Reclaiming the Mission » Incarnational

davidfitch on January 19 2011

The Attractional Basis of Neo-Reformed Church Plants YES OR NO?: or Don’t try this at home if you live in the secularized North

In a recent post on this blog I made the statement:

“I have no doubt that the success of many of the New Reformed Missional churches in the cities is the result of the influx of twenty-something populations into the cities in the past fifteen-twenty years with little or no place to go to church.” Collin Hansen – author, editor at CT, and a contributor to the Gospel Coalition – asks 2 questions in response “Could you point me to research that led you to conclude (this?) Then he also added “I would also be interested to know more about your observation that Redeemer City to City and Acts 29 “depend largely on existing Christianized populations.”

On Collin’s questions – I don’t have statistical research that is irrefutable eh? (Is there such a thing?). I think we could get such statistics if mega churches and some of the more notable Neo-Reformed church plants (Mars Hill, Redeemer) would simply survey their regular attenders and ask their congregants the question “prior to this church, did you come from a previous church or Christian upbringing?” Again and again, every growing mega church I know has simply ignored, pushed to the side or outright refused to survey their burgeoning congregation by asking this question? And yet, I have NO PROBLEM with re-invigorating dormant Christians. I simply want it recognized that attractional strategies are a poor way to engage those truly outside the Christian faith with the gospel. They are not missional in that sense. They often get caught up in competition for existing Christians.

So, In response to Collin’s legitimate questions, I think I can answer his two questions with something better than statistics – the logic of the way the New Reformed church plants carry out their strategies. I offer these two insights:

1.) On Redeemer and Acts 29 and other Neo-Reformed Church Planting Strategies being dependent upon Christianized populations.

The Neo-Reformed church planting strategies, as represented in Mark Driscoll’s Confessions of a Reformissionary, Tim Keller’s Redeemer’s Church planting manual, as well as Ed Stetzer’s manifold publications are attractionally driven. They depend heavily on the “draw” of a charismatic male preacher. They all speak about the importance of the opening service. They speak about the importance of preaching being a culturally relevant communication. Preaching is the main thing. Preaching is the draw. All of this assumes people outside of the gospel will want to come to a place in order to hear a sermon preached. It depends upon a cultural orbit where people outside of Christ would naturally go to church to hear a sermon in order to come to Christ. THIS DYNAMIC IS CHRISTENDOM. Don’t get me wrong – I UNEQUIVOCABBLY BELIEVE PREACHING IS CENTRAL TO THE FORMATION OF GOD’S PEOPLE IN THE WORLD. It just is not the foundation of church planting in mission – which is engaging a community with the gospel. It is not the basis upon which a Missional church plant begins because by definition such a Neo-Reformed church plant seeks from the outset to draw in Christians or the Christianized into this place to hear a sermon. Missional church plants on the other hand seek to engage those outside the Christian faith with the gospel. Conclusion? These church planting strategies are dependent upon Christianized populations. Yes?

I say this not to disparage the many good works for Christ among my Neo-Reformed brothers (and sisters- wink wink). I applaud pastor Driscoll, Keller, Stetzer and all the others for their great work! There are many out there who are still culturally conditioned by Christendom. And there will always also be the occasional person totally outside Christ who likewise gets caught under these influences who will come to Christ. Praise be to God! Yet, I argue that there can be little doubt, that in post Christendom, those who number among the growing populations of the secularized, have little or no intention of ever going to go hear a sermon when they seek God. When they seek God they will go other places first (Oprah, a discussion group, a book club, the pub). Granted there will be exceptions, but as a strategy for mission, it relies on an orbit of a Christianized culture. To me this is irrefutable. What say you?

I think everything what I have said here is evident in places like Mark Driscoll’s Confessions book, Redeemer’s Church Planting Manual, or Ed Stetzer’s most recent set of posts on church planting. To offer just a few examples of literally hundreds:

a.)Almost the entire structure of Mark Driscoll’s church plant of Mars Hill in Seattle is attractional based on his accounts in Confessions of a Reformission Rev.. From the way they did a “launch” to the intense drive on measuring the attendance of the Sunday gatherings. It is common throughout the book for pastor Driscoll to talk about things like how they “survived the horrendous hip-hop and expanded to two Sunday services in time for the fall push, which is when we have our biggest attendance increase” (p. 93). This kind of emphasis is ubiquitous in the book. Attractional is adopted under the argument for being “attractive” (p.31). It is really disconcerting that pastor Mark does not recognize that the “3000” who were saved (Acts 2) on Pentecost were not gathered as a mega church (p.94). They were gathered from all over the Middle East at the Pentecost festival and were part of the Jewish dispersion. Upon being saved, THEY WERE DISPERSED back into their locales to form communities back home.

b.)Tim Keller’s Redeemer church planting manual has also many revelations about how deep the attractional strategy is here. In Redeemer’s manual, there are tremendous efforts to detail how the services at Redeemer were crafted to draw non-Christians into the services. Likewise, conversions are recounted of non-Christians (and we must discern carefully what this might mean). And yet we see again the assumption that must be talked about over and over to get at the issue I am targeting here. We are depending on attracting “non-Christians” to come to a gathering for the teaching of the Bible. Can we at least admit that the average secularized non-Christian does not naturally seek to attend a church service whose main purpose is “to teach” from the Bible even if that teaching and worship always “assumes the presence of non-Christians in it even before we knew if any were there (p.13).”

Tim Keller is one of the most culturally savvy, gospel centered, “restoration of the city” oriented pastors I know. Can I say this clearly I LOVE TIM KELLER! I cast no aspersion WHATSOEVER on the impact of his/Redeemer’s ministry. I’m just saying, it is attractionally driven and depends upon Christendom habits, habits that are in decline in many parts of our culture. I don’t know if his strategy is reproducible in the years to come. Eventually as what is left of the Christianized foundation of city culture diminishes, such church planting strategies will turn into competition for the Christianized peoples as opposed to mission. Redeemer is to be commended for not advertising where Tim Keller is preaching (of the many sites Redeemer has in NYC) because they recognize that attendance would go way up where he preaches, and way down every where else. Nonetheless, this reveals the attractional foundations that lie at the base of Redeemer’s beginnings.

c.)In Ed Stetzer’s recent post about his own church planting venture and his research, he reveals his proclivity toward attractional church planting. Again, Ed has taught me a lot. And I agree with a lot of what he puts out there. But read these words from his post here: “

“Think about the person who shows up on launch Sunday due to a postcard in the mail the week before. Your hope is that your first attendants will be made up of seekers and people open to the first-time consideration of the gospel. And, that means people who are asking questions and starting their spiritual journey– they are often not ready to be spiritual leaders since they are just considering things of faith. … This Sunday we had our first preview service at Grace Church, where I am serving as lead pastor … And, as in the couple hundred people we had come Sunday, we know it to be true that we often encounter a fair number of new, seeking, and sometimes hurting on that first Sunday.”

This is worthy labor for Christ! Yet the idea of having 200 people on an opening service reveals how much this approach assumes people want to come to an opening launch of a worship service. The idea of this happening even with flyers, advertising, a famous rock star musician, IS SIMPLY NOT REALITY FOR THOSE OF US MINISTERING INS SECULARIZED CULTURES. Granted, Ed is working with a church plant in Nashville, the bastion of Christendom in United States. His approach makes sense there. I applaud his work. All I’m saying is, please don’t try this at home! If home for you is post Christendom secularized cities.

