Embarking

from Willow Creek Leadership Summit 2008: Session 4 Part 1, John Burke, Gateway Community Church, Leading in New Cultural Realities

The right kind of soil matters.

I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor. For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building. –1 Corinthians 3:6-9

Spiritual leadership is all about creating the right soil, the right environment.

• Spiritual leadership/ church is messy.  Jesus’ ministry was messy.
• Does the soil you’re creating allow room for authentic questions and struggling?
• We have to be willing to get our hands dirty, cultivating the soil as necessary.
• Who should we be ministering to and reaching?  Messy people.
• If we are not seeing messy people around us who are becoming part of the church, then we are not leading like Jesus.

The Messy Leadership That Cultivates Environments

1. Cultivate the soil with grace-giving acceptance.  Come as you are.  God will accept you as is and walk with you to become more and more what he intended for you.  Most people don’t experience this kind of grace-giving acceptance from Christians.  [Note:  this reminds me of the book The UnChristian and many of the findings there.  See my posts on UnChristian.]  U2 - “Grace makes beauty out of ugly things.”  Too many churches are making it difficult for messy people to come to God.  (cf. Acts 15:10-11,19)  What are the barriers to grace in our context (our particular church/ perceptions, etc.) ie. hatred of gays, how we think about other religions.  How do we answer the culture’s questions well without creating barriers to grace?  In every culture, there are cultural barriers to grace.  What are they in yours?  And how do you do that without compromising truth?
2. Cultivate the soil with authentic confessing community.  Jesus couldn’t stand the game-playing, saving face of the Pharisees.  Phariseeism is pretending that we’re better than we really are.  When we really live in authenticity with one another, God shows up and something amazing happens.  And that is something the world is looking for.  “…calling out the masterpiece underneath the mud.”
3. Inspiring constant connection to God’s spirit.  [John 13-17]  This is one of the most difficult things for self-centered Christians to do.  Stay connected; fruit happens.  [axiom] Spiritual fruit is scandalously simple.

I’m impressed with John Burke because he’s connecting a couple of things together that I really like.  He’s authetic.  He’s leading an effective church reaching many who are far from God.  He’s connected to an emerging culture and meeting real people who are really in the real world.  He doesn’t back off from solid scriptural truths about spiritual transformation.  He’s seeing real fruit in the younger generations and doing creative ministry that is both meangingful and impactful. 

Welcome to the Gum, Geckos, and God Blog Tour!  I was delighted to be invited to participate.  I not only enjoyed reading the book, but interacting with Jim has been fun, too.  Jim Speigel is Philosophy Professor at Taylor University in Indiana. (Also, Jim and his wife just launched a new blog as well, called Wisdom and Folly.)  I had a hard time confining my questions, so I asked Jim a series of questions.  I’ll be posting a new one every couple of hours, and I hope you find these engaging.  Here’s the third installment.

Embarking:  As I was reading through chapter 16, What if I Sin in Heaven, I was struck by a fairly new thought.  You talk a lot about how pain and struggle builds patience and helps us to be formed into the people God desires.  For instance, you say, “… if God took away all the bad things in this world, then he would also be taking away some really good things, like forgiveness and courage.”  The trigger for me was when you answer Bailey’s question about why God doesn’t just stop all this pain right now, you say, “Well, I think it’s because he wants to make us better.”  Ok, this is going to sound really strange, but is it possible - and I know this sounds heretical - that God intended, or even desired (ooh that sounds bad) sin because it allowed for things - like forgiveness and courage and redemption - that would simply not exist without something to overcome?  I once watched RC Sproul and his son argue about the locus of the origin of evil, and they put it in different places… but both of them ultimately put the responsibility for evil on God - even if it was in calculating (or foreknowing as you’ve stated) that evil would be a response to his creation.  In an American court, that would at least make God liable.  Was sin and evil a part of God’s plan - for certainly he wasn’t surprised by it, given his foreknowledge?  If so, then how does that affect our understanding of God, if at all?  This was heightened for me when you said, “Even the God-man was perfected through suffering.”  In some ways, God’s glory seems dependent (ooh, that doesn’t sound good, either) upon overcoming sin and evil, and by doing so becomes more glorious than if sin and evil didn’t exist.

