Reclaiming the Mission » 2010

davidfitch on July 28 2010

Why Pre-Labeling A Church Community’s Stance on Same-Sex Relations is a Bad Idea: Mission and GLBTQ Relations #2

I’ve been building an argument here on this blog for a posture I call “welcoming and mutually transforming” (WMT) towards GLBTQ peoples among us. I suggest that this is the incarnational posture of mission as we engage any culture, but especially as we seek to embody the sexual redemption made possible in the person and work of Christ in the world. I said last post that such a community would be based on three commitments that reflect this embodied (incarnational) posture in the world.
1.) We All Come Broken
2.) We Make No Pre-Set Public Statements
3.) We Embody Spiritual Disciplines that Nurture the Life in Christ for God’s Mission in the World.

This post I want to explore the Second commitment: We Make No Pre-Set Public Statements on What We are For or Against in Sexual Relations.

Here, I am asserting that as a community inhabiting a locale, we do not make any public statements concerning what we believe concerning sexual issues to people outside the community. Sexual redemption is witnessed to others through the telling of stories, humble listening and relationships. In post-Christendom cultures public statements on what we have come to believe concerning GLBTQ and any other sexual issue can only be misunderstood. Positive public statements towards GLBTQ relations (welcoming and affirming) only serve to niche the church (as a GLBTQ church). Negative public statements or public protests against GLBTQ issues only serve to be misunderstood and put the community over against those struggling with these issues. I recommend that a WMT community Make No Pre-Set Public Statements on What We are For or Against in Sexual Relations.

Of course, this is more than a policy recommendation. This is all about the incarnational missional disposition we take in a sexually broken world for the bringing in of the Kingdom. Here are three comments about this disposition

1.) There’s a difference between judging (condemning) someone and discerning alongside someone out of love for that person. To put a sign up, or announce our position against GLBTQ relations, or to somehow protest all GLBTQ issues in front of City Hall, in essence puts us in a judging position towards those we do not even know. This forecloses witness and the possibility for God’s work. I believe evangelicalism’s tendency to publicly judge and condemn on these issues forecloses the possibility for discerning alongside not only GLBTQ peoples, but the many who are struggling with sexual brokenness even inside our church communities.

1 Cor 5:12 makes the distinction between judging those in the community and those outside. Paul says we do not judge those outside the community, those we do not know. Yet Paul calls the church to “judge” those inside the community in the same passage. LET US THEREFORE QUIT JUDGING THOSE OUTSIDE THE COMMUNITY. I believe James 4:11,12 tells us not to speak evil or judge a brother inside the community. Here we are told to not take the Law under our own control, and judge our brother from a position as “judge.” The seeming contradiction between Paul and James here is solved when we realize that James’ mode is to encourage the posture of submission and humility to God. James in speaking against the judgment out of a position of superiority. In other words, there is a difference between judgment – whose goal is to condemn – and discernment alongside someone in mutual submission to Christ – whose goal is the restoration and redemption of one another out of love and humility (1 Cor 5:5). It is the latter position that we are called into as Christians. We cannot be in such a position when we have already pronounced condemning judgment. Jesus commands us towards this posture in Matt 7:1-5. The point of “take the log out of your own eye first” is that we approach one another out of the humility of our own sin. “Let the one without sin cast the first stone.” One of the biggest issues for evangelical mission among GLBTQ is the lack of this awareness of the log in our own eye. We come off judgmental. So let me say this – there is a delicate sense in which no judgment can be made against GLBTQ or any other sexual issues, until we have a redemptive sexual community that can humbly invite and listen and ask the GLBT to join us in repentance and renewal of all sexual desire. This is the essence of the position I am arguing for – Welcoming and Mutually Transforming. For these reasons I suggest no public statements about what we are for or against in terms of GLBTQ.

