felix hominum

Missional SynchroBlog

What is Missional?

I think it is time to make a bigger effort to reclaim the term, a term which describe what happens when you and I replace the “come to us” invitations with a “go to them” life. A life where “the way of Jesus” informs and radically transforms our existence to one wholly focused on sacrificially living for him and others and where we adopt a missionary stance in relation to our culture. It speaks of the very nature of the Jesus follower.

To help reclaim it, I propose a synchronized blog for Monday, June 23rd on the topic, “What is Missional?”

There are any number of ways one could blog on this topic. You could illustrate what the term means, describe what it is not and how it is wrongly used, define the term, explore its misuses, explore its theological foundations, or you name it.

from the Blind Beggar via the Weary Pilgrim, who has a list of bloggers participating.

ps - Malcolm's post on the topic (which he refers to in the comments) can be found here.

Church of England postpones talk of evangelizing Muslims

But now the Church has put off the debate on recruiting Muslims until next February at the earliest and will discuss the promotion of churches as tourist attractions instead.

from the Telegraph

A Call to Pray for Mission in the Diocese of Edmonton

A Call to Pray for Mission in the Diocese

The Church Planting Mission Development Working Group of Executive Council invites you to a day of prayer. The day of prayer will take place on Saturday June 14th from 10:00-2:00pm at St. Mary’s Anglican Church 11203-68 St. Please bring a bag lunch, refreshments will be provided. For further information, call the synod office at 439-7344.

A few folks who have a heart for church planting and mission have been getting together.  It would be great if others could join together for prayer on this day.  Spend some time praying and listening for God's direction regarding mission for the diocese of Edmonton.

some food for thought on local mission...

One of my favourite reads is the Weary Pilgrim.  Ron often has very interesting things to say.  I was reminded of a recent post of his this afternoon, after a local get together of some Anglicans who are interested in mission. Just a bit of a discussion starter, that's all:

Get rid of your building...move back into your neighborhoods where you live, meet in peoples houses (and no I'm not talking house church ). Meet around a meal, invite the neighbors. Talk about issues in the neighborhood/ community. Talk about life, community, work...weave common threads into the conversation. Talk about the Kingdom, Jesus his redemptive imagination of a new creation. Invite, eat and talk...something very mysterious and communal happens in the midst of food and conversation.

Now if you've spread your church out into the surrounding community and neighborhood like salt and yeast, you're wondering how to keep it all together. Years ago that might have been an issue, but in the world of high speed technology it's not. Find someone who has some techno savvy, a people person, a connector, who can be your community network person. (this might be your only paid staff person, it would be money well spent ).

Maybe once a month, rent a hall, get together as a larger community...share stories about what the smaller groups are doing. Have an agape meal, a huge potluck.

Get rid of your paid pastor... (There, that should be good for allot of hate mail), but honestly in this day and age do we need to pay someone to teach. I've been in the church for almost 30 years, and really I've heard nothing new...it's mostly recycled, and like doing another lap on the track. There is great teaching that can be accessed on the Internet, allot of colleges and seminaries have downloads, pod casts. Again this is something your network guy could set up. And hey, lets release people to use there spiritual gifts. Release people to teach, do pastoral visits, healing ministries...

Make Mission your Mission...Now that you have eliminated most of your expenses build the Kingdom. Make mission a core value, make it apart of the DNA of your community. Mission should not be a ministry, it needs to be relocated into the heart of the community. Think local and global. Make it the responsibility of the smaller groups in the neighborhood/ community to react to any needs they see in there locality. Look at global projects the larger community can invest in.

Happy Easter: Pope baptizes Muslim-born man at Eastertide

EGYPTIAN-born Magdi Allam, one of Italy’s most famous and controversial journalists and commentators who renounced Islam and converted to Roman Catholicism was baptized at the weekend by Pope Benedict XVI in a sermon watched by thousands around the globe including his native Egypt.

