Knowtown…

I must confess at the outset that this review is very biased. I happen to like Doug Pagitt and I greatly appreciate what he does. He is a great communicator and I love listening to him speak because he usually does so with a seemingly endless supply of passion. I also respect his choice of words. He seems to have a way of saying the right thing in the right way.

So needless to say I was very thankful to John when he kindly sent me Doug’s book, Reimagining Spiritual Formation: A Week in the Life of an Experimental Church. No surprise, I liked this book a lot. There are way too many good things in this book to highlight them all but I want to point out two things that have been really nourishing to my soul.

The first thing was reading/listening to the many thoughts of the additional authors from the Solomon’s Porch community. It wasn’t just that these were all really good co-authors, which they were, but that it presented the multi-faceted aspects of a faithful community. I always cringe when a pastor talks about his church. Too often we focus on the vision of the leader and judge a church by how well the members conform to that vision. If there are a lot of people conforming we recognize that as “good” leadership. I think it is much more difficult to “lead” by allowing and encouraging diversity. There are many voices in a community, not just one. And in this book we are exposed to many of the voices of Solomon’s Porch and we discover a beautiful harmony in the voices. I found it interesting to read about the many backgrounds of these people. Some came from high liturgical churches and some were discovering liturgy for the first time but all of them were creating a place that they could worship together. There was not always agreement about how things were going. There was a healthy tension presented in those pages that are a testimony to the whole community.

I think that communal posture of reconciliation comes from the other thing from the book that I want to highlight. My favorite quote in the whole book comes towards the end. It captures for me what I am trying to do on a personal level and within the context of a worshipping community and illustrates what I mean by saying the right thing in the right way:

“We work to listen to the community of faith that has produced us and the God who dwells in us. We focus our efforts on trying to figure out if our lives could be relevant to the story of God, not if the Bible can be relevant to our lives” (emphasis mine)

That subtle shift in thinking is very powerful. Why do we spend so much time trying to make our faith relevant to our lives and so little time bending the whole of our lives to our God? That for me is the draw to the ancient traditions. The stream of continuity I am longing for is not “winning people to Christ” but living faithfully in Christ.

I would love to change gears right now and tell a few tragic anecdotes about things going on at the church I recently left. No doubt some of these stories would break your heart and make you cringe. (I am sure there are many good stories that could be told as well) But the reality is that I have way too many logs in my own eye to deal with at the moment. It is becoming very clear to me that God has not called me to expose the flaws I seem to find in others so easily. Instead he is exposing my own pride, hidden agendas and impure motives that I seem to hold on to so tightly.

In those rare moments that I am honest with myself I realize that much of the pain and hurt in my own life and ecclesial dream are not caused by the actions of others. They are caused by not allowing my life to be bent towards the way of the cross. So often I willingly exchange the suffering I am called to as a bearer of the cross for a pain of my own choosing. I think all who feel called to ecclesial leadership have “Garden of Gethsemanie” moments where we have the ability to choose our cup of suffering. The temptations of an ecclesial dreamer to exercise influence or make yourself appear to be more succesful, important or powerful are very real. Becoming relevant to the Missio Dei is proving to be a painful process for me.

Towards that end, DOug’s book accomplished exactly what I expected it would. It challenged, encouraged, convicted and inspired me to be a better follower of God in the way of Jesus.

While digging around I stumbled across this publication about how the general public percieves theological education. There are some interesting observations. Here are some excerpts:

“Seminaries are quiet to the point of absence in their local communities. But then so, as we shall see, are the religious leaders they train.”

“What are faith-based institutions contributing to the larger community? How effective are their leaders? The answers we received to these questions strongly suggest that civic quietness is the rule rather than the exception for religious institutions of all kinds these days.”

“Most Roman Catholics and most evangelicals keep to themselves, and no mainline Protestants were on those lists of people to call, of leaders whose voices make a difference beyond their own organization.”

And from the response to the article, titled, “What is our Business?” by Richard J Mouw:

“There is much room for pluralism in theological education as seminaries develop and pursue stratagies for involvement in local communities. Let the pluralism flourish! But let the discussion of such concerns also flourish, lest our refusal to talk honestly to each other about such matters be the occasion for unfaithfulness.”

Amen.

