We Changed Our Identity Statement

At Life on the Vine, we changed our “identity statement.” We used to use only three words that we emphasized around our places: Transformational, Communal, Missional. Each word encompassed what we’re pushing for in terms of our focus as a people. We are pursuing a discipleship that transforms us into Christ, by sharing a life in Christ together, that participates daily in the Mission of God in the world.  Nothing too radical here eh?

Then this past summer we began to question whether these words were too ethereal. Had they become buzz words? nice sounding but in end not really meaning anything for the concrete lives of our church.  One of the pastors, Geoff Holsclaw began pushing for something more concrete and action oriented as opposed to just a nominalizing adjective. We came up with the phrase “Living in Christ, with One Another, for God’s Mission in the World.” Ah … we loved it. It resonated with what God was doing in our people.

The Missional Non/Checklist

Ah, but Holsclaw wasn’t satisfied yet. He pushed for more. He proposed a set of things we could list that were already going on in our community that we could point our people towards in order to further their discipleship into this way of life envisioned by this statement. After all, people needed to be able to visualize what this life might actually look like. I called it a “Missional Non/Checklist” because we wanted to offer people some ideas as to how they might enter this way of life, BUT WE DIDN’T WANT TO TURN IT INTO A FUNDAMENTALIST LEGALISM ALL OVER AGAIN.  Each section highlighted some basic “best practices” we could engage our lives in. And then under that, we offered a few examples of places where this is going on in our church body. Under “Living in Christ” for example, we highlighted transformational practices of life in Christ like our triads (three people getting together to do a Benedectine type spiritual formation practice), Taize service, spiritual retreat and private devotional exercises. Under “with One Another” we highlighted things like missional orders (house gatherings in neighborhoods), our church picnics, various mission projects, the community garden etc.. And under “for God’s Mission in the World,” we highlighted some service projects and engaging hurting people in regular life rhythms – things we have been teaching about at our church. The idea was not to sign people up for everything going on in the church. Rather give people an idea of what the Christian life looks like within our body as God has been working among us by His Spirit.  Let them find something that fits within their ongoing life rhythms (or develop some form of the practice within their own already existing relationships/rhythms ).

Now I know I’m going to get ripped for proposing a Checklist of anykind, even if I explicitly called it a Non-Checklist. But I think such a Non/Checklist has some advantages. For when the leaders are meeting with various members of our body, we have the ability to ask how’s your transformation going, how’s your communal life, how is your participation in God’s mission? Tell me your struggles? Where do you think this might be happening. Where do you go to get oriented in your life towards God and His mission? Where is there opportunities for God to work in your life that we might be missing? We have something to talk about that’s concrete. CONCRETE, CONCRETE, CONCRETE, did I say concrete?

Of course the first reaction to all of this is, please this smacks of my fundamentalist upbringing – I don’t need this or want this. And of course I still believe that certain ongoing practices beginning with the Sunday gathering around proclamation and the Lord’s Table and the Being Sent – profoundly shape our mind/body/souls for participation in/discerning God’s Mission.  Yet is there not a need for some hands on practical discipleship to guide our people into God’s Mission? For this purpose we have been introducing the Missional Non/Checklist. It’s got a bunch of problems with it that we have already discussed. For one, everything listed under one area could easily be listed under the other two. Yet it offers a starting point (just getting people to think that last thought is a major great piece of discipleship).

Any other ideas out there on missional discpleship? Any other ideas for improving this one? Go easy …

The Barna Group has come out with another provocative statistical study on the American church (you can see it here HT Ed Stetzer). Ed Stetzer refers to it in his blog post here. The implication of the study is that the larger the church is – the more conservative its theology. One might be led to think that this means the larger churches – bigger than 1000 – are doing a better job of discipling people into orthodox believers than smaller churches.

Now I know most people, including Ed, are not going to jump to such an overly simplistic conclusion. A perusal of the comments from Ed’s post already gives one an immediate glimpse of the cynical cloud that hovers over these statistics. So no need to try to undermine the validity of this study and the way it has gone about gathering these statistics. Instead I’d like to ask the question: is it possible these statistics tell us more about what it means “to be born again” than the conservative/orthodox quality of the mega-churches’ theology? I suggest that far from revealing that the mega church somehow nurtures/disciples orthodoxy better than small churches, we see that “born again” (along with the other terms Barna uses to locate evangelical orthodoxy) hardly means what it used mean, that indeed the born again revivalist and activist Christianity of my parents and grand parents generation is on a stark decline. What we really have here is the morphing of what it means to believe in an inerrant Bible, a divine Christ and a conversionist theology into a very vapid form of Christianity best thought of in terms of Christendom (as opposed to a vibrant revivalist evangelical activist Christianity we most often associate with these words).

