In this weeks Leadership Weekly email put out by Christianity Today an interesting tactic is being employed by many churches in their communities that will certainly do nothing to create a sense of goodwill or bring about any sort of partnership between the church and the communities they’re trying to reach and be a part of. Here’s the story:

It’s become known as “The Bush Doctrine.” In order to prevent another devastating terrorist attack like 9/11, President Bush announced that the United States would launch a preemptive strike against any credible threat. It doesn’t exactly jive with Jesus’ command in the Sermon on the Mount to “turn the other cheek,” but then again the United States Government isn’t pretending to be a church.

So what happens when a church decides to employ the Bush Doctrine by preemptively suing their local government for a zoning code the city hadn’t yet violated? This week Collin Hansen reports about the escalating tensions between churches and cities over land use. Municipalities are less welcoming to churches buying and building in their communities, because it takes land off their tax rolls. As a result, many are changing their zoning codes to severely restrict where churches may locate.

Some churches are responding with aggressive legal maneuvers of their own—including filing lawsuits before the cities even reject their land use applications. Do these strongarm tactics work? Are they right? And what is the impact on the church’s mission in the community afterward?

Here’s a full-length article in Leadership Journal about the same issue.

I must say that this is a rather destructive tactic, and one that will certainly engender more and more animosity against the church in the community. This certainly can’t be the sort of message Jesus was asking the church to convey…

Last week while spending time at the North American Christian Convention I was able to make my way into a session on Spiritual Formation led by Dr. Neal Windham of Lincoln Christian College. A few of the statements that Dr. Windham made led me down a particular path of thought that juxtaposed our current emphasis on leadership with our lack of emphasis on spiritual formation as necessity.

I have had the opportunity throughout the past couple of years to spend some time at various conferences throughout the country focused specifically on being the church and bettering yourself as a leader. However, I have never found it odd that spiritual formation was never mentioned in the same breath as leadership until Dr. Windham said this:

Ministries can become small, shallow and confused when we neglect the doxological life.

In other words, leadership is important, vision is important, but without a leader who walks with God they are worthless.

It seems as if in our conferences and even in many of our churches we almost assume that spiritual formation is happening even though we do not have the necessary means of measuring or examining the inner life in accountable relationships. Leadership, it seems is all we’re focused on learning about and growing into.

There must be a radical transformation among the people and specifically the leadership of God’s church… yet, in our conventions and conferences the emphasis sits squarely upon the idea of leadership. It is great leaders we bring in to teach us and speak about leadership issues but we rarely, if ever, bring in a great person on spiritual formation to speak to the masses. I do wonder how many leaders, when looking underneath the mask, truly struggle and are unaware with what spiritual formation truly is and how to go about it.

As a church we need to recover a new attentiveness to the Other, a new understanding and emphasis on formation by the work of the Spirit not only in our people but perhaps more especially in our leaders.

I believe the emphasis on leadership has been extremely effective without it I’m not sure we’d see some of the amazing ministries that are on the landscape today. As a result, I’m not advocating we reduce the notion of leadership or reduce our emphasis on it. Rather, I believe what we need is to elevate the role of spiritual formation in our conversation and practice to the level or above where we currently hold leadership. It will be then and only then that the church will begin to move forward into a new realm of revival.

Leadership and spiritual formation is not an either/or issue… it’s both/and.

“The starting point for any theology of the church today must be a theology of social change….A church whose life is defined and shaped by what God is now doing in the world cannot be imprisoned [by antiquated ] specifications. It must allow itself to be broken and reshaped continuously by God’s continuous action; hence the need for a theology of social change.”

~ Harvey Cox. The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (1965)

Uh oh… looks like a big hole has just been shot in the “facts” (a.k.a. “well-researched scholarship”) presented by Barna and Viola in their book Pagan Christianity?.

“We have uncovered what we believe to be the first church in the world, dating from 33 AD to 70 AD,” the head of Jordan’s Rihab Centre for Archaeological Studies, Abdul Qader al-Husan, said.”

Is there an upcoming retraction?

(ht: bob.blog)

The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community
Hugh Halter & Matt Smay

Jossey-Bass—Church Ministry | Leadership
179 pages

[part 4]

At the end of Pagan Christianity, the authors called for and gave practical steps on how someone could leave the church community they were attending because of the vast amounts of pagan practices being employed by the traditional church body… Smay and Halter do something quite the opposite, something rather noble, and in fact something that looks out for the health and well-being of the church instead of someone’s personal preference. This is the kind of talk we need to hear, and the action we need to see in the church today to bring us together in unity and walk through the changing cultural landscape that is before us:

If you recognize that you are a part of a traditional-attractional church structure, don’t punt! The best response is to create the missional pyramid from scratch with a few missional people of your choice and start right where you are. If you leave, nothing beneficial will happen in your church. But if you—with a humble desire to influence or model a new way—launch out with a few friends while staying connected to your church, you’ll not only enjoy the freedom of being on mission, you’ll be able to influence and inspire more people within the existing structure to change…

We ask for a small handful of would-be missionaries to pilot incarnational community. If it works, then we believe the grassroots success will spread to more people in the existing structure. Most pastors have no reason not to want this experiment to succeed. They want you to live out this calling, but part of their calling is to also hold the saints together. Structures don’t change easily through challenge or critique. They change best as people within the organization change and model new approaches. So, instead of pointing your finger at your pastor or elder board, go live out this ancient way and pray for the larger community to eventually move forward with you… If it works, you’ll have helped move your church into new territory. If it doesn’t, you’ll have a great time with a few friends. How bad can that be?

