For any pastor, there is the constant temptation to get pragmatic – do things to get people and money into your church. We all face financial pressures. We all face the pressures of other people’s (denominations?) expectations. Yet this temptation to get pragmatic is even more intense for missional leaders who are nurturing the establishment of a missional community. Results are hard to measure compared to what other churches are doing. The sacrifice appears great and appears to go unnoticed. This has never been more true than during this time when the fear of financial catastrophe is broadcast non stop across the airways and print media. And so missional church-planters face the anxieties and uncertainties associated with that as well because many of us do not have the comfort of an established money making skill or career. So the inevitable questions arise: what am I doing with my life? I have nothing to show for this? How am I going to sustain myself and my family (if I have one) long term? Can you see how this all builds up and makes the sustainability of missional church plants highly precarious?

Recently, as I sat with some friends who are missional “cultivators” of a church plant, one of them asked “How can missional churches be sustainable?” I said, it depends upon what you mean by sustainable. For in these days of financial crisis I know multiple situations of churches, mostly mega churches, who have built large facilities, and now face immense pressures to pay the bills. Their people are hurting and scared during this financial crisis, and yet these pastors are forced to get pragmatic. At the worst time to do so, these pastors must figure out what to say, or how to say it, to get money in the door. This is what I call unsustainable. The dubious nature of these church’s sustainability is increased substantially by the taking on of large capital expenditures like buildings and large payrolls.

As opposed to the capital intensive churches, it seems that missional communities should have the wherewithal to be more sustainable in these times because it is in our nature to:
a.) Keep building expenses minimal (BTW as many church buildings are being abandoned in post Christendom in the heart of abandoned parts of cities and towns – there are great opportunities for missional communities to take these facilities over).
b.) Maintain a multiple bi-ministerial (bi-vocational) pastorate who can live simply as well as develop market skills which give them options to make their support when need be. This keeps payroll down, spreads it out and keeps the pastors in mutual sustainable community. I might also be quick to add though, bi-vocational life cannot be done without at least three pastors doing it together and sharing the leadership of the church (Nothing worse than one guy or woman trying to do it all and work to pay his/her family’s bills).
c.) Build economically viable communities where costs of living go down through things like free-cycling and sharing meals, child care together.

All of this should encourage missional church planters in times like this. Our church plants are actually more sustainable than the Christendom models of church-planting. We should be encouraged to keep resisting the urge to get pragmatic.

But truthfully, resisting the urge to get pragmatic requires more than this little piece of analysis. It requires a regular practice of spiritual discipline. YOU CANNOT WHITE KNUCKLE YOURSELF, REASON YOURSELF to feel better amidst the fears, doubts and and temptations to go pragmatic. We are ever tempted to get pragmatic, do what it takes to get the bills paid, or do what makes oneself feel more secure and successful. We need a spiritual formation that shapes us into God’s mission and keeps us oriented towards God (in other words keep sane). What would such a spiritual formation look like?

In this regard I offer this suggestion. I just returned from a trip where I spent a day with God in Psalm 37 (first six verses). Amidst my own set of financial concerns, my over worked and over busy life, MY OWN TEMPTATIONS TO GET PRAGMATIC … I needed a day to ground myself. So I spent the day, returning to my roots, walking the neighborhood where I grew up, remembering God’s faithfulness to me in the days of my child hood and since. During this time I spent the day meditating, praying through these phrases from Ps 37 (doing lectio divina for those of you who know this approach).

Psalm 37: A Psalm for Missional Leaders (NASV)

Fret not …
Trust in the Lord and do good
Dwell in the land, and cultivate faithfulness (or “feed on His faithfulness” – this line is a mantra for missional pastors)
Delight yourself in the Lord’
And he will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord
Trust also in Him and He will do it
And he will bring forth your righteousness as the light …

I try to take regular (daily) times of silence with a text like this, long walks, putting my labors, frets and fears into the hands of God and His Mission. This shapes me into His mission. Hope this helps some missional church leader who is close to losing his or her mind right now. What modes of spiritual formation for missional church planters have you engaged in during times like those described above?

