Psalm 137 For The Year 2010

Alan Roxburgh shares this poem that was written by a participant at a conference he was leading a few years ago.

137 For 2010

In the midst of this crazy world I look around and
wonder what has happened.
How do I talk to a kid with a ring in his nose?
Does “The Old Rugged Cross” mean anything to him?
He asks me to sing a song about “my Jesus”.
From what I can tell he is from another planet,
or am I the stranger here?
I think it’s time to sell the wurlitzer.
So how do I tell Martians about Jesus,
when the only language I speak is 1955?
How do I write a headline for them
that doesn’t screw up the Good News?
I kind of wish it were the way it was,
but it’s not. So I need to figure out
how to sing the old lyrics
with a whole new tune.

Missional MapMaking

Alan Roxburgh has a writing project that’s posted on the Allelon website titled Missional MapMaking: The Art of the Missional-Shaped Church.

In chapter one he discusses the assumptions we bring to life - assumptions about what the world is like, who we are, what is of value and importance, how to get along in life, etc. In western cultures we live under the assumptions of what is often called “modernity.” They are assumptions we inherited from the Enlightenment project and the philosophy of René Descartes. You may not know much about the Enlightenment or who René Descartes was, but if you’ve seen a recent job posting (either secular or religious) or if you’ve been to church lately, then you’ve seen the Enlightenment and the philosophy of Descartes in practice.

Does this sound familiar?: Wanted, self-starter who is highly motivated, can multi-task and is seeking to maximize his/her potential in a setting that offers great advancement opportunities. Or have you read “40 Days of Purpose” or “Your Best Life Now”? Whatever you may think of the content of any of those examples, they all share a common way of looking at the questions above and they all answer them from that fundamental understanding of life. Most modern preaching is more of the same, by the way (even those of you who assume you are giving good old fashioned expository/exegetical sermons. No, especially you).

Roxburgh writes:

We’re born into a world and cultures that already have maps. …[F]or us in the West that map has been modernity and that modernity in many ways has profoundly reshaped, even deformed, the Christian imagination in our culture. From birth we’re formed and shaped by the maps of the culture into which we’re born to the point where we assume this map (in our case modernity) simply describes the way the world is. Our cultural map of modernity shapes how we see the world, ourselves, and our relationships. These maps “make sense” because we a live inside their world.

We don’t know how profoundly we have been influenced by the “maps” of the world we’ve been given because this is all we’ve known. As a fish doesn’t notice the water it swims in (until, of course, it is out of it), so we do not fully understand the culture we swim in, the presumptions we make about life. But as Roxburgh says, the map of modernity has, in some cases, deformed our understanding of God, life and the church, even many of the religious expressions of this modern mindset. Roxburgh calls us to become new mapmakers.

[W]e are in a time when the maps of modernity with their promises of management, control, and predictability are no longer sufficient to describe the places where we find ourselves. The rapidity and extent of these changes create disequilibrium, anxiety, confusion and disorientation among people in North American culture, and this means that our maps of modernity again need to be re-imagined. Once more we are required to become mapmakers. In order to move into God’s future, we must assume that the maps we have inherited no longer adequately describe the realities we face. We must release the desire to copy our inherited maps and … learn to listen to the stories of pioneers so that we can make new maps. In this way, we can re-shape the imagination of God’s people.

Check out chapter one of Missional MapMaking here. You can find the Introduction and other chapters here.

Missional Leadership

Alan Roxburg has written a paper on Missional Leadership that’s being posted in several installments on the Allelon website.

Part One is already up.  If you’re a fan of John Maxwell and the like then you need to check out Roxburg’s paper.  In it he challenges prevailing church leadership models that are based on business or social models and even the “fourfold ministry” approach that many gather from Ephesians 4.

Leadership, says Roxburg, is not something based upon timeless principles or certain character qualities.  Instead it is oriented toward particular spaces and contexts.  His main thesis is:

The primary work of leadership is to continually stand in the place (space) where it is compelled to ask the question of what God is about among this group of people who comprise this local church in this specific context at this particular time.

Leadership is theological, as it is always asking what God is doing in the world.  It is also always contextual - for a given place and time.  According to Roxburg, the “space” that Christian leadership takes is “the space in between.”  Christian leadership is neither married to the world, as it was in Christendom, nor is it relegated to the private spiritual life (as opposed to the public secular life).  Instead, it is Incarnational and priestly.  The church exists in the world to stand in between God and an estranged world to draw them together.  As Jesus entered the world, fully Divine, yet participating fully in our humanity, so the church now exists as the body of Christ - participating in the Divine, yet still identifying with the humanity of the world.

