Missional Progressives

Touchstones for Missional Communities

2012-02-10T18:52:00.000-08:00

Some good missional stuff from Alan Hirsch via Future Travelers:
•Every believer contains within themselves the potential for world transformation.
•Our goal is that every believer is a church planter and every church a church planting church
•Are we in the “people of God mode” or “professional mode?”
•How can you improve on Jesus’ plan of discipleship? He said, “Die.”

.•If we don’t get Jesus right, we create a toxic system, that produces toxic people.
•If you want to reproduce, you have got to be “reproduce-able.”
•With disciples you can go places, with consumers you can’t.
•We must act our way into a new way of thinking not vice versa.
•We engaging a people group, we can’t preempt the gospel with our version of church (structure).
•The church is a “scratch and sniff” experience of the Kingdom.
•Incarnation is how the God engaged the world. He doesn’t overwhelm us, he invites us.

Or as I might put it:

Once you truly follow the loving and liberating Jesus, you inevitably are oriented toward others beyond yourself and your comfort zone, and you have such inherent potential for transforming the world; you all do; you don't have to be a special trained or ordained person, in fact that might be something to overcome.

I would now use mission planter and every mission is a mission multiplier. church is one way to bring about the mission.

People not programs, not professional concerns

To live abundantly means to die to who we have been, to continually empty ourselves so God in community can bring us toward our fullest selves. missionaries, even progressive ones, need a theology of the cross.

Yes, getting Jesus right, taking scholarship and theology seriously, not just one's own experiences which are often designed to make Jesus fit our conveniences and culture; Jesus deserves an educated, always growing disciple. There are spiritually toxic people; they come in all traditions.

It starts with you, but doesn't end with you, but how you can help grow others; health begets growth; you can't grow or help others grow without health.

Consumers want to stay in place and make things about them and for themselves; disciples can't wait to get on the road, trying to catch up with Jesus who is always going ahead of us to Galilee.

Act and then reflect; don't wait until you think you have everything figured out and have your great vision and action plan; small acts of justice done with great love trumps our best systems.

Church is people to be filled not boxes on an organizational chart to be filled.

The church is to imitate and initiate the beloved community; but I can't improve on that scratch and sniff metaphor.

God sends, moves into the poor neighborhood, acts like leaven and mustard, emerging from within to change the whole; not attractional, top down, not the way an Empire behaves; church needs to be made in "the likeness of God".

Creating Church in Partnership With Others: workshop resources

2012-02-03T21:07:00.000-08:00

here is a handout of resources I used as part of a missional church workshop at the Southwest UU Summer Institute; it was the focus of the final day looking at Church as Partner. Earlier we had looked at Church as Parable; Church as Progressive; Church as Praxis.

Partnering Churches andNonprofits for Social Justice

Notes by Ron Robinson

...Why partner with other nonprofits in your community,particularly other faithbased and secular nonprofits?

1. Our covenants of the free church:

one of the main covenants that make up the free church is the one between the church and its parish, or the church and the world (see Conrad Wright, Doctrine of the Church, in Walking Together: polity and participation in Unitarian Universalism); so to be fully a covenanted congregational church there is a covenant in ourbeing between the gathered church and its surrounding/supporting community.(which begs the question: what are the boundaries of your parish, your servicearea, your wider community of focus? and what happens when you don't makedistinctions? what are prime needs or gaps in wholeness in that particularcommunity?)....when one of the covenants is weakened, it affects the others,and vice versa, when we strengthen one of our core covenants it will strengthenothers. So working on the covenant that pulls us into a larger sense of ourselves will only help strengthen the covenant between member and church; church and minister (leadership); church and church; and minister and minister; for too long we have focused only on the internal covenants, because they may be presenting us with the most urgent demands, but not the most important.

2. The Holy is present in many ways and places and persons beyond thegathered church; our mission is tonurture the Holy.

3. We can help grow our own gifts through partnerships with others.

Ecumenical difficulties…Used to be that churches could band together into partnershipsand then through these partner with nonprofits or create their own nonprofits,but as ecumenism has suffered and culture changed from churched to unchurchedculture and competiveness increased and church resources dwindled, especiallyfor volunteers and volunteer time, this approach becomes more difficult thoughit still is present...so more churches partnering directly with nonprofits, orcreating their own.

...Ministry Partnership Lessons, from Churches That Make A Difference,by Sider, Olson, and Unruh of Evangelicals for Social Action:

1. few churches haveresources to carry out their vision by themselves.

2. expand church opportunitiesto form relationships (that may lead to evangelism, but can hinder it as peoplemay feel stigmatized and not equal with church members unless friendship formedfirst, sometimes form alternative worship services just for them, inviterecipients to social events, invite them to serve alongside church members)

3. prevents duplicationof services and focuses the church resources where they are most needed.

4. church ministries aremore effective when they cooperate, rather than compete, with local efforts.help local residents grow to help themselves.

5.expose church membersto needs and issues outside their usual context

6. working withestablished agencies can help churches learn structures, and get their feet wetfor creating more novel partnerships.

7. there is a supportiveclimate for faithbased partnerships now

types of partnerships:

1. partner comesalongside a church with the resources the church needs to flesh out its visionfor holistic ministry. eg food banks, music ministries for festivals...annualor one time connections...

2. church supplies thepartner with volunteers or funding,and in return the partner provides thechurch with a ministry outlet that does not require much administrative effort.eg habitat for humanity

3. church allows partnerto use its space

4. church is the parentof a ministry program that spins off to become its own entity.

5. partnership grows outof a history of cooperation and joint project sponsorship, based on personalrelationships and shared ministry goals....individual church member createsentity

How are we doing partnering…

with denominationalprograms

with businesses to helpwith jobs for those in need, round out their growth

with public schools,universities

with communitycoalitions

with ministry coalitions

with church coalitions

with clergy coalitions

with communityorganizing coalitions

participation on publicboards and committees

with nationalorganizations...host for mission trips, or going on them

with government

with urban-suburbanpartner

qualities of good partnerships

1. have a compatiblecore mission

2. don't hinder thewitness of the church: state rules may treat people differently than churchvalues

3. mutual trust andrespect

4. sense of ownership onboth sides: small church partnering with large agency may feel dependent

5. partnerships don'tsubstitute for gifts and resources of congregation: don't subcontractevangelism or social action, fill in the congregation gaps and multiplycongregation gifts not become a crutch for its inadequacies.

6. clear communicationand accountability

Starting a Nonprofit At Your Church:Drawing More Resources to Meet Increasing Community Needs

by Joy Skjegstad

All around the country, church congregations are establishingseparate 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations in order to draw new funding, newpeople, and new partnerships into the ministry of their church. In thesedifficult economic times when community needs have increased and the amount ofmoney given through the Sunday offering has decreased for many churches,setting up a church-based nonprofit can be a creative way to bring moreresources to your community ministry efforts when your congregation may be lessable to underwrite the cost of those ministries.

Through my consulting work around the country, I have witnessedthe power of the church-nonprofit structure in bringing new ministry into beingand helping it grow. Congregations develop a wide variety of ministries undertheir nonprofits: schools and day care centers, housing and youth developmentprograms, job training and placement, food shelves and feeding programs, healthclinics, and a host of other initiatives.

Many of these congregations have found that the church-nonprofitmodel brings together the very best aspects of the church with the outsideresources that a nonprofit can draw. Congregations bring a great deal to therelationship. Churches frequently have the trust of the broader community inways that few other institutions do. Particularly if your ministry dream is tooffer social service programs, the nonprofit's connection to the church mayhelp you draw participants who wouldn't feel as safe approaching a secularnonprofit, a government agency, or a school. Churches also have "captiveaudiences." A congregation is a ready-made group of workers, donors, andsupporters. If you prepare them, communicate with them and inspire them, yourcongregation can exponentially increase the power of your nonprofit ministry.

When I served as executive director of the Park Avenue Foundation,a nonprofit connected to Park Avenue United Methodist Church, church membersserved as a core group of volunteers for foundation programs. Volunteer tutors,mentors, lawyers, doctors, and nurses were all mobilized from within thecongregation to do good works every day of the week in the church building. Ibelieve their connection to the church made many of the volunteers morededicated—they were proud of their church and wanted to ensure that theprograms offered were of high quality.

The nonprofit part of the structure brings a lot to theorganization's effectiveness, too. You'll be able to attract resources fromfunders that would not support a church directly. New collaborative partnerswill become interested in what you are doing, and there will be opportunitiesto recruit volunteers from new sources. One of the most important advantages isthe ability to attract the skills you need through new staff and board membersfrom outside your church.

Securing new financial resources for ministry is the most commonreason that congregations choose to set up a nonprofit. Particularly now, whenyour congregation members may not be able to fully underwrite your vision forcommunity ministry, outside funding sources—including foundation grants andgifts from individuals outside of your congregation—may allow you to moveforward. However, many foundations and corporations will not make grants to congregationsdirectly (with some it is a stated policy). Other funders have no formal policyagainst this, but they are uncomfortable giving to religious groups because offears that contributions for one purpose may be used for something elseentirely. Funders might worry that their gift for a church-based job trainingprogram might be spent on the Sunday school curriculum or choir robes, forexample. A separate legal entity with its own set of books, governancestructure, and board members from outside the church will make many fundersmuch more comfortable about giving to a program connected with a church.

Having a separate nonprofit may also allow you to recruit newvolunteers from organizations that might be reluctant to send people out to achurch. At a time when many congregations are needing to trim their budgets andrely more on volunteers, the ability to attract more people who are willing togive of their time is a real advantage to the church-nonprofit model. Manychurches I have worked with found they could recruit volunteers for communityprograms and services much more readily from other churches, local businesses,corporations or service clubs once they had set up their nonprofit. This isbecause outside groups are more willing to devote “people power” to programsthat are set up to benefit the community, not just the members of onecongregation.

Being able to recruit board members from outside the church isanother strength of the church-nonprofit model. A church-based nonprofit canchoose to have its own board of directors that has at least some members fromoutside the congregation. These "outsiders" can bring new expertise,connections, and resources to your ministry work. For example, if you arelooking for an accountant to serve on your nonprofit's board, you may not findone in your church congregation, but you might find one outside the church, ina nearby business or congregation. A wider variety of board members can alsohelp connect you to more funding sources and potential partnerships with othercongregations and nonprofits.

Having a separate nonprofit may also help you collaborate withsome organizations that would be reluctant to partner directly with a church.When a group of like-minded people get together to address a community issue,coming under the banner of the nonprofit might make others at the table lesssuspicious of your motives for involvement. Some people automatically assumethat the hidden agenda behind any congregational involvement is recruiting newchurch members. If your separate nonprofit has the mission of "respondingto the foreclosure crisis in the community," for example, it makes yourpurpose clear and shows others that you are willing to devote time andresources to a community issue that others care about as well.

Partnering with other groups is essential right now—collaborationscan provide services, resources, and expertise to make up for what has beentrimmed out of your own budget. For example, your congregation may provide jobtraining and placement to community members but may no longer be able to offera feeding program. A partnership with another congregation or nonprofit couldallow you to connect your participants with other resources that they need.

