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.

This might be a little “heady” but its been on my mind for awhile now and I’ve got to put it somewhere! Plus, now that I’m almost done with my Maymester (tomorrow is my very last day of graduate school!) I’ll need to get back into the habit of regularly adding content here. Hope to see you again soon!

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Fractals are everywhere. From the largest of galaxies to the smallest snowflake, fractals are the code of the universe. Every living thing or dynamic system takes a fractal form. Fractals are based on simple mathematical equations that contain unending diversity. The patterns are determined by a simple rule in a series of repetitions that feed back on itself new information.

Starting with a simple building block (a human cell, a coordinates in a computer) these repetitions unleash a creative potential for infinite complexity. Fractal art is one large shape made up of many smaller shapes that reflect, but are not identical to, the bigger picture. Each one of those small shapes is made up of even smaller shapes that look like it! This characteristic is called “self-similar.” To fully appreciate the power of fractal art, you must experience it. Check it out in this corny video here:

The genetic base of an acorn gives the crucial information needed for the fractal equation found in cell division to help catalyze the growth of a tree. The DNA of this seed will grow an oak tree, and not a dogwood or a squirrel. There are boundaries for fractals, and yet, when watching the process, it can only be described as chaotic.

The fractal process for development in the Church is discipleship. Discipleship is the repetitive feedback to the DNA of Christ. Jesus Christ is the incarnate God, who expressed perfectly what it means to live and follow after God as a human. He was the seed planted on the earth that contained within it everything necessary for the diverse Church to grow. It is through discipleship to Christ that the Church is able to clearly see both the limits set on what it means to be the people of God, and the capacity for wild, chaotic, uncontrollable diversity.

The Church is a living, breathing, organism; the second incarnation of God on earth. As the Body of Christ, it is composed of trillions of localized cells, of which there are countless different types each doing the work it was designed to do. It is a system, a network of disciples each holding within them the very love and person of Christ. To the degree that this system can effectively access its DNA, it can grow and nurture itself in healthy ways. This is done through the practice of love.

My friend and mentor, Kent Smith, has recently made publicly available a book he’s been working on for over a year. It’s small (about 40 pages) but its profound, and I believe it has the potential to revolutionize one’s spiritual life, as well as how North American’s understand what following Jesus looks like.

Think about the universe, think of a flower, think of your DNA, think of just about anything we consider beautiful…what do they have in common? A repeating pattern around a center. But what are the patterns in your lifestyle? What is your center? Or rather…WHO?

Kent is interested in a little experiment - and needs your help. Read below to find out more.

Friends,

I want to invite you to join me in testing an exciting new tool I have developed with the help of some friends. It’s a short gift book called Centered, and it is designed to help people take a deeper look at what it really means to follow Jesus.

Last Sunday 250 Million people in the U.S.A. did not attend church. That’s five people out of every six—and their number is growing by about 10,000 per day.

Many of these people are very interested in spiritual reality, just not church. Chances are you know some of these people. If you’d like to take your conversation with them to a deeper level and help us learn from your experience, here’s what you can do:

1) Buy a copy of Centered at the website listed below, read through it and jot down your impressions, good and bad.

2) On reflection and prayer, give or lend the book to one of your friends who seems open to spiritual things with the offer to discuss what they think of it over a cup of coffee (or whatever!).

3) After that conversation, write out your impressions of what impact the experience has had on you and your friend and e-mail them to me.

That’s it. Early indications are that this tool will make a big difference for many people—and I will be delighted and grateful if you choose to be part of the team that helps us refine it even more. (But still love you if this isn’t a good time for such a venture!)

Here’s the website

Blessings in this season. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Kent

So go ahead - purchase a copy; help out a missionary here in North America, and then be blessed by a great message! If you don’t have Kent’s email, feel free to drop me a line by commenting on this post. We’ll make sure the message get’s back to him!

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.

A week and a half before school starts…for the last time. I would be in 20th grade this year if school was still counting, which is unbelievably too long. I’ve known very little about life outside of school, and its time I get to learning. (Funny…leave school to begin learning? One of life’s little ironies I suppose.) The school structures that I’ve been a part of for so long has been good ones. And I’ve enjoyed the overall trajectory that the Lord has sent me on through it all. But its definitely time to finish strong and to FINISH. It all comes down to this year.

My classes this fall are looking good. I’m taking two graduate classes; the first is Theology of Mission with Ed Matthews, and the second is Readings in Christian Spirituality with Jeff Childers. Since I have no clue (i.e. no syllabus emailed to me yet) about Matthews’ class, I’ve gotta rant and rave about my ‘Readings’ class. It’s looking really neat! Here are the 15 books (read, “ZOIKS”) I’ll be reading this semester.

What I’ve loved about my previous class with Childers is that his preference and expertise is on Christian communities not at the hub of Western examination. Christian expansion which coincided with the Western Roman Empire is only a slice of the pie, but that is all we’re ever taught. But what about the Syriac desert fathers of Edessa? What about Byzantium Christianity? Or the Celts? Or the early Anabaptists? Or the lesser known feminine mystics like Julian of Norwich? There is so much more to learn than my own little branches on the tree of God’s great family.

In a similar vein, I’ve been enjoying another Newsboys song (Newsboys? I feel like I’m back in High School again!) called ‘The Mission’: (listen here)

When the runners came from Bethlehem
All breathless with good news
They were passing a baton forward through time
The commission, from God’s lips to our ears
Carried by his saints two thousand years
Connects us all to the same lifeline
As I fix my eyes ahead
I can feel the spirit’s breath…

(AND) I CAN HEAR THE MISSION BELL RINGING OUT LOUD AND CLEAR
IT’S THE REVOLUTION JESUS STARTED, AND IT’S HERE
ECHOING ACROSS THE WORLD FROM THE SHORES OF GALILEE
I CAN HEAR THE MISSION BELL CALL FOR YOU AND ME
I WANNA RUN WITH FIRE
IT’S MY HEART’S DESIRE
LIFTING YOUR LOVE HIGHER

In the history of our faith’s arrivals
Great awakenings, Welsh revivals
Saints and martyrs, summoned by a new birth
Patrick’s save of the Irish nation
William Carey’s expectation
Lambs & lions
Called to the ends of the earth
Gotta put my hand to the plow
Not looking back, not now…

I have a feeling I’ll be exploring lots of uncharted territory this semester, and at the same time, I’ll be finding myself all over the place.