Thus, Christian leadership is not simply about leading in the church (creating church programs, leading church choirs, leading youth group activities) but is about leading the church into the world.  It is about being a kingdom of priests in your own local context.

He closes with this:

If this is the description of leadership, it is important, right at the beginning, to understand why leadership in the church is almost universally interpreted and practiced as that which takes place in the inner space of church rather than the space in-between. Why was this tension, present in the creation stories and the
Incarnation, dissolved into an understanding of leadership as that which takes place in and for the church?

I suspect he’ll begin to answer those questions in Part Two.  Check out the paper (Part One is seven pages), and let me know what you think.

This Week on Shapevine

Man, o man, is this ever a good week to tune in to Shapevine.com. Tonight (April 21st) at 6 PM CST you can catch Sally Morgenthaler. Tomorrow afternoon (April 22nd) at 3 PM CST you can have an online convo with Len Sweet who will be talking to Peter Rollins.

[Funny side story: Last summer I was flying to San Antonio to the Southern Baptist Convention and on the plane I was reading Peter Rollins’ How (Not) To Speak Of God. I noticed that the guy sitting next to me kept glancing over at what I was reading. He introduced himself as Danny Forshee and we had a nice conversation. Then he leaned up not-so-quietly to talk to the guy sitting in front of him (who he obviously knew) and proceeded to tell him that I was emergent <GASP!!>. I got a kick out of that.]

Anyway, if you want to get your emergent on, or if you want to be a part of some interesting conversations (you can even ask questions), check out Shapevine this week.

Old New School Evangelism

David Hayward reminds us that what we often think are the “tried and true” methods of evangelism aren’t so tried and true. They may actually seem a little absurd.

Check out more of his humor and art at his blog.

Things You Need To Know About You

Today I want to point you to the blog of Ernest Goodman. Ernest is a missionary in Western Europe. I consistently learn oodles of stuff about myself, about how I approach my faith, about how I lead others in living out lives as followers of Jesus, and especially about things I need to quit doing and things I need to start doing in reaching out to others around me, by reading what he writes.

When you visit his blog, go with your defenses down. Go as a learner. And be ready to hear the heart of someone who can teach the church in America a lot about how to reach our own culture, as explained from the perspective of one who is reaching out to people in a not-so-different culture.

Kiss The Ring

Within the past year I’ve heard the following statements:

• Contemporary Baptists need to recapture a sound ecclesiology (doctrine of the church)
• Baptists (and other free-church traditions) have no ecclesiology

The first I’ve heard from a number of Baptist sources, predominantly from those who don’t happen to like the ecclesiological expression of a particular person or group or think that such a person or group has lost their sense of “Baptistness.”

The second is my paraphrase of something N.T. Wright wrote in response to the ongoing fracture facing the worldwide Anglican Communion, particularly in reference to churches who are abandoning one diocese for another of their own choosing. He was suggesting that Anglicans are not like those free-church types who have no ecclesiology.

I’m thinking of writing a book on Baptist ecclesiology. It will consist of a title page, table of contents and index. Mostly blank pages in between. I’ll charge $11.95 and include a pen so that the pages can at least be used for notes. Or doodling. Okay. Maybe I’m kidding. Maybe.

We Baptists tend to think of the doctrine of the church almost exclusively in terms of how we govern ourselves. Words that go along with our thoughts on the church include “local church autonomy” and “congregational” or “democratic.” The language of the SBC’s Baptist Faith and Message primarily uses the language of organization to describe the church which can be seen in the primary verbs used in its statement on the church, words like: “associated by,” “governed by,” and “operates under.”

It also lists three things the church does: 1) observes the ordinances, 2) exercises the gifts, rights and privileges given to it, and 3) extends the gospel. So, following our confessional statement the church consists of its polity (or governmental make-up) and its practice.

I suspect that when Baptist thinkers say we must recover out Baptistness they are thinking primarily in terms of polity and when men like N.T. Wright imply that Baptists have no ecclesiology that he’s thinking in terms of practice.

I want to dig a little deeper into the church in both of these areas, but before I do I want to tackle an issue that needs to come first, at least in our thinking (because our practice will follow out of it), and that is the matter of authority. I figure I’ll need to break all of this up into at least four or five posts. I hope you’ll think through some of these things with me. I know that waaaaay back a long time ago I had some readers who come from a more high-church perspective (at least one Catholic and one Episcopalian, if they haven’t bailed out on me yet). The rest of us free-churchers can gang up on you two and really let you have it! And maybe you can give some of it back.

