The Hsu’s Views

I ran across a site called Movement Builders. It is sort of an online space where “movement builder” Shane Walton shares his wisdom and offers his consulting services. I like much of what he has studied regarding movements. His work is fairly broad and general and he is able to speak to both political campaigns, viral product launches as well as I would say, Kingdom movements. Topics include:

• Movement Defined - begin here
• Losing Control of Your Movement - a good thing
• What is a Movement Evangelist? - I’m one

This is thought provoking for me since I’m very interested in helping to facilitate a Jesus movement that will transform San Diego with the gospel of his Kingdom. Come join us (That is the evangelist speaking.)

Kingdom, Leadership, Movements, Organizational Theory

I ran across what must be a comprehensive list of resources, articles and interviews of Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. I’m posting it here because I think everyone will benefit from his teaching on the gospel and how to live missionally in the world.

UPDATE 10/8/08: I found another huge library of Tim Keller mp3’s that include such delights as his series on City, Frodo as a Christ figure, and my favorite on the Prodigal Son.

I think he leads the N. American church in the conversation about cities, transforming culture, and church planting in urban contexts. While all these concerns are precisely the sorts of things that I’m thinking about as well in ministry, I listen to his weekly sermons because they feed my understanding of the gospel and deepen my walk with Jesus.

If you are an mp3 listener, turn your attention to the Audio/Visual section and listen away.

Cities, Culture, Kingdom, Leadership, Missional

I’ve been paying more attention to spiritual formation recently through a book that our ministry is reading together called, “Emotionally Healthy Spirituality,” by Peter Scazzero. He talks about the importance of growing emotionally. He writes that “Emotional health and spiritual maturity are inseparable. It is not possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature.

The second half of the book describes some of ancient spiritual practices that can be employed to help one develop an emotionally healthy spirituality. One of these includes the Daily Office. The “office” is a liturgical aid that contains bible readings and prayers that are intended to be used by a community to keep people focused on the Lord together. It provides a rhythm or an order to ones life that centers it on Christ.

I’ve been using “The Missio Dei Breviary” for a bit now, and will be switching to a printed version of the Northumbria Community’s daily office.

The prayer for this morning’s reflection was/is called The Methodist Covenant Prayer. I enjoyed it’s message and included it below for your benefit.

THE METHODIST COVENANT PRAYER
I am no longer my own, but Thine.
Put me to what Thou wilt,
rank me with whom Thou wilt;
put me to doing, put me to suffering;
let me be employed for Thee
or laid aside for Thee;
let me be exalted for Thee,
or brought low for Thee;
let me be full, let me be empty;
let me have all things,
let me have nothing;
I freely and heartily yield all things
to Thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
Thou art mine, and I am Thine.
So be it.
And the covenant
which I have made on earth,
let it be ratified in heaven.
Amen.

Formation, Heart of a Leader, Kingdom, Leadership, Order, Quotes

I ran across a great quote in a BGU dissertation by John Lamb. He was making a point about how successful Campus Crusade for Christ has been in ministry over the years, but that achievement is not necessarily an asset as the ministry attempts to address the changes in today’s world. The more successful you are, the more likely you will be driven by that success to do more of the same.

He quotes Dallas Willard from “The Divine Conspiracy”:

Intense devotion to God by the individual or group brings substantial outward success. Outward success brings a sense of accomplishment and a sense of responsibility for what has been achieved — and for further achievement. For onlookers the outward success is the whole thing. The sense of accomplishment and responsibility reorients vision away from God to what we are doing and are to do — usually to the applause and support of sympathetic people. The mission increasingly becomes the vision. It becomes what we are focused upon. The mission and ministry is what we spend our thoughts, feelings, and strength upon. Goals occupy the place of the vision of God in the inward life, and we find ourselves caught up in a vision-less pursuit of various goals. Grinding it out.

Success can cause a ministry to lose focus on what God’s calls it to. Next thing you know we are driven by what we have accomplished and that becomes the important thing. Whether you are a large missions agency or a successful mega-church… success can make it difficult to diagnose our myopia.

Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’ Essential Teachings on Discipleship (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2006), 95.

Books, Formation, Leadership, Organizational Theory

Ok, I admit giving a provocative title to the blog, but after hearing a bit of an interview on NPR today it spurred a few thoughts. This might give some insight to the crazy ways my head works.

Dan Mathews of PETA was doing an interview on the National Public Radio show, “These Days” regarding why he doesn’t mind that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is not mainstream or widely accepted. Much of the show was about the radical methods that they employ to draw attention to animal rights.

