Knowtown…

I do not mean to imply in that last post that our telos is fully formed to the point where we can put on a plaque and hang it in the foyer of our imaginary church building. This telos is not something static and permanent that can be defined by the leaders and pushed out to the rest of the community. It is dynamic and changing as those who contribute to this volitional, transforming, reciprocal community dialogue within our covenant relationships to each other over a long period of time. But now is probably a good time to mention again (and again, and again…) that my first axiom in this whole dreaming process is that there is no church in the singular in our moment of history. I doubt I can emphasize enough how much this one thought influences my thinking. I think we do well to remember that all of us are finite beings and that Christian theology is an attempt to grasp the infinite. It should be quite obvious to us all that we cannot do this completely. But if you read through the comments on this post you will see that many of us speak, act, and believe that we have systems or frameworks of thought that completely encapsulate the knowledge of the infinitely holy. This position of certitude is a dangerous place to build a confessing community because it automatically creates an atmosphere and attitude of exclusion and produces a gospel that leads people into a conformity of bondage rather than a conformity of freedom found in bending our lives towards Christ.

There is a reason I want to bring this up again and again. I believe that ecclesial dreaming (or “church planting”) is a very critical move and anyone who engages in it is, at some level, making some form of claim that could be interpreted as saying that all existing ecclesial communities are flawed. (Otherwise we would simply continue in covenant relationships at the local church down the street.) The unspoken, other half to the thesis of this interpretation is that “all other existing ecclesial communities are flawed, but ours is not.” I want to be very clear that this is not what we are saying.

Instead, what we are trying to say is that all communities of faith, including our own, are flawed in our faithfulness. I want us to understand that there are no “ideal” or “perfect” churches that can stake a claim to being THE church (although I know many who continue to make this claim). When we think we have everything right there can only be one telos and that is to make sure everyone believes, behaves, speaks, etc. exactly the way we do, and if they don’t to clearly label them as heretics, un-orthodox, aberrant, or divisive. For many, this is the only way to understand the unity of the church. But, I do believe that we are living in a pluralistic, fragmented ecclesial landscape and dream of a unified, catholic church. Using the fragmented imagery, imagine that the various faithful communities are each one piece. I don’t think that unity requires us to look for the one who has the largest piece and see how many people we can get to recognize them as the only one, or even the most faithful one. Rather, I think we need to realize that no matter how big the piece is it is still finite and cannot capture the infinite. We need to allow all of the fragmented pieces to bring their perspectives and understanding to the table. We need to all acknowledge that we are all only partially right on anything we do to embody the church but that on our own we can’t know which part is the right part. We need the perspective of the other pieces to fully form our faith just as much as they need ours.

So, back to my point… I think our pluralistic culture creates room for more than one telos. If you drive around the Denver metro area you will see a billboard for a large, nationally know church. Along with a picture of the pastoral leaders is a bold proclamation of their telos: Your success is our passion! For the thousands of people who choose to commit to this community for the formation of their faith I am sure this is good news. In the ecclesial circles I run in, it is easy to see where this telos is flawed and would make it difficult (notice, I did not say “problematic”), if not impossible to submit to that community for spiritual formation. But I am under no illusion that there are not many of those thousands who could look at our attempts to embody a faithful community and identify several areas where we are missing the mark.

So what are we to do? Throw our hands up in the air and echo Ecclesiastes that everything is meaningless? March around their building seven times with rams horns and pitchers hoping that God will allow their walls to fall down? Missio Dei does not want to engage in theological or philosophical debates about who is right and who is wrong with this, or any other, congregation. We do not want to define ourselves in opposition to these other churches (though at times, in the way we practice our faith we may very well be in opposition to them). But we do not want to argue or fight against them with verbal polemics. We would rather embody a community that defines itself in relationship to these other communities in such a way that we each critique the other in a way that does not exclude and condemn but calls each of us into repentance and ongoing reconciliation and spiritual formation. We need these other communities with their multiple telos to call us to faithfulness. And we hope to become an alternative community that can do the same for them.

