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What’s Happening at Church?

Posted by revd4 on Tuesday, January 15th, 2013 in Church, Culture, Mission, UU | Comments (0)

My friend Tony just wrote a nice piece about mission and church growth over at Sunflower Chalice. (You can read it here). In it he explores the connection and contrast between church success defined through the lens of growth versus the lens of mission. The comparison of the two perspectives is well summarized when he writes:

Rather than keeping “score” or measuring our success with how many members we have and how much money is in the budget, we should keep score by looking at how much spiritual growth is happening and how much service we are rendering to our community.

I have found that most of our established churches say they are interested in growth. When asking the follow-up question of “why do you want to grow?” the answer quickly travels back to budgetary concerns, the desire for more programs, or the need for more volunteers. These types of answers show a strong orientation toward the institution of the church itself. This orientation reflects a modern, secular, churched cultural paradigm, a paradigm which used to be so pervasive that it was strange to even question it. It was a cultural paradigm in which the public wanted to find a church, that the public exists to support the church, and to become a member of a church was an inherently meaningful experience.

yearnings That cultural paradigm is no longer pervasive in our society. We have moved into a post-modern, post-secular, un-churched world and for those of us who believe the church can be a redemptive experience need to be concerned with reorienting ourselves and our congregations to this new reality.

When I’ve done consulting with churches one of the first things I tell the leadership is that in the 21st century we have to realize that people don’t want to go to church. Belonging to a church simply no longer carries the inherent cultural meaning that it once did. However, that does not mean that the church is no longer important, it simply means that no one is going to go to your church in hopes of belonging to an institution and raising funds for the budget.

The fact is that we live in a time when the church has an incredible opportunity to have an important impact in people’s lives and in society, but as an institution it needs to reorient itself. What Tony refers to as mission can be simplified by asking the question of “what happens at your church?” People won’t go to church to belong to an institution, but they will become of a part of a community where something compelling is “happening.” In the world we live in, the more blatantly obvious and explicit this happening is the more attractive it will become.

For each church the mission, or “what happens” can be very different. Maybe what happens is a spiritual transformation, maybe what happens is that people are empowered to fight hunger, maybe what happens is that people are equipped to be change agents and leaders in the community. The point is that the spiritual but not religious, the nones, the unchurched, and the post-moderns are not spiritually degraded, in fact quite the contrary. The point is that their powerful spiritual yearnings will not be fulfilled by simple belonging to the institution of the church. That’s why they have generally given up on it. However that yearning will connect to a compelling experience that changes their life for the better. That spiritual yearning is searching, seeking, hoping for something to happen that matters.

So “what’s happening” at your church?

My Best Shot at Defining “Missional”

Posted by revd4 on Friday, May 25th, 2012 in Church, Ecclesiology, Identity, Leadership, Mission, UU | Comments (4)

In the conversation on church growth the idea of being “missional” has become a trendy topic as of late. It has its enthusiasts, which I count myself as one, who see incredible possibilities for the future of the progressive church. It also has an incredible amount of confusion surrounding what exactly all these “missional” types are talking about, and questions regarding whether it is even relevant. So this post is my best shot at defining what missional means.

I recently had a DOC executive take time to connect with me and we had a great conversation about ministry, church planting, and the changing culture’s effect on faith and the church. It was an exciting talk, not only because he seemed to “get me”, but he also articulated some exciting denominational responses to the current challenges the church faces.

The DOC (Disciples of Christ) is a denomination closely associated with the UCC’s. Like the UCC’s and the UU’s they are on the whole very liberal, aging, more compassion oriented than soul-winning in their outreach, and place a high value on being inclusive. They are a denomination with 3600 churches and 650,000 members and have been struggling under the weight of cultural trends antagonistic to our traditional churches.

DOC church plant stands up against religious bigotry

However, the amazing part of their statistics is over 700 of those 3600 churches have been started in the last 10 years reaching 50,000 new people. This is all part of their 2020 vision which is an initiative to start 1000 congregations in 1000 ways. These new congregations reach an incredibly diverse array of people in diverse ways from Hispanic, to Welcoming Congregations, to the Alternative.

