Integrating Missionally

GloboChrist

I have spent years quoting the Great Commission found in Matthew 28:19-20:

19 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, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. (NIV)

Yet I never noticed the emphasis on the very end of the text, “I am with you always…”

Carl Raschke, in GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn (The Church and Postmodern Culture), notes “The Great Commission, as many close readers of the Gospel text itself might have emphasized, is not really about getting the message out…It is about manifesting and making real the meaning of the paradox of the incarnation and the miracle of Christ’s reception.” (48)

In addition: “The Great Commission, when all is said and done, rests upon the great postmodern preposition – the ‘with’ of divine relation as contrasted with the ‘is’ of doctrinal propositions. God is never what he is ‘in himself.’ God is always mit uns (with us) or für uns (for us), as Luther insisted. He is what he is in relation to us…It is not divine revelation so much as it is divine relation, a relationship that is ‘with us always.’ It is a relation that must be propagated until the ‘end of time’” (48)

I really like this thought. What are your thoughts?

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Rhizome: Organic Indigenization

I want to return to the MIROR concept, specifically the Organic aspect of the framework. I have been reading Carl Raschke’s GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn (The Church and Postmodern Culture) and he makes several very interesting statements which I want to simply touch on for now:

Westerners cling to the outmoded modernist assumption that Christianity is basically the same, or should be the same, everywhere in the world; it is easy for us to miss what exactly is the latest third-millennium installment of worldwide efforts to fulfill the Great Commission. Because the Western Christianity we know has for years been slowly dying, or at least sputtering, we are wont to suppose that the faith as a whole is in its terminal stages. (42)

Christianity, however, is growing. In fact, there is a rapid expansion of Christianity in areas outside of the West.

Global, postmodern Christianity has three characteristics: decentralization, de-institutionalization, and indigenization. Indigenization is the process where “universal concepts are intelligible only if they are understood in light of specific circumstances. “(39) In fact, one philosopher insists that “the basic notion of universally valid ‘scientific’ concepts, as ensconced in Greek philosophy and so ingrained in the thought habits of the modern West, distorts underlying laws of language and meaning by which people actually communicate and agree with one another.” Meaning is only located in the singularity of the event. In other words, meaning is only locally determined.

Lamin Sanneh, in his book, Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel beyond the West, discusses the explosion in Africa. He notes that in Africa, “Christian expansion was virtually limited to those societies whose people had preserved the indigenous name for God. That was a surprising discovery, because of the general feeling that Christianity was incompatible with indigenous ideas of religion.” (18)

Rascke notes that “indigenization in Africa has followed the pattern of Catholicism in the ancient Mediterranean and in the northern Europe of the Middle Ages. Local ‘pagan’ forms of worship and religious discourse are also transformed into expressions consonant with the gospel itself.” (43)

From the beginning of my studies with Len Sweet, he noted to us that Christianity would take various forms in various cultures. There would be the transformation of religious practices and language. In fact the practice might continue, but would be transformed by the Gospel. Christianity should look different in different cultures. It should not look like Western Christianity. And Allah, for the Christian God, is a valid use of the term.

I’ll return to this later and talk about the dynamic core that Raschke discusses. Also, Todd Littleton and I are preparing to do a vodcast about the book soon, so be looking for that.

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Sharing a parable from Matthew a couple of weeks ago, I noted to our small group that the Kingdom of God must have value for today.  If it is only future tense, then there is no reason to live under the rule and reign of Christ.

The way we frame salvation only places the true value of Gospel, and the Kingdom of God, in the future.  We also limit the Kingdom’s effectiveness by how we frame salvation. We frame salvation as getting out of hell and getting into heaven.  Doing so means that salvation has little impact for our lives today; it is not something to place a lot of value, time and effort into.

So what value does the Kingdom of God have for you?  And why should that even matter?

1.  We sacrifice everything for that which we place high value.

Our family.  Our job.  Our stuff.  We place high values on them, do we not?  We have insurance in case our stuff gets destroyed, we spend most our time at work, and what little time is left we spend it with our family.  We sacrifice so our kids can get braces, go to the best school and have all they need (or better yet, all they want).