If your congregation aspires to develop more community ministrybut needs outside funding, people, and partnerships to do it, starting anonprofit connected to your congregation could help provide some of theresources that you need.

The foundation for the missional church: the water to take the red pill

2012-01-27T10:40:00.001-08:00

Funny what you wake up thinking sometimes; this morning it was this: God is active in the world; base assumption or missional communities won't make sense; our mission is to join up with God's mission; we don't create church to create and contain and convey God and God's mission; we try to create church, or should, to try to catch up with what God is doing in the world; God's covenant with the world is the foundation for our various covenants such as the one with a church body; the church is to be made in the likeness of God (nod of sorts to William Ellery Channing); what kind of God is the church depicting if it is a come to us rather than a go to them church? of course i trust you have your google translator set as you need for God<==>.

New From Alan Hirsch: Inside His Head and Writings: Also, Can the Liberal Church Be Apostolic?

2011-12-30T18:22:00.000-08:00

What's in my head?

by Alan Hirsch on Friday, 30 December 2011 at 17:05

Many people ask me whether there is some reason and logic of my various writings or whether they are random reflections on various subjects related to the missional church. Given that with the publication of The Permanent Revolution in February, I have completed my “library” of missional books, I thought that it is well worth explaining the rationale for my authorship to this stage. So for those who are interested, this is how it goes….

The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st Century Church is really a foundational book and is considered seminal in setting the incarnational-mission conversation in the West. It really is scaffolding with which we can go about reconstructing our way of being along missional lines. It covers areas of incarnational mission, messianic spirituality, and innovative leadership, but redesigns these clearly along missional lines. I believe that the ideas therein are as valid as ever, and Baker is drafting a second, fully updated, edition as I write, so look for it. However, it is worth saying that it was written to help church planters to think like missionaries in the West as the assumptions behind the more formulaic church growth type approaches were no longer valid in our context. This has proved more and more true as we have advanced into the 21st Century. I have to admit that we (Mike and I) never expected the established church would take it seriously. The intended pioneering audience, along with the keen sense of urgency with which we wrote the book, can explain the overly revolutionary tone of the book…an element I correct somewhat in my later work On The Verge. http://amzn.to/vpedgL
I consider The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church to be my centerpiece book…in many ways my magnum opus. The heart of this book is what can be called a “phenomenology of apostolic movement.” In other words, what factors come together to generate high impact, exponentially explosive, spiritually vibrant, Jesus movements in any time and context. Because of its systematic and somewhat comprehensive nature (it identifies a system of six elements called mDNA arranged in a dynamic system) it acts as the organizing ideas that guide the rest of my writings. As I have become more and more convinced of the validity of the core ideas laid down in this book I committed myself to elaborate on these in the six books that follow. Readers of my other works should always have this as the guiding reference work. http://amzn.to/vJ6Aam
The book ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church (with Mike Frost) is all about the central and definitive role that Jesus plays in all movements that claim his name. It is a serious elaboration of the element (called an mDNA) in The Forgotten Ways which I tagged as ‘Jesus is Lord!’ In this serious book we explain why we believe that it is primarily Christology that must define the core nature, purpose, and mission of the church. We are a messianic movement after all. Therefore all renewal must in the deepest possible sense involve a recovery of the role and significance of Jesus for discipleship, spirituality, theology, community, and mission.
My book Untamed: Reactivating a Missional Form of Discipleship (with my beloved wife Deb) takes a somewhat different approach to the standard spiritual disciplines or teaching the ‘heads of doctrine’ approach to discipleship and formation. While not denying the validity of these, we suggest that certain things, ideas, and relationships intrude themselves into the God-relationship and block our capacity to be all that Jesus intended us to be. We believe that by identifying these hindrances, and moving beyond them, opens us up to becoming impactful followers of Jesus. Essentially it is an anatomy of modern idolatry and an exploration of what we call Shema spirituality—understanding the nature of dynamic monotheism, loving God with all that we are, and our neighbors as self. This book elaborates on the mDNA of discipleship and disciple-making. It is designed to be very accessible to Christians wanting to grow in their love of God. http://amzn.to/tHhRHB
Right Here Right Now: Everyday Mission for Everyday People (with Lance Ford) is pretty much as the title suggests. As an elaboration of the mDNA of incarnational mission, it is a very practical book about how to get (and stay) engaged in everyday mission and make a Kingdom difference in the various arenas of life. Anyone should be able to read and engage the ideas in this book. In many ways it aims at activating the whole people of God (and not just leadership) into the missional equation. This is a huge missing piece in terms of movement dynamics. http://amzn.to/uggBnR
My latest offering, The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church is the book that focuses on the nature of ministry and leadership within (and for) apostolic movements. Coming out in Feb 2012, the book focuses on apostolic leadership in particular, but it does so within the broader context of fivefold gifting complex set out by Paul in his foundational work on ecclesiology…Ephesians. It's a big book in every way; weighty in content, unavoidable in its logic, and provides a strongly dissenting alternative to the prevailing forms of leadership in the church. It is likely to be a pretty controversial but will hopefully recalibrate the way we think about, and do, ministry and leadership in the 21st Century. It correlates to the mDNA of apostolic environment in The Forgotten Ways. http://amzn.to/sMYFLa
My book On the Verge: The Future of the Church as Apostolic Movement, written with mega-church, multi-site, church planting movement leader Dave Ferguson, is all about organizational dynamics and change particularly as it relates to established, and relatively successful, forms of contemporary church (although it is by no means limited to them.) The book is thoroughgoing exploration of the nature of paradigms and paradigmatic change, change management and process, innovation of new forms and ideas, and of creating movement dynamics in large and complex systems. This is at least in part an elaboration on the mDNA of Organic Systems. http://amzn.to/uexUyl
The Faith of Leap: Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage (once again with Mike Frost) started as a project to simply elaborate the mDNA of Communitas—that form of togetherness/communality that happens in the context of an ordeal, danger, risk, and challenge. But we soon realized that it meant that we had to look more deeply at the nature of adventure, risk, and courage and how it changes the equation of church, discipleship, spirituality, leadership, and yes…even our most basic theology. Its an exciting book with huge implications for how we ought to think of ourselves and how we should act in the world. http://amzn.to/sC6Vhp
And lastly, but by no means least, there’s The Forgotten Ways Handbook: A Practical Guide for Developing Missional Churches. Written with the help of my old friend and collaborator Darryn Altclass, this book is meant to be as thoroughly practical as the primary text The Forgotten Ways is theoretical. It is a literal cornucopia of suggestions, ideas, practices, and possibilities that can embed missional ideas and a movemental ethos in local churches and organizations. Designed for group work and discussion, it is a great compliment to both the primary text and On The Verge. http://amzn.to/uldOSK

I think that with the above output, I have produced the necessary material that God has commissioned me to do at this stage of my life. I wholeheartedly believe that the form of the church that will advance the cause of Jesus in the 21st (and reverse the decline of the church at the same time) is that of the apostolic movement with all its spiritual dynamism and missional energy. But our imaginations have become so captive to a more static and more regulated form of the church. All these books, read individually, but especially when taken together, present a comprehensive, alternative, primal, vision of the church as a dynamic, high-impact, spiritually authentic, and sustainable, people movement in the Way of Jesus our Founder.

Ron Robinson: What does being apostolic mean, hold out, challenge, the liberal progressive church? How do we free up our leaders to lead and start new ministries and stay networked and connected but not held back, controlled, discouraged, or timid in their risk-taking ministries? How important is a denomination, association? Do we let it be our ultimate allegiance, or God? How do we keep the best of our current ways but shift to a different way of being relational, empowering? Looking forward to the next book.

Worship Wagging the Dog?

2011-12-03T19:27:00.001-08:00

A few thoughts from a facebook response of mine I wanted to elaborate a little more on: Can you imagine a Unitarian Universalist community without worship as the main act? Remember i am a uu christian asking this too :) But does worship drive the budget of time talent resources and money? What is the plus but also minus of that? What is set in motion because of it? Can worship be decentralized to drive the church to decentralize and move out of itself? How does worship reinforce that "our mission is to create a warm welcoming community for people like us who need us" and vice versa?

We have weekly worship; we will try to develop it up if possible as our community develops up as a missional monastery; I would love to offer worship every morning, noon, evening, and night; making it available to any who wish to participate regardless of whether they support us and our mission in other ways; in this way seeing worship in our abandoned places as an act of mission. We might even offer it in different ways depending on resources available.

But it will always be the last thing to get the focus of time, talent, and especially treasure; it will come as a response to mission for and with others in our area, as a response to learning and growing our souls and personal gifts and passions, as a response to the act of eating together and sharing our lives with ourselves and all others who come to the table with us; anytime we need to sacrifice worship in order to re-focus and re-energize for mission, discipleship, and community first, we will do it; worship without sacrifice, as Gandhi says, is a social sin.

In doing so, can we decentralize and take it out into the community in ways not envisioned or practiced now? worshipping at different times and different places is a good start; it makes it more as we say a party than a program; it keeps it from being a product. Can we make it a response that grows from the ground up by community leaders, instead of being a spectator sport led by paid professionals? How do we keep worship from pulling us into attractional church and away from incarnational church?

These are advent thoughts as I begin a new church year.

A Missional Thanksgiving Letter From a Monk Who Stayed

2011-11-23T20:23:00.001-08:00

Here, we include the letter of deep thanksgiving and forgiveness and hope for a better world that was the last will and testament of one of the murdered monks who stayed and served in an abandoned place during the midst of a civil war in Algeria, portrayed in the movie Of Gods and Men which we missional progressives watched here this past Sunday together. A new deep meaning to what it means to give thanks.

“If the day comes, and it could be today, that I am a victim of the terrorism that seems to be engulfing all foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church, and my family to remember that I have dedicated my life to God and Algeria.

"That they accept that the Lord of all life was not a stranger to this savage kind of departure; that they pray for me, wondering how I found myself worthy of such a sacrifice; that they link in their memory this death of mine with all the other deaths equally violent but forgotten in their anonymity. My life is not worth more than any other—not less, not more. Nor am I an innocent child. I have lived long enough to know that I, too, am an accomplice of the evil that seems to prevail in the world around, even that which might lash out blindly at me. If the moment comes, I would hope to have the presence of mind, and the time, to ask for God’s pardon and for that of my fellowman, and, at the same time, to pardon in all sincerity he who would attack me.

"I would not welcome such a death. It is important for me to say this. I do not see how I could rejoice when this people whom I love will be accused, indiscriminately, of my death. The price is too high, this so-called grace of the martyr, if I owe it to an Algerian who kills me in the name of what he thinks is Islam.

"I know the contempt that some people have for Algerians as a whole. I also know the caricatures of Islam that a certain (Islamist) ideology promotes. It is too easy for such people to dismiss, in good conscience, this religion as something hateful by associating it with violent extremists. For me, Algeria and Islam are quite different from the commonly held opinion. They are body and soul. I have said enough, I believe, about all the good things I have received here, finding so often the meaning of the Gospels, running like some gold thread through my life, and which began first at my mother’s knee, my very first church, here in Algeria, where I learned respect for the Muslims.