I share this because it gives a tangible example of what it might look like for a non-evangelical mainline liberal denomination to engage in missional work. Now this is not to say that the DOC’s are surging in growth and have turned everything around, but it does show that even an older denominational bureaucracy can open up to new ways of thinking and practice.

I think the simplest way to understand what missional means is to think of it as one end of a spectrum of how the church orients itself in the world. On one end of the spectrum would be the church as a sanctuary where the church is a refuge from the world. In a sanctuary style church the purpose of the church is focused on the members who are already there. This can take on different forms, but you can imagine a church where decisions place the comfort of current members as the highest priority.

When the word mission or missional is used you can imagine the other end of the spectrum, where the church is oriented around its connection with the world. In this perspective decisions place the relationship between the church and its neighborhood (or more precisely the ‘focus’ of its mission), as the highest priority. This can also take on very different forms, but the main thing is that the focus is shifted from who is inside the walls to who is outside.

Most of our churches fall somewhere in between. To speak of being missional is simply about naming where on this spectrum we are practicing our faith.

I believe the reason why this is resonating to a growing group of leaders has to do with the fact the cultural landscape has changed so dramatically that the sanctuary style of church is experienced as irrelevant to a growing segment of the population. The struggles of the traditional denominations and churches over this cultural disconnect have been elaborated pretty extensively at this point. For this reason, out of necessity, leaders are looking for ways to overcome this disconnection and mission provides the church a possibility.

I imagine the missional perspective is annoying to some, or even threatening, because the focus is not on who’s here but on who is missing. In that sense it’s not about the democratic process of church members that is quite common in a sanctuary style of church. Rather a missional perspective is about the vocation of the church. It is about the calling of our faith to engage the culture around us.

What I find very helpful about missional thinking is that it provides a comprehensive framework to work through the challenges that congregations are facing at this time. It moves the reference point of where we “do” church from inside the congregation, to doing church from within the community we are seeking to reach. This shifts the cultural reality away from the self-reinforced bubble that marks so many churches. Since cultural context impacts faith, this shift alters the way we answer a whole host of questions from worship, to theology, to leadership, and other practices of the church.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this shift for us all is that it raises the question once lifted up by Theodore Parker in his sermon “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity.” That question challenges us all to discern what are the core spiritual commitments of the church which lead to transformation, and what are the cultural commitments that determine who is included? That question also serves as a warning for how easily the two become confused.

Finally I think its important to point out that missional thinking is not about getting rid of existing churches. It isn’t about taking anyone’s church away from them. It isn’t about privileging one particular cultural group over another. In fact it’s the opposite. What it is about, and what true mission is always about, is expanding the scope and diversity of who is included beyond what it is now.

-Dave

The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening

Posted by revd4 on Wednesday, May 9th, 2012 in Books, Christianity, Church, Culture, Emergent, Reviews, Spirituality, Theology, UU | Comments (0)

Review of Diana Butler Bass’ new book: Christianity After Religion

I remember after a workshop that I recently led a participant came up and commented that I have a “yes-but” style to answering questions. Her observation was that through answering “yes that’s right, but now consider this” that I led the group toward simplicity and complexity at the same time. Now I’m not sure if that’s a good teaching technique, but it may be one big reason why I loved Diana Butler Bass’ new book, Christianity After Religion, The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening.

As a pastor I can’t help but take observations about faith, church, God, and ministry quite personally. Whether it is critique or praise, I can’t help but feel compelled to argue for the other side of the story, to say “yes, but…” The first reason I would recommend this book to anyone who cares about the future of our faith communities in the 21st century is that it speaks to both sides of the story.

The first part of the story is becoming well trod territory within denominational churches. It is a story of institutions struggling to effectively relate to the contemporary context we live in:

Many people are just bored (with religion). They are bored with church-as-usual, church-as-club, church-as-entertainment, or church-as-work. Many of my friends, faithful churchgoers for decades, are dropping out because religion is dull, the purview of folks who never want to change… other things are more interesting

The statistics of denominational decline are well documented, but sometimes in the midst of numbers it is easy to forget that these stats represent real people. Bass does an eloquent job of weaving the statistical side of the story with the personal anecdotes that the numbers represent. I found myself on many occasions relating to these stories as either my own, or of others who I know and have had these same conversations with. I have a feeling that many readers will find not only themselves, but their friends and family in these stories. I imagine many who occupy the structures of church leadership will too.

