I mentioned in my comments in the post below how much I like Becoming Missional Check it out. Plus I am going to be updating all of my links, so pass on ones here in the comment section to this post that you think I might want to link to that I haven't yet just in case yours/they aren't on my list to update. Also, for some of my favorites in my Tulsa area, I have just linked to the Emergent Tulsa Cohort and from that page you can click on several of the local bloggers. Anyway it might be next week but the updated links will be coming soon. End.
Type rest of the post here
Friday, April 27, 2007
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
"a third place" gets notice
Our missional incarnational approach here in Turley, OK with the creation of 'a third place' as part of our planting got written up today in the Tulsa World. Here is the link where you can read the article. http://www.tulsaworld.com/community/article.aspx?articleID=070425_9_ZM1_spanc73180.
I guess, since there is no mention in the article of me as a minister and of the creation of the center as a way that our church is serving the community, of how we are purposefully becoming "a guest in our own home" as a spiritual discipline, that it must be working. No seriously, when I first read the article, my old default mode of thinking went up and I thought "oh I wish they'd mentioned the church" but if they had, since we are not only serving people of existing religious affiliations but especially the de-churched and unchurched, I probably would have thought "oh I wish they hadn't played up the church so much." Such is the plight of the 50-something planter moving more into missional approaches to what it means to be church.
We don't have a sign that says the name of our church or even a flier out front that we meet in the space we have created (we did but I took it down); we do have a flier for the church that is available in the community information area but we also post information prominently about events that take place at other churches in our area; we do have a cross placed next to the cable television area but I have been debating about taking it out and just bringing it out, in a kind of processional, whenever we have our meetings (still haven't decided; there are pros and cons). Upshot is that people will find out about us first through our mission, our work together, and through conversation rather than some printed material, a sign, slogans, or worship service.
The fact that it all feels weird, disorienting to people's stereotypes of church, means we are on the right track I think. End.
Type rest of the post here
I guess, since there is no mention in the article of me as a minister and of the creation of the center as a way that our church is serving the community, of how we are purposefully becoming "a guest in our own home" as a spiritual discipline, that it must be working. No seriously, when I first read the article, my old default mode of thinking went up and I thought "oh I wish they'd mentioned the church" but if they had, since we are not only serving people of existing religious affiliations but especially the de-churched and unchurched, I probably would have thought "oh I wish they hadn't played up the church so much." Such is the plight of the 50-something planter moving more into missional approaches to what it means to be church.
We don't have a sign that says the name of our church or even a flier out front that we meet in the space we have created (we did but I took it down); we do have a flier for the church that is available in the community information area but we also post information prominently about events that take place at other churches in our area; we do have a cross placed next to the cable television area but I have been debating about taking it out and just bringing it out, in a kind of processional, whenever we have our meetings (still haven't decided; there are pros and cons). Upshot is that people will find out about us first through our mission, our work together, and through conversation rather than some printed material, a sign, slogans, or worship service.
The fact that it all feels weird, disorienting to people's stereotypes of church, means we are on the right track I think. End.
Type rest of the post here
Friday, April 13, 2007
Anti-Planting Attitudes, and More
Following up on the post below, here are some items lifted from the special Net Results issue on church planting.
From George Bullard's radical church planting letter: You've got to move away from anti-church planting attitudes such as:
--We cannot start new congregations because of all the empty seats we have in existing congregations. Fill up our churches first and then we can start new congregations....because they may take away some of our members, particularly those who no longer live close to our church...because they will compete with us for new members. We have at least one family from every neighborhood within three miles of our church. So we are reaching those neighborhoods.
---Our denominational region plans to start about one new congregation every three to five years now. That is a great improvement over the past when we started a new congregation about every five to seven years....starting new is too expensive to start too many of them. We have to hire a pastor-developer and pay that salary. We have to buy land. We have to build the first building. With all that investment we are lucky to be able to start one church every five years....we hve to make sure they are started right, so we have to go slowly and deliberately to guide them appropriately and make sure they understand the principles of faithfulness.
---We are not a rich region. we cannot put together the large amount of money needed to start a new congregation. We tried a capital fund campaign several years ago for it and it failed. It is more important for the denominational staff to work with churches that are plateaued and declining and need renewal. They have been paying their dues in money and service to the denomination and deserve more than a new congregation. Church planters must be approved by our denomination. Too few candidates exist. Our seminaries do not emphasize it and there must be good reasons for this.
Denominations tend to have three attitudes about church planting, with varying results.
1. If there is a "Church planting initiative" in your denomination, then among the various things the denomination does is to seek to plant churches. (instead of its being the denomination's reason for being. Think what a change that would mean). Those who adopt initiative-mindsets rely on the denomination to start churches at least 80 percent of the time. Often the starts come from split-offs. With this mindset you might get new congregations coming into existence each year that is equal to or less than 1 percent of the churches already in existence. This is where the UUA is, at best.
2. If there is a "Church planting strategy" denominations focus their activities on making it a core value through training of leaders, marketing it as a sell to local churches. After 10 years of sustained attention you will see changes in the church culture. At first some easy to launch churches will start where people have been waiting for support; then next some existing churches will begin to start the process; the final part of that first ten years the new congregations themselves will begin to look to becoming partners and sponsors of other new ones. If the denomination seeks to control the church planting efforts of the newer congregations, there will be some incremental increases in new church plants each year moreso than those with the initiative mind-set. If they don't seek to control the newly-planted churches, then the third mind-set might take hold.
3. If there is a "church planting movement" mind-set, it is radically different from what currently exists. It can't be directly initiated from the denomination, but must be grassroots (but denominational seeding of such grassroots culture can help). You pull together pastors and leaders who have been engaged in it and challenging them to take it to new level. Accountability should be by planting peers and not denominational officials. It can't accept too many external resources. It happens when people live the truth that "the natural reproduction of congregations that begins to occur in the midst of a spiritual environment where new congregations of all types are seen as the best way to extend and expand the kingdom of God. It is a spiritual movement more than it is a strategic plan....Leaders are from the grassroots...It is tough to put a ceiling on how much growth in congregations can take place through a church planting movement." Growth of a minimum of 5 percent each year in the number of new congregations within a collection of congregations is a beginning point."
Here is an example of a beginning church planting movement: Go to The Northwoods Story:Go to http://www.northwoodchurch.org.
It is an oft-repeated story. Northwoods started out to do big mega-church but decided to spread out instead. Still have 2,000 at original site but have 30,000 through 80 congregations started instead. Starting 15 new ones per year. It's about having a "kingdom" perspective, not institutional organizational perspective. Funny how we progressives so often don't translate our community-minded "kingdom" social gospel approach into planting in the same spirit. Maybe there is something safe about having church as a safe place to retreat to in between our forays into making the world a better place, but if we truly want to do it we need to turn things inside out and re-create the church as kingdom-work.
From Bob Roberts from Northwood: "Every church member seen as a church planter." I love it. Changes everything. Need to start instilling that. Once you get your mind around that, it makes missional and incarnational and relational church planting more understandable. Note what this does to membership expectations.
---" Powerful, personal worship is key." Here is another paradigm portal. A real controversial place of pushing the ecclesia. See earlier posts about worship. How often does our image and addiction to "corporate worship" and size in worship prevent us from doing the real prayerful spiritual work that is needed and that would lead us to being missionaries wherever we are? Can people envision church without worship as they are used to it? Small group worship and even two to three prayer groups and even personal prayer time, immersing in music, silence, nature, scripture, singing to God by yourself, engaging in art deeply, all this can be meaningful worship that drives us to create communities and relationships, instead of the regular Sunday worship event trapping us from doing so.
The Disciples of Christ vision was to start 100 new congregations a year, 1000 in 1000 different ways. So far after five years they have close to 450 new congregations. They are supporting their planters with training, grants, global experiences. Healthy church planters start healthy congregations. Everyone is coupled with a mentoring coach. ---From Ed Stetzer: Churches start churches. He has a list of 72 church planting organizations. this is a new phenomenon of the past 20 years, and more recently within that time frame....You can, and denominations do, pour millions into churches that are broken. Revitalizing existing churches is a great idea, but no one has been able to do that. We need to help churches transform, but we need to start new ones too. And we need to do it not just with "good people" who stand in front of other good people and tell them how to be good, to quote Mark Twain. Stetzer says for forty years we have made the church better, spruced up buildings, spiced up worship, made sermons practical, and the culture is "more lost" and people who go to church are less committed.
--From Ronny Russell: an oldie but goodie--if someone comes to a church leader with an idea and passion for a new ministry how many hoops will they have to jump through? (If I was in search that would be the basis of my first question to folks looking for a new minister)....Church can become like little bands of disciples going about Galillee and Judea following Jesus. Others will see and hear and want to join.
---From Tom Bandy.: Who cares if your church exists? (another good search question.) but better yet, Does God care it exists? Stop talking lovingly amongst yourself and talk more lovingly among strangers. The codependency between laity and clergy is the most significant block to mission growth. 1. Take away money from institutional maintenance and put it into relevant programs for the public. Don't stop with programs, but with programs that lead to conversations in the community. Be a mentor to those in community in need. Have a single signature ministry in the zip code.