2.) Likewise, Pre-labeling One’s Church as “Welcoming and Affirming of GLBTQ” undercuts missional engagement as well. For we really have no way to know what that might mean? Are we in essence affirming all sexualities, which in essence means we are saying nothing about sexual redemption at all? Are we simply affirming sociologist Jodi OBrien’s recent statement on sexual relations – ”I support the fight for everyone to make choices regarding how they wish to author their own lives (in their sexuality) and the meaning they seek for themselves and those they wish to define as “family.”” If so, is there any possibility for incarnational transformation left in the area of sexuality? If a church community’s first allegiance is to Christ and the calling of one another and the world into following Him and His Kingdom, it is easy to see how these “welcoming and affirming” words – even if one took a pro-gay Christian stance – have no way to be defined. Instead, they serve only to “niche” the church. They in essence market the church and create an attractional dynamic that almost guarantees the loss of the transformational dynamic of the missional community.

Of course the same goes for those who wish to make public statements about “welcoming but not affirming.” Besides the obvious ways this communicates pre-judgment, there is simply no way we can communicate the positive Christian sexual vision, to those outside it. To prove my point, try to explain to someone outside the church why “celibacy” is part of the compelling Christian vision for sexuality. Of course, people inside evangelicalism can’t even get this. One of evangelicalism’s biggest problems is we have no compelling sexual vision which makes sense of celibacy as a fulfilling calling. We have little or no sexual ethic except the glorified desire of Hollywood lopped onto heterosexual monogamous marriage. We have no theology of desire formation. It is “lust,” and enjoy it, only while married to one person. We have no concept of the “ordering of desire.” This is why our witness is so vapid among the sexual brokenness of our day. This is perhaps why we think saying “no” to GLBTQ is enough. Yet it isn’t enough. Saying “heterosexual is God’s norm” says next to nothing in the climes of post-Christendom. It does not define the sexuality Christians are called into.

Since the vision of Christian sexuality cannot be communicated outside the community in words only, since this kind of redeemed sexuality can only be offered with embodied witness, I again strongly suggest that WMT missional communities not make public gestures that pre-label the community sexually amidst the world of sexual brokenness.

3.) We hold our existing commitments humbly as witnesses to redemption not enforcers of a morality.
That we make no public pronouncements, does not deny we carry pre-existing sexual commitments that are creation grounded, redemption filled, and desire reordering. Our community has not been brought into being ex-nihilo. We are part of a story 1000’s of years old. The wisdom in Scripture towards gay relations, pre-marital sex etc. should not be easily discarded because of science or other presumed modernist authorities. There are large parts of wisdom here which have little to do with whether Scripture actually prohibits pre-marital sex, gay sex. Protestants keep looking for Scriptural proof texts while we should be reading the depths and wisdom of the Fathers, the Pope etc… which reveal the profound meanings behind things that the world simply cannot understand (like no contraception, celibacy). It is part of being incarnational to participate in the historical development of Christ’s witness that has been given to us. We do not seek to escape history. I don’t see how we can be missional amidst the sexual brokenness of our day without a recognition that God has been working to redeem creation, and human sexuality in Christ for 2000 years.

Having said this, we must become communities that hold our commitments with a confidence sufficient to listen to those outside our commitments. We must listen and dialogue. We must so trust the Holy Spirit that Jesus is Lord that we can hear the depths of what is going on in the lives of GLBTQ peoples. Part of our problem as evangelicals is that we have been so insecure in our own sexual commitments and sexual lives that we live these commitments defensively.

Is it possible that, even while assuming the prohibition against Gay relations (which I assume), that we will discover some parts of gay sexuality that we can affirm? That there is much we can affirm about same sex friendship, never mind cross-gender friendships. Can we see understand the depths of the reasons why heterosexual relations have become so formed within gay relations, can we understand and affirm some of the qualities of love that GLBTQ peoples have searched for and found within gay relations? Can we listen? Can we search and uncover together. In the process learn about our own brokenness? All of this requires, the holding of our own commitments (those of us who are committed to the traditioned sexual ethic of Christian life) humbly, vulnerably, so as to listen. To me, such an engagement makes possible the Holy Spirit’s work in transforming us together out of submission to Scripture, mutual confession, and healing prayer.

