Café Vista

It is often said that the Bible begins in the garden but ends in a city.  Israel as a nation begins with its focus on wandering in the desert and then it places the ark in Jerusalem.  Mission in the early church was focused on cities – often the great trading cities, and then only moved to the countryside much later. Christianity in its formative years was primarily an urban phenomenon.

For much of the history of the western church the idea of the rural parish has formed a kind of pastoral ideal and has often shaped our imagination about the church and its life/ ministry.  We have often felt uncomfortable with the city, so much so that much of the 20th century has seen the flight of the church from the inner city to the suburbs.

In turn, the suburbs were themselves the attempt to bring the countryside to the proximity of the city without exposing families to the vice of the city itself.  Some historians believe that suburbia itself was originally an evangelical invention or idea.

Today, across the world, populations are moving to the city.  At this moment more than half of the world’s population live in cities and so how we deal with mission and the city is a critical issue.  In the UK, a conference on mission in the city is being organised by a group called A Passion for Mission.  To be held on the 26 June at the Chinese Church meeting in Hammersmith, London, the conference will spend a day thinking about strategies to reach cities.

The evidence from across the world suggests that the very move to the city does two things, first it dislocates those who are Christians from the familiarity of church life and so they often drop out of church.  Second it causes those who were not Christians before the move to be more open to change and hence to the message of the gospel.

The Bible ends with the city and mission is called to connect with the city here and now.

I quote below some comments from Darrell Jackson reflecting on the recent findings of the European Values Survey – an annual survey that tracks changing attitudes of Europeans to a wide range of issues.   Darrell notes:

“The EVS data indicates a markedly irreligious generation of 50-69 year olds, best characterised as ‘ideologically hostile’ to religiosity. This generation is now beginning to retire from influential roles in the media, politics, education, and the arts. The havoc that these ‘lost generations’ have wreaked – in constructing a narrative of hard secularism – may finally be waning.

Our initial analysis supports the findings of other social scientists who suggest that the current generation of 20-29 year olds is reportedly less hostile to religion and religiosity but that this may be little more than a generation best characterised as ‘benignly indifferent’ to religiosity. This more ‘open generation’ may prove to be more amenable to creating the space necessary for a discussion of religion and religiosity within the media, politics, education, and the arts.”

You can check out Darrell’s blog for yourself on:  http://europeankoala.com

The Parish Collective

I first came across Paul Sparks and Tim Soerens some months ago during a visit that Tim made to the UK. The idea behind the Parish Collective is deceptively simple. It arises from the conviction that place matters and how we as local communities of Christians also matters. In one sense it is a practical expression of how one moves from space to place, or how we give significance to particular spaces. We might call that concern a view of space as parish.

The Parish Collective believes that there is a movement across America (and elsewhere for that matter) that is rediscovering the importance of place. The are convinced that many of these experiments are “under the radar” and so they are trying to locate and connect them through the framework of the Parish Collective. Paul and Tim begin to talk about this concept.

Paul Sparks has a remarkable story to tell. There are very few people who would deliberately enter into a conversation that would lead to the deconstruction of the congregation that they lead. That is to some extent what Paul did and for very good Missional reasons. In essence he was leading a very successful Gen X church which centred on a highly creative worship event. Attendance was good, especially in the context of the Seattle area.

However, Paul realised over time that there was something deeply unsatisfying about what had been created. In essence that related to the sense that this was an event that was more related to the entertainment of a crowd than to the growing of disciples. Over time, and through conversation, Paul began to transition to a group that would relate more deeply to the place where they lived and worshipped. To use a phrase from Alan Roxburgh, they were intent on entering their neighbourhood.

That move had consequences, some of them numerical and hence financial which are always painful, but over time (and it surely does take time) something deeply contextual in terms of the gospel has emerged. In this video Paul tells something of this story.

Nearly a year ago, I featured a video interview with Ruth Rice on Puzzling Questions.  She is a Baptist minister from Nottingham who was trialing Puzzling Questions while the finished material was with the publishers.

An advance copy is now on my desk – it will be released on 23 April.  The course is intended for those who are asking spiritual questions but who are not quite ready for Alpha.  In that sense it can be a pre-Alpha event or a stand alone course that allows your friends and contacts to explore without commitment.