From George Bullard's radical church planting letter: You've got to move away from anti-church planting attitudes such as:
--We cannot start new congregations because of all the empty seats we have in existing congregations. Fill up our churches first and then we can start new congregations....because they may take away some of our members, particularly those who no longer live close to our church...because they will compete with us for new members. We have at least one family from every neighborhood within three miles of our church. So we are reaching those neighborhoods.
---Our denominational region plans to start about one new congregation every three to five years now. That is a great improvement over the past when we started a new congregation about every five to seven years....starting new is too expensive to start too many of them. We have to hire a pastor-developer and pay that salary. We have to buy land. We have to build the first building. With all that investment we are lucky to be able to start one church every five years....we hve to make sure they are started right, so we have to go slowly and deliberately to guide them appropriately and make sure they understand the principles of faithfulness.
---We are not a rich region. we cannot put together the large amount of money needed to start a new congregation. We tried a capital fund campaign several years ago for it and it failed. It is more important for the denominational staff to work with churches that are plateaued and declining and need renewal. They have been paying their dues in money and service to the denomination and deserve more than a new congregation. Church planters must be approved by our denomination. Too few candidates exist. Our seminaries do not emphasize it and there must be good reasons for this.
Denominations tend to have three attitudes about church planting, with varying results.
1. If there is a "Church planting initiative" in your denomination, then among the various things the denomination does is to seek to plant churches. (instead of its being the denomination's reason for being. Think what a change that would mean). Those who adopt initiative-mindsets rely on the denomination to start churches at least 80 percent of the time. Often the starts come from split-offs. With this mindset you might get new congregations coming into existence each year that is equal to or less than 1 percent of the churches already in existence. This is where the UUA is, at best.
2. If there is a "Church planting strategy" denominations focus their activities on making it a core value through training of leaders, marketing it as a sell to local churches. After 10 years of sustained attention you will see changes in the church culture. At first some easy to launch churches will start where people have been waiting for support; then next some existing churches will begin to start the process; the final part of that first ten years the new congregations themselves will begin to look to becoming partners and sponsors of other new ones. If the denomination seeks to control the church planting efforts of the newer congregations, there will be some incremental increases in new church plants each year moreso than those with the initiative mind-set. If they don't seek to control the newly-planted churches, then the third mind-set might take hold.
3. If there is a "church planting movement" mind-set, it is radically different from what currently exists. It can't be directly initiated from the denomination, but must be grassroots (but denominational seeding of such grassroots culture can help). You pull together pastors and leaders who have been engaged in it and challenging them to take it to new level. Accountability should be by planting peers and not denominational officials. It can't accept too many external resources. It happens when people live the truth that "the natural reproduction of congregations that begins to occur in the midst of a spiritual environment where new congregations of all types are seen as the best way to extend and expand the kingdom of God. It is a spiritual movement more than it is a strategic plan....Leaders are from the grassroots...It is tough to put a ceiling on how much growth in congregations can take place through a church planting movement." Growth of a minimum of 5 percent each year in the number of new congregations within a collection of congregations is a beginning point."
Here is an example of a beginning church planting movement: Go to The Northwoods Story:Go to http://www.northwoodchurch.org.
It is an oft-repeated story. Northwoods started out to do big mega-church but decided to spread out instead. Still have 2,000 at original site but have 30,000 through 80 congregations started instead. Starting 15 new ones per year. It's about having a "kingdom" perspective, not institutional organizational perspective. Funny how we progressives so often don't translate our community-minded "kingdom" social gospel approach into planting in the same spirit. Maybe there is something safe about having church as a safe place to retreat to in between our forays into making the world a better place, but if we truly want to do it we need to turn things inside out and re-create the church as kingdom-work.
From Bob Roberts from Northwood: "Every church member seen as a church planter." I love it. Changes everything. Need to start instilling that. Once you get your mind around that, it makes missional and incarnational and relational church planting more understandable. Note what this does to membership expectations.
---" Powerful, personal worship is key." Here is another paradigm portal. A real controversial place of pushing the ecclesia. See earlier posts about worship. How often does our image and addiction to "corporate worship" and size in worship prevent us from doing the real prayerful spiritual work that is needed and that would lead us to being missionaries wherever we are? Can people envision church without worship as they are used to it? Small group worship and even two to three prayer groups and even personal prayer time, immersing in music, silence, nature, scripture, singing to God by yourself, engaging in art deeply, all this can be meaningful worship that drives us to create communities and relationships, instead of the regular Sunday worship event trapping us from doing so.
The Disciples of Christ vision was to start 100 new congregations a year, 1000 in 1000 different ways. So far after five years they have close to 450 new congregations. They are supporting their planters with training, grants, global experiences. Healthy church planters start healthy congregations. Everyone is coupled with a mentoring coach. ---From Ed Stetzer: Churches start churches. He has a list of 72 church planting organizations. this is a new phenomenon of the past 20 years, and more recently within that time frame....You can, and denominations do, pour millions into churches that are broken. Revitalizing existing churches is a great idea, but no one has been able to do that. We need to help churches transform, but we need to start new ones too. And we need to do it not just with "good people" who stand in front of other good people and tell them how to be good, to quote Mark Twain. Stetzer says for forty years we have made the church better, spruced up buildings, spiced up worship, made sermons practical, and the culture is "more lost" and people who go to church are less committed.
--From Ronny Russell: an oldie but goodie--if someone comes to a church leader with an idea and passion for a new ministry how many hoops will they have to jump through? (If I was in search that would be the basis of my first question to folks looking for a new minister)....Church can become like little bands of disciples going about Galillee and Judea following Jesus. Others will see and hear and want to join.
---From Tom Bandy.: Who cares if your church exists? (another good search question.) but better yet, Does God care it exists? Stop talking lovingly amongst yourself and talk more lovingly among strangers. The codependency between laity and clergy is the most significant block to mission growth. 1. Take away money from institutional maintenance and put it into relevant programs for the public. Don't stop with programs, but with programs that lead to conversations in the community. Be a mentor to those in community in need. Have a single signature ministry in the zip code.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
New07 Conference & Net Results issue
Looks like an exciting conference coming up with a strong focus on church planting. Go to www.new07.org. Also simply wonderful and moving and inclusive articles in the Mar./April 2007 issue of Net Results, www.netresults.org. A big focus in the magazine on the happenings planting-wise within the Disciples of Christ. As you all may know from my previous posts I am a big fan of what the DOC vision is, and it is sustaining itself with good sprouts so far. A good workable model that the UUA and UCC should be immersing in. I will come back here and post more excerpts post-Easter. End, for now.
Type rest of the post here
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Tuesday, April 03, 2007
An Emergent Manifesto of Hope
Heads up on a great new collection of essays "An Emergent Manifesto of Hope" edited by Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones. It is a book I have been waiting for...primarily because it updates the "whole emergent" thing and includes within it a range of voices from three previously muted parts of the community--women, the "mainstream" denominations, and people engaged in liberation and social justice-focused ministry.
For an inside look at the table of contents, an excerpt, etc. go to:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/080106807X/ref=sib_dp_pt/102-5936296-4372150#reader-link
I will be posting more from it post-Easter. But here is a teaser from Brian McLaren's contribution in it about the need for a post-colonial Christianity in the West.
"In this way, we do not see ourselves as the emerging church--meaning a slice, sector, or division of the church that is roughly analogous to "the charismatic church" or "the seeker church." Instead, we see ourselves as the church emerging, meaning a growing edge of the church at large in all its forms, stretching from the margins into new territory beyond modern, Western Christianity.....Kenzo's question "Will evangelical faith break or stretch?" also applies to traditional (or mainline) Protestant faith, Roman Catholic faith, and Eastern Orthodox faith. I know that many of my traditional Protestant friends think they have this whole problem solved. They have had diversity training, after all. Now I am all for diversity training, but I can't help but think that many of the struggles my traditional Protestant friends face are rooted in the fact that their structures are essentially colonial structures--designed not for empowerment at the margins but for control from the center, and the center is nearly always a place of white or Western privilege...."
End, for now. More to come soon.
Type rest of the post here
For an inside look at the table of contents, an excerpt, etc. go to:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/080106807X/ref=sib_dp_pt/102-5936296-4372150#reader-link
I will be posting more from it post-Easter. But here is a teaser from Brian McLaren's contribution in it about the need for a post-colonial Christianity in the West.
"In this way, we do not see ourselves as the emerging church--meaning a slice, sector, or division of the church that is roughly analogous to "the charismatic church" or "the seeker church." Instead, we see ourselves as the church emerging, meaning a growing edge of the church at large in all its forms, stretching from the margins into new territory beyond modern, Western Christianity.....Kenzo's question "Will evangelical faith break or stretch?" also applies to traditional (or mainline) Protestant faith, Roman Catholic faith, and Eastern Orthodox faith. I know that many of my traditional Protestant friends think they have this whole problem solved. They have had diversity training, after all. Now I am all for diversity training, but I can't help but think that many of the struggles my traditional Protestant friends face are rooted in the fact that their structures are essentially colonial structures--designed not for empowerment at the margins but for control from the center, and the center is nearly always a place of white or Western privilege...."
End, for now. More to come soon.
Type rest of the post here
'a third place' and recent readings
I have three books I am reading and re-visiting now as we get closer to going public with our "a third place" community center located here in Turley, OK as a way of becoming a more incarnational church. (To keep up with this movement from attractional to incarnational church send me an email and I will place you on our weekly email list). I recommend these books, in addition to the ones by Hirsch and Frost commented on earlier here, for anyone wishing to start a new way of being in relationship with people already coming to your church or with those who don't, haven't, and won't come--but with whom you can still be in deep relationship, which is what counts.
