditions to live alongside each other conducting immanent criticism of the other as Stout calls for and which I see as Hauerwas and McIntyre already doing in relation to the tradition they are calling democratic liberalism. Why can we not both keep going, if we agree to be non violent (something Hauerwas is advocating, will Stout advocate the same for democracy?). Under these conditions why would my emergent friends want to join the tradition of democracy over the one born out of our history in Jesus Christ except that democracy is currently in power.

Just some thoughts as we think how to go forward as the church in our postmodern time.

Over the years I have had many theological discussions at evangelical seminaries with fellow pastors, professors, students and theologians. Of these, there are conversations that are dialogical and then there are others that are solely for the purpose of declaring a winner. Often conversations of the latter are based in what I would call guerilla logic, the use of classical (symbolic) logic to not further a conversation, or even show internal inconsistencies in one’s argument, but rather an attempt to use some of these tools to simply thwart the contribution of the other without an attempt to understanding what the other is trying to put forward. This I would like to call “guerilla logic. I would like to propose we discourage all such moves in conversation by declaring these moves in conversation "guerilla logic." Allow me to describe a few moves made in guerilla logic that I would like to cry “foul” on.

One favorite move in guerilla logic is the “law of non-contradiction” often referred to as the “law of the excluded middle.” Here the interlocutor attempts to find a contradiction internal to other’s argument. You cannot say both A and -A. What some of my evangelical interlocutors fail to see when they use this tool is that it can be used violently to take another’s argument and cast it in a way that cannot make sense in the argument’s original sense. For example, when a Christian says to a Buddhist, you cannot both say there is a God and there is not a God, he or she has cast what the Buddhist is saying in a way that neither faithfully represents what the Buddhist means nor the internal logic of the Buddhist way of thought. The concept of absolute nothingness seems to resist easy translation into anything we Christians might understand and most Buddhist thought resists translation into a form of the law of non-contradiction. Issues of incommensurability are run rough shod by evangelicals who insist on using the law of non-contradiction as a weapon. It’s a conversation stopper.

There are various other versions of this law of excluded middle - non-contradiction which when used end conversation. These versions of guerilla logic don’t seem to take into account what the other is saying, intending or trying to accomplish. Like the use of false dichotomy. Here my friendly evangelical interlocutor engages me on an argument where I describe two approaches to a particular problem or theological issue. I argue the strengths and weaknesses of each one. My conversation partner then says “false dichotomy.” In other words, it is not necessary that a solution or approach be either/or, it could be both/and.
For example, in my book the Great Giveaway, I suggest that evangelicals typically preach either through expository sermons or topical sermons. There are strengths and weaknesses to both. This is a heuristic device, a typology to further understand what we are doing and why in our approaches to preaching. In talking to a professor about this, I was confronted with “false dichotomy,” i.e. preaching does not need to be either one or the other. He defended expository preaching against its internal weaknesses by closing off the conversation. It is of course true that preaching can be both topical and expository but I was using the types as heuristic devices to discuss and uncover weaknesses and strengths and reasons why and how we do things when we preach. The preaching professor may have won the argument, but we did not learn anything about preaching and where we must go to be more faithful preachers in our time. Using typologies has heuristic value as a line of argument. It is a method, since Weber and Troelsch (and their follower’s H Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture) that ought not to be highjacked easily without careful thought to the intent of the author’s use. I do however like Yoder’s criticism of typologies in his critique of H. Richard Niebuhr in Yoder’s Authentic Transformation).

Lastly, there is the all too easy conversation stopper, which seeks to devoid a generalization because it internally contradicts its own statement by generalizing itself. For example, Lyotard makes a statement about the incredulity of meta-narratives, “there can be no meta narratives.” The Christian (evangelical) says, this internally contradicts itself because it is self makes a metanarrative claim. The problem here is that the guerilla logic does not successfully describe the complexity by which Lyotard defines and describes meta narrative. Likewise, it does not take into account the manner in which Lyotard speaks having already discarded universalizing. He does not pretend to speak outsides of history and its limitations. In the same way, A McIntyre talked about how all moral accounts are born out of a social history in which they make sense. He said, there can be no knowledge that is not narrative in its structure. Stout tried to argue in modernist fashion that McIntyre had internally contradicted himself. But this in my estimation does put a burden on McIntyre to narrate his own account of knowledge explicitly and perhaps outnarrate Stout, but this does not make McIntyre’s arguments by itself illegitimate.