I greatly appreciate this approach, and I could imagine a better way for the church to begin working together amidst different philosophical approaches. This is the antithesis of “I’m taking my ball and going home” which has become way to prevalent in the church today.

[introduction]

What is the gospel? This is the million dollar question and if we as a church are to truly begin to understand the implications of revival and bring about the possibility and atmosphere of such a world transforming experience, then answering this question must be at the front of our minds. Often times we have understood the gospel, too simply, as praying a prayer to receive forgiveness so that one may enter into heaven upon his/her death. But this does not bring about a sense of joy, or happiness to much of today’s culture. We are not occupied with the notions or implications of death in our lives, rather we’re more consumed with the thoughts of here and now—the injustice of war and poverty, the social brokenness of our families and relationships, global warming and our relationship to creation.

Our understanding of the gospel has been shortened, just as we have also shortened the term. Dallas Willard in his book Divine Conspiracy offers up a concept of the gospel that brings about a broader understanding. It is not simply “the gospel,” rather it is the “Gospel of the Kingdom of God.” It’s a gospel that is really big, different, something to be experienced and entered into in the here and now. It’s about an aspect of God’s divine life that is now, not just after death.

I like how Halter & Smay sum up our current understanding of the gospel (page 88 The Tangible Kingdom):

The gospel—that is, the huge, life-reorienting story that has had such massive drawing power to just about any spiritual seeker over the centuries—has been reduced to a pathetically simple, doctrinal Podcast that no one is interested in.

When Jesus came proclaiming his gospel, the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, he offered up that it was available now, the gospel is a present reality that we can actively participate in and that we are expected to participate in!

Until we recover a holistic understanding of the gospel as something that is not just available after death but is to be lived in and experienced now, we will not be able to enter into a type of revival that can transform the world. Until then, we will continue to be stuck in the dogmatic sort of “pray the prayer” type of religion that inspires… no one.

This recovery is an instrument of the Spirit… it is what the Spirit will use to cause an outbreak of revival, however it is in our control to move in this direction. A nice little paradox isn’t it?

The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community
Hugh Halter & Matt Smay

Jossey-Bass—Church Ministry | Leadership
179 pages

[part 3]

…the traditional “Come to us” attraction model of church was successful in the past. People outside the church still appreciated our values… But when our values are opposite, or even different, it is much more difficult to find a way to be together… Cultural distance (a concept shared by Alan Hirsch in The Forgotten Ways) explains why there is room for some churches to stay the same, but also why most churches will need to make radical adjustments. It all depends on who you are called to reach. If your calling is to influence those with the most similarly held values, then you can keep providing the same thing. But if you want to influence the massively growing percentage of people who are much further from the gospel, you’ll have to provide, model, and invite people into an inclusive community that welcomes people with alternative values. (Page 72)

The problem today is not that the church is broken, rather the problem is that the culture is changing at such a rapid pace around us that we have yet to catch up. We need new expressions of church and of communicating the gospel to reach out to these new expressions of the culture. It’s hard to realize sometimes while dabbling on the progressive fringe, how important the establishment (traditional church) is and how seemingly irrelevant some expressions of traditionalism are becoming. Yet, they still reach out to and speak to the modernistic paradigm and fruit is being harvested regardless of what we may think.

By looking at things from this sort of lens I think it allows for us to approach differing expressions of the church with grace and generosity, in some instances even with a sense of appreciation. This is the lens we need to begin seeing each other through, and by doing so will allow for us all to come together with a strong sense of unity amidst our diversity, and realize that we are all called to reach different segments of this growingly diverse population called America.

The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community
Hugh Halter & Matt Smay

Jossey-Bass—Church Ministry | Leadership
179 pages

[part 2]

The issue of contextualization has seemingly reared its head again as John MacArthur and others have continued their rampage against the idea of contextualizing the gospel. Which, honestly, makes absolutely no sense to me—I can’t imagine what vacuum the gospel would have to be in in order to be considered pure, but that’s a separate issue. What Halter and Smay discuss in chapter 6 is the idea that it’s in our contextualization, it’s not solely about the context you are entering but rather the posture in which the telling/embodying is done.

