Reflections on the last audioconference

To my wonderful students: Once again I want to thank you for engaging so vigorously in discussion. I found the discussion last night to be very interesting. I was moved by the eloquence of your words, particularly on the subjects of hospitality and worship. What surprised me most was the diversity in the definitions of the missional church. I wish we could have another conversation to continue to hash the components of a good definition.

For me the definition has to include the missio dei, the sending of the Son and the Spirit for the redemption of the world. So perhaps I would define the missional church as a community of Christ's followers who take seriously their call to engage with the mission of the triune God in Christ and through the power of the Spirit.

Keep thinking and exploring these issues! Blessings to you all.

Thank you

I have just done the final count on the blog posts and have read or re-read the last batch of posts. I am so grateful for your engagement with each other and with the course material. I am humbled by your stories of faithfulness in congregational settings. I'm challenged by your questions. Thank you so very much for giving time and energy to this endeavor. I'm very much looking forward to our last evening together on Monday night.

I thought of another question for the last audioconference. Do you think the missional church is a fad or do you think it has lasting value for the Church in Aotearoa?

Last audioconference and last assignment

I've been thinking about our last audioconference, and I'd like to leave some time at the end for us to propose and discuss possible definitions of "missional church." So I invite you do to some thinking between now and then about how you would respond if someone came up to you and said, "You've been taking a paper on the missional church. After studying it for a semester, how would you describe what it is?"

For the last assignments, please email them to me as well as mail them in. That will help me with the marking.

I'm still enjoying your blog posts. Keep up the great work!

New blog posts here

Please use the "comments" link under this blog post for your own posts from now on. I welcome comments on any topic this week. Some suggestions are more thoughts about teams in the missional church and the relevance of the missional church for Aotearoa New Zealand.

As I said in the audioconference on Monday, I'm going to count everyone's posts and let you know how many I think you have (by putting a slip of paper in the envelope with assigment 2 when I send it back). On May 23 at 9 a.m. I'm going to do the final count of blog posts and your mark will be based on the number of posts you have made by that time.

Thanks so much for all your interesting comments. I have really enjoyed reading the blog posts. Be sure to read all the posts under my April 28 post because they're quite interesting.

Fresh Expressions website

Jan Clark sent me a link to a website you may be interested in. It is billed as a website for practitioners of Fresh Expressions. Take a look:
http://www.sharetheguide.org/

Ideas for blog posts (April 28)

I really enjoyed the discussion last night and found it personally challenging. Thanks very much to all of you who spoke up.Two of my suggestions for blog posts this week come from the blog posts last week.

1. Susan Gill wrote: "I’m more and more convinced that all our talk about Missional Church and some of the values we’ve considered are really about discipleship. Truly being a Christ-follower is about seeking and obeying God’s will and the way we go about that will surely encompass missional values – hospitality, inclusiveness, valuing the other, art etc." I'd love to hear your reflections on the connection between discipleship and a missional outlook.

2. Graeme Flett wrote, responding to something Craig said: "As I recall you [Craig] said something to the tune of 'is it not missional when it is about the other?' I think this is a really apt thought as the word missional can become the in-cliché used to justify all sorts of entrepreneur activity and yet miss the point. I share your sentiments here. I wonder whether consideration of ‘the other’ helpfully sifts the authenticity of our own Christian spirituality! It certainly challenges mine." I'd love to hear your reflections on whether a focus on the other should play a small or large part in the definition of “missional.”

My third idea for blog posts is to make further comparisons between the idea of liminality and the topics we talked about last night. We made some connections between liminality and the leader as a poet. What about the connections between liminality and the other aspects of leadership we talked about, especially apostolic leadership?