2.) On Collin’s second part of his question, regarding my contention that the success of many of the New Reformed Missional churches in the cities is the result of the influx of twenty-something populations into the cities.

I think it is irrefutable that masses of white (a lot of them evangelical) populations moved out of the American city in droves to the suburbs in 1960′s to 80’s. Starting in the nineties this reversed itself. There was a huge migration back into the city by yuppie, white twenty something populations. That wave hit peak in early nineties to 2000 (this wave was symbolically represented by the popular TV show Friends – a bunch of white twenty something’s who lived in the city). I was part of that wave and attended (and was a leader) in Park Community Church in Chicago in its early years. I often attended and knew people who went to Redeemer Presbyterian in Manhattan (where I often worked). These massive populations entered a city where the previous white evangelical churches had long since left, closed, or became minority churches. These new professionalized populations had no place to go to church. Maybe only 5% of these new professionalized city immigrants were Christians, but that still was a huge number and I firmly believe that places like Park Community Church and Redeemer became feeding grounds for these highly educated young professionalized Christian peoples.

I have NO DOUBT the ministries in question are vibrant and real. The question is, as these Christianized peoples find their churches, and there is less of that “market” left to be re-churched, what will become of mission to the secularized peoples. Shall we continue to plant churches on the Redeemer or Acts 29 model and fight over the Christianized?

In conclusion,

I applaud the work of the Neo-Reformed church planting movements. The work accomplished for Christ on many levels is irrefutable. Praise God! Seriously and sincerely! In this post, I am merely trying to point out that this strategy’s effectiveness is inherently built on attractional premises, which will become increasingly more difficult and competitive amidst the secularized cultures of the West. The remnant of Christianized populations will run out unless they are mobilized for mission among the lost cultures. For these challenges we need a new vision for church-planting. I’ve sketched in brief my ideas on this in this post? I think we need a discussion.

Am I valid in saying that Neo-Reformed church planting – in that it emphasizes the singularity of the culturally relevant preaching service as the means to form a gathering – attractional? Dependent upon culturally Christianized populations? And therefore less than missional in its vision for reaching a secularized post-Christendom culture? YES OR NO? and why? Blessings

Filed under Acts 29,Church Planting,Incarnational,Post-Attractional,Post-Christendom 83 Comments

davidfitch on September 8 2010

Sanctuary or Living Room? Senior Pastor or “Community Organizer”?: What You Do The First Year Shapes Your Congregation for Decades

It is common in church planting for N. American churches to rush in a.) naming a main leader and b.) starting a public service (what has often been called the launch). For instance: the Acts 29 Network – a training network for planting churches – puts an unusual importance on a.) choosing a strong male leader to plant the church, and b.) the launch of a service where “the gospel” is preached clearly, contextually and authoritatively. The impression here is that the preaching itself, led by a strong male leader, is sufficient to draw the lost into the gospel.

Although there is much to be thankful for in what God is doing with Acts 29, for me, this is an approach heavily dependent on the cultural conditions of Christendom. The preaching requires people already habitualized to go to church and hear a sermon. It requires people who understand the language. It organizes the church structure toward the center – where the single strong leader is – instead of outward where lost people are. It will work where there are wandering peoples who have a Christian past and/or have discontent with existing forms of church (i.e. Roman Catholic or traditional evangelical) who are easily drawn to something new and impressive. This is not, however, a Missional strategy because in many ways it sets the new community up to be a centralized attractional community. Its dynamic works against invading the rhythms of a context, living the gospel in ways that invade the secular spaces of the world that is living oblivious to God and His work in Christ for the world. If we would be missionaries, we need to think differently about congregational formation.

Our church is in the beginning stages of seeding two new communities. We’re helping with two others. Over the weekend we gathered in Hyde Park (for the Missional Midwest Roundtable of EcclesiaNetwork) with several leaders of missional communities. I led a discussion on the goals, purposes and dangers of the first year of congregational formation in what we used to call church plants: the gathering of a community amidst a new territory for mission. I said there should be three goals for the first year of a church plant- a seeding of a missional community:
1.)   Establish a small community of fellowship in the neighborhood who can pray together for the Kingdom. This community will develop as friends, dialoguing, listening, praying – learning to listen for God’s voice, observing where He is working so as to respond and participate in what He is doing to reconcile, heal, create anew and birth righteousness.
2.)   Get to know the neighborhood. Exegete it so as to know how to pray, minister, adopt rhythms, hang out, and be Christ’s presence.
3.)   Facilitate hospitality. Become a place to facilitate hospitality in the neighborhood as well as helping people move to the neigborhood. I urge a contant calling of people into the KIngdom. When these people don’t live in the neighborhood, I encourage the community to help these people of the kingdom find jobs, find a place to live at reasonable cost, know how to live in this community.

If these are the goals of the first year (or two?), I said (at the Hyde Park meeting) we should then consider two questions:

A.) Do we need a pastor or a community organizer? My contention is naming someone a “pastor” – dare I say “Senior Pastor” – starts to order the community’s life around this one person’s centralized leadership. It sets up the community for expectations that this one person shall provide for certain needs, services and the making of decisions. The community’s life becomes a centralized orbit around this one person as opposed to a dispersed activity (of God) living in and among the neighborhood. This habit will be almost impossible to overcome in the years ahead. I suggest putting off naming someone “the pastor.” Instead name him/her the “community organizer.” There will be a time and a place to name pastors (I purposely put this in the plural). But at the beginning stages a single pastor could really jam up the workings of a missional community’s involvement in the community and participation in the work.
B.) Do we meet in a sanctuary or a living room? My contention is that meeting in a sanctuary (i.e. a meeting place with rows and a pulpit) is bad for meeting the goals of the first year as stated above. Meeting in rows, with a pulpit up front creates a passivized audience but it also creates a certain expectation as to what church should be. This expectation will be almost impossible to overcome in the years that lie ahead. Instead we need to develop relationships. We need a space to voice questions and dialogue. We need to hear stories of what God is doing and express hardships and ask “what is God saying?” This is why I suggest the first year’s gathering should have the feel of a living room as opposed to a service in a sanctuary. There will be a time and place to start the rhythm of more formalized preaching/worship. But this itself should be an extension of the fellowship that is developed during this one crucial year.

In both cases, there will be a time to both ordain pastors and formalize worship (see this post here). However, what I learned at Life on the Vine is that moving too early on these two fronts (which we did) will not only force the issue, but ingrain bad habits in a community that shall harm it for years to come.

At the Midwest Missional Roundtable, four other church planters discussed their struggles with these ideas. What do you think? What are the pluses and minuses of the Acts 29 approach versus the approach proposed here? What are the pluses/minuses of “senior pastor” versus “community organizer”? What are the pluses/minuses of “sanctuary” versus “living room”?

Filed under Acts 29,Church Planting,Incarnational,Missional,Missional Leadership,Neo-Reformed 27 Comments

davidfitch on August 30 2010

The Welcoming and Mutually Transforming Community Among the LGBTQ: An Example and Some Questions

I’ve written enough on this subject already. But I sense a need to summarize some thoughts especially in light of this post by Craig Carter. I think Craig’s got me wrong and frankly inhabits a position that does not meet the demands of mission to a sexually broken society. I’ll respond to Craig’s post in next few days when I get a minute. For now, I’d like to put forward a summary of the whole thing by posting a comment from the last post. It’s by Jon Trott. Jon encapsulates the challenges, the practices and the shape of the “welcoming and mutually transforming community” as it seeks to incarnate the sexual redemption of Jesus Christ.