But answer this question…What have you sacrificed for the Kingdom of God?  Have you left family, friends, and your possessions for the Kingdom of God?

2.  It is obvious what we value, because of the sacrifice we make for it.

Isn’t that what I just said?  Probably, but I want to frame it a different way.  It is not what you say that demonstrates what you value; it is what you do.  Most pastor types sacrifice all for the church.  Most pastor types want their lay people types to sacrifice for the church, and one church particular.

But the church is not the kingdom.  It is not our responsibility to build the church.  Let me say that again: It is not your responsibility or my responsibility to build the church. That is Christ’s responsibility (Matthew 16:18).  It is not even your church.  It is Christ’s church (Matthew 16:18).

If we de-emphasize the church and emphasize what we should be prioritizing (Matthew 6:33) then our focus is bigger than the organized church.  And the church is able to move out of the institution and into the MIROR-ing.

3.  It we emphasize what Christ told us to prioritize, then all that we need will be added to the intimate relationship we have with Jesus.

The food, the shelter, the clothes, they will all be added to the relational rule of Christ in our lives.

How do we return value to the Kingdom?

1.  Determine how you spend your time, energy and money. What do you emphasize in your life?  Examine your finances.  Examine your weekly schedule.  Examine what you read.  Pastors, examine what you teach and preach and what you model in your life.  Examine how you work with other churches and pastors.  Examine how your church participates in the kingdom glocally.  What does the church spend it’s money on?  Where do the majority of its resources get used?

2.  Work through the scriptures to determine the value of the Kingdom of God. This is something I am in the process of doing.  Find the scriptures that talk about the Kingdom of God and see what value it has for us today.  What value does the Gospel have for us today? (Beware, this will change your view of the Gospel.  Most of us do not have a proper theology of the Gospel.) If we do not know the intrinsic, personal, and present value of the kingdom, we will not sacrifice for it nor will we emphasize it.  Not valuing the kingdom means we will de-emphasize it, and place the emphasis on something else.

I realize the value of the church as it is used by God to build for the Kingdom.  But the church is just one tool God will use.  If we over-emphasize it, we miss the Kingdom, which is where our priority should be placed, both individually and corporately.  And what we value, we will give our all for!

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Organisms reproduce.  Institutions get bloated.

That is a large difference between the MIROR, Missional church and others.

Reproduction is not copying you, it is creating something new.

Remember the movie Multiplicity? In the movie, Michael Keaton’s character, Doug Kinney, is a stressed-out family man who meets up with a scientist who has developed a successful means for cloning humans. The scientist allows Doug to make a clone of himself that can take over for him at work, while he tries to spend some quality time with his family. The clone, called “Two” (while having all the knowledge, memory and experience of Doug), turns out to be overly macho and easily irritated, suffering a residual personality quirk of the cloning process.

Eventually two more clones are made. “Three”, in sharp contrast to two, is extremely sensitive and thoughtful (“Two” considers him a ‘wuss’). “Four” is cloned from “Two”, and has the mentality of an overly-curious child. Unfortunately since he is a clone-of-a-clone, his IQ is considerably lower than that of his predecessors, since the personality defects are more pronounced when a clone is cloned (The analogy from the movie refers to how a copy of a copy may not be as ’sharp’ as the original). One night Doug leaves home for a business trip. While Doug is gone each of the clones run into Laura and each one sleeps with her. The next day “Two” comes down with a cold and can’t go to work, so he sends “Three”. As “Three” goes to work not knowing a thing about construction, an inspection on site is on that day. “Three” unimpresses the inspector which leads to him losing Doug’s job.

As the movie progresses, Doug’s wife becomes increasingly upset with her husband, not realizing that many times she is speaking to a clone. After she pours out her heart to “Four”, mentioning how he (Doug) has never kept his promise on fixing the house, she asks him what he wants and is unromantically told “I want pizza”. Upset, she takes the children to live with her parents. When Doug returns he learns that Laura and the kids have left. He also learns from the clones’ confessions that he has lost his job and each one of them have slept with Laura. Trying to figure out how to get Laura back, “Four” tells him about what she said to him on how he never fixed the house. With the help of the clones, Doug remodels the house and wins back the love of his wife. With their purposes served, the three clones leave and set up a pizza shop called “Three Men from Nowhere”. There “Two” becomes the business man of the shop, “Three” is the chef and “Four” is the delivery boy. (1)

Reproducing is not cloning; it is not going multi-campus.  Reproducing involves birthing something new and separate with its own DNA.

