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Pete Ward, author of Liquid Church and senior lecturer at Kings College, London, spoke at Fuller last night on “All Consuming Liquid Culture, Liquid Church”. In his talk, he addressed critics who said he was too positive on culture in his book “Liquid Church”. Vincent Miller’s book, Consuming Religion, served as his conversation partner.

Pete Ward asks if the dislocation of ’stuff’ and symbols from the church is necessarily a bad thing? More importantly, we need to look at where these items are re-located in culture. For example, a CD of church music, recorded by a secular musician, and played by someone in their car, re-locates the sacred in new spaces. As another example, we know about Taize because of its products –

we might decry commercialization, but hasn’t the re-location of their

music been beneficial? He asks if God can be in that? If the text mediated Christ at church, does it still mediate Christ in the culture? He wanted us to consider that possibility. He describes this movement as the stretching of “ecclesial being”.

He talked about ’stuff’ – that stuff means things, maybe more than we know. They often reveal or ‘represent’ the spiritual state of things. These ‘representations’ circulate, and we share a language talking about them (discourses). Because we buy certain stuff and not others, we become something, i.e. we form identities around the materials of our lives. Both those who oppose culture and those who embrace it form their identities in this way.

Ward discussed God’s presence and how it is mediated in our culture. Episodically, God is ‘represented’ in our communications, in our discourses, provided this mediation gives rise to contemplation. These mediations stretch ecclesial being and relocate our sense of belonging and identity. In the Liquid Church, we might see Christ mediated through networks, brands, and products.

For Ward, the church is faced with two choices — Pandora’s Box or St. Peter’s. We can try to keep all the spiritual things hidden and safe (Pandora), or we can re-think what we formerly thought was unclean and open up our faith to those outside our traditional boundaries (St. Peter’s option). Pete votes with his namesake…

WARNING: This is my take on what Pete said, and I am not sure I was always tracking with him. Pete, if you read this, please forgive me for where I completely mis-represented what you were saying!! 

Pete is one of the best thinkers on church and culture, and I always love hearing from him. He asks the hard questions and refuses the pat answers. He pushes me to think through the most pressing missiological issues regarding the intersections of church and culture. I found myself in another world after his talk, trying to process all that I heard…

Technorati Tags: consumerism , mission

For the last year, I wore one teaching hat at Fuller. I taught classes in Mission in Contemporary Culture, i.e. arts, media, politics, economics, and what Jesus-like mission looks like in these formerly secular areas.  I even taught on U2! I love teaching in the cultural arena — even now, I look forward to the Fall when I can try out some more ideas in these classes.

This fall I’m putting on another hat — church growth. Seriously? Eddie Gibbs, my mentor for the last seven years, is retiring this week. That deserves a post of its own — but Eddie is not leaving Fuller, he is stepping down from faculty. I’m glad I have the chance to work with him on some other projects.

Eddie taught church growth at Fuller, just as
C. Peter Wagner did before him, and
Donald McGavran did before him. Their flagship course was MC520, Foundations of Church Growth, an introduction to McGavran’s thought and the whole field of church growth.

This fall, I get to have a turn — I’m teaching MC520 for the first time. My first inclination was to blow it up and start over. I have such mixed feelings about how church growth has been used, especially in the US. However, I’ve been reading McGavran’s Indian writings, and I see very little American style church growth in there, but a good bit of insight on indigenous people movements. He argued for  organic, non-institutional, non-Western, non-patriarchal forms of church, as opposed to the large institutional mission station. Not a bad start, in fact I resonate with much of his thoughts coming from India…

So, this fall, I’m going to present the church growth material in its entirety. Same reading, same assignments. However, at every point I will be commenting on the material, asking Jesus & kingdom questions, asking early McGavran (Indian) questions. In a sense, it will be a dialogue with a fifty year old tradition. I’ll be learning as much as I’m teaching.

So, no ‘blowing up’ of classes — I think I need to listen to those who went before for a year or two. In five years, the class may not look like it does now. But that will be after I have carefully spent some time arguing and wrestling with their ideas, and where possible, making them my own.

 A few weeks back I participated in an Emerging Church/Urban Church
dialogue. It goes all over the place, but it still might be worth a
listen. I tell my story of how I came to study Emerging Churches. Dan Hodge, missiologist and Tupac Shakur expert, is always
worth spending some time with…You can listen to it
here…

A friend of mine, Lance Ford, asked on his blog whether churches that look like their sending church are a problem.

We definitely have subcultures in the US, so amongst similar strata, we will have churches that look alike – this has happened throughout American history. People need to worship God from where they are, i.e. their own culture, so this is not inherently a problem. However, even with subcultural similarities, no two churches should look the same. Why is that? Any church that looks too much like their parent church runs the risk of violating the priesthood of all believers and 1 Cor.14, where everyone gets to share their gifts with one another. How so?

If churches look like their founders, despite new people joining the church, it is likely that newcomers are not included as full participants in the life of the church. Churches need to reflect those who are there. Worship needs to flow out of the particularisms of the people in the community, not just the founders. Like good missionaries, the founders must create ample space for the contribution of others; the leaders must be strong facilitators as much as they are contributors. If not, it is inevitable that the founders will be the producers, and those that come, the consumers. The result is a franchise or ‘cloned’ church. But much worse than that, the church is robbed of the gifts that are resident in each member, and they miss the chance to see the kingdom of God in their midst. 

