Missional Church by Gruder

The first text for Emerging Church Leadership at Multnomah was Missional Church by Gruder, et. al. Here is a link to the 3 page paper that I wrote on the book.

-Derek

Toward a Theology of Discipleship

I’ve been working (truthfully, not working much) on a Theology of Discipleship as a result of some of the discussion of what constitutes spiritual growth at SBC. I ran across a blog posting today from a pastor in Hawaii who I found myself agreeing with (mostly). He has some of the elements that we often think of in discipleship perhaps summarized in "growing relationship with Christ" and "a ministry that is fruitful and healthy."

Additional items he adds:

- Healthy Marriage
- Healthy Family
- Healthy Body/Soul
- Healthy Lifestyle (time to enjoy life)

My journey is taking me down a direction of thinking about how important that our “health” is: I was thinking family health, working life health, friendship health, body health, emotional health. Often when something here is wrong, our life is not fully whole yet God offers healing in all these areas.

This same journey is making me read the Bible with a perspective of integrating the spiritual and secular areas of life -- spirituality is not simply about spiritual habits and church attendance. It's truly about how Christ intersects our relationships and how we live out the greatest commandments in the context of regular 21st century life. Looking at my own life, that means: how I live with Christy, how I bring up my girls, how I work with my co-workers, how I relate with my friends, acquaintances and people I share the road with.

"Everything God has done in our lives is unproven until tested in the midst of relationships," quoted by Loren Laumer.

Here's the blog posting:

Church Relevance Interviews Wayne Cordeiro

from The Digital Sanctuary by Cynthia

Yesterday, Kent Shaffer at Church Relevance posted a brief interview with Foursquare Pastor Wayne Corderio from New Hope Christian Fellowship in O'hau. I just covered Pastor Wayne's church here last week having returned from a visit there in early August. Here's the permalink of my experience at New Hope.

The Church Rlevance interview includes this bit of Pastor Wayne's simple advice:

Establish 5 or 6 things and live toward them. For example, his six are:

1. A genuine and growing relationship with Christ Jesus.
2. A genuine and healthy marriage.
3. A family that is close and healthy, spiritually as well as emotionally.
4. A ministry that is fruitful and healthy and one that overflows into resourcing other leaders.
5. A body that is healthy and a soul that is able to be creative.
6. Time to enjoy life with family and friends.

Head over to Church Relevance to read all 10Q. Permalink: 10Q with Wayne Cordeiro.

-Derek

Podcast on The Blogging Church

A popular business-oriented blog did a podcast on Brian Bailey's The Blogging Church

-Derek

Shaun Garman at Red Sea Church

Red Sea Church is a 5 year old church in the St. John's community of Portland. Shaun Garman is the pastor that started the church. Shaun came and discussed his testimony, the history of Red Sea, and some thoughts on leading a church as a planter.

Shaun became a Christian at age 16, but fell away later and as a result of his girlfriend (now his wife) reading his Bible and asking some questions, Shaun got more serious about his faith. Shaun spent several years starting and operating some companies and God grabbed his life and moved him into ministry about 6 years ago. I wish that I had gotten a recording of this testimony because it was just a great example of sensitivity to God's call (even though it took some time for him to follow-through) and I can't do justice in my writing.

Some random thoughts from Shaun:
- Build from a sending church. It's a healthier model for the church planter to have support and accountability.
- Don't plant a church because of rebellion. Some plant churches because they feel rejected by their church, are dogmatic on a certain doctrinal element, want to be cooler than the existing church.
- The planter MUST be compelled by the gospel. Shaun's entire talk was really based upon the concept of "gospel-centered" theology/leadership/programs. For Shaun, the gospel must be the central focus of not just a message or an event, but must be the governing principle over everything that's done at the church.
- Christ: Soteriology (the gospel)
- Community: Ecclesiology (the church)
- Culture: Missiology (the mission to bring the gospel to others)
This are the central tenets of the purpose, doctrine and practice of Red Sea.

My commentary: My church's purpose statement is: (1) introducing people to Jesus and (2) together becoming more like him. Similar to the Christ|Community|Culture but is more intentional at getting our #1 (introducing) going in the church. Perhaps there's something to learn for us at SBC here. I'm fiddling with what my "Theology of Redemption" looks like which is a way saying all of this as well (just another way of looking at the CCC of Red Sea and the Intro/Become of Sierra Bible).

