discernment – Page 2 – Salvaged Faith

I have now been a part of my church community for three whole years. It is amazing how fast time has gone by and how much we have accomplished with one another.
As I reflect upon my time in ministry, I feel very blessed. We have been a family. We have worked together. We worship and study and minister. And through it all, there has been almost no conflict!

I have to admit… that last statement makes me a little uncomfortable. In part, I feel like we have been “playing nice” with one another for some time. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wonder sometimes if I have done too much comforting of the afflicted and not enough afflicting of the comfortable.

During this season of Epiphany we have been exploring Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians and it provided an excellent opportunity to talk about conflict. While Paul urges the people to be united and not divided in heart, I wanted to make sure that my church heard that conflict, in and of itself, is not bad. It is a reality. We will have differences of opinion. We will have varying perspectives. That is a good thing. How we deal with conflict is what gets us into trouble. Paul’s problem is not with the differences, but the fact that their differences have pitted them against one another; he urges them to seek a common unity in the cross of Christ.

As Christians, we have to be able to speak what we know. We have to be able to listen to what other people have to say. We have to dive into the Bible and let it be our foundation. We need to let the Holy Spirit guide us. All of these are good ways of handling conflict.

But we haven’t always let those things be our guide. And past conflicts have in many ways left this congregation tired and worn out. And so we choose not to engage anymore. We choose to be quiet. We choose to not participate.

I was reminded by a friend this week that what will destroy the church is not opposition from without, but indifference within. When we are content to sit back and let others make decisions… when we are afraid to speak the truth… when we don’t feel like we have anything to contribute… that is when the church should be worried.

While I am grateful for not having huge problems to deal with, I also want my congregation to know it is okay to speak up.

Speak up if we are going too slow or too fast. Speak up if you don’t understand. Speak up if you have a question. Speak up if you disagree. Speak up if you agree. Just participate. Be engaged. And know that every single one of you – from the quietest to the most outspoken – is a part of this Body of Christ… each of you are important and vital. Each of you has something to offer. Don’t be afraid.

I wrote those words a few days ago. And this morning, I have been glued to my computer as I watch the protests in Egypt.

Egyptians protest in central Cairo today.
Photograph: Khaled El Fiqi/EPA
(from guardian.co.uk)

A commentator on the live Al Jazeera English broadcast said that these protests are so unprecedented because for so long, the Egyptians sat back and were not involved. They had become complacent and indifferent.

And then, they found their voice. A number of people have said that the Egyptians are no longer afraid. They are welcoming the tanks on the streets… it is a dare to continue protesting and they are taking up the challenge.

People from many different walks of life have come together today to protest the regime that has been in control in Egypt. Young and old, religious and non-religious, men and women have taken to the streets all across the country. There are men in suits and in jeans and t-shirts. Conflict is rampant…

Some are peacefully present. Some stop in prayer. Some hurl rocks. Some shout. Even in the face of lines of communication being shut down, they are not afraid to speak and to continue to find ways to get their message out. What has troubled me today is how violent these protests have turned. Years of pent up anger and frustration are being spilled out through fires and projectiles being thrown. Violence from the police and army and violence from protestors feed on one another.

Today, the conflict that has erupted is good. The greviances of the people should be heard. But let us pray that both people and government might find peaceful ways of resolving this conflict, of talking and communcating, of finding a way forward.

In this installment, I want to talk about some of the “best practices” that I see coming out of emerging, missional, and postmodern churches. Some of these practices are mentioned in Diana Butler Bass’ book, Christianity for the Rest of Us, but they also come from Kester Brewin’s, Signs of Emergence. A few of the “best practices” are ones that I have been introduced to as I have been in conversation with pastors across the country.

First, I think in emergent churches there is a deep shift towards becoming a community of practitioners. Rather than offering services to be consumed, these congregations invite individuals to become a part of a communal pilgrimage. Or as Dan Kimball claims, the emerging church will have to teach people “that they are the church and that they don’t simply attend or go to one.”

Faith becomes “a craft learned over time in community,” according to Bass, as she describes the Seattle Church of the Apostles which takes seriously this communal pilgrimage. Realizing that many in the community had no experience whatsoever with Christianity, they developed a process called The WAY, focused on creating pilgrims rather than members. In the year long journey, “the goal is to help them at their own pace to come into a living relationship with Jesus Christ that takes over the center of their life.”