In summary, guerilla logic moves are conversation stoppers. They are the use of logic to win instead of further conversation. My evangelical comrades often use them in ways that commit their own fallacy of fitting other people’s statements into another form which changes the content and meaning. If we evangelicals are going to move forward into the issues of modernity/postmodernity for the furtherance of Christ’s church, we must give up guerilla logic.

I start this blog for the purpose of conversations engaging the issues of being the church in postmodernity. In particular may the thoughts blogged here and the accounts of everyday doing church described herein, promote the furthering of Christ’s church among evangelicals as we seek to figure out what it means to do church at the end of modernity. As the influence of the Enlightenment wanes and the presumptions we have based our lives upon decline, let us engage seriously and with humor, what it means to be evangelicals as modernity crashes and burns.

The blog’s title is The Great Giveaway, after the recent book of mine released by Baker. It reminds of the accusation that we have “given away” being the church to techniques, democratic and republican politics, democracy and capitalism, consumerism and other modern maladies. We have packaged and commoditized our faith in Christ. And so I aim to blog, in conversation with many I am already hearing from who have read the book, and those who have not, how can we receive back what it means to do and be Christ’s church in North America.

I do not aim to publish papers on this blog. I will hold my entries to one or two large paragraphs at most. This is the Web for St. Pete’s sake (although I doubt he cares that much). I will try to put enough to summarize a key issue and make a point. I invite any all comments as conversation. This is a blog and I will do my best to keep it a blog.

For Christ, His Kingdom and His church.

My name is David Fitch. The above pictures can be used as promo photos. Scarry huh? Especially the top one.

I grew up in the evangelical church of N America, in Canada, Northeast United States, and the Midwest. Seen all its strengths, weathered all its problems. Left it all in disgust for a good while. But came back to my roots to work for renewal, reinvigoration and transformation for the days that lie ahead.

Over the past seventeen years, I have come to terms with my heritage - evangelicalism, the current evangelical malaise, mission, and being the Body of Christ in the new N. American cultural context. Through a many-faceted journey, God has blessed me with new conviction, an excitement for the future and a willingness to participate in whatever way He sees fit. I am encouraged especially by the missional/emerging churches springing up and the leadership that is taking place among the "younger evangelicals."

This journey (I referred to above) included a.) doing a Ph.D at Northwestern University, b.) teaching in a large city church, c.) leading a small intentional community in the city of Chicago, and planting a missional church, Life on the Vine Christian Community in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. I helped start Up\Rooted, a collaborative gathering for Chicago area church leadership engaging the post-modern context. Over the past ten years I have been a part time professor in various capacities. Currently, I now serve as one of four pastors at “the Vine” and teach as the B.R. Lindner Chair of Evangelical Theology at Northern Seminary, Lombard, IL. I head up the M.A. in Missional Church Ministry at Northern.

I am the author of articles on church , culture and theological ethics in journals as diverse as the Journal of the Academy for Evangelism in Theological Education, Discernment, Pastoral Psychology and the Journal of Christian Education. Most recently I published The Great Giveaway: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from American Business, Para-Church Organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism and Other Modern Maladies (Baker Books, 2005). I am writing a new book to come out end of 2008 (hopefully- gulp)

I occasionally serve the furthering of Christ’s Kingdom by speaking/presenting on the challenges of being Christ’s Body in the new contexts of post Christendom, postmodernity and North American consumerist culture. I seek to encourage the church to faithfulness, encourage pastors to more faithfulness, develop and encourage missional church planters, and help denominations/churches navigate the new terrains of N. American post-Christendom culture(s).

