The Hsu’s Views

Hey friends,

Save the date, Aug 23rd. Our next U40 meeting will explore the centrality of spiritual formation to the reimagined church. In the last year, there have been a good number of conversations in our circles regarding shared shared spiritual practices, a rule, and other elements that have often been captured with the term “neo-monastic.”

I too have been on a bit of this journey, initially reluctantly, but now with conviction that we should try to connect the dots and, like most topics we cover, figure out what the Lord is doing and get on board.

At our next meeting, we will connect, share a bit about what God is doing in our lives and ministry. I was planning on sharing a bit about my learning from journey in recent months. Mostly thoughts from Dallas Willard’s “Renovation of the Heart,” and a current course on Celtic Spirituality.

I also wanted you to hear from my friend Father Gary Crandall. His church has been neo-monastic for 25+ years. Their fellowship emerged from the Catholic charismatic movement. Their journey led them to begin a series of churches in the U.S. that have a charismatic protestant theology, yet the church also has a monastic element in the Franciscan tradition. We’ll have a chance to interview some members of the community as well.

I thought it would be interesting to learn and compare ancient (Celtic), old neo (with Father Gary), and new neo (some of us?).

More info to follow, but essential details are below.

I’ll also mention that we have been graciously invited to stay after for some lunch to fellowship some more, ask questions, etc. If you are interested, bring $5 and RSVP with me so we can get it figured out.

Essential bits:
Date: Aug 23, 2008
Time: 9am - Noon, optional lunch with community following.
Location: Resurrection Community Church
http://www.resurrectioncommunitychurch.org/
12730 Elm Park Lane
Poway, CA 92064

Geoff

Here are a few photos from our last U40 meeting at Point Loma Nazarene University on Jun 14, 2008. Click through for more.

This is the second of a two part entry. The first is here.

Ellul continues to describe the scandal of X (true Christianity) by evaluating how our need to create systems and order runs counter to X.

“When we are told that the church has ministers, and its life is organized around them, well and good. But at once we have to remember that these ministries are a gift of the Holy Spirit and not a permanent or organized thing. This leads us to invert the biblical movement. We set up pastoral positions or benefices with rectors and bishops, etc. We then fill these posts with people we think are suitable. But this is the opposite of the movement presented in the Epistles, in which the Holy Spriit gives to the church people who have the gifts of love or the word or teaching, and the church has to find a place for them even if it had not anticipated doing so. If, after a while, the Holy spirit does not give someone who has the spirit of prophecy but gives someone who has the gift of miracles, then the church must change its form and habits!”

We should probably embark on a conversation about the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers but we won’t. But what is important to capture is the idea that there could/should be a flow and flexibility in the offices of the church in relation to the giftedness of the people God has placed into its midst. Should God work within the confines of our human structures, or should our structures flex and support what God is doing?

Within many of our denominational structures, we have placed such importance on our ecclesiology that we put “Congregational” and “Presbyterian” in our names. I think it is a healthy for the church in North America as it moves into what has been called a post-denominational posture. Perhaps it will allow greater flexibility for God’s people to exercise and release their gifts as the Lord so blesses people and congregations.

Ellul continues to show the weakness of structures that are an attempt by humans to create order and sense for themselves.

“No doubt some will reply that God is not a God of disorder, incoherent, or abitrariness, but a God of order. Of course he is. Unfortunately, the whole of the Old Testament shows us that God’s order is not that which we conceive and desire. God’s order is not organization and institution (cf. the difference between judges and kings). It is not the same in every time and place. It is not a matter of repetition and habit. On the contrary, it resides in the fact that it constantly posits something new, a new beginning. Our God is a God of beginnings. There is in him no redundancy or circularity. Thus, if his church wants to be faithful to his revelation, it will be completely mobile, fluid, renascent, bubbling, creative, inventive, adventurous, and imaginative. It will never be perennial, and can never be organized or institutionalized. If the gates of death are not going to prevail against it, this is not because it is a good, solid, well-organized fortress, but because it is alive; it is Life — that is, as mobile, changing , and surprising as life. If it becomes a powerful fortified organization, it is because death has prevailed.” Ellul — P. 157.

These comments thrilled me because I dream of a reimagined church that moves and functions more like a movement than an institution. I’ve been on a journey of learning about Complex Adaptive Systems (Thanks Lee) and Chaos theory. Alan Hirsh’s work in The Forgotten Ways regarding apostolic movements is exquisite and exactly right.

In short, I have felt that our structures, our organizational theories have been been efforts to create order and control, but in the process we placed limits on God and his people, choking the movement of God’s Spirit. There is order and structure, but in a very different way than what our Modern minds have been able to recognize and appreciate. Scandalous.

What would a movement of Christ look like that took seriously these organic, viral, mobile, fluid bubbling, creative, adventurous leanings. Would our structures look more like scaffolds than cathedrals, flexible and responsive to the Lord’s movements? Perhaps as denominations and local churches are freed from religious bureaucracies focused on self-preservation, they will be able to increasingly direct their energies to God’s Kingdom agenda.

“If it becomes a powerful fortified organization, it is because death has prevailed.” I’m sure that the Holy Spirit would never allow the Church to get to this place… on the whole, but in North America, it feels like a dangerously large percentage of the Church has reached this point.

I’m working to subvert the further institutionalization of the church. I want to reimagine a way of following Christ that allows or even embraces chaos and disorder (in human terms). Does this make me an anarchist?