"Obviously, my death will justify the opinion of all those who dismissed me as naïve or idealistic: “Let him tell us what he thinks now.” But such people should know my death will satisfy my most burning curiosity. At last, I will be able—if God pleases—to see the children of Islam as He sees them, illuminated in the glory of Christ, sharing in the gift of God’s Passion and of the Spirit, whose secret joy will always be to bring forth our common humanity amidst our differences.

"I give thanks to God for this life, completely mine yet completely theirs, too, to God, who wanted it for joy against, and in spite of, all odds. In this Thank You—which says everything about my life—I include you, my friends past and present, and those friends who will be here at the side of my mother and father, of my sisters and brothers—thank you a thousandfold.

"And to you, too, my friend of the last moment, who will not know what you are doing. Yes, for you, too, I wish this thank-you, this “A-Dieu,” whose image is in you also, that we may meet in heaven, like happy thieves, if it pleases God, our common Father. Amen! Insha Allah!"

(Written in Algiers by Dom Christian of Abbaye Notre-Dame de l'Atlas, December 1, 1993; two years prior to his murder)

It isn't enough just to be mission or purpose driven....

2011-11-21T12:35:00.001-08:00

If the mission has the church, if the mission creates the church, instead of the other way around, then it matters what the mission is....

Getting churches to move from spending time trying to create a mission statement and living in mission is a good first step, but it isn't enough...

Is your church's mission to get more people to think alike? In hopes that this alone will create a beloved community? Is it to attract those who already think alike, e.g. are already religious liberals or spiritual progressives, but just don't know yet about your church, or just don't know yet about all the benefits they could receive from being a member of your faith community?

Do we want our churches to grow as echo chambers? Do we think we can best change our world by having bigger churches of the like minded religiously? Do we put our trust in an approach that thinking will lead to action, just as we do that worship will lead to mission?

Or, or, is the mission that calls our church into being more than this? Very much different from this. Not to get bigger so we can put on more programs and better worship to grow liberal minds. But instead our mission is to grow the soul of the neighborhoods and lives around us, outside of us, and as we do that, in relationship with those very different from us, we trust that what guides us and inspires us will grow too.

All of our efforts and struggles seem to come down to choosing between the kind of mission we have, not just that we have one.

And then the next question is, why do we choose one mission over the other? The same as why do we choose one location for our church over another? Do we make our decisions based on what is best for ourselves, for our churches, or for what is best for that living spirit of life that may be in and among us but also transcends us, calling us to go where we don't want to go, to love those who no one wants to love?

I came back from the recent leadership conference, and from outstanding deep conversations there, and read lots of comments from people around here pondering a church building move, and from others about minister moves, and listened to people talk about the struggles and resistance to change and various issues in their churches, and I kept coming back to these questions above: how would people answer when asked if their church should exist so people who have liberal religious beliefs can have a home, or so poor people can have a home?

This Thanksgiving, as every day, Jesus asks us: who is our family? where should we set our tables? who should we invite? This Christmas, Jesus asks us: whose birthday is it anyway we celebrate? where should our resources and gifts go? Or God asks us. Or that Transcendent Spirit of Life asks us. Or that moral center that makes us human animals human asks us. Definitely, we are being asked....

More interesting exportable research from Barna on young adults and church

2011-11-16T08:06:00.001-08:00

Five Myths about Young Adult Church Dropouts

November 16, 2011

The Barna Group team spent much of the last five years exploring the lives of young people who drop out of church. The research provides many insights into the spiritual journeys of teens and young adults. The findings are revealed extensively in a new book called, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving Church…and Rethinking Faith.
The research uncovered five myths and realities about today's young dropouts.
Myth 1: Most people lose their faith when they leave high school.
Reality: There has been considerable attention paid to the so-called loss of faith that happens between high school and early adulthood. Some have estimated this dropout in alarming terms, estimating that a large majority of young Christians will lose their faith. The reality is more nuanced. In general, there are three distinct patterns of loss: prodigals, nomads, and exiles.
One out of nine young people who grow up with a Christian background lose their faith in Christianity—a group described by the research team as prodigals. In essence, prodigals say they have lost their faith after being a Christian at some time in their past.
More commonly, young Christians wander away from the institutional church—a pattern the researchers labeled nomads. Roughly four out of ten young Christians fall into this category. They still call themselves Christians but they are far less active in church than they were during high school. Nomads have become 'lost' to church participation.
Another two out of ten young Christians were categorized as exiles, those who feel lost between the "church culture" and the society they feel called to influence. The sentiments of exiles include feeling that "I want to find a way to follow Jesus that connects with the world I live in," "I want to be a Christian without separating myself from the world around me" and "I feel stuck between the comfortable faith of my parents and the life I believe God wants from me."
Overall, about three out of ten young people who grow up with a Christian background stay faithful to church and to faith throughout their transitions from the teen years through their twenties.
David Kinnaman, who directed the research, concluded: "The reality of the dropout problem is not about a huge exodus of young people from the Christian faith. In fact, it is about the various ways that young people become disconnected in their spiritual journey. Church leaders and parents cannot effectively help the next generation in their spiritual development without understanding these three primary patterns. The conclusion from the research is that most young people with a Christian background are dropping out of conventional church involvement, not losing their faith."
Myth 2: Dropping out of church is just a natural part of young adults' maturation.
Reality: First, this line of reasoning ignores that tens of millions of young Christians never lose their faith or drop out of church. Thus, leaving church or losing faith should not be a foregone conclusion.
Second, leaving church has not always been normative. Evidence exists that during the first half of the 1900s, young adults were not less churched than were older adults. In fact, Boomers appear to be the first American generation that dropped out of church participation in significant numbers when they became young adults. So, in one sense, the Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) were part of the evolution of the church dropout phenomenon during the rise of youth culture of the 1960s.
In addition to continuing the dropout pattern of previous generations, today's teens and young adults (identified by Barna Group as Mosaics) are spiritually the most eclectic generation the nation has seen. They are also much less likely than prior generations to begin their religious explorations with Christianity. Moreover, their pervasive technology use is deepening the generation gap, allowing Mosaics (often called Millennials of Gen Y) to embrace new ways of learning about and connecting to the world.
Kinnaman commented on this myth: "The significant spiritual and technological changes over the last 50 years make the dropout problem more urgent. Young people are dropping out earlier, staying away longer, and if they come back are less likely to see the church as a long-term part of their life. Today's young adults who drop out of faith are continuing something the Boomers began as a generation of spiritual free agents. Yet, today's dropout phenomenon is a more intractable, complex problem." [Note: See Myth 5 for more about how the dropout problem has changed.]
Myth 3: College experiences are the key factor that cause people to drop out.
Reality: College certainly plays a role in young Christians' spiritual journeys, but it is not necessarily the 'faith killer' many assume. College experiences, particularly in public universities, can be neutral or even adversarial to faith. However, it is too simplistic to blame college for today's young church dropouts. As evidence, many young Christians dissociate from their church upbringing well before they reach a college environment; in fact, many are emotionally disconnected from church before their 16th birthday.
"The problem arises from the inadequacy of preparing young Christians for life beyond youth group." Kinnaman pointed to research findings showing that "only a small minority of young Christians has been taught to think about matters of faith, calling, and culture. Fewer than one out of five have any idea how the Bible ought to inform their scholastic and professional interests. And most lack adult mentors or meaningful friendships with older Christians who can guide them through the inevitable questions that arise during the course of their studies. In other words, the university setting does not usually cause the disconnect; it exposes the shallow-faith problem of many young disciples."
Myth 4: This generation of young Christians is increasingly "biblically illiterate."
Reality: The study examined beliefs across the firm's 28-year history, looking for generational gaps in spiritual beliefs and knowledge. When comparing the faith of young practicing faith Christians (ages 18 to 29) to those of older practicing Christians (ages 30-plus), surprisingly few differences emerged between what the two groups believe. This means that within the Christian community, the theological differences between generations are not as pronounced as might be expected. Young Christians lack biblical knowledge on some matters, but not significantly more so than older Christians.
Instead, the research showed substantial differences among those outside of Christianity. That is, older non-Christians were more familiar than younger non-Christians with Bible stories and Christian theology, even if they did not personally embrace those beliefs.
The Barna president described this as "unexpected, because one often hears how theologically illiterate young Christians are these days. Instead, when it comes to questions of biblical literacy, the broader culture seems to be losing its collective understanding of Christian teachings. In other words, Christianity is no longer 'autopilot' for the nation's youngest citizens.
"Many younger Christians are cognizant that their peers are increasingly unfriendly or indifferent toward Christian beliefs and commitment. As a consequence, young Christians recognize that the nature of sharing one's faith is changing. For example, many young Christians believe they have to be more culturally engaged in order to communicate Christianity to their peers. For younger Christians, matters of orthodoxy are deeply interconnected with questions of how and why the Gospel advances among a post-Christian generation."
Myth 5: Young people will come back to church like they always do.
Reality: Some faith leaders minimize the church dropout problem by assuming that young adults will come back to the church when they get older, especially when they have children. However, previous research conducted by Barna Group raises doubts about this conclusion.
Furthermore, the social changes since 1960 make this generation much less likely to follow the conventional path to having children: Mosaics (often called Millennials or Gen Y) are getting married roughly six years later than did the Boomers; they are having their first child much later in life; and they are eight times more likely than were the youth of the 1960s to come from homes where their own biological parents were never married.
The author of the new Barna book, You Lost Me, Kinnaman asked several questions in response to conventional wisdom: "If this generation is having children later in life, are church leaders simply content to wait longer? And if Mosaics return, will they do so with extra burdens—emotional, financial, spiritual, and relational—from their years apart from Christian community? More to the point, what if Mosaics turn out to be a generation in which most do not return?
"Churches, organizations and families owe this generation more. They should be treated as the intelligent, capable individuals they are—a generation with a God-given destiny. Renewed commitment is required to rethink and realign disciple-making in this new context. Mosaic believers need better, deeper relationships with other adult Christians. They require a more holistic understanding of their vocation and calling in life—how their faith influences what they do with their lives, from Monday through Saturday. And they also need help discerning Jesus' leading in their life, including greater commitment to knowing and living the truth of Scripture."

Missional New Monastic Emergent Church Workshop in January

2011-11-15T19:52:00.001-08:00

Quick Links

Dear Ronald E. Robinson,

We've heard much for decades now about climate change in North American Christianity. Mainline decline. The rise of evangelicalism. Mushrooming megachurches and disappearing mid-sized congregations. Persons who claim to be spiritual but not religious. Post-Christian and post-Christendom North America. A remarkable increase in the de-churched and of persons who check "none" regarding religion.

But we also see significant renewal movements. Missional church. Emerging/emergent church. The new monasticism.

Woven through the climate change and movements of renewal are serious and provocative questions about the relationship between Christianity and "church."