A woman in our church, Cyd Holsclaw, is taking our denomination’s ministerial studies program. The course named “Introduction to Theology” asks her to respond to several contextualized questions deriving from the various categories of what used to be called Systematic Theology. Looking at the questions she was given she decided to rewrite them. She said the questions were not really the questions she was getting from either new Christians or inquiring seekers. The questions have changed. What follows first are (some of) the questions she was given followed by her rewrite of the questions.

The Ministerial Studies Questions

ECCLESIOLOGY: How does your church compare to the purpose and pattern of the Early Church?
SOTERIOLOGY: A person from a Roman Catholic background asks you why you don’t pray to the Virgin Mary. How would you answer that person?
SANCTIFICATION: In your desire to become Christ-like, what quality of God’s character do you need the most?
THEOLOGY: What do you consider to be the greatest of God’s attributes and why?
ANTHROPOLOGY: A new Christian, who is concerned for his unsaved family members, asks you where his deceased grandfather, who never heard the gospel, is in eternity. How would you answer him?

Cyd’s Rewrite of the Questions

ECCLESIOLOGY: I don’t need church. Organized religion really bothers me… I’d rather just go for a walk in the woods and meet with God there.
SOTERIOLOGY: The whole idea of only one way to God is ridiculous. It’s so arrogant to say that Jesus is the only way. I’ve met a whole lot of people who are kinder and more compassionate than the Christians I’ve met. Those people seem more in touch with God.
SANCTIFICATION: God loves me unconditionally. I know there are some issues I need to deal with eventually, but don’t throw this legalism on me and give me a code of rules I’m supposed to live by. That’s not the kind of God I want to serve.
THEOLOGY: Jesus dying on the cross is so bloody and violent. How am I supposed to believe that a God who kills his own son in cold blood would love me?
ANTHROPOLOGY: Christianity is all about men. God is a man, Jesus is a man, pastors are men, etc. How do I, as a woman, fit into a faith that seems to be all about men?

I am struck by how often I hear the questions that Cyd put forth in her rewrite even when I go to the most conservative of locales and talk with evangelical pastors. Her insightful rewrite calls all of us theological educators to shape theological education beyond the acquiring of basic information. This of course is the continual struggle of all theological programs. Correspondence and online programs struggles with this even more. The first set of questions (from the Ministerial Studies Program) are important and in many ways foundational to answering the second set of questions (Cyd’s rewrite). We need both. Yet for many of us, we need an education that gives us the means to think through the concrete questions of our day theologically, Scripturally, historically and beyond the modernity and Christendom assumptions that seem to hover over the first set of questions.

How can we better connect the Systematic Theological questions with the concrete ones on the ground in our ministerial programs (especially correspondence and on-line programs)? There are many other questions like Cyd’s. Can you offer any additional?

As some might know, I have a complaint concerning the way evangelicals engage culture. The way we engage culture is either to reject it all or embrace it all. Our culture habits, I contend, have been formed under a 50 year Niebuhrian hangover where we view culture in singular unilateral terms. To compound the problem, we regularly make Jesus Christ into a principle to be translated (or not) into it (instead of concretely embodying his way into the world). This is the influence of Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture.

Culture is more complex, multiple and diverse than that. It is ubiquitous as well. It cannot be escaped. And Jesus the Christ is not a principle but an historic incarnation of the second person of the Godhead. God began his work in the world (Missio Dei) by actually entering into the world for the reconciliation of the whole world to Himself. To be His people, is to engage the world in all its complexity for the incarnation of the gospel via the formation of a people. This people, is a cultural expression of the Holy Spirit as an extension of God’s Missio begun in the sending of the Son.

To be “this kind of people” requires a more complex understanding of our cultural task than the aforementioned Niebuhrian categories we have been offered in Christ and Culture. This is why Andy Crouch’s new book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling is important. For Andy does what few others can do. He puts forward an understanding of culture that encompasses all its complexity. He delineates the task of “culture-making” for the Christian with great subtlety. He does all this in a prose that is artful, compelling and highly accessible.