The essence of the Theology of Redemption is: we were created to have fellowship directly with God just as Adam and Eve had, but we now live in a broken world that is filled with broken people bumping into other broken people causing wounds and hurts. God's own son Jesus died on the cross to close the gap between us and God, to bring hope to the hopeless, and purpose to those seeking meaning. God calls us to redeem anything in the world that we can -- people primarily, but communities and cultural elements as well so that the whole world would know Jesus is the only begotten Son of God.

-Derek

Visit to Imago Dei

Christy and I went to visit Imago Dei on Sunday morning this week. Neither of us had ever attended Imago so it was a great chance to experience some Imago-ness.

I went to college at Multnomah with Rick McKinley, the pastor and founder of Imago and the XP at Imago was my roommate during my our first year there. It's been so great to see what God has done through these and all the other staff and key people at Imago over the years.

Church didn't seem all that different than many other places I've been. The worship band was good, but not great. Rick is a good preacher and he is very funny -- just like Donald Miller says. I listened to a podcast that Rick did (http://www.catalystspace.com/src/15-RickMcKinleyPodcast.mp3) on Catalyst last year and he said basically the same thing that we experienced, Sundays are not that different from many other churches, but their communities and missional activities are the distinctives of Imago.

From the bulletin this week, here's a sampling of some of the items going on:
- School of Theology: this is a fancy term for their adult education classes. These range from some pretty heady classes like a class in Pentateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy) to a couple recovery/mentoring classes to men's and women's issues to finances. (Link)
- Communities: Imago has several different types of communities with different purposes and flavors: Home ("primary pathways to connect with others and grow"), Missional (groups who center around meeting a need in the community), Recovery (for people struggling with addictions), Mom's (women's ministry).
- Love Portland: This is a series of service ministries that Imago is doing to just serve the people of Portland (gotta watch the short video).

I'm going to do some more writing on Imago in a few weeks after I have a chance to get some more insider info from Eric Brown.

-Derek

Why I Had to be 34 Before I Planted a Church

From the A29 Network:

Why I Had to be 34 Before I Planted a Church

Ryan Mobley | Lead Pastor of Delta Church | Springfield, IL

Church planting is sexy. It's the hot thing to do in ministry these days. If you're a young guy looking to go into ministry, you're probably real tempted to head down the church planting road with nothing more than a pocket full of dreams, cockiness, some Sunday School or Young Life ministry experience, maybe a Bible college degree, and if you've really been procrastinating, a Seminary degree. But the more I see guys in their early- to mid-twenties with cool sideburns, a beer in one hand, and "The Reformation for Dummies" in the other talking about going and planting a church, I tend to get a little nervous...like how I feel when I'm driving down the road and a car with the big "student driver" Domino's Pizza sign on top pulls up next to me. I usually let them pass and stay in front of me so I can keep a good eye on them.

There have been many young church planters who have had tremendous success in our lifetime: Bill Hybels, Rick Warren, Mark Driscoll, and even a guy like Andy Stanley (OK, he didn't really 'plant' a church, but he was still relatively young). This is very inspiring. Young guys in ministry see these examples and want the influence and success they see in Seattle, LA, Chicago, and Atlanta. But here's the problem...

Read More...

-Derek

Can You Teach an Old Church New Tricks?

Class today was very stimulating. Dr. Trautman got us into a great conversation for the last half hour regarding renewal vs. planting.

His opening was about a church in SoCal that had a review by some church consultants. The consultants noted that the church had a very small evangelism budget relative to their overall budget and little in "missional" programming. His question was how would you go about changing this church.

Since so many of the students are specifically enrolled in the class in order to plant missional churches, the responses were reflective of this viewpoint. Holden said that he thought there was a blessing in sticking with the church and enduring the suffering. Mike said that he was enthused by his church's changes over the last few years in becoming more intentional in their service. Mike also stated that he just wanted the people to get out of the pew and do something. For some reason, it seems that we church folk don't follow our Bibles very well.

Perhaps a core issue in stimulating church renewal is that we are sheep. Sheep aren't very good at change. They don't follow very well and they tend to be resistent. Sheep don't like to work, but they like to eat and sleep. Since we are all sheep (even the pastor/church planter), we can say the same thing about ourselves.

A more depressing thought: we will always be sheep.

Hope: The Holy Spirit lives in these sheep. He can change the heart of an individual and the heart of a church.

I certainly agree with church planting as a strategy for reaching new people by getting more people out in the community to bring the gospel to the people. This isn't a full solution to the "sheep" problem. Certainly a church planter will enjoy the opportunity to shape the look and feel of the church becuase there's no tradition or predecessor to live up to. However, it seems to me that a church plant becomes an established church when: (1) the founding pastor leaves, (2) there are more people attending who weren't around in the "glory days", or (3) the initial surge of mission fades as the church builds programs to care for the new believers/attenders.