A deputy editor at the Milan newspaper, Corriere della Sera, he has built his career crusading against what he calls the “inherent” violence in Islam and championing Israel’s existence. He has been honoured for encouraging tolerance between cultures, but his baptism angered some in the Muslim world with his high-profile conversion in an Easter vigil service led by Pope Benedict at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

story here

Church planting for Anglicans in the 21st Century - simple version

While I am still distilling the notes and conversations from the recent Vital Church Planting conference, I thought I would offer a Coles' Notes version of some things to consider:

• People don't just go to church anymore.
• We don't rule a vast empire anymore.
• We don't need to make more churches like the ones which are declining.
• We need to reach the unchurched.  That is, not try to reach those nominal Anglicans who will only come at Christmas or Easter, but those people who are not yet Christian.

One of the things which may frighten and confound Anglicans is the need to face the fact that our branch of the church is in steep decline in the western world.  Apart from the wonderful graph presented at General Synod which showed steady decline over the past several decades, in our own Diocese we have seen a 10% drop in attendance in the last 4 years.  Now there may be fruitful time spent on analyzing why this is so.  But such analysis, in the long run, will eventually boil down to this:  we are either afraid of, or confused by, "Evangelism". 

The first line of defense against evangelism is to offer a caricature.  "I don't want to shove something down someone else's throat", or  "I don't want to be pushy."  We point to what we think of as poor examples of evangelism, and then we claim that since this is what evangelism is, we should not do it.  It is a caricature - it is not an excuse to shy away from the real thing.  What does this mean for church planting?  We have tended to assume that if we simply get a building and start offering weekly Eucharist, people will come out of the woodwork because there must be a certain number of Anglicans in any given area.  Surely another Eucharist will draw them out, the church will grow, and soon there will be 200 children in the Sunday School like there were in 1956.  The reason such churches grew in the 1950s was that waves of British immigrants arrived on our shores and filled the nearest Anglican parish. 

We didn't make new disciples, we just did large scale sheep stealing from the UK.

Vital Church Planting

A conference in Toronto at the end of February.  Here's the site.

Two of us will be heading out from Edmonton. We expect folks I know in T.O. to give us the usual Upper Canadian hospitality.  We'll be staying at Wycliffe College (an alma mater mei) for a few days during the conference.

Do Anglicans plant churches?

Anglican Journal Letters: who is responsible for new church members?

From the letters to the editor of the latest Anglican Journal

Dear editor,

As rector of a small parish mostly full of wonderful senior citizens, I was recently horrified to hear a younger clergy person say that he regularly asks his seniors what they are doing to replace themselves! How is that their problem? Why blame the people who are there for the people who are not there?  Most senior Anglicans are not aggressive sales people, and might feel quite embarrassed to be pressured into such a task.

The seniors in my parish are open-minded, intelligent and conscientious about fitness, charity and inclusiveness, among other things. They are interested in the world and its people, and they love God’s creation. They are mostly very accepting, for instance of blessing gays and lesbians (though they are less certain about gay marriage). In our tourist town, we regularly welcome visitors from around the world, and these senior Anglicans are ambassadors of goodwill as they eagerly listen to who people are and wish them well on their journeys, expressing pleasure at their visit, and enthusiasm for them as interesting individuals.

I could hardly think of a worse approach to such a group than to pressure them to replace themselves! They work so hard and are so generous in order to keep the place going. How is it now their job to make sure there are others coming up to replace them? On top of the obvious cruelty of such a stance, there is also the forced focus on their demise that such an approach implies. Hopefully my colleague’s approach to our precious Anglican seniors is not widespread.

This letter raises a number of significant issues.  I want us to think about just a few of the  questions raised.  This is not so much directed at the letter as sparked by it.  Who is 'responsible' for bringing in new members?  Or to put it another way, do you ever retire from the great commission? 

One of the marvelous charts we didn't have a chance to address at the last General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada dealt with the steady decline of church membership.  It was a graphically beautiful and simple piece of art - just a black-diamond ski-hill covering 40 years of descent.  There was not a blip during the so-called "Decade of Evangelism" (anyone remember that?). At the recent synod of Montreal, the bishop made special mention of the dismal statistics of his diocese over the past number of years.

