On the Eve of MLK week and the Obama Inauguration I want to offer some observations on why the emerging/missional church is so young and white.

I do this because it is an issue that keeps coming up. We had a missional learning commons two weeks ago. It was a gathering of people to talk missional church, encourage missional communities and pray for the neighborhoods.  We had 89 people. Although many ethnicities were represented, the majority of attendees were white persons (of both genders) under the age of 35 (my guess). A white attender (Sam Hamstra) asked me why is the emerging/missional movement so white? The next day, at my own church, Angela (an African American women under age 35) asked me about the learning commons because she had hoped to go. And then she also asked “was there diversity there?” to which I had to answer “No.” She asked “why?” Then this morning I was meeting with a church planter rep. from the Christian Reformed Church active in missional church work between African American congregations and white suburban people moving into the city. We talked again about the same issue.

I think it is fairly well accepted that the emerging movement/ missional movement is populated largely with young white people of both genders. There are older white people like myself involved. And there is say 10 to 20% of the movement populated with various ethnicities. But by and large, the overwhelmingly large proportion of the missional and emerging movements is white and young (somewhere around 35 and under).  To throw light on why this might be I offer two stories that I have experienced recently (I know I am taking a while to get to my point here but stay with me ?).

1st Story At the Learning Commons, Jon Berbaum was talking about one of the disciplines of the missional order. He called it the discipline of poverty. He then explained that the discipline of poverty is the discipline of living beneath our means. We in essence look around the neighborhood and see the standard of living and consciously seek to live beneath this standard so as to give more of our time and  our excess wealth to the Mission of God in the neighborhood. He also talked about how his group had to choose a place of mission that was not “over their existing level of means, skills and ability to earn a living.” This meant often moving to lower income neighborhoods on purpose so as to not have to adjust working hours (hence less having less time to give) to live up into higher standards of living.

An African American (named Chris) stood up and said something (and I will try to recount this as best as I can) like we in the African American community find this suspect. For we view poverty as something God has called us out of. Indeed part of salvation is the deliverance from poverty. He asked “could we use another word to describe this discipline than poverty?” Indeed the whole practice (from what I heard) of living beneath your means would have a difficult time translating into the African American context. Poverty is indeed, as Jon and Chris both agreed, a contextual issue.

2nd Story I teach pastoral ethics at Northern Seminary, a seminary that has as high percentage of African American students. One question I pose during the latter stages of the course is as follows: a pastor ministers in a community where the average house costs 350,000 dollars (this is actually true in NW Suburbs of Chicago). The pastor buys a house worth 2.1 million. Is this a good decision or a bad decision for a leader of the flock? What considerations would you use as a pastor in making the decision to buy a house within your ministry context. In my most recent class, every African American (except one) applauded this pastor as being a model for the salvation of God, for being a good leader. They said that, for the average African church congregation in poverty, they need someone to both respect and to aspire to be. For the African American members of the class (except for one), it is unthinkable for a pastor not to model “prosperity.” There are many more nuances to this culturally which I don’t have the time to recount or the cultural familiarity to properly represent here. I’m just trying to offer some general observations. Invariably, in this same Pastoral Ethics class (I have had similar stuff happen no less than 10 times in my classes surrounding this same core issue) the younger white seminary students (I’ll call them emerging church types) protest that the pastor that would spend such outrageous sums of money on a house cannot lead his/her congregation missionally into the world.

All of this points to the reality that seems to me clearer and clearer as the days go by. The majority of African Americans as well as first and second generation ethnic groups (especially Hispanics but also Asian to some degree) of N America are arriving into modernity just as young whites are throwing their hands up at it. The sons and daughter of evangelicalism are fed up with modernity (individualism and rationalism apart from a way of life), capitulation to capitalism as an organizing principle in the church (money and poverty are private issues) and a Christianity separated from engagement of the wholistic gospel for the whole world. These people are largely white and young. Meanwhile, the African American church and Hspanic church have been in poverty, are enamored with the hope of capitalism and the American dream. They have been struggling for years with poverty and America and God offers the hope to finally escape and achieve comfort and financial stability. The prosperity gospel drives these contexts. Indeed many of these ethnicities have not yet gone through the loss of community that the stark society of excess affluence and modernity brings.

