Emerging Church — into the light?

Billed by Brian MacLaren as “one of the most important books of the year,” Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence: How Christianity is changing and Why is a brief and elegantly put together survey of the big things that are affecting us all in the West, and how various sociological and philsophical givens have impacted our faith. She beins with the provocative idea that every 500 years, Christianity has a major rummage sale, in which new ways of doing it have emerged, leaving old ways to redefine themselves or die, whilst restated forms burn off somewhere else.

The Great Reformation is one obvious example, but the Great Schism inaugurated a similar tectonic shift, as did the Collapse of the Roman Empire around the 6th century. These shifts are always presaged by turmoil and uncertainty, and have sometimes involved great violence, but the effect of the process, although traumatic, has been to extend the whole dramatically.

Back in the 60’s Bishop John Robinson used to talk about a New Reformation. Driven by massive cultural change, things that seemed obvious a hundred and fifty years ago seem incredible now, in every field of human endeavour. Einstein, the automobile, the marginalization of grandma, all have played a part. What the internet has done is make everything more immediate. It is almost impossible now to hide where the cracks are showing, or paint over them by appeals to institutional trbalism. The game is up for our ancient certainties, however desperately some hold on to them, as waymarks and/or security blankets.

In such a world, there is always Hope in Christ. Christians have lived through these upheavals in the past, and will no doubt, by the grace of God come out of what’s happening now in some renewed form. As generations unfold, somewhere between 9 and 13 percent push back hard, whilst the others, Conservatives, Social Justice Christians, renewalists and Liturgicals, converge towards the centre of Church culture, making their own trajectories, that map their own fault lines and fusions. In that context it behoves us all to work out the real bases of our authority, and their real implications.

I’m with Brian MacLaren about this book — read it, and reflect on it, discuss it. There is so much fantasy about, from Liberals who seem to believe progress is about to teleport the whole world to San Francisco, to Conservatives who talk as though globalising Christianity can transport us back to the Janet and John mores of the 1950’s by way of rural Nigeria. Compared to that stuff, Phylis Tickle’s book is a blast of cool, proficient sanity. If we can bear to take an aerial view of the trenches, there are big ideas here to help is make sense of a confusing and fluid scene below and around us...

I am banged up having my annual reality check at Saint Wandrille, Normandy, until Saturday. This entry has been preposted. The internet is switched firmly off for the week, and I will be delighted to respond to comments, but only at the weekend.

John Burke: Gracious open doors?

John Burke is lead pastor of Gateway Community Church in Austin, Texas, and a leading member of the Emergent Leadership Initiative, an Evangelical movement to plant and grow authentic new churches in emergent culture. Winning young people for Christ is not just about packaging, but about authenticity, allowing God to change us hardened burned out religious people into bearers of grace.

From ten years’ rich, fruitful experience of growing an evangelical church among the generation most cagey about Christian commitment, John spoke of creating the right soil for faith to grow, not expecting people to get everything sorted at the check-in. God requires Mercy not Sacrifice, raising a significant question — are we leading like Jesus or like the pharisees? The world does law not grace. Grace says come as you are, and that is the essence of the good news.

John reports that the two big stumbling blocks people have every time are about other religions and homosexuality. So the question for would-be prevailing Evangelical Churches is one a young neighbour asked him of Gateway, “Does your Church teach people to love others? because I could never attend a Church that teaches people to hate gay people.”

It was fascinating, gievn the all-too-open discussions of this subject among Anglicans, how very coy non-Anglicans are, with much coded communication. Having brought it up, John simply referred people to a chapter of his book, as does the follow up Website. Nobody was willing to discuss it in real time. Even in code, however, John brought exact corroboration, hot off the streets, of the Barna Group research last year indicating we have a major missional issue here. Pretending that this is a subject about which we are either in the 1950’s or can return to the 1950’s is just idiotic. Making it a lead issue seems to be missional suicide.