SPIEGEL:  These are big and difficult questions, and for my full and nuanced treatment of the problem of evil I recommend readers to chapter six of my book The Benefits of Providence.  There I develop and defend the “soul-making” theodicy which says that God’s purpose in evil and suffering is to make us more mature disciples of Christ.  (For biblical grounds for this, see James 1:2-4 and 1 Peter 1:5-7, among many other passages.)  As for God’s sovereignty over evil, I don’t think it can put any more bluntly than it is articulated in the Westminster Confession of Faith, which asserts that God ordains whatsoever comes to pass.  And why does he ordain what he ordains?  To bring glory to himself.  That says it all, I think.  And while it is a difficult teaching to accept, I think it is biblical.

I’ve commented on the Reveal Study before, but given my last post on the subject, I want to follow up a little bit. 

• Reveal Spirituality Survey Results
• Reveal Small Group Data

After reading MacDonald, it reminded me of something that Bill Hybels said in response to the Reveal Data.   I heard him share some of these thoughts at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit, but here is how he said it as quoted at the Out of Ur blog of Christianity Today called Willow Creek Repents (There’s a second post as well from Greg Hawkins of Willow.

We made a mistake.  What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and became Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ’self-feeders’.  We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.

Out of UR then goes on to says, “In other words, spiritual growth doesn’t happen best by becoming dependent on elaborate church programs but through the age old spiritual practices of prayer, bible reading, and relationships.”

Have we gotten so far away from the basics that we’ve lost the very core of what it takes to develop a disciple?

As a Pastor of Spiritual Formation, I’ve been giving a lot of thought into the development of people into disciples of Christ.  I’m continuing to work on a process at my own church that will hopefully begin to launch in the fall that takes people from the starting point of faith, and gives them some next steps until the point when they’re multiplying other disciples.  Sounds very modern and linear of me, doesn’t it!  It is and it isn’t.  More on that later.

But, given that, I ran across an article by Gordon MacDonald from the Leadership Insight called ”So Many Christian Inants.”  I definitely resonate with the sentiments in this article.    Here is a poignant moment in the article:

I have concluded that our branch of the Christian movement (sometimes called Evangelical) is pretty good at wooing people across the line into faith in Jesus. And we’re also not bad at helping new-believers become acquainted with the rudiments of a life of faith: devotional exercise, church involvement, and basic Bible information—something you could call Christian infancy.  But what our tradition lacks of late—my opinion anyway—is knowing how to prod and poke people past the “infancy” and into Christian maturity.

So true.  Remember that famous quote (who said it… people disagree… Packer, Colsen, Chesterton… I think Chesterton first?) “American Christianity is thousands of miles wide, but only an inch deep.”  Evangelicalism has so focused on conversionism (see The Future of Evangelicalism 4, The Future of Evangelicalism 5) and the atonement that we’ve forgotten some of the important depth that the whole sciptures teach, and our part in multiplying disciples.  Multiplying converts is of course of first importance, but that’s only the beginning stage.  Lately, I’ve been thinking of conversion more as “changing allegiance” from one kingdom to another, and that once you enter the kingdom, then everything begins.

MacDonald also hits on something I’ve been talking a lot about lately.  Here’s how he says it:

The marks of maturity? Self-sustaining in spiritual devotions. Wise in human relationships. Humble and serving. Comfortable and functional in the everyday world where people of faith can be in short supply. Substantial in conversation; prudent in acquisition; respectful in conflict; faithful in commitments. Take a few minutes and ask how many people you know who would fit such a description.

In fact, I just gave a friend MacDonald’s book The Resilient Life because it talks about just that - how to live a life in which you become more and more Christlike as you approach death.  In some classes I’ve been teaching, I ask the following question to start to get at a definition and a starting point for growth, “If having Jesus formed in us is the goal (remember, Paul was in the pains of childbirth so that Christ would be formed in his followers - Galatians 4:19), then what would it look like if Jesus were living your life?  How would he look in your shoes, during your day, with your gifts, and your opportunities?  Now, where are you in comparison to that? (That’s not a question to elicit guilt, as you might imagine since I’m reformed)  Now, what is the next thing you can do to move towards having Christ formed in you?  What areas need the most work?  If you focused on one area, which one would bear the most fruit of transformation?”  Then, we can begin to develop a plan to develop spiritually. 

