My friends over at Allelon posted a video of me talking about some basic observations on post-Christendom and the challenges of seeding new missional communities (what we used to call church-planting). We were at a great event called Cultivate offered in Hamilton Ontario last fall. Recently I have had to write down again some of my reflections on this topic as I have been writing a chapter surveying my missional church planting observations in Canada for Resonate‘s newest publishing venture. What I have posted below is basically what I have come up with. Although I am primarily thinking about Canada here, I also think it applies to many parts of post Christendom U.S. I’ll post these observations in two parts, 1.) the post Christendom shift in the situation we find ourselves in and how this is reflected in church planting practices, and 2.) what this looks like for the kinds of leaders that would seed missional communities in post Christendom. The first post is pretty much old stuff. It sets up the second post which I find more interesting.
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50 YEARS OF CHURCH PLANTING: THE STORY AS I SEE IT

Over the last three decades, I have watched church planting change dramatically in Canada and the Northern parts of the United States. Back in the sixties/seventies, we used to send fifteen or twenty people from one local church into another place several towns over that was “under-churched.” We would hold worship services, teach Sunday school, have a children’ ministry. We would set up shop. We would choose a pastor who had all the tools as “they would say.” He (most often a male) would be young, energetic and able to work like crazy. We would send out announcements expecting many who were looking for a church to show up. And if we did the basic services well, then we assumed the little gathering would grow into a self-sustaining church in 3 years. We might call these churches franchises.

Church planting worked like this because there were still large numbers of Christians to draw from for a congregation. We were in the great post-WW2 expansion in North America. New towns and subdivisions were springing up left and right. And just as each town needed a supermarket, a library and public schools, it needed a church. One could assume that out of the many thousands moving here into these new habitats, some would be Christians and need a church. So we planted churches like franchised local grocery stores. This was still an era of Christendom.

In the eighties, the focus on church planting changed. Post WW2 expansion had slowed. More and more of the suburban boomers had not returned to the churches of their youth. The focus of church planting shifted to recapturing these now unchurched people for Christ. Now when we went to plant a church we needed first to conduct marketing surveys. We asked what we could we do to make church more relevant and user friendly. These surveys focused on finding out what these unchurched people were looking for? What turns them off of church? How can we do church in a way that relates to these people? How can we make church relevant so that the “unchurched” would want to come to our services. What could make church more attractive? We focused on delivering the services with “excellence” and “efficiency” characteristic of the marketplace. In this way we planted churches like Wal-marts. The seeker service and church growth methods were invented. Hundreds of boomer generation people came who had left the church a decade before. Many hundreds of people in traditional churches left as well for “the new and improved” big box churches. Today, hundreds of mega-churches exist across North America as a testimony to “the success” of this approach to church planting.

Church planting like this worked because there were still huge amounts of unchurched people who had once learned of Christ in the earliest years of their upbringing. These unchurched had some familiarity with “who Jesus was.” Deep within their boomer psyches, Jesus still carried credibility, even authority, even if they did consider the church obsolete. We assumed therefore that if we could just make Jesus relevant and attractive (as opposed to their former experiences of church) they would come. If the Bible could be communicated in a way that was meaningful to people’s everyday life and needs, these unchurched would surely listen. They did come. People making “decisions for Christ” multiplied. Church-planting like this however, still depended upon what was left of the vestiges of N. American Christendom. A majority of the conversions were former high-church catechumens “coming back to Jesus.”1 They had never made a “personal” decision to follow the Jesus they had earlier been taught about (most often in catechetical rote fashion). In this way, the seeker church movement was built upon Christendom.

To most Christians living in Canada, the days of Christendom are fading fast. There has been a change in mindset of those who would plant churches. As the number of Christians without a church shrinks, as the number of unchurched who once were catechumens of Christianity grows extinct, I have witnessed first hand the new wave of church planters who think of church planting in completely different ways. They are not interested in competing for the leftovers of Christendom. They resist the notion that the church is in need of just one more innovation. They are interested in nothing less than becoming missionaries, to plant churches cross culturally, across the barriers to people who have no knowledge or language about Jesus.

