Sidewalk Cracks

Ok, so, one minute I'm on the phone with a mission developer (i.e. a pastor who is starting a new faith community/congregation/ministry) who is looking for a coach and she's dreaming out loud about a church that a) addresses the lonliness and isolation that deadens people in suburbia and b) wakes them up to a life that means something by inviting them to work for justice and serve their neighbors and give themselves away for the sake of the world...and I'm totally psyched. I'm like, "Yeah! That's right! Preach it, sister!" And I'm thinking this is exactly the kind of "church" we need to be growing. And I think I even said, "The whole 'me and Jesus' church that invites you in so we can 'make you successful and make your life better' is so over. People today want their lives to matter." And the very next minute - I'm not kidding, as soon as I hung up the phone - I'm facing this headline in today's Chicago Tribune: Sidewalks crack suburb tranquillity By Courtney Flynn Tribune staff reporter Published May 9, 2007 Here's the story: While new housing developments in suburbia these days almost always include sidewalks, because we've discovered that sidewalks help connect people to each other and create community, the older developments didn't. And, to the surprise of town planners, efforts to bring sidewalks to these neighborhoods are causing a firestorm. Petitions, protests, angry town council meetings. We don't need them, people are saying. We walk our dogs in the street! Our kids get on the bus right in front of their houses. Everybody drives everywhere, anyway. It'll cost too much money. And, above all, you never know who those sidewalks will be inviting into your neighborhood.

[Hubert] Frank, 68, who organized a petition for Whitehall Drive, said sidewalks could also pose a safety risk by welcoming strangers into the neighborhood. "There's strange things happening in the world today, so why would we want to open up that possibility?" he said...The concern is, who knows what you'd be encouraging to come through."

"Who knows WHAT you'd be encouraging to come through...," Mr. Frank said. Not even WHO. This is sin, right? I mean SIN. In other words, this is people turning in on themselves, away from God...away from neighbor. And wherever there are people, there is sin. So, I'm not going to blame the sidewalk wars on anybody or any institution in particular. But I'm feeling a little cranky right at the moment. And here is what I'm thinking: Not only have all of our "me and Jesus" churches failed to address this sin in our suburban neighborhoods, we have contributed to the problem! We have allowed people to huddle up in the safety of our beautiful buildings and put them to sleep with assurances of personal salvation (given "FOR YOU!") and numbed them with our 3-point sermons on how to build happy families (as though there is some kind of reward - rather than a cross - for following God's 12 step program). We have given them the illusion that they are part of a real community because we smile at them when they come through the door on Sunday morning and, if they wear the nametag we ask them to, treat them like family...instead of like the strangers they really are...sending the message that strangers are BAD and difference is unacceptable. Aaargghhhh! This is SO not "over!!" Dear new friend of mine, working the mission field of American suburbia: You can't get that new church up and running soon enough. [Read the whole story at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0705090110may09,1,6246343.story?page=1&coll=chi-news-hed.]

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.