My thinking was spurred when he said, “We are the group that everyone else if a little embarrassed about.” A bit later he observes that when you seek to be popular, you lose your edge (or effectiveness, I don’t remember the exact words, but that was the sentiment.)

It made me draw the parallel with the need in the church today. It seems that the natural tendency of God’s people, if left alone to its own devices, is to lose its distinctiveness as an alternative community in the midst of the world. Secularism has often softened our sense of right and wrong, and has blurred the lines of moral and immoral. We tend to drift to a place where the counter-cultural values of the Kingdom lose it’s edge and we settle at a comfortable place not far from the values of the world.

Historically, the role of the Apostolic and Prophetic was to lead the charge to help the people of God keep its edge. The apostolically minded were the ones boldly pioneering into uncharted waters with little regard for what others thought of them. The prophetically minded would be calling God’s people away from their indistinct secular values and back to those that better represent a holy God.

As the church in North America becomes increasingly secular, there is a growing need for the apostolically and prophetically gifted to use their gifts in leading the church. They are the ones that can be the group that everyone else is a little embarrassed about. They are the ones that see injustices that the rest of the church has grown blind to. They are the ones that are engaging in “odd” practices because they want to call attention to the plight of “the least of these.”

I think we need more oddness in a time such as ours. We shouldn’t shun our brothers and sisters that are pursuing alternative forms of gathering as God’s people. We should actually listen to those devoted followers of Jesus that have difficulties with U.S. foreign policy. Some of those people with whom we are a bit embarrassed understand God’s creation mandate as a call to care for the world that God has created and called good.

Yes, there will be those who will be radical for the sake of being radical, often in self-interest. But it seems like if the body of Christ lives under his benevolent kingdom reign and rule, and that this rule is distinct from that of the worlds, and that the natural direction is secularization, then the existence of brethren that are “out there” is a good thing.

Leadership, Movements, Social Concern

In “Leadership and the New Science,” by Margaret Wheatley, we are introduced to the relatively new learning that is occurring in life sciences and fields such as Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory. As a consultant to large businesses and organizations, Wheatley has created a niche for herself by applying knowledge from these new sciences to help lead organizations with new paradigms. Read parts of the book online for free at google books.

In Chapter 8, the focus is change in livings systems. In contrast with a Newtonian world where laws, principles, and a mechanical paradigm shapes our thinking, the first lesson we learn from living systems that it is more important to look at the whole of the system even as we work with individual parts or isolated problems.

The second lesson is that to be effective in change, we must “leave behind the imaginary organization we design and learn to work with the real organization, which will always be a dense network of interdependent relationships.” I’ll blog on that elsewhere.

For today however, the focus will be on the third lesson of the chapter. We must look for the “invisible processes rather than the things that they engender.” We need to look “behind the things of organizations to work with the processes that gave them birth.” I think this is a call for us to drop the preoccupation with structures whether a big building, house church, or missional communities in a coffee shop. We must pay attention to the processes instead…

Read more…

Books, DMin Stuff, Leadership, Movements, Organizational Theory

“…the restoration of the church will surely come only from a new type of monasticism which has nothing in common with the old but a complete lack of compromise in a life lived in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount in the discipleship of Christ. I think it is time to gather people together to do this…” Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Extract of a letter written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to his brother Karl-Friedrick on the 14th of January, 1935. (Source: John Skinner, Northumbria Community.)

Leadership, Missional, Movements, Order, Quotes

Recently, in a November 07 meeting, the language of a Covenant Community or an Order has come up in describing the collection of folks that are orbiting around us in the U40 group. In the (ever-?) ongoing discovery of who we are and what God might be calling us to here in San Diego, it was noticed that:

• we are a collection of people who are longing to be with others on the missional journey.
• we have a vision/burden to see San Diego and to some degree Tijuana transformed with the gospel of the Kingdom.
• we are centered-set around Jesus and his Kingdom agenda.

I didn’t really have a good mental map of what a missional Kingdom movement would look like. But last November, after Chris Brewster and Jason Evans began using the language of being like an “order,” the conversation just took off. I left the meeting with a couple of very clear thoughts. First, this was clearly something that just about everyone in the room felt some resonance with. Second, I knew nothing about orders. I still don’t.

But the more think and read about it, I’m intrigued. I like the idea of gathering missional leaders that have a burden for the whole city to choose to covenant together. While not leaving their primary faith communities, there would be a deliberate second order choice to join with others to be the city church. It would value the unique callings that individual brings to the community/order such as church planting, marketplace ministry, arts/media, or educators, etc. At the same time, we covenant to learn from each other who are gifted and called to be involved in justice and sustainability issues, racial reconciliation and homelessness issues (to name only a few.)