I see this as one issue that separates the missional/emerging church types from the other demographic groups. A core calling of missional life for me is the call to live beneath our means to thereby have more time and funnel more of our blessings (excess wealth) into the Mission of God. Perhaps this is what keeps the missional movement from diversity? I don’t necessarily know. But I sure would like to ask others what their observations are.

Brian McLaren has used a slide in many of his talks over the past 10 years which shows how Latin America, and what used to be called the third world, are just entering modernity. Here the gospel is doing well. Ironically much of this church movement is charismatic and driven by prosperity gospel (Peter Berger outlines this in an article in Books and Culture - I hope to respond to this article vigorously as time allows in the next few months). McLaren says meanwhile post-modernity/post Christendom has begun in vast parts of Western Europe, Canada and the West, post modernity has begun. Here the gospel is failing miserably as the church shrinks to nothing.

All of the above recounts our dilemma and perhaps why the emerging church and missional church continue to be stubbornly young and white. Missional church represents the sons and daughter (largely) of evangelicals who are fed up with modernity, its programmed church, its dualistic rationalistic version of salvation, its capitulation to monetary success and the way it has distanced itself from the poor. This group has passed through modernity, free market capitalism as a social doctrine (tied to the fall), and seen its effects upon the church. They do not aspire to the goods inherent here because they have walked through the desolation of it all. Meanwhile sits the others who for various contextual reasons do not see modernity and capitalism, the accumulation of wealth as a bad thing.

I wish to make no judgemnts of who is right on the issue of “living beneath your means.” Indeed, as Chris said at the Missional Commons, this is a contextual thing. I agree that there are many contextual elements here to which I have no way to speak to. But I suggest this may be an issue contributing to the young whiteness and the lack of diversity of the missional/emerging church. What do you think? Is there a growing divide between those who are children of the American prosperity of the past thirty years and those who have been pursuing the American dream and have yet to reach it.

Warning:Academic Discussion Ahead. This post assumes you know what ecclesiology and missiology are and have thought about the relationship between the two.

At a recent post here at the NEW Missional Tribe Network, Ben Wheatley argues along with Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost that “Missiology needs to precede ecclesiology because if ecclesiology precedes missiology, mission becomes just a subset of the church.” There are some good comments after the post. Wheatley is of course following Alan Hirsch in his book Forgotten Ways (p.141 ff.) and Hirsch and Frost in the Shaping of Things to Come (p.) I’d like to chime in here with another take. I believe its fruitful to ask what are the epistemological implications of such an affirmation.

Epistemology is the study of how we know. Though it is a specialized question mostly reserved for philosophers (all we pastors need is another “ology,” right!), I believe our epistemological assumptions shape the way we understand the gospel (individual versus social) and church (a group of individuals or a social context for working out the gospel). Many will say that we should forget about such issues and just follow Jesus. Of course, this too is laden with epistemological assumptions. I contend that the formula “Christology determines missiology determines ecclesiology” is fraught with epistemological assumptions (modern Enlightenment) that lead us to the very problem (individualist de-cuturalized oriented salvation leading to pragmatic Christianity) the phrase was intended to avert in the first place. So let’s think this through.
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Caveat I generally reserve this kind of writing for other kinds of blogs or in academic contexts. So please, if you’re not interested – don’t go on reading. For me however this issue is essential for the time and place we live in. So here goes.
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I contend that the affirmation “missiology precedes ecclesiology” depends upon the epistemological priority of the individual thinking self – the cogito of modernity. We know Jesus and the gospel primarily as individuals first versus the encounter of God in Christ manifested in a people. For many of us postliberal types however, the church is the embodied narrative (post)foundation for the working out and displaying of the truth of Jesus Christ into the world. In this way, the church provides the epistemological foundation of sorts. It is in the social context of the church where the language is learned, the Story is carried on and indeed the presence of Christ is directly visible (The fullness thereof-Eph 1:22-23). From this place the revolution infests the world. For us, it makes no sense to say that the church is derivative of mission.

No doubt, in response to this, Hirsch and Frost would make the case that Jesus should be that foundation. Who can argue with that? Jesus (Christology) should precede missiology, right? (This is most likely what they’re expanding on with their most recent book, Re Jesus, though I have not read it and am due to get it from Amazon this week). This is true, yet this still bypasses the epistemological question entirely. How do we “know” Jesus? In essence, if missiology precedes the church, we must assume the gospel comes first in and through individuals and their mind/experience faculties.

