Wednesday, August 24, 2005

The Church On The Other Side, Chapter 2

Well, it's been almost a month and a half since I talked about the first chapter. I need to get back to this pet project - chewing on McLaren's book called The Church On The Other Side.

Strategy #1 (also known as chapter one) stated this: Distinguish between renewed, restored and reinvented churches, and focus on the last.

The next chapter talks about Strategy #2, which is: Clarify and simplify to "more Christians, better Christians" in authentic missional community, for the good of the world. Or in other words, as the title of this chapter states, "Redefine Your Mission."

McClaren first begins this chapter with a brief synopsis of the history of the Church and attributes the actions of the Church up to this point partly to the fact that the Church often does not have a good grip of what its mission is, or even why it should have a mission in the first place. Because of this, sometimes the Church has acted in opposite ways, one right after the other; other times the Church has acted in opposite ways at the same time.

These days, it seems that every church has some type of a mission statement or purpose statement. I've been in ministry for over ten years now, and I remember that right about the time that I started in ministry was the time when it became the right thing to do for churches to develop a nice, succinct, five point mission statement that embodied different purposes that the church exists for. However, the problem is that it doesn't mean that you are actually going to attempt to fulfill your purpose just by writing down your mission. It's kind of like New Year's Resolutions: just because you put down a list of things you resolve to do/not to do, doesn't mean that automatically you will change and be the person you want to be. You have to have some kind of a process, some kind of set goals that help you to baby step your way towards the purpose. Unfortunately, I didn't see this happen in pretty much any church I've been on staff. It's like we develop a nice purpose statement so we can put it on our website or etch it in our glass walls (which Saddleback Church has done a good job of doing), but it doesn't go much further than that.

Then, of course, came the Purpose-Driven Church, followed closely by the Purpose-Driven Youth Ministry, the Purpose-Driven Children's Ministry, the Purpose-Driven Worship Ministry, all the way to the Purpose-Driven Ministry to Portugese Chocaholics Who Slobber All Over Themselves Every Time They See A Hershey Bar.

McLaren, in this chapter, says that four values will come up to the forefront in "the church on the other side". These values are: (1) More Christians; (2) Better Christians; (3) Authentic Missional Community; (4) For The Good Of The World. When McLaren first wrote this book (at the time it was entitled Reinventing Your Church), he had only the first two values as coming to the forefront. Now that he is heavily involved in the Emergent conversation, the last two have come up as important.

And this is what really drew me to the idea of an emergent church. The first time I ever even heard about the emergent movement was at a Youth Specialties convention that I went to with the youth minister I was on staff with. I was only out of youth ministry myself for six months, and I went to the convention because Crowder and Tomlin were going to be there - but as I listened to these youth ministers and speakers talk, I felt like I might as well have been at a Star Trek Convention. What they were speaking about was that unintelligible to me. A few years later, I picked up a copy of Christianity Today that talked about the Emergent movement, and the part that started me on this journey (although I had read some books that had interested me in a fresh, new way of looking at faith, like Mike Yaconelli's books Dangerous Wonder and Messy Spirituality) was reading McLaren talking about "the circles". If you don't know about the circles, let me quote from the article "The Emergent Mystique" from Christianity Today:

----> Yet recently McLaren has started to sketch the outlines of his vision of a postmodern church. He sketches a big circle labeled "self," a smaller circle next to it labeled "church," and a tiny circle off to the side labeled "world."

"This has been evangelicalism's model," he says. "Fundamentally it's about getting yourself 'saved'—in old-style evangelicalism—or improving your life in the new style. Either way, the Christian life is really about you and your needs. Once your needs are met, then we think about how you can serve the church. And then, if there's anything left over, we ask how the church might serve the world."

He starts drawing again. "But what if it went the other way? This big circle is the world—the world God loved so much that he sent his Son. Inside that circle is another one, the church, God's people chosen to demonstrate his love to the world. And inside that is a small circle, which is your self. It's not about the church meeting your needs, it's about you joining the mission of God's people to meet the world's needs." <----

This was revolutionary to me. (For another take on laying a missional foundation for the church, check out the first few chapters of Dan Kimball's book Emerging Worship: Creating Worship Gatherings For New Generations. I will try to find the graphic I made to explain this missional way of thinking and post it.)

Anyway, in this chapter, I find it interesting that McLaren refers to Rwanda as an example of the first two values (more Christians, better Christians) not being successful apart from the other two values - because Saddleback Church is trying to become the discipler of the entire country of Rwanda (August 22nd issue of Time Magazine). The other thing that struck me as interesting was the section on the seeker-sensitive movement. He says this: "In all our talk about seeker-sensitive churches and services, I fear we have neglected one small detail: seeker-sensitive Christians. Christians in the new church must really love non-Christians."

How do we change the church? If we focus on making the Christians we already have "better Christians", I'm afraid that the church will become even more "bubblicious" (living in a bubble), and will have no idea how to relate to those who are unchurched. If we focus completely on "more Christians", then we have a church of immature Christians who need constant milk in order to survive, which will then cause those who are "deeper" (for lack of a better term) in their faith to leave because they aren't getting fed. That's why it's so important to focus on the last two values, because when we get our eyes off of ourselves, our own needs, the fact that the church isn't meeting our needs, and we instead focus on God's plan for us in helping to bring the world to redemption - everything else will fall into place.

Chapter 3 - coming up next!

3 comments:

Rochelle said...

I liked this sentence in the chapter "We,with our"faith" have lost our saltiness and so, our Lord said,we are fit for nothing and should be thrown out, to be trampled under foot by men (Matthew 5:13)..We deserve to be trampled when we claim a faith of such power and show so little of it in our lives. It's hard to change our mindset to that of the smaller circle being self and reaching out to non-christians in the world, the bigger circle

Adam said...

Very true. The worst thing about this whole dilemma is that if we actually did focus on the larger circle, then ultimately we would have our needs met, because looking out for other's interests above our own truly satisfies us. If we are only looking out for ourselves, we will never be satisfied, because there's always a bigger house, the Jones' always have more stuff, and there's always something else to buy or do or achieve.

Adam said...

I didn't really complete my thought. By worst thing about the whole dilemma, I meant that the worst thing is failing to realize that if we focus on others rather than ourselves, that ultimately we would be self-fulfilled.