John’s book takes a commendable pragmatic line — keeping Christ at the forefront, not homosexuality, whilst being wide open personally to accept gay people just as they are. He believes people’s lives turn around in the light of Christian faith in ways they never could if cultural stumbling blocks were erected in the way of their coming to that commitment in the first place. So say all of us, no doubt, but I suspect it will be a good while before many US Evangelicals feel comfortable about discussing openly the follow on — is this, some gay people may feel, in the end a kindly but ultimaterly inadequate, even patronising, response to this personal, moral and cultural issue?

Lambeth Conference Nightmares?

The whole Lambeth Conference process is about faith, and living by faith is a risky business. Meeting 15 bishops in Saturday, only one had actually been to one before so we're pretty much all Lambeth virgins. That may help us think different; what some would see as the greatest weakness of the process may actually save the day. Watching Alan Becker’s amazing flash animation, Animator vs Animation, imagine just how it could all go wrong...

h/t Hilary Unwin.

And just to say what could go right, given the anger and frustration of some commentators that we can’t pass imposing resolutions and play power games down at the cashpoint like last time, here are some pointers to the real power and possiblity of an indaba process from E. B. Brooks:

What kind of entity (notice that I am not calling it a structure, yet) would be about setting free, instead of creating boundaries? What kind of entity would be about improvisation rather than writing a script? What kind of entity would be about leading to the next level rather than justifying the current level? What kind of entity would be about the actors, rather than the stage, the set, or the director?

Emerging? Off the wall?

Something for the weekend? Open your mind to what things could be —how they morph — what they really mean. With turbulence and emergence all around, and associated forming and deforming structures, this MUTO animation is off the wall but, perhaps, on the button:

Made in Buenos Aires and Baden by BLU

Cross channel? shopping channel!

A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine. But now you can control the weather. Many thanks to Huw Davies for news of the the gadget everyone’s talking about in Cana of Galilee. The over-the-top Shopping channel style transcends the limitations of language, too. Vintage. Is there no limit to what we expect of technology?

The thought we all want instant Wine at the click of a mouse also connects for me with this wonderful thread going right now on Maggi Dawn’s blog about new wine, old skins, tradition innovation and emergence. Go read.

Round Tabling

I preached last night for the inauguration of Camilla Walton’s ministry as Team Vicar of St Michael’s Beaconsfield. Dom Gregory Dix’s monumental work, The Shape of the Liturgy, continuously in print since 1944, and profoundly influential in the remodeling of Roman Catholic, Anglican and Free Church liturgies in the 60’s and 70’s, was actually written not in Oxford, nor even a monastery, but the vicarage of Saint Michael’s which he had been sent to serve by his community early in the World War II. It was a joy and honour to meet someone who had served mass for Dom Gregory.

Camilla had chosen the Hymn to Love from I Corinthians 13 for her induction, along with Jesus washing his disciples feet in John 13. It reminded me of this poem, that various people last night asked me to put on the blog. I first encountered it from my friend and close colleague Sheila Nunn when she used it as the basis for the design of our Diocesan Convention Eucharist in 2002. I saw Sheila a lot as she was dying of cancer in 2003, and we talked through this poem together, and its implications for the kind of church we have to be, and the kind of bishop I was supposed to be — that had just been announced. I think of it often...

In search of a round table

Concerning the why and how and what and who of ministry,
One image keeps surfacing: A table that is round.
It will take some sawing
To be roundtabled.
Some redefining
And redesigning,
Some redoing and rebirthing
Of narrow long Churching
Can painful be
For people and tables.
It would mean no daising
And throning,
For but one king is there
And he is a foot washer,
At table no less.
And what of narrow long ministers
When they confront
A round table people,
After years of working up the table
To finally sit at its head,
Only to discover
That the table has been turned round?
They must be loved into roundness,
For God has called a People
Not "them and us".
"them and us" are unable
to gather round; for at a round table
there are no sides
and ALL are invited
to wholeness and to food.
At one time
Our narrowing churches
Were built to resemble the Cross
But it does no good
For building to do so,
If lives do not.
Round tabling means
No preferred seating,
No first and last,
No better, and no corners
For the "least of these".
Roundtabling means
Being with,
A part of,
Together and one.
It means room for the Spirit
And gifts
And disturbing profound peace for all.
We can no longer prepare for the past.
To be Church,
And if He calls for other than a round table
We are bound to follow.
Leaving the sawdust
And chips, designs and redesigns
Behind, in search of and in presence of
The Kingdom
That is His and not ours.