In summary, for all of the reasons above, I am arguing that a Welcoming and Mutually Transforming Missional Community must avoid gestures that would pre-label the community’s stance of sexual relations in the neighborhood.
Is this playing games? talking out of both sides of mouth? Can there be any avoiding of pre-judgment?

My next post on the WMT community is on the Spiritual Disciplines of such a community.

Filed under Incarnational,Neo-Anabaptist,Women/GLBTQ 38 Comments

davidfitch on July 22 2010

The Mission and GLBTQ Relations: Three Commitments of a “Welcoming and Mutually Transforming” Missional Community #1

Way way back last March I started a series of posts on the two issues of a.) women in ministry and b.)the normative status of Gay/Lesbian sexual relations, and their relation to each other theologically in the post-evangelical landscape. (The entire series is here) I saw the post evangelical landscape as divided between the NeoReformed missionals (NRm) and the postEmergent Coalescence(pEC). In relation to the church’s position on GLBTQ relations, one side (NRm) took what has commonly been termed the “Welcoming but Not Affirming” position while the other side took the “Welcoming and Affirming” position. I viewed both positions as inadequate for our post-Christendom times. I asked if either position was missional? See that post here. As an alternative, I wanted to explore the incarnational logic of Missional community, a logic I believe drives the Neo-Anabaptist missional engagement of culture. I called (with the help of Brad Sargent) this position “Welcoming and Mutually Transforming” (WMT).

I left off the last post by saying that the only way to witness to and to live this WMT position was through a “welcoming and mutually transforming” community (WMT) of sexual redemption that finds its very identity “in Christ” for the Mission of God in the world. I want to flesh out what this might look like in three posts, this one and the next two to follow. I want to propose that such a sexually redemptive community is based on three commitments that reflect the embodied (incarnational) posture of such a community in the world.
1.) We All Come Broken
2.) We Make No Pre-Set Public Statements on What We are For or Against in Sexual Relations (please do not jump to conclusions on this).
3.) We Embody Spiritual Disciplines that Nurture the Life in Christ for God’s Mission in the World including Listening, Reading Scripture Together, Confession of Sin, Repentance, Dependence Upon the Spirit and other practices that affirm Life, Sexuality, Friendships, Creation and place them all within what God is Doing for Restoring the world and Reconciling it to Himself (missio Dei).

For today’s post, I offer some comments on commitment 1.). Then I’ll go quickly to 2.) and 3.) in the next two posts.

WE ALL COME BROKEN.
The overriding assumption of the “Welcoming and Mutually Transforming” community is that all are welcome, and everyone who comes must come to it as broken, in need of transformation. If there is no acknowledgment of our brokenness, of our sin and need for God, it is not possible to receive the Kingdom of God. “Blessed are the poor in Spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” If we say we are not broken, if we have no recognition of our need for transformation, why then come?

As I said here in this post, the condition of transformation in Christ, i.e salvation, is that all of our desires are submitted to Christ for renewal, orientation transformation. This is the beginning of discipleship. This is not to say apriori that all our desires are corrupt and inappropriately ordered. It merely acknowledges that there are desires in our lives that are broken and in need of healing, and we do not always know which ones these might be. Furthermore, all desires find their rightful end in God and so all desires are in essence incomplete til they are ordered in this final way.

Yet this posture, of coming to Christ as broken, must be modeled before the world in community. We, the church must be first in the confession of our brokenness. This is not just a tactic. This is the first and necessary step towards the redemption, the dying and rising with Christ, that births the renewal of all things. We must be living this “way” that we are inviting the whole world into.

The biggest problem with the evangelical church’s witness regarding sexuality among our society, nevermind among the GLBTQ, is that we ask others to change their sexual behavior without seeing the duplicity in our own sexual behaviors and orientations. We therefore come into a context, whatever its sexual issues are, from a power position, claiming everyone else is screwed up but us. This defies the incarnational logic of Christ, and the way the Triune God works in the world in Christ by the Spirit.