In a post a while back, I described an all-day ‘dreaming’ event we had at Fuller. As one of the presenters I listed four dreams I had for my school. In my blog, I listed the first and said the other three would come later. Here is one part of the later — Dream #2 for my school.

How do we equip men and women for the manifold ministries of Christ and his church, when these communities have no physical church structure, their life is 24-7, where the church service is not the main focus and thus not the connecting point with those outside? How do we train in when the church-y stuff is gone?

We must train our students for church in the world – that the culture forms the ground from which they minister.  How to do that? We would equip students with skills to connect their faith within cultures, teaching them both to exegete the powers and to transform them. This would include both an exclusion and an embrace of cultural elements. We would advocate a Jesus-like model as a way to live in contemporary culture.
   
To train these cultural prophets, our pedagogy must change. We must allow the students’ questions to drive the execution of our content – same core material, but accessed in ways that help them serve as missionaries in their context. Each class is dynamic – the questions asked form a rubric for what is
covered – the content, teacher, and students are in a dynamic
conversation.

Professors must be aware of the ways in which their course material serves Christ-followers in their missionary endeavors. We would offer our resources in theology, in biblical studies, in historical research, in ethics and philosophy to serve their witness in contemporary culture.

We would equip our students not solely in linear ways, but as artists, as sources of creativity in the spiritually wired culture. These students would live as prophets in the midst of contradictions — embracing God’s ways amongst the marginalized in cultures that favor the powerful. This is my dream…

Recently I blogged about an upcoming discussion on Lesslie Newbigin and his contribution to mission thinking in the West. For this discussion, we were asked to share what he contributed and where we thought we should go in light of that contribution. I discussed his contributions, now I will briefly share where my thoughts on the future…

One approach would be to see if the seeds Newbigin planted are now growing in the church, or whether we still have work to do.

To what extent can the church name the powers? Most of the Western church has been formed within the fact/value split – if not from the culture, then from within the church itself. Not yielding to the sacred/secular split, how might the church learn to speak prophetically to the powers, all the while seeking their redemption? How might the church look to where Jesus is at work in the culture, and follow him there? How might the church learn to foster the rearrangement of cultural items to Christ, not adding or subtracting to the culture, but glorifying God within the culture itself? How might the church follow Christ in all realms, including politics, economics, arts, education, recreation? 

Regarding Christendom, to what extent is the church still patterned after Christendom models? Has the clergy/laity split been rooted out or simply replaced by professionalization and various modes of control? Do we train individuals or entire communities in giftedness? On the church question, do Christians see the church see itself as the people of God dispersed rather than as a place and time to meet? Do communities of faith meet in all sorts of configurations, consistent with the culture, presenting no unnecessary barriers to those outside?

Newbigin advocated for the church’s engagement of all spheres of culture, thereby proclaiming public truth. Sphere by sphere, our members need skills to embody this truth; they need to learn how to embrace, to critique, and to see where God has gone before them. The church today has yet to acquire the skills for which Newbigin advocated. I think we would do well to press on until these skills become synonymous with ‘church’.

Recently, I had an email conversation with one of my favorite students, David Best. It had to do with the diversity of thinking (or lack thereof) at Fuller Seminary. He first blogged about it here. He asked if he could blog about our ensuing conversation, I agreed, and then I thought I would post on it as well.

(more…)

I was asked to join an International Think Tank on Mission to Western Culture later this month, specifically focusing on Lesslie Newbigin’s contribution to the conversation. Here is my brief response to the question…

Newbigin created a space for Western churches to analyze their relationship to Western culture. Returning to 1980s Britain after forty years in India, Newbigin viewed the Western church with a different set of lenses, and he spoke a message that the Western church needed to hear.

Newbigin returned to a church held captive by the culture and its own church traditions. He asked how the church had become so marginal to public life. He traced the church’s current form back to the Enlightenment, with its focus on reason, the individual, and the removal of values from the public (or factual) sphere. In addition, Newbigin identified another source of the lifeless nature of the Western church – Christendom. Because of the church’s historic relation to the state, Western churches served passively as chaplains to the culture, baptizing the culture’s agenda. With the church’s domination by the powers (the ‘isms’) and its historical relationship with Christendom, the church found itself beaten-down with little ability or energy to respond.

All was not lost. Newbigin argued for a response, another way out of the church’s predicament. Because of the historical nature of the church’s position (it was not a ‘given’), other trajectories were possible. He advocated that the gospel must be the starting point for Christians — specifically the as expressed in the Incarnation and the Trinity. The gospel must frame all other structures and practices, not science or any other ‘tradition’. The gospel can handle pluralism, provided the gospel is located at the center. The church, not the culture, sets the agenda, speaking from within the biblical narratives to the wider world. 

For Newbigin, the church must embody this public truth in all realms, foregoing the facts/values split of the Enlightenment, e.g. in neighborhoods, in arts, science, politics and economics. Rather than accept life on the margins, the church must serve as pointer to the coming reign of God. In retrospect, Newbigin gave the church a gift by exposing the powers and encouraging a gospel-like response in all spheres of culture.

Karen Ward and I will be speaking at a series of blah… days in England July 14-18. Jonny Baker and  friends organized it — really looking forward to connecting with friends that I have not seen face to face in a few years…

As I slowly pick up the pieces from the tornado of craziness I experienced this quarter, I recall some events that I would have wanted to announce but didn’t. One was a podcast I did with Red Herring. It has been a little while, but I remember that he asked good questions and I enjoyed our chat. Much of the dialogue surrounded the book and classes I teach at Fuller.