I have rambled at length about this because I am very aware that Missio Dei is not for everybody. As an ecclesial dreamer this creates a problem when it comes to inviting others into the conversation. For better or worse, the evangelical emphasis on church “growth” has marked all church planters with a desire to have more people come into our expression of Christian community. But what do we do when people come into the conversation looking for something that we are unable or unwilling to provide for them? At what point does our attempt to create an atmosphere of fusion, turn into fission? I think there is a tendency and a very strong temptation by ecclesial dreamers to exert their authority when this tension becomes to great and definitively resolve it by creating the clear lines of demarcation that identify who is “in” and who is “out”. We are trying to avoid that response and in so doing have created more problems than we have solved. These are hard questions to wrestle with in any context and we have experienced it first hand. We have not successfully navigated this turbulence yet. We still have a long way to go. But I think we are learning a lot and in the process I think the unique telos of our community is beginning to form. I think in recognizing that there is no church in the singular has helped me navigate through the temptation to try and make Missio Dei all things to all people. But it is also helped me to see in very clear ways that we can be something beautiful, meaningful and transformational to some people and this is only heightening my awareness of the “elephant in the room” problem that has plagued us from the start…

I apologize from the start that this post may not make a whole lot of sense. I am having a hard time deciding where I want to go next with this narration of my perspective of the unfolding of Missio Dei and I find this part of the story difficult to write about because it touches places deep within me. For me this is a very personal part of my journey that is hard for an introvert like me to “put out there”. However, I am very open to being pushed or challenged in this if anyone has any feedback.

There are several obstacles I see that I think are hindering our quest to become more than we are at the moment. There are the typical problems that face all church plants with limited resources. These issues are magnified by the fact that we are attempting to be as “open source” as possible, but even so I don’t think these issues are our biggest hurdle. For me, the tricky part of the navigation has been forming a community telos.

In the church plant I was in before, everything fell into place when we finally settled on what our telos was going to be. Like most church plants this was defined by myself and the other pastor working out our values, vision and mission. When all our efforts began to flow from this, things began to fall into place. But, like most other evangelical churches, our values, vision and mission were simply a rewording of our understanding of the great commission. Our task was now to persuade people to buy our version instead of the version of other churches in the area. We were not trying to be competitive or “steal sheep” but we needed people (and their resources) to build our budget. Implicit, but always unspoken, in our values, vision, and mission was a belief that we, as the pastors, knew what the people needed and how best to give it to them. In the task of making disciples we defined ourselves as the discipl-ers.

Fast forward to the recent past. In my opinion, our present group has come to a different understanding of the great commission and as a result we have had to re-narrate our role in being obedient to it. For me, what this means is that our community will not be a place that tries to market our version of values, vision and mission that implies we have some sort of spiritual commodity to offer to the poor needy people who do not already have it. I don’t think that the great commission was the graduation speech for the followers of Christ. In other words, I don’t think Christ was saying “now that you have arrived, you need to go find other people to take your place. You don’t need to be disciples any more, you now need to disciple others.” Instead I think that Christ was encouraging his disciples to invite others into the discipleship process as fellow disciples. The goal, in my opinion, was to embody a community that was mutually, volitionally, and reciprocally forming one another’s faith as they collectively followed the commands of Jesus Christ. This required everyone in the community to bend their lives towards the way of the cross.