FROM SETTING UP GROCERY (BIG-BOX) STORES TO CULTIVATING GARDENS

For those of us born before 1970, this change is truly stunning. The landscape of post-Christendom demands we think about church planting with a new eye for faithfulness, truth and integrity. Among the new missional leaders, church is the name we give to a way of life, not a set of services. We do not plant an organized set of services; we inhabit a neighborhood as the living embodied presense of Christ. Missional leaders now root themselves in a piece of geography for the long term. We survey the land for the poor and the desperate, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually as well. We seek to plant seeds of ministry, kernels of forgiveness, new plantings of the gospel among “the poor (of all kinds)” and then by the Spirit water them, nurture them into the life of God in Christ. We gather on Sunday, but not for evangelistic reasons. We gather to be formed into a missonal people sent out into the neighborhood to minister grace, peace, love and the gospel of forgiveness and salvation. The biggest part of church then is what goes on outside gathering. If the old ways of planting a church were like setting up a grocery store, now it is more like seeding a garden, cultivating it, watching God grow it amidst the challenges of the rocks, weeds and thorns (I owe this metaphor to my fellow co-pastors at Life on the Vine). What do these leaders look like? How can we walk alongside them? After hanging with a hundred or so of these leaders over the past few years, I offer the following observations. I’ll post on this next.

Footnote
1 Ironically many denominations still categorize these “decisions” as “conversion growth.” Meanwhile more and more youth are leaving evangelical low churches for the high church traditions (Colleen Carroll, 2004). I wonder if the high church traditions count them as (re)conversions as the low church evangelicals once did when their youth converted to evangelicalism? .

At Out of Ur yesterday, they have a post on a hermeneutics quiz crafted by Scot McKnight. Scot devised a “hermeneutics quiz” for Leadership that aimed at teasing out the hermeneutical stance of the person taking the quiz. With typical Scot McKnight genius (and I mean that), he takes some very sophisticated isues and makes them palatable for us practicioners. Several were asked to take the quiz and respond to their scores. I scored a 67 which placed me into the progressive (liberal?) category (just barely). My response reads as follows (you can read more here).

QUIZ SCORE: 67

I find myself unhappy with my score on the quiz because it labels me a “progressive” (but just barely). I am unhappy because a progressive is described as a person who doesn’t believe in the plain and literal meaning of the text. Yet I certainly do. I just don’t believe the plain meaning is always immediately evident to each individual reading the text all by him/herself (and this includes even the most brilliant historical critical exegetes among us). Indeed that plain meaning is best preserved through the ongoing community of the church carrying out its apostolic task to faithfully transmit the gospel both in the community’s preaching and its living. If that makes me a progressive, so be it.

I also must protest that seeing the Bible as “historically shaped and culturally conditioned” somehow makes me a progressive. For there is no more conservative view than believing in the incarnational nature of the gospel that has come in the particular person of Jesus Christ. This means that Truth necessarily comes via history and culture. The fact that I believe this should make me a raving lunatic conservative in these times where everyone wants to find God in the universal. All in all, I enjoyed taking this quiz and I say thanks to Scot. But I still wonder, how can this quiz help evangelicals escape the hermeneutical categories (of modernity) that individualize and dehistoricize the ways we seek to interpret Scripture?

After thinking further about this, I think this quiz might reveal how much we need different categories for understanding hermeneutics for the days that lie ahead. Scot describes how “conservative” means holding to a literal, plain reading of the text. “If the Bible says it, that settles it.” He then describes how “progressive” refers to those who see the Bible “as historically shaped and culturally conditioned” …”one must interpret what the Bible said in its day and discern its pattern for revelation in order to apply it to our world.” Scot is not trying to be exhaustive nor could he be exhaustive. Yet one should still notice that there is no real positioning for someone who believes in both of the above as they are worked out in a community (an ongoing tradition). And both positions seemingly ignore the ways the text, the living Word, shapes the reader/hearer and how indeed our meanings are changed in the reading/hearing? Hans Frei famously advocated a plain literal reading of the text within the ongong community (Theology and Narrative ch.4.). Ricoeur advocated the unfolding of the reality in front of the text (Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences ch.4). I might be wrong here, but both Frei and Ricoeur in many ways cannot be put into either of the two McKnight categories.