The room was full of Presbyterian pastors, meeting in a church in New Jersey. I asked them to fill out the “spirituality” and “religion” word association chart… “What word comes to mind first when you think of ‘religion?’”

Someone called out, “Robert’s Rules of Order,” the guide to parliamentary procedure much cherished by Presbyterians. I turned around, half expecting that the pastor was kidding. He was not. He was smiling, beaming really. As if he had seen a beatific vision. I wrote Robert’s Rules of Order on the board as I thought, “This is going to be a long day.”

Diana Butler Bass writes this book not as a detached observer, and certainly not as a “cultured despiser”. She writes as a lover of the church and the faith that it has blessed her with. She writes of her own story as a seeker that has traveled in and out of the institutions of religion, finding many different expressions of what the core meaning of faith is about. Her story of returning to faith (decades ago) through a Charismatic experience of Jesus was particularly revealing. She relates how she struggled to explain her church-going to friends and finally had to explain it wasn’t religious but that it was “a spiritual thing.” This dynamic of disconnect between institutional religion and the experience of faith is at the heart of the book. It is this insight that connects the contradictory realities of a declining church with the parallel reality of a mass spiritual awakening.

The same polls that find religion on the wane also find this thing called “spirituality” on the upswing…To speak of “spirituality” simultaneously signals discontent with religious institutions and longing for a new, different, and deeper connections with God, one’s neighbor, and oneself.

This is the other side of the story, and why I find this book so helpful and hopeful. Religion is on the decline, ‘yes, but’ a tidal wave of spiritual experience is sweeping our nation. The other side of the story is a new vision of religion that is less focused on the particulars of believing God, or creeds or theologies, and more focused on how one believes. That is, there is a turn from emphasizing an intellectual way of belief in God toward an experiential walk with God. In America this began with Emerson and the transcendentalists, and really began to emerge within the institutional church in the Pentecostal experience.

Its not the case that beliefs don’t matter. Its not even that “religion” doesn’t matter. It is that whatever else the word “spirituality” means, it means that traditional understandings of beliefs and religion is not enough. The question of what one believes moves to how one believes.

How is a question of meaning and purpose that pushes people into deeper engagement in the world, rather than memorizing facts… how opens questions of belief anew: How do I believe? How do we believe? How does belief make a difference… as belief questions morph from what to how, from seeking information about God to nurturing experience of the divine.

This is the good news for those who care about the future of faith. It suggests that although we may be experiencing the death of church, that the reason for its demise offers the promise of renewal. The cultural rejection toward the church emerges not from a lack of spirituality but from a deeper experience of God than what the traditional church has been offering.

This “fourth great awakening” is transforming the way we understand faith, the church, and ourselves. It effects not only the overtly spiritual matters but the realms of ethics, community, politics, and culture. The question for the church is not if things are going to change but how is that change going to come about. How will the traditional institutions respond. Will they support leadership adapting to the new cultural realities, will they ignore such efforts, or will they sabotage them.

The greatest pressure points in the religious world are between dogmatics and romantics, between old lights and new, between those who wish to shore up the old religions and those who embrace the new spiritual awakening.

Its an open ended question. I have a minimally informed sense that denominational leaders are waking up to problematic statistics which is forcing a recognition that change is here. The million dollar question is whether institutions born and bred to suit a different age have the capacity to change. Can they reorient their mission to engage this new cultural reality with all of its possibility? Or is it in the very nature of such institutions to be dogmatic and insistent in the old way of doing things until the very end?

I hope transformation is possible, because if it isn’t then I’m afraid the end is very near. My hope is for a renewal whereby the progressive church provides leadership not by telling people what they should be thinking or doing, but by entering into the awakening, being a part of it, and doing “church” with it. It would be a church humbled by its own social dislocation, and out of a faith-filled transformational love moves to meet and engage people where they are and as they are.