The three books are:
1. "The Gospel According to Starbucks: Living with a Grande Passion" by Leonard Sweet (great conversation guide included; I will be using this post Easter as we finish with the DVD series "Saving Jesus.").
2. "The Great Good Place: cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons and other hangouts at the heart of a community" by Ray Oldenburg
3. "Brand Lands, Hot Spots & Cool Spaces: Welcome to the Third Place and the Total Marketing Experience" by Christian Mikunda.
I will be excerpting from them. But if you have read these or can recommend others in the same vein, please do. TIA.
End.
Type rest of the post here
The three books are:
1. "The Gospel According to Starbucks: Living with a Grande Passion" by Leonard Sweet (great conversation guide included; I will be using this post Easter as we finish with the DVD series "Saving Jesus.").
2. "The Great Good Place: cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons and other hangouts at the heart of a community" by Ray Oldenburg
3. "Brand Lands, Hot Spots & Cool Spaces: Welcome to the Third Place and the Total Marketing Experience" by Christian Mikunda.
I will be excerpting from them. But if you have read these or can recommend others in the same vein, please do. TIA.
End.
Type rest of the post here
Friday, March 30, 2007
Holy Week: Parable of Passion
A popular saying is that there is no way to bridge the gap between the "Jesus of history" and the "Christ of faith." I have sympathies for that, especially as my own journey has taken me deeper into the traditions of the Christian community(ies) that sprang up in response to the resurrection (I am more of what might be described as a catholic-liberationist UU Christian using Tom Wintle's categories; see the now 20 year old essay on Who are the UU Christians at www.uuchristian.org). But I think the saying is wrong.
The key is the parables of Jesus, which contemporary scholars see as the key to the historical Jesus and his mission re: Kingdom of God, but as they are transformed into the "parable" of the death and resurrection of Jesus known as the events of Holy or Passion Week. What Paul does first, then the gospel writers elaborate on narratively, is to connect the essence of Jesus' parables, a kind of com-passion which over-turns the values paradigm of the world, with the Passion Week story itself.
The "moved by compassion" which Jesus portrays by the Father of the Prodigal Sons (plural intended) and by the Samaritan, both of whom are in positions of being shamed and dishonored in the eyes of the hearers of the parable, is what happens as God is moved to raise and anoint the crucified Jesus. The unholiness of the leaven and the mustard seed, the corruption that becomes a sacred spirit erasing oppression, becomes the cross transformed from the world's power-over ending and finality into a doorway to the divine relational power always creating more and abundant life.
And so the Palm Sunday event becomes a parable of how the really divine enters into the world, a parody of the Caeser's entry based on war and victory and might and youth and beauty and wealth and education and achievement. Deep freedom is to be so connected to God you can walk past the rows of crosses into Jerusalem at Freedom Passover time and cause a disturbance at the precise time when the most power is aligned against you in order to teach people to see again who it is they should be serving.
And so the parable of being anointed by a woman overturns our notions of projects and plans of justice for others somewhere else at some other time and calls attention to the sacredness of the here and now, to the abundance of spirit that there is enough to go around, and to the importance of the blessing of the body, and speaking or acting about the elephant in the room, the danger of death impending. As Spong has written, Jesus' model was about love freely and wastefully, in the world's eyes, spent. This event enacts that model.
And so the Maundy Thursday event is a parable about the divine world is a banquet of fools and outcasts rather than conqueror's feast; a parable that even betrayal and confusion, etc. amid the banquet is part of the transformation and the coming of the Kingdom of God. And that the kingdom of God is like fear and loneliness and despair and surrender in the garden, and about lying and denial and more betraying.
And so on Good Friday the kingdom of God is a parable of true divine power, of silence not oration; of beaten not beating; of humiliation not detachment; of nakedness not finery; of helplessness and fear and abandonment and mockery. Of not being able to choose, living freely nevertheless, for it isn't that Jesus chose these things, or that, God forbid, we would seek to choose them. But they are not the final and ultimate events that define us. The kingdom of God in this day's events carries an emptiness like the parable of the woman with the empty jar in the Gospel of Thomas. Like the parable of the laborers in the vineyard that challenges what we think about such human concepts of "deserving" rewards; it challenged the notion of justice. Parables, like poems and dreams, are unable to be closed off with interpretation. So it is with the Good Friday events particularly, they belie even this interpretation, refuse to be understood, and only call for our presence not our answers.
And so Easter Eve is the parable of the kingdom of God is like a mother mourning, like the going through of motions, like stunned moments when life seems to stand still, and realizations of what is lost hit us, like the parable of the rich man and his storehouse of grain.
And so Easter is the parable of how the kingdom of God is like women, (how many times were women, the personal and private spaces deemed insignificant turned into places of the sacred in Jesus' parables?), or even a lone woman, returning to a place considered shameful, out of sight and out of mind, like fear and trembling at something not understood but you feel in your gut, your womb (that Greek word that has been translated in the parables as com-passion or pity is about the deepest movements in the bowels, our gutsinks, something born in the womb connecting us to others), that calls us to likewise move with compassion, to turn again (how many turnings in the story of Mary of Magdala in the gospel of John account?), to see again. [william ellery channing's advice to new ministers--teach them to see!, based on jesus' way]. Like the hierarchy of who God should come to first being overturned, the women receiving it first, the learned receiving it lastly and doubtfully. Like coming into the world not on the great avenues of the Empire, or in Temples, but on the road to Emmaus, not in crowds but in twos and threes and small groups, and along the shores where daily work and living take place, in eating together. And coming even to touch one who was most unworthy, who had persecuted other followers. The Kingdom of God then vs. the Kingdom of Rome vs. the Kingdom of America/Churchdom/SecularNihilism/Consumption now.
The calling of the parables Jesus taught, and likewise of the Passion Week depicted in the historical Jesus becoming the Christ of Faith, is to turn upside down and inside out and open what seems to have been closed all things that echo more of the Empirical world's values and culture and ways of being. It is the reason for being for the missional incarnational gatherings we call church. It is the week when we should celebrate what has been done once and can be done again, even in our time, as we commit ourselves to what it means to really follow in the spirit of Jesus the Christed of God, and to form and reform communities and relationships in that spirit.
The key is the parables of Jesus, which contemporary scholars see as the key to the historical Jesus and his mission re: Kingdom of God, but as they are transformed into the "parable" of the death and resurrection of Jesus known as the events of Holy or Passion Week. What Paul does first, then the gospel writers elaborate on narratively, is to connect the essence of Jesus' parables, a kind of com-passion which over-turns the values paradigm of the world, with the Passion Week story itself.
The "moved by compassion" which Jesus portrays by the Father of the Prodigal Sons (plural intended) and by the Samaritan, both of whom are in positions of being shamed and dishonored in the eyes of the hearers of the parable, is what happens as God is moved to raise and anoint the crucified Jesus. The unholiness of the leaven and the mustard seed, the corruption that becomes a sacred spirit erasing oppression, becomes the cross transformed from the world's power-over ending and finality into a doorway to the divine relational power always creating more and abundant life.
And so the Palm Sunday event becomes a parable of how the really divine enters into the world, a parody of the Caeser's entry based on war and victory and might and youth and beauty and wealth and education and achievement. Deep freedom is to be so connected to God you can walk past the rows of crosses into Jerusalem at Freedom Passover time and cause a disturbance at the precise time when the most power is aligned against you in order to teach people to see again who it is they should be serving.
And so the parable of being anointed by a woman overturns our notions of projects and plans of justice for others somewhere else at some other time and calls attention to the sacredness of the here and now, to the abundance of spirit that there is enough to go around, and to the importance of the blessing of the body, and speaking or acting about the elephant in the room, the danger of death impending. As Spong has written, Jesus' model was about love freely and wastefully, in the world's eyes, spent. This event enacts that model.
And so the Maundy Thursday event is a parable about the divine world is a banquet of fools and outcasts rather than conqueror's feast; a parable that even betrayal and confusion, etc. amid the banquet is part of the transformation and the coming of the Kingdom of God. And that the kingdom of God is like fear and loneliness and despair and surrender in the garden, and about lying and denial and more betraying.
And so on Good Friday the kingdom of God is a parable of true divine power, of silence not oration; of beaten not beating; of humiliation not detachment; of nakedness not finery; of helplessness and fear and abandonment and mockery. Of not being able to choose, living freely nevertheless, for it isn't that Jesus chose these things, or that, God forbid, we would seek to choose them. But they are not the final and ultimate events that define us. The kingdom of God in this day's events carries an emptiness like the parable of the woman with the empty jar in the Gospel of Thomas. Like the parable of the laborers in the vineyard that challenges what we think about such human concepts of "deserving" rewards; it challenged the notion of justice. Parables, like poems and dreams, are unable to be closed off with interpretation. So it is with the Good Friday events particularly, they belie even this interpretation, refuse to be understood, and only call for our presence not our answers.
And so Easter Eve is the parable of the kingdom of God is like a mother mourning, like the going through of motions, like stunned moments when life seems to stand still, and realizations of what is lost hit us, like the parable of the rich man and his storehouse of grain.