Chuck Lathrop

Stained, Compromised, Involved

Snow this morning, but disappointing because it was far too warm for anything to settle. It was mostly gone by lunchtime. However Stewart, Nick & Anna got in some play with it and did some snow sculptures that are sitting in our freezer. The only alternative wasn’t the one they wanted, a day’s play in a winter wonderland, but missing the lot.

I had to go to All Saints London Colney for the annual residential weekend for about 100 of our curates from the diocese. There I encountered some words from Ron Rolheiser, RC theologian, teacher, writer, General Councilor for Canada for the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Many thanks to Dr Elaine Storkey, who was leading the event:

This side of eternity, all truth incarnates itself with inadequate expression, self-interest, personal wound, historical conditioning, ideology, and invincible ignorance. It's not easy not to be put off the truth by the very persons seeking to bring it about — and the churches have no monopoly on compromise and double standards here.

What's the answer? If every concrete enfleshment of church, morality, truth, justice, politics, family and aesthetics is flawed by inadequacy, dysfunction, infidelity, self-interest, ignorance and abuse, does this give us the right to absent ourselves from commitment?

We have a choice. However, that choice is not between what's perfect (a pure church, social justice that's completely non-compromised, art without ego or arrogance, family life without dysfunction, politics without bias, morality without narrowness, feminism without imbalance, religion without flaw or bad history) and what's bad. The choice is rather between involvement with the limping, stained and compromised or no involvement at all.

Churches that grow too big?

Great and interesting series of Easter posts by Mike Croghan critiquing classic US denominational models of Church, including a great post about Church size and growth. When you go over 75-100, he suggests, it becomes very difficult to maintain real relationships:

I can't think of anything that a single church community can do which a network of communities working together can't do (though admittedly, such networks would probably move more slowly in many cases). On the other hand, I can think of a bunch of thorny issues that begin to arise when communities get so big that anonymity is possible - which probably happens when they approach 50 or 70 adults; fewer if the leadership responsibility is concentrated in one or two individuals. Once anonymity is possible, the church ceases to be a community of followers of Jesus.

He draws attention to two particular issues:

It's not a community where relationship is optional. It's OK to be an introvert. It's OK to hang back and take relationship at your own pace. But once it's possible to simply fall through the cracks - to neither know or be known and for no-one to realize that - it's not a community. It's more like a neighborhood - or a housing development. There are , no doubt, communities within the neighborhood - groups of people who share real relationship with each other - but the only thing shared by the entire group is not relationship, but mere proximity. Just like in the average housing development in the US today.

It's not community where following Jesus is optional. It's OK to be just starting on the way. It's OK to not be sure you want to be on that way at all. But it should be clear to everyone that following Jesus is what the community is about. It's not a group with a dual track: one group of people who try to be disciples, and a second group who choose the second, perfectly acceptable alternate track: simply show up once a week and pay for services provided by the first group. Oh, I know that every church says it's about discipleship. But practical reality speaks way louder than words, and the fact is that in communities large enough for folks to "slip through the cracks", it's blatantly obvious to all involved that the "just show up and consume" option is a perfectly valid one, 'cause folks can see plenty of people all around them choosing that.

Thinking of our network of almost 300 congregations in Bucks, I can see real truth in Mike’s words, encouraging and challenging. Encouraging because it’s a tremendous opportunity to serve in a Church which doesn’t (by dint of history) have any denominational coherence, and never has had. Practically speaking, there are one or two large (even four figure) congregations, but they have a really sophisticated game plan for maintaining community on a smaller scale within them. Far, far more often, parishes come in small packets: Mike’s 75-100 figure is eerily accurate for many. Call that good news, if you will, where people really relate to each other within those congregations — and that does happen surprisingly often. Smaller rural Churches can be really strong relationally; places where everybody is somebody. Sometimes.