Protestants have generally answered the epistemological question by referring to the Scriptures. The Protestants, you remember, no longer could trust the church as God’s work in the world. As a result, whether one is Prot. liberal or evangelical, the Scriptures are what point us to Jesus. This is where we encounter the living Lord. For evangelicals, the autonomous individual rational mind reads the Bible and by the Holy Spirit understands and encounters the living Word. For liberal Protestants, the autonomous “feeling self” reads the Bible and “gets in touch with (encounters) the religious experience” of Jesus afforded by the Scriptures. Evangelicals argue for the historical reliability of Scripture and the wherewithal of individual rationality under submission to the Holy Spirit to come to the propositional and real truth. Lib. Protestant theology appeals to the authority of universal religious experience. To me, Hirsch and Frost must affirm these classic protestant assumptions for this phrase (missiology precedes ecclesiology) to stand and make sense.

In either case however (evangelical or Prot Liberal), two bad things happen. ONE, it puts the epistemological foundations for knowing Jesus upon the autonomous ( a law nomos unto him/her self auto ) individual via the universal categories of either universal human experience or human reason and the meta narrative of science. We are now all on our own (via the Holy Spirit) to interpret as best we can (via historical commentaries). Yet even the best of us knows that we differ as to what the Holy Spirit is “telling me.” Try listening to John McArthur and Joel Osteen explicate the same Scripture at the same time. This is why interpretation is a communal discipline of the Holy Spirit where individuals are in submission to the church and the Holy Spirit and its ongoing community and collective history of interpretation. TWO this modernist epistemology inevitably makes Mission into something for individuals to pursue. It turns the Mission inward. It works against the reality that God has always chosen to work collectively in a people beginning with Israel to the birth of the Twelve and the church (read Gerhard Lohfink). As Yoder taught us, Jesus offers more than an individual salvation or a personal pattern of discipleship, his Lordship births a social reordering among us, a politic, as a foretaste of the world to come. Herein lies the base (foundation) for our witness into the world.

As an aside, but important to me, we live increasingly in a postmodern, post Christendom or even post-epistemological world, where these universal foundations are gone. Christendom, or a universal rationality, or a universal human experience (the most imperialist assumption of them all) has been destabilized. If we wish to minister under the “missiology precedes ecclesiology” moniker how do we navigate these contexts? Yet it seems to me Missional is particularly aimed at these contexts.

For all of these reasons we need the church as an epistemological foundation for the gospel in the world. We need the church as God’s ordained bearer of the Story, an historical apostolicity to ground us into who Jesus is and our ongoing relationship to the Lord of Lords and King of Kings. Here Scripture is socially embodied in the continuous people of God. Indeed such a story can only make sense in a community that embodies the Story. The stories, the language, the anamnesis of a people continuous with Jesus himself, birthed by his apostles (sent ones), the very extension of Jesus himself, wherein His presence is promised and made possible by the Holy Spirit – this body in the world becomes the epistemological foundation for knowing Jesus. This is the very incarnation (another missional buzz word)of Christ in the world. This is why the apostle Paul insists on calling the local church “the Body of Christ.” Herein lies “the fullness of Christ” the one who rules over all things (Eph 1:22-23). In this community we show forth (socially embody) in the present what is the world’s future, the salvation of God in Christ that is overtaking the whole world.

All this to say, I don’t see how this epistemological quandary can be navigated apart from a strong ecclesiology. Indeed putting missiology before ecclesiology should eventually lead to the contextualizing of the church into oblivion. Indeed, I believe the incarnational nature of the church is jeopardized by making it a post development of the missionary sending as opposed to putting it as the very extension of that sending.

I therefore suggest the following: Instead of advocating missiology precedes ecclesiology, let us instead advocate that indeed ecclesiology is missiology, or for that matter, missiology is ecclesiology. I’m following the same logic as my mentor Hauerwas (you can hear him here in Toronto in March), who often reiterates “the church does not have a social ethic, the church is a social ethic.” The church does not have a missiology, the church is a missiology.