In the case of evangelicals and gays, evangelicals have typically baptized all heterosexual attraction as good and then offer “getting married” as the solution to anyone who cannot control him/herself. We never deal with the stunning amount of screwed up heterosexual/monosexual desire that lies resident in our churches which heap abuse after abuse upon one another and sap our sexual lives of God’s purposes.
As the community of Christ, i.e. a “welcoming and mutually transforming” community, we must lead the world into redemption by first leading the way into humility, brokenness and confession. This communal embodied posture is the defining starting point for missional engagement with a culture’s sexual issues in Christ, no matter what they might be. It embodies what it is we are inviting all people into including those who call themselves “gay.”

I think the major objection to this from the GLBTQ advocates in our midst is that “this is a power play.” By saying all desire must be submitted to Christ, the argument goes, you are pre determining our sexual desire as sin. I’ll address this more in the next post. But for now, I wish to say that Jesus and the entire New Testament insists that those in power and those with the gospel must be those who give up power, in essence go and inhabit the world powerless, live in submission to one another, and to the “other” in submission to the Lordship of Christ. Instead of saying to the gay/lesbian “you must confess your sin ________, let us instead say “let me confess my sin to you” and invite you to join in with me (discerning sin in and among my life), as we seek what redemption might look like as we submit our lives to Christ. To anyone who might seek that a particular desire be classified as sacred over the supremacy of Christ, to those who are not yet ready to enter into the death and resurrection of Christ, we grieve. This, nonetheless, is what we live incarnationally as witnesses to. This is all we have to offer. The Triune work of God in the person of Jesus Christ. The way of renewal through the death and resuurection of Jesus Christ. We are not demanding that anyone follow this path. We are not pre-judging anyone. We are merely witnessing to (and offering non-coercively) to the world what God is doing and in and through Jesus Christ.

My question to y’all, is this posture of the WMT community a power play? Is the very giving up of power a power maneuver? If so, how?

Filed under Incarnational,Neo-Anabaptist,Uncategorized,Women/GLBTQ 25 Comments

davidfitch on July 13 2010

The Diversity We Seek: The Danger of Manufactured Pre-Determined Diversity

I had a conversation with someone the other day at “the Vine” about diversity and seeking diversity. At “the Vine,” we’re in the process of planting/reviving 2 missional communities and I argued that one of these contexts – Hyde Park – had to be the most diverse place in the Midwest. She said no, that a different place – Waukegan – was. We were working with two different concepts of diversity.

The actual demographics of each place can be debated. But I argued numerically that Hyde Park was more diverse because its inhabitants included a wide range of ethnicities (white people are probably in the minority here), a wide range of economic classes (from wealthy to poor across all ethnic spectrums), and a wide range in levels of education (from the intellectual elites of Univ. of Chicago to the under educated poor of the Chicago public schools system). I said as far multiple kinds of diversity, Hyde Park had to be the most diverse place in the Midwest.

My friend said Waukegan is more diverse than Hyde Parke. What she meant when was that Waukegan is a place which is more “not us.” We are middle class suburban (majority) white people with the comforts of education, stable families, homes and jobs. Waukegan is more on the “margins,” people who are struggling for all those things. When I said Hyde Park is more diverse, I was referring to the makeup internal to that community, and its broad differences within one community. When my friend said Waukegan was more diverse, she was saying Waukegan was more “other” than us: diversity as a function of a relation external to us.

As we plant communities what are the opportunities and pitfalls of each? Which diversity should we seek to plant in? Diversity a.) or Diversity b.)? What different things should we consider in terms of God’s redemptive purposes in each? Which diversity should we seek as the most appropriate context for a church like ours to seek to inhabit?

I think these are important questions. There are opportunities and pitfalls in both. I offer a comment in relation to both kinds of diversity.

