Thanks to Jenna for getting my butt off the blogger bench.

Today I spent almost the whole day doing some of my favorite things: traveling and networking.  My little dirty secret:  I actually LIKE public transit - it gives me great delight in playing the game of transferring buses, deciphering train map puzzles, and timing the whole thing just right.  Today I took Pace Bus 250 all the way from one end of the route to the other - all the way to O’Hare Airport’s Kiss n’ Fly.  The bus driver looked at me a bit suspiciously as I looked longingly into his eyes…

From there, I met Dave Rudin, who is pastor at Summit View Christian Church in Hoffman Estates, and we carpooled it the rest of the way.

It’s amazing how church planters are really most interested in the same things.  They are interested in how to bring someone in desperate need of Jesus to a place where they are ready to follow him, and grow them even beyond that to the point where they are a mature believer helping others come to know Christ.  This process of reproducing disciples is the heart of what church planting is all about.  In fact, most of my interactions with the term “church planting” have left me somewhat wanting, since Jesus never asks us to “go into all the world and plant churches” - but rather make disciples.

Today’s group conversation however centered around our own discipleship.  The process of spiritual formation and personal growth is a favorite topic of mine - especially when talking like this in groups.  It’s inevitable that people will start throwing resources and new ideas around, and I’ll start writing them down like a crazy person.

Speaking of sweet resources: check out 48 Days to the Work You Love by Dan Miller, and this sweet quote by Kahlil Gibran:

Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste,

it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple

and take alms of those who work with joy.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread

that feeds but half man’s hunger.

And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes,

your grudge distills a poison in the wine.

And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing,

you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

All work is empty save when there is love;

and when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself,

and to one another, and to God.

What is it that gets your heart racing - that makes the time fly by?  If you’re only working for the money, chances are good you won’t last long in the job.  If you just put your resume out there and hope someone bites, chances are good you’ll hate your job just like the rest of America.  But if you discover your calling - your vocation - and can think of some way in which your job fits into the higher calling, then even cleaning toliets or sweeping floors can be genuine work and worship to God!  May we all find our calling, and enjoy the work God has brought us to.

“Your lack of faith disturbs me.” - Darth Vader, Star Wars Episode IV

Let’s never take ourselves too seriously!

It’s hard for me to take much of Frank Viola. He has a harsh writing style to him and though I’m totally into reading about the issues he focuses on, I guess I just don’t get what field he’s playing in. I love the brother and read his Pagan Christianity TWICE before reviewing it (to help make up for everybody else preferring to review first and read later). So he’s written a little article that’s floating around the web called “Finding Organic Church.” Its basically written to answer the question he hears over and over again, “What if I want to experience this kind of body life but there are no organic churches in the area to be a part of and we can’t relocate?” Frank’s basic response is to do what Aquilla and Priscilla did; to do what John the Baptist did - prepare a foundation for someone else to come. To Frank, that means gathering people together and cultivating interest in organic church by starting reading groups, BBQs, etc. Then invite (or cultivate) a nearby itinerant church planter to teach the church how to be led by Jesus rather than by a person.

I see this all through Acts and the New Covenant, and it has some practical/psychosocial handles to it as well (how can someone regularly participating in the group authoritatively tell everyone not to lead?). I know that this will be a useful method for ministry in organic church planting, and I’m thankful for the work he’s done on it. Keeping it in check that it is ONLY a method and not the lynch pin to life, the universe, and everything. (Americans have this love affair with franchising. It’s in my blood too.) But it seems to miss the point that new churches are started not just by existing Christians getting together for a book club, but by new converts who are meeting in a dance club or a coffeehouse! If this “revolution” becomes just another sheep trade, I want out.

He states that he’s writing this article in part because he has seen too many house churches become unwilling to accept outside aid. I know what that can look like. Too many burnt Christians think that they must put “their church” in a “reverse quarantine,” the same way we choose to drink bottled water or organic foods. If the whole world is diseased, then the healthy hole up somewhere till the whole thing passes. The problem is they quickly become insular and infighting usually destroys the group within 6 months to 1 year. Frank’s hope is that there will be healthy, itinerant church planters that can visit churches throughout a region and keep feeding healthy nutrients of teaching, exhortation, and mission to these churches.

