Embarking

(written back in August… but forgot to post)

I’ve found the conversation around mega-churches and emergent churches lately quit fascinating. (cf. Fitch’s first post, and his redux post] I’ve heard many people for awhile saying, “the fruit just isn’t there with the Emergent Churches.”  By fruit, this usually means converts.  So, when David Fitch went after Mark Driscoll and talked about this issue, I found it quit interesting.  Being someone who is emerging at heart and history (and in some ways theologically, but not others) but also being currently a pastor at a mega-church (where I sometimes fit in, and other times feel like an odd-ball) these conversations are quite intriguing.  I’m particularly interested in numbers 4 and 5 of the 5 points Fitch makes, which I’ve listed below - this from the Out of UR Blog:

4. Having said all this, I think that the missional communities that do persist probably have a higher conversion rate than the Driscollesque mega churches. Missional churches are much smaller, so 6 conversions from a group of 25 over ten years would match (or exceed) the percentage growth of a typical mega church. I think it would be interesting to measure how many dollars per conversion are spent in missional churches versus mega churches. It makes me smile knowing missional churches are probably more cost effective when it comes to conversions because we resist spending money on buildings, programs, and “the show.”

5. We must recognize that “missionary conversions” take longer than megachurch conversions. The conversion of a post-Christendom “pagan,” who has had little to no exposure to the language and story of Christ in Scripture, may require five years of relational immersion before a decision would even make sense. If you do not have this immersion/context, any decision that is made is prone to be little more than a consumerist decision—it is made based on the perceived immediate benefit. It lasts as long as this perceived benefit remains important. It does not lead to discipleship.

So a true missionary conversion, which I believe missional churches are after, takes a much longer period of time than the kind of conversions most often generated through a megachurch. The megachurch is largely appealing to people who grew up in old forms of church and know the Story but quit going to church many years ago. These “unchurched people” require the old messages to be made more relevant. They need to be “revived” or called back into a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we should recognize there are fewer and fewer of these kinds of people left.

These are some arguments that I myself have made in the past.  Knowing, realistically two things: 1) how inefficient mega-churches really are in reaching the lost per dollar spent and 2) how really unconcerned most members of these churches are to reach anyone.  Emerging churches are still too young to measure long term fruit and effectiveness, but it will be interesting to see the longer term effects of churches that spend less money, focus more on community, tend to care more about “holistic transformation”, and are committed to individual people over programs.  The percentages of transformed lives to Jesus Lordship and Kingdom per capita and per dollar (though even talking about it that way seems, somehow, wrong) would be very intriguing to see.  So… someone do the study already.

The other thing I find so intriguing is the issue of “who” these churches reach.  My take is that not only mega-churches, but most contemporary evangelical churches are fairly good at reaching those who are part of Christendom… meaning they’ve been raised with Jesus and the church, and they have been educated in Christianity.  They may be “de-churched” because they were one-time churched, but maybe they never took the step to enter the Kingdom and submit to the Lordship of Jesus.  Those people do need to be reached.  But what I think is being argued in some of what Fitch is saying is that those who are part of the emerging postmodern, post-Christendom culture have very little or no knowledge of Christian theology or of Jesus other than what they learned on the Simpsons, King of the Hill, or in political campaigns.  These folks are a slower burn because they have so much knowledge to gain before they have a clue what they are saying “yes” to.  I’ve heard Alan Hirsch talking about this at a church planting portion of the RCA’s OneThing conference in San Antonio when he said that the “forms” of church we are using today are reaching a certain group of people, but that the culture shifts of post-christendom require new forms of church plants to reach new people who will likely never be reached by our current forms.

Ok, so I’ve been gone for awhile.  You may notice, I blip on and off like a bad TV that’s been hit by lightening.  True.  When busyness hits, I go underground - at least on the blogosphere.  I wish it weren’t so because it’s wonderful to write for no other reason that to write, process, and share.  Anyway, this week in September is the busiest week of my year and September is generally the busiest month.  But this summer in general was just plain busy.