We invite you to attend the Inaugural Re-Mind & Re-New Conference at Phillips Theological Seminary. The conference, formerly known as Ministers' Week, is an educational event designed to foster the renewal of participant's minds and spirits. Featured speakers include: Dianna Butler Bass, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Chris Haw, and Craig Van Gelder.

A registration fee of $90 inlcudes the program, coffee breaks and dinner on Tuesday evening. Registration deadline is January 9, 2012. Register for the conference here.

Free Webinar

The conference is preceded by a free webinar on November 30, 2011 at 10:00 a.m. CST. Led by Dr. Gary Peluso-Verdend, the webinar will briefly address conference topics and introduce participants to selected writings from featured speakers.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

10:00 a.m. CST

To register, view the full schedule, learn more about presenters and find additional information, visit the Re-Mind & Re-New Conference web pages, at www/ptstulsa.edu/remindrenew.

For questions contact Melanie Tipton at melanie.tipton@ptstulsa.edu or 918-270-6405.

Resources On Connecting with Your Missional Field

2011-11-10T17:58:00.001-08:00

Here are a few samples of resource handouts I will be using during the engaging your missional field workshop this weekend at the Fall Leadership Conference, Evangelizing The South, held at Glen Rose, Texas, by www.swuuc.org.

Engaging Your MissionalField with The 3R’s of MissionalMinistry: Relocation, Redistribution, Reconciliation

1. Location: Go As Local As Possible.Pick your Parish. Who you gonna serve? Narrow Your Scope to Make the MostDifference with your Resources. A block? A neighborhood? A Demographic Group? Begin with concerns about changing thecommunity around you, not with concerns about changing the church.

2. Relate With Remainers, Returners,Relocators. Connect these groups. EmbedYourself. Find the “peaceful presences” to partner with. Various ways to relocate: physically with yourresidence, moving your church, or regrouping your church, or just with classes,your board meets outside its own building; your social events, even yourworship; think of all the ways you can take what happens inside your buildingand do it with others in your community.

3. Choose the Abandoned Places of Empirefor your mission field: the first of the 12 Steps of New Monasticism. Seehandout for all 12.

4. People lead to partnerships and tothe particular projects you choose as long as they fit within your overarchingMission Vision Values. (For us, the mission is a given: Luke 4, Matthew 25, andthe values from 8 Points TCPC, 7 Principles UUA). Is your own truncated senseof mission and mission statements holding you back from engaging in mission?Looking and Living Outwards will help you to grow within your community aswell; what are the connection and the gifts of all the people includingespecially those on the fringes who can connect you with others?

5. Listen, Learn, Follow. Know the data,know the history, know the leaders, but also pay attention to the margins andthe fringe folk, those new in the community you are serving, just as you shouldwithin your own; do windshield tours and walking, talking, community forums.

6. Experiment and Fail your way toSuccess. Don’t wait to serve. Be wary of planning; instead prepare. Be wary ofBig Hairy Audacious Goals. Be wary of your dream of community interfering ingrowing community. Don’t fall in love with your vision statement.

7. Balance the needs of the partners fromoutside your area providing service and the needs of the neighbors receivingit; err on the side of neighbors; create your own non profit and work with nonprofits and governments. See handout.

8. Moving from Come to Us to Go Be WithThem. Know Yourself and Your Context and the Disconnect between them. Figureout where you fall on the Missional Field Scale. See handout.

9. Growing Smaller to Make BiggerChanges in the World; also grow in multiplicity moreso than with addition;develop growing overlapping missional communities; turn all small groups andcircles within the church into missional communities with a service component.

10. Permission Giving culture; turn over toothers. Simplify how things get done.

11. Going Missional is more than anotheroutreach program added on; it is core; affects budget, building, board,programs. 3 Sets of missional practices (Alan Roxburgh and Scott Duren,Introducing the Missional Church): 1. Cultivating Sacred Presence, ie worship,prayer, spiritual disciplines; 2. Demonstrating Love, through life together(cannot be done by a conglomeration of individualists who see each other onlyat formal meetings); 3. Engaging the neighborhood.

12. Meeting needs is not the starting point forincarnational mission. “When missionaries start with the need, hoping they willone day get to know poor people personally, they are likely to be found 10years later, still addressing the need,” John Hayes, of InnerChange, whichbrings us back to relocating physically, getting to know people as friends, asgivers not just as receivers,

Cultural Distance andMissional Engagement

Adapted from Right Here, Right Now:Everyday Mission for Everyday People by Alan Hirsch and Lance Ford

How we perceive the relationship ofour church in our contexts. Demonstrating the difficulties in remaining andgrowing as an attractional only church.

How far is a person or group from ameaningful engagement with your church’s core message and practices?

m0---------------m1-----------------m2-----------------m3-----------------m4

Each numeral with the prefix mindicates one significant cultural barrier to the meaningful communication ofyour core message and practices. What makes it difficult for “them” to “come tous”:

Examples of cultural barriers:language, race, nationality, religion, worldview, economical class, educationalattainment, age, occupations, family size, political leanings, etc.

m0-1: Those with some concept ofUnitarian Universalism who speak the same language, have similar interests,probably the same nationality and are from a similar class grouping as you oryour church. Most of your friends would probably fit into this bracket.

M1-2: Here we go to the averagenon-UU in our context: a person who has little real awareness or interest inUUism but is suspicious about the church (they have heard bad things). They maybe open to spirituality, socially aware, but have been offended previously bychurch, some call them “bad fruit” and are hard to reach.

m2-3: People in this group probablyhave no idea about UUism. Or they might be part of some ethnic group withdifferent religious impulses. This category also likely describes peopleactively antagonistic toward UUism as they understand it, e.g. Christianfundamentalists.

m3-4: This group might be inhabitedby ethnic and religious groups with a bad history with historical Westernreligious communities, such as have Muslims and possibly Jews. The fact thatthey are in the West in greater numbers now ameliorates some of this distancebut they are highly resistant to the culture of “church” by whatever name; someimmigrant and refugee communities fit in here too.

………..

Our church has a distinct culture andso do the people we are trying to reach. All mission in Western contexts nowmust be considered cross-cultural enterprises.

The attractional model of churchrequires the other to do all the work in crossing the cultural divide. Theyhave to be the missionaries.

Compounding this is the dynamic ofhow people who join churches, often within three to five years, have nomeaningful relationships with anyone outside the church. So if we do bring themin and socialize them to our group we cut them off from their host communitywhere they could help us continue to connect.

--------

If you are looking for measures ofmissional engagement, see how your community is doing according to the 12 Marksof New Monastic Communities, adapted: 1. Relocate to the abandoned places ofEmpire. 2. Share economic resources with one another and with others. 3.Hospitality to the stranger. 4. Lament for racial divisions within the churchand our communities, combined with an active pursuit of a just reconciliation.5. Connection with other churches. 6. Intentional formation of spiritual lifeborrowing from the lines of the old monastic formation rules. 7. Nurturingcommon life among members in an intentional community. 8. Support for singles,celibacy, alongside families and couples. 9. Geographic proximity to communitymembers who share a common rule for life. 10. Care for the plot of God’s EarthGiven to us along with support of our local economies. 11. Peacemaking in themidst of violence and conflict resolution. 12. Commitment to a disciplinedcontemplative life.

Rules For Radicals inMission

From Alan Roxburgh’s Missional:Joining God in the Neighborhood, with acknowledgment to Saul Alinsky

1. Go Local. Truly Live in yourneighborhood. Also instead of creating church programs to invite people to,lets make the neighborhood the focus of our creativity and commitment and turnthe local church into the center of formation for the equipping, sending, andresourcing of people in the local.

2. Leave Your Baggage At Home. Relatewith people as people not as objects for your purposes. The local church learnsto become like strangers who receive the hospitality of the people in thecommunity.

3. Don’t Move From House to House. Bloomwhere you are planted. Follow the call to stability and place in the 21^stcentury. A truly counter cultural move.

4. Eat what is set before you. Be readyto meet the other person in the ways that are comfortable for them.

5. Become Poets of the Ordinary. Listenand tell the stories of the people.

6. Move the Static into theUnpredictable. How are the local church’s arteries becoming hardened. Creatingnon-anxious presences so anxiety can be surfaced and change faced. Appreciativeinquiry with others.

7. Listen people into speech. Creatingspace in the community, and in the local church, for this to happen.

8. Experiment Around the Edges. Don’trush to fix an identified problem with a program; open up and try small thingslike asking and talking with others, doing something small. Help people dotheir own work of discovery.

9. Cultivate experiments, not BEHAGS,big hairy audacious goals; what to resist to allow number eight to happen.BEHAGS tend to perpetuate feelings of being in control, instead of enteringinto vulnerability, and trust.

10. Repeat Rules one through nine overand over again. Change comes through practice.

Map The Neighborhood:Assets Resources Hazards, Listen to stories, where do peoples gather, includingvirtually, from bus stops to coffee shops, workplaces, et al.

What issues areimportant to various groups? Who speaks for the community? What are theysaying? Who doesn’t have a voice?Why? Who are the historians and poets of thecommunity? What are they saying? Who has power, and who doesn’t and why? Whattopics concerning the neighborhood keep coming up?

….when did you firstmove in? what brought you here? What are your best memories of theneighborhood? What do you like best about the area? Tell me about your family.Does your extended family live here too? What would you love to see happen inthis community?

Missional CommunitiesResources: A Sample List

Books: The Almost Church Revitalizedby Michael Durall;

Missional Renaissance and alsoMissional Communities by Reggie McNeal;

The Shaping of Things To Come byMichael Frost and Alan Hirsch;

Introducing the Missional Church, andalso Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood, by Alan Roxburgh

Right Here, Right Now by Alan Hirschand Lance Ford

The Abundant Community by JohnMcNight and Peter Block, see also McKnights Turning Communities Inside Out

The Faith of Leap, by Hirsch andMichael Frost

Exiles by Michael Frost;

The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch,

Christianity Rediscovered by VincentDonovan (most of the books on this list are very contemporary; Donovan’spivotal book is from the 70s);

Welcoming Justice by John Perkins,

Let Justice Roll Down by JohnPerkins,

Follow Me To Freedom by John Perkinsand Shane Claiborne,

The Irresistible Revolution by ShaneClaiborne,

Houses That Change The World,Wolfgang Simson,

Change The World by Michael Slaughter

Emerging Church by Ryan Bolger andEddie Gibbs,

The Organic Church and Search andRescue, both by Neil Cole,

Life of the Beloved by Henri Nouwen,

The New Conspirators by Tom Sine,

The New Friars, and also LivingMission by Scott Bessenecker,

The Tangible Kingdom and Gathered andSent by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay;

The New Monasticism and School(s) for Conversion,both by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove,

Economy of Love, by Claiborne andothers

Church Morph by Eddie Gibbs,

Reimagine The World by BernardBrandon Scott,

Revolution by George Barna,

Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola,

UnChristian by David Kinnamon;

The Secret Message of Jesus,especially appendix, by Brian McLaren,

Under The Radar by Bill Easum,

An Altar in the World by BarbaraBrown Taylor,

Planting Missional Churches by EdStetzer,

Inside The Organic Church by BobWhitesel.