I rest my case and await the accusations that I am an ecclesiocentric fundamentalist dinosaur . I’m open to criticisms. And, for the record, none of what I have just said takes away from the edification and growth I have received from listening and conversing with my friend Alan Hirsch. Peace

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PS: I’m finding there is a interesting history here between the various Missional church authors and the history of the theological construct Missio Dei. It could be argued for instance, that the concept of Missio Dei that emerged post WW2 in the WCC Missions Councils was the Prot liberal version of it, which de-centered Missio Dei away from both the church and of course the particular person and work of Jesus Christ. This scared away the evangelicals and they resisted Missio Dei as an organizing doctrine for world mission (see Ed Stetzer’s article here). In this light, it could be argued that Alan Hirsch (along with Michael Frost, David Bosch and others) are simply recovering Missio Dei restoring Jesus to to the Missio Dei missiology, the Jesus who was lost in the WCC developments regarding Missio Dei. Nonetheless, both Prot liberal and some current missional church authors rely upon the same epistemological assumptions inheritng the problems as discussed above. In this sense, I see Hirsch and Frost’s argument of “Christology determines missiology which then determines ecclesiology” admirable for recovering Christ in missiology. The argument unfortunately continues the flawed (according to me) epistemology of the Enlightenment.

You all can tell I’m writing a book on Missional Theology:).

The more I get to know Ed Stetzer, the more I love him. Of course, he and I disagree on stuff and of course we agree on stuff. It is the discerning of disagreements/agreements together that makes possible the church. So I very much enjoyed “doing some church” on film. Bill Kinnon and wife Imbi filmed this when they were Chicago late last year. Ed Stetzer is a pastor, prolific author, missional thinker and director of LifeWay Research for the SBC. This is part one of the video production that appears on the new Missional Tribe Network – an amazing grassroots collaborative networking site for all things missional. Check it out and join.

Ed Stetzer & David Fitch – a missional conversation from Missional Tribe on Vimeo.

Missional Tribe social network Begins Tomorrow!!: The astonishing power of networking via the internet has become once more apparent. Bill Kinnon and six other Instigators, Peggy Brown, Rick Meigs, Sonja Andrews, Brad Sargent, Kingdom Grace and Brother Maynard are joining together to launch the Missional tribe Network. Talk about blogpower. You people blow my mind. It’s all happening tomorrow (Epiphany Jan 6). But you can get a preview right now by clicking here. I can’t wait.

Missional Non/Conference This Past Saturday: The astonishing power of networking was also revealed to me at our Seeding Missional Communities Learning Commons that happened this past Saturday. Three weeks before we were actually going to host this event, I called Ben Sternke in Ft. Wayne and asked if he was up for hosting it on January 3rd. He said yes. With no organization whatsoever I put a small post up on my blog here asking if twenty people would be interested in getting together to encourage, talk and challenge each other in the struggles and issues of seeding missional communities. I said if we got twenty people to positively commit (no backing out) we would do it. Twenty people committed in three days (of which about ten eventually backed out ☺). Then Chris Smith from here and here of Englewood then put it on facebook and then I piggybacked on that off my own face book account. Bill Kinnon (who asked his daughter how to do it) had to tell me how to do that. We promised little but collaboration. There was no charge, no book sales, no pompous personalities (uh well except for maybe me, for which I confess my sin ☺) with little to no experience living in missional church. We arrived in Ft Wayne on Saturday and I counted 89 people in the room at one time in the morning (not that numbers matter ☺). Could Ft. Wayne be the new Midwest “mecca” of Missional Church? ☺ We had short presentations by practitioners, then lively conversations, we broke up into smaller groups, we prayed through Luke 10 in silence and corporate prayer, we hung out during breaks and lunch, we were sent out for mission. Ben provided the room, chairs and the coffee. All the feedback I’ve had since Saturday is that many were encouraged, or challenged by something new, or just blessed to be among fellow collaborators. I was encouraged to see so many people of various age groups (although I’d say 80% under the age of 35) who are seeking to rid the practice of church of excess and get down to simplicity, authenticity and integrity in relation to living together as the church – including economics, community and mission. As of this writing Dan took some good notes here, and Wes did the same here. Chris posted notes from his presentation here.

Now a makeshift board is coming together and a website and we’re going to do it again!! Thanks to Ben Sternke who was our gracious host. Thanks to all presenters. Thanks to everyone who came and made this day so rich in Ft. Wayne, the new mecca of missional church (what does that mean?).