And so Easter is the parable of how the kingdom of God is like women, (how many times were women, the personal and private spaces deemed insignificant turned into places of the sacred in Jesus' parables?), or even a lone woman, returning to a place considered shameful, out of sight and out of mind, like fear and trembling at something not understood but you feel in your gut, your womb (that Greek word that has been translated in the parables as com-passion or pity is about the deepest movements in the bowels, our gutsinks, something born in the womb connecting us to others), that calls us to likewise move with compassion, to turn again (how many turnings in the story of Mary of Magdala in the gospel of John account?), to see again. [william ellery channing's advice to new ministers--teach them to see!, based on jesus' way]. Like the hierarchy of who God should come to first being overturned, the women receiving it first, the learned receiving it lastly and doubtfully. Like coming into the world not on the great avenues of the Empire, or in Temples, but on the road to Emmaus, not in crowds but in twos and threes and small groups, and along the shores where daily work and living take place, in eating together. And coming even to touch one who was most unworthy, who had persecuted other followers. The Kingdom of God then vs. the Kingdom of Rome vs. the Kingdom of America/Churchdom/SecularNihilism/Consumption now.
The calling of the parables Jesus taught, and likewise of the Passion Week depicted in the historical Jesus becoming the Christ of Faith, is to turn upside down and inside out and open what seems to have been closed all things that echo more of the Empirical world's values and culture and ways of being. It is the reason for being for the missional incarnational gatherings we call church. It is the week when we should celebrate what has been done once and can be done again, even in our time, as we commit ourselves to what it means to really follow in the spirit of Jesus the Christed of God, and to form and reform communities and relationships in that spirit.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
The Next 300 Years of Unitarian Universalism
This is the background, and elongated print version, parts of which I preached as a sermon given March 25, 2007 at Hope Unitarian Church in Tulsa.
This sermon began a few years ago at a conference here in Tulsa held by my alma mater, Phillips Theological Seminary, and comments by my professor and faculty adviser Dr. Brandon Scott whom I know many of you have either heard in person or seen lately on the DVD curriculum, Saving Jesus. I remember two things Brandon said that night—one, that he has come to a point in his life and career where he spends a lot of time trying to think not of the answers as much as what are the two or three most important questions he should be spending his life on; and second, that we need to be thinking, imagining, and preparing based not on three-year strategic plans but on three-hundred year visions.
Now if Brandon were here today listening to me he might question how I’ve paraphrased him, but since he’s an historical Jesus scholar, I say turnabout’s fair play.
What I am sure he recommended that night, though, was the book by sociologist of religion Rodney Stark called “The Rise of Christianity: How the obscure, marginal Jesus movement became the dominant religious force in the western world in a few centuries.” (Princeton University Press, 1996; Harper Collins paperback, 1997) It is a primer in 300-year imagining. It is also a hopeful and challenging work for any of us who might today find ourselves feeling obscure and marginal religiously. As we well might. For as Catholic priest Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things magazine, recently wrote of Unitarian Universalism that it is “now almost institutionally extinct.” (“Metaphysical America,” First Things, Mar. 2007, p. 28)
Welcome to the ice age of UUism. And certainly our percentage numbers in comparison to the population within the United States, continue to drop, half of where they were 50 years ago I believe. And there has, of course, been a decline from the days of yore when the churches in our movement were the principal players in the creation of the nation and its institutions and values. Which is one of the main reasons, I believe, for pondering these matters with a look to the future and whose values will be taking hold.
The book lays out a natural matrix for how the numbers of followers of Jesus within the Roman Empire could have grown steadily and exponentially from an estimated number of 1,000 in the year 40 of the common era, that’s say a decade after the death of Jesus and the beginning of the stories of his being raised to life by God, to 1,400 in the year 50 when Paul is beginning to write his letters to Jesus communities (when Paul dies in the early 60s there are probably only 2000 Jesus as Messiah followers in all the Empire), to 7,530 followers fifty years later in the year 100 which is after the pivotal destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans and after the composition of much of the New Testament, to 40,496 fifty years after that in the year 150 when you begin to have the spread of diverse forms of communities such as the Gnostics and when a self-identity is becoming rooted as something else than Judaism, and then to 217,795 Christians fifty more years in the year 200. I think, by the way, that 200,000 plus number is also in the ballpark for how many Unitarian Universalists, adults and children, are listed as current church members within the UUA.
I am going to pause at this year 200 to point out that there were still then fewer than 1 percent Christians within the Roman Empire; actually Stark’s estimate has it at 0.36 percent at that start of the third century. They weren’t as numerous then, in the first few centuries after Jesus, as what we often think, looking back as we often have done only through the lens of Hollywood at depictions of Rome and the early church. And I doubt things went as neatly as they might appear on graphs of statistical estimates, but over time it shows what happens when growth is exponential and sustained at just an estimated 3.42 percent a year, or 40 percent a decade. I say “just” because this kind of rate per year is often attainable and exceeded even by American churches in such an unchurched culture as we have in our world today, and it has been attained a few years even by Unitarian Universalism—we didn’t, however, sustain it for more than a year at a time and never for a whole decade.
Spread out over 1,000 plus congregations, an annual average rate of 3.42 percent doesn’t translate into that much growth per congregation, but not all congregations are alike in growth capabilities and so the ones who are get offset. It’s one of the reasons why growing church associations put so much resources into church planting—creating new healthy congregations is the number one way to grow total numbers. But we don’t do that. Others have. Stark is a scholar of new religious movements, particularly Mormons, and their rate of growth has matched what he lays out for the early Christians. 300 Years from now I wonder at the title for the book about who in America went from being an obscure marginal movement to the dominant religious force.
So up to the year 200 Christians weren’t as numerous as what we often think they were, but keeping the same steady rate of growth for the next 100 to 150 years they soon would be more numerous within the Empire than we often think they were. By 250, the numbers reach 1.17 million or now 1.9 percent of the Empire, and by the year 300 they number 6.29 million or up to 10.5 percent of the Empire. By 350, this rate results in 33.8 million Christians or now 56.5 percent of the Empire. Although before this date you had the case of Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicea in the year 325, forming a kind of preliminary church state connection which some Emperors tried to minimalize after Constantine, Christianity still didn’t become the official religion of the Empire until the close of the fourth century, after a majority of its inhabitants have become Christian.
On the one hand, to those who look at the rise of Christianity as purely supernatural and occurring inevitably because of God’s will and miracles, Stark’s book shows how it could have happened otherwise. And on the other hand, to those who think the Empire became populated by Christians only because of the Imperial actions of Constantine, Stark points out that the actions of the Emperors were probably more a response to Christianity than a creation of it. He certainly seems to have been a suspect convert. In fact, Stark has written that Constantine and the Emperors did more harm to the nature of the original Christianity, you might say, to the essence of what got them there, than any benefits of being an Empire Church. As we will see, they took the edge off of it, and only now in our lifetime, as we have truly entered an Unchurched post-Empire end-of-Constantine era of Christianity, is the edge beginning to come back. Which is why we need to learn, for our next three hundred years, what we can from those first three hundred years of the pre-Empire Church about what it really means to be a church influencing lives and the world. The real concern is not the rise of numbers itself, but what propelled them.
This emphasis on the first 300 years of the communities following Jesus has long been a central concern of Unitarians and Universalists. It is what led us into being known by those names. We point to how our theological heresies were only heresies after the first 300 to 400 years. We are more at home in the earlier times. You might say we can claim to being the truly traditional or conservative Christians. (I can understand why you may not want to…but believe me, it’s a good conversation starter).
I also don’t want to fall prone to the error of primitivism and a mistaken belief that all things early early on are best—we have certainly benefited from many of the theological and other developments that have arisen after those early years, but because of the hinge of history we are in with the rise of the quantum or postmodern age and its primary means of communication and culture and effects, it is crucial to see again what is transient and what is permanent in what should guide us forward. Being replaced is the Modernity and Enlightenment age and values that gave rise to our very forms and institutions of free church as we have known them. Just as Unitarian minister Theodore Parker said in his 1841 sermon on The Transient and The Permanent in Christianity, the church that did for the first century didn’t for the fifth, and what did for the fifth didn’t for the fifteenth, and what did for the fifteenth didn’t’ for the nineteenth century. We know now, that as change itself has changed, what did for the 1990s doesn’t even for the 2000s. But, interestingly, because of the recent changes what worked for the year 70 might for the year 2007. It’s called “Ancient-Future” thinking.
It’s not necessarily or primarily about theology either, though I have a bad habit of seeing all things through theological lens. Occupational hazard. A big part of the problem for Unitarian Universalist, and mainline to liberal Christian churches as well, as we face the current crisis and the future uncertainty, is that we think the big changes are all about theology, about message, what we think. Theology is an important motivator, but no matter whether we are a UU Christian oriented church in Massachusetts or Michigan or Oklahoma or a UU church of some other dominant or mixed orientation in these places or somewhere, our challenge has been and is the same—how in a changing culture in and around and through us do we change ourselves so that we are able to meet lives and culture where it is in order to continue the mission of healing lives and bringing wholeness to that interdependent culture of which we are a part. Or, since studies show that 9 out of 10 people in effect choose to die rather than to change habits leading to death, how do we entertain ourselves during extinction, or at best ineffectiveness?