In the first section of the book (entitled “Culture”) Crouch surveys and describes the complex phenomenon of “culture” and the ways we engage it. A highlight here is chapter 5 entitled “Gestures and Postures.” Here Andy traces the attitudes of Christians towards culture in N. America from post Civil War times when evangelicals burst forth with a swirl of culture creating activity including many institutions of enduring significance. Then came the European influences upon mainline Christianity and the fundamentalist cultural “retreat.” Then came the neo-evangelicals attempt to engage more actively and critically American culture. Francis Schaeffer is a highlight here. Then came the Jesus people and CCM industry. After this the consumers of culture. Through this history, Crouch outlines several “postures” towards culture illustrated by this brief history including condemning, critiquing, copying and consuming culture. Then lastly he describes what it might look like to be gardeners of culture, a metaphor I am already fond of (see here). Here we have a taste of the serious, reflective, complex, yet balanced approach to culture that Crouch is calling Christians to in our time. Here we find a basis for a more complex engagement with culture that I think is essential if we would be missionaries in the new post Christendom worlds many of us are ministering in. Yet this is not a dull textbook account. It is wonderful writing. This chapter, to us a cliché, is worth the price of the book.

In the second section (entitled “Gospel”) Crouch gives us a masterful reading of the development of culture according to the Scripture from Genesis to Revelation. In the third section (entitled “Calling”) Crouch writes directly concerning the calling we Christians have “to make culture” amidst the world. Here in Section 3, Crouch again offers keen insights. He asks “What does the calling to be a culture maker look like?” In answering this question, Crouch does not offer intellectual slogans (praise God!). Instead he offers many serious reflections on this task. He asks us “Culturally, can we change the world? His answer: “Yes and no.” (197) For engaging the culture is complex, largely out of our control. Yet if we follow the distinctive template of God’s work in culture (Luke 4) God can inhabit our culture-making in unforeseen graceful ways. This means that that changing/engaging culture cannot simply be accomplished with money. Rather in order to transform culture “new structures of possibility” must be created that do not exist yet. (222). This is the task of the artist. Crouch suggests, that in engaging this task as Christians, we will find that God is at work in the exact places where “the impossible seems absolute” (216). We will discover that our calling is to join him in what he is already doing, “to make visible what – in exodus and resurrection- he has already done.” (216). We will engage culture-making both with power (and those who have it) and our lack of it – emphasis on BOTH! He advocates that “culture-making” be pursued on the ground level in our local communities in what Crouch describes as the “3, 12, and the 120.”(this I loved!!). We are to look for grace where divine multiplication happens that far exceeds our efforts.

Here is Crouch’s summary paragraph:

So do you want to make culture? Find a community, a small group who can lovingly fuel your dreams and puncture your illusions. Find friends and form a family who are willing to see grace at work in another’s lives, who can discern together which gifts and which crosses each has been called to bear. Find people who have a holy respect for power and a holy willingness to spend their power alongside the powerless. Find some partners in the wild and wonderful world beyond church doors. 263

Getting back to my first paragraph above, I have abhorred evangelicalism’s Nieburhian simplistic views of engaging culture as the church. I have found these views unworkable for those of us who seek to “incarnate” the gospel as communities of Jesus in our cultural contexts. I have found most Christian artists too ready to hop on board with the American culture-industry being seduced by its power and thereby becoming ineffectual and eaten alive by the cesspools that exist out there. I have found us largely ineffectual in the task of redemptive culture making in our time.