This way of looking at things changes the telos in ways that are hard to explain or practice. I think we need to be careful to avoid the language of “reaching non-christians/pre-believers/lost/etc” as if we have stuff to give them but they have nothing to give us. I don’t want to be someone else’s discipl-er. I would rather have them join me in being a disciple of Christ in a community with other disciples. Which means that sometimes I will be required to give to them while at other times I will be asked to receive what they have to give. Reading Miroslav Volf and dialoguing with others involved in our discussion has had the side effect of producing in me a higher ecclesiology than I have had in my previous church experiences. I am beginning to appreciate the sacramental reality of the confessing community of the people of God in a way that is spiritually transforming for everyone in the community, including those who are leaders. (I realize that most liturgical bodies have continued to do this much more faithfully than the non-denominational structures I am emerging from. I wrestle often with the question of why not simply join one of them. As tempting as it is, I still find the hierarchical structures of them to stand in the way of a more “open source”, dialogical community.) As you can tell I am having a hard time communicating this clearly and I have no doubt that there are many who could articulate this much better than I can. Is it any wonder it is taking us so long??

So one problem I wrestle with is how do we invite people into this process? We do not have a target group we are marketing to. We are not trying to “reach” or “convert” people. We recognize that conversion is a work that the Spirit produces in us (not the other) as we participate in this transforming community. We are trying to become a volitional, reciprocal, covenant community that works at transforming and bending our lives towards faithfulness to the way of the cross. This requires a different type of communication, leadership structure, programming, planning, etc than you will find at most churches. It requires a different telos. I have been communicating with several different people in different contexts over the past two years who grasp what I am talking about and are very excited by it. They indicate that they are open to exploring this community at a deeper level. But over the last 6 months or so all of them have begun to ask a question that I am learning to hate. More on that later…

I will be the first to admit that those of us still dreaming about Missio Dei have not done a very good job of articulating our vision of leadership. In many ways I feel primarily responsible for our failure in this but that may be just me projecting an unrealistic expectation on myself. A more realistic observation would be that the type of ecclesial leadership we are striving for is so rare in an ecclesial context that it is difficult to notice even when it is right under your nose.

I often hear two challenges to what we are thinking when I attempt to explain our goals in leadership. The first is that the proper response to bad leadership is not no leadership, but good leadership. This response misses the point on several levels, in my opinion. First, it wrongly assumes that we are anti-leadership. We are well aware that any corporate gathering of people will require leadership and we are certainly not opposed to that. Nor are we resistant to being labeled as “leaders”. But the next question is who gets to define what is “good” and “bad” as it relates to the topic of leadership. It seems to me that the very things many people would use to describe leadership as good are those things that Christ indicates as bad when it comes to ecclesial leadership.

The second challenge I sometimes hear comes from those who find it difficult to conceive of anything but a hierarchical structure of leadership. It usually goes something like this: If you ask a group of people who claim to have a flattened leadership structure why they do not have a “senior” leader, whoever answers the question is the “senior” leader. This claim already assumes a definition of leadership that requires that the strongest, loudest, communicator is the leader. I reject that claim. If we want to recognize ecclesial leadership in people who exercise their influence and authority in agreement with Mark 9:35, Mark 10:41-45, Philippians 2:5-8, and 1 Peter 5:1-3 we will see that the loudest, strongest communicator of the group is not (or at least, should not be) the leader. A true ecclesial leader would point out that because there are many people in the community there are many answers to the question as it is posed and attempt to create a context for everyone to share their own reasons. When several of the answers are given they would suggest that perhaps a better question is “why, in light of such a diverse range of answers to this question, does this group still gather together with the intention of forming one another’s faith?” What we might find is that a group structured in such a way would not need a “senior” leader because there would be an openness to seeing the leadership abilities in every person when they made a volitional, covenant commitment to participate fully in the community. (there are some issues that I do see myself or another “ecclesial” leader of the community being responsible for but I want to save those specific examples for a different post.)

You might be tempted to ask if such a community can exist. I would say that they already do and the better question is what preconceived notions about leadership and ecclesial structures do we still need to deconstruct in order to see them? My hope is that we will grow into such a community as we continue down our chosen path. I think by now it is as obvious to readers as it is to anyone who has been involved in our conversation over the past many months that we do not have answers to many of the questions we have faced in the area of leadership and those we do have we have implemented very poorly. I cannot begin to count all the mistakes we have made along the way. But I can tell you that we are committed to failing forward and resisting the temptation to revert to the more manageable path of viewing leadership as a power that is a limited resource to be grasped and lorded over those we define as weaker. I believe we are in the process of discovering how this ecclesial, open source leadership will work redemptively in our context, but I have to admit that the process of developing all this more fully is much slower than I originally hoped it would be.