This may be short changing McKnight and really what he has accomplished in this provocative quiz of his. I am sure no one could devise a quiz where Frei and Ricoeur could find their place. The quiz is meant to be heuristic. It certainly is causing me to reflect again on this subject. As I reflect, it seems to me that the orthodox gospel truth we bear is best preserved by the church’s living tradition (Narrative) as inextricably linked to the canon in carrying on the truth of God revealed in Christ for all the ages. It is not best preserved and carried on by individuals relying on individual skills of interpretation, for here it is more often distorted. It is not best preserved and carried on by individuals wielding historical critical exegesis although this has its place. For this often promotes interminable conflict in the churches because we have not learned to read Scripture together in courage and humility. We need further categories that evangelicals haven’t acquired yet. And this is why we need to thank Scot McKnight for writing this quiz and raising these questions. Thanks Scot!

What do you think about the categories of progressive (liberal) versus conservative in the evangelical church when it comes to interpreting the Bible? Where do they fall short? Did you take the quiz? Do your score fit?

At Northern, I teach a Doctoral seminar every year on the cultural/intellectual shifts involving modernity, postmodernity and post-Christendom. Jack Thompson, a Doctoral student in the class and a local pastor handed in a great paper last year. Within the paper were parts of an interview with two twenty-something emerging church type guys. They were leading a house group at Jack’s church. They were also teaching a class and talking about church in ways that was all new to the rest of the more traditional Baptist church. Their words really illustrate the deep cultural shift taking place among the sons and daughters of evangelicals. I used some of this interview in teaching another class yesterday. Much of the content here may be old hat to many of us. Yet it continually shocks me how many churches are unaware of the depth of this shift taking place. In reading it again, I thought it illustrates beautifully the shift that is going on in the new generations of the West. If you are looking for some clarity on these issues, I offer this somewhat lengthy interview as transcribed below. And if you have time, can you answer this: How would your local church receive these two guys, Matt and Jose, and what they have to say? If you have the time, enjoy!

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JACK: What have you learned about modernity?

MATT: Modernity was an era of science, proof about things and solid facts. It was a wonderful age of construction and maybe a kind of renaissance…. Today, modernists are using apologetics against non-Christians and it was never intended for that. That’s the problem. They use books like Mere Christianity to logically try to explain God and his existence then they use Evidence That Demands a Verdict and all of this archeological dig stuff… but we were never meant to prove the existence of God. You can’t do it. God is way too big. And then when you think you have a hold on God’s existence, then you realize he’s just bigger. And people then give up. People today get really angry and say, “You can’t explain God. Don’t even try.” And if you think that you can totally explain God as a Christian, then you’re close minded because you are just putting God in a box and non-Christians know this….

JACK: What else have you discovered?

MATT: …In the evangelical world…we throw terms like repentance around and how we just try to sell the gospel to people… going door to door, using the four spiritual laws, which are half-truths anyway. They are ridiculous. They’ve only been around about 10 or 15 years anyway…selling the gospel becomes like selling fire insurance. You just have to believe, intellectually that Jesus is God, and that he died for your sins, and then you are saved and can just sit around for the rest of your life. And I think this is all just so ridiculous because God wants us to move, and go, and do something. It has nothing to do with simple belief. Your beliefs may start something, but actions come out of your beliefs and that’s the point. The evangelical system says, “believe the right things, adhere to the correct intellectual things and you are going to be saved.” And “saved” to evangelicals is the idea that you are going to heaven later— then life becomes a kind of a waiting room. But they don’t realize that God wants to save you from traumas of the past. God wants to save you from what’s going on inside you right now, psychologically, physically, emotionally, spiritually, it’s every part of you that God wants to renew you. And evangelicals forget about this. They make an empty system where all you have to do is have a little bit of faith—whatever that means—and then you will be saved. And it’s just like becoming a mere shell of a Christian and totally miss the point.