In the case of Waukegan, there is an opportunity to go to the margins and minister the gospel. Given the ubiquitous poverty, this represents “the deserted places of the empire.” These are the folk God has called us to be mindful of. There is the great readiness here, fertile soil here. “Blessed are the poor, the open handed, the ready to receive, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Just as important, here is where we can learn the Kingdom, for God is at work here in unusual and different ways than we are used to. Yet there are dangers. How do we go here and not be people of privilege? Coming with the answers? Coming with our value systems we learned in the suburbs? How do we enter with proper humility? Most importantly, we must resist the temptation that we know, can predict, what redemption will look like here we inhabit these places for the Kingdom. There is a temptation it will look like our pleasant lives back in the prosperous suburbs. This is the false promise of “the American dream”.

In the case of Hyde Park, we have opportunities here as well. We have the opportunity of calling this community into the diversity of the Kingdom, the community of reconciliation and renewal that God is bringing thru Christ. The ones who are wealthy will learn from the poor and vice versa. The ones who are educated will learn from those not and vice versa. The various ethnicities will learn to love and care and understand and learn from each other. Yet we must be careful here not to allow a manufactured diversity to take shape where somehow we all look the same. We cannot appeal to some preconceived notion of what such a diversity might look like in this context. We cannot assume what our music will be, what wealth will mean. We must avoid the mistake (and this is true of many communities) that those who are successful in economy must somehow be minimized, what their success in the world might mean here (I’ve learned this from the Afro-American church communities). They surely must model how to live differently with wealth but they also must teach us how to live in the economy for witness. There is a danger of a manufactured pre-determined flattened diversity that is often shaped by the bland vision of American democracy. God wants to create something anew here through His life of forgiveness, reconciliation and renewal.

I have noticed (a times) a manufactured diversity in large churches in majority white suburban wealthy communities. Here people of different ethnicities and social backgrounds are hired to be visible and lead from up front. Is this a good thing? Sometimes this can work for some good. Sometimes, I’m afraid it is manufactured and is niot the diversity we seek. Kingdom diversity is a culture of renewal worked out on the ground in real relationships. I tend to discourage such attempts at manufacturing diversity. What about you? Is this a temptation where you minister? In what ways do you see manufactured pre-determined diversity taking shape in Christianity? Are you against the ‘token hires’ to promote diversity? How can we avoid the tendency to do manufactured pre-determined diversity? Do we need to?

Filed under Ecclesiology,Missional Ecclesiology,Uncategorized 9 Comments

davidfitch on July 6 2010

The Emerging View of the Church in Society: Alan Hirsch/Michael Frost and the Danger of De-Ecclesiologizing The Church in Mission

This is my last of three treatments on the theology of the emerging/missional church. As I said on the three previous posts here, here and here, I’m currently winding down my book project The End of Evangelicalism? by writing an epilogue probing the possibility what a new faithfulness might look like to emerge “from the rubble” of evangelicalism. I applaud the emerging and/or missional church movements. But I contend they must avoid three dangers, three traps if they (we) are to elude the traps that evangelicalism has itself already fallen into. That’s when I came up with these three clumsy terms, de incarnationalize, de-eschatologize and de-ecclesiologize. Today, I’m examining one of my favorite persons in the missional church movement – Alan Hirsch and his co-writer Michael Frost. I love these guys. I hope they take what I wrtite here as an act of love and appreciation for what they’re doing. Here’s some of what I wrote (edited for a blog post with citations etc. deleted) on third of the 3 traps using Hirsch and Frost to illustrate what such a danger might look like.

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Emerging/Missional leaders have criticized evangelicalism’s practice of the church as too defensive and inward looking. The evangelical church, they say, has become an organization set off over against society as opposed to being a people in and among society in God’s Mission. Missiologists Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost, two of the main leaders of the missional church movement in N America, have challenged evangelicals in this regard to embrace a “missional ecclesiology” in N America.

