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 emerging
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.
Reflections on Total Church
Here are some hits from the Total Church conference that I managed to capture:
Total Church is all about Christians living out their lives in community that is shaped in every way by the Gospel. (this was hammered throughout…made sense to me)
The gospel is the air we need to breath every single day – it’s not just something we pull out for evangelistic purposes. (I had already come to this conviction recently…the need to preach the gospel to believers not just un-believers)
The life of the believer is one of joyful repentance (Luther). It’s like we are continually saved, continually responding to the gospel. (Same as above)
We model to a watching world our covenantal life together. (It seems to me we don’t show the watching world anything much better/different than what they already experience…tough call)
Mission is the central purpose of the church in the world – central, not peripheral. (Pretty standard, missional thinking here)
More often than not the gospel and mission becomes the last bolt-on element to our lives.
So decision making goes: Job -> Location -> House -> School -> Church -> Gospel/Mission.
Instead it should be: Gospel/Mission -> Church -> Location/School/House/Job
(The above observations are so so true…The Crowded House guys really challenge their people to think very counterculturally on this)
When you use the word church, you are immediately mis-communicating as the word has so much baggage and misperception. (I have sympathy for this view, though I am in two minds about what to do about it)
The bedrock of gospel ministry - Long Term, Low Key, Relational (this was foundational…as an approach this seems so much more authentic than hit ‘em hard, confrontational evangelism)
Living with gospel intentionality in the everyday ordinary things of life. (gospel intentionality was a phrase that permeated the whole day. It very much underpinned the above ministry approach)
A commitment to building relationships and living out the gospel and talking about it as part of normal conversation. May require the introverted people to become relational. (Yep…fire up introverts)
I am reading the Total Church book at the moment which is helping to round out the concept. One key outtake, which others have also noted, is the concept of Evangelism in community, which really exhorts outside relationships being built in the context of the gospel community living out it’s life in all it’s dimensions. I really like the concept, but doing it in practice requires a huge shift in praxis, and it’s foreign to our fiercely individualistic culture.
The Church with No Singing
…with the missional revolution & all that, we’ve discovered that many people are part of tribes/subcultures, many of which are not interested in church as we know it, and it may be that a Christian community needs to grow within the tribe - an indigenous church rather than inviting individuals from the tribe to a normal church. Such a tribe may be big into some style of music, in which case a church in that scene may feature that kind of music. Or remembering that most secular Aussies don’t sing much at all, maybe some of the churches to emerge next will not sing at all.
So commented Eric in a response to a recent post on music.
This is a really interesting thought. A church with no singing.
My church actually had no singing for four weeks in January as we went through the “Ideas that Changed the World” series. Honestly, I quite liked it (and just not because it gave me a break!).
My community group is looking at what it means to be the church, and the role of singing is one topic that’s already come up.
I’ll report back on the findings.
Fan of Nooma?
One of the greatest blessings of the past 400-500 years has been the translation of the hebrew and greek scriptures into all sorts of languages, including our own wacky dialect - English.
The result is, that anyone who can read, can examine the bible for themselves and understand God’s word, and in doing so be able to evaluate the truth of what others say.
I say this as a preface to directing you to this series of critique’s by Greg Gilbert of the popular Nooma video series, presented by Rob Bell.
I have personally watched a number of these short, topic based DVD’s over the years and mostly found them OK. Some were a bit weird, but most had interesting challenges.
If you are a Nooma fan, I would encourage you to have a read through the critique. It will help you to approach these resources with eyes wide open, and like the Bereans in Acts 17, you can examine the scriptures yourself to see if these things are so.
Excuses, Excuses
Posting action has (obviously) been slow…
The truth is I am completely focused on an opportunity for an incarnational commercial proximity space which has come up out of the blue. Very, very exciting.
To be honest it is pretty scary, so for the pray-ers out there, I’d appreciate a quick prayer for wisdom in discerning God’s path.
Thanks all,
Jeff
Incarnational Coffee
I had an unexpected experience today…
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