Living in an intentional community of very imperfect people, of which I am certainly one, I might add that sexuality within a Christian community ought to entail confession, transparency, and restoration. This could also be formulated as repentance / restoration, but that implies sexual failure, which is not always the case; one can be tempted without falling. But the need for others walking alongside — others who also transparently admit their own struggles sexually and otherwise — is one of the great lacks in the Church today. It startles me how dishonest we are individually and corporately about the near-universality of sexual temptation. How do we minister to one another? Living as I do, I have the amazing luxury of being able to walk down the hallway on most days to a friend’s room, pull him aside, and ask for prayer and/or counsel re being tempted sexually. These days, it is more often just “Five minutes to live by” — a quick confession of feeling weak or even entertaining sexual thoughts — followed by a prayer. Why do this? Why not just do it on my own? Because the act of becoming transparent before my brother also makes me accountable to him as a representative of Jesus. I know the difference — he’s not going to rescue me or condemn me. But looking into his eyes and telling the truth about myself sexually is a place to start facing my own struggles in a deeper way than I otherwise might.
There’s so much more to this… as someone who does believe in the work of mutability groups such as Exodus International (in part because I know people — see them daily — who have changed their orientation), I do bear witness to what the Scriptures say regarding homosexuality. But I don’t think homosexuality is where the conversation starts or ends. Rather, it is part of the human journey toward wholeness that Jesus uniquely enables us to walk into.

In this simple comment, Jon describes what I think gets at some the essential elements of a “welcoming and mutually transforming community” that I have tried to articulate in this long series of posts (you can read them all by clicking onto the Women/GLBTQ category). Jon’s community (the JesusPeopleUSA Community of Chicago) manages to occupy the broken position thereby inviting everyone to see their brokeness not from a position of power (making public pronouncements). We’re all in this together. This hopefully becomes a place where we do not engage “the other” from platitudes which mean little in this age where the words “heterosexual,” “gay,” “lesbian” mean any number of things. Jon’s community engages in regular concrete practices where the examination of one’s self, desires and the reshaping of those desires is all part of a communal language, liturgy and practice. Jon’s community appears to do all of this while continuing to live within the historical wisdom of the Christian tradition, that same sex unions and many other kinds of sexuality miss the purposes of God’s creation and His work for sexual redemption in our lives. I don’t know everything about JPUSA community in Chicago. I am sure there is some dirt here too. Yet Jon’s words give a little vision of what is possible through incarnationally inhabiting a context for the sexual redemption God has begun in Christ for the world.

My questions are: 1.) Is this possible in non-proximal intentional communities? say in “groups of three,” or other forms of redemptive community. 2.) Why does my brother Craig Carter have such a problem with this? If anything I expected more push back from the traditional Emergent folk who I consider my friends but have been largely silent on this particular approach I am pushing for. What’s going on here?

Filed under Incarnational,Neo-Anabaptist,Uncategorized,Women/GLBTQ 22 Comments

davidfitch on August 12 2010

The Witness of a Transforming Sexually Redemptive Community: Mission and GLBTQ Relations#3

In my last post on this subject, I said “One of evangelicalism’s biggest problems is we have no compelling sexual vision … 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 do so 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.” I said this is perhaps why we have nothing else to say to the GLBTQ peoples except “hetero-sexual sex is right” and “same-sex relations is wrong”.

It seems then that the first task of a “Welcoming and Mutually Transforming” missional community, ministering among the sexual brokenness of today’s society (whether GLBTQ or heterosexual or otherwise) is to recover a Christian vision of sexuality. There’s no way to describe what such a vision would look like in a blog post. Yet if I were to summarize the direction I think we need to go, it would be with the sentence, “human sexuality is a reflection of the Triune Relation that we are created to experience in the image of God.” But this really does not translate to those outside of Christian faith easily apart from a community living a sexuality in process of being redeemed. It would take a twenty page essay (or my sexual ethics class at Northern ?) to begin to describe this vision theologically.

So instead of that, I offer four ways God transforms our sexual desire and thereby our experience towards his created purposes. Then I make a comment on the practices we need for such a community to become this kind of place where we can be transformed by the Spirit. In describing these 4 areas for transformation (this is just a start) there’s almost a sense here, that if we allow ourselves to be shaped in these ways through confession, prayer, liturgy, truth telling etc. and thereby live them out, the GLBTQ issues will sort themselves out along with all the rest of the sexual issues the church is facing in today’s society (although I still recognize the necessity of articulating our sexual commitments internal to the Body of Christ).

FOUR AREAS FOR SEXUAL TRANSFORMATION

1.) From “sex for me” to “sex towards Oneness.” Sex is dying to self in order to become one. There is a reflection of the Triune God here. There is a reflection of the way of the cross here. “Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her …” Eph 5:25. Sex is the act of our own self-giving to the other for the sake of becoming one. And yet, the sexual malformation of our society often does the exact opposite – turning the other into an object for sexual satisfaction. The attraction that is nurtured is primarily the fulfillment of libido “for me.” Anytime this happens, we are duped and in a trap. When having sex becomes about who I am, my “sexual identity,” my ego, “how many notches on my belt,” “he/she wanted me,” “I feel desired” and any of the other numerous ways society perverts sex into self fulfillment, I suggest we’ve become trapped into objectifying and being objectified. Instead of oneness between two, there is now an awful distance. We’ve lost the formation that makes the deeper purposes of God’s creation possible. We therefore must gather into community (I suggest groups of threes) to confess and discern how we make others into objects in the way we think about them, sexualize them. (I’ve been in powerful men’s groups where this kind of therapy revolutionized men’s lives). We must examine, bring out into the light, confess, and be healed of these inordinate desires deep within the soul that seem so “natural” yet war against the purposes of God for our lives. Once released of these enslavements, our own desires are not only freed to be re-oriented, but also those who have been victimized by these sins can also be free from the way their desires have been shaped by these sins.

2.) From dominating the other to being with the other. Our society trains us to make others into a fantasy for me. This is where the patriarchal dominance of the male over the female is a reflection of sin. Christian sexual redemption however overcomes difference WITHOUT OBLITERATING IT. This is the mystery (Eph 5:28-33). The two very different persons “become one.” Anytime we obliterate difference, to avoid the difference, any dominance or control exhibited therein, is the manifestation of sin that will lead to addiction. As a reflection of the Triune three in one, God created sexual life for the bringing together of difference. In some respects, I contend this is where same-sex relations can only fall short of God’s purposes. We therefore must examine ourselves, submit ourselves to Christ for the ways we seek to avoid difference, dominate or control those who are different in our sexual lives, play off ways we have stereotyped the opposite sex.