Yesterday, before the audioconference, I looked around online to find definitions for “liminal.” I couldn’t find my notes during the audioconference, but of course they turned up as soon as we signed off. Here are some of the ways to describe the meaning of the word:
- From the Latin word, limen, meaning threshold
- A psychological, neurological or metaphysical subjective state of being on the threshold or between two existential planes
- Pertaining to threshold or entrance
- A blurry boundary zone between 2 established and clear spatial areas. Or, when referring to time, a liminal moment is a blurry boundary period between 2 segments of time.
- “a betwixt and between place”

I also found an interview with a novelist who was talking about the liminal characteristics of his novel, and he said that he believes life isn’t really being lived unless it’s a series of transformations. I was interested in the connection he made between liminality and transformation. That parallels, in a small way, what I was saying in the audioconference about my view that Christian ministry often involves liminal moments, because ministry involves watching God, through the gospel of Jesus Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit, transform our lives and the lives of people with whom we minister.

Another book

I've been meaning to tell you that Kevin Ward, who many of you will know and who teaches in our department and at the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership, told me recently that he thinks the best book on the missional church is The Ministry of the Missional Church by Craig Van Gelder. (Unfortunately I learned this far too late to include it in the coursebook.) The amazon.com listing for the book has some nice description about halfway down and three reader reviews at the bottom:
http://www.amazon.com/Ministry-Missional-Church-Community-Spirit/dp/080109139X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240647148&sr=1-1
Van Gelder has written several other books about the missional church as well.

Too bad it's in Los Angeles

I did an MDiv degree at Fuller Seminary, so I get their alumni emails. I just got one announcing a conference I wish we could all attend. I thought you might enjoy reading about it:
http://www.fuller.edu/academics/school-of-theology/dmin/CE/McNeal.aspx

More books

Here are some more books on topics related to the missional church. These are all in the University of Otago library.

Intuitive Leadership: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor and Chaos by Tim Keel. Keel is the pastor of Jacob’s Well, an emergent church in Kansas City, USA, that I admire quite a bit and a blogger who I enjoy. In this book Keel describes a number of priorities I think are very important for Christian leaders in our time, including narrative and metaphor, as the sub-title suggests. He does a good job giving his take on the cultural challenges of our time, and there are bits and pieces that help the reader understand the priorities of Jacob’s Well.

The New Friars: The Emergent Movement Serving the World’s Poor by Scott A. Bessenecker. I loved reading about the many ways younger Christians are engaging in service to the poor. The New Zealand based movement, Servants to Asia’s Urban Poor, is described in some detail. The blending of a contemplative approach and a concern for justice seems admirable to me and appropriate for our time.

A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren. This 2004 book is an important presentation of the ideas that shape the emergent movement. The subtitle gives the feel of the book: “Why I am a missional + evangelical + post/protestant + liberal/conservative + mystical/poetic + biblical + charismatic/contemplative + fundamentalist/calvinist +anabaptist/anglican + methodist + catholic + green + incarnational + depressed-yet-hopeful + emergent + unfinished Christian.”

StormFront: The Good News of God by James V. Brownson, Inagrace T. Dietterich, Barry A. Harvery and Charles C. West. This is one more book in the “Gospel and our Culture Series,” which has provided several books for this paper. These authors use some interesting language, i.e. “storm” for some of the characteristics of our time.

Ideas for blog posts (April 22)

I have three ideas for blog posts this week.

(1) I'd love to hear more about how and where you have observed that spiritual formation happens in New Zealand. I'm particularly interested in the connection between prayer and spiritual formation. Any thoughts?

(2) I'd love to hear more about what you think is the significance of liminality. Thank you very much, Craig, for your clear and helpful summary of Alan Roxburgh's thoughts in the last minute of the audioconference. I'd love to hear more from you about why that chapter seemed significant to you, and I'd love to hear others' thoughts about the concept of liminality.