There are a couple new books I’m reading, or almost done with.  The first is GloboChrist: the Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn by Carl Rashke.  If you’d like to read an excerpt, click here.  Tall Skinny Kiwi has been blogging about it, and I hope to engage it a bit in the coming weeks.  I’m pretty much done with it.  I’m also half way through Andy Crouch’s new book Culture-Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling.  Both are good books, and I’ve enjoyed them both.  Lots to say about Crouch’s book.  Raschke’s is provocative, interesting, sometimes overstated, and just OK.  I’m going to be starting Gordon MacDonald’s book Who Stole My Church soon as well as Four Views of Youth Ministry and the Church with one of my youth pastors.

On to McLaren.  I wanted to share a quick metaphor that McLaren used when he was talking about The Gospel and salvation and Kingdom.  To truncate it a bit, Brian was talking about what I’ve mentioned before about the message from many that the penal substitutionary theory of atonement or receiving Jesus as one’s personal savior is the Gospel.  Someone in the audience had questioned him about where he stood on this theory, etc. as the Gospel.  McLaren used a metaphor in which he said something to this affect, “People want to talk a lot about going to Florida and what I think about Florida and how to get to Florida, when I thought we were going to California.”  I didn’t really like his metaphor, although I thought it raised some important issues.  When you talk to people (like me… and Brian) about the Gospel, our view is wider than the theory of substitutionary atonement or receiving Jesus as Savior.  However, when many people here that, they think we’ve forfeited the gospel.  I would argue that we are actually saying that the Gospel is more than that, not less.  And for sure, Christ’s work on the cross as our substitute to atone for our sin and rebellion against God is key, and core to the Gospel.  However, it is not itself the gospel. 

So, I have an alternative metaphor.  Think for a moment about the St. Louis Archway.  It was originally built in the ’60’s to commemorate Thomas Jefferson and the Westward expansion of the Americas.  So, imagine with me that the Arch were the actual gateway to the the West, that you would have to pass through the archway to get to the western frontier.  And let’s say that the Eastern United States was ruled by a different king and under different rules than the Western United States.  So, let’s say you live in the east, and friends of yours have told you about the King and Kingdom of the West, how different it is, how much more humane, how much healthier, etc. it was.  So, you head West from your home in Washington DC and you come to the St. Louis Archway.  You take pictures; you go to the top of the Arch; you even take the helicopter ride.  Then, you settlt there on the banks of Illinois just to the East of the Mississippi river, or maybe you cross over and you set up your new home on the western banks in St. Louis, Missouri.  But, you never go West (young man).  You never see the sprawling Iowa and Nebraska plains, the deserts of Nevada, the mountains of Idaho, or the California coastline.  Even so, you think you’ve travelled West. 

That’s the metaphor I think of when we truncate the Gospel to a theory of atonement, to a sinner’s prayer (which much of the time is misunderstood while it’s happening), or being born again (not in the biblical John 3 sense - which is more like the West , but in the contemporary sense like the banks of the Mississippi).  Those are all gateways, are all part of going West, but the Gospel is about the King and his Kingdom that are both coming and have come.  And as CS Lewis said, we must go “further up and further in” to experience the beauty and wonder of the place Aslan has prepared for us. 

I’m certainly interested in the St. Louis Arch and getting across the Mississippi, but I also really want to see the Rocky Mountains, the Snake River, the Tetons, the Black Hills, the Grand Canyon, the vineyards, and pacific coast beaches.

After McLaren’s talk, my friend and I had the highlight of the evening when we stopped at one of my favorite places:  Traverse Bay Pie Company.  If you’re ever near one, you have to stop and have at least a piece of pie, but don’t go alone.  Make sure you have a good conversation partner along.

I went to see Brian McLaren tonight with a friend at Baker Book House in Grand Rapids.  He was on a book tour for his new book in Phyllis Tickle’s series on Ancient Spiritual Practices called Finding our Way Again.  He didn’t talk a whole lot about the book, but instead talked for a bit about his last three books (The Secret Message of Jesus, Everything Must Change, and this new one) and the kernels of thought and heart that have produced them.  You can tell that McLaren is passionate about change in the world in which we live more in line with the Kingdom of God.  It’s always great to hear McLaren, not because he’s super-inspiration or charasmatic, but because he opens up the Scriptures often in a new way and his questions are challenging.  I also am particularly fond of his almost fearless (now) prophetic words towards the secular culture and towards the church, particularly the evangelical church.  He answered the typical questions I figured he’d get like “What do I say to my conservative friends who don’t like you or think your dangerous” and “what do you really think of hell and the afterlife.”  The second one, he really danced around and I wasn’t fully satisfied with, but he consistently went back to his reading of Scripture through the lens of the inbreaking Kingdom of God in peace, love, generosity, and goodness.  Here are a couple highlights for me (paraphrases):

“The evangelical church is not meant to be a chaplaincy to secular capitalistic consumerism.”

