Here's a link to an interview with Eddie Gibbs. I think his work will be helpful for our continued discussion. Click the title above to read the whole thing. Here's a sample:
So what must churches do?
A good man said many years ago, pagans out of a secular world don't come ready-laundered.
You do need a strong, disciplined core. One of our problems is we have so many church members who are not disciplined. You need a core of people that are serious about living out the life of Christ, just as the Methodist class system in the 18th century.
When we invite others to join us, it is an invitation to join us on our journey because discipleship is a lifelong learning experience. There should be a reciprocal dynamic at work. As we get to know those who are coming out of a dysfunctional, destructive lifestyle, it should be with the sensitivity to the leading of the Spirit, but not the dumping of our own moral agenda to address those issues.
So we ourselves are being challenged. And I sometimes ask the students at Fuller this question: When Peter went into the home of Cornelius, the centurion, who was converted? Both of them came out of that meeting changed.
Institutionalization and Individualism
I'm furiously trying to finish two papers by 5:00 tomorrow, but I came across this and thought it would be perfect for our discussion. The following is an excerpt from Darrell Guder's The Incarnation and the Church's Witness. I would feel bad for posting two pages of his book on the web, but it's out of print and VERY hard to find.
The church's sense of itself as an incarnational community is focused on its purpose established by its Lord. This obvious statment has many implications for the way that the church has come to understand itself, particularly in the Western tradition. As we struggle today to develop a missional theology for the West, there are two major challenges raised for us by the communal character of incarnational witness.
First, incarnational mission is a challenge to the institutional church of Christendom, in all its forms. If Christ's calling defines the church's purpose, and if the called community is to incarnate the good news, then, to put it bluntly, neither the institution's existence nor its maintenance is to be its priority. The church is not the ultimate and intended outcome of God's grace. Christ did not die only to save Christians, nor to form a church of the saved, but to bring God's healing love to the world. The formation of the church and the salvation of its members are the "first fruits" of God's desire for all creation. Mission, therefore, must not be reduced to institutional preservation, or, in terms of today's crisis of the church in the West, its survival. Its faithful witness takes place as the church submits to Christ's lordship and carries out his work wherever he sends it. The curch does not point to itself, but to Christ, following the model of John the Baptist: "He must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:30).
It is an unavoidable dimension of real historical existence that institutions are formed and continued. The formation of God's people is necessarily an institutional process, both in Israel and in the church. If this were not so, then the calling and sending of God's people would be a docetic, nonhistorical "spiritual" process with little relevance to the world God loves. The problem is not
that the church is institutional but
how it is institutional. From the beginning of his ministry, Jesus challenged the institutional forms of God's elect people because, in many ways, they had become a betrayal of God's mission. Whenever we read about the religious leaders of the Jewes in the Godpel accounts, we should put ourselves and our church leaders in their place. Jesus' polemic agains the religious leaders revealed the great diversity of ways in which the institution then and now can reduce and distort its incarnational mandate. Jesus' message to those who hear responsibilty for the "religious establisthment" is a constant call to repentance.
The institutional chruch has a sublte but powerful interest in bringing the gospel under control and making it manageable. This has always been true. As defenders and beneficiaries of the instittuon, we are challenged by the mandate of incarnational mission to examine how we function critically,. The questions that the incarnational understading of mission places before the institutional church is this: Is our communal institional life a embodiment of the good news? Does the way we live, decide, spend mondy and make decisions as organizations reveal both the character and puposes of God for humanity?
Second, incarnational mission is a challenge to the individualism that dominates Western culture. If the gospel can be incarnated only in and through a community, then the individual Christian must be defined and understood in terms of his or her membership in that community. The individual Christian is constituionally dependent: he or she is part of an organic whole that lives and functions only as all its parts exercise their mutal interdependence. This does not discount the distinctive gospel experience of the individual Christian. But that experience is rooted in God's preceding action through the community and must enrich that community. We believe as individuals beacause God has been at work in the community of faith through the ages to bring the gospel to us and us to the gospel. Further, God's Holy Spirit weaves each individual's fatih story in to the story and witness of the entire community. In the New Testament, the gospel is addressed to the plural "you" to the community that is called, that has responded, and that continues to be sent as a missionarly people. If we are to witness to the gospel incarnationally, then we will take very seriousy the way in which we relate as individuals to the corporate church. We will take just as seriously the need to reflect critically and repentantly on the way the institution relates to its members.