3.) From pursuing pleasure as the first goal to seeking pleasure as the after effect of true union. I take it that in Eph 5 the love of agape (Eph 5:25 committed covenantal self-less love) is joined together with the love of eros (Eph 5:31 the love that seeks union). Marcus Barth in his commentary of Ephesians says this is the only place in Greek literature where this happens. To me this says pleasure/attraction/the desire for union is not necessarily first, but often the afterwards development of a love that pursues the covenantal purposes of God in marriage. To seek pleasure as an end itself, to make the other an object for pleasure, to somehow take any short cut to pleasure by making it an end in itself, deforms one’s sexuality. It dissables the growing of our sexuality so that, over a life time monogamous relationship, sex becomes less and less about pure physical attraction and more about the pleasure of union. The pursuit of pleasure/attraction as an end in itself therefore must be confessed as sin. We must gather in some helpful way to submit ourselves to the disciplines (many of them liturgical within the rites of the church) that shape us for a lifetime of growing into One with the person God has given us for marriage.

4. From sex as personally generative to sex as procreative, extending beyond me into life and mission. Of course, I understand that sex can and perhaps should be personally generative (giving life). But what the Catholic tradition has truly understood, is that personal generativity is only generated out of the giving of oneself over to the procreative act that is beyond me in Mission. As Bob Hyatt has said so well here, the first command in the Bible to have sex is “be fruitful and multiply.” That sex should be always tied to procreation is something beyond the social imaginary of our current society. Yet to say that sex is physically tied to the unselfish act of giving oneself over to the future, to being obligated to the out-of control act of giving birth to something beyond one’s self is to ultimately say that sex, in the Christian sense, is missional. Yes I said sex is missional. For to give birth to and raise children, not as idols to our selves but as a belief and commitment to God’s future, is missional. Tying sex and procreation together in this way changes the very experience of sex. To detach it from the giving one self over to creation (even if biologically having children is not possible) changes sex. This is why Catholics have said that once you have contraception you shape and discipline desire totally differently. In this way then, we must allow our bodies to be shaped by God’s call to procreate biologically. Now there are obvious implications here for same sex relations as well as adoption. Don’t have time to expound here. In addition we must come to see celibacy as a discipline that orders our drives towards God’s mission in the world. We must see our singleness, whether short term or life time vow, as a time for the spiritual disciplining of our bodies for God’s mission.

THE HABITS OF A SEXUAL REDEMPTIVE COMMUNITY

In order for a missional community to offer sexual transformation in Christ, it must offer a place where spiritual disciplines can be practiced for the shaping of desire into Christ. Admittedly, the received standard view is that desire is natural/given tied to biology. And of course, desire is tied to the body in some ways. Genetics have something to do with it. And yet so much of sexual formation is developmental. The reshaping of desire is inconceivable in our society because of the modern construct of desire. Yet the contradictions inherent in saying desire is or cannot be shaped are so obvious it is hard to carry out this assumption in any meaningful way See Sarah Coakley’s can’t miss work on this here (HT Kinnon, Ben Myers)

In order for any of the above areas to be transformed, we need a regular practice of confession of sin, examination, space for the Spirit to shape imagination, healing prayer, liturgy and worship. (I recommend groups of three). We must have places where we can study Scriptures, talk openly and cast a vision for what God has created in sexuality. We must practice the renouncing of certain negative habits sexually (think of how we have renounced the domination of women in patriarchal patterns), how we look at each other, how we practice friendship, how we nurture our teenagers towards sexual fidelity. We allow the Holy Spirit to train ourselves into new habits that will often be at odds with society. Yet they are a profound witness to the sexual redemption God is bringing to the world in Jesus Christ.

Has anyone experienced such a sexually redemptive community? In my attempt to boil this down into a (long) blog post, what elements have I missed that are essential for such a transformative community?

Filed under Incarnational,Missional,Uncategorized,Women/GLBTQ 30 Comments

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 26 Comments

davidfitch on June 28 2010

The Emerging View of Salvation: Brian McLaren and the Danger of De-eschatologizing the Kingdom

As I said on the two previous posts, 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 among others. 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. Here’s some of what I wrote (edited for a blog post with citations etc. deleted) on the second of these 3 traps using Brian McLaren to illustrate what such a danger might look like.

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Emerging church writers have spilt much ink criticizing evangelicalism’s narrow understanding of salvation. Author/pastor Brian McLaren has led the charge. For McLaren, truly the father of the emerging movement, evangelicalism has over-personalized salvation, made it into a transaction and has generally been pre-occupied with the afterlife and escaping hell. As a result, evangelicalism’s salvation message has actually distanced the believer from the salvation that God is doing to transform the unjust world. As a result, evangelicals have become dispassionate and even duplicitous in the way we lead our lives in the world. Again, in short, McLaren agrees with everything I have written in The End of Evangelicalism? concerning evangelicals and our practice of “the Decision.”

McLaren responds the status quo by admonishing evangelicals that they have forgotten (or ignored) the Jesus of the gospels and His message: the Kingdom of God has begun. We have focused instead on the Pauline/ Lutheran doctrine that we are justified by faith in Christ through his atoning work on the cross. He argues that evangelicalism’s salvation has become a personalized middle class gospel accommodated to the comforts of American prosperity. It is a message hardly recognizable in what Jesus preached in the gospels where He announces that the Kingdom of God has broken in, a new way of life with God has begun. McLaren, true to the evangelist he is, invites his readers to identify with it and join in living the way of Jesus in this new Kingdom. As opposed to an evangelical conversion that emphasizes the afterlife, McLaren says Jesus is about the work that God is doing in His Kingdom to reorder our lives now. In joining in with God and His Kingdom we can become part of what God is doing to transform the world.

In his The Secret Message of Jesus, McLaren takes this theme that is over 100 years old in New Testament scholarship and refashions it for evangelism. He invites his readers to follow Jesus into the socio inter-personal and political dynamics of the Kingdom birthed by, in and through Jesus Christ. In Anabaptist fashion, McLaren describes how God is working not through coercion or power but in the daily (even mundane) lives of committed followers of Christ willing to participate in what He is doing through love and reconciliation. To those of us tired of the individualist consumerist habits of evangelical salvation, Brian McLaren is a breath of fresh air. He offers a salvation that includes repentance and a decision, but is grandly holistic. It is a belief and practice that shapes us out of the duplicity and dispassion that has seemed so much a part of evangelicalism’s practice of evangelism.

In McLaren’s next book, Everything Must Change, he expands on this vision. He describes the message of Jesus as a new way of life founded upon “a counter story.” This story is of course the Kingdom of God, “a framing story” offered by Jesus that truly helps us see what God is working in the world. Over against the stories of domination in our world that are destroying the earth, sustaining suffering and exploitation and perpetrating gross injustice, McLaren calls for an awakening to this new framing story, the “creative and transforming story” of Jesus (EMC, 274), where God’s love, reconciliation, sacred beauty, restoration, justice and renewal takes shape among us and in the world. This is a story “that changes everything” (EMC ch. 3). McLaren calls his readers to become true believers and participants in this “framing story,” the Kingdom of God.

It is in Everything Must Change that we see, maybe for the first time, McLaren’s temptation to de-eschatologize the Kingdom. De-eschatologizing the Kingdom happens when one separates the Kingdom of God from its fulfillment in the historical (i.e.incarnate) work of God in Jesus Christ. It is in EMC that we notice that Brian is comfortable differentiating “the message of Jesus” (the Kingdom of God) from “the message about Jesus” (that Jesus Christ, in His life, death, resurrection and as Reigning Lord, is the means by which the Kingdom is taking place) (See for instance EMC 22,98). It is therefore possible to read him in this book as advocating that we must put our faith and trust in God and His framing story – the message of the Kingdom – as opposed to submitting ourselves to the one who has been exalted as Reigning Lord and is actually bringing in this new in-breaking Kingdom. Jesus becomes (if we’re not careful) the guide, the exemplar in helping us do this. This move de-eschatologizes the Kingdom and risks thwarting the formation of a politic for mission in three ways.