“If you read the passages of the bible literally about some things, you have to read it literally about others.”  His example here was the story of the Rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16, in which he says, “If you read this passage literally, it seems like the way to get to hell is by being prosperous, and the way to get to heaven is to be a poor beggar with nothing.”

McLaren also talked about what the Gospel is and how it relates to things like penal substitutionary atonement and he also responded to Driscoll’s comments (although Driscoll was unnamed) attacking McLaren - the jist being that McLaren’s Jesus is too soft and sissy, and Driscoll’s Jesus who appears again in on a war-path of violence against his enemies.  McLaren was excellent on this point and gracious to his detractors as always.  I’m not going to sum it up except to say that McLaren is thinking about writing a book that responds to the misunderstandings of his critics.  On this note he talked about exclusivism, inclusivism, and universalism in terms of salvation - and I think I’ll try to post on that next.

Overall it was an uneventful but stimulating discussion as always.  McLaren speaks today at Mars Hill, in case you’re interested. 

I’ve found the conversation around mega-churches and emergent churches lately quit fascinating. (cf. Fitch’s first post, and his redux post] I’ve heard many people for awhile saying, “the fruit just isn’t there with the Emergent Churches.”  By fruit, this usually means converts.  So, when David Fitch went after Mark Driscoll and talked about this issue, I found it quit interesting.  Being someone emergent at heart and history (and in some ways theologically, but not others) but also being currently a pastor at a mega-church (where I sometimes fit in, and other times feel like an odd-ball) these conversations are quite intriguing.  I’m particularly interested in numbers 4 and 5 of the 5 points Fitch makes, which I’ve listed below - this from the Out of UR Blog:

4. Having said all this, I think that the missional communities that do persist probably have a higher conversion rate than the Driscollesque mega churches. Missional churches are much smaller, so 6 conversions from a group of 25 over ten years would match (or exceed) the percentage growth of a typical mega church. I think it would be interesting to measure how many dollars per conversion are spent in missional churches versus mega churches. It makes me smile knowing missional churches are probably more cost effective when it comes to conversions because we resist spending money on buildings, programs, and “the show.”

5. We must recognize that “missionary conversions” take longer than megachurch conversions. The conversion of a post-Christendom “pagan,” who has had little to no exposure to the language and story of Christ in Scripture, may require five years of relational immersion before a decision would even make sense. If you do not have this immersion/context, any decision that is made is prone to be little more than a consumerist decision—it is made based on the perceived immediate benefit. It lasts as long as this perceived benefit remains important. It does not lead to discipleship.

So a true missionary conversion, which I believe missional churches are after, takes a much longer period of time than the kind of conversions most often generated through a megachurch. The megachurch is largely appealing to people who grew up in old forms of church and know the Story but quit going to church many years ago. These “unchurched people” require the old messages to be made more relevant. They need to be “revived” or called back into a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we should recognize there are fewer and fewer of these kinds of people left.

These are some arguments that I myself have made in the past.  Knowing, realistically two things: 1) how inefficient mega-churches really are in reaching the lost per dollar spent and 2) how really unconcerned most members of these churches are to reach anyone.  Emerging churches are still too young to measure long term fruit and effectiveness, but it will be interesting to see the longer term effects of churches that spend less money, focus more on community, tend to care more about “holistic transformation”, and are committed to individual people over programs.  The percentages of transformed lives to Jesus Lordship and Kingdom per capita and per dollar (though even talking about it that way seems, somehow, wrong) would be very intriguing to see.  So… someone do the study already.