In conclusion: All of us like sheep are going astray. We keep turning to our own way. The Lord has taken our sins of worldiness, apathy and hypocrisy and layed it upon Jesus. He has paid the price so that the church -- established and emerging -- can become what the Bible intends. \

Sheep: let's follow the Shepherd!

-Derek

Alternative Culture

In our text for the class at Multnomah (Missional Church, edited by Darrell Gruder), some interesting points are made in relationship to how the church is to be a voice of difference in the culture.

Presupposition: since there are literally thousands or millions of distinct cultures, then the church's response to this dominant culture will need to be different. Example: a church in suburban Chicago is in a different culture than a church in Cairo, Egypt and thus the ways that the church relates to each culture is going to look very different. The church in Chicago may need to demonstrate its counter-cultural difference by opposing materialism and apathy toward the poor whereas the church in Egypt must distinguish itself from the prevailing muslim society perhaps by supporting the rights of women.

Gruder's points:
1. "In every cultural context, now matter how benevolent or hostile the governments or societies around it may be, the church is called to demonstrate an alternative culture" (p. 119).
- In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught a counter-cultural set of values that if followed would make any Christian community much different than its surrounding culture.

2. "Virtually every Christian public ethic justifying behavior that runs counter to the example and teaching of Jesus does it on the grounds of responsibility. In many cases, the critics admin that following Jesus would mean something quite different from what they are proposing. But Jesus' example is deemed irrelevent or irresponsible" (p. 125).
- On the other hand, I think that most Christians (including myself) have often bought into the idea that if they really live as Jesus did, they could not be successful in life, business and would risk ridicule and persecution. That, is probably exactly the point that Christ makes when he promised the disciples that they would encounter resistence (John 15).

3. "The church as an alternative community can make a powerful witness when it chooses to live differently from the dominant society even at just a few key points. An important task of the church is to discern what are those key points at which to be different from the evil of the world" (p. 127).
- I'd like to hope that this means something more than political positions such as abortion or gay marriage and that we're talking about more close-to-home issues within the local body such as sanctity of marriage, meeting the needs of the poor or business ethics.

4. "Such witness also means that one's seatmate in an airplane , after learning of your church affiliation, will exclaim, 'Oh, I've heard of you! You're the people who are always there to clean up after tornadoes and floods'" (p. 128).
- Rob Bell says it like this, "if your church were to be gone tomorrow, who would miss it?" Would anyone outside of the church family and religious community feel that the city had lost a valuable asset?

-Derek

Retreat at Wildhorse

Multnomah (the Bible College that is) has a retreat for all undergrad students every year now and we just got back an hour ago. The retreat was held at Young Life's Wildhorse Canyon Camp (which was once the infamous home of Rashneeshpuram). This is just an incredible example of God and His people redeeming the place for His glory!

This morning Dr. Garry Friesen (Decision-Making and the Will of God, Multnomah 1981) spoke. He is a very brilliant person (I really enjoyed my NT class many years ago). However, this message fit into the profoundly simple variety. He talked about the importance of simple faithfulness. His point is that God does not desire anything more than faithfulness with what he's given us (see Parable of the Talents Matt 25).

We don't need to be worried about results from our ministry, school-work (this was a retreat for college students) or any other area of life. However, we should really grade ourselves on our faithfulness to follow-through on what God has put before us. For the perfectionist, this is great advice (Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly -- even if you can't do it as perfect as you want, it's worth doing as much as time allows). For someone like myself (a not-very perfectionist!), we may need to look at better than what we'd accept, because only then will we fulfill the potential that God has given.

Quote from George McDonald (bio): Easy to please is he-hard indeed to satisfy." God is pleased with our faithfulness and doesn't require more than that, but His desire for us to be faithful is never satisfied -- He requires the same thing every day.

Thanks for the reminder Dr. Friesen.

