Light of the World, a City on A Hill
…thinking out loud about living missionally in the city of Sydney so that the city will come to know Jesus…Archive for books
Total Church on Journey’s In Between
Matt Stone is a Sydney based missional thinker and former Sydney Anglican (he’s gone Baptist, but we still love him).
Matt comments on the recent Total Church conference and peripheral discussions on his blog.
If you were at the conference or have some views to share, head on over to Matt’s blog.
Reading not Blogging
I have to admit, I have had little enthusiasm for blogging over the last few weeks. Not sure why…probably just been too busy.
Anyway, as always, I have been reading.
My current list is:
- Pierced for our Transgressions - Rediscovering the glory of penal substitution (Jeffery, Ovey, Sach)
- The Future of Justification: A response to NT Wright (Piper)
- Total Church (Timmis, Chester)
I am enjoying all three. The Piper book, which tackles the New Perspective on Paul, is pretty heavy going but good to stretch my brain.
Christology, Missiology, Ecclesiology
I have been steadily ploughing through my recent Amazon haul of books and am finding them all really helpful.
I will post some more complete thoughts later, but for now I wanted to mention a line of thinking that has come out from a number of authors, and has resonated with me.
The view is that we first and foremost must understand and define our Christology (who Jesus is and what is the Gospel) and this in turn drives and shapes our Missiology (why are we here, what are we here to do) and then against the backdrop of our cultural context we form our Ecclesiology (what we do and how we do it).
Michael Frost explicitly spells this out in his “Exiles” book.
I think sometimes my faith tribe (and others like it) can be a bit “Pauline”, i.e. skewed toward the NT Epistles, and in turn de-emphaise the Gospels, reducing them to “Jesus died, rose, ascended,believe in him and be saved”.
I am now trying to re-discover the Gospels and perhaps move towards more well rounded view of ‘the’ Gospel.
Its Church Jim, but not as we know it
Now I’m not a Trekky by any stretch of the imagination, but the quote came to mind as I reflected on Neil Cole’s most recent book, Organic Church.
I ploughed through the book over the recent Australia Day long weekend, mainly as the content compelled me to keep reading.
In a nutshell Cole, who has previously been a “normal” church pastor as well as a denominational church planting leader, puts forward the view that in this post-modern age, the most effective way of spreading the gospel is via what he calls organic church planting movements.
The book starts with a parallel to the Matrix (which seems like a popular thing to do with Christian writers). Cole suggests that the info that follows is a bit like ‘taking the red pill’, which, if you haven’t seen the movie, is something Neo (Keanu Reeves) does in order to be freed from the blissful ignorance of the matrix and exposed to the stunning truth of the real world.
I don’t know that Cole’s revelations are on the same scale as the revelations about the Matrix were to Neo (that his whole existence was a complete ruse), but in many ways I felt like my eyes were opened to some profound possibilities.
Like many, Cole is not a fan of “Attractional” church, and his alternative very much focuses on taking the gospel to the people. One of the key start points is frequenting places where people gather and and then building relationships. The places he mentions are cafe’s, coffee shops, sporting venues, parks & playgrounds - wherever people congregate. For Cole, the local coffee shop was his venue of choice (to which I say, amen) and he recounts the story of developing a faith community out of the caffeine-addicted regulars, which then went on to start another faith community in the next coffee shop.
After six years of this process of ‘injecting’ the gospel into these normal, everyday places and passing it on from place to place, Cole claims that there are over 600 functioning faith communities comprising over 10,000 people.
Now you may not be impressed by numbers (I keep seeing comments suggesting success is not measured by converts), but how ever you see it, there now seems to be 10,0000 more people who know Jesus thanks to the Holy Spirit and Neil Cole’s approach than before.
I see both strengths and areas for caution in Cole’s discipleship approach.
One key strength is reproducibility. This is an area the “Attractional” church model really struggles with as it requires a lot of energy, money, and talent to run this type of church to a standard that people are used to in the regular world. Anyone who has started a new church plant will know this. The “Organic” approach, on the other hand, requires very little resource, and in fact funnels a large part of the most available resource -time- into relationship building.
Another strength is that those groups of people who would never even consider the Christian Church as a place to meet their spiritual yearnings are within reach. By going to them, tribes like Tradies, Goths & Emo’s, Atheists and hardcore metal fans can all fall into the relationship circles of Christians and therefore the gospel.