I’ve been away from blogging for awhile now.  For those of you who read regularly, I apologize for not writing.  I don’t share much personal/ family stuff here, but for a long time now, my family has been very sick and I’ve been on a couple of vacations.  We’ve had a number of crazy illnesses, including all 3 kids each having pneumonia twice.  We’ve had an average of about 2.5 doctor, hospital, or ER visits per week since November, and it’s been wearing us down.  In addition, our house got struck by lightening and our dog almost died twice.  (No, I’m not joking).  I don’t talk much about spiritual warfare, but nothing else explains it.  Yesterday I was talking to a doctor from the Infectious Disease Clinic at Devos Children’s Hospital, and told him to continue to run tests, but that I was asking a lot of people to pray for us. 

I’ve been continuing to read as much as I can, which isn’t enough, and continued to think.  I had a lot of ideas for posts, and then they got lost along with the sleep that seemed to disapate right before my opened eyes.

Recently, I’ve been reading some critics of what are called either postfoundationalists/ postconservatives like Stanley Grenz, John Franke, Roger Olson, et al.  I’m interested in the conservative evangelical response to projects which seek to take postmodern thinking seriously while also holding strongly to evangelicalism and scripture.  I’ve been reading all sides, but I tend to tip towards the Grenz, Franke, Olsons as well as some of what James KA Smith, Carl Raschke, Kevin VanHoozer, John Stackhouse, and others like them would say.  I like to read the critics because it helps to clarify and challenge my own thinking. 

I’ve also been toying with some article and book ideas, but haven’t recently found the time to write with the kids’ being sick and life in general.  Some space/ time to write would be awesome.

Anyway, I’ll be back with what are, I think, some interesting posts coming from my interchange with Jim Speigel on Gum, Geckos, and God starting on Monday.  I couldn’t limit my questions to one, so we’re going to go back and forth a bit on a number of questions.  I hope you enjoy it… and the book is a lot of fun to read.

I spent the week last week at a Camp on Lake Michigan called Camp Geneva.  It’s actually where my wife and I met, and where we held our wedding reception.  I’ve been going out there each year to be a chaplain.  My kids get to experience camp, and I get to give back to camp a little bit.

Well, it’s a great week.  The week I’m there is  the 4th to 6th grade all week.  Now, I love these kids, but precisely because of their age, it requires some thinking in a good part of the brain - the child “translation” side.  This age group is filled with questions and curiosity and they’re really beginning to try to make sense of the world. 

Half way through the week, a counselor came to me with her cabin and asked if they could spend some time with me asking questions.  “No problem,” I said.  Well, that’s what I thought.  It was so much fun - for an hour we sat and just talked about everything you can think of from what will we be like in heaven to what are ghosts to how could Jesus really be God if he was also human to whether or not God spoke every language?  We talked about whether we’d know people in heaven and whether babies who died would always be babies in heaven.  (These kids were fascinated with the afterlife.)  They wanted to know if people could hear us from heaven so that we could pray to them after they died, whether we would become angels, and how God sees kids with disabilities.  Later in the week, another counselor asked if I’d do the same thing with her cabin.  It was a pure blast.

I wish at that point I had Jim’s book Gum, Geckos, and God  available (see previous post) or had already read it because he promises to look at some of these things in conversation with his kids in the book.  I’m excited to read this and rethink conversations I’ve had with my son Isaac about what I call our heavenly “super-bodies” and what God looks like and my daughter Aliya’s concerns about how on earth (literally) it’s possible for Jesus to come back to life (faith is amazing).

I’m participating in a blog tour for Gum, Geckos, and God.  The stop here will be on August 4th and following.  Basically, I’m going to ask Jim some questions on the book, and he’ll respond, and you can join in.

Setting:  Walmart bathroom; 3 year old in one stall, 5 year old two down – so they’re yelling.

3 year old:  [Singing Jesus Loves Me modified]  Jesus doesn’t love me; Jesus doesn’t love me. 

5 year old:  That’s not right.  Jesus loves you.  He always does.

3 year old:  I don’t like Jesus.  He won’t let me touch these blue walls, so I don’t like him. [Pauses]  Jesus, it’s me!  I’m sorry Jesus.  Jesus, it’s me!  I’m on da toilet!!” [Now to mommy] I just talked to Jesus, mommy.  Just for a minute.  He’s upstairs.

5 year old:  Jesus isn’t upstairs, he’s in the sky.

3 year old:  Not in the blue sky.

5 year old:  Yes he is.

3 year old:  In the blue sky!?

