Tag Archive - mission

Suburban Spirituality: Church Shopping

May 22, 2009 in Ministry-Theology with 7 Comments

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[image from wearitdotcom]



When someone says it better than I can, then my philosophy is…let them say it. So the following is a long quote from the article Suburban Spirituality: The land of SUV’s and soccer leagues tends to weather the soul in peculiar ways, but it doesn’t have to.

For all of its foibles—which at its worst include lousy preaching, political infighting, self-centeredness, stagnation, a gaggle of special-interest groups—the poky local church (C. S. Lewis referred to the pokey little church in the Four Loves) in suburbia is still the most fertile environment for spiritual development there. Genuine spiritual progress doesn’t happen without a long-term attachment to a poky local church. I’m all for improving the organization of a local church to make it more biblically effective, but the maddening frustration that prompts someone to leave one church for another may be the precise thing that holds great potential for spiritual progress—if one stays. “Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote. “Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it.”

Disillusionment with one’s church, then, is not a reason to leave but a reason to stay and see what God will create in one’s life and in the local church. What I perceive to be my needs—”I need a church with a more biblical preacher who uses specific examples from real life”—may not correspond to my true spiritual needs. Often I am not attuned to my true spiritual needs. Thinking that I know my true needs is arrogant and narcissistic. Staying put as a life practice allows God’s grace to work on the unsanded surfaces of my inner life. Seventeenth-century French Catholic mystic François Fénelon wrote, “Slowly you will learn that all the troubles in your life—your job, your health, your inward failings—are really cures to the poison of your old nature.”

I would add “your church” to his list; that is, all the troubles in one’s church are really cures to the poison of one’s old nature, or, as the Apostle Paul put it in Romans 7, the “sinful nature.” The biggest problem in any church I attend is myself—and my love of self and my penchant to roam when I sense my needs aren’t being met.

Staying put and immersing oneself in the life of a gathered community forces one into eventual conflict with other church members, with church leadership, or with both. Frustration and conflict are the raw materials of spiritual development. All the popular reasons given for shopping for another church are actually spiritual reasons for staying put. They are a means of grace, preventing talk of spirituality from becoming sentimental or philosophical. Biblical spirituality is earthy, face-to-face, and often messy.

Comments?

Suburban Spirituality: What Is Your Mission?

May 20, 2009 in Marriage-Family, Ministry-Theology with 0 Comments

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[image by e453753]



Over the last couple of posts I have looked at the primacy of finances and family as to reasons why people often move to the suburbs. Those are two of the reasons we consider very important as well. And let me remind my readers that suburban life is not the only place this happens…it can happen in urban areas, hipster loft living, etc.

One of the questions my wife and I asked ourselves when we were first married and purchased our first home in the suburban neighborhood Pasadena…was, what is our mission in this neighborhood? Or how could we help transform the community we were living in? When we first moved in we had lofty aspirations, but dual incomes, graduate school, 3 hour work commutes, and a new baby…slowly killed the dreams we had to live more missionally in our community.

What happened? Was our desire for freedom and autonomy battling with our desire for community and service? We don’t know. But we hope to continue to learn, ask questions, and experiment with how to have more of a mission for our neighborhood and community that we settle down in.

In an Out of Ur blog post from April of 2006, The Brutal Burbs: how the suburban lifestyle undermines our mission, the writer quotes Matzko McCarthy from his book, Sex and Love in the Home: A Theology of the Household.

The dream of the suburbs is a self-sufficient home, inhabited by affable kin and grace with plenty of yard to provide a buffer between neighbors. The aim of suburban life is to choose a home and neighborhood where we can be happy, where people work hard and respect the ways of others, and where families get along on their own and come together for recreation and leisure….The great pleasure of home ownership is freedom and autonomy.

So as you think about moving, where to settle down, or thinking about life where you currently live…my question for you would be:

Do you and your family have a mission for your neighborhood and community? What is it?