Early on in their writing, Frost and Hirsch chided the N. American church for its obsession with attracting people to come to its services and programs. In The Shaping of Things to Come, they labeled the N. American church as fundamentally “attractional.” It is structured primarily around a building which is to be the center of all its various services and programs. This “attractional” modus operandi has engulfed all of the church’s functions including evangelism. According to Hirsch and Frost, we even seek to reach the hurting and those seeking faith by inviting them to church to a program we built to meet their needs. For Frost and Hirsch, this notion of the church is fundamentally flawed. It depends upon the social orbit of Christendom society where the societal expectation is that the church would be the center for all things having to do with God. This Christendom world, however, is slowly passing away. Today, this attractional “indrag” works to close off the church from the hurting and the poor and the ever-increasing world of non-Christians.

For Frost and Hirsch, the N. American church is carrying on the bad habits of Christendom. We still believe we possess power and influence in our culture “to compel them to come to us.” We organize ourselves into hierarchical business like structures that centralize the church’s operations instead of dispersing it into the world. In order to preserve our own culture, we divide what is sacred (the church) from the secular (the world). It is a power play requiring those who believe to come to church to meet God. As a result, the church is self-enclosed trying to defend its own view of the world. It has not only withdrawn from Mission, it has become antagonistic to it. In many ways then, Frost and Hirsch agree with just about everything I have written in The End of Evangelicalism? concerning evangelicalism’s practice of “the Christian Nation.”

In response to this state of affairs, Hirsch and Frost preach a dispersed notion of the church where it inhabits its neighborhoods and contexts of everyday life. Recounting some the core themes of missional thinkers, they unfurl how the church is to live missionally as an extension of the Mission of God in the world (not as a church that does missions as a program). We are to follow Christ and the incarnational model of God’s sending the Son into the very context, rhythms and language of everyday human life. We are to live inhabit the context and witness to the Kingdom. These are “the forgotten ways” of Jesus and His disciples, which bred the first mission into the world. It is only after we inhabit and identify with those we are with that the church can then take shape in terms of its programs and services. To do the reverse is to revert to the attractional ways of Christendom.

This brief summary does not do justice to the contributions of Hirsch and Frost to the burgeoning missional church movement in N. America. They have provoked the church, especially the evangelical church, to rethink its position in society and take up the posture of Christ in the world, who came humbly, vulnerably to serve, seek and save the lost. They offer us a practice of church that shapes us out of the dispassion and protectionism that has plagued so much of our churches. Their work is helping to shape among a politic of faithfulness for mission in our time.

Nonetheless, there is a potential ideological trap that lies within the missiological practices of Hirsch and Frost. It is the trap of de-ecclesiologizing the church’s relationship to society. By the word de-ecclesiologize, I am not referring merely to Frost/Hirsch’s resistance to the institutionizing of the church. Indeed some of that might be warranted. I refer instead to the separating of the practice of the church from any continuous work of the incarnate Christ in history as extended in the forms of the church by the Holy Spirit. If this happens, I contend that the church is set adrift from any determination in Christ and the work of Christ in the world. It becomes de-ecclesiologized.

This trap is not immediately apparent in Frost and Hirsch. On the contrary, they have written extensively in sympathy with theme of The End of Evangelicalism?: the restoring of Christ to the center of a politic of Mission in the world. The central task of their book ReJesus is to “reinstate the central role of Jesus … in the life and mission of God’s people.” They do not wish to separate the practice of the church from Christ, they seek to “reinstate” it. They often summarize their approach to this issue with the formula: “mission must precede ecclesiology and that Christology must precede missiology.” For Hirsch and Frost, this phrase requires that Christ must come first and be the source of the church’s formation in the world. It is Christology which drives Mission from which the church is birthed in the world.