The pack consists of a Leaders Guide, a Participants Workbook, a DVD with sections to use each week and a further more detailed book that gives both leaders and participants extra material to chew on.  Paul Griffiths drove the project through and I helped to write some of the material as did Julie Kite, an evangelist with a local Baptist church in East Anglia.

The questions that are addressed in the course came from some research undertaken by Coventry Cathedral as part of their engagement with people asking spiritual questions who do not come to church.  The 6 key questions are:

1.  Who am I?

2. What is God like?

3. What happens after I die?

4. How can I be happy?

5. Why is there suffering in the world?

6. What is the spiritual world and how does it impact my life?

There will be a website to explore after the release date.  Watch this space…

Over the last few months I have become more and more aware of the development of myriads of experiments around what it means to do mission and so be church.  Most of those experiments are purely local in conception and have not been inspired by any wider framework nor are they connected in anyway with broader networks.

Of course there are conceptual frameworks that seek to legitimize experimentation within denominational structures – Fresh Expressions in the UK is the best known of these frameworks.  There are also some networks that seek to connect and encourage experimentation at a very local level – The Parish Collective in the USA is one of these.

Just recently I visited a couple of experiments in the Seattle area – two in particular stand out as fascinating attempts to rethink mission and church.  I will write about one of these in a later blog but the one that occupies my thoughts at the moment – partly because I am having lunch there today – has taken the intriguing name Luther’s Table.  Nothing to do with Lex Luther but a great deal to do with Martin Luther.

Luther’s table is partly a restaurant, partly a coffee bar and partly a regular bar serving a wonderful selection of beer and other alcoholic beverages.  That is the visible and very public manifestation of the project.  Its actually part of a larger complex that offers housing for women who have been in situations of abuse and who are wanting to transition to different lives.

Worship takes place in this environment, open mic nights operate, evening discussions around theology and life (Theology Pub) happen on a regular basis.  Gretchen Weller Mertes is the Mission Developer on the team and this is a conscious attempt to think about what mission looks like in the downtown area of Renton, a community near Seattle.

The story of the centre is that it was originally a traditional Lutheran Church which had declined to the point where it was facing closure.  The original building has been taken down and replaced with a new purpose built facility.  A team of workers and volunteers give the project a feeling of life and a certain “buzz”.

Its probably too early to say what is going to arise from this experiment.  Its under the broad direction of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and locally is connected to another Lutheran church – St Matthew’s Lutheran Church.  Visit the site and you will see that at one level they do not take themselves too seriously – I love the menu, check out the sandwiches – The Vicar, The Sinner, The Katy Luther and The Pope.  I was a bit disappointed not to see a Melancthon Munchie but there is time yet.  The spirit of playfulness extends to various aspects of their work but they are deadly serious about mission. This is an experiment I intend to watch and taste carefully and hopefully often.

How can ordinary lay people become missionaries in their daily lives? Dwight Zscheile has been involved in a major research project exploring this dimension of missional living. Here he talks about some of that learning especially his conclusions around how leaders can help in that process.

I have just finished reading Alan Hirsch and Tim Catchim’s new book The Permanent Revolution.  As always with Alan’s books, a great read using powerful, punchy prose.  I would also say that it is a helpful apologetic and explanation of the five fold ministry paradigm and in particular of the apostolic dimension of that paradigm.   For that reason I will be pointing my students  and other church leaders to this as a useful text.

However, it still felt a little bit like yesterday’s discussion.  I think most people concerned for mission in a western context have got the idea that a predominately pastoral paradigm will not cut the mustard.  Even if we use different language around entrepreneurial leadership or other such terms, the idea that leadership challenges have shifted is probably widely accepted.  In addition, denominations, theological colleges and local churches are all needing to locate different organizational paradigms to respond to a challenging future.

To some extent the missional movement, inspired as it was by Newbigin’s original challenge about the conversion of the west, got slightly stuck in an ecclesial response to the missional challenge.  In that sense, Mike Breen’s provocative challenge around the headline “Why the missional movement will fail” is correct if we mean by missional movement an over-concern with leadership and organizational structures.