The past weekend was a good weekend of quiet reflection and great interaction with folks near and far. I should have finished my re-reading of Farley’s book (it’s a short read) but I am taking my time with it because it is helping me pull some of my scattered thoughts together. One strange side thought that is coming out of all this is a new appreciation for some of the folks involved with Emergent. One of the things that I think is fairly obvious to most observers is that this “emergent” thing is primarily an Evangelical, Protestant thing. Notice I did not say it is exclusively an Evangelical, Protestant thing.

I think there is a sense in which I am not alone when I say I am drawn to some of the depth and beauty of the non-Protestant traditions. Which begs the question posed in the comments of the previous post, “Why not just go to a non-Protestant Church?” I am not going to answer that question here because it would take too long to do so properly, but I want to share some observations and then talk about why this increases my respect for what Emergent is doing.

The observation is this. Many who are products the Protestant/Evangelical traditions are feeling this sense that something is not quite right. I alluded to this in an earlier post but I think there is a reason that the language of “ancient-future” is so popular right now. The “ancient” part reminds us of the depth and beauty found in the non-Protestant traditions and the early Christian creeds. We long to reconnect with that but our history, primarily since the Reformation, has created very real theological and philosophical walls that cannot simply be ignored. We can bring ancient disciplines into our weekly gatherings and embrace the creeds but there is still something very tangible that makes those things feel foreign in our contexts. Incorporating pre-Protestant disciplines in our worship does not change the fact that we are Protestant Churches So we look to the “future” and hope that as time goes on, these things will become more comfortable and we will feel more at home in the generous orthodoxy of the Christian faith.

The danger of course in this “ancient-future” outlook is that it ignores or overlooks the present. There are very real things that make us who we are today. We need to wrestle with those things honestly and faithfully. While some may not like talking about these ecclesial realities with philosophical terms like “modernity”, “postmodernity”, or “deconstruction” there is no denying that some form of honest, authentic, and theologically reflective living in the way of Jesus now has to take place. We need to seek continuity with the ancient-future but we need to live as faithful followers of Christ in the present.

So along come some ecclesial dreamers who agree to have this conversation among friends. This conversation resonates with a few, angers others and seems completely irrelevant to many. Obviously, there is no way this group can please everybody. It does not surprise me that Emergent is primarily a Protestant thing because we are the ones that have the present history that makes ancient-future problematic. What is (or should be) the relationship of Protestants who are rediscovering some disciplines and practices to other followers in other traditions who never lost those disciplines and practices? Is the answer to simply join non-Protestant churches? Can we continue the tasks of critical reflection, deconstruction, or whatever else we want to call it by reading authors like Farley and supporting “Emergent” leaders who are trying to embody this? I can’t pretend to know where this primarily Evangelical, Protestant, “emergent” thing will end up but I am thankful to the many people who are sharing their journey as they go.

I was fortunate enough to recieve a very welcome email from a fellow ecclesial dreamer tonight offering some valuable and much needed insights to my last couple of posts. There were many thoughts generated from this email but there were two primary ones:

1. These ramblings of an ecclesial dreamer come from one who is in over his head. I know not what I ramble about.

2. I feel a very strong pull to the non-Protestant Christian traditians. I have felt this for a long time now and am not quite sure what to do about it.

I think I did not communicate as clearly as I wanted to in my last post. I have no gripe personally against seminary and I respect those who commit themselves to the hard work it involves to accomplish a seminary education successfully. Truth be told I wish I could afford to go. I am hoping to avoid seminary bashing. I have benefited greatly from the scholarship of gifted and dedicated people who are part of the theological education systems. I thank God for them.

The point I am trying to argue is that there is much more deconstruction that needs to take place. It seems to me that there is a trend to narrowly define the shift from modernity to postmodernity. So modernity is equated with the Evangelical church of the last 50 years or so and Postmodernity is equated to “Emerging” church. I am afraid that in this narrow view, emerging thinkers are being pressured to stop the deconstruction process too early in order to stay in everyone’s good graces. This leads to the problem of people who believe it is possible to create new “theologies” while ignoring the history of theological education and leaving the institutions that teach “theology” intact.

I think it is a mistake to think the conflict is between the contemporary evangelical churches (like Willow Creek or Saddleback) and newer types of corporate worship “gatherings”. As I tried to point out in the previous post, this creates false choices between Organic, holistic communities on the one hand and programmatic hierarchically led communities on the other. These types of choices continue to the further fragmentation of the Protestant church and lead to a dwindling conformity rather than a growing and dynamic pluralism.