Andy Crouch’s book is a step in a different direction. It is not a call to reject culture nor transform culture (naively thereby becoming the culture). It is a complex call to culture-making as Christians. There is a danger in his subtle Reformed Kuyperian “Common Grace” that runs through out the book. The role of the church as a bearer of culture and inhabiting witness to redeemed culture is lacking. Because of my admittedly Anabaptist sensitivities, some of what Crouch says makes less sense without a stronger ecclesiology. Nonetheless!!! I could easily frame this whole book within a more acceptable (to me) ecclesiology/epistemology. So none of this detracts from the book for me. What Crouch describes is a road map for missional communities and their task to artistically engage their cultures in culture making! For out of who we are in Christ, we can neither withdraw nor naively hop on board (copy or consume) the current culture industries of our time. We need to engage in culture-making which inevitably means rejecting some things, yet sometimes aligning with what God is already doing, always distinctively “being the presence of Christ.” Crouch gives us ways of thinking that help us do exactly that! He gives us much help as communities who seek to incarnate (making cultural) Christ in the world. I’ve been blessed to read the book. I’ll use sections of it in my upcoming classes on “church and culture.” I will recommend it to all my Christian artist friends trying to figure out the cultural task of our time when there simply is no unified culture left to engage, except the Culture Industries of a Fallen Empire i.e. Hollywood et. al. Any other takes on Andy’s “Culture Making” out there you’d like to share?

Read this piece in der Spiegel: “The End of Arrogance: America Loses Its Dominant Role.” It may be one sided, nonetheless it summarizes a lot of what I perceive has been going on for quite some time in the world and its attitudes towards U.S.A. Yet it has now exploded for all to see in the events of the last three weeks for it is as if the “emperor wearing no clothes” has been revealed in the horrible financial shakeout being experienced around the world. Even with all this however, there are attitudes and ideas that remain unshakeable among many of us in the ways we see the world. I want to urge therefore that we have discussions around a few issues at this time lest the American church misses a crucial opportunity to reassess what we are supposed to be doing during this time. I offer the following topics:

1.) Is America the richest nation on the earth and does this change how we think about Global Mission? I keep hearing people on both the right and the left persist in calling America the richest nation on earth. I contend we are not. We are broke. As a nation-state we are the most indebted industrialized nation on earth. Per capita, we are the most individually in debt. We are broke! The debt loads on individuals are suffocating. And so the expectation that the U.S. should be the economic engine for world social justice and democratic reform, or more importantly, global mission, must come to an end. Granted, our insatiable consumerism, and morally bankrupt Christian discipleship when it comes to money is coming home to roost. The fact still is however, at this time and place, we are broke and we cannot expect the churches of undisciplined desire (my nomenclature for late- American evangelicalism) to provide the moral or material capital for world mission. Brazil, India, China and even Russia have more money than the U.S. In some ways, if individuals of the third world have no debt and a sustainable living wage, they are wealthier than the people who can no longer afford their “upside-down” mortgages on these 5 bedroom, 2-3 garage homes in the suburbs. For these people are left enslaved to their debts for at least the next 10 years.

It is time then for American churches, mission organizations to rethink our place in world mission. I know this is old hat, but we need to rethink America as a Mission-sending country. The current financial crisis is the time to come together to remap world Mission. We, in post Christendom N. America, have become a mission field and we must take our place alongside all other countries as mutual participants in the Mission of God.

2.) Do the fears of market capitalism influence the way we do church too much? (The first paragraph here is a good definition if you need it of capitalism). Perhaps we have become too over confident in our faith and trust in market capitalism? Is this possible? Has it influenced the way we organize ourselves socially and economically even among the people of God? Amidst the demise and/or corruption of capitalism (depending on where you’re coming from) how do we become churches that display a Christian economic in these times of financial crisis? How do we display ways of exchange, participating mutually in God’s bounty that free us from the fear of losing our own financial security? Why is it we hide our finances from even our closest Christian friends in the same church? Why do we not know who is hurting and being foreclosed upon even in our own church? How can we resist and indeed overcome the ways the “System” is falling apart and indeed taking down many people with it? We had a meeting at our church along these lines this past Sunday.

Any other issues this article brings up? Any answers/disagreements to these questions?