Our traditional answer to that question is to develop programs.  Again, MacDonald:

You need programs to make large churches go: kind of like the automakers need an assembly line that stamps out fenders as fast as possible… But mature Christians do not grow through programs or through the mesmerizing delivery of a talented speaker (woe is me) or worship band. Would-be saints are mentored: one-on-one or, better yet, one-on-small group (three to twelve was Jesus’ best guess). The mentoring takes place in the streets and living-places of life, not church classrooms or food courts. And it’s not necessarily done in Bible studies or the like. Mature Christians are made one by one through the influence of other Christians already mature.

So there’s the catch, and I couldn’t agree more.  I’ve been harping on this in my own church and trying to - not eliminate programs (they can serve a very important role) - but to lower their value and raise the value of the person-to-person interacdtion.  We were wired for relationships, and we don’t grow as well on our own.  And that’s what MacDonald is questioning:  how many of us are willing to really commit to discipling others?  How many of us are being discipled?  We tend to lament the epidemic of Christian infancy, biblical illiteracy, and lack of leadership, and yet our focus seems so often to be placed in the wrong area.  This is a question of mine as of late:  “How do we move away from a programmatic potluck approach to Christian Education and towards a relational people process of spiritual formation and discipleship?”

Ok, so I haven’t talked a lot about the emerging church, or the Emergent Church a whole lot over the years.  It finally feels like time for me to engage at a higher level.  I’ve been moving around in the emerging church world and postmodernity for a long time - thinking, reading, praying, writing - but haven’t really stepped out and engaged with others on a very high level.  For whatever reason, it feels like time to do that.  Maybe I feel a little more comfortable in my own skin and now that I’m 35, feeling like some of things I’m thinking bear sharing, conversing about, or engaging with.  So, just for autobiographical reasons, let me share a couple of things about my history:

• I grew up in a strong evangelical Christian sub-culture and knew a lot about Jesus, but didn’t know him.
• Starting in 1990 I began my journey into philosophy which lead to a pretty deep entry into postmodern philosophy. Much of my intellectual formation from 1990-1994 came through interactions with the following people: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Pascal, Lyotard, Vattimo, Habbermas, Heideger, Derrida, Fish, Rawls, Marx, Engels, Foucault, Rorty, among others.  Deconstruction was a huge part of my personal journey, and was also helpful in understanding Scripture and Jesus more clearly.  It was in the middle of this journey through postmodern philosophy that I actually met Jesus.   

Now, that might sound strange to some of you because so many Christians tend to lament the rise of postmodernity and see it as a dangerous threat to Christianity.  Well, it can be, and whether that’s a good thing or not depends on how it’s a threat.  Deconstructing the things that have been added to what God intended can be a very good thing.  Deconstructing what is biblical and true about God and about humanity can be a terrible thing.  (more on this in later posts).  Anyway, I think since that time, I have understood the Bible, my relationship to God through Jesus Christ by his Holy Spirit, my understanding of the narrative of history, my understanding of what God has done, is doing, and will do, my understanding of the place of individual Christians and the church in culture, my understanding of the development of theology, my frustrations with systematic theology (particular the merging of secular philosophy with biblical theology to create something extra-biblical), my understanding of issues of justice, restoration, the marginalized, incarnation, and much more.

From 1994 to 2005 I was involved in college ministry, starting several new ministries to college students and then pastoring a church that could probably be described in some ways as borderline emergent.  I always described it as reaching out to the de-churched and trying to be a church that took God and the Scriptures seriously while, as our slogan said, “Ask questions worth answering; seek answers worth believing.”  We loved dialogue, struggle, and the communal aspects of the faith journey.  We had people who were part of the community from far left, far right, and somewhere in the middle socially and  theologically  Recently I’ve been serving in a leadership position in a larger, more conservative small mega-church that is fairly mainline as far as larger community churches go. 

I’ve always felt intimately tied to evangelicalism, and yet have always felt like an outsider as well.  I was raised in a church plant in the reformed tradition with a former missionar as a pastor.  I’ve never really been purely a reformed calvinist, either, although I have many calvinist tendencies and beliefs and did attend Calvin Seminary for goodness’ sake.

Anyway, all that to say that I’ll be trying in upcoming posts to engage some of the issues at a higher level, like the strains in the emerging church (Emergent Church, Emergence Theory, emerging church and the differences), the positive sides of deconstructionism informed by Christian faith, how Kierkegaard and Christian existentialism fits into my own journey, and more.  I’d like to actually talk a bit about what McLaren talks about in his book Everything Must Change, which I promised awhile back, but haven’t gotten to, along with multiple other books I’ve read lately.  Then, if all goes well, I can get into a couple of people who are “on the scene” and some of the issues at hand.