(3) We talked briefly about the idea of a third place. I believe one way a church with a building can serve its community is by providing space for a third place. I'd love to hear your comments about how you've seen churches do that. If you want to read what I wrote about the church as a third place in my thesis, here's where you can read it:
http://www.lynnebaab.com/academic.htm
Click on chapter 7. There is a section of that chapter entitled "A Third Place" which begins on page 190. The part that directly addresses the church as a third place is only three pages long. I just re-read that section, and I had forgotten that one characteristic of a third place, according to the people who originated the idea, is that a third place makes possible conversation that is open-ended, freewheeling, and not goal-oriented. It's thought-provoking to consider the place of that kind of conversation in a congregation. Here's the citation for the origin of the concept of a third place:
Oldenburg, R. & Brissett, D. (1982). The third place. Qualitative Sociology, 5(4), 265-284.
(Note the format of this citation is the APA format, not the Chicago format that our department requires. If you read the article and want to cite it for an assignment, you'll need to change the format of the citation.)

Ideas for blog posts (31 March)

Thanks for all the great discussion last night. I really appreciate the way you are engaging with the ideas in the readings.

I’ve got two ideas for blog posts this week. Of course, you are free to write about anything related to the missional church.

1. Last night we talked a bit about some of the dichotomies set up by the various authors, and we noted that some of them seem to be false dichotomies. For example, “more about prayer than planning,” in the first Stetzer (2006, p. 164) reading. I’d prefer to talk about prayer as a part of every stage of planning, prayer as a significant part of the way time is allocated in every planning meeting, and personal prayer for the congregation's plans as a major responsibility of all leaders of a congregation. Perhaps there are dichotomies like that one that you’d like to discuss in a blog post.

2. One of the ideas we didn’t discuss very much is the notion of a community being incarnational in its focus. I’d like to suggest that as a second option for blog posts this week. What do you think it means to be incarnational or to think in an incarnational way? What do you think it looks like in practice to be incarnational in your focus? In what ways is Jesus’ incarnation a model for us in ministry and in what ways is Jesus unique and not a model for us? What are the connections between incarnational ministry and the various characteristics of a missional church?

Some new books in the Otago library

When I knew I was going to be teaching this paper on the missional church, I ordered several dozen books for the University of Otago library. Some of them are directly related to the missional church, and others are simply about trends in church life. Some of them came in after I prepared the course book last spring. I spent a lot of the summer reading the books I’d ordered, and I want to tell you about some more of them. All of these are in the Otago library, so you can request them.

The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier by Tony Jones. I told you that I studied American emergent churches as a part of my PhD, and I loved this book. Jones does a great job describing the ways emergent churches are engaging in ministry in new ways. Because I resonate so strongly with what they're doing, I was surprised at the opposition they have received, and Jones explains the issues that have caused them to get criticism.

Glocalization: How Followers of Jesus Engage a Flat World by Bob Roberts, Jr. Roberts uses “glocal” to describe our new world – we’re part of a global world in so many new ways, but the local has become more significant as well. I wish I’d had this book in time to include it in the coursebook, because I think the global-local issues are so significant for missional churches.

Tribal Church: Ministering to the Missing Generation by Carol Howard Merritt. Merritt is an American Presbyterian minister in her 30s. She’s writing for mainline congregations who want to do a better job ministering to people in her age group and younger. Until I read her book, I hadn’t realized how often younger Christians in churches feel criticized by older Christians. She does a good job describing the debt challenges faced by her generation, which is one of several ways she believes the faith of younger Christians is impacted. I'm very curious if Christians in New Zealand in their 20s and 30s would resonate with what she writes.

Choosing Partnership, Sharing Ministry by Marcia Barnes Bailey. The author has served as a co-pastor of a church in the United States, and the book focuses on the benefits of shared pastoral roles. With the flattening of hierarchies, it seems to me that co-pastor roles are becoming more common.

The Church and the Dechurched: Mending a Damaged Faith by Mary Tuomi Hammond. The author uses “dechurched” to describe people who have lost a faith they valued or left a church community because of a bad experience. She has vivid stories about what happened to people that will break your heart.

Missional House Churches: Reaching Our Communities with the Gospel by J. D. Payne. The author interviewed people in 30 house churches around the United States.