Last Minute Opportunity

Today at 3 PM Central, 4 PM Eastern, go log into Shapevine (www.shapevine.com) and listen to Reggie McNeal for free. Earlier in the week they had Andrew Jones. Others in their lineup include Ed Stetzer, Alan Hirsch, Len Sweet, Sally Morganthaler and others. How cool is that?

Slavery? In Our World?

According to Free The Slaves there are 27 million slaves in the world today, though there is nowhere in the world today in which slavery is legal. Instead slavery is referred to in a variety of ways: debt bondage, bonded labor, attached labor, restavec, forced labor, indentured servitude, and human trafficking. The US State Department recognizes the reality of worldwide human trafficking and says that there are between 15-20,000 non-US citizens who are being trafficked in the US. Most slaves worldwide are women and children.

But what can an American do about it? Most instances of human trafficking occur in India, east Asia or Africa. How can an average person in the US make a difference? Let me make some suggestions.

First, become aware. A good one-stop resource site can be found at the Not For Sale Campaign. Learn, and then speak out. Express your concerns to your governmental representatives. But in the end, the State Department is already aware of the problem and political forces are already at work to bring pressure on those who deal in human trafficking.

Our other options will challenge our economic interests. One of the reasons there is such a thing as forced labor is because Americans demand everything to be as inexpensive as possible. The Levi’s you wear are likely made in another country by a woman who works 14-16 hour days for wages that even she and her family cannot live on. You see, the US has labor laws that protect people from this sort of thing. A great many other countries around the world do not, and we don’t complain because it benefits our pocketbooks.

But Christians must serve a higher cause than economic prosperity. Some things are more important than saving a few dollars here and there. So pay attention to the things you buy. Is it made in Sri Lanka? Bangladesh? India? China? If it is there is a good chance slave labor (or slave-like labor) helped produce it. Can we knowingly participate in that? Some will object that we really have no choice. But do we understand that that sort of language is the language of slavery? Do we really have no choice? Even in our city of 20,000 there is at least one second-hand store.

Lastly, we must break our own slavery to things. Yes, clothes are a necessity, but clothes are still made by tailors and can still be found from sources other than usual ones. As a parent with small children I’ve become more aware of how much of the stuff that is advertised to them on TV is a) worthless junk, and b) made in some impoverished country so that Americans can happily buy them for next-to-nothing. Perhaps we need to turn our televisions off so that we are not inundated with the constant barrage of advertising that feeds into the problem.

Christmas is coming. What sort of choices will we make in our purchases? My wife and I have committed that we will no longer buy the cheap junk for our kids just because it makes their eyes light up for 30 seconds - only for the thing to be thrown in a corner shortly thereafter. It isn’t worth it either economically for us as a family or conscientiously when we consider who likely made it and at what personal cost. Our Sunday School class at church usually has a dirty Santa gift exchange with a limit of $5 or $10. This year we’ve committed to pool our collective $5-$10 and use it to help either a local ministry, person in need, or some other missions or benevolence cause around the globe.

These things may provide some examples of where we can start. Where will you start?

The Gospel For A Community

I remember sitting in my seminary preaching lab when Dr. Grant Lovejoy told us that most Baptist preaching breaks down into one of the following: pray more, read your Bible more, give more, witness more.  Pretty true.  And one thing each of those has in common is that the emphasis is on the individual exercise of those things.

That’s because we tend to overwhelmingly view the Christian life as an individual endeavor.  But I think that individualism comes more from American culture than from the nature of the good news, the Biblical message and apostolic teaching.  I’ve been teaching a Bible study through Hebrews.  When the author of Hebrews wanted to address the threat of people in the church abandoning their faith he didn’t preach a good "pray more, read your Bible more, give more, witness more" message.  He challenged them to band together for mutual encouragement and accountability.  "But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin" (Heb. 3:13, ESV).

The gospel and the Christian life is not something we were meant to have a go at on our own.  But modern churches are often structured such that we continue to live largely isolated lives.  This is especially true the larger the church is.  I’ve known quite a few people who wanted to join a big church so that they could "get lost in the crowd."  But even in smaller churches our structures often keep us isolated from meaningful contact with one another.  We come.  We sit.  We sing.  We listen.  We leave.  And many won’t have any contact with anyone else from their church until the next official meeting time.  How is it possible, in that context, to "exhort one another every day?"  Could it be that in missing that we find one of the reasons for our own "hardening by the deceitfulness of sin?"  What would a gospel living community look like?  What would have to change in how we currently think of and practice the life of the church?  Are these things possible in the context of our present cultural situation?

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