1.) First, de-eschatologizing sets the stage for “the Kingdom” to become another nebulous Master Signifier which can mean anything. When we separate the Kingdom from the ongoing in-breaking work of Jesus as reigning Lord, the Kingdom is set free from its moorings in God’s eschatological work. No, no longer grounded in its history in the nation of Israel and the fulfillment of that history in Christ, the Kingdom can be applied as a concept to any number of activities that one deems qualifies as God’s ‘ethic’ for bringing justice into the world. Indeed, it can become the means of another form of ideological complicity as we casually associate “the Kingdom” with various causes without discerning whether this is of Christ and His Kingdom. I have no question that some government initiatives qualify as God’s Kingdom, especially when Christians get involved. Yet how would we know apart from the church’s participation in God’s eschatological activity to bring this Kingdom to fulfillment in Christ? The Kingdom has of course become a Master-Signifier before. Some might even suggest that George Bush used evangelicalism’s amalgamation of democracy and the Kingdom to justify the Iraq War as the bringer of God’s “freedom” to the world. There is a long history of such “ Kingdom abuse.” Separated from the eschatological fulfillment of this Kingdom in Jesus Christ, the Kingdom can become just another Signifier that distracts us from God’s justice as opposed to building a politic of God’s justice/Mission in and among our everyday lives.

2.) Secondly, de-eschatologizing the Kingdom strips us of our ability to inhabit the gospel in peace and hospitality. Ironically, when the Kingdom is de-eschatologized, we are tempted to make it into a Cause which we advocate over against those who disagree with us. We are tempted to take control of history when the Kingdom is separated from the certainty that God is working to bring it to completion in history in Christ (1 Cor 15:25-28). As a result, the onus to bring in the Kingdom is shifted more onto what we do than what God is doing. We lose the wherewithal to participate in God’s work as patient and non-coercive participants as McLaren wants (I consider it a curious mistake of McLaren to give up on the second coming in New Kind of Christianity 197). It is only as we are confident of what God has in store for the world, that we can participate daily as His subjects, not as ones who need control the world. McLaren’s words in his title, “Everything must change,” reveal the stress of this de-eschatologizing. Instead, I would suggest “Everything Has Changed” already in Christ and we must now participate in what God has already begun and is bringing to completion in Christ for the world. Only in practicing such a belief can Christians avoid taking on “the Kingdom” as another cause which we must fight for over against those who disagree with us. This patience and hospitality is essential for a political presense that can participate in God’s Mission in the world.

3.) Lastly, de-eschatologizing the Kingdom loses the very dynamic that gives us hope for something different coming into the world. One of the first things I learned about the Kingdom in seminary is what we used to call “the already, but not yet” character of it. From Oscar Cullman, George Ladd and other NT theologians we learned there is a tension in the NT that acknowledges the Kingdom has come yet it is not yet completed. We then are a people baptized into the new age all the while continuing to live among the old. We are called to live under and bear witness to the new realities of the Kingdom, Christ’s Lordship, his defeat of the powers, his victory over death, sin and evil. This takes seriously the fact that something actually happened cosmically to the world in Jesus Christ yet it has not been fully manifested (it comes as a mustard seed). If we separate the Kingdom from the Reign of the living resurrected Christ, we lose this tension. If we lose this tension, we lose the wherewithal to engage the world for the transformation God is bringing in His Mission.

As I said last post, the emerging church shows much promise for leading post-evangelicalism into a new faithfulness for Mission. McLaren, and many other emerging leaders, teach us a salvation of the Kingdom that breeds hospitality and authentic witness to what God is bring to the whole world. He takes the foundational teachings of Jesus and writes them for a new evangelism in our time. My concern is for a new post –evangelcial political presence of faithfulness in our culture. I suggest McLaren contributes to such a new presence. If there is to be such a politic in our future however, we must avoid the trap of de-eschatologizing our belief and practice of salvation.

What do you think? Does Brian McLaren commit the ideological “trap” of de-eschatologizing the Kingdom? rendering the gospel of the Kingdom impotent for shaping a politial presense in the world?

Filed under Evangelism,Incarnational,Missional Theology,Uncategorized 14 Comments

davidfitch on June 24 2010

The “Emerging” View of Scripture: Pete Rollins and the Danger of DeIncarnationalizing the Word

As I said last post, 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 among others. But 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. Here’s some of what I wrote (edited for a blog post with citations etc. deleted) on the first of these 3 traps using Peter Rollins to illustrate what such a danger might look like.

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Emerging church writers have spilt a lot of ink criticizing evangelicalism’s modernist assumptions on Scripture. They have rightly showed the problems inherent to evangelicalism’s excessive propositionalism, hubris in interpretative method (that there is one true interpretation tied to the author’s original intent) and its resulting exclusionary arrogance. Irish philosopher Peter Rollins, a former evangelical Pentecostal, addressed these issues on behalf of the emerging church with his books How (Not) To Speak About God and his follow-up book The Fidelity of Betrayal. His deconstructive approach is popular among the emerging church leaders in N. America.

According to Rollins, the established church, which often means evangelicalism, is too certain about what we know about God and too hyper-cognitive towards Scripture thereby taking the mystery out of our encounter with the living God. We evangelicals, so Rollins suggest, tend to colonize the text, make Scripture our own possession and in effect make the words of Scripture an idolatry. As a result, we have become a controlling, uninviting, judgmental people losing the wherewithal to encounter the living God and inviting others into such an encounter. We know Scripture but we are untouched by it and so we are insulated from God who seeks to reveal Himself in and through it. In short Rollins agrees with everything I have written in my upcoming book The End of Evangelicalism? concerning the evangelical practice of “the Inerrant Bible.” Rollins solution is to move us from “right believing” to “believing in the right way.”

To get us to the right way, Rollins’ provides a diet of pre-Medieval mystics, apophatic theology and some post-structuralist ideas found from the likes of Derrida, Jean Luc Marion and John Caputo. True to his apophatic leanings, Rollins says we must approach revelation with a sense that there is always more of God concealed than is revealed. God can never be fully revealed in words, even the words of Scripture. We therefore always fall short of knowing what we mean by God. The evangelical tendency to concentrate on the known content of Scripture, therefore, misses the point. God is made known in the unknown. We must approach all revelation with a humility and openness appropriate to this reality. In true deconstructionist terms, we must acknowledge “that our various interpretations of revelation will always be provisional, fragile and fragmentary.” Context, culture and language both limit the extent of our understanding of God as well as make it possible. Truth is not so much then about what we can conceptually grasp. It is about the living encounter with God that transforms our selves as a result what Rollins labels a “soteriological event.”

To those of us who have suffered with the modernist habits of the evangelical practice of Scripture, Rollins comes as a breath of fresh air. He helps shape in us a humility towards Scripture that can breed the hospitality and conversation we need for a politic of Mission.