Reproducing requires sacrifices from the parent.

The parents of any organism sacrifice for the sake of the child. This could require the release of a number of your current church members as they participate in the birth of the new organism.  In our church, though we were a small church of 50-70, we released three families, eight people in all who felt God was leading them to our plant.  We encouraged our planter to build relationships knowing that we could have members released to him.  We lost almost 10% of our membership.  However, it really was not our church.  It was HIS church.

Reproduction expands the influence of the parenting church.

The child church will reach people the parenting church cannot.  The child church will be able to be contextual as it reaches people through the personality of the church in the context it resides.

So how do you go about reproducing?

1.  Spend some time with Bob Robert’s book The Multiplying Church: The New Math for Starting New Churches. It’s one of the best books on multiplication written.

2. Talk to denominational leadership or other church planting organizations. There are many church planting organizations out there, from Glocal.net to Acts 29 to Church Multiplication Associates.

3.  Develop a church planting process and system.

4.  Find areas in your community where there are large populations of unchurched.

5. Plant a church.

Notes:

(1) Wikipedia contributors, “Multiplicity (film),” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Multiplicity_(film)&oldid=243283039 (accessed November 3, 2008).

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Are we willing to trust a person with the Bible and the Spirit alone for his or her theology? That was a question I posed to a friend who also happens to be a theologian.  His response was that thought scares him to death, but it is something that must be done.

It is the Spirit that leads us to all truth, right?

MIROR Churches understand that theology is organic.  There is an air of contextualization around it.  Beliefs in one region of a country, nation or continent will not be the same as in others.

There is absolute Truth, and his name is Jesus.  In addition, there are some core beliefs, statements that Jesus and others explicitly made regarding core theology (think early creeds) that cannot be explained away.  Nevertheless, we live as broken images of God, and our theology is a reflection of that.

All Theology is Organic Theology

1.  Theology is cultural. Interpretation is cultural.  A person in Latin America may understand the woman at the well in John 4 as a victim.  In their culture, men issue the divorce; women can’t divorce their husbands.  Therefore, those in parts of Latin America read John 4 in a completely different context and understand that passage differently.  If we truly trust the Spirit to lead all people into truth, not just those who have been to seminary or understand the grammatical-historical hermeneutical process, then we have to allow for differences in our understanding in texts.  As a result, there will be differences in theology.

2.  Theology is experiential. Not only do we understand culturally, we interpret experientially.  The experiences we have had in life affect how we interpret what we see, hear, and read.  For instance, in watching a sit-com, research shows we misunderstand as much as 30% of the meaning within the show.  Our experiences determine, according to the research, how we interpret the meaning of the show.

Despite what we think, Certainty is based on emotion, not reason.

Dr. Robert A. Burton, associate chief of the Department of Neurosciences at UCSF, has written a book entitled, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not.  In this book, he shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we know something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge.  In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact.  Because this feeling of knowing seems like a confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason.  But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning.  The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen.

So how do we live in this tension of absolute truth versus organic theology?

1.  Trust the Spirit. If I may be so bold, this is the one thing we struggle with the most.  We find it hard to trust the Spirit to lead us into truth.

2.  Hold our theology loosely. There are specific commands that Jesus gave that we can hold on to very tightly.  We have, however, spent so much time and energy to systematize our beliefs that we have boxed God in.  We need to hold tightly to a few essentials and realize that we just may be wrong.

3.  Avoid the condemning tone and “slippery slope” images. I know very strong Bible-believing theologians who interpret scripture differently than I, and thus their theology is different.  I do not condemn them, as they have looked hard at the text and have come to different conclusions than I.  I do not call them liberal.  They do not embrace homosexuality or universalism. They just believe differently based on their interpretive lens.

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