I’ve noticed that there’s an impulse to reject denominations among “missional/emerging types.” This is especially true regarding the older more conservative evangelical denominations. Often denominations like these can’t get out of their own way to allow “fresh expressions” of missionality to take shape within their churches and church planting structures. They are often blind to the ways Christendom has become entrenched in the ways they administer the churches. They have rules that aggravate. They have doctrinal formulas that were formed out of a different place and time. They focus on the differences, the denominational distinctives, that really don’t mean much anymore. All of this turns off even the most dedicated of young missionaries to the territories of post-Christendom.

And yet I think these denominations could play (must play!) a role in just the kind of renewal we seek. We see emergent presbyterians, anabaptist emergents (submergents) and indeed many many other emergents as Tony Jones has outlined. The conservative evangelical denominations however seem strangely left out. Yet I think denominations like the Salvation Army (check out Pernell Goodyear’s church) and other holiness denominations that have deep roots in ministering wholistically to the poor will be a significant place for the kind of renewal the missional movement is leading.

This is why I wrote THIS PIECE for Fuller Theological Seminary‘s Theology News and Notes. Its about my own unusual and good relationship with the Christian and Missionary Alliance, my home denomination, a conservative evangelical denomination if there ever was one. The whole issue is on the emerging/missional church within denominations. You can read my piece here. Check out the entire issue! Thanks to Ryan Bolger and Eddie Gibbs. They did a great job!

How has your experience been within your denomination? Have they been supportive? Would you recommend your denominational heritage for those seeking to explore missional/emerging church?

I recently sat with a couple at our church discussing church planting. I pointed to the immediate neighborhoods, many of which have 4-5 bedroom homes and 2 cars. I said “do you realize, if you have no debt, you are now richer than 25% of the people who live in these neighborhoods, because 25% of these people are underwater on their homes, cars, credit cards etc. They have no equity and are working 70 hours a week to keep from going further in the hole.” The change in the financial landscape of our country in just the last two years is staggering and it has changed the focus of millions of people over night. I contend it could be changing the culture for a new openness to Mission as well. As a result – for those who can live simply, beneath their means, with no debt -the opportunity for Mission is unparalleled.Let me explain the shift in culture as I see it. In the post World War 2 period, people looked at jobs, money, houses in terms of the necessities of life. We went to a job to earn an income to support our families and if we were Christians to contribute to the Kingdom of God. We bought a house (we could afford) in order to live in it. We were not obsessed with having a large sum of money for retirement that would enable us “to maintain our lifestyle” (insurance salesman lingo that became canonized in American life as part of what every person should do if he/she is responsible). Starting in the 80′s however, our jobs became “careers” for personal fulfilment, our homes became idols of excess pouring thousands of dollars into upgrades, our money became a scorecard of our success. Each of these things became identity shaping idols. And these idols squeezed out community, Mission and even family from everyday American life. The obsessive focus on these idols emptied American life of depth, meaning and purpose beyond the thin veneers of American consumerism. The zenith of this excess reached its peak in these last 5-10 years. Today we are seeing the leveling of these idols. The idol hath fallen.I have argued that vast swaths of the American church has accommodated itself in some of the worst of ways to the values inherent in these idols. I believe the missional church movement has emphasized a different response to this culture: that we should live more simply, live beneath our means, reject these idols of career, house and money. We must come together to cultivate communal life, communal sharing, transformational practices that resist consumerism and above all the everyday participation in the Mission of God. Our jobs, our homes and our money each in turn become captive to God’s Mission.It is my opinion that the current financial crisis, its pure magnitude, is revealing the emptiness and falsity of the idols of the past thirty years of American life. I intend no gloating over this. Much pain is sure to follow. Yet amidst the crumbling home values, the new emptiness of work and the loss of community in our society, I believe Missional living (Acts 2.42ff) becomes compelling in new ways as it calls us to be a community of the redeemed, sharing one another’s burdens, offering each other housing when in need, sharing housing if need be, living simply beneath our means (even in the rich suburbs), offering help to the struggling (even those with a foreclosure sign on their front lawn). As the crisis unfolds, this could create a whole new openness for church as a Missional way of life. Could God be preparing the new fertile ground for His Mission in the United States? What do you think?