5 year old [yelling]: YES!!

3 year old:  How does he fly?

5 year old:  He doesn’t.

3 year old:  The angels fly.

5 year old:  Yes they do.

3 year old:  With their wings.

(And it went on… but who can ever re-create these things?)

This happened a few years ago when my now 8 year old was 5 and my now 5 year old was 3.  I was reminded of this when I read the first few lines of a new book by an old friend (well, he’s not old… we were just friends while I was in college and he getting his doctorate) called Gum, Geckos, and God.  It’s a book about God, theology, and questions that James S. Spiegel wrote from conversations with his kids and interaction with his philosophical mind.

I’m going to tell you some more about it in the next post or two, along with maybe one or two kid stories… but first a little about its author, James S. Spiegel (click to read his bio).  Jim is a Philosophy professor at Taylor University, a wonderful thinker, and a mean basketball player (at least he used to be).  You can read the official bio, which you should do… but I’m going to write a few other rememberances.  Jim and I played in a band back in college days, and I was often inspired by Jim’s wit and his intelligence.  I remember playing with him at the Michigan State Student Union, at a local bar, at a retreat, and at our church.  I remember Jim getting mad at me for some bad decisions I was making with some friends who were a negative influence.  Jim is a thinker and a lover.  He loves God and he loves his family and he loves his friends.  Jim also loves music, philosophy, and certain sports and TV shows.  

Honestly, I haven’t seen Jim since a buddy of ours got married several years back, but I have fond memories of jamming late into the night to the strange mix of Cranberries and Classic Rock.  I’ve only started the book, but I’ll be participating in a Blog Tour, and I hope you’ll not only read along, but get the book.   It’s funny, helpful, and serious all at the same time.  If you have kids, you’ll certainly recognize some of the great theological questions of 5 year olds from your own experience and Jim takes the deep philosophical and theological issues to bear and tries to put them into concepts that even a child can understand.  What a concept.

On his blog, Peter Enns has been sharing portions of a paper he delivered to the faculty at Westminster Theological Seminary in response to his book, Incarnation and Inspiration that got him into trouble and now into suspension.  In a recent post on the authority and cultural expressions of Scripture, first speaks of the mixing of Jesus divinity and humanity in his person.  Enns says that these are “essential” to who Jesus is, and that the combination is important.  I would be wrong to try to pit the humanity against the divinity or to raise one above the other.  Interesting, I was just relistening to a podcast recently by Seattle’s Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Seattle  entitled “The Supremacy of Christ and the Church in a Postmodern World.”  Driscoll was making a similar argument, accusing the Emergents of raising the immanence and incarnation of Jesus too high and accusing the New Reformers of raising the transcendence and exalted Jesus too much.  In any case, Enns argues that the authority of Scripture comes from its divine origin, in other words - in God’s words, but that it is encased unescapably in humanity, or cultural expression.  Here is a short passage from his post:

What I argue in I&I is that Scripture works in an analogous (not identical) way. Scripture is God’s word because it is of divine origin. That is the locus of authority, and no discussion of its humanity in any way compromises that authority. What a study of Scripture’s humanity does do is help us see the manner in which the divine author speaks authoritatively into particular ancient cultures. How this authoritative Scripture translates to different times and places, in both its timeless affirmations and contextualized particularity is (I trust this is not too reductionistic) the task of theological study. It is my firm experience, however, that evangelical lay readers, those to whom the book is addressed, are not accustomed to understanding the nature of Scripture this way.

This is one of the issues that I find so fascinating about how we understand Scripture, and one that I’ve mentioned in various ways here on my blog.  One of the ways it has been raised among some like myself is how much we can “purge” the human side, the cultural side, and get to pure propositional truths.  Again, don’t read what I’m not saying, and from what I’m reading of Enns, he’s not saying either but being accused of.  I’m not saying there isn’t truth, or objective truth for that matter or that God’s truth isn’t propositional in any way.  What I am saying is that our access too it is always enculturated, always incarnated, always spoken through word and cultural and interpretation from God into human cultures and persons.  God communicates, he doesn’t philosophize.  God relates, speaks, and loves rather than providing pure platonic visions of himself.  God is God, “I am who I am” and not philosophical categories and platonic idealism or Kantian pure reason.  God is interactional and in his divine goodness has chosen to speak, act, and even come incarnationally.