JACK: Do you see decisions to follow Christ as connected to the background of the seeker?

MATT: Right, it’s about the filters we all have. It’s the parents we grew up with, the culture, the time, the atmosphere, just everything about us. And these filters move into our theology too. Moderns think, “We’ve got it! ! It’s been over 2000 years and we finally have a good grasp on the Bible and what it means, and we have archeology and all this other evidence and facts and we’ve now finally got it!” Unfortunately, they don’t realize that maybe their idea of God and how to understand him and their theology, is like just one way. They don’t understand that it’s not the only way but just one way of thinking which came from somebody before, right. Their idea isn’t the best one, it was just a new one when it came out for the first time—when they had to fight against the modernist interpretation of scripture. And now, we’re doing it in the postmodern age. And people today are saying, “No, you’re just wrong, and you’re heretics” and stuff. But the modern viewpoint and how they interpret scripture isn’t the only way or the best or the most evolved. The world is changing. I mean, God doesn’t change, but He is changing us, right.

JACK: What do you think about evangelicalism’s idea of salvation?

JOSE: I find it interesting in the NT, that when Jesus talks to his disciples, he never asks them make a decision. He asks them to make a commitment.

JACK: …to “Follow me.”

JOSE: Yes. They had to leave their houses. It was a great commitment.

MATT: And they knew what it looked like. They knew what they were getting into.

JOSE: Yeah, they did know what they were getting into. Jesus used harsh words at time like when he said, “Let the dead bury the dead…” (Lk 9:59). They were tested and knew what Jesus was about. So they had to make a real commitment. It wasn’t only one more year of my life. It was like two, three and the rest of their lives. They knew that. It was like a marriage. When you get married, you don’t do it with just the first person you find…. You have to get to know the other person—you have to experience who they are and ask questions, and then you make the commitment. I mean, we are supposed to be the church, the bride of Christ, and we expect nonbelievers to find Christ by answering a certain way to a bunch of dumb questions? Do we really expect them to make a commitment based on that? I mean, how stupid is that! Nobody does that in their right mind today.

JACK: So you’re saying the motivation for making a decision to follow Christ has to be right?

JOSE: You have to fall in love with Christ. You can’t just get married because you want to get out of your house. That marriage is ruined in that case. You have to fall in love with the real person.

JACK: Often evangelicals will throw “hell” at people to get them to make a decision. I suppose you’re saying that this can also be wrong….

MATT: …The idea of hell was borrowed from the pagans. The Pharisees took the concept of hell from the pagans to scare people to following God and Christ just pretty much takes their language and throws it back in their face. So then the question is what hell is really about? Jesus uses images like “Gehena” outside the city gates—an actual garbage dump—so that they understood the imagery…. But the thing is that Jesus never pushed hell into somebody’s face. There were a lot of people that did come up to him who were honestly seeking God. Jesus had infinite patience with them. But those individuals like the Pharisees who were getting in the way of people following God, people who were honestly seeking and asking questions about who God is, and how to follow him, Jesus just got their face and tore them apart. How dare you get in the way of people honestly seeking God. You know, the rich man came up to Jesus, and asked him, “How do I follow God? I’ve followed all of the Ten Commandments.” And whether he believes him or not, Jesus just says, just sell all of you stuff. Jesus didn’t throw him in the back of the stage and say, “What do you mean you have followed all of the Ten Commandments! You haven’t done that! No one can do that! You’re going to Hell!” No, Jesus takes him a step further and goes, “Fine, if you love God so much, just sell your stuff.” Jesus seems to always push us further. He challenges us, right.