Rollins’ proposal, however, poses a danger. His version of truth risks that the gospel never hits the ground sufficiently to shape a political reality. He certainly intends to foster the incarnation of the gospel in people’s lives. This is a big theme among emerging leaders. Nonetheless, it is questionable whether he has provided for a confidence in what God has revealed sufficient enough to order a politic of truth, justice and reconciliation in the world. He is apophatic after all in his approach to religious language (God can never be contained in language). He is serious about all interpretations of revelation being provisional. As a result, we could end up ever and always postponing judgment as to what God is saying so that indeed we never test it, engage it and allow it to shape our lives together as a people in everyday life. Because God is revealed in what we cannot know, we may get lost in contemplation and/or conversation that never provides the determinacy to actually participate in the Mission God in concrete ways as a people.

This is what I call the danger of de-incarnationizing the Word of God. It is the same critique of deconstructionism that has been voiced by Milbank, Zizek, and others. They suggest that deconstruction glorifies “the never to be reached” and sucks us in to a ‘bad infinity.’ Our life together begins to look like a “pseudo activism indistinguishable from a Bhuddist quietism.” None of this may be true of Rollins but it is the danger that lies close at hand: the danger of a concept of truth that by definition never lands in the concrete circumstances of our every life together.

To be more precise, to de-incarnationalize the Scriptures is to separate them from their source in Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son – to remove the language of Scriptures from the logic of incarnation. God has condescended to reveal Himself in Christ via human culture including the language of Scripture itself. God was born in human flesh and lived among us speaking our language. He died, rose and ascended gifting the church with apostles, teachers and the ongoing proclamation of the Word all by the purview of the Holy Spirit. In that His Holy Spirit is among us, His presence continues and inhabits the ongoing language of His people. As we situate ourselves in this language, we are able to encounter God in it and discern Him elsewhere. The Scriptures are the very extension of the incarnate Christ through the Holy Spirit into the world via the preaching, Table and community of His people. In such a place, we are able to discern justice, righteousness, reconciliation and the ways of God in our lives together for the world. This does not deny that the language of His people always points beyond itself to the fuller reality which it cannot contain. This too is part of the incarnation (This is from Jamie Smiths Speech and Theology). And we must always approach the Scriptures with humility and submission in all the ways it is practiced. Yet the Word has condescended into our lives, and God continues that enfleshment in His people. We can discern the truth in the Spirit via the Scriptures, actual truths, what we must do, concretely for our lives together in the world. To separate the Scriptures from their incarnate continuity with the Son is to render them impotent to shape us politically as the reconciliation of God at work in the world. We are in danger of receiving a Truth that can never land in the social realities of our every day lives.

That Rollins is at least vulnerable to this trap is evident in some of the liturgical services of his Ikon community as outlined in the 2nd half of How (Not) to Speak of God. These well-crafted performances are meant to be “soteriological events.” They invite the participant to engage in Scriptural stories in ways that deconstruct the most commonly held interpretations of Scripture. Their operating mode is to turn the received interpretation ‘on its head’ so as to clear some space for a fresh encounter once it has been determined “what God is Not.” The events are inventive and engaging to say the least. There is no doubt they provoke an encounter with God. Yet these liturgies can have the affect of deconstructing the participant pulling him/her apart from our history in Christ. Yet the very purpose and profundity of Christian liturgy, as I understand it, is the opposite: to draw us into the very participation into our history of God in Christ. These Ikon services can have the affect of removing the participants from the very context or language that we need to locate ourselves within the Story. The modus operandi here illustrates some of what happens in the de-incarnationalization of the Word. In an effort to avoid the ‘creedalizing’ of doctrine, we are left devoid of (disconnected from) the history of what God has done, and is doing whereby we can see God in the world and participate in Mission. As a result, these “Ikon services” can come off almost as performance art. They can leave the participant with no place to go and no context from which to move into the world to locate God’s Mission. If this indeed happens, these are not liturgies that can incarnate a people into a life together in Christ for His Mission in the world.

The emerging church therefore has much to offer post-evangelicalism in the forging of new faithfulness for Mission. If there is to be such a politic in our future however, we must avoid the de-incarnationalizing of our belief and practice of Scripture.

What do you think? Does Pete Rollins commit the error of de-incarnationalizing the Word? rendering the Scripture impotent for shaping a politial presense in the world?

Filed under Incarnational,Missional Theology,Uncategorized 29 Comments

davidfitch on March 29 2010

Woman and Men in Ministry Together: Affirming Women and Transforming – The Missional Way

A couple weeks ago I began a series of posts on the post-evangelical landscape regarding two controversial issues – women in images ministry and the normativity of gay/lesbian relations. To reiterate, I contended that how a church/movement comes down on these two issues together reveals much about the assumptions that drive their theology. The manner in which the Neo-Reformed missionals reject women in ministry and/or GLBT relations together reveals much about the way they do theology re: Scripture, authority, sanctification etc. Likewise, the way the post Emergent/emerging coalesence here in the U.S. (heretofore referred to as pEC) affirms both reveals the underlying assumptions that drive the way they do theology. As I see it, getting at these assumptions improves the conversation in the post-evangelical landscape moving us further together into the Kingdom of God.

The Missional Way I have been proposing is a third way of doing theology. It is an incarnational logic that drives much of Missional practice. It has some similarities to the pEC’s in that it is non-foundationalist, post Christendom, driven by cultural engagement and community life, wholistic in salvation. Yet there are differences as well which I tried to make clearer previously over at this post. This incarnatiuonal, post Christendom driven understanding of life and truth in the gospel leads, so I argue, to certain directions on the two issues of “Women in Ministry” and “GLBT sexual relations” – what I’d like to call Position No. 3 “Yes to Women in Minstry/ and Transforming of All Relationships” (this phrase was tipped off and influenced by Brad/futurist guy in the comments on this post). FYI for the theologically driven reader- the transforming logic here comes from Yoder’s Authentic Transformation idea as opposed to Niebuhr’s transforming logic here which is where I see both Neo-Reformed and pEC coming from. This view a.) affirms women alongside men as equal participants in the ministry of Christ’s church in the world, and b.) calls for a redemptive community by which we explore together and witness to the sexual redemption God is working in the world in relation gay/lesbian sexuality and sexuality in toto.

In terms of the way this works out on the women in ministry issue first, according to the Missional Way, women are full participants in the ministerial authority of the church, including ordination, because:

1.) Authority by its very definition is flattened and thereby includes All! The Missional church understands authority in the church as manifested in a flattened leadership within the community – the priesthood of all believers. The Kingdom has begun. The Holy Spirit has been poured out on all – men and women alike, your sons AND DAUGHTERS shall prophesy (Acts 2:17). Men and women therefore partake together in the gifts and the authority of the Lord in the community. In so doing however, the very nature of this authority has been transformed. It is not exercised as the power of the world (Mark 10:42-45) – top down hierarchically. (This was part of what Christendom did to the church’s power). This power is exercised via the humility and vulnerability of the Incarnate Christ. In distinction from Reformed ways of thinking about authority, there is no senior pastor! Women and men participate equally. In that certain forms of church power has taken on hierarchical structure, we should not fight for women to enter authority on those terms. It is an outmoded Christendom way of authority in the church. Neither should we see authority as derived from democratic legitimation. Communal authority emerges out of the gifts within communal discernment. There is difference and roles. Equality is based on the mutual participation in one Body (1 Cor 12). It is not an equality that obliterates our differences. This way of authority and power spreads out into the world instead of centralizing authority in a professionalized top down hierarchy. Under these terms, how can women be excluded from full participation in ministry? (The Anabaptist, as well as holiness and pentecostal influences here are obvious.