A New and Right Spirit: Creating an Authentic Church in a Consumer Culture by Rick Barger. I’m very concerned about the ways church has become one more consumer commodity, so I was really glad to find a book that addresses that topic.

Mandate to Difference: An Invitation to the Contemporary Church by Walter Brueggemann. This book is a collection of talks Brueggemann gave in a variety of settings a few years ago. It’s not a systematic discussion of anything, but some of the topics relate to things we’re talking about in this paper.

The Missional Church in Context: Helping Congregations Develop Contextual Ministry edited by Craig Van Gelder. Eight essays give different viewpoints about how churches can minister in their own context more effectively, including multi-cultural settings.

Leadership Next: Changing Leaders in a Changing Culture by Eddie Gibbs. Gibbs discusses the ways leadership patterns in churches must change in order to engage with our culture.

Gracism: The Art of Inclusion by David A. Anderson. I am convinced that welcome and inclusion need to be discussed by congregations and need to be affirmed in new ways for our time. The author is an African-American who draws on his own experience as pastor of a multi-cultural church in Washington, DC.

More thoughts on what is church

In 1982, my husband and I, along with more than a dozen other young adults, were commissioned by our church (a big thriving Seattle church) to go to a small, aging congregation to try to help revitalize it. We, the younger crowd, felt that the first thing to do was to start small groups that would meet in people’s homes. The older crowd at our new church, mostly born in the first two decades of the twentieth century, thought Bible studies and prayer were a good idea, but they felt that all small groups should meet in the church building. They wondered how church leaders can exercise influence over what people believe and think if people are meeting in homes. As you can imagine, their attitude precipitated a lot of discussion about how and where God works and how and where church activities can and should happen.

In recent decades, I have observed a significant shift among Christians as they talk about where God works. We understand more clearly now that God works beyond the walls of a church building. And we see that God works even beyond what we consider to be the Christian community. I don’t know if any of you have seen the musical “Les Miz,” but there’s a line in it that has shaped popular thinking: “To love another person is to see the face of God.” That line has some truth in it. But how much truth?

I want you to think hard about how you define church. The definition that Tim proposed last night in the audioconference – the church is any group of people gathered to talk what matters to them (my paraphrase) – goes too far for me. In my view, the church has to have some commitment to Christ. However, it’s clear that the popular understanding of church has changed dramatically in the past one or two generations. We no longer believe an activity has to take place in a church building in order to be called church.

So spend some time pondering. Are the people gathered at Parachute the church? Or part of the church? Or an outreach from the church? Is a home group the church? Or only part of a larger church? Some of you talked last night about Christian practices or sacraments being necessary for a group of people to be considered the church. Which Christian practices do you believe to be essential for the church?

I recently heard a British man talk about the mission-shaped church movement called “fresh expressions” that is attached to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s office in the UK. He showed videos and slides of several “churches” that have been funded by the fresh expressions movement. One was a youth center with skateboard ramps. One was a group of people who gather once a week to bake bread and then eat it together. Both had arisen after ministers walked the streets of their community to try to figure out what that particular community needed as a gathering place centered around people’s spiritual needs. It was clear to me that the leaders of these two fresh expression churches were deeply motivated by Christ’s love, but it wasn’t clear how prominent Jesus was in the actual functioning of each church. So it made me wonder, in the same way that Tim’s definition of church makes me wonder, to what extent and in what ways does the place of Jesus need to be central in order for a gathering to be called "church"?

Next audioconference March 30

At the end of last night’s audioconference, I said something like, “See you next week.” I should have said, “next time,” because the next audioconference is two weeks away, on March 30. (Note that because this blog is hosted in the U.S., the blog post date says Monday, but I'm writing it in New Zealand on Tuesday.)

Ideas for this week's posts

This is going well! I'm very interested in the responses you all are posting. I very much appreciate your honesty and insights, and I hope you are all reading what the other students are posting. I was hoping we would be able to learn from each other, and that appears to be beginning to happen.