So who is 'responsible' for those who are not in church? First the language needs to be changed to something, well, something more "gospelesque".  To suggest that members need to 'replace themselves' is, as the writer of the letter points out, the wrong approach.  It hints that the purpose of the church is to perpetuate itself as an institution, rather than joyfully help others into a reconciling relationship with God through Christ, and to live out a life in the Spirit.

I do, however, want to talk about the deeper angle of the writer's question:  "How is it now their job to make sure there are others coming up to replace them?"  It is never our job merely to replace ourselves (that criticism is correct), but it has always been our job to make disciples of those who are not yet disciples.  I would suggest that it is part of every Christian's call to witness to Gospel to those who are unaware of Christ.  One never retires from the Great Commission, just as one never retires from the Great Commandment.

One of the catch-22 moments of church life comes when we realize that we are working hard to keep the place going. This is very tricky, but I think we need to look at such a situation carefully.  I'm simply trying to work out some of the issues that are involved for many churches in this position.  If we focus our efforts on making new disciples, won't that answer the question?  In the long run, a church which does not have an emphasis on evangelism will of course find itself working hard (and harder) to keep the place going.  On a purely practical level, a membership which does not actively seek to make new disciples will find itself with dwindling human resources, and will at a certain point find itself unable to even simply "keep the place going".  However, a church which seeks to make new disciples will be able to share the same tasks of ministry over a greater number of people - that church can keep going and even do more.  10 hands can do this much to feed the poor,  20 hands can do that much.

So whose job is it?  And even phrasing it as a 'job' says something about our attitude toward the task.  I'll stop now for minute...

Jim and Casper Go to Church - book review

An atheist and a Christian do a road trip around Evangelical Church-land in America.  They take along their laptops and decide to record the experience.  The result is "Jim and Casper Go to Church", a short and easy read which is a bit of a religious travelogue through a smattering of Christian churches.  Jim, of Off The Map, wants to know, really know, what an atheist thinks when he or she walks into a church service.

They start out big, with a visit to Rick Warren's Saddleback, which is on the corner of Purpose Drive ("yes, those are the actual street names", p.1) and Saddleback Drive.  On the west coast they visit the Dream Center, and then the current incarnation of Mosaic, where they have a brief (and seemingly unproductive) chat with Erwin McManus.  In Chicago they go from classic Presbyterian to inner urban - from "King James" to "w'sup, Coach".

i didn't find that there were many surprises in this book.  On the one hand, a sophisticated and educated atheist goes to a variety of Christian expressions, and finds the various faults which they embody.  Fair enough.  There are enough specific "techniques" which the various branches of the vine use on a regular basis.  My favorite ritual is described like this:

...I waited for the moment we had come to expect at the close of every church .  We call it the "breaking-voice phenomenon."  For some reason, the pastor ends the service sounding as if he's about to cry.  Christians are largely inured to this.  It's so common that we either endure it or enjoy it because it's the tribal signal that services are almost done. (55)

So is it just a church-bashing exercise? As St Paul says, by no means!  What Jim Henderson wants to communicate is a two-fold proposal.  First, Christians are largely unaware of how their "services" look to the outsider who is unchurched.  It's the sort of principle that, I believe, you either get or don't get.  Second, Jim tries to reshape our vocabulary.  Rather than seeing Casper as "lost", the reader is encouraged to see him first as a person, not as a project.  Jim uses language like "a person whom God misses".  Rather like the Father "missing" the prodigal son, rather than focusing on the son as "lost".  What we need to do, says Jim, is to "defend the space" of friendship and discussion and listening to the unchurched, rather than focus on the "place" of worship.

The heart of the book is not the critique of various churches and worship styles, but rather the modeling of a conversation between a Christian and an atheist.  The book can raise a number of questions:

• do we think our "church services" are helpful to the unchurched?
• should they be?  or should evangelism take place primarily in another "space"?
• what is the experience of the outsider walking into our church?
• do we even connect at all, personally, with people outside a Christian circle?

Overall, I'd give it a 6-7 out of 10 simply as a book to read, but closer to an 8 as a tool for starting a conversation within my own church about "us and them".

Next up is a return to Budziszewski...