Embodying a different leadership structure is only one small part of the multi-faceted obstacles we have encountered in the birthing of Missio Dei. I am beginning to realize that these narratives of mine are probably not very helpful to anyone but myself but there is much more to come in the unfolding of my perspective of this expedition so I will continue to dump. More to come…

Since the middle of 2003 the intention of my ecclesial dream has been to participate in the formation of an ecclesial community. That is quite a sentence for me considering that when I left my first church plant I swore I would never get involved in something like that again. But here I am in the early part of 2005 and I have never felt this “unchurched” in all my life. What happened?

In order to answer that question I have to talk about two of the many convictions I hold. These will sound familiar to those who know me. First, as Miroslav Volf correctly points out, there is no church in the singular this side of the eschaton. This thought is huge to me and lays the foundation for appreciating the pluralistic reality of the church. Without this conviction it is too easy to fall into a competitive mode where we find fault with other churches and assume that we can do it better. I am way too familiar with my own history as a pastor to make any claim of being able to do church better. Which leads to the most obvious question I get: “Why start something new? Why not just go to X church?”

This is tricky territory. There is no easy way to answer this question without sounding arrogant, angry, opinionated, superior, judgmental, etc, etc… But it is an honest question so it does deserve an honest attempt at an answer. But for me to answer this question I have to tie it to a second conviction I hold. As I have mentioned before, Doug Pagitt does a great job of framing this question. I agree with Doug’s assessment that ecclesial dreamers do not start new churches because the pews in existing churches were full but because the places of dream making and leadership in other churches were full.

Simply put, my second conviction is that institutional structures themselves are a problem. Or to put it another way, in spite of all the differences that exist between the vision and mission statements of various churches even across denominational lines, the ecclesial structures themselves are remarkably similar. From my perspective, the dominant thinking of ecclesial structures (particularly in the area of ecclesial leadership) are implying that at that level there is a singular way to do church this side of the eschaton. Now, at this point, this post is in danger of turning into 10,000 word essay so I think I want to leave the issue of leadership here for the moment (but if you are interested you can find the main theme of my thoughts here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5).

Holding these two convictions creates problems that simply do not exist in the typical church plant. If you go through the boot camps or read the books you will find out how to develop your values, vision and mission, recruit a core team, and attract people to the articulation of the values, vision, and mission. It’s not rocket science. But, regardless how many times you go to the thesaurus to make your vision sound different from the church down the street, if you follow this pattern you will be exactly the same at the organizational level.

At our meeting last month one thoughtful person asked how we will avoid being just like the cliques in high school wrapped in an ecclesial wrapper. So instead of jocks, stoners, and geeks we will have moderns, emergents, fundamentalists, etc… In my opinion there is only one way to avoid this and it answers why it is taking us so long to get there. To transcend this fragmented cliquish nature that dominates the current ecclesial landscape we need to begin with a completely different leadership structure. If you want to have a corporate, spiritually formative community of faith that values and embodies the beauty of diversity and plurality you have to begin with a leadership structure that is willing to embody that. I will try to flesh that out more fully in the next post but for now I simply offer this as one of the main reasons it has taken us so long to get to this point of the journey.

The other night I finally had an opportunity to watch the animated film The Incredibles. I thought it was a great movie but I couldn’t shake the idea that there was something familiar about the main character. Later, while reading the comments of this post I noticed that Will left a comment indicating that he saw it as well. Chance? Coincidence? I think not!!

It seems that this man may be even more incredible than I originally thought.

