VillagePastor

LIVING JOYFULLY IN THE TENSION

Once a month our staff meets in a place called South Village, where we step outside of our weekly agenda and talk about the course of the future. We try to pay attention to trends, voices, books that we should be reading, readings that shake us. I like how Kafka once put it: “I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?” A book, as he puts it, “must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

Some recent reads fit that category, including Sittser’s Water from a Deep Well (guaranteed to deepen your soul); excerpts from Barna and Viola’s new book, Pagan Christianity (guaranteed to make some of you very angry); a reread of Taylor’s Leaving Church, a memoir of her ministry and decision to leave the pastorate for the academy (guaranteed to unsettle some in ministry); The Shack, a fictional piece of one confronting God through human tragedy (certain to blow one’s imagination when it comes to the person of God).

In our time yesterday, recent readings and re-readings encouraged me to rethink, along with our staff, just what we are trying to be as a church. I have used such words as “Emertional” in other blogs to talk about the place we have aimed the course of our church. That is, a course in which we find ourselves on neither side, be it emergent or institutional church. Honestly, in many books, I cannot find voices that describe who we are.

We certainly want nothing to do with institutional, if by the definition it means we are a church molded by an ancient Christendom, culturally respectable at any cost, suburban, mainstream, forming greater and greater rigidity (I really resent voices that put all of us in churches over ten years in the same category). Nor are we interested in trying to appear emergent or hip because we have chosen a particular sound or expression over another, ancient over present, etc. Frankly, we couldn’t if we wanted to.

Like others (how many I have no idea), we live in this tension—finding ourselves somewhere between the following--

      -liquid vs solid

      -informal vs formal

      -fluid vs institutional

      -community vs buildings

      -egalitarian vs hierarchical

      -dialogical vs monological

      -incarnational vs attractional

      -follower vs consumer

      -community vs audience

      -image vs word

      -younger vs older

      -post modern vs modern

Each, it seems to me, needs the other. Each must find a way to live with the other. The question we keep asking ourselves is this—is it possible? Can a younger generation of Jesus followers do ministry together with boomers and those older? Maybe the better question is—will they? Can we take the wineskins necessary for the fermenting wine (the necessary structures, policies, facilities, programs, staffing, etc through which Jesus works) and keep them from becoming hard and brittle? How do we take advantage of the things that make an institution, without becoming institutional? How do we keep pressing forward without ever arriving, knowing that atrophy begins at the highest point? Can we celebrate the past, while aiming the church towards its best years yet? Can we become larger, while at the same time growing smaller? Can we expand our facilities to do ministry, while stressing issues of community, justice, movement?

Exiles seems to be a pretty popular phrase to describe those outside of the existing church (Frost, Brueggemann, etc). I wonder if churches like ours are becoming the real exiles—that sometimes seem to feel a bit homeless in the larger landscape.

Virtual Church

Yesterday I sat with a parishioner who is aiming to complete his master’s degree on line. His questions revolved around the best distance education programs available, and whether he should transfer from one “online campus” to another. It is all part of living in an age that is going more and more virtual. I called this morning to discuss reward miles, virtually, for it took forever to speak with a live person. My kids (adult children I should clarify) are part of a generation that seem to spend less and less of their time with real people, and more and more of their time—and resources—in virtual worlds. They talk back and forth with characters on a screen as if they are real, almost more real than those flesh and blood persons who might be in the room. How amazing is it that more and more are logging into three dimensional virtual worlds created by its residents, customizing characters that give people second identities? That might even replace themselves!

But it is in the world of education and the church, where I have invested much of my life, that virtual reality is getting my attention. Technology has brought us to the day where more and more churches are expanding, not by mentoring future leaders to shepherd growing churches, but by setting up video venues to bring great preaching to someone in your neighborhood. It’s nothing really new. Since the advent of radio and TV, a certain amount of ministry has been virtual. But today, you begin to wonder how far into unreality we are willing to go. Maybe you have heard of Second Life, just one of several websites, where users control their avatars, who communicate with one another in a virtual church setting. The promo is that now people can be more connected than ever! But is this really true? 

I wonder what is being lost. Have we lost our understanding of who is man, and what he was created to be, how he was created to relate? Are we sacrificing true ecclesiology on the altar of technology? We discussed this today over faculty lunch. What is missing when a student chooses to do education via distance, versus engaging with a professor in the same room? What are we losing when a pastor is no longer flesh and blood, but an image on the screen? Some might say that in a church of 3000+, where technology enables people to see their pastor up front, on a screen, that it is no different. But is this true? It causes me to wonder how real am I to people in a church of 1700?

I’m aware of some of the gains. Convenience and financial costs make online education attractive. No need to uproot. In the case of church, virtual church has its economic advantages. More satellite campuses, more sites, more impact. Some see it as a solution for dying churches. Just enhance the technological capability, and you too can experience dynamic preaching. But do the advantages outweigh the costs? Are we creating entertainment venues, or houses of worship? Are we creating worship characterized by response to God’s revelation, or response to personalities? For an emerging generation, hungering for authenticity and community, is this really going the wrong direction?

When I reflect on my days as a student on a seminary campus, I remember one morning a professor asked me to stay after class. He was a pretty demanding teacher, and I feared I had screwed up somewhere in his course. When all of the students left, he asked me to come closer to his desk. Note I said—“closer”. In that moment, he asked how I was doing. I started to say okay, but he knew, and he asked again, “No I mean, how are you really doing?” He had discovered something few knew at the time, that a girl that I had fallen in love with had just broken off the engagement. I can’t really remember what he said that day—I just remember that that moment made a significant impact on my life—more than any e-mail I’ve ever received. And to this day, when this retired prof comes around campus, while I have long since forgotten a lot of the history he taught, I remember this, that being in that class room was far better than sitting in front of a screen. I would like to think that this is the way it should be in the church.