Anyway, we’ll see if I have time.

One of the things that’s happening, now, in response to this shift we’re going through in the church that I’ve been trying to describe, is that there are some - mostly younger - Christians who are trying to make sense of their faith rather than walking away from it.  They have experienced a Christian faith that is simplistic, overly-rule and lifestyle oriented, dualistic (separating spiritual and physical, sunday from the rest of the week), subculturized and removed from world engagement, and seemingly unable to answer many tough questions that have arisen in the world they experience.  But, the good news is that they are not willing to abandon their faith.  Here’s what has happened.

Many young Christians have instead sought to deconstruct the current framing story in which Christianity is embedded.  Many have talked about the move away from Christendom and into this emerging world that is post-Christian culturally.  They’ve sought to personally discover, I think, at least five things: 

1. A biblical understanding of the heart and soul of the gospel.
2. A biblical understanding of the heart and soul of true community.
3. A biblical understanding of how to engage and transform culture.
4. A biblical understanding of God’s heart for the world as understood through the message and actions of Jesus.
5. Biblical and historical practices of experiencing the presence of God.

That’s an awesome thing.  Think about it: instead of abandoning a faith they’ve experienced (remember, experience is a person’s felt truth, whether it is true or not) as irrelevant, they’ve sought to discover God for themselves and try to redesign or remodel the contemporary church with two important things in mind:

1. Biblical faithfulness
2. Cultural relevance and influence

That’s what I think a lot of so-called “emergents” are trying to do.  (Oh, and I should, just for full disclosure, put myself into this category whether I take personally the label emergent or not.  Label me however you want.)  In any case, as we’ve watched new and different iterations of this desire to rediscover the heart of faith, the gospel, and the church, we’ve seen some real messes.  We’ve seen some people misinterpret the Bible, misunderstand spiritual practices, and walk on the edge of some pretty scary and dangerous beliefs.  However, we’ve also seen a resurgence in ”straight to the bible” seeking, an increase in concern for justice, a new heart for the poor and the marginalized, a higher challenge towards peace instead of violence, a new appreciation for the arts and beauty, and a powerful movement for the stewardship of creation.  So, sure, this new adventure of discovery of a new generation who is seeking to understand and appropriate the faith of their fathers has made some great correctives to areas we’ve gotten off course while also opening some theological and/ or moral doors that we’re not so comfortable with, and probably shouldn’t be.  But remember, this is a generation seeking God and seeking truth, not rebelling against it.  

And that is exactly where we have gotten it most wrong.  Rather than walking the road of discovery with this new generation, rather than praising them for wanting it to be real and make sense in their lives and matter for their neighbors and make a difference in the world, we’ve offered not help, wisdom, and humility, but instead rebuke, correction, frustration, name-calling, and even derision.  The church should value those pursuing God and humbly walk with them.  Could it even be that God is doing a new thing (he’s done that before) or that God is correcting his people (he’s done that before) and that he’s using a new generation to dream dreams and see visions? (he’s done that before, too.)  So before we get too far down the road of being critical of the emerging generation seeking to rediscover the biblical church, biblical community, biblical impact, biblical passions, and biblical spirituality, it might be good for us to listen to what’s going on and hear if the Spirit has anything to say to the church.

Tom DeVries’ sermon today dovetails very well into what I’ve been raising about spiritual formation. When he quoted Chuck Colsen on the reassertion of Lordship needed in the Christian church today, he’s hitting exactly this point. Again, Dallas Willard (DW)raises this very point, which Tom raises about loving God and loving neighbor. Tom raised it in a quotation when dealing with the life of CT Studd, I think, who was saying that he was looking at all the commandments, putting a checkmark by the ones he was obeying to show demonstratively his love, because Jesus says, “If you love me, you will obey what I command.” [John 14:15] DW hits this very point hard when looks at the great commission:

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. [Matthew 28:19-20]

“Teaching everything I have commanded you,” Willard says, is living the two great commandments to love God and love neighbor. The question is, how does this happen? CT Studd said that he knew he wasn’t willing, but that he was willing to be made willing. If that’s the case, if we really do want to be formed into the likeness of Christ, then how does that happen? How exactly are we formed in Christ to become like Christ? It’s out of this context that Willard provides a stiff judgment that has been a huge challenge to me lately:

In the face of this challenge, I know of no current denomination or local congregation that has a concrete plan and practice for teaching people to do “all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” Very few even regard this as something we should actually try to do, and may think it to be simply impossible. Little wonder, then, that it is hard to identify a specifically “Christian” version of spiritual formation among Christians and their institutions.