David Fitch finishes his blog post by saying the following:

… evangelical Christians must consistently invite our neighbors into our homes for dinner, sitting around laughing, talking, listening and asking questions of each other. The home is where we live, where we converse and settle conflict, where we raise children. We arrange our furniture and set forth our priorities in the home. We pray for each other there. We share hospitality out of His blessings there. In our homes then, strangers get full view of the message of our life. Inviting someone into our home for dinner says “here, take a look, I am taking a risk and inviting you into my life.” By inviting strangers over for dinner, we resist the fragmenting isolating forces of late capitalism in America. It is so exceedingly rare, that just doing it speaks volumes as to what it means to be a Christian in a world of strangers.

Wess Daniels: What Are You Passionate About?

March 13, 2009 in Ministry-Theology, Technology-Social Media with 9 Comments

danielswess2Who Is Wess Daniels?
That’s hard for me to sum up in just a few words because Wess does a lot of different things, and he does them really well. He’s one of the more eclectic friends (loves technology, but also obsessed with vinyl records as of late) I have, and he’s definitely one of the smartest, and someone I look to for wisdom on many issues. I met Wess a couple of years ago at Fuller Theological Seminary where he is working on his Ph.D., studying under Dr. Ryan Bolger. Let me tell you in his own words a little about him:

I am a PhD student at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena CA, and am in the School of Intercultural Studies working in the area of Western culture and peace church issues. My hope is to teach classes in a college or seminary setting on Church and Culture. As a Quaker, my interests lay in free church theology and practice. I am also interested in the growing green movement and how the church might embrace this as a call for the future.

You can also find out a little more about Wess below:


Gathering In Light Introduction Video from wess on Vimeo.

My favorite thing about Wess though is that he is a great father and husband, and we had some fun times walking through Old Town Pasadena pushing our daughters in our baby strollers, sipping coffee and trying to have deep conversation while our daughters were all over the place…but that’s real life and I enjoyed those times.

Check out Wess’ blog Gathering in Light which is one of my favorites. Connect with him on Twitter, as well as check out his writings at Barclay Press. And for all you tech/social media people, Wess is someone I would be listening to.

In His Own Words…

What are you really passionate about?

Currently I am working on research about the future of the church, with a direct emphasis on the Quaker tradition, because that’s who I am and what is closest to me, but really I am most passionate about vibrant, radical and inspiring expressions of Christian faith in our today’s “global information culture.” In my research I am looking for people who are traversing the various boundaries we have set up within our Christian institutions. You’ve already had people on here Rhett who are doing things very much like what I’m talking about, Tony and Mike, are both explorers, looking at new ways to express faith and they are doing this at the crossroads of something old/new. I like to call this hybrid or remix Christianity – take our tradition(s), add a dose of contemporary culture, multiply this by faith and throw in a bit of creativity and see what you’ve got.

Continue Reading…

The Dilemma of the Church: Pursuing it’s Mission or Self Preservation

May 23, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 2 Comments

Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (pp. 29-30)

Running an organization is difficult in and of itself, no matter what its goals. Every transaction it undertakes—every contract, every agreement, every meeting—requires it to expend some limited resource: time, attention, or money. Because of these transaction costs, some sources of value are too costly to take advantage of. As a result, no institution can put all its energies into pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure simply to keep itself viable. Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says. The problems inherent in managing these transaction costs are on of the basic constraints shaping institutions of all kinds.

Thoughts:

  • Churches cast a vision/mission statement. This can often be handled in two ways: 1) They spell it out very specifically for the congregants through steps, action plan, etc. 2) They leave it open, allowing for the creativity of the congregants to carry out the vision/mission as they see fit.


  • Dillema: If the church doesn’t spell it out, and wants the congregants to be creative, the church needs to cut off the “choke point” that is usually created by layers of bureaucracy and hierarchy, giving freedom to the people. Or they need to spell it out, give marching orders, but in the process they cut off people’s creativity and the participation of the congregation.


  • In the end, the church has the choice to be self-preserving by maintaining control, or really pursue its mission/vision by opening up.