Lyle Schaller’s books especially TheNew Contexts For Ministry, and What We Have Learned, and From Geography toAffinity,

Postmodern Pilgrims by Leonard Sweetand his other books, and the other books by Bill Easum and Tom Bandy, and TheHouse Church Manual by William Tenny-Brittain

The Small Church At Large by RobinTrebilcock.

A few Films: Entertaining Angels: TheDorothy Day story; Romero; The Least of These; Briars in the Cotton Patch:Koinonia; Places in the Heart, The Spitfire Grill, Chocolat, Babette’s Feast,Man on Wire, The Blind Side, The Mission, The Shawshank Redemption, October Sky, The Blues Brothers, OfGods and Men. See also videos Economy of Love by Shane Claiborne, and Justice ForThe Poor from Sojourners, with Jim Wallis.

Websites: www.missionalprogressives.blogspot.com www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com,

www.msainfo.org, http://www.shenango.org/PDF//Missional%20Church%20bibliography%20_2_.pdf, Http://www.nationalministries.org/missional_church/docs/MCT_Six_Characteristics_Missional_Church.pdf

For a listof diverse missional communities: http://missionalprogressives.blogspot.com/2011/09/links-to-diverse-missional-communities.html

The Workshop Where It Began Five Years Ago: Notes from Reggie McNeal

2011-10-27T23:00:00.000-07:00

Five years ago this month, I was in a workshop with missional church leader Reggie McNeal, when the vision that had been trying to rise to the surface, a vision of turning our church inside out, of moving from trying to attract to trying to incarnate, of creating a space to give away to others in which we would be guests, when this vision became clear. I recently found the notes of that workshop and thought I would share them.At the top of the page I have written and circled his words: Church never votes to go missional; church that votes will always vote to go back to Egypt. (see Exodus). 1. But he started with a discussion of John 4:34-35, part of the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman after the disciples have left him to go into town to get food. From Eugene Peterson's translation of these lines: Jesus said, "The food that keeps me going is that I do the will of the One who sent me, finishing the work he started. As you look around right now, wouldn't you say that in about four months it will be time to harvest? Well, I'm telling you to open your eyes and take a good look at what's right in front of you. These Samaritan fields are ripe. It's harvest time! So, we are again getting at the difference here between the actions of the disciples and Jesus, or you might say the difference between church and Jesus. The disciples leave the area, the well, leave Jesus to go into town to get food. Church is trying to feed itself instead of others. It misses the action, it misses the party. And while the disciples can't see what is right around them (like not being able to see how God is present and working in the neighborhood outside their own doors), Jesus sees that there was no reason for the disciples to have left to seek food elsewhere; it was right around them all along; they just had to get outside of themselves and their agenda and see what the world offered to them. The fields are ripe, but the church can't see it.2. Part of that mission field is knowing how it is shaped by generational cultures. And so much of my notes is about the different generations, how a marker of our time is that we see such change and disruption from one generation to the next, whereas in the past there was more continuity between generations; and we have several generational cultures cohabitating at the same time which was not the case before. He divided up the generations as those born before 1925 who created the 20th century; then those born between 1925 and 1945 who are the builders and who favored mass standardization. Then between 1946 and 1964, the boomers, who created the experience economy and church as experience. Then those born from 1965 to 1983,the Gen X who stress relational, and family even if it is fictive family or their tribe of friends, who see themselves as survivors, wanting mentoring and lifeskills. And then those born between 1984 and 2000, the Millenials, who are exibiiting a turn toward community service and volunteering and renewed idealism after much of the cynicism of the Gen Xers. And then those born after 2000 who are simply the forming Next Generation. 3. He then talked about shifting from a focus on church growth to a focus on kingdom growth. That the world is the destination, not the church. Is church like an airport hub, or is church like a livewell with kept fish. We need to quit evangelizing . and start blessing. We need to move from being members or from all being minister to all being mission-aries.Start with community building agenda not church growth agenda. 4. The rise of Simple Church. There is a return to spiritual formation. Don;t think multiple site, but poly site; one vision in different places. The questions to ask yourself and those on your team: What do you enjoy doing? Where do you see God most at work in your life now? What would you like to see God do in your life in the next six to twelve months from now? Then how is it coming? How would you like to help other people? How can we pray for yiou? Our church scorecard needs to be their individual scorecard. Check into www.wiredparish.comBe counter culture to consumer culture. Offer spiritual direction; ancient practices are connecting now. Be apostolic in your leadership, which means people invest in people who will make a difference in people.Move from planning to preparation. Our DNA needs to be based on Vision, Values, Results, Strengths, and Learnings. We are shifting the scorecard oif success. We need to develop missionaries of relationship. Hand off ministry. Church is undergoing a Template Change.

Being Missional and Progressive: Various Welcome Statements About How We Try To Do It

2011-10-12T13:41:00.000-07:00

A Variety of Portals and Welcome Statements About The Welcome Table Church. Free Universalist Christian Missional Community. www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com

I.
Following the radical Jesus in deeds not creeds; though we may gain much wisdom from the historic creeds, we are not bound by them. Join us in service to our community throughout the week. That is the primary way we become church. Our Welcome Table of Worship is open to all who welcome all, regardless of belief or denomination, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, physical abilities, economic status, or political affiliations. We don’t think Jesus would have it any other way.

Free because God works in freedom so we are non-creedal. We don’t give theological tests for admission, but encourage you to test us and try us to see if this way is for you. Universalist because we believe God is Love and All who abide in Love abide in God, and God’s love is for all for all time. Christian because the generous compassionate way and story of Jesus, is our primary pathway opening up to God. Missional because we are sent to serve others more than ourselves, building up God’s beloved community more than our own, putting our time talent and treasure more into the world than into our own organization. Community because we are made not to be autonomous individuals but to be a people of God.

We are a simple church, but it can be a deep struggle to live toward true freedom, to practice God’s love for all, to follow the liberating Jesus who was crucified for his radical ways of hospitality and justice, to live for and serve others more than self, and to put community first. We invite those who wish to struggle with us, to fail with us, and to continue struggling with us. Worship gatherings and common meal are our times to refresh our spirits for the service of God.

II.
Here is a rewrite of the principles from The Center for Progressive Christianity, signalling our approach to religion.

1. The radically loving and liberating Jesus is central to our community's experience of God.
2. Jesus isn't the only way to experience God. It is good to let other experiences of God into our lives.
3. Communion is the way we worship, and is about God's welcome table for all, and our committment to a life of hospitality and justice throughout the week.
4. We will worship and work with anyone toward creating a just and more loving world; we don't give theological tests for being with us.
5. How we live in love deepens and reveals our faith more than our particular beliefs do. We honor the uncertainty, and change, of beliefs, but also the risk of committment.
6. Freedom is rooted in community, not in individual likes and dislikes, and must be nurtured in community.
7. We are called to resist evil done against Creation and against all of the most vulnerable, and must look to our own blessings and privileges of life that are contributing to injustice.

III.
The Covenanted Community, adapted and extended from Tich Nhat Hanh:
1. We show up.
2. We pay atttention
3. We speak truth in love
4. We stay focused on mission, and flexible on how to accomplish it
5. When we fail at 1 through 4, We show up.

IV.
The five smooth stones, adapted and altered from James Luther Adams and several sources:
1. Truth and meaning is ever being revealed anew, but this can mean also finding truth and meaning in forgotten or neglected or discarded ways.
2. Our relationships rest on mutuality and free consent and persuasion, not coercion.
3. Our committments are aimed at a just community.
4. Goodness must be incarnated in life if it is to be real.
5. We acknowledge the power of evil but believe hope and love and an abundant Universe are ultimate.

V.
The Three R's of Christian Community Development:
1. Relocate to the abandoned places of Empire (or remain, or return)
2. Redistribute goods and The Good
3. Reconcile peoples who are divided, broken, separate.

VI.
The Four Paths of Missional Church: World, We, I, God
1. First, Scatter out into the world beyond ourselves and Serve others. We are Sent People because God is a Sending God.
2. As we do the first, next Grow loving community, in order to do the first path more fully, and to reflect that God is always a Relational God.
3. Then focus on Growing Your Soul, in one's heart, mind, body, and spirit. The more we grow personally the more we have to give along the second path of community.
4. Finally, Respond with Worship: Gather together in Gratitude for being able to walk the first three paths and for the Renewal of self needed to sustain our walk with God found in all of these paths.

VII.
The Six Spiritual Practices of our Missional Community
1. Pray daily
2. Worship at least weekly.
3. Check in spiritually with another at least monthly
4. Go on Retreat at least annually.
5. Commit to going on a once in a lifetime pilgrimmage.
6. Practice random acts of kindness and beauty daily.

VIII.
The 3 Characteristics of an Emerging Church
1. Focus on the life of Jesus.
2. Blur the artificial boundaries and places of the secular and the spiritual
3. Live in Community.

Links to diverse missional communities and resources

2011-09-04T23:05:00.000-07:00

Please add to the list below; I will be off and on.

www.cmaresources.org

http://www.catholicworker.org/communities/commlistall.cfm

www.inwardoutward.org

http://www.adullamdenver.com/

http://www.scumoftheearth.net/SOTEC/Welcome.html

http://www.thesimpleway.org/

http://m.facebook.com/Pilgrims.in.the.Park?_rdr#!/Pilgrims.in.the.Park?view=feed&filter=14&refid=0

http://www.rockharbor.org/

http://bensternke.com/2009/10/warning-list-for-missional-communities/

http://www.commonwealthchapel.com/get-connected/missional-communities/

http://www.rivernyc.org/

www.ccda.org

www.newmonasticism.org

http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20101123_81_A9_CUTLIN542411

http://jrwoodward.net/2008/11/a-primer-on-todays-missional-church/

http://www.friendofmissional.org/

http://www.ecclesianet.org/

www.missionalchurch.org

http://tacoma.somacommunities.org/

http://www.vergenetwork.org/7-questions-series/

http://www.koinoniapartners.org/

Missional Church Bibliography

2011-09-04T23:02:00.000-07:00

http://missionalprogressives.blogspot.com/2010/10/few-starter-books-on-being-missional.html

Rules For Missional Radicals

2011-07-06T14:01:00.000-07:00

From Alan Roxburgh's book (see post below). Go to his website at http://www.roxburghmissionalnet.com/. Specifically to his blogpost at http://www.roxburghmissionalnet.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=160:neighborhood&catid=44:culture&Itemid=89

10 Rules:
1. Go local: incarnation comes in neighborhoods, neighbors, connecting and growing connections and spirit and help; we know people across the world but not next door (one critic contends Roxburgh needs to allow space for virtual neighborhoods); this is part of relocating; it is where our finite human selves and resources can also be conveyers of the most influence. meeting God in the neighborhood.

2. Leave your baggage at home. Be prepared to be a native, to enter new worlds right around you in the people of diversity

Workshop on Missional Progressives Reimagining Church/World

2011-07-02T14:08:00.000-07:00

From July 25-28, I will lead an afternoon workshop at Western Hills Lodge on Fort Gibson Lake not too far from Tulsa. The title will be Missional Progressives Reimagining Church, but the first point will be that what we are engaged in is reimagining the world around us, and if we don't start there then any kind of reimagining church will be in vain...

