VillagePastor

Giving the Emertional Church Its Due

Having just finished Gibbs and Bolger’s newest book, Emerging Churches, I came away with this strange mixture of being both turned on and turned off. I left the traditional church years ago (at least philosophically) for many of the same reasons my brothers and sisters in emerging churches have left. But gaining a clearer picture of this “conversation,” I am unwilling to go where many of them are going. I am somewhere in what sometimes feels as no-man’s land; not ready to embrace the whole of what is referred to as Emergent, nor interested in going back to what is typically the traditional, institutional church. I agree with Gibbs that the church must embody its message and life within postmodern culture or it will become increasingly marginalized. I’m just not sure that what he describes is the kind of body I believe God has called us to live in. Could it be I belong to something like the emertional church (for lack of a better term, which sounds strangely baptistic but is not), a church that is somewhere in the middle?

It is tempting to set up contrasting models of Traditional and Emergent, and appear positively as something between the extremes. But I want to avoid this. Working in pastoral theology, as well as being a pastor, I find that many love to set up straw men they can easily confute. Behind this is a subtle, and not so subtle, expression of pride, which suggests some of us have found the way. We are God’s instruments to seize this runaway train called the church and bring it back to its biblical tracks. I hope this is not the tenor of this blog.

I both hear and read the distinctions between traditional and emerging. The list is long, and what follows is only illustrative:

• Ordered / Organic

• Church as place / Church as a way of life

• Building / Community

• Homogenous/ Diverse

• Constructed / Deconstruction

• Worship planned for the consumer / Worship arising out of the community

• Propositions to be known/ Narrative to be experienced

• Print & Ear / Image & Eye

• Reaching those turned on to church/ Reaching those turned off to church

• Modern / Postmodern

• Epistles, church / Gospels, kingdom

• Counter cultural through exclusion / Counter cultural through inclusion

• Attractional / Incarnational

• Monologue / Dialogue

These have sometimes been used to define the differences. The only problem is that they are simplistic and reductionistic (if that is a term); more imagined than real. Here’s what I know for sure. The following is a church I want to be a part of: Intimately large (not necessarily an oxymoron), a community devoted to one another, yet expanding in its capacity in order to create a movement; increasing its capacity to be global, doing the kind of cross cultural ministry that greater resources enable it to do.

This is a ministry that has not been done so well by traditional churches that assumed a Constantinian cultural context, nor is it discussed much by emerging churches. The Emertional Church is intent upon sending teams abroad with such collective energy that they partner with existing ministries to make incredible impact. It is a church that views size as an opportunity to gather momentum that, joining with other sizeable churches, can dissuade corrupt powers from attacking believers (standing with others to influence events in Darfur or Damascus). Size that creates the organizational expertise to establish specialized ministries that are then able to reach special needs (like Katrina disasters).

Critical to the Emertional Church is radical connections, where people are challenged at both a gathered and small group level to be community. A group of people that cannot know everyone, but challenged to powerfully engage with someone. Some will question the possibility of community in a larger church. I’m not convinced of its impossibility, but I also realize it will take great intentionality, using such passages as Colossians 3 as a guide.

It is a church that respects both ordered and organism, knowing that it is impossible to have sustained life without developed form. But suspicious enough of form to know it easily turns rigid. The Emertional Church, while unapologetically committed to structures and policies and facilities and staff, is also dedicated to maintaining function over form. Structures are servants that lose usefulness when they become so inflexible they can no longer contain the fermenting Jesus. This requires that the Emertional Church also be deconstructionist, calling for the tearing down of structures, ways, habits that inhibit ministry, while continually constructing what is necessary to thrive in the world of today and tomorrow.

Here are a few more descriptions of this church. Modern, yet postmodern. Many of us come from a modernistic context, but live in a postmodern context. It’s up to us to figure out how to minister in light of this. There has to be the respect for foundations, things that are certain, things that are linear, things that are distinct. There is an unapologetic commitment to the authority of Word. Not all things are sacred. Spiritual can be cheapened to define things that are not. True spirituality cannot be experienced apart from the church. On the other hand, the Emertional Church rejects many of the modernistic claims. Modernity and rationalism have not necessarily led to a better world. There are mysteries that cannot be easily systematized, explained. Not everything fits in neat systems. Truth that really matters is not so much proven by arguments as verified by changed lives.