I am in the middle of a writing project that describes how the main markers of traditional evangelicalism – high view of Scripture, conversionist soteriology (you must be born again) and an evangelistic activism – do not mean what they used to mean in their evangelical origins say prior to WW2. They have become belief structures, ideological objects, identifiers which in effect mean less and less in our real lives yet somehow enable us to go on claiming a very secure identity as Christians – the identity of an evangelical Bible believing Christian who knows where he/she is going when she dies! The actual practice of a high view of Scripture – i.e that this is God’s history of Mission in the world continuing on to this day, the actual practice of born again conversion – a visceral repentance and turning towards a Christian life of repentance, reconciliation, and service to God’s Mission in the world, has become an ideology where these dramatic ways of life are lost, and instead organized into corporate forms of behavior that have little impact in people’s concrete living and the Christian engagement of society. This is of course a description of what happens when Christianity becomes accommodated to an existing culture. The point then is: far from telling us that it is the true believers, orthodox Christians, the “born again, Bible believing, evangelistically oriented, vibrant Christians” that go to mega churches, this survey of Barna might actually tell us something quite different: that the remainders of what’s left of Christianity have been herded into the large mega churches to live out their days in a much more comfortable socially accommodative form of Christianity. OK, this might be harsh – but I’m just asking!!

From all indications, Barna didn’t survey the growing band of missional communities I am in communication with. I don’t blame Barna: for one – these communities are hard to find – they don’t advertise a lot!! But here, these small communities (under 200, many under 50) live Scripture in ways rarely visible in corporate Christianity. In the way they submit their lives to Scripture, its call on their lives daily, they show their assent to a high view of its authority in their lives. Here in these missional communities they believe in the divine Jesus and seek to follow him. They believe in conversion, but that conversion is more than a momentary decision, it is the turning into/the baptizing into an entire new life under His Lordship. I AM NOT SAYING THIS IS NOT VISIBLE TO SOME EXTENT IN THE MEGA CHURCHES. But I am suggesting that the high view of Scripture, the assent to Christ divinity, the believe in a “born again” life is not simply assented to but is forced to be a form of living for the smaller missional communities. Their form of organization allows for nothing else. After all, who would want to go to such a small organic community unless they were intentional in these ways? This is something completely missed by Barna’s survey.

To be sure, mega-church Christianity is organized to be accessible to individuals. We should not be surprised then when individualist aspects of Christianity (the personal born again experience, the inerrant Bible perspicuously available to each individual) find their largest prevalence in large churches. Likewise, the protestant mainline churches which have long been in decline, aren’t as attached to individualist Christianity. We should then not be surprised that their churches will be smaller more communal.  The real lessons from these Barna numbers however, may be that a.) It is the smaller missionally- minded communities of younger evangelicalism that might be the ones truly living out these beliefs, and, while this is happening b.) Christendom (what’s left of it) continues to consolidate into the mega church.

I’m open for comments and push back on this interpretation of Barna.

As I have traveled these past few years, I’ve heard the repetitive refrain from despondent pastors: “I always thought that if I preached a good sermon the church would grow.” I heard it again last week so I thought I’d comment on it along with two other beliefs about preaching that get me disturbed. Here’s 3 dying myths (IMO) of Christendom about Preaching.

If You Preach A Good Sermon The Church Will Grow (in Numbers)

Many a despondent preacher has discovered that this notion is no longer true. It has become a dying myth in post Christendom. Nevertheless, this notion gets reinforced by mega churches who leverage (by video screens etc.) one (or two) charismatic gifted teacher to build crowds who come to consume a good sermon. This, I contend, is largely drawing on the leftovers of Christendom, people still looking for “good teaching” that is portable and user friendly to somehow improve their Christian lives. I take no offense in ministering to those of us who are leftovers from Christendom, we need to be fed and nurtured too! I just want all pastors who aim their ministries in this direction to realize the pie is getting smaller and the competition hotter. Anyone therefore still holding onto the premise – if I just preach a good sermon, they will come – and ministering in post Christendom-  must either compete or be grossly disappointed with the continued dwindling of his/her congregation.