Monday's conversation is called Church as Parable...If Jesus' parables are about 180 degree turns in how people conceived of God, what would our 180 degree turns on how we conceive church be today? (one of the 180 degree turns is that all churches should not be conceived as the same, need to be the same in expression, etc, and so that includes all churches making 180 degree turns from what and who and where they are now; but we need to break our molds).

Monday night I will be leading the evening worship from 7:30 to 8 pm with an evening prayer theme of "Abide With Me".

Tuesday is called Church as Praxis. Sharing insights and stories and examples of how churches are already reimagining reincarnating themselves and what it means to become church. how are new mission and church plants being manifested?

Wednesday is called Church as Progressive. Why are progressive churches, peoples, in good position to be leaders in missional movements, and why are they last to pick up this adventure, what holds us back, and how are the two related as our strengths become our weaknesses and our weaknesses our strengths?

Thursday is called Church as Partner. How can we get out of our inherent isolationist approach of thinking we are in it by ourselves, and have to do it all ourselves, as ourselves, and how can we create ways to partner with others in mission, sharing stories of creating relationships beyond us to transform us and the world around us.

For more, go to http://swuuc.org/pages/services/camps/swuusi.php

Starting with the Right Questions

2011-06-23T21:26:00.000-07:00

From the new book Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood by Alan Roxburgh:

"The problem is that we won't address questions about the nature and function of the church by starting with questions about the church. [from RR: if you are at General Assembly or one of your church conferences notice how many issues, questions, concerns, conversations, lectures, workshops, etc. are all about the church]. In the changed contexts of our time, starting with church questions (whether multisite churches, the renaissance of the church, whole church, church morph, sticky church, or church turned inside out or whatever) takes us in all the wrong directions because they are the same old questions we have been asking since before the Reformation.

"On the other side are those who want to set aside the church as it exists (of course there is no other kind of church) as being irrelevant or past bothering with....Each of these is mentioned to make it clear that my argument of this book is not antichurch. In fact, my argument is born out of a passionate desire for local churches to embrace the missio Dei in their neighborhoods and communities.

"The heart of this book is to address these questions: What is God up to in our neighborhoods and communities? What is the nature of an engagement between the biblical imagination and this place where we find ourselves, at this time, among these people? What then will a local church look like when it responds to such questions?"

Pay attention to see where these questions are being asked, and where they aren't and why

Asking The Right Questions: Moving From Church to Neighborhood To Find God and Church

2011-06-22T11:32:00.000-07:00

From Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood by Alan Roxburgh:

"The problem is that we won't address questions about the nature and function of the church by starting with questions about the church. [from RR: if you are at General Assembly or one of your church conferences notice how many issues, questions, concerns, conversations, lectures, workshops, etc. are all about the church]. In the changed contexts of our time, starting with church questions (whether multisite churches, the renaissance of the church, whole church, church morph, sticky church, or church turned inside out or whatever) takes us in all the wrong directions because they are the same old questions we have been asking since before the Reformation.

"On the other side are those who want to set aside the church as it exists (of course there is no other kind of church) as being irrelevant or past bothering with....Each of these is mentioned to make it clear that my argument of this book is not antichurch. In fact, my argument is born out of a passionate desire for local churches to embrace the missio Dei in their neighborhoods and communities.

"The heart of this book is to address these questions: What is God up to in our neighborhoods and communities? What is the nature of an engagement between the biblical imagination and this place where we find ourselves, at this time, among these people? What then will a local church look like when it responds to such questions?"

Pay attention to see where these questions are being asked, and where they aren't and why

Moving Away From Church Questions to Neighborhood, God, Scripture Questions

2011-06-22T11:01:00.000-07:00

Are You On The Fringe?

2011-05-05T15:27:00.000-07:00

All of May on Sundays during worship time we are having a conversation reading and discussing selections from Change The World: The Message and Mission of Jesus: Rethink Church by Mike Slaughter. This coming Sunday we will be taking up the question: Are We Missional? (after first exploring the necessity of being and becoming missional as part of following Jesus). The key quote is from Alan Hirsch: "All great missionary movements begin at the fringes of the church, among the poor and the marginalized, and seldom, if ever, at the center."

Are we a people of the center? Or the fringe? In what ways yes and no? No matter how large a community, it is important to spend time and resources and energy focused on the fringes of the community, and with the fringes of the wider community. Does your leadership spend its energy on keeping those already in community happy and sustained and growing, or do you let them be the scouts out into the fringes where they can bring back the reports of what is needed, who is doing what exciting, who to partner with? How does our ethnicity, and where we live, and where we go to school, and where we shop and hang out, all reflect being a people rooted in the center of culture or on the fringes?

How to be missional and live on and with the fringes? Here Slaughter lifts up first the Great Requirement from Micah, then he links it with the Great Commandment in John's gospel that no greater love than to lay down your life for others (I would rather use for the Great Commandment Luke's commandment borrowing from Deuteronomy Shema to love God with all your heart, might, etc and added to love your neighbor as yourself which is then followed by the parable of the Samaritan so we really know who our neighbor is to be, the one on the fringes) and then Slaughter finishing his model with the Great Commission which will move into the next section which begins with the question of "Are We Inclusive?" which I will pick up next.

See more on our specific community at www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com

Hoping to get to a Change The World conference at his church in Ohio this coming October.

Don't Cling To Me!

2011-04-23T12:15:00.000-07:00

"Don't Cling To Me": An Easter Missional Immersion in the Christ of Faith

The Text: This year on Easter Sunday, one of the texts from the Revised Common Lectionary is from the Fourth Gospel, of John, from the original finale of that gospel. It is the section narrating Mary of Magdala's discovery of the empty tomb, of Jesus, and faith. The story of Mary’s encounter at the tomb in John, goes like this, from Eugene Peterson's The Message interpretation:

“ Early in the morning on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone was moved away from the entrance. She ran at once to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, breathlessly panting, "They took the Master from the tomb. We don't know where they've put him." Peter and the other disciple left immediately for the tomb. They ran, neck and neck. The other disciple got to the tomb first, outrunning Peter. Stooping to look in, he saw the pieces of linen cloth lying there, but he didn't go in. Simon Peter arrived after him, entered the tomb, observed the linen cloths lying there, and the kerchief used to cover his head not lying with the linen cloths but separate, neatly folded by itself. Then the other disciple, the one who had gotten there first, went into the tomb, took one look at the evidence, and believed. No one yet knew from the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead. The disciples then went back home.

But Mary stood outside the tomb weeping. As she wept, she knelt to look into the tomb and saw two angels sitting there, dressed in white, one at the head, the other at the foot of where Jesus' body had been laid. They said to her, "Woman, why do you weep?" "They took my Master," she said, "and I don't know where they put him." After she said this, she turned away and saw Jesus standing there. But she didn't recognize him. Jesus spoke to her, "Woman, why do you weep? Who are you looking for?" She, thinking that he was the gardener, said, "Mister, if you took him, tell me where you put him so I can care for him." Jesus said, "Mary." Turning to face him, she said in Hebrew, "Rabboni!" meaning "Teacher!"

Jesus said, "Don't cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go to my brothers and tell them, 'I ascend to my Father and your Father, my God and your God.'" Mary Magdalene went, telling the news to the disciples: "I saw the Master!" And she told them everything he said to her.

The Turning Points: This is a text full of turnings, and of naming. When we get into the story deeply, it is literally spinning us around, as good faith will, as for the early church the whole world was now being turned around, being named, being created anew….It is the turning of the day from darkness to light, so important in the Johannine gospel and view of Christ as the light of the world. Mary comes to the tomb, probably slowly, mournfully, dutifully, then sees the stone gone and fearing the body has been stolen, more mocking, more shaming, she immediately turns and runs quickly to the male disciples. Then she presumably turns again and follows the beloved disciple and Peter back to the tomb where they do their dance of authority on who will go inside the tomb first and what conclusions of belief and remaining doubt they will have, and then they turn again and leave.

Mary stays this time. Mary weeps. She kneels to get a closer look this time. And she sees two angels whom no one had seen before, located at the two ends of where Jesus’ body had been; had they been there before when Jesus’ body had been laid out there before, had they gone when the two male disciples showed up but returned when Mary came back? Mary continues still, not turning back and prompting an angel to call her Woman, exerting power by the name used, and the angel calls into question her very weeping, as if accentuating here emotions, perhaps her gender, and her reason for being there.

There the story takes a quick turn itself. She expresses her fear that the authorities have taken, have spirited, the body away. The body is important to Mary. Blessing the body is important. And then she turns again, as if toward a presence just around the turn of a corner, just out of sight, and sees someone she doesn’t recognize. Should she? Is her emotion blinding her? Is it another example of her not being a true disciple as much as the male disciples or else she would have recognized Jesus right away? Has her old default mode of believing dead is dead, that the Empire always wins, blinded her instead? In the presence of two angels, which biblical witness says is often a scary fearful thing, and in the presence of someone she doesn’t know, right away at least, and who calls her also by the dismissive title of “Woman” and questions her state, why she weeps, all of this in the realm of the dead and buried, still Mary does not turn and flee mute and terrified, even if awestruck here, as in Mark.

And as if her standing her ground is standing on holy ground, she is rewarded by the pivotal question, the question that turns all of our Easters upside down for us: Who is it she is looking for? Who are we looking for on this day and in this season, this year, this day? Mary, still not recognizing Jesus, answers back, that powerful act of speaking from her heart and truth to the power of those in her midst, turning his question back on him: Mister, she says directly to the nameless man she thinks may hold the keys to her despair, if it is you who has done this, undo it, return the body to me, so I may care for it. So I may do what needs to be done. So I may act in an “as if” world, as if the community of love and support and traditions still exists even despite the crucifixion, anointing the body of Jesus as Jesus anointed and blessed so many bodies in pain himself.

And then Jesus symbolically turns on the light, revealing himself in response to her attention, her faithfulness to love, even justice in caring for the shamed body of an executed criminal. Jesus does this by calling her by her name, that powerful act of relationship, breaking through the boundaries of the system of power and the honor/shame mode, becoming present in the vulnerability of the mutual relationship. That is all it took for Jesus to be revealed, saying her own true name. And she turns toward him. And she names him Rabbi. What had been, which had been taken, has now been restored.

Then the story turns again: She has gone to him and has taken hold of him, for Jesus says “Don’t cling to me.” Peterson and more liberal biblical scholars agree that this is a more accurate phrase than the “Don’t touch me” phrase. It definitely implies there is something there to hold onto, yet as Jesus goes on to explain, his new body is in transition; he is the old body and he is the new body. Don’t cling to the old body. Don’t cling to what was. Let him go to God, as he tells Mary to turn one more final time and go tell the other disciples that he is going on, returning to God. And so she does, telling, teaching them what her Teacher has just taught her.