Contrary to popular simple church beliefs, not everyone can plant a church. (There’s nothing simple about it.) Sure, anyone can hold a bible study - but it takes someone who is called, gifted, trained, and sent as a church planter (an apostle) to help center a spiritual family on Jesus Christ and the Way. It takes intense training to instill healthy DNA into a church, then to support that spiritual family - many times it takes failing and falling hard on your knees. The difficult work of inviting communities of people to die to themselves is not a role many should covet, nor are many called to. But it is a good calling.

However God arranges your spiritual family, remember that he will also arrange for cross-pollination of your family and others in the extended family of God. Keep your doors open, not just for the teacher or church planter, but especially for the stranger, the poor, and the lost - they may have even more to help us discover just want kind of person this Jesus really is.

As for Frank, I am thankful for his ministry and I hope that he continues to participate in uncovering for all of us what it means to be the body of Christ. I’m less inclined than he to think that institution is a bad thing (its actually an inevitable thing, even a group of friends choosing a movie to watch is by definition an institution). I believe that for every insular, cynical, and paranoid house church out there, there are 10 vibrant, transforming, and multiplying churches with open hearts prepared to accept whatever God gives them. May we be part of that transforming revolution of love.

We should find people of great influence in our peer group and in our discipline and listen to them. Because they differ slightly from us, these people sharpen us. Sometimes they are achieving such greatness that we feel a drip of depression looming in our seeming lack of accomplishment. But that only remains when we focus on our accomplishments or lack thereof.

Many would call this sort of activity “self-centered.” I contend that it is probably not “self-centered” enough. Perhaps we need to go even deeper into searching ourselves - we need to search inside of ourselves to find the still small voice instructing us. This voice trumps all external, peer-reviewed comparison. It says, “Keep running the race” and “fight the good fight” and “I will give you rest.” Man, I love that still small voice.

Two weeks ago I was graduating with my masters. One week ago I was back in the classroom. Yeah, I’m asking the very same question you are! “WHY!?!?”

ACU was “nice enough” to let me graduate 3 hours short of my degree, so long as I took and passed a summer one-week intensive course. I naturally picked a class right after my regular semester ended, to get the course completed as quickly as possible. I chose “Emerging Culture & Emerging Churches” with Dr. Chris Flanders. Flanders got his Phd from Fuller Seminary, and before that was a missionary and church planter in Thailand. Since he’s been in Abilene, he’s joined the chorus of professors describing the postmodern shift, but he alone seems to think that such shifts might at all change how and what church looks like.

The class was very engaging, and also very affirming. It helped me think through some of the principles of thought in postmodernity (reading philosophers like Derrida, Foucault, Caputo, etc) and then talking about what that might mean for communities of faith. We looked at churches trying to explore a post-foundationalist theology…all very heady, but also very interesting stuff.

One big take away was an axis continuum Flanders showed us from Mary Douglas. It looked something like this:

Grid and Group Theory:

The two axes, Group, and Grid, show the progress of institutions (which was defined as a coordinating group of any kind) as growing inevitably and increasingly higher in “Grid”. The higher you go in Grid, the more structure and levels of authority there are. The rules and roles are more clearly defined. The other axis, Group describes the degree to which the collective controls the individual and degree to which people are bonded to particular social units - the sense of “family” the group feels.

Church examples of each: Hierarchy (Catholic Church), Authoritarian (Roman Religion; Emperor is God), Individualism (consumerist mega-church Christianity), and Egalitarianism (Quakers).

At first I wasn’t sure how I felt about this chart. Hearing that communities, the longer they are together, always move “up grid” and wake up one day a huge franchised corporation did not settle well with me. But is it possible to be meaningful, to make a difference that matters, while not selling your soul? Where do you find the balance so that lives can be changed, while remaining as structurally flat as possible to keep remain centered on mission and people rather than on preserving the institution.

What if instead of a chain of command (a la Roman Catholic Church), there was a web of relationships. Individuals networked together for the common good. Organic, family-style churches networked together as a coalition in a local context. Servant leaders of these church networks that network together to work as a resource to one another and provide training for new leaders that focus on a region. As church networks grow, is this a potential way to go “up grid” without having to distribute power to individuals, but rather power to communities? What am I missing here? I’d love to hear your thoughts.