I fully grant that good teaching is necessary and it feeds the soul. (I regularly defend the 9 a.m. communal teaching hour at our church as essential) Certainly consistent doctrinal exposition of texts is important on an interpersonal dialogical level in a smaller class room type setting Unfortunately in larger arenas, the retention rate is next to nil from week to week. Good charismatic (entertaining?) preaching soothes the soul as opposed to feeds the soul. It can become a consumer item, even if it is expository preaching. Under these conditions, Christians, who are told to connect to the local church for the sake of their discipleship (as opposed to being part of a politic of mission in the world) – will naturally gravitate towards the most exciting preacher. They will leave the previous church because “I wasn’t getting fed.” For the small community churches of modernity therefore, whose members are graying, who are seeking new and younger members to replenish the dying saints, they must compete for the remainders of Christendom by presenting the Bible in as compelling and entertaining a way as they can muster. To those who can’t compete, they are in a quandary.

Having said all this, the “great halls” (stadiums) of preaching distribution” will not connect to the lost souls of post Christendom. Post Christian people are not attracted to “the sermon” as the first place to go out of their spiritual distress. We must help the leaders of the Mission in America therefore to understand, that if you spend 35-40 hours a week in your office preparing a good sermon on Sunday – making it not only theologically competent (which is worthy) but slick, you are ministering to the dying vestiges of Christendom. And don’t just expect that if you preach a good sermon on Sunday your church will grow.

Who You Preach To Is Who Will Be In Your Congregation

I have heard it said repeatedly “who you preach to is who will come.” This has worked within Christendom for centuries.  Today, in post-Christendom, it has become another dying myth that IMO should be dispelled. It says that if you preach to unbelievers in your service your members will start inviting their unbelieving friends to “hear” what you’re saying. But if you don’t preach to unbelievers you’ll have a worship service full of believers. But here again, this feeds on the impulses of Christendom – that the way to bring non-believers into the Kingdom is through inviting them to hear a good sermon. Although, frankly, this still works with what I have been calling the “leftovers of Christendom,” this simply will not make any sense to those who can think of nothing more irrelevant and disenchanting than to go listen to someone “preach at me” (often their perception). Many within Christendom, are trained into the discipline of the sermon. Instinctively, this is the place where we can go and learn about God. I don’t want to disparage the work of ministering to the “leftovers of Christendom.” It is however a shrinking pie. And more people are competing for a piece of it. Therefore it is just not necessarily as true as it once was that “Who You Preach To Is Who Will Be In Your Congregation.”

The Goal of Preaching is to Make the Bible Relevant

We pastors, who are at the end of our wits in the fields of post-Christendom, will often -as a last ditch effort- try to make our preaching more relevant. Caught between the winds of the Neo-Reformed who argue “we just need to preach the truth and they will come,” and the mega church gurus who argue that we need to make the Bible relevant, we make a last ditch effort to do the latter (because we already tried the former). Sadly however, this is a Christendom attitude that attempts to pull in the Christendom leftovers with a more updated gospel ready made to fit their already Christianized lives. As more and more churches try to “out relevant” each other, and the leftovers of Christendom become anesthetized to relevancy, “making the Bible more relevant” is revealed as yet another dying myth in post Christendom.

The Kind of Preaching We Desperately Need in Post-Christendom

The task of preaching is to proclaim truth. It is the moment that brings the truth into the present. Much like anamnesis in the Lord’s Supper is much more than intellectual recall of the Lord’s death and resuurection, so preaching is more than recalling and teaching information from the past (in the Bible) about God. Preaching is a speech-act. It is the proclaiming of the truth out of Scripture over us so as to bring the truth into being – by the Spirit. Preaching is a truth making event – not in the sense that the truth is invented here – but that the Spirit – through the gifts – brings it into reality. (I’ll have to defend myself against the accusation that I’m a Bultmannian sometime). Much like Jesus said in Luke chapter 4:21 – “today this Scripture has been fulfilled in its hearing” – proclamation is a speaking forth of an interpretation (from Scripture) of our lives in terms of who God is, the gospel and what He is doing to bring it about in our lives and thru us into the world. If anything then, far from trying to make the Scriptures relevant – the goal of preaching is to make everything else irrelevant. It is the renarrating of our selves corporately into God.

The bottom line is, even if you only have ten people left, once we preach for formation, where God’s truth is birthed in and among us, we become shaped for His Mission in the world. We can see things we didn’t see before. We act out of assumptions we didn’t have before. We imagine what God is doing in ways not possible before. And the little congregation of “ten” becomes a powder-keg for Mission and the harvesting of fields ready for the gospel (the mission will grow!).  Such preaching is essential to the missional community because it is the means by which the Spirit shapes a community into the reality of God, the Lordship of Christ and His Mission.

Bottom line is I think churches trying to enter post Christendom need to look at preaching totally differently. And I think Missional gatherings need to nurture this gift named proclamation. Comments?