The Take Away: There is much of what has been thought of as “the feminine” in this story foundational to Christianity, even if much of John overtly may try to sideline Mary’s role and lift up male disciples. Vulnerability, persistence, intimacy, bodily caring; elements present in Jesus as well, though here as in other parts of the gospel of John particularly Jesus himself is revealing of himself through encounters with strong women (such as his mother at the wedding of Cana). Even deeper though this resurrection story seems to signal to us that it isn’t just what we know about Jesus, what we have experienced of Jesus in the past, what we think we can recognize as his shape and his voice, or argue about, but that we shouldn’t cling to all that precisely because Jesus is becoming something new for us, something we will only perhaps be able to understand and appreciate in community, in teaching one another and sharing our experiences of empty tomb moments.

It is as if Jesus is saying if you want to be in my presence from now on, go cling to one another, and cling to those I brought close to me. It might not even be your own personal encounter with me that I am now desiring; it is your becoming me in community with others.

That is what I call the Christ of faith, the shape of the historical Jesus becoming and unfolding in new ways, becoming clear and powerful, giving that power away to others, all in the midst of others. Especially on Easter do we celebrate the truth of this transformation, especially in the places and through the people who are like tombs where we witness the stones being rolled away and the shame give way to Love and we hear our own name called, and turn toward it to be restored and to go restore others. Especially right here, right now, with you.

A missional pioneer moves into NYC

2011-04-15T08:29:00.000-07:00

Vineyard has long been a seedbed of missional church life; check out their venture in New York City getting the attention of progressives. They church good especially in urban areas. http://www.rivernyc.org/ Particularly pay attention to the section on The River Partners, and the various differences they list out that makes their church a missional church without saying it exactly. But they set up the spectrum and show you how they are moving the margins so to speak of what church does and is for. Especially why "they worship after the service."

Location, Location, Location

2011-04-06T21:06:00.000-07:00

The more I experience it, and the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that becoming missional means choosing your location wisely, or letting it choose you, and while that has always been a hallmark of the contemporary church planting system, for the missional it means going to the very opposite places that most consider when they seek to plant a church. Few who want to plant a standard model church, especially progressive church, would come to a place like ours with these statistics:

...55 percent worry about the amount of food they have
...6 percent use spoiled food
...29 percent use a food pantry
...31 percent receive food from church
...35 percent borrow food from family
...25 percent borrow food from friends
...25 percent adults skip entire day from eating
...29 percent adults skip meals
...26 percent did not eat and are hungry at time of survey
...43 percent eat less than they should
...60 percent eat low cost foods
...52 percent cannot afford nutritious meals
...57 percent run out of food
...60 percent cannot afford healthy food

The Food Environment:
...29 percent have no affordable source of food in community
...63 percent know about a food pantry
,..56 percent rate the food quality in Turley area as fair or poor
...59 percent indicate food in Turley area expensive or very expensive relative to budget

Overall Health:
...56 percent not currently healthy
...41 percent health is fair or poor
...54 percent are overweight
...66 percent should weigh less
...47 percent smoke or use other tobacco

I guess you can be missional anywhere; I often suggest to people in the fast growing affluent suburbs that they can be missional there by being subversives against consumerism, looking for ways to do guerilla gated community crashing, no-shopping, buy nothing demonstrations, hold a picnic worship in the midst of the miracle mile restaurant rows where community tables are shunned or unknown, and organizing urban plunges and relationships of support with communities in the abandoned places of Empire.

But at the end of the day....not only are you still living and supporting these well off neighborhoods, but I think it takes a lot more energy, a lot more resources, a lot more persistence to make a dent missionally in more affluent places, the same as it does to try to do a regular attractional church plant in these places; affecting the neighbors is just tougher it seems than what a small group can accomplish missionally in the abandoned places; maybe you can attract more to your group when you are located where there are more, but then you have the same problem of breaking through all the noise to be seen and heard by them.

One of the first crisis points for a missional leader will be: where to live, and how to live, and with whom to live?

Embodying Progressive Missional Faith: Two Part Presentation

2011-03-26T21:37:00.000-07:00

Embodying a Progressive Missional Faith

Part One: Reclaiming Abandoned Places: The Three Rs of the Missional Church and The Spiritual Life, Sunday, 10:30 am, March 20, 2011, sermon First Unitarian Church, Worcester, MA;
Part Two: An Epistle to Plymouth, MA—Abandon Church! Become Church, a sermon on the Installation of the Rev. Jay Libby as the 24th settled minister of First Parish in Plymouth, MA, founded in 1606 in Scrooby, England, Sunday, 4 pm, March 20, 2011

Rev. Ron Robinson

Part One, Worcester
Readings:

From Luke 13:20-21. The Parable of the Leaven: And again he said, To what shall I liken the kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman stole and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was corrupted.

From Jorgen Moltmann's "The Source of Life"...Moltmann saw the devastation first hand of whole communities in Europe during and after World War Two:
The ideology of “there is never enough for everyone” makes people lonely. It isolates them and robs them of relationships. The opposite of poverty isn’t property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community. For in community we become rich: rich in friends, in neighbours, in colleagues, in comrades, in brothers and sisters. Together, as a community, we can help ourselves in most of our difficulties. For after all, there are enough people and enough ideas, capabilities and energies to be had. They are only lying fallow, or are stunted and suppressed. So let us discover our wealth; let us discover our solidarity; let us build up communities; let us take our lives into our own hands and at long last out of the hands of the people who want to dominate and exploit us.

Sermon:

First let me give thanks to your church and let you know I have many times spoken of you when I have preached on the presence and what I call the parable of the free church. One Sunday several years ago I was here for the first time sitting right about there…what I remember and tell is that right after the Lord’s Prayer the Rev. Barbara Merritt preached a powerful sermon about her belief in God and why it was important for atheists to be a part of this church. That combination of tradition, personal testimony, and inclusive community helped me to see anew and feel deeply what we mean by the free church, and like all good parables it has me still thinking and trying to live into it.

Jesus’ parables are one of the guides for our community back home. A favorite is when Jesus said The kingdom of God is like leaven, which a woman stole, and put into three measures of flour, until it was all corrupted. hat seemingly measures of meal, until it was all corrupted. That seemingly simple parable is about the radical fact of God changing sides. God’s Relocation. The kingdom of God, was itself a parable, for the kingdom, the world, the Empire as everyone knew, was Caeser’s. The evidence was everywhere; if you needed reminders just look at your coins or your crosses lining the roads. Caeser was Lord and Savior and what was divine was power and honor and property and propriety and security. Jesus immediately challenges those assumptions by claiming the world is not Caeser’s but that of the God of conquered, small poor Israel.

Then Jesus goes on to link this God with leaven, something ordinary, and also unholy, not like the purity of the unleavened bread, rather something moldy that was to be kept separate and apart while preparing your meal. Next God is likened to a woman, and as if that isn’t bad enough in the eyes of the world, she is a woman who sneaks or steals this leaven, and then foolishly puts it into enough flour to feed a feast, and what happens? It all goes bad, becomes useless. And that’s where the parable ends.

The God of this parable has relocated…from holiness to unholiness, from power and privilege and public status and acts to what happens in the home, out of sight is no longer out of mind, at least in God’s mind and sight; relocated from fullness and contentment to emptiness aand waste; also from A Static Being to a process, a movement that changes and corrupts from within the dominant culture’s status quo and beliefs in what is worthy and respectable. Jesus challenged the authorities of his time, as this parable challenges us today, to also pick sides, to relocate, to go experience God, and help make God visible, where the powerful and the privileged won’t go and even seek to keep hidden from others, in hopes of keeping their honor, their marketing, their economy intact.

One of the best examples of this parable in action in our times can be seen in the life of Civil rights and community organizing activist John Perkins, founder of among other groups the Christian Community Development Association. Little known to the general public, he has had a huge affect especially on young people today seeking to change communities the way an earlier generation sought to change laws.

John Perkins was born 80 years ago in rural Mississippi. His father left when he was young; He watched a white police officer kill his unarmed older brother while standing in a line at a movie theater; his brother had recently returned from service in World War Two. John was full of anger and was a ticking time bomb; he hated church because it seemed to do nothing for the community in the face of injustice; he had quit school at third grade to work. He married but continued to drink and party. His family, seeing his anger and despair and fearing for his life, managed to send him out of Mississippi to work in California. There he began turning his life around and became part of the black middle class; then through his young son Spencer he began attending a church that had a prison ministry; there in meeting with the inmates and encountering the bible for really the first time he not only became a Christian but began taking seriously this prophetic Jesus who calls out for justice for the poor and oppressed. And It was the late 50s, in the thick of the growing civil rights era in the South, and the Jesus he was now following led him to go back home with his family to rural Mississippi.

At first he was only going to teach this Bible, to the youth so they would get the message earlier than he had when he lived there. But soon the needs of the community, and the voice of this Jesus, were calling out to give more than a message: so a community center and farm was started, food was distributed, health care was begun, child care was given, adult classes begun, and worship held, and civil rights were supported. The God that relocated him also showed him that the work of God is in redistribution, both of goods and justice.
The more public his ministry the more it was seen as a threat. One night he and a van full of youth were stopped on a rural road by police who arrested him for contributing to the delinquency of minors and took him to jail where he was beaten and tortured near to death. In a hospital, the care of a white nurse coming so soon after his treatment by white jailers gave him an epiphany; it helped him to put his hatred into a larger vessel of God’s love, and gave him a new focus, racial reconciliation.

And so were born the 3Rs of community development that has guided and grown his work in the past decades and inspired many other communities: One R is for relocating to places of struggle and abandonment; a second R is for redistribution of services and spirit; and a third R is for reconciliation of peoples.
Actually he points out that to do this work requires combining three groups of people: remainers, those who have never left an area when others have and who have a native’s wisdom; returners, those like he was, like my wife and I, people who come back where they had been and who have brought new gifts of service and perspective with them, and relocaters, those called out to go to abandoned places new to them, called out by their own discomfort at being in comfortable places. All are needed. And while there is nothing like actual physical relocation, getting new neighbors, there are many important ways people can relocate their time, talents, and treasure to abandoned places. I just hesitate to go into them because they so easily become our default mode and will distract us from a more radically transforming calling whose simplicity itself might be what’s the most challenging.

A phrase has sprung up to describe places like where John Perkins lives and where I live, places located all over the place in rural and urban settings. It is called the abandoned places of Empire. It harkens back to the Roman Empire, there at a time when the Empire was crumbling, new communities on the edges were being created as small alternative socieites with values of cooperation instead of conquering. But now The Empire we feel at odds with is a contemporary American Consumer Entertainment Marketplace Empire with dominant cultural values that champion Appearance, Affluence, Achievement, Coolness, Convenience, Comfort, Strength and Safety. And above all, perhaps, personal autonomy full of choices never ending. Challenging those American Dream values now is akin to Jesus casting God as leaven, as unholiness. This is an Empire who says the good life, even the spiritual life, is found in being surrounded by the so-called best things. The goal of this Empire is for places like ours to exist only as places people leave, as places where people live as punishment for not being able to buy into all the Empire provides us. We are the “Left Behind” places, as if the Rapture had already happened, in an economic, political, communal sense.