The church as self-referential
Ok, I was going to talk about something else, but Josh's comment made me think about what we talked about in my class. I'm going to write some stuff that is basically how I remember our class going, but it may be a little sketchy, so force me to be clear on the parts that don't make sense!
Comblin's argument (as I remember it) about the church being self-referential is essentially that through the years we have developed the practice of reading the Bible in terms of what the church should do instead of what God actually did. We read something and immediately think that it is a one-to-one instruction for the church.
The thesis advanced in my class, however, was that it is wrong for us to read the bible and think only of the "church" (especially in its current institutional form). In the grand scheme of things, the church is at the very best third on the ladder of importance.
First is the Reign of God. God either rules or intends to rule every bit of this universe. I live in Los Angeles, and there are parts of this town where you can plainly state that God is not in control here. My Old Testament professor offers the picture that instead of dancing around theories to say that God is actually in control and just allowing or causing horrible things to happen, it is perhaps better to say that it is God's intention to rule in every situation and we get to participate in that. More on this later, but because we trust God, we trust that it is his intention to make all things right and to reign over this existence entirely.
Second is the Missio Dei, the mission of God. This is illustrated in Comblin's idea that Jesus is totally the One Being Sent. It starts in Abraham being called by God and continues on. It is perfected in Jesus and we can look to the incarnation as our model of being in this world. God is working and is sending his people to join in this work.
Third is the church. The church in this way is a group of people who trust in the reign of God and who band themselves together to follow his mission in a particular place. Instead of seeing the church first, they are caught up in God and the fact that he is active and working today. The church isn't the end in itself, it's the group of people enamored with his mission. My professor put it thus, "It is to participate with God in the healing and redemption of the world by joining a community." The church follows Jesus, who is being sent, hearing the Word, in the world.
So, personally, we need to hear things over and over again (at least Josh and I do). But if we read the Bible as a church only as "what the church is supposed to do" we get in trouble. We miss the fact that it's a story and limit the Bible's ability to speak to us. We narrow it down until it is simply a manual of instruction and it is nowhere near "living and active" or "sharper than a double-edged sword". We decide that our interpretation of what it said on a certain matter is the closing of the case. Now, I'm only talking about the church reading about what the church should do, not about larger morality issues (yet).
If we keep reading the Bible with a church-first rather than a Reign of God-first mentality, we will always get the instution that we have today. If we read it in a way that looks to what God has done and allow it to encourage us toward what he is doing today, we form a community to participate in this work. We sometimes instutionalize in order to better serve his mission, but we don't serve the institution. If something new is needed, we change to fit where God is going.
Brian McClaren showed a picture of this bridge in the Philippines (I believe) built by the Japanese during WWII. As you would imagine this bridge is still intact today, built to last. A few years ago, horrible flooding and rain hit the area. When it subsided, the river the bridge crossed had moved around the bridge. The bridge is still there, and will be there for a long time still. The problem is that it no longer serves the purpose it was built for. McClaren sees the great cathedrals in Europe in a similar way. They are there still, but the culture has moved away from them. They are testaments to great engineering and what once was, but are no longer useful for their intended purpose.
If we chain ourselves to the institutionalization of what God is doing, we will always lag behind. God is always at work, always "doing a new thing". We've got to organize as a community around what he is doing, not around preserving what we already have. To refuse that God may be doing something "outside" is the way in which we deafen ourselves to the Word.
Sent By the Father 1
A book we used as a devotional in my Jesus the Missionary class was Sent by the Father: Meditations on the Fourth Gospel by Jose Comblin. I'll definitely share more than a few things from this little book, because it is packed with goodness. Comblin's thesis is that the book of John reveals Jesus completely as The One Sent. This aspect of Jesus is continuing today, he is being sent by the Father over and over, all around the world and we are to join this mission.
Comblin offers a caution, however, against the things that keep us from being sent ourselves. Many times we cannot hear his voice, as we have become self-referential. Comblin asserts that, "To hear God it is necessary to leave off listening to yourself and to abide in a pure hope, in a pure listening, to be disposed to receive something new. Jesus' rebuke to the Jews could not have outraged them more: 'You never heard his voice, or saw his form. ... His word has found no home in you' [John 5:37]" (Comblin 1979:7).