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) was a French thinker, sociologist, theologian and Christian anarchist. Despite my aversion to anarchy in general, Christian or not, I decided to pick up a copy of his book, The Subversion of Christianity, largely because I saw his work referenced many times in multiple books.

Centrally, he argues that the true and best expression of how to live as a community that is shaped by the gospel became distorted at a very early point due to many different reasons. He persuasively argues that Christianity became subverted by pagan practice and beliefs, focused on moralism, and created it’s religious forms and structures in man’s image.

In Chapter Eight, he continues his thesis that much of what true Christianity, or what he calls “X” throughout the book, is very usually the opposite of what is natural to us. “It is thus a scandal.” Or in the words of Kierkegaaard, nothing displeases or revolts us more than New Testament Christianity when it is properly proclaimed.

In this context Ellul writes that what might be natural to us is order. It is something we want and expect, but “X, when it comes to us, cannot be organized. We can have neither stability, routine, collective permanence, association, nor group cohesion if we want to live by revelation, if we put X at the center as the sole truth.”

“When we are told that the Holy Spirit constituted the church at Pentecost, we like that. But when we learn that the Holy Spirit is like the wind that blows when and where it wills and we do not know where it comes from or where it is going, we do not like it.”

“When we are told that the church consists of those whom God calls, we applaud, but who are they? Who can trace the boundaries? We may say that the church has a center, Jesus Christ, but it has no circumference.”

Ellul is saying we want to clearly know who God is and where he will lead us, but the scandalous truth of God is that we can’t put him in our boxes to satisfy our need for order. Similarly, our desire for some clear categories of who are actually “saved or called” is a desire for order that perhaps cannot lend itself to a clear cut answer. The Church’s answer might be construed as those who are baptized… but even that might be seen as merely a human construct to create categories for who is saved or not.

I think it is fascinating that Ellul, in speaking of who is “in or out” uses language that is eerily close to language of centered-set and bounded-set that is being used today in missional discussions. The scandal is that we can only clearly define the center, Jesus Christ. It is only our need for order/categories that we look for some circumferential border defining who belongs and doesn’t. The scandalous bit is that the determination is God’s business, not ours.

More tomorrow in part two.

First of all, I was recently reminded of a page at DJ Chuang’s site cataloging a massive amount of resources by or about Tim Keller. I think there are few in N. America today that are as clear in their thinking as Keller is regarding the communication of the gospel in today’s contexts. Similarly, his heart and vision for church planting for the purpose of transforming cities is incredibly helpful. In marveling at the material at DJ’s site, I happened upon a quote that Keller made from the Redeemer Church Planting Manual.

“We believe that, paradoxically, churches grow best not when they aim at church growth as much as when they serve the peace/shalom of the whole city. Saint Augustine believed that citizenship in the City of God made us the very best citizens of the human city.”

If we were to talk about keeping our “eye on the ball,” this seems so timely. It really captures well the captures the reason the church exists. Our purpose is not primarily to grow in size or numbers. It is to participate in missio dei and his kingdom agenda of bringing/restoring His peace/justice or, namely shalom.

Ran across this photo and project over at Jay Lorenzen’s blog. It is a visualization of the Internet created by a projected called The Opte Project. This project was created to make a visual representation of a space that is very much one-dimensional, a metaphysical universe. The data represented and collected here serves a multitude of purposes: Modeling the Internet, analyzing wasted IP space, IP space distribution, detecting the result of natural disasters, weather, war, and esthetics/art.

I’ve been staring at it for some time now and keep asking what it teaches us about networks. I’m especially interested in what it teaches us about the church:

• when viewed as disciples and their many relationships in a community or city.
• when viewed as local churches and ministries in a city.

What do you see?

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.

Preacher’s Magazine over at Nazarene Publishing House has published an article by Hal Knight called “John Wesley and the Emerging Church.” Knight does a good job at trying to tentatively define “emerging church” in an effort to make the case that the Wesleyan tradition would do well to embrace this emerging development in the church.

He make several observations about the emerging church and then comments on parallels with Wesley.

1. Emerging churches understand discipleship as “following closely and emulating the person and ministry of Jesus.” Knight comments that many of these emerging post-evangelicals “are actually very much in the spirit of an earlier evangelicalism that was rooted in Wesley’s vision of holiness of heart and life… This evangelicialism was committed to ministries with the poor, abolition of slavery, and women’s rights as well as fervently evangelistic.”
2. Emerging churches are pre-eminently missional. They seek to be communities who participate in the mission of God in the world. They understand church structures not as ends in themselves but as means to mission. Wesley believed God had raised the “people called Methodists” “to reform the nation, particularly the church, and to spread scriptural holiness over the land.”
3. Emerging churches are radically incarnational. They see all of life as being holy, rejecting the dualisms of sacred/secular, public/private, mind/body, faith/reason that are so central to Enlightenment thought.
4. Emerging churches are alternative communities. The church is seen as a people who do not “go to church,” because they “are the church.” They are frequently networks of small groups seeking mutual accountability as a central practice. “The parallels with Wesley are obvious: a network of small groups, mutual accountability, transformed lifestyles, relationship in community and living for mission.”
5. Proclamation and teaching in emerging chruhes finds truth more in bibilical narrative than a rational/propositional reading of scripture.

Knight also notes one other feature of emerging churches, namely their generous orthodoxy. Read the article. It is good stuff.

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…

(more…)

“…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.)