I want to rush to the present so that I can begin to wrestle out loud with some of my more current thoughts but I feel there is still more to be said to put some of that in a broader context. So I think it is important to mention that in the last year at my previous church was the year I first attended an Emergent Convention. That was a wonderful experience of meeting many great and gifted ecclesial dreamers. It was the San Diego Convention of 2003. There are way too many highlights from that week to detail here but among them were the “Church Planting in an Emerging Context” critical concern course led by Tim Keel and Doug Pagitt, lunch with Jason Clark, the Wednesday night general session facilitated by Chris Seay, and my own personal favorite, the Friday night session with Barry Taylor (I still cannot believe that people were actually walking out of Barry Taylors session). God used the Wednesday and Friday night sessions as a one-two combination to breathe a fresh new life into my ecclesial dream. Unfortunately (or unusually), those two sessions were not made available as CD’s.

That week inspired me and I returned to my church with a renewed passion. While my pastor resonated with what I brought back, many of the deep pockets were resistant at best. Admittedly, I was not communicating things very well at that time either. At any rate, it was during these months between February and October, 2003 that I began to realize that many (most???) of those who are in the established churches do not see the emerging conversation as a breath of fresh air, but as a threat to their existence. There was trouble in the air and I did not have the strength to navigate through that on my own. Once the decision was made to replace our pastor I realized it was time for me to go as well.

By this time I had already been involved with many other ecclesial dreamers who connected through the Emergent website (as mentioned in the previous post) so the language of that group began to explore the possibility of “doing something” together. And this began a very turbulent part of my ecclesial adventure. I was about to be exposed to some challenges that revealed more of my weaknesses than I was comfortable with and make me more convinced than ever that the changes we needed to make were more than cosmetic.

The time from October 2003 till now has been hard. Very hard. I have been wrestling with a lot of inner turmoil as I wonder if I even have a place in my own ecclesial dream. I have had to navigate the questions from others who left my last church hoping that I would start something and deal with their frustration with me that I was not providing that for them. And the hardest part was wondering why this new group of ecclesial dreamers was struggling to get its act together. My knowledge of the giftedness of the people in the discussion and my experience with my first church plant led me to believe that if we were following the typical church planting blueprint we could have developed a pretty good church plant. And everyone involved had circles of influence that could have allowed us to create a fairly good congregation to build on. We could have been contenders. And it knew it shouldn’t take too long to pull this all together. But it wasn’t happening. Would this group attempt to embody something together or were we meant to be nothing more than a cohort of emerging friends? We certainly had some spatial proximity issues that would make the forming of a church difficult but I don’t think that it would be impossible. (After all, I am hoping to see the seemingly impossible become a reality.)

So what was the problem and what role did I play in that? What is my perception of where I am currently in the ecclesial dream and what are the next steps? What are the convictions that are driving my current efforts? What obstacles do I see on the horizon? There are many ways to jump into that discussion. My perspective on these things is obviously slanted but its all I have. Over the next several posts I want to share some of the “church planting” axioms/convictions that, for better or worse, are influencing my ecclesial dream.

I suppose I should begin with a short sketch of where I am coming from before I jump into where I am and where I (hope I) am heading. Much of this will be redundant for those who know me but I think this context will help me narrate the rest of the journey.

I am still an ecclesial dreamer. I still have aspirations of participating in the formation of a spiritually formative, Christian community of faith. I want to say that I am already doing this but obviously that would be a reductionistic, oversimplified statement with out fleshing out more of what I mean when I say that. I don’t think I could do that in this context no matter how hard I try so I am not going to attempt it. So I am not hoping to try to explain everything around this ecclesial dream but simply reflect on various facets of it as I feel comfortable talking about them. Some of this may not make any sense and some of it may seem contradictory.

