The Conversion of the Church...Again

A couple weeks ago, I gave a copy of "The Church Inside Out" to a friend whose ideas I've always really admired and who is one of the best thinkers I know. He had never heard of Hoekendijk before but he eagerly read the book overnight. In the morning, my friend said with a smile: "I just kept thinking, as I read it, 'Hey, I thought those were my ideas!'" Have you ever noticed how, really, nothing is new under the sun? For example, Darrell Guder is an influential participant in the missional church conversation. I have been especially influenced by his 2000 book, "The Continuing Conversion of the Church" in which he argues that we have to repent of the ways in which we have tried to "reduce" the gospel to individual salvation and trivialized God in order to make God "manageable." This has led, naturally, to a reductionist understanding of the church and its mission. Instead of a movement that God has set loose in the world to bear witness to the inbreaking kingdom, the church has taken shape as an institution, "its focus...more and more on the administration of salvation. Its worship centered on the message of individual salvation; its sacraments established and regulated the status of salvation; its doctrines sought to define and delimit salvation. The questions it asked and anwered were these: Who is saved? Who is not? How can one be sure? How can salvation be lost? How can it be guaranteed?...More and more the clergy became the special caste of Christians who managed everyone else's individual salvation...[and] the overriding problem repeatedly has been a control-driven combination of concerns for public order, institutional security, and the protection of power" (chapter 6). Just for fun, I made a list of the things Guder recommends for the conversion (i.e. renewal or transformation) of the church in this new century: 1. Start With Scripture: Ask The Right Questions, Expect Something To Happen, Act Like Christians 2. Order The Ministry For Mission: Redefine The Office (i.e. the job of a pastor is to make sure people are equipped for mission & ministry in their daily lives), Expect More, Catch Up With The Spirit 3. Call People To Mission: Keep The “So That” Front And Center (i.e. the gift of salvation is a call to discipleship), Be Clear about what God has done and is calling us to do 4. Conduct Evangelizing Worship: Expect Jesus To Show Up, Be Open To Change, Worship Is A Public Witness (not a private club), Let The Good News Happen (i.e. we should experience it not just hear about it when we gather) 5. Disagree Christianly: Expect Conflict, Remember That Jesus Is Lord 6. Let Mission Shape The Community: Move Away From Membership, Reverse The Flow - not gathering but sending - not in but out Want to know more? Read Guder's book. Or, you could read a little tract written in 1675 by Philipp Jakob Spener (another voice that deserves a new hearing) called "Pia Desideria." Here's his list: 1. Start With Scripture: Make This The Most Important Thing (for laity, too!), Read It In Context, Read It Together in Small Groups 2. Reform The Leaders: Leadership Begins With The Heart, Reform The Process of Shaping Leaders (i.e. seminaries...because the system we have instills arrogance and know-it-allism in them), Tear Off The Masks 3. Exercise The Universal Priesthood: Unmask The Devil (i.e. clericalism), Call People To Action 4. Deliver Evangelizing Preaching: Make It Real, Preach To Save People 5. Disagree Christianly: Stand Firm, But Love 6. Put Faith Into Action: Practice Love, Practice Accountability Separated by over 300 years of history, these two theologians (prophets?) were saying essentially the same things about what is needed to pull Christianity out of Christendom in order to rescue the followers of Jesus from bondage to hierarcy/clericalism/traditionalism/etc. and set them free to participate in God's loving mission in the world. The point is: Nothing's new. The question is: Why would we expect it to be? Each generation, in its own way, tries to put God into a little box so that we can take control of the gospel. And in each generation God raises up voices that call us to repentance. God raises up people who pray/work/hope/cry out for our conversion. This has been happening since Paul called Peter on the carpet for putting institutional concerns, church polity, and personal security ahead of gospel freedom (Galatians 2:11ff). It is happening today. I hope that, if you are one of those people who has been praying and working and hoping and crying out for the conversion of the church for the sake of God's loving mission in this world, you will know that you are not alone. Not by a long shot.