Examples of typical Fitch presentations titles

• Preaching to Fund Counter-Imagination - Proclaiming the Reality of Christ so that people Can Be Called To Live Into It
• How Not to Make Justice Into Another Program at Your Local Church
  
• Why Pastors Are Lonely - The Task of Undoing the Leadership of Modernity
• Sex in the City of Endless Desire - Why We Christians Cannot Survive marriage or singleness without spiritual formation.
• The Great Giveaway - The Call to Be the Body : The Call to Missional Presense and forget everything else! (Eph 4:1-16)
• The Challenge of Missional Church Plants and A Few Subversive Suggestions.
• The End of Modernity - The Situation We Find Ourselves In - And Why this is Good News for the Church
• Noticing the Ways Consumer Christianity Is Ruining Us … and Where We Can Joyfully Go From Here

If you're interested, you can e-mail me (dfitch@seminary.edu) for other talks, discussion groups, presentations and other stuff. Blessings all. Thanks for reading.

David Fitch's Speaking Schedule

Where I've Been

April 2006
Forum for Evangelical Theology at Garret Evangelical Theological Seminary
The Conference on Christianity and Consumerism in Minneapolis
May 2006
Resonate Echo Hamilton Ontario
July 2006
C&MA General Assembly in Edmonton,
Emergent Canada in Edmonton
Ekklesiaproject Conference, Chicago - presentation on "Preaching that Funds Counter- Imagination"
Sept 2006
Theology and Culture Think Tank at Minneapolis
The Foursquare Great Lakes pastor’s conference in Minneapolis
December 2006
The AEF Conference

2007

Jan 20 (3-6p.m.) Full Life Chicago (at Arlington Heights Free Church) - I'll be speaking on the subject Christian Singledom in the City of Endless Desire - Why It's Spiritual Formation or Die
Feb 22-25 Theology and Culture Think Tank in Los Angeles
Mar 24 Evolving Church Conference. Oakville, Ontario. I'll be doing a workshop on "Justice in but not of Capitalism." How the cultural forces of capitalism (and even Western democracy) train us out of doing justice as Christians. Why and how practicing local justice in Christ makes possible bigger social justice engagments in the world.
Mar 28 Up-rooted meeting at Northern Seminary after the Brady Lectures with Brian McLaren.
May 9 I'll be doing an all day seminar (9:30 a.m. t0 4:00 p.m.) at the Grow Center for Biblical Leadership, Northern Seminary Chicago. I'll be presenting on "Postmodernity as good news for the church." Topics will be a.) Understanding the situation we find outselves in, b.) Renewing ministry amidst the postmodern generations, c.) Organic church versus Mega-Church and d.) In light of all this ... what does this mean for worship, spiritual formation, community and mission. More info to come at the Grow Center website.
May 26 C&MA Council in Orlando Seminar on "Postmodernity as Good News for the Church"
May 27 Watermark Community Church, Tampa Bay, Sun morning gathering
Sept 20 Up/Rooted The Emerging Critique of Evangelicalism
Oct 13 Faith and War, Three Views Conference from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. sponsored by the Congregational Church of Batavia, to be held at the Batavia Public Library, 10 S. Batavia Ave. Batavia. I'll be representing the Christian pacifism position towards war.
Nov 17 Cultivate Gathering in Hamilton Ontario.

2008

Feb 12-14 "Practicing the Gospel: An Ecclesia National Gathering" - Chevy Chase MD
April 29 C&MA Midwest District Conference, LaFayette , Indiana "Church planting and Evangelism in post-Christendom Contexts"
July 28-31 Haggard School of Theology -Azusa Pacific University "Renewing the Practices of the Church - in the Postmodern Context" D.Min Seminar.
Sept 22-25 C&MA Eastern PA District "Exegeting Culture" Training Seminars
Oct 9-11 Presenting at 2008 AEF Conference on the church.
Nov 1-3 Presenting at the AAR session of the Christian Theological Research Fellowship on "Contesting Evangelicalism"
Feb 9-13 Fuller Theological Seminary "Church Planting Via the Challenges of Post-Christendom" D. Min seminar