God is still who he is.  He is still the King and the authority.  What he says goes.  What he wants, will be.  There is no other name under haven by which we can be saved.  But let us be careful not to turn scripture - or God for that matter - into pure philosophical Kantian metaphysics.  We need to find a way to accept the way God has communicated with us - not through theological treatise, but through narrative of his relationship with his people - and then figure out how it speaks to us today, and what God really intends and who he is.  That’s much harder work than black and white propositions, I know, but that’s the work.  Driscoll is right (although I don’t like saying that) that we need to balance the transcendent and immanent God as he is.

I’ve talked in previous posts about what it means, has meant, and might mean in the future to be an evangelical.  There are lots of definitions, but there is some remarkable similarity among them.  I want to mention a new document here entitled “An Evangelical Manifesto” which seeks to give some definition to Evangelical identity and public commitment.  The document seeks from within evangelicalism to give self-definition in a sort of apologetic against or in contra-distinction to the labels that can come from culture, media, and those who might speak against evangelicals.  I don’t think, though, that it’s primarily defensive.  There’s certainly a view towards the future of evangelicalism in the midst of a shifting church, culture, and theological debate.  There is certainly a focus here on the place of evangelicals in public life and some “redefining” based upon evangelicalism’s wedding itself too much in the past to religious right.  The document on first glance looks to be pretty good.  People like Timothy George, Os Guiness, Richard Mouw, and Dallas Willard were a part of the steering committee, which is good.  I’m still reading it, so I’m not ready to comment, yet.  There are a few things about the tone, the wideness, and the heart of evangelicalism that I like.  Not sure if I’ll sign it, yet. It’s been noted by CNN (actually AP) and USA Today among others (and you can find an article at CT here).

I’ve been writing a bit lately about the issues of “who’s in” and “who’s out” and drawing firm boundary lines within evangelicalism. There are some these days who are tightening up the theological borders, while others are in favor of open borders and new cultural expressons of our faith so long as we maintain our core identity (see posts on The Future of Evangelicalism).

In the midst of this has come the controversy surrounding Westminster Theological Seminary and Peter Enn’s. Apparently, Enn’s published a book (which I have not read) called Inspiration and Incarnation, using an incarnational analogy to describe inspiration and Scripture. He was recently suspended by the board from his position for this book because it apparently went against the Westminster Confession of Faith.  What I’m gathering Enns means by incarnational analogy (again, without having read the book), is that there is a co-mingling (as in Jesus’ incarnation… the human and the divine) of humanity and divinity in the project and development of the Scriptures. My hunch is that the rub here is around inerrancy and defining what “God-breathed” means. If there is too much “humanity” and culture in the Scriptures, then that might soften our understanding of it’s authority, it’s special nature, and inevitably create a slippery slope away from inerrancy. Again… I haven’t read it, but if that’s what it’s about, I can see the issues here. The interesting thing to me just on first blush is that even though Jesus was human, even though Jesus was “enculturated” as a Jewish man in first century Palestine, born into the home of a carpenter - we don’t tend to worry that Jesus is somehow tainted or less than perfect, or diminished in his God-hood. So, why would we worry about an incarnational theology of inspiration? Maybe there’s a lot more too it.

In any case, what bothered me were a couple of things (you can find this info at Christianity Today in an article entitled “Westminster Theological Suspension.” There’s also a good deal of discussion on Scot McKnight’s blog). 

First, it was interesting how split both the faculty (12 for 8 against) and the board (9 for 18 against) were on their decisions to support Enns or not.  Clearly, this is not a cut and dried issue, and one that took 2 years to get through.  Apparently there were not “personal” issues involved.  I guess this was theological.  And yet it came down to such a split vote in both places within Westminster?  Just ask yourself this question… “What does this tell us about the state of evangelicalism?”  I won’t answer that for you.

Second, even though this was supposedly a theological issue, CT said this, “…the board failed to give Enns an opportunity to be heard” and that that boards staement said, “while theological ocncerns were mentioned, there was little board discussion of theological specifics.”  Hmmm.   That’s a head scratcher.

Well, obviously I don’t know enough about the story, but it’s disturbing none-the-less.