Doors Are So Last Century

This is a shout out to the woman who grabbed me after my final presentation at the Open Hearts, Open Doors Conference in Duluth, Minnesota a week ago. (The mission of this annual, ecumenical conference is to assist congregations in becoming more welcoming to LGBT persons and their families. It's the first conference of this kind that I've spoken at and it was awesome to be invited.) With a furrowed brow, this lady - in her 60's or 70's - said this after spending a day and a half listening to me preach & teach:

"I don't know what I think about all this (i.e. your presentations)...It took so much work to open these doors to everyone...and now you're telling us, 'Why do you have doors at all?'...(long pause) and I think you're probably right. But I'm going to have to go home and spend some time thinking about this."

I really appreciated her honesty...and her willingness to wrestle with new ideas, including this one: Putting a sign on the front lawn of your church that says "Everybody is welcome here!" just doesn't matter...if no one "out there" can think of one good reason why they should care. In this postmodern, post-Christendom, post-ecclesiastical, post-bourgeois, post-personal, post-(you fill in the blank now) world people are no longer lining up to get through our doors. If they were, a welcome mat would be all we'd need. But they're not. They couldn't care less if "we" are ready to welcome "them" because they think we are irrelevant. And who can blame them. Mostly, we're answering questions they don't have. And it doesn't seem like we're even interested in the questions they do have. Let me say this another way: They don't think we're irrelevant because we're not welcoming them into our places of worship. They frankly don't care whether we welcome them or not because they don't believe we have anything they could possibly want or need. This is one reason I just can't get very excited about the "let's make our denomination more welcoming" project that consumes a lot of people inside every mainline church these days. It's not that I think we shouldn't be welcoming. That's a no brainer. It's just that the project to become "welcoming" is, in some really big ways, so...last century. In this new century, people "out there" don't care whether or not there is a congregation in their neighborhood that welcomes them. But I DO think they would be intrigued if they got to ACTUALLY MEET a living, breathing, believing, loving follower of Jesus on their home turf...in the house next door, in the cubicle next to them, working under the hood of their car, coaching their kid's little league team, running for city council, playing pool with them at the local pub. I think they would be really interested if they could see, in the way we ordinary Christians live and act and serve, what true freedom looks like. I think people would be moved to real curiosity if they ever found themselves in the presence of someone who shows them what it looks like to be really free...free from sin, death, and the devil (ala Martin Luther)...free from peer pressure, self-loathing, greed, bondage to material things, and all the other stuff that strangles the life out of people in this culture...free even from the suffocating politics and legalism and traditionalism of the institutional church...free to serve others, free to give themselves away to make a difference in the world, free to be the priests they were ordained to be at their baptism (no degree, no credentials necessary!), free to die to self for the sake of neighbor, free to love even their enemies! Hoekendijk again: "Rarely do our words arouse amazement, but people look up when they meet a free person who uses that freedom to serve" (1954). No one looks twice at our "welcome" signs, anymore. But heads snap when a free person walks by! In this new century, WE will be the only church that matters. Not the building. Not the pastor. Not the membership roster. Not the clergy roster. Not the rules. Not the sign on the front lawn...no matter what it says. WE are the church. I wonder what we would be fighting over, arguing about, and striving for if our heads were really wrapped around that idea.