2.) Ordination recognizes those gifted and entrusted with the gift of teaching preaching. From this vantage point, ordination is still important for the gifts recognized for maintaining the theological integrity of the community (preachers, teachers, apostles and others as well). There’s a succession going on here. And yet it is not an ordination of hierarchy but of service. On these terms, there is no reason to exclude women from ordination? Of course there is the issue of Scripture’s pronouncements which leads to my next point.

3.) The Kingdom Has Begun and This Helps Us Understand the Tension in Scripture Between Roles in the Church and Roles in Marriage: The Missional Way is driven by Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom – that it has begun in Himself – His life death and resurrection and Rule as Lord. It has begun, yet it is not yet consummated. For this reason gender and bodies have not disappeared yet (as the Gnostic Corinthians suggested). Marriage continues until Jesus returns and the new age consummated (Mark 12:25). Gender difference and the roles within marriage continues to exist ALTHOUGH THE KINGDOM TRANSFORMS THESE ROLES OUT OF THE PATRIARCHAL ABUSES OF THE PAST! The main point I want to make here therefore is, given this dynamic at work in the NT, we can now understand many of the texts which chasten women from teaching over men in the NT to be the chastening of women who did not honor their marriages in the exercise of their new found authority in the church- e.g. women who did not cover their hair while teaching (1 Cor 11) or who took out their newfound authority against their husbands (1 Cor 14:34) etc. So whereas the Neo-Reformed tend to take Scripture as plainly outlawing women in ministry over men, and pEC’s tend to dismiss these Scriptures as culturally obsolete, the Missional appreciation of the dynamic of the inbreaking Kingdom allows for a fuller appreciation for the eschatological tension of the Kingdom that must be upheld in these dynamics. This inevitably extols the full participation of women alongside men in the ministries of the church while guarding the maintaining of the community’s marriages in “the in between” time. Women are welcomed alongside men in the full authority of the Kingdom as long as they each maintain their God ordained marriage callings (1 Tim 3:4-5 if they are married that is, if not then this does not matter for women or men which is why Paul is always urging people to remain single and unentangled). This is all I can say on this here (I have a long unpublished paper on this). This all illustrates how the three ways often approach Scripture.

4.) The principle of revolutionary subordination. In Christ a new authority has begun and all are invited into it. Yoder called this the principle “Revolutionary Subordination.” The idea here is that just as Jesus our Lord incarnated himself, humbling himself, giving up the right to power, God exalted Him, the Truth was vindicated and empowered (Phil 2). We operate in all ways under this principle subordinating ourselves to powers, false authorities, ways of exercising power with the peaceful witness of character, truth and Scripture. God will manifest the truth. This extends into the practice of mutual submission one to another in the community (Eph 5:20, Matt 18:15-20) Jesus himself inhabits this submitting of ourselves and works in each conflict, each leader to further His Kingdom via the way of peace. We therefore reject past ways of abusive power, and do not ask women to become part of the them. For many of us, the ways we have exercised power in the church is not incarnational and must be rejected period, not just for the ways it has excluded women.

So women are of course invited as full particpants in this new way of power. Yet there is an incredible transformation here that not only affirms women’s full participation in ministry but transforms the very power structures that have hardened the church and sucked the life out of its witness. Instead, all who come into the Kingdom as a community are empowered to participate in a way of revolution that spreads the power and leadership of the church into the world for Mission.

In the past I have complained how the bland politics of Western democracy obliterates difference. I have also complained that the NeoReformed evangelicals have excluded women from authority in the church thereby foreclosing the incoming Kingdom of God. To me the Incarnational logic of the incoming Kingdom -that drives the Missional church – is a way forward out of both of these malaises.

My next post on this subject will address how the Missional Approach of Welcoming/Transforming plays out in the GLBT Sexual Relationships Issues in the church today.

Filed under Ecclesiology,Incarnational,Neo-Anabaptist,Neo-Reformed,Post-Christendom,Women in MInistry,Women/GLBTQ 23 Comments

davidfitch on August 7 2009

Ordination and the Lord’s Table: PROVIDING SOME “SHAPE” FOR “THE THINGS TO COME”

There is for better or worse, an anti-institutional bias that simmers in some parts of the missional church. This can be seen in books like George Barna’s Revolution and Neil Cole’s Organic Church. Many think the same of Alan Hirsch’s The Forgotten Ways and Hirsch and Frost’s The Shaping of Things to Come. On “The Shaping”, I applaud this book, love it and see it as the first off my shelf when trying to guide someone into the missional literature that unfolds what missional church is all about. (BTW for a new groundbreaking guide to missional church, don’t miss this book coming out shortly). And of course, I consider Alan Hirsch the best of allies and a good friend. But I have to jab a little (good-naturedly of course) that perhaps “we could use a little more shape for the things to come.”

In this regard then, I offer two principles concerning organization and ecclesiology to all missional church planters that can clarify the “incarnational” implications of the form of church practice and its organization.
1.) Structure/organization should always be an “after-development” and inextricably connected to the “gifts of the Spirit.” Yet we still need it and we should never avoid it. Structure actually grounds the “charisma” (gift) into day-to-day historical life which is another way of being incarnational (not fleeing the day to day).
2.) Ecclesiological form – certain core practices – serves to ground the church in history, i.e. preserves its continuity with Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son. In this way – church form is actually incarnational preventing the church from becoming a mystical society of individuals all into their own thing even if it might go by the name of “Jesus.”

Throughout the entire history of the church, there has always been a tension between the spontaneous and organized. And if there is a swing too far to one side or the other, bad things happen. If a church does not rely on authentic Spirit driven contextualized ministry it will become rote, dead and unengaged with the local context. If a church, as Spirit filled organism, does not provide sufficient organization enabling what the Spirit is doing, it is doubtful whether it can ever gain traction in the context. The lack of organization will frustrate and produce a never-ending chaos. The individual gifts of the Spirit (charismas) will eventually implode in their own narcissism (read 1 Cor 12,14 as Paul’s corrective). Likewise, if the church retains no historical continuity with those who have gone on before, it becomes arbitrary and so syncretistic that it is hard to recognize anything that might be Christian. If a church adheres to historical form to the exclusion of contextualizing, it becomes so separated from the culture to which it has been called to minister that it becomes incapable of participation in any Mission.

My observation is that among missional churches, house churches I have visited over the past several years, the impulse has been anti-institutional, so that there is even angst in doing the minimal organization work they allow themselves to do. Some get too anti-institutional, too afraid of organization, too detached from the historical questions. Indeed I get accused of this often by people in the church I serve as I continually push for organic forms of organization that keep the church de-centralized and attached to various forms of ministry taking shape in the locales where people actually live.

All this to say, it helps if we must understand how organization and historical form can indeed be incarnational. I think the two principles articulated above help in this regard. I think “ordination” and “the Lord’s Table” illustrate these two principles well. So here goes with my two principles.

1.) Structure/organization should always be an “after-development” and inextricably connected to the “gifts of the Spirit”: The Case of Ordination.