Every spiritual awakening seeks to make visible, even if only in some incomplete way, God’s dream for creation… This awakening will not be the last in human history, but it is our awakening. It is up to us to move with the Spirit instead of against it, to participate in making our world more humane, just, and loving.

Get the book, read it, and discover the hope that spirit continues to speak; and be challenged to listen.

Easter and the Face of Grace

Posted by revd4 on Saturday, April 7th, 2012 in Christianity, Grace, Preaching, Spirituality, UU, Worship | Comments (2)

Happy Easter Everyone, this Post is for Easter, if you missed it Good Friday is here.

I remember standing at the front of the church for my wedding when my bride Jennifer turned the corner to walk down the aisle. She looked FINE! I remember looking at her face as she came down the aisle and being overwhelmed by my love for her.

Now fast forward two years later when the mainline pipe in our home was under repair. As a result our basement floor was dug up and very strong methane sewage gas was floating freely up into our home making all of us sick. My wife, son, and I left for a hotel to spend the night. By the time we got there both Jennifer and I were puking sick.

I remember lying there in the hotel bed and looking over at her face. She had pale skin, bloodshot eyes, and a sunken sickly look on her face. This was not the same face as on our wedding, this was a different face. It was the face of nausea, it was a face that was exhausted, it was a face certainly without make-up or any other pretense. And in that very moment I remember looking at her and feeling the overwhelming love for her course through my veins.

This is because, while I find my wife to be very attractive, it is not the face that I love. The face is what helps me recognize what I love. Her face allows me to recognize something a whole lot more than what is on the surface. In other words it’s not her face, but what her face represents and who I recognize through it that fuels my love.

The gospel testifies to an event happening in a certain time, with a particular culture, at a miraculous moment when God showed up, and Jesus was the face of that God. According to the writers when people looked upon the face of Jesus they began to recognize who God was in a very powerful way. For this reason his disciples followed him, crowds gathered wherever he went, and the apostles often sacrificed everything to extend his church. There was a great expectation that he was the messiah sent to lead Israel in victory against their enemies and the oppressions of Rome.

But as we know it didn’t quite work out that way. The Easter story is liturgically laid out for us each year transitioning from the crucifixion and death of Jesus on Good Friday, through to the Easter Sunday resurrection that marks the triumph of God, faith, Christ’s sacrifice, and the world’s salvation. End of story, yay God!

Except that according to the gospel writers at least, Easter was a little more complicated and confusing than that.

Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; but they were kept from recognizing him.
He asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?”
They stood still, their faces downcast. One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”
“What things?” he asked.
“About Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied. “He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people. The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. (Luke 13-21)

On the road to Emmaus the disciples are talking about everything that had happened with Jesus. They are probably talking about the times they shared meals together, their great hope that “he was the one who was going to redeem Israel”, and what all that meant now that he was gone. Imagine that, to be walking with God and not recognizing who it is, to start going on and on to God about how God had died. Talk about missing the point.

Losing your savior is no small thing. Often when we think of atheism we’re really only speaking of an intellectual disbelief in a “thing” called God. But losing one’s savior is to experience atheism of a whole different order. It is to feel the loss of God. It is to feel abandoned by the one who holds your destiny in hand. It is to have the cosmic rug ripped out from under your feet. The crucifixion of Christ is the death of God.

You, me, all of us experience our own small deaths all the time. There is death in the loss of love, the end of meaningful work, the betrayal of friends, and all the failures and dashed dreams that mark your life. It is a death of whatever purpose is supposed to sustain our short stay on this world. And when such a death comes, your purpose, your life, and the whole point to it all becomes unrecognizable.

And here comes Easter. A story about God showing up, and God’s face is the face of Jesus; this one guy who causes people to recognize God in a whole new way. The disciples sure thought they knew what he looked like, and yet when he showed up on the road to Emmaus they hadn’t a clue. Certainly the religious people believe they know what God looks like as well, yet in the Easter story the religious leaders were the biggest supporters of crucifying Jesus.