I further believe that keeping this narrow focus casts the emerging thinkers in a negative light. It is commonly believed that emerging thinkers are culpable for creating the current conflict between moderns and postmoderns and breaking the continuity with previous ecclesial thinkers. However, when put into a larger historical context it could be narrated that the conflict is caused by those who think they are defending the generous orthodoxy of the faith by protecting the institutions formed in the forge of modernity. Looking at these institutions critically in their historical context is only the beginning of the deconstruction process.

I highly recommend Edward Farley’s Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education as a starting point in this conversation. Since this book is out of print and may be hard to locate I am thinking about writing and posting a summary of the thoughts here. I believe the ideas expressed in this book can help us deconstruct in a more constructive way. In the meantime I wanted to post a few quotes from his book to get the ball rolling.

”I am persuaded that reform attempts will continue to be merely cosmetic until they address the fundamental structure and pattern of studies inherited from the past and submit to criticism the presuppositions which undergird that pattern. I am also persuaded that such a reform, guided by the recovery of theologia, is correlative with a reform of the institutionality of clergy education.” (preface, xi)

“The reason the standard criticisms of theological education do not amount to a call for reform is that their focus is more on the symptoms than on the disease itself.” (page 3)

“The following statement succinctly expresses the travail of the theological school at the level of how it is experienced by its constituents. The typical product of three years of seminary study is not a theologically educated minister. The present ethos of the Protestant churches is such that a theologically oriented approach to the preparation of ministers is not only irrelevant but counterproductive. When we consider what appears to make ministers upwardly mobile, we suspect that the reward system for professional promotion and success is largely a matter of un- or anti-theological skills. Anticipating this, however vaguely, the theological student sees little point in ‘being a theologian.’ As students graduate into the reward system, they frequently discover the dispensability of their academic studies. At its very best, a theological education is only the beginning of a career-long discipline, and it is just this continuing ‘study of theology’ which does not occur. Such is the problem at the level of the churchly and ministerial context of education.” (page 4)

My friend Jason is blogging about a recent choice he made, his own ecclesial dream, and life within the system rules of Denver Seminary. As an ecclesial dreamer myself I fully support his decision and respect that he is dreaming the seemingly impossible. God knows we need gifted people like him trying to impact the system. I failed miserably in my attempt to embody his dream and I sincerely hope for him it becomes a reality.

My own choices have brought me to a place where I do not want to participate within the system anymore. While I do not regret these choices I have to admit it has brought me to a strange place. I am finding that outside the system there is very little support or encouragement but there is plenty of contempt, disrespect and marginalization. Over the past 18 months I have been told that a am not a “leader” because I made a choice to not try and push my agenda. I have been overlooked as a pastoral candidate because I did not share the desire to lead a congregation in to debt in order to attract Christians from other churches. I have been told that my dream is not valid because it does not lead to a church that competes with the other churches in my area for market share. I was told my “spiritual gift” was making the PowerPoint slide presentations for the Sunday morning service. I have had people exclude me from meaningful relationships because they could not see in me anything that would help them advance their own ends. I have been told that God is not at work in the relationships I have that are forming my faith.

Now before anyone thinks I am only angry and ranting about this I am not. True, those things hurt deeply and I am angry but there is more to it than that. I realize that all of these things are a result from choices that I have made and I am content to own those choices. I could have stayed on as the pastor of the church I helped plant and had access to all of the resources that the system provides for its own and been recognized as a pastoral leader. I could have stayed at my last church and continued to receive the compliments, affirmation and fellowship of some good people and compromised my integrity. But the truth is I was not willing to. I sense my calling is down a different path. The moment I made that choice I had no value within the system.

I’ll be the first to admit that maybe I just don’t have what it takes to be a pastoral leader within the system. It very well could be that the problem is with me as a person. I don’t have the drive, desire or degree to make it to the top. But it could also be true that the system itself is a proprietary one. In the old days of computers there were a lot of proprietary systems. Every piece of the system was designed to work together as a unit. This was efficient and cheap which made these systems very popular. The problem was you could not upgrade them very easily. If a really good sound card or video card came out you could not put it in your system. It wasn’t that the new card was bad. In fact it was superior in every way except that it was not designed to work in a proprietary system. So what does that have to do with anything?