This “ancient-future” change challenge isn’t the same for all churches. For UUs, and other progressives, theology about God and Jesus and the Bible, etc. is actually pretty well reflective of the non-creedal focus and pluralism of those first 300 years. Our leading of the way in scholarship has helped us from the start in this regard. It is, and should be more, one of our gifts to the world. Presenting this gift has been one of the reasons for being for my employer, the UU Christian Fellowship, since its founding in 1945. However, for the more conservative and so-called evangelical churches, they are finding that their challenge is often theological on these questions; in order to meet the new and changing pluralistic and tolerant secular culture they are being faced with being bound up by medieval answers and ideology. They are having to learn theological change, and in many places already are doing so. But where they have it easier to change, by and large, than we do is that their sense of being church, of purpose and mission driven and flexibility on forms of the church, is more in line with the nature of the early church’s 300 years.
We have forgotten history’s lessons, even within our own church tradition’s history, that theological change itself is often a response to changes in organizations and their wider cultures. Since my title today is the Next 300 years of Unitarian Universalism I thought it would be interesting to do some reading about what was going on in our founding churches in New England some 300 years ago. Back then, in and around 1707, the conflicts were actually about changes in church structure and membership and worship (You might be interested to note that it was the liberals or innovators who for example wanted to bring back in ritual and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer which the original Puritans had deemed too Catholic, and they wanted to form new churches to reflect this new change, and others were opposed and wanted to keep things the way they’d been and in some places as a result more authority was placed over churches, and in some places authority was lessened and more innovation allowed.) All that conflict over the form of the church sowed the field for the next generation’s beginning theological liberalism from which we often point to as the beginning of Unitarian Universalism in America. I think a closer look shows where the real innovation and beginning took root and the importance of examining the very forms of who we are.
Instead, our thinking what it means to do and be “church” still pretty much is what it has been since the 1500s, and 1950s, with some tweaking of late.
Too often still our default mode of Church is a set-apart place you go to, a building, usually the same building for many years, and in which you receive certain things from, which you then take back to the world out there, it is hoped in a good way; church is the Sunday morning for an hour or two thing, focused on being a spectator to a sermon or other presentations led by others, often those with learned degrees; or church is an organization, with bylaws its scripture, a kind of machine that needs to be kept well-oiled with time, talent, and treasure, as we say; and maintenance of all that, including maintenance of its leaders, becomes the mission, and the purpose of “getting in” (hear that phrase) newcomers is to share the load. Energy is spent on trying to “attract” visitors and “hold” them and “orient” them to the ways and works of the church. It is a Constantinian Empire, Newtonian Machine Universe approach to church that would be foreign to the early followers of Jesus who would see it more like what occurred in the various forms of Temple religion, and its anathema to many today who want to rage against the machine not manage one. I don’t think it will be sustainable much longer the further in we go to the wormhole of the new era.
See if these characteristics that marked that rise over a 300 year period sound an echo in our world. I am sure they didn’t hold true for all communities in all places then; and that there were, as now, unhealthy expressions of faith. Reading Paul’s letters to the communities shows they were anything but pure models of spiritual health; that’s one of the things that gives me hope. They didn’t wait for perfect before spreading out and reproducing themselves in new places and ways. But they seemed to know, to have the spirit in their bones of the truth that the aim of any healthy organism is to reproduce itself, even in a new environment, and the healthier the DNA of the organism the more inevitable will be its growth; it can’t help it; and so what we might call church planting or incarnational mission today was natural for them, their community wasn’t successful, not being its true self even, if it didn’t multiply. That’s the difference between an organic movement and organizations. And something we lost over the years as UUs.
Let’s take a quick journey back to those 300 years before Constantine to consider how the model of one rise might be a guide for taking action now that will be aimed at the next three hundred years. See if then echoes now.
Epidemics and death ravaged the world of the early followers of Jesus, time and time again. There was great commercialization and increasing urbanization and ecological damage and resulting dislocation of peoples from families and from the land and traditions. There were constant wars and militarization. There were many new religious faiths intersecting. Old religious structures were destroyed. Women and widows and children were particularly marginalized and oppressed and abused. Ethnic cultures dominated and competed and if you weren’t in the right ethnic group you were endangered.
Into this world came the early Jesus communities. They offered relationships of social networks, what we might today call “fictive families.” They had an ethic of radical love for one another and hospitality to the stranger, continuing in the best tradition of Judaism in which they were originally embedded and in which many still saw themselves, Jew or Gentile. When others fled the epidemics, they had the commandment to stay and risk and nurse their fictive families and strangers. This actually increased their survival rate and widened their communities and relationships. They provided leadership positions for women, and slaves, and regardless of ethnic background. Offering such a community of relationship for women and children actually led to growth in their birth rate.
They established themselves in places of great urban unrest, of instability, in the seaports where there were crossroads of faith and diversity and people seeking a connection to the divine. Places of desperate lives and danger. They were often made up of what might be considered the middle class, artisans, craft workers, people of some wealth who would host the gatherings in their homes, but who were willing to share their wealth and social network and greater still their identity with those who did not have what they had. In times of persecution, they were willing to be martyred—the original meaning of martyr is to witness—not just because they saw it as a way of entering the afterlife, but because it had a real here-and-now effect; someone would be thrown to the lions for the spectacle of the Empire; it not them, it would be someone else; they became known as the ones who would take the place of others so they might live. It was part not of their creed; they didn’t have one; but part of their story. There weren’t as many of these persecutions and types of witness as Hollywood and tradition has seemed to portray, but the effects of those that did take place were known by and influenced many, to deepen their own commitment or to be drawn toward the community.
They were counter-cultural communities, in high-tension with the values and actions of the Empire but not completely cut off like some sects; offering a way of living that was much different from all that was around them, but still in, even if not of, the world. You could tell their difference. And they offered a new way of being religious that still carried the familiar stories and traditions of what had come before. Their communities, their networks, their relationships (hesitate to call them their churches) were low maintenance and high mission. There weren’t for many years the set-apart places considered sacred while other places of gathering were not considered sacred; they were mobile, de-centralized; without budgets or bylaws as well as buildings of their own; they let their lives be their message and didn’t for many years have texts that were considered sacred. They were stronger after each crisis because they were present in them. They had no advertising or web sites; just their lives and their ultimate faith that they were commanded to share their good news of how God had been and was active in the world by sharing their goodness in acts of compassion to those whom others wouldn’t consider their neighbor or family.
Stark writes: “Christianity did not grow because of miracle working in the marketplaces (although there may have been much of that going on) or because Constantine said it should, or even because the martyrs gave it such credibility. It grew because Christians constituted an intense community, able to generate the ‘invincible obstinacy’ that so offended the younger Pliny but yielded immense religious rewards. And the primary means of its growth was through the united and motivated efforts of the growing numbers of Christian believers, who invited their friends, relatives, and neighbors to share the “good news.”” (Rise of Christianity, 208, HarperColllins)
By intense community, or what some now call communitas to differentiate it from the kind of inward-focused community, think of the kind of bonds that are formed when you are on a service-to-others-oriented trip like going to New Orleans, or fixing a meal and eating with the hungry in your own town, time and time again until you are fed by them, or find yourself in deep conversation on important matters and the time passes at a party with someone you’ve just met, or on silent retreat. Think of that as not something your church does, as a program, but as its essence or reason for being. Now think of channeling all time, talent and treasure toward that or events like it. What you have is both the Jesus movement of the first century and the emergent church movement of the 21st century.
By ‘invincible obstinacy’ think of what it means not to surrender your religious heritage or language even when others tell you you don’t have any right to it because you don’t think or believe a certain way, or that you are going extinct or powerless and have no place at the table of the real religions where all the action is.
And by invitation, think of not just inviting someone to come be a spectator at worship and pick up some literature to think about it; invite them to see you and be with you in action in the community. Or do like Stark said Mormons have done. Their studies showed that knocking on doors only got new members 1 in 1000 tries (of course they don’t do it for that, but for the bonding and faith-building for those who do it) while they got new members 50 percent of the time when they created a dinner and invited a friend or relative to come eat and talk with church leaders or other members.
Perhaps above all, in Stark’s book’s title, the phrase used is “Jesus movement” not Christian Church. Organic. Dynamic. Ready to risk. Built on relationships and not rules. It’s time to breath in the air of a movement again and look for a thousand different ways we can plant ourselves in our communities, either by “from scratch” new incarnations like we are doing in Turley, with a model of where two or more are gathered it is church, building community space first and then gathering the church within it, or by existing established churches shifting resources to mission teams and small groups who are charged with being present in the community, sowing seeds that might someday multipy and grow to become more than the originating church itself. Movements are to think big, go small, and turn themselves inside out to follow their mission. I think of the church that gathers at 3 a.m. to be there for those who finish their shifts at that hour, or the church movement that designs itself to never have more than 16 members in any one group but to have groups all over the place, or the church that instead of trying to attract people to come from an apartment complex by knocking on doors or leaving tracts and invitations for them, actually pays the rent for a couple for a year to live in the apartment complex and meet and serve others there and form a church within the complex.