JACK: It seems to me that in your class, you are also challenging us at Immanuel to change our attitudes towards decision making, salvation and following Christ.

MATT: We were created for something bigger…. Evangelicals today have this system where people are “saved” and don’t go to hell and Christians are wasting away what it is supposed to be for them. The Christian faith is supposed to be a way of life, and we’ve made it a constrained belief system. The Greeks would say that the end is the goal and the journey is just how to get there. The Jews would say that the journey is the point. We have to understand that as Christians we are going somewhere. The journey is important. It’s the experience of going and growing…

JOSE: Well, we do have eternal life. But the problem with many evangelicals is the idea that we are going to have eternal life—we are going to be saved and are going to heaven. God really wants us to live now, and people don’t understand that. He wants us to live today. We don’t have eternal life just when we die, but we have it right now and we are supposed to live life to it’s fullest.

JACK: We are supposed to have the Kingdom of God right here and right now, not just in the future.

JOSE: Yeah, it’s right here. And we do this by living. How many Christians today don’t fully live? They just exist.

MATT: I agree. A person has to get to know Christ, what he does, what he’s about, what it’s like to be a Christian. They have to know that there’s going to be hard times ahead but it’s the best possible way to live because they were created for something bigger. I mean that’s the gospel message for me. You are created for something bigger and beautiful, more than you have ever imagined. It’s epic, it’s for God. It’s wonderful and beautiful and God’s going to help you along the way on this journey. And He wants to heal you, and you are going to do great things in this world. You are going to do things involving love and beauty, and peace, and justice and kindness. And you are going to spread it to the ends of the world. And that’s what it means to be a Christian. And if they’re not into that, then they’re not into God. I’m not going to fake them into thinking it’s going to be some beautiful life, you know. Because then you get a whole bunch of angry Christians like I was before….

JACK: Postmoderns will emphasize a new ecclesiology for the church today—emphasis on be the Church—be the body of Christ—be a community…

MATT: Moderns don’t like the idea of a commitment to Christ because they would rather see numbers of decisions…. Honest commitment is scary for many evangelicals today because it means that salvation is out of their hands. It is then up to God and the Spirit to work inside of the seeker…. They maintain their techniques because they want to keep evangelism in their hands. They don’t have real faith that God is going to make Himself attractive to the seeker. They just have to give up trying to control everything and let God do His work.

JOSE: Often times modern churches try to make things appear cool. “Let’s just make God cool for the seeker. Let’s make him relevant to our society or to our culture.” What…God is God! He is cool.

MATT: Also, it seems like today, Christians have to be cool people. And actually I don’t try to be cool—I’m not that cool anyway. I’m kind of a nerd. But I am who I am, you know. I’m not cool or different around my friends. My friends understand me. I’m not any different around them. I’m just being myself.

JACK: How can Immanuel come to terms with the new postmodernity era ahead?

MATT: The world is postmodern. So what does it look like to be the church in postmodern era? I don’t like the idea of Immanuel trying to be a “postmodern Church.” We are the church. We are one body. It is just that we are going to have to reinvent some things to be able to fit into today’s culture. Something Rob Bell said is that you call yourself postmodern, then you are not. I was postmodern even before I realized what that term meant. It’s just a mindset and it’s a culture. You don’t try to be a postmodern church; you just try to be relevant to the time. It’s not anti-modern, it’s postmodern —emerging out of the modern world. We are growing out of it, pushing to the next step. But we are coming out of modernity. We don’t deny it. We look at church history and think it’s beautiful, and modernity had its place, but it is over. And it’s not like postmodernism is better, but it is more relevant. It’s just growth…. Is a two year old more important than a fifty year old or vice versa? And it’s not that emergents are rebelling against the modern church; it’s that we are asking questions because we have to.

JACK: Do you see a need to try to bridge the gap between the young postmoderns and the older traditional members of the church?