I’d add a third problem to Mike’s two. People can be too geed up about quantity. The first question people ask vicars at parties, and vicars ask themselves, is often “how big is your congregation?” Fear and fantasy infects their minds, and they begin to think they are failures if they don’t grow into a 200+ congregation. So they flog themselves to try and grow. This compromises their authenticity, which in itself prevents them growing. Thus the vicious circle runs, and the more they bash their head against a wall, the more it hurts, and the more stuck they become.Jesus once said something interesting about grapes, figs and briars. A Tangerine is not a Small Orange, and however hard it fantasizes about being a Big Orange, God won’t let it happen.

What concerns me isn't the size of congregations as much as Mike’s second point about dual tracks. Where congregations of any size become “dual track” with a bunch of keenies doing the Jesus bit and everybody else in it for what they can get out of it, or sheer force of habit, Houston, we have a problem. We’re probably less hung up (explicitly) on numbers than Americans, but more hung up on relationality. Hmm. What do you think?
PS h/t Studiohermetique for “Schizophrenic Supplicants, above.

Sue! Sue! I might even sue you!

Over the pond, from shore to shining shore, various legal eagles are engaging in top gun dogfights about church matters, and it ain’t a pretty sight. I suppose a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and everyone, of course, is right from their own point of view. “What else were we to do?” I hear everybody saying...

We Brits are good at ignoring sounds of breaking glass from our neighbours, but we still belong to each other, by baptism. If Dustin & Meryl next door lock horns acrimoniously, what kind of idiot do I have to be to stand at the bottom of the garden egging them on or, worse still, join in? But in all humility it strikes me...

I once wrote a thesis about Victorians suing the pants off each other for ritualism, so I want to say that, historically, there is life after litigation (as well as a pile of pants). However litigation, right or wrong, incurs spiritual debt. Here’s this morning’s second lesson from Morning Payer:

Pursue peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and through it many become defiled.

Emergent missional living is far more crucial for future Christianity than denominational turf wars. Reading Brian MacLaren, I reckon Anglicans, with our particular instinct for faith in momentum and diversity, can bring special experience to the party. US fresh expressions, like the Common Table, are great laboratories of the Spirit. Whoever’s right and whoever’s wrong about the particular points in dispute, fellow disciples I like and respect a lot there are saying we just can’t be the kind of disciples God needs us to be for as long as we’re hooked on the whole “litigate to accumulate” thang. Hear the warning of Blessed, but Weird, Al Yankovich:

PS Aviation Art by Lou Drendel

Exclusively for Everyone (= Anyone?)

Having mentioned denominational ins and outs yesterday, I stumbled over a thought-provoking and perceptive post by marketing guru Seth Godin, about the power of exclusion to fuel sales:

When I was in college, the Dean tried to put together an advisory group of students. Nobody he invited joined--it wasn't worth the time. Then he named it, "The Group of 100" and in just a few days, it was filled. The easiest way to have insiders is to have outsiders.

Credit card companies have made billions by selling a card that others can't get.

Politicians stand up and talk about their (exclusive) religion, or pit one special interest group against another.

And of course, the best nightclubs have the biggest velvet ropes and the pickiest doormen.

Limiting the supply of your service, or the quantity of your product, or being aggressive in who you sell to (and who you don't) are all time-tested ways to build a killer brand. Humans like being insiders, and will work hard to create their own imaginary demarcations to demonstrate that they've made it inside.

Populism is almost always a hard sell, it seems.

When Tiffany's lowered prices and quality and tried to reach out to the masses, they almost went bankrupt.

He goes on to talk about how this works on the net, and the exclusion models, conscious or not, of Wikipedia and others. He goes on to suggest, as a marketing guru,

The first thing I'd ask myself before launching a product, a service, or a candidate is, "who are we leaving out?" If the answer is no one, be prepared for uncharted waters. The future of marketing (at least the big successes) is going to be fueled by those with the guts to embrace the masses. The profits, at least in the short run, may well be found by those that embrace exclusion.