Why is it that it is so hard for anyone to recognize God’s presence and purpose in our world. Maybe it has to do with how we cling to the face of God with such strength and certainty. Yet the face only helps us recognize who it is behind and beyond it. For this reason when God showed up in Jesus, not a lot of folks recognized who it was. He didn’t look the part. He wasn’t a handsome warrior king. He wasn’t a powerful man by the world’s standards. He didn’t have a high position or ranking in the established systems of religious, political, or economic power. He didn’t fit the image, so that they didn’t recognized God’s presence in their midst, and they killed him.

Then comes Easter.

Easter is not just about the human curse of being unable to recognize the face of God in a world committed to the products of material wealth and earthly power. Easter is not just about the tragic reality that when God shows up, we can’t seem to stop ourselves from killing him. Easter is not just about the shocking image of Jesus hanging on the cross wearing a crown of thorns and blood dripping down his face as he dies.

Easter is about a very simple truth that continues to give hope to humanity. That even in the midst of feeling the loss of hope, purpose, and meaning in our lives that something remains. Easter is about the simple truth that even with our most fervent and radical rejection of God, including the act of crucifixion, that at most it is only a transient loss, it is only a face that we lose. In Jesus a precious face was lost, but the truth is that what his face helped people recognize never dies, never leaves, and forever loves.

The road to Emmaus isn’t just a story about ancient disciples, it is my story and your story. In fact it is the story. We are all on that Emmaus road together, so sure of ourselves in talking about the meaning of what life could have or should have been. We are all on that road together, so sure that Easter happened so very long ago, that we struggle to recognize the presence of God in midst of all the different faces.

On the road to Emmaus the Easter punch-line is that even in the midst of what feels to be the death of faith, the source of faith is right there beside us. The Easter meaning holds that even the power of the Empire’s violent cross cannot stop God from coming back to humbly walk beside us. In fact, we may be looking God right in the face and just don’t know it.

peace and grace,

Dave

For more Easter-Season messages check out UUCF Spring Issue here

Moving Beyond the Box, a Missional Postflection

Posted by revd4 on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012 in Church, Conversations, Culture, Mission, Technology, Theology, UU | Comments (14)

Hi all,

I just wanted to reach out and say thanks for all the encouraging words leading up to my visit to Unitarian Universalist district assembly in Meadville, PA. The Keynote talk seemed to be well received and the workshops afterwards were very lively, informative, and hopeful. We have a lot of leaders bravely struggling to increase the relevance and impact of their churches. In this post District Assembly reflection there were a couple of discussion topics that emerged during the workshops that I led that I wanted to further address. These were the themes of technology and theology. If you weren’t at the keynote some of this might not make complete sense and for that I apologize ahead of time.

The first question had to do with a systematic analysis describing exactly why the church is presently struggling as an entity that is institutionally alienated from the broader society and culture. In this analysis I intentionally did not mention technology as a leading factor contributing to the church’s irrelevance. This point came up in discussion and felt a bit counter-intuitive to some of the participants.

There are a few reasons I did not include it as a leading factor. First, let me say that the changes that technology brings is shifting culture in new and dramatic ways, so I did not mean to deny that. But I would suggest that the very fact that there is an awareness of this dramatic change of technology suggests that it is not a leading source of the church’s estrangement from the broader culture. In other words, the fact that leaving it out feels counter-intuitive means that we are not blind to the reality of technological change. In fact, no matter what cultural worldview you hold, you are dealing with changing technology, after all, you are reading this blog.

What I would say is that from a missional standpoint, it is not technology per se, but rather the culture that has been influenced by it that should be our focus. Different cultures and subcultures relate to different technologies in different ways. How we use technology to include people in our faith should be determined not by who we are inside the walls but by who is outside the walls.

The leading factors that were the focus of the missional analysis centered not on the methods that influence people (such as technological change), but on the people themselves, the culture, their lives and values. In other words, the discussion of why society has changed is a huge topic which could easily be endlessly debated, and so for the sake of the actual mission I’ll hand it over to the academics. My focus was on how we break through the UU cultural ghetto into real people’s lives. Technology is important, but who your heart breaks for is critical.