So, as these ideas have been bouncing around in the back of my head, I ran across a blog by Len Hjalmarson entitled, “Missional Order - Two Lenses.” If I understand correctly, there is a group of folks associated with Allelon that are talking about forming a missional order of sorts. Len’s post seems to be after a series of meetings at “Seabeck.”

The posts were meaningful to me because I’ve been asking the same questions as these folks:

• What are the common practices that the community would gather around?
• How would a missional order relate with local churches?
• Can you just start an order? Do you need a license from somewhere?

How would something like this work when those of us thinking about this in the U40 crowd have only read about things like this? Len then quoted a passage from Missional Church that I had just been spending much time in. Chapter Seven, written by Alan Roxburgh, details a structure for missional leadership. I spent a good deal of time here because I thought I’d make a presentation for the Feb 08 U40 meeting. We didn’t get to it, but I highlighted the same passage as Len.

In commenting on the role of missional leadership:

“…The leaders’ primary skills are directed toward intentionally forming such orders within the community.

This can only happen as leaders themselves participate in such orders. Leaders must exert the greatest attnetion and energy at this point for anumber of reasons. First, it is the covenant community that witnesses to the gospel as an alternative logic and narrative within the social context, including in particular the larger unbounded congregation. Second, this area is precisely where leaders have been given almost no preparation; there are few models from which they can learn. The leaders themselves must therefore become a novitiate, embark on a missional apprenticeship, in order to give the kind of direction needed by the emerging missional community. This is a demanding task that cannot be given a secondary role in the church.” (Emphasis mine) (Missional Church, 211)

I’ve no idea where the conversation will go… stay tuned.

Cities, Leadership, Missional, Movements, Order, U40

Willow Creek Community Church has been one of the most influential churches in the United States in recent history. The way they have “done” church has been considered so “effective” that people around the world have been flocking to their doors to learn how to do it in their own communities, or countries. Their work on cell groups, spiritual gifting and leadership development has been so influential that their programs have spread around the world.

During my early years in seminary, I had the opportunity to attend many of their leadership conferences. Simply walking into their buildings was mind numbing. As a North American, with my preferences for bigger and better, it was impossible to think that Willow Creek was not successful, and was not “doing it right.”

However, with the release of a multi-year study published as a book, Bill Hybels says:

We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ‘self feeders.’ We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.

What is so powerful in the findings of their new research is that they are admiting that they were relying on a highly programmatic approach toward doing church. They believed that as long as you got people to more worship and service events, people would automatically grow in their faith. They inadvertantly created a bunch of consumers that expected the church to do all the work of bringing them to maturity.

Did you see what Hybels said? They need to teach people how to do the spiritual practices more more agressively on their own. This completely squares with a study I’m in on Monday mornings. We are working through Dallas Willard’s, “Divine Conspiracy” where he argues that we have somehow lost our way. As disciples of Jesus, the curriculum we should be following to be Christ-like, is simply to do what Jesus did. This is a plea to return to the simple yet profound spiritual disciplines that have been employed over the ages.

As you watch the video of Greg Hawkins (recommended) it is interesting to see how readily he acknowledges their over dependence on a heavily programmatic approach to doing church. Oddly, and this is seen in Hybels video as well, the solution still seems to be some sort of programmatic approach to helping people be self-feeders. I’m wondering if this will become the next big product/strategy that gets pushed out the door.

Links:

Read Chapter One: Are You Really Making a Difference?

Blogs on the topic:

Willow Creek Repents? - Out of Ur (Christianity Today)
First-Person - by Bob Burney at Baptist Press

Books, Leadership

…is what the opposite of leading from the center would be. I resonated with Drew Goodmanson’s post entitled, “You Can’t Program the Gospel.” He comments,

“If church leadership creates a program and tells people they should attend, it is not the gospel.”

Religion thrives on the notion of “oughta.”  At times it can feel as though our churches expect our participation in its various programs.  Our participation in frequency and fervor is an example of our maturity in Christ. The Gospel is more of a “wanta” deal. Our experience of God’s grace drives us wacky with a desire to serve him.

Drew comments that program driven churches lead from the center. And with that approach, you wind up with people that have to execute the “program” that the pastor feels led to do (”oughta”). This can deaden the ability for people to hear and follow the leading of the Spirit in people’s lives. If however, we foster, encourage and support the people who have a passion for a particular ministry, we release them to the ministry that they are burdened with (”wanta”).

I bet church works better this way.

Leadership, Mercy, Organizational Theory, Social Concern