Some people see the shift to “postmodernity” in the Evangelical realm as a transition going on within the system. Therefore, they believe that changes made within the system will produce change in the end result. I tend to think that is too short of a historical perspective. Too many equate “modernity” with Willow Creek or saddleback churches and fail to look at the broader foundation of theological education since the Enlightenment. There is a lot of talk about the need to create new theologies and renarrate the gospel message itself and I agree. However, doing this within the systems rooted in the Enlightenment are bound to fail because the Enlightenment project itself has failed. Seminaries that are based on a German Scholasticism and rooted in the failed Enlightenment project cannot produce lasting change in a non-proprietary, “post-modern” context because they must protect and defend their own proprietary system in order to exist. I think lasting change at our moment of history will require both people inside and outside the system. Unfortunately, until those on the inside value those who choose a different path and take responsibility for their own side of the emerging conflict, the continuity will be broken.

In the preface to the third edition of Naked Church, Wayne Jacobsen talks about how the proprietary nature of the system affected his own church:

“Eventually, however, increased growth and our inability to agree on the best way to handle it, finally exposed that we, too had fallen into the trap of serving our own system. Even though not a person among us would have wanted it to happen, we came to manage God’s work with man’s best wisdom and ceased to enjoy the simple power of loving him as a people together.

The solutions we sought proved to be divergent. Some people wanted more programs and stronger leaders like other churches had and some of our leaders were more than happy to fulfill those desires. Eventually those of us who sought an intimacy-based body life were forced to give up our dream or to leave.”

I think Wayne presents a false choice between 1.)more programs and strong leaders and 2.)intimacy-based body life. I believe its possible to have both. But having gone through the scenario he writes about I understand what he is saying. In my own first hand experience that false choice was a product of a system which only recognizes and rewards one type of leadership and ecclesial structure. People who work in that system continue to face this artificial choice resulting in several great leaders being overlooked as suitable to the pastoral office or many communities of faith with no access to strong, theologically educated leadership. I am willing to eliminate that choice by removing myself from the system that creates it. And if that means I will never be a real theologian or pastor or have a degree to validate who I am I’m at peace with that. Like Wayne, I am too stubborn to give up the dream.

I have a friend who got me hooked up with Trillian, a great chat program that allows you to use one program to chat with MSN, AIM, Yahoo!, ICQ, etc…

I have been playing with it all afternoon and I like it a lot! So I pulled my yahoo account in and set up an AIM/ICQ account. ANyone who uses MSN, AIM or Yahoo, feel free to add me to your contact lists. I have placed my account names in the left column. Chat on!

The more I reflect on my changing ecclesial dream the more I realize that my dream is not changing at all. In reality I am the one who is changing. And I have to tell you this change is painful and humbling. I am rereading Wayne Jacobsen’s book, Naked Church. I first read this book in 1988 and as I reread it now I can see that it has strongly influenced my thoughts on ministry. Early in the book he tells this story.

Church father, Thomas Aquinas, met with Pope Innocent IV who was counting a large sum of money on the table in front of him. The pope exclaimed, “You see, Thomas, that the Church cannot now say as the primitive Church could, ‘Silver and gold have I none.’” Aquinas replied, “Yes, Holy Father,” but neither can she say as did Peter to a crippled man, ‘Rise up and walk.’”

This story has me wondering what are the priorities of the church today. If given the choice between accumuting resources and healing the broken which one would we choose? If I am honest I have to admit that I have chosen the accumulation of resources too often. It is so easy to justify this in our quest for influence and power. Hoping to embody a community of faith that is vibrant and growing and reaching new people and making new disciples requires us to leave many of our wounded behind and embrace the illusion of progress. It is hard to attract the seekers to a gathering that is attended by a bunch of broken people. And God knows we certainly don’t want them leading anything!

I find Christ’s response interesting when JOhn the baptist sent his disciples to ask Jesus if he really was the Messiah.

“Go back and tell John what you have just seen and heard:
The blind see,
The lame walk,
Lepers are cleansed,
The deaf hear,
The dead are raised,
The wretched of the earth
have God’s salvation hospitality extended to them.
Is this what you were expecting? Then count yourselves fortunate!” (Luke 7:22-23)

There is nothing in Christ’s reply about the large amount of followers or increasing influence. “Is this what you were expecting?” I wonder why we are so quick to use verses like Acts 2:41 when we talk about emulating the early church and not verses like Acts 3:1-10. As much as I would like to have the resources to plant a vibrant, growing, succesful church I hope my community will not let me trample over and discard the wounded God places in front of us on our way to the Temple.