Alan Hirsch – in his recent book with Michael Frost: ReJesus p.75f. – uses Max Weber’s famous “routinization of charisma” to illustrate the fact that there must be a passing on of the charisma from the founding gifted leader to the resulting “organization.” “The link between the Founder to the Found” must be preserved at all times for the health of the organization to be preserved. Within NT scholarship, Bengt Holmberg back in 1980 IMO, did the best job of appropriating Weber to Paul. Holmberg showed (among many things) how the spontaneous gifts of the Spirit breaking out in the Pauline communities became routinized through a process of the recognition and formalizing of the gifts and their functioning in the church. Routinization was a positive development as long as the giftedness, the actual empowerment of the gift for authority in the church by the Holy Spirit is never separated from the office itself. The danger is to avoid all routinization saying, “we need no structure because we daily depend upon the Spirit!!” This is an over realized eschatology believing we are already in the new age entirely instead of the anticipation of it proleptically before the end of history. This is what was happening in Corinth and was the occasion for the writing of 1 Cor 12-14. Instead we need this “formalizing” – this recognizing of the gift to facilitate its flourishing in the community. This testing, recognizing includes its testing for character and orthodoxy and then blessing it. This is the function of ordination. This keeps the church grounded in history (apostolicity). This keeps the church from a Gnostic mysticism where individuals all by themselves seek to become individual Jesus’ without the historical embodiment of that in a community. At the same time however, church structure can become ossified and somehow ensconced in the church – no longer an outflowing of the life of Jesus Christ and His Lordship becoming manifest by the Spirit in a local place and time. This happens as the result of a futurist eschatology that sees the Spirit and the Kingdom as wholly future. “Jesus died, forgave our sins and will return for us in the rapture. Until then let’s live as good as we can and bring as many with us when the rapture comes.” We are therefore just biding our time until he returns. Let us organize for efficiency. Either avenue is a failure to live in the “already-but – “not yet” tension of the Kingdom breaking in through Christ’s Lordship as manifested in the Spirit in a context, place and time. I feel the false reliance on business leadership is frankly another example of a leadership notion based in a futurist eschatology.

In any case, formalized leadership (and its structure) is always an after-development of the manifestation of the gifts. It must at all times stay directly connected to the gift as empowered by the Spirit. This is how the Founder stays linked to the Founded (Eph 4). Perhaps this then is what could be meant by the phrase missiology precedes ecclesiology. If so, then I can agree with/and encourage that!

2.) Ecclesiological form – certain core practices – serves to ground the church in history, i.e. preserves its continuity with Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son: The Case of The Lord’s Table.
There are certain “things” that form the church that DO NOT CHANGE FROM CONTEXT TO CONTEXT. Instead, we do them and the shape and language of these “things” are translated to accomplish the function. These “things,” call notae or marks of the church within church history, are seen everywhere the Body of Christ comes into being. In this sense, ecclesiology is not determined by missiology. It is missiology. By becoming a people of Jesus, His Very Body, in the context we inhabit, we are sent as an apostolic community into a context to bless the world with God’s salvation in Christ.

In order for this “body” to take shape, there are these “marks” that must happen. I won’t list them now, but one good example is the Eucharist, the Lord’s Table. Kudo’s to Frank Viola and his post on Out of Ur about the post church generation. I agree with him on several things. He offered various tests in part 2 here. I might suggest that the Lord’s Table to be such a test. Here is a “ritual” that we learn that ever grafts us into the history of Jesus and Israel that shapes our lives into the Triune God and His Mission. Like the Jews and the Passover Feast, the Lord’s Table is a well-defined practice, and takes the Passover into the next dimension (in salvation-history). It keeps us in essence grounded in the incarnate Christ. It actually, through practice, forms us into a reconciling community, members of one another. It keeps us in history instead of again, becoming individualist trying ourselves to be little Jesus’ as individuals in the world. Such “little Jesus mystics” in the end, apart from His Body, eventually turn in on themselves. They seek Jesus for themselves and it usually turns into each individual’s own version of Jesus. Instead, we need the corporal existence of the Body organized for growing and shaping people into His mission in history in the world. Missional disciples (Christians shaped to participate in God’s mission in the world) do not grow on trees, they are shaped via the church through practices like the Lord’s Table into the stature of Christ (Eph 4:11-16) To reject so-called “rituals” and formal organizing principles of the church that define our very sociality, is not following the principle of incarnation, it defies it… for it pulls us out of history into self generated ecstasy. This is why I wince when I read Alan and Michael Frost say something like, “The more one replaces a fresh daily encounter with Jesus with religious forms, over time he is removed from his central place in the life of the church. The result of this removal (by whatever means) is the onset of dead religion in the place of living faith.” (p. 71 ReJesus). Now Alan and I have debated this in front of a group before. And of course Alan is right! But we shoudn’t forget that the problem isn’t the form; it is the rote and detachment from the Founder that has been allowed to happen that is the very foundation and basis for the rite in the first place.
Summary
In summary then, I want to argue that ordination and the Lord’s Table (as an example of a “ritual” which is universal for all churches in all places) make “incarnational” church possible. They do not work against it. They ground us in history, which is the essence of incarnation. Of course, in each case, these things can become dry rote. But instead of throwing them out with the proverbial bath water (for the sake of either contextualization or ridding the church of dead rote), we should seek to reinvigorate them, connect them again, and contextualize them. We are ever working at Life on the Vine to make the Eucharist the powerful grounding shaping forming event of the week that sends us out for participation in His Missio. We are ever looking for ways to make the processes of leadership recognition communal, servant oriented instead of positional, and yet historically grounding. I contend that this facilitates our participation in the Mission of God. How do you navigate this tension, between institutionalizing and spontaneity, between Spirit and form, in your own missional context? What other examples of these principles have you encountered?

P.S. on another ecclesiological vein, Bob Hyatt’s posts on video venues are a must read. To me, he illustrates the ways video venues defeat the local incarnation of a church into its immediate context. They turn a practice of the church meant to ground us into history, into a mystical Gnostic experience that detaches us from the local context. Nice post Bob! Perhaps I’ll comment on this more next time.

Filed under Ecclesiology,Incarnational,Missional,Missional Leadership 16 Comments

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David Fitch

I'm a bi-vocational pastor at Life on the Vine and the B.R. Lindner Chair of Evangelical Theology at Northern Seminary. Sometimes I tweet stuff and I'm on Facebook as well. Check out the about section for more.
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The Attractional Basis of Neo-Reformed Church Plants YES OR NO?: or Don’t try this at home if you live in the secularized North

1.) On Redeemer and Acts 29 and other Neo-Reformed Church Planting Strategies being dependent upon Christianized populations.

2.) On Collin’s second part of his question, regarding my contention that the success of many of the New Reformed Missional churches in the cities is the result of the influx of twenty-something populations into the cities.

In conclusion,

Sanctuary or Living Room? Senior Pastor or “Community Organizer”?: What You Do The First Year Shapes Your Congregation for Decades

The Welcoming and Mutually Transforming Community Among the LGBTQ: An Example and Some Questions

The Witness of a Transforming Sexually Redemptive Community: Mission and GLBTQ Relations#3

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

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

The Emerging View of Salvation: Brian McLaren and the Danger of De-eschatologizing the Kingdom

The “Emerging” View of Scripture: Pete Rollins and the Danger of DeIncarnationalizing the Word

Woman and Men in Ministry Together: Affirming Women and Transforming – The Missional Way

Ordination and the Lord’s Table: PROVIDING SOME “SHAPE” FOR “THE THINGS TO COME”

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