Three hundred years later, you never know what the results will be. That vision, that history and hope, keeps me going. There is nothing magical about 300 years by the way; remember that 300 years back then in many ways is not the same pace as 300 years now. Maybe a span of 50 is the new 300! It is more a symbolic number, just out of reach enough so you don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can plan your way toward it. Planning is out! Preparation is in. One example of our recent UU short-sightedness I think was the reaction to the beginning of a new church in the Dallas Fort Worth area called Pathways. A lot of planning went into that and when it didn’t meet expectations of numbers of members, more in the 70 range than the 300 range for its starting, it was then labeled by some a failure, a waste. God we need more wastes like that. Part of its difference was to be an intentionally great expectations kind of church with a high standard of mission for each of its members. I tell you that in 300 years a plant with 70 such prepared folks, particularly if prepared to be church in a new way, might become the most numerous. It’s happened before.
The alternative church goes by many names today. Emergent. Organic. Incarnational. Missional. Ancient-Future. Submergent. Under-the-Radar. Beyond-the Box. To name a few. So many labels for folks who hate being labeled. Another reason Unitarian Universalists should feel at home there. And there are even more forms and expressions and experiments of it (ask me about the church in Denver called Scum of the Earth). But they have one thing in common—they know, as did the early followers of Jesus, as did James Luther Adams in our reading, that there is a Spirit that bloweth where it listeth and maketh all things new, even if it takes the ancient models to make them new again and sustain them for what the future brings, and for how they shape the future.
My prayer this morning for Unitarian Universalism is that it be guided into that always emerging Spirit not by fear or a culture of scarcity or superiority or complacency, but by love for others not here and a culture of abundance, so it will risk dying to what has been in order to help others live. If we are to go extinct, let it be in a blaze of mission and not by self-suffocation. And since Unitarian Universalism is no separate body more important than the local body, that prayer is for your church, and since your church exists in the covenant each of you enters into with it, that prayer is for you.
This sermon began a few years ago at a conference here in Tulsa held by my alma mater, Phillips Theological Seminary, and comments by my professor and faculty adviser Dr. Brandon Scott whom I know many of you have either heard in person or seen lately on the DVD curriculum, Saving Jesus. I remember two things Brandon said that night—one, that he has come to a point in his life and career where he spends a lot of time trying to think not of the answers as much as what are the two or three most important questions he should be spending his life on; and second, that we need to be thinking, imagining, and preparing based not on three-year strategic plans but on three-hundred year visions.
Now if Brandon were here today listening to me he might question how I’ve paraphrased him, but since he’s an historical Jesus scholar, I say turnabout’s fair play.
What I am sure he recommended that night, though, was the book by sociologist of religion Rodney Stark called “The Rise of Christianity: How the obscure, marginal Jesus movement became the dominant religious force in the western world in a few centuries.” (Princeton University Press, 1996; Harper Collins paperback, 1997) It is a primer in 300-year imagining. It is also a hopeful and challenging work for any of us who might today find ourselves feeling obscure and marginal religiously. As we well might. For as Catholic priest Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things magazine, recently wrote of Unitarian Universalism that it is “now almost institutionally extinct.” (“Metaphysical America,” First Things, Mar. 2007, p. 28)
Welcome to the ice age of UUism. And certainly our percentage numbers in comparison to the population within the United States, continue to drop, half of where they were 50 years ago I believe. And there has, of course, been a decline from the days of yore when the churches in our movement were the principal players in the creation of the nation and its institutions and values. Which is one of the main reasons, I believe, for pondering these matters with a look to the future and whose values will be taking hold.
The book lays out a natural matrix for how the numbers of followers of Jesus within the Roman Empire could have grown steadily and exponentially from an estimated number of 1,000 in the year 40 of the common era, that’s say a decade after the death of Jesus and the beginning of the stories of his being raised to life by God, to 1,400 in the year 50 when Paul is beginning to write his letters to Jesus communities (when Paul dies in the early 60s there are probably only 2000 Jesus as Messiah followers in all the Empire), to 7,530 followers fifty years later in the year 100 which is after the pivotal destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans and after the composition of much of the New Testament, to 40,496 fifty years after that in the year 150 when you begin to have the spread of diverse forms of communities such as the Gnostics and when a self-identity is becoming rooted as something else than Judaism, and then to 217,795 Christians fifty more years in the year 200. I think, by the way, that 200,000 plus number is also in the ballpark for how many Unitarian Universalists, adults and children, are listed as current church members within the UUA.
I am going to pause at this year 200 to point out that there were still then fewer than 1 percent Christians within the Roman Empire; actually Stark’s estimate has it at 0.36 percent at that start of the third century. They weren’t as numerous then, in the first few centuries after Jesus, as what we often think, looking back as we often have done only through the lens of Hollywood at depictions of Rome and the early church. And I doubt things went as neatly as they might appear on graphs of statistical estimates, but over time it shows what happens when growth is exponential and sustained at just an estimated 3.42 percent a year, or 40 percent a decade. I say “just” because this kind of rate per year is often attainable and exceeded even by American churches in such an unchurched culture as we have in our world today, and it has been attained a few years even by Unitarian Universalism—we didn’t, however, sustain it for more than a year at a time and never for a whole decade.
Spread out over 1,000 plus congregations, an annual average rate of 3.42 percent doesn’t translate into that much growth per congregation, but not all congregations are alike in growth capabilities and so the ones who are get offset. It’s one of the reasons why growing church associations put so much resources into church planting—creating new healthy congregations is the number one way to grow total numbers. But we don’t do that. Others have. Stark is a scholar of new religious movements, particularly Mormons, and their rate of growth has matched what he lays out for the early Christians. 300 Years from now I wonder at the title for the book about who in America went from being an obscure marginal movement to the dominant religious force.
So up to the year 200 Christians weren’t as numerous as what we often think they were, but keeping the same steady rate of growth for the next 100 to 150 years they soon would be more numerous within the Empire than we often think they were. By 250, the numbers reach 1.17 million or now 1.9 percent of the Empire, and by the year 300 they number 6.29 million or up to 10.5 percent of the Empire. By 350, this rate results in 33.8 million Christians or now 56.5 percent of the Empire. Although before this date you had the case of Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicea in the year 325, forming a kind of preliminary church state connection which some Emperors tried to minimalize after Constantine, Christianity still didn’t become the official religion of the Empire until the close of the fourth century, after a majority of its inhabitants have become Christian.
On the one hand, to those who look at the rise of Christianity as purely supernatural and occurring inevitably because of God’s will and miracles, Stark’s book shows how it could have happened otherwise. And on the other hand, to those who think the Empire became populated by Christians only because of the Imperial actions of Constantine, Stark points out that the actions of the Emperors were probably more a response to Christianity than a creation of it. He certainly seems to have been a suspect convert. In fact, Stark has written that Constantine and the Emperors did more harm to the nature of the original Christianity, you might say, to the essence of what got them there, than any benefits of being an Empire Church. As we will see, they took the edge off of it, and only now in our lifetime, as we have truly entered an Unchurched post-Empire end-of-Constantine era of Christianity, is the edge beginning to come back. Which is why we need to learn, for our next three hundred years, what we can from those first three hundred years of the pre-Empire Church about what it really means to be a church influencing lives and the world. The real concern is not the rise of numbers itself, but what propelled them.
This emphasis on the first 300 years of the communities following Jesus has long been a central concern of Unitarians and Universalists. It is what led us into being known by those names. We point to how our theological heresies were only heresies after the first 300 to 400 years. We are more at home in the earlier times. You might say we can claim to being the truly traditional or conservative Christians. (I can understand why you may not want to…but believe me, it’s a good conversation starter).
I also don’t want to fall prone to the error of primitivism and a mistaken belief that all things early early on are best—we have certainly benefited from many of the theological and other developments that have arisen after those early years, but because of the hinge of history we are in with the rise of the quantum or postmodern age and its primary means of communication and culture and effects, it is crucial to see again what is transient and what is permanent in what should guide us forward. Being replaced is the Modernity and Enlightenment age and values that gave rise to our very forms and institutions of free church as we have known them. Just as Unitarian minister Theodore Parker said in his 1841 sermon on The Transient and The Permanent in Christianity, the church that did for the first century didn’t for the fifth, and what did for the fifth didn’t for the fifteenth, and what did for the fifteenth didn’t’ for the nineteenth century. We know now, that as change itself has changed, what did for the 1990s doesn’t even for the 2000s. But, interestingly, because of the recent changes what worked for the year 70 might for the year 2007. It’s called “Ancient-Future” thinking.
It’s not necessarily or primarily about theology either, though I have a bad habit of seeing all things through theological lens. Occupational hazard. A big part of the problem for Unitarian Universalist, and mainline to liberal Christian churches as well, as we face the current crisis and the future uncertainty, is that we think the big changes are all about theology, about message, what we think. Theology is an important motivator, but no matter whether we are a UU Christian oriented church in Massachusetts or Michigan or Oklahoma or a UU church of some other dominant or mixed orientation in these places or somewhere, our challenge has been and is the same—how in a changing culture in and around and through us do we change ourselves so that we are able to meet lives and culture where it is in order to continue the mission of healing lives and bringing wholeness to that interdependent culture of which we are a part. Or, since studies show that 9 out of 10 people in effect choose to die rather than to change habits leading to death, how do we entertain ourselves during extinction, or at best ineffectiveness?