Groucho, famously, said he wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have him as a member, and this aspect of human nature applies to faith, too. The C of E, like it or lump it, with its all embracing medieval parish system, lack of ass-busting heresy trials, and legal niceties that give rights to anyone and everyone, flies straight in the face of conventional marketing. Formally, the doors are open to all — It’s informally that the social networks have subtle ways of excluding. Church is a worked example of both the joys and perils of open source thinking and living. The most exclusive and demanding churches grow fastest but seldom get any bigger. The least are always in decline, but seldom die out. Can marketing theory help explain these paradoxes?

1. “S/He who is not against me is for me” is there in the gospels, but balanced by “S/He who is not for me is against me.” With teaching on his second miles, giving away you shirt, and going anywhere to teach, Jesus challenged this aspect of human nature, as well as acknowledging it. Some people are attracted, and some repelled, by the concept of a really inclusive church. We need to understand why and how this happens, and look behind both kinds of slogan, asking what’s happening in us when we react to them, and why. Coincidentally, How gender specific is this response?
   
2. The Kingdom of peace and love only grows when people feel special and together, but at the same time empowered to embrace strangers. Expressions of Christianity have to hold in tension a coherence principle and an inclusion principle. They have to find ways not to play one off against another, but somehow feed one off the other. Are Liturgy, symbol and art, perhaps, ways of expressing the whole that square this circle?
3. If people are interested in Church growth and Evangelism they have to distinguish two different kinds of processes that can claim the name —
   
1. a marketing process driven by exclusivity, guilt or chauvinism that always ends up diminishing its objects, wittingly or not — church imperialism can be very powerful, but its fruits will turn out to be sick, like cancerous growth. Here, people have firmer in and out lines, and are harder on outsiders than themselves. Ideals never quite translate into action, and the ceiling to growth is that of the marketing paradox to which Seth refers.
   
2. organic growth, often more steady, where the stress is on discipleship leading to personal growth in community. Here, people are harder on themselves than outsiders, and its hallmark is powerful bonding (social capital) which is at the same time generous and outward looking — they'll know the Christians by their love and because those people, being unlearned, are turning the world upside down. Thus the exclusion paradox is transcended.

What, in Seth’s terms, is our experience of Church growth and evangelism? What does the fruit of our effort imply we are really doing? How much is our practice based on marketing logic, and how much on Jesus’ radical bucking of this aspect of human nature?

Wodbine Willie says...

Before leaving this season of Remembrance, a passage from the writings of G. A. Studdert-Kennedy, World War I Uberchaplain and evangelist, caught my eye. Democracy and the Dog-Collar (1921) is about the organisation of working life, reacting to the claim that the First World War was a failure of Christianity, but this says something powerful about ecclesiology, too...

TRUE PERPETUITY IS ONLY OBTAINED BY PERPETUAL READINESS TO CHANGE
ORGANISED Christianity is a failure, but then organised anything is a failure. Christianity is a life, and you cannot really organise life in its fulness. It always tends to break its body and reform it into a more perfect expression of its real soul. It is not only organised religious life that fails and is always crying out for reformation; organised political life fails, and is always crying out for reformation. That is the necessity that lies behind political change. An organisation that was not a failure could never hope ultimately to succeed — it would be dead. Christ has always been greater than His Church, and always must be, until His Church becomes the new Jerusalem and the Kingdom of God.

Aircrew or Snakes on a plane?

In every area of life Teams draw the best out of people and get the job done better. Sadly, many teams aren’t really teams — just clumps, playing out their inability to get on together, and fouling each other up. That really matters if the Benedictine principle that best discipleship comes through community works. It does.

Linda Gratton and Tamara Erickson have published a helpful (current) HBR article on Eight ways to build Collaborative Teams. Biggest foul ups?

1. Size — too big in business (too small in Church?)
2. Badly managed diversity
   
3. Virtual working: doing most things by email rather than personally
   
4. Herding Cats: High education levels and overactive Egos

With a spiritual twist, these foul-ups can be radically upsetting and intractible. You end up with a team that isn't a team, just the Vicar’s fan club — or, even worse, anti-fan club. So what? Gratton and Erickson suggest eight ways of fighting back and making your team a real team:

1. Investing in an environment to support real teamwork — in business, designing working space appropriately. In Church, taking the pews out (in various senses).
2. Modelling collaborative behaviour — The same issue in any context. Leaders and senior staff have to do what they commend to every one else. Just do it.
   