Church At The Crossroads

Here's a voice that needs to be heard again. It belongs to a guy named J.C. Hoekendijk. Born in 1912, he was a contemporary of Lesslie Newbigin, who has had the stronger influence on the "missional" theologies and churches of recent decades (and, therefore, within the emergent church conversations). Both men were missionaries; J.C. was born to missionary parents in Indonesia and educated in the Netherlands, his parents' homeland. Both held positions within the World Council of Churches back in the 1960's. Hoekendijk was Secretary of Evangelism. He stirred things up with his stinging critique of evangelistic efforts born of "a nervous feeling of insecurity" and designed only to "restore Christendom" by saving "the remnants of a time now irrevocably past." J.C. was, in many ways, a populist who wrote in plain - and powerful - language. The theological establishment didn't like him much, although his students did, and when Hoekendijk divorced, the establishment had a "good" reason to more or less shut him down. Sidelined - for stylistic as much as for theological reasons - he ended his career pretty far removed from the world stage, quietly teaching at Union Seminary. He died in the early 1970's. Hoekendijk was a footnote in my missiological studies, a foil to Newbigin's more popular work, a voice with something interesting - but not really important - to say. A little tired of hearing the same old within missional and even emergent conversations, especially because I've been able to discern virtually no impact yet on the wider culture (meaning outside the institutional church) as a result of them which I think can be the only true measure) - indeed, more often than not I don't even hear any intention or hope of impacting the wider culture! - I used www.amazon.com to locate a used ($4!) copy of "The Church Inside Out," a compilation of J.C.'s writings over about a decade beginning in 1954, and read it cover to cover in one sitting. Then I bought up all the other copies I could find (about 10 of them)to pass out to friends and curious conversation partners I meet along the way. J.C., it turns out, might have some important - and not just interesting - things to say, after all. First(and, remember, this is 1954!), he sets the stage, describing the needed and inevitable demise of Christendom, which has thoroughly corrupted the Biblical concepts of church, the "heathen," and salvation. Notably, from safe within Christendom, we can see only two kinds of people "out there" beyond the church: 1) moral "pagans" - i.e. drunkards and the like, who have fallen away from a pious Christian life, who become the target of our "disgustingly moralistic" preaching, and to whom we offer "moral rearmament" and forgiveness for a wild past, rather than the fullness of God's Shalom, and 2) intellectual "pagans" - i.e. skeptics, who are suspicious of the doctrines of Christendom undoubtedly because they just don't know enough, to whom we are "condescendingly apologetic," and to whom we offer forgiveness for their "stupidity" in this case, rather than the fullness of God's salvation. From within Christendom, we can't even see, much less respond, to those who are in total revolt and completely reject our message...or those for whom the message is utterly irrelevant. We fail to see the world as the primary location of God's activity and the object of God's love. And we lose all connection to the radical gift God, in fact, has given and wants to give. Hoekendijk says that gift is Shalom - "at once peace, integrity community, harmony, and justice." This is the gift the Messiah brought with him and which he came to proclaim. Those who follow him are, likewise, called to proclaim (kerygma), live (koinonia), and demonstrate (diakonia) Shalom. And, as they do this, church happens. The church, in other words, is NOT the point. The church does not "send" us into mission; the church is a function of "the apostolate," The church is, in other words, an instrument that emerges to help us do the work we are called to do; it is "a means in God's hands to establish shalom in this world." And the WORLD is most definitely the point: "Our God is not a temple dweller. In the strict sense of the word he is not even a church god. He advances through time; ever again he lets the new conquer the old. He is not a God of the 'status quo,' but rather the Lord of the future, the King of the history of the world, and, as such, also Head of the church...We must maintain the right order in our thinking and speaking about the church. That order is God-World-Church, not God-Church-World" (J.C. Hoekendijk). There are "missional" movements afoot today to make the church "more the church," it is said, for the sake of the world. And there are other, evangelical and missional movements afoot that often get accused of trying to make the church more "like" the world, for the sake of converting the world. Hoekendijk - I think - would argue that both movements are misdirected because they are both still church-centered...and God is not. Mission is never centripetal (drawing people in to where salvation is), he argues. It is always centrifugal. Hoekendijk describes mission this way: "It leaves Jerusalem and the Jewish group and is on its way to the ends of the earth and the end of time. To join means here: To join the journey away from the center." Practically, what does this mean? A missional faith community won't stick a sign in its front yard saying "Come worship with us!" First of all, a missional faith community might not even HAVE a front yard...because all a building is in this paradigm is a tool and maybe, in some contexts, it wouldn't be a particularly useful tool. But if it DOES have a front yard, the message on the sign might be "Let's make a difference in the world together!" Or something like that. A missional congregation wouldn't promise to take care of me...it would call me to give myself away for the sake of my neighbor. It would invite me to live a life that MATTERS. It would call me to BE the church right where I have been planted...at work, at school, in my neighborhood. Isn't that what Jesus meant when he said, "Come follow me"?? That didn't mean, "Come huddle up in this building and pray a lot." Jesus spent his ministry out at the "crossroads" (cf. Matthew 4:12-17). If we're following him, that's where we'll be, too.