This “ancient-future” change challenge isn’t the same for all churches. For UUs, and other progressives, theology about God and Jesus and the Bible, etc. is actually pretty well reflective of the non-creedal focus and pluralism of those first 300 years. Our leading of the way in scholarship has helped us from the start in this regard. It is, and should be more, one of our gifts to the world. Presenting this gift has been one of the reasons for being for my employer, the UU Christian Fellowship, since its founding in 1945. However, for the more conservative and so-called evangelical churches, they are finding that their challenge is often theological on these questions; in order to meet the new and changing pluralistic and tolerant secular culture they are being faced with being bound up by medieval answers and ideology. They are having to learn theological change, and in many places already are doing so. But where they have it easier to change, by and large, than we do is that their sense of being church, of purpose and mission driven and flexibility on forms of the church, is more in line with the nature of the early church’s 300 years.
We have forgotten history’s lessons, even within our own church tradition’s history, that theological change itself is often a response to changes in organizations and their wider cultures. Since my title today is the Next 300 years of Unitarian Universalism I thought it would be interesting to do some reading about what was going on in our founding churches in New England some 300 years ago. Back then, in and around 1707, the conflicts were actually about changes in church structure and membership and worship (You might be interested to note that it was the liberals or innovators who for example wanted to bring back in ritual and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer which the original Puritans had deemed too Catholic, and they wanted to form new churches to reflect this new change, and others were opposed and wanted to keep things the way they’d been and in some places as a result more authority was placed over churches, and in some places authority was lessened and more innovation allowed.) All that conflict over the form of the church sowed the field for the next generation’s beginning theological liberalism from which we often point to as the beginning of Unitarian Universalism in America. I think a closer look shows where the real innovation and beginning took root and the importance of examining the very forms of who we are.
Instead, our thinking what it means to do and be “church” still pretty much is what it has been since the 1500s, and 1950s, with some tweaking of late.
Too often still our default mode of Church is a set-apart place you go to, a building, usually the same building for many years, and in which you receive certain things from, which you then take back to the world out there, it is hoped in a good way; church is the Sunday morning for an hour or two thing, focused on being a spectator to a sermon or other presentations led by others, often those with learned degrees; or church is an organization, with bylaws its scripture, a kind of machine that needs to be kept well-oiled with time, talent, and treasure, as we say; and maintenance of all that, including maintenance of its leaders, becomes the mission, and the purpose of “getting in” (hear that phrase) newcomers is to share the load. Energy is spent on trying to “attract” visitors and “hold” them and “orient” them to the ways and works of the church. It is a Constantinian Empire, Newtonian Machine Universe approach to church that would be foreign to the early followers of Jesus who would see it more like what occurred in the various forms of Temple religion, and its anathema to many today who want to rage against the machine not manage one. I don’t think it will be sustainable much longer the further in we go to the wormhole of the new era.
See if these characteristics that marked that rise over a 300 year period sound an echo in our world. I am sure they didn’t hold true for all communities in all places then; and that there were, as now, unhealthy expressions of faith. Reading Paul’s letters to the communities shows they were anything but pure models of spiritual health; that’s one of the things that gives me hope. They didn’t wait for perfect before spreading out and reproducing themselves in new places and ways. But they seemed to know, to have the spirit in their bones of the truth that the aim of any healthy organism is to reproduce itself, even in a new environment, and the healthier the DNA of the organism the more inevitable will be its growth; it can’t help it; and so what we might call church planting or incarnational mission today was natural for them, their community wasn’t successful, not being its true self even, if it didn’t multiply. That’s the difference between an organic movement and organizations. And something we lost over the years as UUs.
Let’s take a quick journey back to those 300 years before Constantine to consider how the model of one rise might be a guide for taking action now that will be aimed at the next three hundred years. See if then echoes now.
Epidemics and death ravaged the world of the early followers of Jesus, time and time again. There was great commercialization and increasing urbanization and ecological damage and resulting dislocation of peoples from families and from the land and traditions. There were constant wars and militarization. There were many new religious faiths intersecting. Old religious structures were destroyed. Women and widows and children were particularly marginalized and oppressed and abused. Ethnic cultures dominated and competed and if you weren’t in the right ethnic group you were endangered.
Into this world came the early Jesus communities. They offered relationships of social networks, what we might today call “fictive families.” They had an ethic of radical love for one another and hospitality to the stranger, continuing in the best tradition of Judaism in which they were originally embedded and in which many still saw themselves, Jew or Gentile. When others fled the epidemics, they had the commandment to stay and risk and nurse their fictive families and strangers. This actually increased their survival rate and widened their communities and relationships. They provided leadership positions for women, and slaves, and regardless of ethnic background. Offering such a community of relationship for women and children actually led to growth in their birth rate.
They established themselves in places of great urban unrest, of instability, in the seaports where there were crossroads of faith and diversity and people seeking a connection to the divine. Places of desperate lives and danger. They were often made up of what might be considered the middle class, artisans, craft workers, people of some wealth who would host the gatherings in their homes, but who were willing to share their wealth and social network and greater still their identity with those who did not have what they had. In times of persecution, they were willing to be martyred—the original meaning of martyr is to witness—not just because they saw it as a way of entering the afterlife, but because it had a real here-and-now effect; someone would be thrown to the lions for the spectacle of the Empire; it not them, it would be someone else; they became known as the ones who would take the place of others so they might live. It was part not of their creed; they didn’t have one; but part of their story. There weren’t as many of these persecutions and types of witness as Hollywood and tradition has seemed to portray, but the effects of those that did take place were known by and influenced many, to deepen their own commitment or to be drawn toward the community.
They were counter-cultural communities, in high-tension with the values and actions of the Empire but not completely cut off like some sects; offering a way of living that was much different from all that was around them, but still in, even if not of, the world. You could tell their difference. And they offered a new way of being religious that still carried the familiar stories and traditions of what had come before. Their communities, their networks, their relationships (hesitate to call them their churches) were low maintenance and high mission. There weren’t for many years the set-apart places considered sacred while other places of gathering were not considered sacred; they were mobile, de-centralized; without budgets or bylaws as well as buildings of their own; they let their lives be their message and didn’t for many years have texts that were considered sacred. They were stronger after each crisis because they were present in them. They had no advertising or web sites; just their lives and their ultimate faith that they were commanded to share their good news of how God had been and was active in the world by sharing their goodness in acts of compassion to those whom others wouldn’t consider their neighbor or family.
Stark writes: “Christianity did not grow because of miracle working in the marketplaces (although there may have been much of that going on) or because Constantine said it should, or even because the martyrs gave it such credibility. It grew because Christians constituted an intense community, able to generate the ‘invincible obstinacy’ that so offended the younger Pliny but yielded immense religious rewards. And the primary means of its growth was through the united and motivated efforts of the growing numbers of Christian believers, who invited their friends, relatives, and neighbors to share the “good news.”” (Rise of Christianity, 208, HarperColllins)
By intense community, or what some now call communitas to differentiate it from the kind of inward-focused community, think of the kind of bonds that are formed when you are on a service-to-others-oriented trip like going to New Orleans, or fixing a meal and eating with the hungry in your own town, time and time again until you are fed by them, or find yourself in deep conversation on important matters and the time passes at a party with someone you’ve just met, or on silent retreat. Think of that as not something your church does, as a program, but as its essence or reason for being. Now think of channeling all time, talent and treasure toward that or events like it. What you have is both the Jesus movement of the first century and the emergent church movement of the 21st century.
By ‘invincible obstinacy’ think of what it means not to surrender your religious heritage or language even when others tell you you don’t have any right to it because you don’t think or believe a certain way, or that you are going extinct or powerless and have no place at the table of the real religions where all the action is.
And by invitation, think of not just inviting someone to come be a spectator at worship and pick up some literature to think about it; invite them to see you and be with you in action in the community. Or do like Stark said Mormons have done. Their studies showed that knocking on doors only got new members 1 in 1000 tries (of course they don’t do it for that, but for the bonding and faith-building for those who do it) while they got new members 50 percent of the time when they created a dinner and invited a friend or relative to come eat and talk with church leaders or other members.
Perhaps above all, in Stark’s book’s title, the phrase used is “Jesus movement” not Christian Church. Organic. Dynamic. Ready to risk. Built on relationships and not rules. It’s time to breath in the air of a movement again and look for a thousand different ways we can plant ourselves in our communities, either by “from scratch” new incarnations like we are doing in Turley, with a model of where two or more are gathered it is church, building community space first and then gathering the church within it, or by existing established churches shifting resources to mission teams and small groups who are charged with being present in the community, sowing seeds that might someday multipy and grow to become more than the originating church itself. Movements are to think big, go small, and turn themselves inside out to follow their mission. I think of the church that gathers at 3 a.m. to be there for those who finish their shifts at that hour, or the church movement that designs itself to never have more than 16 members in any one group but to have groups all over the place, or the church that instead of trying to attract people to come from an apartment complex by knocking on doors or leaving tracts and invitations for them, actually pays the rent for a couple for a year to live in the apartment complex and meet and serve others there and form a church within the complex.
Three hundred years later, you never know what the results will be. That vision, that history and hope, keeps me going. There is nothing magical about 300 years by the way; remember that 300 years back then in many ways is not the same pace as 300 years now. Maybe a span of 50 is the new 300! It is more a symbolic number, just out of reach enough so you don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can plan your way toward it. Planning is out! Preparation is in. One example of our recent UU short-sightedness I think was the reaction to the beginning of a new church in the Dallas Fort Worth area called Pathways. A lot of planning went into that and when it didn’t meet expectations of numbers of members, more in the 70 range than the 300 range for its starting, it was then labeled by some a failure, a waste. God we need more wastes like that. Part of its difference was to be an intentionally great expectations kind of church with a high standard of mission for each of its members. I tell you that in 300 years a plant with 70 such prepared folks, particularly if prepared to be church in a new way, might become the most numerous. It’s happened before.