3. Creating a gift culture — supporting social and professional networks, and mentoring. In Church growing cultures of generosity rather than a demoralising rationing mentality that kills off all joy.
4. Training to raise emotional intelligence. Good news — anyone can acquire people skills if they work at it. Bad news — they have to work at it. Focused learning works infinitely better in this area than happenstance and good intentions.
5. Working to grow a strong sense of community. People often look to churches for community, but it has to be worked at hard, especially in dormitory communities of pressurised people. ‘Christians are people who pray and have parties.’ (Bishop Jack Nicholls)
   
6. Assigning leaders who are task and relationship orientated. Brits tend to be task driven and relationship weak (stand offish and/or implicit).
7. Building on heritage relationships. In business, putting people who know each other together. In Church, bearing in mind the baggage, and using positive baggage to hold luggage that needs transporting. Also, avoiding year zero thinking, and using the (usually abundant) history for blessing and enrichment not cursing and limiting possibilities.
   
8. Role Clarity/ Task ambiguity. With fuzzy generalised idealistic expectations, and the way they load all accountability on to the few, along with their tendency to no agreed metrics and high judgmentalism, churches are almost conspiracies to foster Role ambiguity and Task Clarity!

So, team ministry or ministry team, ask:

• Is our team a team?
  
• How is this so?
• If not, why not?
  
• What's the single thing I can do to make us more what we say we are?

Sharing Jesus, Changing lives

A truly inspiring day as a guest at the dedication of CMS new mission centre in East Oxford. Strangely, the Church of England has never had an official institutional mission arm — just a network of voluntary societies driven by passion. CMS has been at the heart of mission for 210 years. We were reminded in today's service of the key role CMS’ early supporters like John Newton and William Wilberforce played in rolling back the slave trade and transforming society in those early days.

The centre includes a mission studies library and resource centre, named after Samuel Ajayi Crowther, former slave, translator of the Scriptures into Yoruba, and pioneer bishop in Nigeria. Last year CMS supported 704 people and 204 projects in mission all over the world, including the UK. Oxford’s increasingly a world city. There’s blessing for us locals in having close access to the heart of the CMS network in our diocese. It's a more than welcome development.

As well as serving the cutting edge of mission, CMS has been a hotbed of creative thinking for the whole Church, led by visionaries and big thinkers like Canon Max Warren and Bishop John V Taylor.

Max Warren said — “It takes a whole world to know Christ.” Go figure. Think of all those words mean and could mean in a rapidly globalising world that he foresaw sixty years ago, which is now our daily reality.

Today CMS is a key resource to the whole Church — a hotbed of praxis, prayer and reflection about discipleship across cultural frontiers. The early Church worked really well across frontiers, sharing Christ as he was reflected and refracted among disciples of different cultures in places like Corinth, Alexandria and Rome. Years of institutionalisation and control freakery have ossified this gospel process, but are now giving way, all over the world, to a vibrant sense of emerging kingdom. This, not institutional powergames rings a lot of bells for readers of the gospels, whatever their culture or background. Christianity is resuming its primal character as a way of life, a pilgrimage. In this kind of a world faith grows not by cultural or doctrinal imperialism, but virally. Because there really is a God who loves us, that’s OK. We can break our shackles, and transcend our Institutional silly B’s!
Two striking artistic expressions of such creativity caught my eye — paintings by Chinese theologian and painter in residence Dr He Qi, and an amazing sculpture out the front, “Light of the World” by Saga Arpino, a bronze with three kilometres of glass rods, hand cut into 10,000 sections.

Archbishop Rowan preached on the Light of the world. In 2 Corinthians 4, Saint Paul sees Light playing on and shining through the Christian Communityin a transcending way. It’s a transformational process from glory to glory “Until we have faces” (C. S. Lewis). Christ introduces us to ourselves, to each other, and to God. Then we can begin to glimpse what we all look like from God's point of view. God has a face, and to know him as he is enables us to wak in the light. It’s the route to true freedom, transformation and hope.