It is this formula, however, and the assumptions behind it, that reveal the potential for the de-ecclesiologizing of the church in their ecclesiology. Implicit in this formula is that we (anyone) can know/encounter Christ determinately apart from the ongoing form of the church. The continuous forms of the church, including Eucharist, the preaching and interpretation of the canon of Scripture, the fellowship of the gifts, are therefore dispensable for Mission. Jesus forms the church directly in Mission and the church is de-ecclesiologized in Mission.

Hirsch and Frost of course are following the founding theological mantra of missional church theology, that “it is not the church that has a mission to bring God’s salvation to the world, it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the church.” That the church should be defined as an extension of God’s Mission in the sending of the Son should not be questioned. Yet for Hirsch and Frost, this doctrine means that the church carries no continuous form from context to context. According to Hirsch, first comes entering the cultural context, identifying with its people, getting know, understand and live among the context. Only then, after one’s life takes shape in the culture, after redemption has taken hold in the culture, can the church take on forms. The church, as Alan is fond of saying, “comes out the back of mission.” The forms in which the church takes shape in the world are all a matter of post facto development after “we” have inhabited a context. The questions however remain: who are the ones who engage the context prior to being the church? Does not this missiological engagment assume the prior existence of the church? And how does one know Christ in this context apart from the continuous forms of the church to carry on His presence in the world?

Hirsch and Frost imply in ReJesus that it is through “a direct and unmediated relationship” between the individual believer and Christ that He is known in the context (ReJesus 55). They go to great lengths to “debunk the many false images” of Jesus that have existed in the church down through the ages. They then seek to “go back to the daring, radical, strange, wonderful, inexplicable, unstoppable, marvelous, unsettling, disturbing, caring, powerful God-Man” (ReJesus 105,111). They recognize here that we must allow all the various images of Jesus in the gospels to drive our encounter with the world. There is a serious attention given to the texts of Scripture in defending the “wild Messiah” Jesus they advocate as the basis for Mission in the world. There remains the question however, how do we seek after this Jesus without ourselves becoming victums of another encultured view of Christ? this time the Wild Messiah as portrayed and argued for by Hirsch and Frost. For Frost and Hirsch it is a fresh encounter with the living Christ which over comes the forms of the church instead of being made manifest in these same forms as Christ has given them to the church. The danger here is that Christians are left without a basis for our very connection to the ongoing presence of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit in the Triune history. We become a bunch of individuals seeking a personal mystical experience of Christ via our own interpretation of the gospels. We become individual worshipers of a self-described Jesus devoid of the means to be immersed in the work of the Triune God in the world.

The church however has been given practices from Christ and in continuity with Christ as the Sent One to embody Christ in the world by the Spirit. Within these practices of the Eucharist, the preaching of the Word, baptism, the fellowship of the “gifts” through mutual submission, ordination, service to the poor (Matt 25), the presence of Christ in mutual discernment (Matt 18:15-20) the body of Christ is materialized in the world. These various practices must be contextualized for each place we inhabit God’s Mission. Yet it is here in these practices that we learn that the incarnation is more than a principle to be applied as a missiological method – it is a reality extended in and thru the church. These practices should not separate us from the world, they should incarnate us as His body in the world. To somehow separate these practices from the extended work of Christ in history into the world via the Spirit is to risk setting up on high an ideological picture of Jesus as the possession of each individual. Instead through these simple ecclesial practices, we are enabled as individuals to submit to and participate in the full Trinitarian Mission of God of which the church has been sent and is a part. In these ways, missiology does not precede ecclesiology, missiology is ecclesiology and vice versa..