Another vital discussion was about faith and theology. Just to be clear, I’m a grace guy, a Universalist, everything else flows from this. It’s how I interpret theological stories and images. In my conversations in the workshops and in the hallways the question came up many times of the place of theology in our current UU climate.

There does seem to currently be a shift underway both among clergy and laity, but for a period of time after the merger of the Unitarian and Universalist denominations it seemed that the answer to bad theology was no theology. This is what I call the believewhateveryouwantism interpretation of the faith. Believewhateveryouwantism is the interpretation that is simultaneously embraced and decried in the description of Unitarian Universalism as the religion where you can believe whatever you want. There are some clever tropes to avoid this reality such as saying “you don’t believe what they want, you believe what you must,” which sound good but ultimately don’t mean much. The result of all this included a semi-purposeful disconnection from not only liberal theology, but from the discipline of theology as a whole.

It was interesting to hear from so many people the recognition that avoiding theology because it contained Bible words is not as liberating as it once was. So many of the people present had kids who graduated from our programs and have no interest in going to a UU church, and many have found themselves a spiritual home in other denominations both liberal and conservative. The reason they cited is that they were given nothing to believe in. In a recent conversation with a dedicated UU who recently moved to the UCC’s (a liberal Christian denomination), she said that the effort in retaining young adults is hampered by the fact that in her experience we lose most our kids by middle school. As she put it, unless your a church nerd, the moment you discover a social circle outside the church there’s not much of a spiritual reason to stay.

For the preaching-teaching minister it puts one in the position as no longer an interpreter of the faith, but as practically the only embodiment of it. In other words, take the Bible away, and the minister almost inevitably takes its place as the spiritual resource. In this kind of scenario the clergy moves from a more traditionally protestant role of preacher and teacher into a role closer to that of the Guru. The problem with this (other than simply the abandonment of both Unitarianism and Universalism) is that our ecclesiastic system is not set up for the Guru-disciple relationship.

The point of theological discipline is not that the Bible is perfect in all ways. It’s authority is that the very language of our tradition’s faith and practice is sourced in the stories and images of that ancient book. Liberal theology does not come from liberals thinking about religion, it emerges out of the disciplined process of how we tell these stories and engage those images. This means dealing with not just the stories, images and ideas that we like, but engaging the ones we don’t as well.

One of James Luther Adam’s (20th century liberal Unitarian theologian) guiding principals for a free faith is a belief in continuing historical revelation. That means approaching the revelation of truth and meaning with both an openness to the future, which most liberals do well, and it also means a continuity with the past. This is what Adams referred to as a sense of length. In my former church we used to say it this way – in our faith the Bible is the beginning but not the end.

The missional point of this being that the practice of telling people they have a million spiritual options available to them is redundant for our contemporary culture. As a Universalist I’m called by a particular theological interpretation, practice, and experience. Witnessing people discover the reality of God in their life is powerful and transformational. Like I said, I’m a grace guy.

Within the UU denomination it is very possible at this point to come up with alternative interpretations, but the point being that believewhateveryouwantism is an interpretation with a very narrow level of relevance and impact to most folks under 50. (In fact I’d find it interesting to discover what a missional humanism looks like but that’s a project for someone else to work on).

One final reflection before I close. In the conversations we often arrived at a point of questions and complexity to the point of feeling overwhelmed. Maybe like you feel now after having read this. To this I say two things.

First this is not easy, change never is, and their are no silver bullets.

And finally when overwhelmed, remember to return to the critical missional question, who is it that your heart breaks for in such a powerful and profound way that it changes you for good. The way forward is not found in a new program, its not found in another vote, nor is it in a clever elevator speech. The way forward is an adventure of doing Unitarian Universalism with new people in new ways.

peace and grace,

Dave

UU

What’s Happening at Church?

My Best Shot at Defining “Missional”

The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening

Review of Diana Butler Bass’ new book: Christianity After Religion

Easter and the Face of Grace

Moving Beyond the Box, a Missional Postflection

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