As I have seen this lived out, on the ground, many emergent faith communities are actually small groups that are connected to more institutional churches. In some ways, I think of them as that magic 10% of the people who get it and who really want to live out their faith. As Taylor Burton Edwards has talked about Wesleyan missional groups and accountability groups and class meetings – in some ways he has encouraged people to focus on those people who want to take the deeper plunge. Their journey and witness can become a catalyst for other transformations in the lives of your congregation members and in people completely unconnected to the church. Praxis rather than doctrine rules this shift.

Another “best practice” is that these churches take seriously their location. Kester Brewin describes these churches as adaptable systems that resist standardization. While the modern scientific perspective took something from one context and directly applied it to another, the postmodern realizes that cookie cutter ministry will not work and that each church needs to be authentic to its own location.

For example, Bass describes an Episcopal church that began a Hispanic congregation for new immigrants. In their worship practices, and especially in communion, they felt they needed to pay attention to what it means to be “home”:

Think of the joy of going home to the house you grew up in, with the smell of your mother’s cooking in the kitchen, the tastes of food, the sounds of family. Here, like your mother’s table, the Lord’s table welcomes you home. Here we are an extended family in the Spirit through communion. You are all members of God’s house.

That might seem comforting to us who fondly remember what it is like to be gathered around a parent’s dinner table. But how much more welcoming is it for a community of people who are far from the homes they grew up in. How much more inviting is that statement for a people who are creating a new home in unfamiliar territory. When you are disoriented and alone, the reminder that God welcomes us into a wider family is powerful. The goal is not to market to a specific audience or offer a product; rather the church must look seriously at how the gospel comes alive within the experiences of the people.

In Indianapolis last year, I was able to immerse myself in the Earth House Collective and Lockerbie Central United Methodist Church. They recognized that their neighborhood was quickly changing and that their dying congregation needed to adapt. So they transformed their basement into a restaurant and their fellowship space into a coffee shop and they tore out the pews and in addition to Sunday night worship, they host plays, dance performances, movies, and concerts. Their church became a community center and thousands of people come in through their doors each year. That is not something that I can just transplant into a rural community – but it authentically came from their location near the Indy arts district.

The third thing that I find imporant in these churches is their spirit of discernment. Brewin describes this as creative waiting:

So against our hasty judgment, and in God’s scientific wisdom, before we can experience the transformation that is vital to our survival, we will be required to wait. To be acted on gently, gracefully, and peacefully. Shaped, not crushed; guided, not dragged.

The Church of the Epiphany in Washington, D.C. has adopted the more traditional Quaker practice of open worship. They are asking what God wants for them as a church by listening together in small groups. They gather to hear the truthfulness of God. There are no speeches, no panel discussions, and no debates here, only the deeply countercultural act of silence… When ready, someone shares… the speaker, who is never interrupted by the group, tries to focus the presentation on God’s presence in the midst of these concerns.

This practice is about deep openness to change rather than the modern church’s resistance to it. Just imagine if a congregation was able to say, “just because we’ve never done it that way before, doesn’t mean we can’t.” Bass reminds us that the Christian story is about metanoia or “the change of heart that happens when we meet God face-to-face.” To deny this, is to deny our calling.

Finally, these congregations live with “both/and.” This is the postmodern notion of being comfortable with paradox and contradiction, yet it is also deeply Christian. When asked what he had learned during his long life about the Christian journey, Elton Trueblood responded with the word “and”:

It is good and bad; it is made up of life and death; it is being close to God and sometimes distant… It is the task of the Christian to live in the ‘and,’ in the ambivalence of life.

All the vital congregations Bass studied lived in this tension. They were “creative and traditional, risk-taking and grounded, confident and humble, open and orthodox.” The church I interned with in Nashville, Tennessee was large enough that some of those tensions were felt. We were a fairly diverse group of folks – liberal and conservative, traditional and yet also willing to try new things. A small and powerful worship service began on the fourth floor of the building in an old theater space and I think for a year and a half – the folks who gathered there really lived in that tension of the “both/and.”

These four characteristics are what have inspired me about the praxis and theology of the emergent church. I find in each of them deep biblical roots and have seen the transformation that occurs when they are allowed to take center stage in communities and congregations. But for the most part – that happened in urban contexts, in population centers, with resources like money and talent and time to help foster them.

What happens when the theology and practice are transported to a small county seat town in Iowa? Stay tuned…

Posts Tagged with discernment

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