The hidden subtext of such a concern is that if we someone fix the church then mission will follow.  It probably won’t if only because we will never come to a day when we have fixed the church.  Changing organic systems is not like mending machinery on a production line.

At a deeper level the discussion about leadership leaves out two other critical areas which are probably more important than the leadership debate or at the very least, the leadership debate cannot be understood without reference to these two areas  First there is the issue of discipleship making.  Mike Breen is right to point to this as a key issue (for him the key issue) facing mission in the west.

The second area is how we engage our neighbourhood or community.   Churches with great leadership and wonderful discipleship making capacity simply are irrelevant if they have not thought through how this is all going to connect with a culture that largely regards us in a negative vein (and that is flattering).  To be very frank I think churches have spent more time thinking about leadership and discipleship (in the sense of a mobilized membership) than they have about how to connect at a deep level with those amongst whom we live.  I don’t see too many churches doing well in developing meaningful conversations with their community.

There is still somehow an expectation that if we produce a great programme people will come.  In North America that is still sufficiently true that we can ignore the connection issue but in Europe it really is not true.  We ignore the community connection issue at our peril.  When we have as many books, conferences, seminars and manuals on how we forge a different relationship with our community as we do on leadership issues, we might be getting somewhere.

As we reflect on the Great Commission its clear that the making of disciples (not just believers) is our key mandate as followers of Christ. In reality we are better at making converts than disciples. Mark Bailey of Trinity, Cheltenham offers some insightful comments on this issue.

I have been privileged to spend a couple of days with a group of German leaders of various church planting agencies and initiatives within denominational groupings who meet from time to time as a “roundtable”.  It has been fascinating to compare the experiences of this group with the UK, or more specifically the English situation over the last 20 years, especially in relation to DAWN as a concept.

On the ground, just as in England, and I suspect increasingly across Europe, local church planting initiatives are multiplying.  There is probably much more happening at a local level than we realize or even have the facilities to track.  That is encouraging.  There are 2 key differences between the German experience and that of the UK.

First, the German DAWN group has not yet succeeded in building a consensus around the idea of a national goal for church planting which is so integral to the DAWN idea. This particular group has only been in existence for five years and it is not sure whether they will ever agree on such a goal.

“Fortunate for them”, I can hear some people responding from a UK context and I understand that sentiment.  However, there is something to be said for the idea of coalition, mutual encouragement, the sharing of ideas and experiences, the energizing impact of what others are doing when communicated as part of a joint vision.

I was fascinated to learn what the Free Evangelical Church has been doing with regard to church planting.  In 2005, they adopted the goal of planting 100 new churches in 10 years, and they are well under way. It is a very significant effort and when placed alongside other initiatives amongst Pentecostal and other new church groupings, something vital is emerging.

And yet, whereas normally the impact of such an important development in a group like the Free Evangelical Church might be expected to have a wider impact or leverage on others it does not appear to have done so.  Those who are aware of this initiative regard it highly and that underlies the importance of information sharing.  There is usually more happening than most people imagine and communicating the “facts on the ground” is at least as encouraging as setting ambitious goals.

Second, unlike the situation of England where the Anglican church was almost the initiator of church planting as a mission strategy, (admittedly with significant encouragement from YWAM), in Germany the State church is not just practically absent from the church planting scene but possibly hostile to the concept or at best sees it as something that does not concern or interest them.

This absence of the involvement of the State Church from church planting seems to stem from two realities.  The first of these realities is that there are far fewer evangelicals in the State church in Germany as compared with the Anglican church.  Whether we like it or not most (though not all) of the church planting initiatives in the Anglican church have come from the evangelical wing of the church.

The second reality is that the language of church planting does not really work in a strong parish system.  There is a need for a different vocabulary that might allow the participation and imagination of the State church in Germany to be stimulated.  In England that language is formed around the vocabulary of Fresh Expressions of church.

In recent times the concept of Fresh Expressions has begun to percolate the awareness and thinking of the State church and so there is the possibility of a new connection being established between the State church and the other denominations and networks that are already involved in church planting.  The growth of a movement needs both ”facts on the ground” – people actually getting on with the task, and a wider awareness of what is already happening and what is possible for the future.  The spreading of that knowledge is what catalyses a wider involvement and turns creative experiments into fully fledged movement.