I have two ideas for blog posts for this week, and you're free to write about other things as well. Here's the first idea: someone gave me a link to a website: http://www.missionalnetworkweb.com/
I don't have time to look around that website this week. If some of you would like to look it over and see if there's anything helpful on it, feel free to do that. Give us the exact links to any articles you think are good and tell us why you think they're good.

Here's the second idea. Last week I was telling someone about this missional church paper, and I said, "I know what a missional church looks like, because I've been in one, but I don't know how to help a church become more missional." The person I was speaking to said, "You have to begin with people's view of God. It all depends on that." Based on the readings for next Monday, feel free to respond to the idea that the place to start is with people's view of God. Do you agree? Disagree? What about our view of God influences our understanding of being missional? How would you go about changing congregation members' (or small group members') view of God? What aspects of their view of God would you want to change?

Questions about journal entries

I've gotten two questions about the journal entries, so I must not have been clear in the coursebook. Sorry about that. I expect you to write a journal entry every week, and there are questions for each week. So the questions for the week before an audioconference are for one journal entry, and the questions for the week after an audioconference are for another journal entry. Let me know if you have more questions.

Thanks, Grahame and Craig

To Grahame and Craig, who were bold enough to be the first people to make posts on the blog, thanks so much for your thoughts.

As a follow-up to Craig's post, here's a question. Do you think Minatrea is equating mission-minded and maintenance? I'm not sure he was doing that, and I'm not sure I would equate being mission-minded with being focused on maintenance. It seems to me some churches are mission-minded and missional, and some churches are mission-minded and focused on maintenance. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this.

Another thought I had is that even the most missional-minded person has maintenance thoughts sometimes, and probably many people focused on maintenance sometimes think missionally. So perhaps sometimes we should say, "When I'm thinking along maintenance lines, I find myself worried about . . . " or "When a person is in maintenance mindset, they might say . . ." This would help us from thinking there are two categories of Christians or two categories of churches.

Some blog post ideas

One clarification about posting to this blog. You will be posting by clicking on "comments" below one of my blog posts.

One of the topics I'd like to see addressed in blog posts this week or next week is the question of what "maintenance" looks like in congregations. I see it most clearly when (1) people talk about what they fear and (2) when I listen to people pray for the needs of their congregation. So I'd be happy to see some of you address these questions: What are the fears that are often expressed by people who view maintenance as the major role for congregations today? What are the kinds of things people pray for when they are most concerned about maintenance? And you may want to address the related questions of what do people fear and what do they pray for when their concerns are missional?

You may have many other ways to illustrate what maintenance looks like in a congregation. I'd love to read your observations.

Here's another topic I'd like to see addressed in blog posts: What is the church? And how does your proposed definition help us connect with missional church issues?

Missional Church

Welcome to the Missional Church paper at the University of Otago. I'm looking forward to "meeting" you all tonight at the audioconference. I'm looking forward to the dialog we will have during the audioconferences and on this blog. Students at the 300 level are welcome to read this blog and make posts.

Students at the 400 level are required to make posts during most weeks of the semester. I set up the paper this way because I want you to learn from each other online as well as in the audioconferences. You can write about

• something you read about the missional church that you found interesting, either in an assigned reading for the class or elsewhere
• something we talked about in the audioconference that you want to follow up on
• questions you have about the missional church
• or other topics related to the missional church

Here's one thing I would really appreciate. I intended to order Steve Taylor's book, The Out of Bounds Church?, for the Otago library. In fact, I thought I ordered it, but evidently I forgot to. Some of you have undoubtedly read his book and some of you probably read his blog. I would appreciate comments about what you learned from his book, particularly as it relates to our discussions about the missional church. And if you see something interesting on his blog, please post a link on this blog for the rest of us.

For this first week, feel free to write about anything in the bulleted categories above or to write about Steve Taylor's book. If I think of more specific questions after the audioconference, I'll post those questions.