MATT: Yes. It would be really bad if we had this group of people who were postmodern and emergent and this group modern and traditional. This would be divisive. This is why people often leave churches. Some people feel unwanted and just leave. We have to have an understanding at some point. And we don’t want another denomination. The emergent church is not a denomination. It’s a new way of understanding church within every denomination. This is huge. It is something about the faddish aspect of the emergent movement that it becomes a denomination. They had an emergent church conference for a couple of years, and Brian McLaren showed up and absolutely hated it. He was like, “What are you trying to do, for an elitist group or something? We’re trying to bridge and accept and bring everyone together, right?” They missed the point altogether. The point is to move away from the church being like a country club….postmoderns are not trying to destroy the modern system. If the modern system works for them, then cool…. But I am just trying to get people to follow God whether it is modern or postmodern.

At the “missional communities learning commons” this past Saturday (you can read about here and here), Geoff Holsclaw, one of the pastors with me at Life on the Vine, talked about “generative tension” that springs from multiple co-pastorship. He talked about how the conflict that comes from leaders discerning and leading a community together generates far more growth, creativity and discernment into the future than a singular Senior pastor type leader at the top.

I believe this is incredibly true at Life on the Vine. I could tell you stories where I had blockhead ideas that I thought were “the Way” we must go. Nonetheless I listened, learned and submitted, and a much better way emerged. It takes learned practices of patience, courage and mutual submission. I have a rule, in my own leadership. I lead, I discern, I put forth (sometimes with great force) the way in which I see we must go forward. Then I listen. Then I respond. If after a while, there are three or more firm dissenters, I back off and discern with the leaders another way. The community at Life on the Vine has been incredibly inventive in the Spirit and gone places in a short period of time out of this kind of Spirit-led vitality among its leadership on Wednesday nites (our church leadership meeting every other Wed nite) despite all its faults and (sometimes) uglier moments.

Such an openness to generative conflict also models a kind of community for the rest of the community to see. I believe this is important because I see generative conflict as an essential characteristic of the entire missional community. For there must be an openness and a learned practice of engaging difference first within community and then outside it. For it is in these kind of eventual generative encounters with those who are outside the community (and the gospel) that the gospel becomes enfleshed and true conversion can happen. This profound notion of generative conflict is so life giving; yet everything in modern privatist individualist society works against it. It is very hard to describe. And so I offer this quote from the great archbishop of Canterbury:

The late Don Hubert van Zeler of Downside Abbey told the delightful story of a North Welsch convent where the garden gate had at some point in a chequered career been reversed – so that the side facing inward now read “Private” in large letters. The cloister was being warned to keep its distance from the privacy of the world. This reversal is no bad symbol of the necessary revisions in our understanding of peace. The “world,” the unregenerate, uncritical life of most human societies, is the place of private, isolated existence, fear of facing the cost of decision and involvement – haunted by the fantasy of “peace” … withdrawal … shrink from tension…. In contrast, the cloister abandons privacy for a solitude which forces people to confront their fear and evasiveness and so equips them for involvement by stripping-down of the will…. It is a lifestyle which at one level invites conflict (beyond self-protection and self-gratification), the conflict of which the rest of society is afraid, in order to allow a more truthful and courageous humanity to emerge. And the peace of the cloister lies in and through this particular battle. Rowan Williams Truce of God p. 63 (via Roman Coles p. 187).

I could go on about why most evangelical churches, I have known (and I’ve been among many of them), resemble miserably the kind of conflict resolution so apt in “the private isolated existence” of human society. But I won’t. Instead I have hopes that missional communities we dreamed about last Saturday will show the way to kind of life together pictured by Rowan Williams in the quote above.
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Are there any examples/stories out there of “multiple leadership in mutual submission” that could help us walk in this direction? Are there any missional communities, missional orders experiencing this kind of generative conflict (I know you mennonites must know what we’re talking about)? I believe it takes deliberative teaching/leadership. Any help on this out there?