I guess I’d like to see that change, and see us take our formation seriously, not to prove Willard wrong, but to be changed for the purposes of Christ.

“Everyone receives spiritual formation, just as everyone gets an education. The only question is whether it is a good one or a bad one.”
–Dallas Willard

Isn’t that so true? Psychologists talk about nature and nurture and how our cultural/ family environment shapes who we are. The Greek word psuche means “soul” (or sometimes spirit), and the word psycho-logy is built off of it, originally meaning the study of (logy, from logos, which is, incidentally, the word used in the Gospel of John to describe Christ as the “Word”) the soul. How far psychology has gotten from the study of the soul - in some ways. In other words, it still bears an important connection.

If, as Dallas maintains, we are all spiritually formed, then we all take shape and are shaped by someone or something. Often our shaping influences are our parents, our family, or our particular cultural environment. If we aren’t dualists (believing that the physical and spiritual are separate) but believe that the spiritual and physical are intertwined, then what happens in our environment shapes our spiritual selves - our souls. What we expose ourselves to and in forms us in the inner world.

That is one of the greatest arguments behind creating boundaries around what music we listen to, what video games we play, what movies we watch, and what friends we hang around with. Depending on our spiritual maturity, our strength of the inner person, and our awareness of being spiritually formed, different levels of boundary are needed. That’s what Paul was getting at when he talked about some people stumbling over things others would not, and how everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial.

“Everything is permissible for me”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible for me”—but I will not be mastered by anything. [1 Corinthians 6:12]
“Everything is permissible”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible”—but not everything is constructive. [1 Corinthians 10:23]

That’s because the things and people and environments with which we interact shape who we are and contribute to our spiritual formation. We have to be careful about what is beneficial, what is constructive and not just what the law says is permissible.

Too often, we are unaware of how we are being formed and shaped moment by moment, day by day. We are often unaware of how our actions are a part of the spiritual formation of others as well. The cultures and environments that we create in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our relationships, in our workplaces, and in our churches are directly related to the indirect spiritual formation of people for better or worse. CS Lewis maintains (I think in Screwtape Letters) that we are either helping one another to become our eternal beings - someone worshipful and prepared for heaven, or someone hideous fit for hell. When we talk about “spiritual fitness” the question remains how we are being formed. There is often a passive formation happening through the creation of cultures and environments that are either forming us to be fit for heaven or not.

Recently I’ve been reading a lot about Spiritual Formation from Dallas Willard. Dallas is a phenomenal teacher, writer, and leader in thinking around spiritual formation and discipleship. He has a number of books that are fabulous, including The Divine Conspiracy, The Spirit of the Disciplines, Renovation of the Heart, and Hearing God. You can find information on Dallas and these books at his website.

I’m going to spend some time over a few blogs presenting and engaging some of the ideas in a few of his published and unpublished articles as well as some things swirling around in my head.

The first thing to raise is probably Willard’s discontent with the state of spiritual formation in the lives of protestants, including evangelicals. I remember reading several years back Mark Noll’s ground-breaking book Scandal of the Evangelical Mind [for Noll's own update 10 years later in First Things, click here] and Willard’s critiques make me wonder if a book entitled Scandal of the Evangelical Formation might be appropriate. In any case, Willard makes the point that evangelicals especially have been so focused on salvation and right or sound doctrine that we have neglected to answer serious questions about how Christ is formed in us, especially with regard to our participation and role in our own formation. In discussions about some of these ideas recently with a friend of mine (Ken White, Lead Pastor of Huron Hills Baptist Church), he added to that list our concerns over a proper worship service. This isn’t to say that focusing on salvation, sound doctrine, and proper worship aren’t important, but that too often for evangelicals, our preoccupation with these have been at the neglect of a focus on personal and corporate spiritual formation. A lot of questions are raised:

• What is spiritual formation?
• How does it happen?
• How is Christ formed in us?
• What do we do to participate rather than hinder the process?
• How is the community involved in our spiritual formation?
• What is our actual plan/ process for “making disciples of all nations” - which is our mandate from Jesus?

As Cultivation Pastor here at Fair Haven, I’ve been giving these questions a lot of thought. Stay tuned for more thoughts and questions, and please comment with your thoughts as well.