This article from today’s Rocky Mountain News tells the story of a controversial prayer that was given by a local Catholic priest, Rev. Bill Carmody to open Tuesdays legislative session. Here is what was prayed”

Forty years ago, John F. Kennedy, who was running for president, was under intense scrutiny for his Catholic faith. He made a pledge to the nation that he would not allow his faith to influence his decisions as president. He honored that pledge.

Sadly, politician after politician has followed in Kennedy’s footsteps and no longer bring their faith with them in public office. This has led to a vacuum of morality in public debate. Politicians now claim, “I am personally opposed to this but I can not let my morality and/or faith influence my decisions.”

I ask you, Almighty God, to change this.

I ask that the Catholics here present in this chamber bring their faith in making public policy decisions.

I ask that evangelicals bring their faith when they vote on public policy.

I ask that mainline Protestants bring their faith into the public square.

I ask that the Jewish people here present bring their faith with them when they vote on issues of public policy.

I ask that all people of faith here in this chamber truly be first and foremost, people of faith.

I ask that the representatives here present today will be men and women of God. If it costs them elections, so be it. It will bring this nation closer to God.

Our nation needs people of God to represent them in public office. Our nation has seen enough of people who claim to be a person of God yet never bring God or their faith into the public debate.

Almighty God, please change and convert the hearts of all representatives in this house.

May they be the antithesis of John Kennedy.

May they be women and men of God and may their faith influence and guide every vote they make.

May God bless this chamber and our state.

While thinking through some of the shift taking place in my ecclesial dream I came across the familiar passage of Acts 6. I am wondering if I have misunderstood this passage all these years. I used to believe that the point of the passage was that some people have the job of “prayer and ministry of the word” (in this case, the apostles) while others are needed to fill tasks like “serving the poor” or “waiting tables”. I think this is one of the verses that is used to create the division between clergy and laity. But we certainly wouldn’t encourage the laity not to pray and minister in word would we? (In fact, later in the Acts passage one of the seven selected was ministering in Word so effectively it led to his execution) Is this only a one way door where everyone is supposed to do “prayer and ministry of the word” and “serving the poor” but once you reach a certain status you can drop the “serving the poor” part and expect the underlings to do it? How does this relate to the concepts of being servants of all, bearing one another’s burdens and treating others better than ourselves?

Maybe there is a different way of understanding this passage. Maybe the apostles were not creating a distinction between “pastoral” ministry and “non-pastoral” ministry at all. Maybe they were simply refusing to accept responsibility for something that these people could (should??) do for themselves. Perhaps their response could be understood as “why are you trying to excuse yourselves of your responsibilities and shift them on to your leaders?” Maybe this is a paraphrase of Matthew 5:23-24. How can one devote themselves to prayer, ministry of the word or any form of communal worship when they have some unresolved conflict with another member of the community? The goal is not to bring your offering to the pastor and expect them to take care of the problem but to leave your offering and go reconcile with the other person.

Seen in this light, the apostles would not be trying to elevate themselves as someone special but rather making themselves just like everyone else in the community. This would set a powerful precedent that all Christ’s followers have a responsibility to reconcile with one another. (A precedent echoed by Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:1-3) The expected result would free up a lot of time for the ecclesial leaders to continue stewarding the community and allowing the community to resolve these issues amongst themselves (which in Acts 6, apparently, is exactly what happened). This is what I would expect to see from disciples who follow Christ’s example–not lording over people but empowering and equipping them to embody the roles of ambassadors of reconciliation.

How easy is it to run to the pastor when ever we have a problem and expect her to take care of it? How often have you heard pastors complain that most of their time goes towards administrative tasks and conflict resolution? But even more surprising is how readily pastors accept these tasks in the first place. Perhaps we should empower, equip (yes, sometimes we will need to intervene and instruct at some level) and expect our community participants to resolve these things amongst themselves. Is it any wonder that average members of average churches do not actively participate in the life of the community? Why should they when it is so easy to shift the responsibility and accountability to someone who will gladly do it if the price is right.