The Hsu’s Views

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.

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.

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?

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…)

“Coming together is a beginning,
Keeping together is progress,
Working together is success.”
- Henry Ford

(from a display seen at the Detroit Airport.)

Bill Easum has a nice chapter in his book on how Christianity is best understood as an organic movement. He notes that many theories about congregational life are flawed because they begin with an institutional or mechanical worldview. He writes:

“Christianity is concerned with the unfolding of the Kingdom of God in this world, not the longevity of organizations. Much of the prophetic message was focused on the unfaithful leadership of those who put institutional law above bringing about change in the world…” P. 17

There are a few other “zingers” in the book, but it was written in 2001 and I wouldn’t be surprised if the critique against mechanistic approaches to church required the stronger prophetic stance that he takes here. I still suspect a twinge of modernity in his writing, but I’m thankful for his observations on organic movements.

Movements:

• Follow a leader - in our case it’s Jesus.
• Embody the spirit of the founder - it’s followers emulate the leader.
• Are guided by mission rather than rules - principle vs. rules(?)
• Are mobile rather than static - we are to be ready, willing and able to go wherever Jesus leads.
• Depend on contextual people - we are tuned in to the culture of our community.

Now, it is a bit vogue to bash the traditional attractional church. Before you jump on the bandwagon, I’d recommend “The Missional Leader” by Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk. I just started it and I think I’ll recommend it to all my friends that are trying to engage the missional conversation in their institutional churches. It takes a very positive approach to the reality that the vast majority of God’s children are in these contexts. You’ll hear more about the book from me here. Stay tuned!

…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.

I ran across this blog entry from the UK called Safe Space.  It is a great read on the need for innovators in the church. He includes a few principles for encouraging entrepreneurs.

I’d read it just to ponder the quotes that he’s highlighted.