The alternative church goes by many names today. Emergent. Organic. Incarnational. Missional. Ancient-Future. Submergent. Under-the-Radar. Beyond-the Box. To name a few. So many labels for folks who hate being labeled. Another reason Unitarian Universalists should feel at home there. And there are even more forms and expressions and experiments of it (ask me about the church in Denver called Scum of the Earth). But they have one thing in common—they know, as did the early followers of Jesus, as did James Luther Adams in our reading, that there is a Spirit that bloweth where it listeth and maketh all things new, even if it takes the ancient models to make them new again and sustain them for what the future brings, and for how they shape the future.
My prayer this morning for Unitarian Universalism is that it be guided into that always emerging Spirit not by fear or a culture of scarcity or superiority or complacency, but by love for others not here and a culture of abundance, so it will risk dying to what has been in order to help others live. If we are to go extinct, let it be in a blaze of mission and not by self-suffocation. And since Unitarian Universalism is no separate body more important than the local body, that prayer is for your church, and since your church exists in the covenant each of you enters into with it, that prayer is for you.
Friday, March 16, 2007
The Forgotten Ways: Notes on Mission
The following comes from "The Forgotten Ways: reactivating the missional church" by Alan Hirsch, foreword by Leonard Sweet (you should also read Sweet's new, The Gospel According to Starbucks). What a good summary of incarnational missional church, and points to remember.
"In a remark ascribed to Gordon Cosby, the pioneering leader of that remarkable community Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C. [http://www.pottershousebooks.org/HTML/origins.html], he noted that in over sixty years of significant ministry, he had observed that no groups that came together around a non-missional purpose (e.g. prayer, worship, study, etc.) ever ended up becoming missional. It was only those groups that set out to be missional (while embracing prayer, worship, study, etc. in the process) that actually got to doing it....Mission is being used in a narrow sense here to suggest the church's orientation to the "outsiders" and ministry as the orientation to the "insiders." Experience tells us that a church that aims at ministry seldom gets to mission even if it sincerely intends to do so. But the church that aims at mission will have to do ministry, because ministry is the means to do mission. Our services, our ministries, need a greater cause to keep them alive and give their broader meaning. by planting the flag outside the walls and boundaries of the church, so to speak, the church discovers itself by rallying to it--this is mission."
Hirsch goes on to describe the effect of the Empire taking over the church in the 4th century and bringing in philosophical orientations that were foreign to its more Hebraic beginnings, namely infusing it with the spirit of dualism (all that Platonic stuff). And so God and the World were juxtaposed as dualistic opposites, and the Church became the great sphere of itself between the spheres of God and the world. And so people come out of the world and into the church in order to experience God. This has been the predominant model from Augustine to today. It lies at the heart of the modern, mechanistic, attractional, organizational church. Hirsch uses a great allegory of contemporary times to illustrate this and I will try to come back and put it in when possible. For now click Read More to read on.
"In a remark ascribed to Gordon Cosby, the pioneering leader of that remarkable community Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C. [http://www.pottershousebooks.org/HTML/origins.html], he noted that in over sixty years of significant ministry, he had observed that no groups that came together around a non-missional purpose (e.g. prayer, worship, study, etc.) ever ended up becoming missional. It was only those groups that set out to be missional (while embracing prayer, worship, study, etc. in the process) that actually got to doing it....Mission is being used in a narrow sense here to suggest the church's orientation to the "outsiders" and ministry as the orientation to the "insiders." Experience tells us that a church that aims at ministry seldom gets to mission even if it sincerely intends to do so. But the church that aims at mission will have to do ministry, because ministry is the means to do mission. Our services, our ministries, need a greater cause to keep them alive and give their broader meaning. by planting the flag outside the walls and boundaries of the church, so to speak, the church discovers itself by rallying to it--this is mission."
Hirsch goes on to describe the effect of the Empire taking over the church in the 4th century and bringing in philosophical orientations that were foreign to its more Hebraic beginnings, namely infusing it with the spirit of dualism (all that Platonic stuff). And so God and the World were juxtaposed as dualistic opposites, and the Church became the great sphere of itself between the spheres of God and the world. And so people come out of the world and into the church in order to experience God. This has been the predominant model from Augustine to today. It lies at the heart of the modern, mechanistic, attractional, organizational church. Hirsch uses a great allegory of contemporary times to illustrate this and I will try to come back and put it in when possible. For now click Read More to read on.
But if dualism is not allowed to be the underpinning of the church, and God is not seen as separate from the world but already active within the world outside the church, then the spheres change position. Hirsch has them overlapping, and in the space where they each meet is the space for the new communitas or missional incarnational church. But I think of it more as spheres within spheres, or conical. The world sphere is a smaller one within the bigger sphere of God, and the Church is a smaller sphere within the sphere of the World, but of course still within the larger circle of God. And so for the church to have its own shape and to actually be the church it must engage with and merge with the world in order to experience or draw closer to God. It flips Constantine and the Empire Church on its head. It also throws into question, and perhaps chaos, the identity of the church in regards to religious pluralism, for God in this model would be possible anywhere in the world, beckoning to the church to find itself there.
Hirsch continues to talk about the Third Place Communities in Tasmania, Australia. [the Living Room Church where I am in Turley, OK, see the links, is involved with this in creation of the new "a third place" community center here where we are in the Tulsa area]. He says, "This group of Jesus' people refuse to gather as God's people in sacred, isolated spaces. Rather they exist to incarnate and do mission in "third places,' where people hang out in their spare time. So they gather in pubs, sports clubs, play groups, interest groups, subcultures, etc. and people look in at what they are doing. He talks about the re-thinking of what it means in such contexts to "do public worship." (If you try to just replicate your sanctuary style worship while you are in one of these public spaces, you likely will not be allowed back in. Point is it means a rethinking of worship and interaction and mission.).
Friday, March 09, 2007
Letting Loose The Young
One of the things I should have said in the post directly below is that I was 37 in 1991. I had actually started making moves to start the church as early as 1985 when I was 31 years old. That's a great time to be doing what I am calling for below, or even earlier. Even in your college days. It is a native vs. immigrant in the culture thing, quoting Leonard Sweet.
(another things we need to get over, in that list below, is the mindset that "churches" have to have an indefinite lifespan; I think there's a tendency to think, or act, that if if we can't start one that will be around in the same institutional form for 400 plus years, like First Parish Plymouth from 1620, then maybe we shouldn't make the venture at all--what will happen if it dies out or we move on?). Part of the speed of the new age we are in is that the lifespan of groups will speed up; what the lifespan of a church might have been before, say 60 years statistically unless it makes certain plateau leaps, will now be maybe 10 years, or less. Experimentalism and entrepeurism should guide us.
Where in our youth gatherings are we putting out the call to be planters, of missions and new gatherings; or are we saying to those who have such an urge, go first ye to seminary and then you can be about the business of the "kingdom."? Maybe they are there; maybe I've missed it; I admit to not being up to snuff on all the denominational goings-on. But if people, especially young people, want to make real changes in institutional racism and classism, for example, then go about creating new communities; it is easier and more effective and likely will have more of an impact than trying to transform existing communities and cultures. Come to Turley and see how we are doing it, here with a 50something immigrant white geezer. Let's change the turf rather than fighting over old turf. Where are these calls at Convos and gatherings of youth and young adults? Are we afraid of offending seminaries? If seminaries are smart, they will see where the future is and, as the church should, go where God/Spirit is already present and giving birth and see about connecting with it, incarnational rather than trying to be an uber-attractional institution.
Why are you waiting on someone's blessing? Go meditate and pray and journal daily on the parable of the sower for three to six months, if you want to wait on something.
(another things we need to get over, in that list below, is the mindset that "churches" have to have an indefinite lifespan; I think there's a tendency to think, or act, that if if we can't start one that will be around in the same institutional form for 400 plus years, like First Parish Plymouth from 1620, then maybe we shouldn't make the venture at all--what will happen if it dies out or we move on?). Part of the speed of the new age we are in is that the lifespan of groups will speed up; what the lifespan of a church might have been before, say 60 years statistically unless it makes certain plateau leaps, will now be maybe 10 years, or less. Experimentalism and entrepeurism should guide us.
Where in our youth gatherings are we putting out the call to be planters, of missions and new gatherings; or are we saying to those who have such an urge, go first ye to seminary and then you can be about the business of the "kingdom."? Maybe they are there; maybe I've missed it; I admit to not being up to snuff on all the denominational goings-on. But if people, especially young people, want to make real changes in institutional racism and classism, for example, then go about creating new communities; it is easier and more effective and likely will have more of an impact than trying to transform existing communities and cultures. Come to Turley and see how we are doing it, here with a 50something immigrant white geezer. Let's change the turf rather than fighting over old turf. Where are these calls at Convos and gatherings of youth and young adults? Are we afraid of offending seminaries? If seminaries are smart, they will see where the future is and, as the church should, go where God/Spirit is already present and giving birth and see about connecting with it, incarnational rather than trying to be an uber-attractional institution.
Why are you waiting on someone's blessing? Go meditate and pray and journal daily on the parable of the sower for three to six months, if you want to wait on something.
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