Often times we are stuck in the idea that it’s okay to teach/train missionaries how to contextualize because we’re are sending them to “go over there” into the foreign land. But when it comes to our own culture and context, we often times do a very poor job of teaching people how to create entry points for the gospel in their own worlds. This is the beginning idea of missional living. Halter & Smay make a great distinction here between missional and incarnational (often times they’re seen synonymously).

Missional sentness is focused on leaving and everything related to going, but incarnational represents how we go and what we do as we go… God could have sent his son by asking him to set up a website and download spiritual information to every billboard in the world. But apparently he knew that information about him doesn’t help people understand or love him So the only option for the Father and for us is to embody the concept.

Unfortunately, in modern day evangelicalism, we’ve mastered the idea of going… but we’ve fallen way short of embodying the gospel and being the gospel to people. Instead, “we’ve prioritized the verbals over the nonverbals, the message over the method… the proclamation over the posture.” This is why the church is in such trouble in our society—we’re not living out the values of the gospel. We’re all talk and no substance. We’ve mastered the idea of belief-ism, but have yet to actually live out in tangible ways as a united community what that belief-ism is really all about. Our operating principle, our little cities seem to revolve completely around the idea of believing the right way. Those are the lines we’ve drawn (denominations) and the walls we’ve erected.

In the reconstruction of the church, it is essential that we re-discover and embody the ideals of incarnational ministry… otherwise we’re in for a long ride potentially seeping into a new “dark age” of the church.

At the Exponential Conference this year, Tim Keller gave a talk in one of the breakout sessions talking about perhaps one of the least talked about and possibly more uncomfortable topics out there… revival. Keller was unapologetic about the use of the word revival and even said that “Biblical, Spiritual Revival is what is missing in the modern church planting movement” and even perhaps the church today. Revival is a topic that is not currently being written about, talked about, or even being mentioned very much in many circles—yet Keller asserts that it is an essential component if church planting is to move from action to a movement.

I’ve been reflecting over Keller’s 16 characteristics of revival the past couple of days and although listed below I want to begin really wrestling through them in community. So, for the next several weeks I’ll be posting them individually with some reflection and hope to really begin understanding what revival truly looks like and how unpredictable and possible it really is.

The 16 Crucial Dynamics of Revival
1. Recovery of the difference between Gospel & Religion
2. Extraordinary Prayer
3. Creativity/Innovation
4. Nominal Church Members are converted
5. Sleepy Christians wake up!
6. Unbelievers are drawn in, in numbers that programs cannot produce
7. Edifying/Dynamic Worship
8. Great Teaching/Preaching
9. Life-changing Community
10. Evangelism –> Outward Focused
11. Passion for Justice/Poor
12. Cultural Engagement
13. Always a loony fringe
14. Always a backlash
15. Always a lot of churches planted
16. Real Social Healing

The church is the greatest preserver of the status quo in human history… I can conclude that the church, in its present state, is not the hope of the world. I believe that nothing has so persistently and effectively blocked the way of salvation as the church.”
~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

King first wrote this in the early 50’s and now over 50 years later I wonder how much has really changed… has the church really moved very far forward, or are we stuck in the same rut? Honestly, I think we’ve traded one set of problems for another as we continually walk in this static, circular existence.

One of the things that is hard about being in a healthy, growing, and absolutely amazing church, you tend to lose some of the perspective regarding the struggles of the church-at-large within America. In fact, if you are in a church that is growing and people are enthusiastic and excited about what God is doing in your midst you should consider yourself lucky (I know I certainly do), for this isn’t the norm… we are a part of the exception.

There is a growing population within the church-at-large that is increasingly growing dissatisfied with “church-as-we-know-it” and are walking away, trading old institutions for new forms and practices of “being the church”. Unfortunately it doesn’t just end with a growing sense of dissatisfaction, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, nearly 25% of adults have not just walked away from the church, but have traded their faith for a different religion. People are leaving the church and Jesus in their wake.

So, the question remains… is the church really all that different from 50 years ago or are we simply trading problems as we remain in our cycle of sameness? Is there a way out of the cycle, and what does that look like? Because as King so poignantly observes: to do nothing will persistently and effectively block the way of salvation.

Ever wonder the main reasons for why pastors get fired? Me too! Thank to the Baptist Press, they’ve given us a new report on the forced termination of pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention.

10. conflict with other staff
9. sexual misconduct
8. administrative incompetence
7. week leadership style
6. decline in attendance
5. conflict pre-dating the pastor’s arrival
4. too-strong leadership style
3. poor people skills
2. church’s resistance to change
1. control issues (the same #1 reason every year since 1996)

I found it really interesting that of the top 10, five had to do with issues surrounding the pastors leadership style or approach. It makes me wonder if the church could reduce some of the pain of termination and overall terminations by simply added 2 components—better leadership training of pastors; and equipping churches with simple human resource tools in the interviewing process.

 
*The average American watches 26 hours of television per week.

*The biggest difference between pastors and parishioners: Parishioners watch 26 hours/week while the pastor only watches 2 hours/week.