The Emertional Church values both incarnational and attractional. There is a place to gather. In fact, a body that reflects the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ can be a greater influence on the community than believers simply scattered. There are occasions when the church attracts, and the community responds. Easter, Christmas serve as immediate examples. But people in this model must come largely through people; not through events, programs, celebrities, slick advertising.

The Emertional Church places great value on monologue and dialogue. Preaching is not an option, but a mandate. But there is also room for dialogue, for community involvement in constructing worship, orienting the direction of a sermon, setting in motion creativity and the arts. There is a need to reach both ear and eye, and all the senses for that matter. The Word of God proclaimed with clarity, its message delivered by one with the posture of a preacher, amidst a community that values poetry as it values prose, silence as it values sound, sacraments as it values revealed Word. Counter cultural, both by being holy, unique, separate, and being engaged, involved, immersed in culture.

It may sound like a dream. It’s actually the vision we have for our church at Village. We have committed ourselves as a people to it.

More Monday Morning Pastor

Some weekends give me more pause than others - this weekend is a case in point. First, it was pretty cool to see 16 people baptized over the weekend. I find baptisms really connect with people, more than I ever remember. They connect with me. They are a public affirmation of faith that at the same time reaffirm the faith of those who witness them.

And while I should be nothing but grateful for them (and I really am), the moment presented some questions for me. Some had pretty obvious answers. One of the candidates remarked that though his life was not that bad, it was important to be faithful to baptism. These words could have easily been mine at 18. But I have since come to realize…wait, no, it is that bad!!  We are utterly desperate creatures, far more sinful that we will ever realize, but yes, far more loved than we will ever know.

But it was something else that was working in me. Most of the baptisms involved teenagers. I could relate. I was baptized at this point in my life, and I could see myself in their stories. Hugs, smiles, shouts, applause - even occasional hoots went up as each person was baptized. A pizza party followed. And I am for all of these things. We need more celebration in the church. And what better thing to celebrate than a future generation standing up to say Christ has made a difference, and I want the world to know that. We should shout! Churches have often in the past been too stiff. I don’t remember the party atmosphere when I was baptized. The church took the moment with far more solemnity. I was baptized in the day clapping would have been viewed with suspicion; it would have been someone either unfamiliar with church etiquette or a visitor from a charismatic church. Shouts and hoots would have put the ushers on red alert.

But I am also aware that baptism is a central act, a crucial moment in the care of souls, a very intense communal moment when one is baptized into both Christ and His church, declaring one’s commitment to his/her community of faith, and a profound reverence needs to hence accompany the moment. And I am wondering if we have lost a sense of this. Robert Webber describes baptisms in the early church as passage rites. No one was baptized until he/she went through the rigors of spiritual formation. Candidates for baptism were prayed over in worship, and after a period of discipleship (which included prayers, fasts, all night vigils), they would come back on a designated Saturday night to prepare during the evening for the next day’s baptismal service (ideally Easter or Pentecost). They would fast for a day or two, read Scripture throughout the night, renounce the evil one and commit to following Jesus to the death, and in the morning, be immersed and anointed with oil. There was a profound sense of a death to self that comes with receiving Christ, the water in baptism symbolizing their watery grave. More weeks of discipleship followed.

Is there something of this missing today that needs to be recovered?  Are baptisms less about rites of passage and more about finally getting around to the moment?  Just wondering…

I may still be reacting to a baptism I participated in a couple of years ago, when I asked a woman why she wanted to be baptized, and she said she wanted to be with her friends who attended the church. These words would seem rather thin to an earlier age when candidates declared that baptism represented nothing less than their obedience to Christ, their commitment to radical discipleship, and a public opportunity to declare in holy fear: “I renounce Satan and his works and his pomp and his worship and his angels and his inventions and all things that are under him, and I associate myself to Christ, baptized into the only true God Almighty.”  A fear that transcends the fear of simply getting up in public needs to find its way back into this act, that sobers us all, that then is mixed with profound joy and celebration.