-Derek

New Wine, New Wineskins

New Wine, New Wineskins: http://www.new-wineskins.org/

NW is a program of Multnomah Seminary to build a "Theology of Engagement with Culture." I went to an introductory meeting today. Two Profs spoke as well as a few of the student leaders. Dr. Metzger described the following story for a speaking event at Portland State University in a lecture on paranormal psychology:

(Paraphrase, but written as if in the first person):
I spoke to a class at PSU on evangelicalism and presented the basic message of the Bible, discussed some of the misunderstandings of Scripture that resulted in some of the "problems" that many people have with Christianity. During this whole time, one young woman in the class was loudly conversing with others and making remarks during the talk which really angered me. After the 25 minute presentation, she was the first to ask a question, "Do you think you're better than me." After some time to collect myself to contain my anger (because of her apparent inattention during the talk), I asked if there was something in my talk that made it sound as if I thought that way. Her reply was that she was a sinner, and not a part of the "club" that goes to heaven. (More on this story later).

This seemed to me (this is Derek talking now!) as a very difficult question and I wondered how I would take the question and respond positively. We discussed this quite a bit with many students saying that they would apologize on behalf of the church for those who may have made her feel that way along with some carefully crafted language about free will, etc. However, Dr. Metzger had an interested response (to the effect of), "Christ has freely given an invitation that anyone can accept." His response is that there is no "club" that has a restricted membership.

The end of the story finds the young woman conversing with Dr. Metzger and some of the students from Multnomah who came and at one point after hearing the gospel responded, "that's all you have to do?" What a tremendous witness!

QUOTE OF THE NIGHT: "We should not only look at what Jesus said/did, but at what He became: a servant!" --Dr. Harper

-Derek

Defining Missional and Emerging Churches

This week in my class at Multnomah, we discussed an interesting article reprinted from Christianity Today: http://www.ctlibrary.com/print.html?id=40534

This is a great article for people who are unfamiliar with postmoderns and the emgerging church to read to understand some of the trends. This is important for leaders in established churches because they represent changes in how the younger generations will interpret what we do.

These are the characteristics that the author suggests:
Emerging churches are communities that practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures. This definition encompasses nine practices. Emerging churches (1) identify with the life of Jesus, (2) transform the secular realm, and (3) live highly communal lives. Because of these three activities, they (4) welcome the stranger, (5) serve with generosity, (6) participate as producers, (7) create as created beings, (8) lead as a body, and (9) take part in spiritual activities.

While this list doesn't seem really different from the churches I am familiar with (other than #3), there must be some subtle and perhaps overt differences between our current church models and these emerging models.

It seems to me that there is a fundamental difference that the postmodern person has: how she will discover "truth." While I have been raised theologically to believe certain core doctrines and concepts, the spoonfeeding of these doctrines may not connect with this generation. And while some have brought into question every single doctrine from the eternality of God to the person of Jesus, I believe that there must be a place for some doctrinal presuppositions (nature of God, integrity of Scripture, person and work of Christ) to provide a framework for the postmodern to question his way through the Bible.

Virtually all the works on postmodernism that I have read point to a propensity for discovering truth through experience (which makes traditional Bible instruction very challenging). Gruder suggests that "our understanding of truth is always an interpretation relative to our context and cultural understanding." One exciting passage in the article points to how the life of Christ becomes MORE relevent than I've seen it in traditional church:

Here is an emerging, provocative way of saying it: "By their fruits [not their theology] you will know them." As Jesus' brother James said, "Faith without works is dead." Rhetorical exaggerations aside, I know of no one in the emerging movement who believes that one's relationship with God is established by how one lives. Nor do I know anyone who thinks that it doesn't matter what one believes about Jesus Christ. But the focus is shifted. Gibbs and Bolger define emerging churches as those who practice "the way of Jesus" in the postmodern era. Jesus declared that we will be judged according to how we treat the least of these (Matt. 25:31-46) and that the wise man is the one who practices the words of Jesus (Matt. 7:24-27). In addition, every judgment scene in the Bible is portrayed as a judgment based on works; no judgment scene looks like a theological articulation test.

The second major emphasis from the document that I garnered was the emphasis on missional focus (which I blogged about last week). One item to add to that is the application of 2 Corinthians 5 and ministry of reconciliation. It is suggested that this ministry of reconciliation applies to both the lost souls (as we evangelicals typically interpret the passage), but also to the full ministry as Christ displayed a sympathy for the lost and for the "whole persons and whole societies." It is my desire to develop a personal theology of mission for myself and my spheres of influence during this semester.

In our first text for the class: Missional Church by Gruder, it is suggested that our churches need to take a broader view of "missions." "Congregations still tend to view missions as one of several programs of the church. Evangelism when present is usually defined as member recruitment at the local level and church planting at the regional level. . . Indeed the main business of many missions committees is to determine how to spend the missions budget rather than view the entire church budget as an exercise in mission (p6)."

-Derek