The danger in all of this is that the church falls into the trap of becoming ideologized. Without the forms of the church, we Christians are left without a source of political formation in the world. Without a practice to be formed “in Christ,” we as individuals instead gravitate around compelling causes, which often can be used and manipulated for ulterior purposes, whether it be the building of a large organization or the accumulation of power for purposes devoid of Christ. If the church has no stance from which to engage the world, discern the issues, and engage God’s work in the world, it is susceptible to disappearing as it is contextualized out of existence. It can then become an ideology or worse, the instrument of an ideology. Either way the church loses its faithfulness. “Mission” becomes an ideological banner because it too is undetermined by a concrete practice in the world. It in essence becomes a concept to be applied. We can be lured to put it to the service of the pragmatics of making the church more successful in terms and for purposes that have little to do with God’s Mission. In all these ways, de-ecclesiologizing the church’s place in the world makes the church susceptible to the trap of becoming the instrument of ideology, repeating (what I show in the End of Evangelicalism?) the evangelical mistake of “the Christian Nation.”

Hirsch and Frost rightly want to guard against the Western habit of imposing a form of imperialism on the host cultures we seek to inhabit. They want to guard against the church thinking its got it all figured out before it lands in a culture. They want to guard against the tendency for the church to think that the Holy Spirit is only working in the church and its practices. For all of this Hirsch and Frost are to be applauded. With Frost and Hirsch, we should understand that the practice of the church needs be contextualized although not discarded. The church has failed often in its history at this. We need to realize that God’s Mission is at work outside the church, that Jesus is Lord over all things, and the church exists to inhabit, discern and be responsive to His work, not our own pre agendas. The church has failed at this. We need to listen to Hirsch and Frost. Yet we must do so while taking heed to avoid the trap of de-ecclesiologizing the church stance in society.

There is no question in my mind that Hirsch and Frost are leading post evangelicalism towards a new faithfulness for Mission. They teach us how to be Christ’s body, His very incarnate reality in the world. They teach us the ways of compassion, of being among the poor and the needy, they teach us how to be an hospitable witness that embodies the justice of Christ in the world. These are truly the beginnings of a politic of faithfulness. If there is to be such a politic in our future however, we must avoid the trap of de-eccelesiologizing our belief and practice of the church in society.

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What do you think? Does Alan and Michael fall into the trap of de-ecclesiologizing the church? Have I fallen into the error of Catholicism (please describe what that might be for you eh?)? Does this matter?

Filed under Ecclesiology,Missional Ecclesiology,Missional Theology,Uncategorized 27 Comments

davidfitch on July 1 2010

Doctor of Ministry in Missional Church: Check this out

Over the years I have wanted to be part of a doctoral program that prepares pastors already in ministry to re-shape/guide their existing churches/minsitries into a Missional orientation. This is easier said than done. Having been through our share of transitions here at Northern in our D.Min leadership, I’ve seen first hand the issues involved in structuring a D. Min program that can be both a.) manageable by the student and yet b.) substantive enough to lead him/her through the theological, Biblical and contextual issues necessary to truly engage ministry challenges. These two issues become doubly important for those of us who seek to train and engage the church into God’s Mission because we don’t want to extract the student out of his/her context for too long – that would defeat the purpose of what we’re doing. And yet substantive training in theology, Scripture and contextual engagement is so important because of the changes any Missional re-orientation will demand.

For all these reasons, I think we have put something together here at Northern. We are bringing together Al Roxburgh, Craig Van Gelder and myself to teach a Doctor of Ministry in Missional Church. I will be covering the theological and ecclesiological aspects. Al will cover the various transitional and leadership aspects. And Craig will cover the various issues of cultural engagement. In reality all of us will be covering all four of these areas as they intersect in what we’re doing. This is huge. The midwest has needed this kind of program for Missional church studies. There are seven courses in total and a Doctoral thesis. Three of the courses are research methodology and orientation within the disciplines. It’s compact yet thorough. Are you interested!! Contact me via Northern’s website or Randy Tumblin in admissions via e-mail at rtumblin@seminary.edu. We’ll be taking approximately the first twelve to join up. Blessings on your journey!!

SPECIAL THANKS!! to Len Hjalmarson who posted about the program at his blog NextReformation, Todd Littleton who did the same at his blog, Jamie Arpin Ricci here at his blog Living Alternative and Brad Brisco, Rick Meigs and Brad Sargent. Thanks for helping get the word out!!

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