I left my first church planting experience several years ago, thoroughly convinced that I would never again get involved in church leadership. It was not that the experience was negative, because it wasn’t. We were very successful in our plant and that church still exists today. But what I learned intuitively (though I did not have the perspective or vocabulary to articulate it at the time) was that the typical Evangelical, non-Denominational, ecclesial structures that I grew up in and was planting in, was not a context that I was comfortable with. So I was probably more shocked than anyone to find myself a few years later heavily involved in the leadership of another church.

But this church was different on many levels. First, I think theologically it was a much better fit for my own leanings. Also, there were certain things in place that gave us the freedom to experiment with things at the ecclesial level. We owned our building so we had a lot of flexibility with our budget and did not have a lot of the resources concerns that plague some churches. Our pastor was a very gifted communicator and had the ability to connect with the unchurched, upper-middle class demographic that we were situated in. We were doing a lot of things that the other churches in our area did not have the ability to do and as a result we attracted a different kind of crowd. This gave us a unique reputation in town that was pretty positive with some but pretty negative with the christian subculture. Admittedly, we did not have the ability to navigate this as faithfully as we should have. To make a long story short, the pressure from many people who wanted us to be more like the other churches in town began to create an unhealthy tension within the church and a change had to be made.

This experience was a real eye-opener for me and put a strong dent in my ecclesial thinking. It was during the four years I was at this church that I became aware of the “emergent” conversation and was very hopefull that our church would be able to make a transition. To be honest, I thought we had actually made the transition. But I was wrong and I became more convinced than ever that it was the ecclesial structure itself that created the problems we faced but I was not sure exactly what that meant for me.

After a strange transition of pastoral leadership took place (I have blogged about that in the past so I won’t rehash it here) I left that church in October of 2003. By that time, I had already been involved with other ecclesial dreamers who I connected with through the Emergent Village for about 10 months. Those relationships began to create a different context for my ecclesial dreams and created a hope in me that I had not ever had before. But as this post is already longer than I intended I will return to that at another time.

It occurs to me that if I am no longer blogging about ecclesial dreams it may be time to change the description of my blog. I have many good reasons (a.k.a. weak excuses) for why I have been reluctant to publicly share my most recent ramblings in this space. But thanks to reading blogs from ecclesial dreamers who have been much more disciplined in sharing their own experiences, thoughts and dreams I have been encouraged to get my feet back into those waters. I am hoping to get my personal laptop (my main blogging computer) back and running again over the next few days (it crashed about two weeks ago) and then I hope to begin sharing much more of my ramblings and reflections on the rocky adventures I have had in the hopefilled attempts to flesh out things that began only as ecclesial dreams. I hope to share some of my own personal perspectives on this activity we call church planting and my frustrations with the obstacles caused by my own poor choices and lack of ability. I also hope to address from a more personal level why I feel called to this work and why I believe it is necessary to not give up. I want to attempt to articulate and describe why Missio Dei is something that I can not give up on. But even more than trying to explain these various things we hope to do I want to try to share more commentary on the things we are already doing.

Over the next few weeks I hope to begin this process by sharing some of the questions we have been wrestling with since our meeting a few weeks ago. I hope that in the process of returning to the roots of the ramblings of an ecclesial dreamer, some of the stuff I share in this space will be as helpful to other ecclessial dreamers as the writings of others have been to me over these past several months.

One last thing– I just want to give a deep, heartfelt thanks to Hamo, Steve, Christy, Rudy, Jimmy, Jason, Sivin, Jen, Tony, and Vaughn for sharing their thoughts when I was not willing/able to do so. Their ramblings have been encouraging me, nurturing my soul, and adding fuel to the fire of my ecclesial dream.

Andrew Patrick is an ecclesial dreamer that I discovered through pioneer, Andrew Hamilton. He is asking a great question that has been asked by others in various venues but deserves to be asked/answered again and again. If you read this blog I hope you will visit his and post an answer in his comments. I am sure he will appreciate it.

The Sailor and the Scholar is now blogging at Fully Alive. This blog is worth reading so I highly recommend updating your old links or adding this as a new one.