Some Small Thoughts on Becomming Big

I’m just finishing a really interesting book, The Great Giveaway. David Fitch states his thesis right up front. “The thesis of this book is that evangelicalism has ‘given away’ being the church in North America.”  That’s a pretty bold statement, but Fitch makes a pretty good case, citing eight areas we have given away.

Each have intrigued me, beginning with his first; the church has given away its definition of success. It is here that Fitch is troubled by our use of numbers as a measurement of success. And he is right. We do tend to give a lot of emphasis to numbers. I would be less than honest if I said it doesn’t matter to me if our numbers decline at church, if attendance flattens out, if giving numbers do not go up. I watch numbers all the time - numbers on a scale, numbers in my classes, numbers when I play competitive tennis, numbers on staff reports Tuesday mornings. In my earlier years, I went to pastoral conferences, very much aware of my numbers, and other peoples’ numbers. Fred Smith once spoke to a group of us, opening his statement with the words, “Well, I am sure by now you have all had time to sniff one another.” In his southern drawl, we all knew that what he was using a canine metaphor as another way to describe our penchant for comparing ourselves, comparing numbers. We do this because, as Fitch puts it, the biggest ministries usually get the attention.

The concern of Fitch, and it is valid, is that numbers are not a true measurement of success. But it goes beyond this. Fitch says right out that numbers that lead to bigness tend to work against the mission of the church. The larger the church, the more difficult the church is able to be the church. Community diminishes with size. Church becomes some large, corporate, religious behemoth, impersonal, non-responsive, and monolithic. Instead, we should pursue a version of success that is faithful to God’s call to be his body as opposed to success via numbers. We should organize ourselves consciously away from the goal of getting big toward the goal of being the body.

It is this last sentence that turns sideways for me. It seems like becoming the body often leads to growth. As Rick Warren put it some years ago, if there is health in a body, if there is faithfulness to God, it will grow. It’s the nature of healthy bodies. So okay, probably most would agree, and say, yes, true, but when you get too big (say a size over 200, it is time to split off and become small again.

But is bigness all that bad? Is mega-church a derogatory term?  Does it necessarily turn into something impersonal and corporate?  As we are in the midst of building a “bigger” facility, are there reasonable concerns?  Bigness is viewed with some deep suspicion. But I am coming to believe that bigness isn’t all that bad. In fact, I’ve discovered that being smaller isn’t necessarily a measurement of a healthier body. Some of the most dysfunctional, yes even impersonal churches I have seen, been a part of, were under two hundred. And I have discovered, am discovering, that size does not necessarily counteract mission. It might even enhance it, enable it. Some churches have reclaimed their mission, in part, by growing to the next level.

McManus, in his Unstoppable Force, makes a passionate case for the church recovering its momentum, that it once again be a movement. But you can’t have movement apart from mass. Momentum operates by an equation something like this: P=MV2. To put it another way, Momentum = Mass times Velocity. Mass does not, on its own, create momentum. But when you have a focused energy multiplied by a certain mass, incredible momentum can occur. So mass isn’t necessarily an impediment to mission. It might even be one of the keys.

As Fitch puts it, mass can be a mess, but without mass, you have no movement. Without mass, you may not have the resources to do anything very significant when it comes to global efforts. If our church had not grown from 200 to 2000, we would not be sending significant teams abroad 2-3 times a year, partnering in powerful ways with ministries in places such as Hyderabad or Beirut. We would not be partnering with agencies in our neighborhood to become a resource for a healthier Washington County.

Fitch gives fair caution. And yes, getting bigger just to get bigger, to use size to salve our egos, etc., is really bad. But the issue isn’t whether we should get bigger or smaller. What we should aim to be is the visible community of faith, living out the stature of Christ (no matter the size), allowing this inevitable growth to take us to a level where we can create powerful momentum, both here, and abroad.