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.

Fear of the future. Fear of change. Its easy to get trapped in fear with so much change going on around me. Entering my last semester of school, I’m amazed at how ethereal and theoretical most of my life has become. Now that graduation is in sight, I’m looking into what the future holds, and I have to say that all this practicality is a little unnerving.

For me, the danger is in finding my freedom from fear in my own prescribed guarantee of the future.

Prescribing is different than planning, or preparing. Its when I fall into deciding and prescribing who I will work with and what my paycheck will be that missing the mark in even the slightest bit becomes a complete failure in every respect.

Right now I’m looking for a job. Its my hope that I can get a job that fits in line with what I’ve been trained in and what I’m passionate about. Honestly, that limits my options pretty severely. Most guys with an MDiv are looking into working for a large mega church as a preacher, which regularly pulls 50-100 K a year. DANG.  As hard as this is to say, “Thanks, but no thanks.”  Add the fact that I am really interested in Chicago and before you know it I’m SOL.

Now I know how the guy with a philosophy degree feels.

There are plenty of other, more exciting jobs out there for me. I’m finding them all the time. I found a few today in fact! The question is not, “Will I find a job?” But rather, “Will I keep my options open while looking for a job that allows for flexibility and God’s guidance?”

These are very humbling times for me right now. I’m going to be putting myself out there for quite awhile, and might have a stack of rejection letters before its all said and done. I’m not giving up - and at the same time I’m not setting myself up (for failure).

A future that is completely mapped out (read: wife, 2.3 kids, well-paying job in church planting/mission work right out of school, white picket fence) isn’t realistic at all, and much less fun. If my response to fears of life after graduation is to create a perfect life to fall into, I’m in danger of being rudely awakened.

We live in the “church district.”  Meaning right downtown, and all the huge downtown church buildings that loom all around.  There are lots of nice people that show up on Sundays and throughout the week, but every fifteen minutes - ALL week long - I hear the bells of the two largest churches giving me the correct time.  Only the churches are about 20 seconds off sync.  Which is the correct time?  Do I have to be a Methodist to set my watch by one time, and Baptist if by the other?  Every day at 5pm, these churches begin playing hymns…but because they play through each other, you can’t understand anything, and the tune sounds awful.

Are they competing?  What’s the deal?

I like to set my watch to another resounding vibration echoing through the downtown Abilene streets.

Near our apartment is a half-way house that really takes up a whole city block.   Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon at 3:45pm the recovering addicts rally together and with one voice they scream at the top of their lungs, “FREEDOM!….FREEDOM!”

Let me tell you - there is little that can do more for a heart like mine that is so bent on seeing personal transformation in others than hearing this cry for freedom throughout the week.  I am certain that the chanting will change my life, just like it is changing theirs.

Today I caught myself quietly chanting along and finding deep peace in my heart.

I’ve been piled high with life (3x too much life to be precise…but that’s for another post). So until I get my head above ground, I’d love to let you peek into a Willow Creek Community Church (huge mega-church in Chicago) board room and hear just a little bit of what they’re discovering as they research and reflect the last 30 years of “seeker-sensitive” “program-driven” church and its effect on growing people into spiritual maturity:

From DisciplesFirst

Willow Creek Community Church, a mega-church of tens of thousands with a multi-million dollar budget and one of the first churches to promote being seeker-sensitive and to offer a program-driven, full-service approach to meeting the spiritual needs of people, has started rethinking what they’ve been doing for the last 30 years. They’ve discovered that “participation” in a packed schedule of church activities doesn’t mean people become real disciples (though it is one way to build a large institution). They are rediscovering the spiritual disciplines that cannot be programmed and staff-driven. They are discovering that creating the church version of a shopping mall doesn’t help people really become the committed disciples they had always sought nurture.

Bill Hybels calls this realization the “wake-up call of his adult life.” What Hybels says they are “pioneering” as personal spiritual life plans one might recognize as the ancient discipline of having a “rule of life.” I truly complement Willow Creek and its leadership on admitting when they discover that depth of spirituality is not what they are fostering, and wonder what the future of the mega-church movement holds when the initiator of it all begins to question the very essence of what they’ve been doing.

Maybe the American tendency to excess in everything has led us to morbidly obese congregations, too large for their own good. You can view a couple 13 minute videos by leaders from Willow Creek here.

What is happening in the Church when the pioneer of mega-church mentality is now discovering that what they had been creating in their members was not necessarily a life in union or intimacy with God, but avid attendees? I am truly thankful for the humble hearts in the WC leadership and pray that I can learn from that.

MEGAChurch - the hip thing on the church scene from the 50’s to the 90’s. Focuses on huge facilities, enormous budgets, a professional team of ministers to pull off a fantastic show, and producing the best “goods and services” within a short, specific amount of time each week. Funny enough, its popularity coincided with the “bigger is better” mentality of food courts, fast-food restaurants, and HUGE portion sizes.

m e t a-Church - the hip thing on the church scene in our world today. Focuses on a local, relationally tied network of family-sized churches where no one is the “leader” except the Holy Spirit. Funny enough, its popularity coincides with the “local” and “organic” food craze that is sweeping our nation.

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Check out this awesome book by Roger Gehring, House Church and Mission. It is his published dissertation on how churches were formed and how they functioned in the 1st Century. Some points on Gehring’s work to consider from Scot McKnight:

1. Jesus centered his ministry in Peter’s house in Capernaum (Mark 1:29, 33; 2:1; 3:20; 9:33) and from there he launched missional work and in that home they prayed, worshiped, and learned at the feet of Jesus. There is solid archaeological data for this stuff.
2. Jesus sent his disciples out and expected them to establish missional centers in communities by founding a house church. (Matthew 10)
3. The Jerusalem church was established through house churches (Acts 2:42-47).
4. Paul’s ministry was to establish house church missional centers (Romans 16).

The basic history of church architecture development is:

1. House churches until about 150 AD.
2. Church houses (houses converted into houses devoted almost entirely, or at least several major rooms, to church). Until 250 AD or so.
3. Basilica/hall-length churches. From c. 250 on.