He moves from Jesus' rebuke to the Jewish community of his day, to a rebuke directed toward us today: "The church itself was transformed into Christendom; it treated the word of God as its property and tried to encase the kingdom of God in its own institutions. Christians, believing that they had in themselves the face of God, consequently thought that to be faithful to themselves was to be faithful to God. The church concluded that its service to God was to perpetuate and magnify itself. It did not know God. It ceased knowing him at the moment it ceased listening and learning and began, instead, repeating to itself the words of God that it had already heard" (Comblin 1979:7-8).
I don't know how you just read that, but I felt very convicted hearing those words the first time (and now, too). Have we become too self-referential? Are we too worried about the survival of the church as an institution that we fail to hear God calling us into the world? I think about Revelation 3, when Jesus is speaking about doors. He says, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock..." in verse 20. Jesus is being sent. We have shut ourselves in, and he is "out there" amongst the people, eating with them.
Comblin's thesis implies that as Jesus was and is sent, so are we to be sent by the Father. It may be that we're sent across the street or across the world, but make no mistake; we are being sent. Tomorrow, I'll contrast this with the method we usually choose today in churches to bring people to the Lord, but talk to me today. What do you think?
For Those who can't post comments
Hey everybody. If you can't post to the blog, please send me an email. I'm trying to get the powers that be to fix it, so it should be handled by Monday, but I'd love for everyone to comment who wants to do so.
The McDonaldization of the Church
Ok, the first book I'd like to talk about is
The McDonaldization of the Church: Consumer Culture and the Church's Future by John Drane. Drane took a book by George Ritzer called
The McDonaldization of Society and adapted it to look specifically at the churches today. McDonaldization is the process where many aspects of society are becoming increasingly streamlined and tailored to deliver the most "oomph" for the least amount of work/cost. Ritzer sees it as the most dominant force in Western civilization, touching everything from bank tellers, to television shows to sex workers (really).
McDonaldization to Ritzer and Drane means four things: Efficiency, Calculability, Predictability, and Control.
Efficiency is not bad in and of itself. It just means identifying the best means to achieve a particular end. It shows up in the church in our reliance upon rational systems. As Drane puts it, "We love rationalized systems, and try to apply them to everything from our theology to the way we welcome visitors to our Sunday services." (Drane p.41) The problem with an unmonitored emphasis on efficiency is the fact that relationships are NOT efficient in any way, shape, or form. In a fast food restaurant, "Hi, welcome to..." really means "keep it moving".
Calculability is all about size and quantity. I think it's pretty easy to see where the church can get caught up in calculability. Ever heard of a little church called Willow Creek? How about Saddleback? No? Well, if you've ever been a minister and talking to other ministers of any kind, they will always ask how big your church is. They may be polite about it, but we all want to know so we can judge how we are doing. It will also show up in our thinking about how long or short a church service should be. Too long or too short and the church has done something wrong.
Predictability is defined by George Ritzer as such: "In a rational society people prefer to know what to expect in all settings and at all times. They neither want nor expect surprises... In order to ensure predictability over time and place, a rational society emphasizes such things as discipline, order, systemitization, formalization, routine, etc. It is these familiar and comfortable rituals that make fast-food restaurants attractive to legions of people" (Drane p. 48) Drane sees the most disturbing part of this in our discipleship systems. Do we expect that people, once discipled, will all look like each other? What's the basis for this thought?
Control can be seen easily in any fast-food chain or supermarket. They are designed specifically for you to move in a certain direction and then move away quickly. Seats at McDonald's are not comfortable because they don't want you to stay, it's a matter of control. Issues of power and control, especially in the church, are always plaguing our culture. It goes hand in hand with Predictability, where we can try to stop anyone or anything that appears out of the ordinary or even contrary to our teaching.
These categories are not new, nor are they the products of McDonalds. They are simply easily identified in fast-food chains everywhere. I want to offer critique but not necessarily in the way that says these four things are all evil. I just think it is important to recognize the ways in which our culture affects us, even when we don't know it. We are so bound by this model that we design much of our lives to try to fit into these categories. We then get so frustrated with that attempt because our lives just aren't as clean-cut as that. I can't fit you into four categories, and I certainly won't even try.
Please offer any comments, this is my first go at it, and I'd like it to be a place for conversation, not just me talking. I'll offer more personal/devotional stuff, too, if people are interested.