The main areas for caution are that of leadership development and maintaining sound doctrine. In reading the book you very much get the sense that new believers become leaders of these new faith communities pretty quickly, raising obvious questions around spiritual maturity and wisdom. I am in two minds about this. On one hand, leadership of a church (regardless of size) in my tribe (Anglicans) is predicated on at least 4 years of full-time theological training. On the other hand, when Paul and Co were starting churches in the new testament they “appointed elders for them in every church, with prayer and fasting they committed them to the Lord” so says Acts 14:23 [ESV]. They didn’t send them off to bible college for 4 years before they were counted worthy to lead. If it was good enough for Paul, should it also be good enough for us?
On balance, if you could ensure sound doctrine underpinned each new faith community being developed, I reckon Cole’s approach has real merit.
Re-Erecting the Sacred Secular Divide
I have had to put ‘Emerging Churches’ (the book by Bolger/Gibbs) aside for a time as, honestly, the latter chapters around participatory worship were grating on me. The reason is that, in the earlier parts of the book, the various leaders were arguing for a demolition of the sacred/secular divide (to which I say amen), but then go on to argue that every person in the corporate gathering must contribute from their giftedness if it is to be legitimate. But to me this then implies that the use of one’s gifts outside the large(r) gathering somehow don’t count in the scheme of serving the Church body, and so the sacred/secular divide goes up again.
“I want to prepare like an evangelical; preach like a pentecostal; pray like a mystic; do the spiritual disciplines like a desert father; art like a catholic; and social justice like a liberal”.
Of the Reading of Books, there is no end
I now have another 9 books on the way from Amazon (I love Amazon….really). They are:
- Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality - Miller
- Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens - Cole
- Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture - Newbigin
- Simple Church: Returning to God’s Process for Making Disciples - Rainer
- The Gospel in a Pluralist Society - Newbigin
- Evangelism Without Additives: What if sharing your faith meant just being yourself? - Henderson
- Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture - Frost
- Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission
- They Like Jesus but Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations - Kimball
I hope Newbigin lives up to the hype…
On mission
Jeff
Challenging, Disturbing Reading
I am working my way through another book which has come recommended, Emerging Churches by Gibbs & Bolger, a couple of academic types from Fuller Seminary in California. The book is the result of the authors extensive interviewing of Emerging Church leaders from the UK and US.
I am almost half-way through and am feeling, to be honest, a mixture of challenge, excitement and significant discomfort.
What’s exciting is that many of the faith communities described are truly striving to demonstrate an “all-of-life” faith, with the elements of the gospel permeating even the most trivial of life’s details. The result is people loving and serving their communities in all sorts of spontaneous ways.
The ecclesiology (how we do “church”) of most of these emerging communities bears little resemblance to what most of know. By in large the Sunday gathering is de-emphasised in favour of less formal, smaller gatherings that sync with day-to-day life. This approach is very challenging for me and I am still thinking through how this could really work in practice.
There are a number of things disturbing me. One is, for the most part, a rejection/minimisation of authoritative teaching, instead favouring a very post-modern multi-perspectival approach whereby everyone in the community contributes their view. Now while this is not necessarily bad I have seen that this can often just be the “blind-leading-the-blind” thereby affirming each other in ignorance.
The more disturbing aspect, however, is an unwillingness to stand up for the truth claims of scripture. I accept this is a generallisation, however, it is a stance taken by so many in the book I don’t think it to be completely unfair. This reluctunce has certainly been a key criticism levelled at the EMC in the blogosphere and, based on the leaders quoted, I can see why. A quote from a guy called Pete Rollins stunned me. He says (in relation to interfaith dialogue):
“We demphasise the idea that Christians have God and all others don’t by attempting to engage in open two-way conversations. This does not mean we have lasped into relativism, as we still believe in the uniqueness of our own tradition, but we believe that is teaches us to be open to all. We are genuinely open to being wrong about parts and perhaps all of our beliefs - while at the same time being fully committed to them.” pg132
(emphasis mine).
From what I’ve read in a number of books, there are some wonderful and challenging elements coming out of the EMC movement and I’m finding afinitity with guys like Michael Frost who draw these out clearly. On the other hand, there is truth (no pun intended) to the criticisms of some who look to be simply re-badging late 20th century liberalism. As Driscoll said in a recent conference talk, there’s one significant thing these guys are lacking: Converts.
Jeff
Another (undoubtably) good book
Counter Cultural Living…Part 3
Do you want to be “counter cultural”?
Be like me.
I am married (and never divorced), and live with three of my own children (admittedly one is still on the way) with aforesaid marriage partner.
According to social researcher Hugh Mackay, I am now a complete minority…on the fringe of Australian society.
The mainstream is now people living alone, or perhaps with one other person. No wonder ‘community’ (whether in the flesh or in the digital sphere) is so sought after.
More Reading…