John Perkins says think of the shame people have who remain with constant reminders they have not been good enough or smart enough or lucky enough or young enough to leave as they should. That shame breeds a paralysis that makes it hard for people to become active with others for their own and their community’s behalf. It makes it hard for them to see the counter-truth, that as theologian Jorgen Moltmann says, the opposite of poverty is not property but the opposite of both poverty and property is community.

Even the good news of our community, the 74126 zipcode, far northside edge of Tulsa covering an unincorporated and incorporated urban rural small town area, once working class and growing before a racist response to integration occurred and white flight began to suburbs and investment in schools and the community ended. Still, I sometimes wonder why anyone wouldn’t want to relocate there, where five years ago we bought a home on two acres with a great view for $28,000. Ten minute drive from downtown; ten minutes to a lake. A realtors dream.
Then I remember hardly a night goes by we don’t have a shooting; just between May and August last year there were 311 shootings in Tulsa, and the highest concentration were in our area, which doesn’t actually have the highest crime rate overall. And we also have the city’s huge mountain of a landfill that has risen up in just the past decade to rival the height of the natural hill behind our house, and it is perpetually on fire and being closed for environmental damages, which just means even more illegal dumping on our streets. We are in a healthy food desert where 55 percent worry about how much food they have and 60 percent can’t afford healthy food, and I do wonder if that number would have been higher if people were more aware of what constitutes healthy food. We have no home pizza delivery, no movie theaters, our parks have been closed or redesigned to be used by people driving in from the suburbs, and most of the businesses we do have are owned by people who live elsewhere, as do our teachers and police and many of our preachers; even some churches only rent in our zipcode for the low rent not because they serve people from here.

Our average household income keeps going down and is now just barely above $20,000; When we bought our property it had been abandoned for several years like 40 percent of the vacant homes near us, and we had to plead our case to the bankers to get the loan to buy the place; they didn’t believe me, an executive director of a national religious organization, and my wife, a physician, were actually going to live there, moving from our new home in a new subdivision in a fast growing suburb. A place where after spending more than the purchase price on renovation and remodeling the value of our property has remained virtually the same because the the rest of the ones around us have continued to decline.

The opposite of poverty is still even the good news of our community where We have the lowest life expectancy in our greater area, fourteen years less than the area with the highest rate just a few miles away, but we have the fewest, meaning none, health care services in the area. One of the first things our micro-church helped to bring to our area, locating it in the community center we created, was a university health clinic, but the economic and social dynamics of funding it and supporting it were not sustainable for funders and it has closed; while similar clinics in other parts of the city remain open full time, ours couldn’t maintain even a half a day one day presence which it had been reduced to by the end. Getting people to come wasn’t the problem; getting the right people to come, those with some insurance possibilities to help offset the uninsured, was the problem; there just weren’t enough of them, and those that were already were going elsewhere. On the advantage side, in the edge communities and out of desperation can come what we call “creative disruptive innovation” and we are now planning a health care mentoring network hiring people from our neighborhoods to partner both with their neighbors who are high users of the emergency room and to themselves teach medical residents about the communities in which their patients attempt to live.

The opposite of poverty is even our community where government and educational services have been cut and the fact that we are a small blue conclave—my precinct voted 225 to 25 for President Obama--in the only state where every county voted against Barack Obama, doesn’t bode well for having slashed state funds directed our way.

So If one adopts the values of the Empire, then ours and the places John Perkins has lived, are the last places you would want to live. But if you follow the values of the parable of the leaven, if you are intent on growing a soul in relationship and community with the most vulnerable, then these and ones even more severely stressed in other countries, are the first places. And once you relocate, and begin the work of redistribution and reconciliation, you’ll kick yourself for not going sooner. Every day presents an opportunity for the kinds of small acts of random justice, random love and beauty, random church, that sustain and deepen our lives of faithfulness to the Spirit Everlasting. They are the kind of places where a few people with a few resources can spread hope like leaven. They are places where it is easy to experience the counter truth that the opposite of poverty and property is community.

Besides the visible things we have created in just these past four years since we turned our little church group inside out and began incarnating ourselves into the community around us, instead of expecting the community to come to us, becoming like a guest in our own place, besides the clinic and garden and food pantry and computer center and clothing room and concerts and festivals and all the one on one personal assistance, what has really begun to be seeds of change in our zipcode is simply the ways people have begun to have a way to share their presence with one another through our presence. Which has been done with under a dozen leaders, with no paid staff.

What we have had has been God’s leaven, another name for which is beloved community, or communitas, the kind of community that forms itself by turning away from itself, outward with others. It is communitas on one side, and Empire on the other,and I say, as a Universalist, that God has chosen sides, has moved into the neighborhood of abandonment and not the gated community, and is hoping but not waiting for church to move there too. God hasn’t given up on those behind their gates, not given up on the well-off, on the cool and beautiful people who wouldn’t be caught dead in our zipcode; no, unlike the Empire, God is big enough to be an active loving presence everywhere, with everyone; It is just that God will transform our gated lives and communities not from within them but from the 74126 zipcodes that are located everywhere. I believe it is the next great adventure, mission, frontier, horizon for us as a progressive spiritual people to find ways to be there too. I am sorry I haven’t been able to tell you about the lives we have literally saved, about the joy that overshadows the setbacks. But these words by John Perkins from his book “Welcoming Justice” will I hope suffice.

“So what does it take to make beloved community happen? I really believe that it begins with a place. I’ve preached relocation all my life because the communities I’ve been a part of have been abandoned. Everybody left, so I called them to come back. But my real concern is for the place. If the church is going to offer some real good news in broken communities, it has to be committed to making a good life possible for people in the place where we are. If you care about a place, you’ll care about the kids in that place. If you don’t care about the kids, they’ll knock out your windows. But the kids in our neighborhood don’t knocfor the place. If the church is going to offer some real good news in broken communities, it has to be committed k out our windows. One of the first things we did when we came here was to put in a sandbox and build a jungle gym. We made sure there was a field for kids to play ball.

“When you’re committed to a place, you also care about the beauty of the place. The flowers around our place are important. Every summer the children come running to ask me if they can take some flowers home with them. They don’t have pretty flowers at home…Shared beauty makes people want to share life together. You don’t have to tend your flowers in a neighborhood very long before you have something to talk to your neighbors about.

“It may sound simple but I think you’ve got to have neighbors you talk to and get to know before you can love your neighbor as yourself. That’s why community development has been so important to me all these years. The church can’t organize the perfect community. If people aren’t drawn by the cords of love to a vision of beloved community, you can’t force it on them. But we can organize for justice. We can develop a community so that there is a place for people to know one another. That’s the work God has given us to do. Only God can send the rain, but we can till the ground by committing to a place and making sure people can flourish there. That’s the first thing the church has to do if we’re going to interrupt the brokenness of society.

“As we commit to our communities, we also need to learn how to see them as economic places. It’s not enough to just move into a place, plant some flowers and be nice to your neighbors. All of that is good, but that won’t address the brokenness of people’s lives because the structures of the community are broken. People need work, good housing, education and health care. So the church has to invest its resources in developing the community. We also need to use our influence to get businesses and government to invest in the community. ..I wish churches spent more time thinking about how their members could love one another and share a common life by working together as a community. Part of the reason our churches are so individualistic is that we just accept the economic systems of our culture without question. We assume that the people who can get the good jobs should go wherever they have to and the people who can’t get the good jobs should just take what they can get. But churches that want to interrupt the brokenness of society ought to be about creating jobs in the community and giving neighbors an opportunity to work together. If we take our communities seriously as economic places, we’ll spend more time thinking about creating good work than we spend thinking about more relevant worship styles or bigger church buildings."

Amen, John Perkins.

So, Go, find the abandoned places and the people who will be the leaven in your own life and for your own church, even as you then walking together with them become the leaven in the world which no Empire can withstand. '

[For more on John Perkins see www.ccda.org. On abandoned places of Empire see the work of www.newmonasticism.org. For more on our community in Oklahoma see http://www.uuworld.org/news/articles/172162.shtml and www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com.
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Part Two: Abandon Church!, Become Church---"An Epistle to Plymouth" on the Installation of the Rev. Gerald E Jay Libby as the 24th settled minister of the First Parish in Plymouth, MA. Sunday, March 20, 2011.

Prayer:
O God, May my words reflect Thy Spirit, May our minds and hearts be open to all the abundance and diversity of Life Itself, and May this time together inspire us to help make Thy Love Everlasting visible in the world.

Sermon:
First, my friends, from The Selected Texts for today from the Revised Common Lectionary comes this passage especially appropriate on this day of new beginnings: It is from the start of the 12th chapter of Genesis (using the version from The Five Books of Moses, Schocken Bible by Everett Fox). Adonai said to Abram: Go you forth, from your land, from your kindred, from your father’s house, to the land that I will let you see.”

This pivotal passage in the Bible gets even more power and meaning as it comes right after the incident with the Tower of Babel. There humans discovered God does not like uniformity, hubris, and edifice complexes designed to put more and more people into one single place for their own identity and selfish aims. Right after the story of the destruction of the Tower of Babel and the scattering of the people into cultures of peoples, then comes the story of Abram. He is not yet known as Abraham, and at this point is all of 75 years old. When he was a child his father had heard the Lord call him out of their home in Ur to go to Caanan but his father had settled in Haran. It was from there Abram is called out, out of his comfort, his safety, his identity, in response to the Voice that interrupts our plans, and confounds what we know, turns us inside out, and reminds us of whose we are and what that means.

Greetings and Gratitude, I bring to you, the oldest congregation in our Association, from a very small band of folks in the far northside of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who are an emerging congregation in our Association. Gratitude for your gifts today, and your history, and your invitation to be here. Consider the invitation given to come be our guests. Perhaps, though we have a great age difference, we can find ways to walk this road as together, oldest and newest, in both service and spirit.

Walking together. That is what this occasion is all about. It is a phrase from the prophet Amos made popular among our religious tribe by the one whom recently we lost at the age of 94, our historian of The New England Way, Conrad Wright. He helped restore our foundations as a people of covenant, especially those covenants or promises that constitute and create our free church. These include the covenants between a person and church; church and its elected leaders, including minister. Also church and church; and minister and minister. These four are our internal covenants helping to establish right relationships and Identity. They are like the materials of a ship that hold it together and give it a particular shape.

But there are two other more externally focused covenants: 1. that between church and world, be it known as parish, or immediate neighborhood. and 2. ultimately the covenant and connection between church and God, howsoever is called the Transcendent Spirit that is also within, among, and yet beyond us, the Voice that calls us or rises within us, and sets us on a journey, sending us out to be servants among scattered peoples. These two external covenants are like the Sea and the Wind; they are what give the ship of church its purpose, its reason for having its particular shape, and when they change in drastic ways they can sink or stall the ship built in the best of ways for other environments.

The four internally focused covenants are often the ones we spend most of our time dealing with; they are the ones that present us with urgent matters; and because of this they are the easier to grasp, and to write guidelines and policies about and create celebrations like this one. But if you are not grasped by the other two, the church will not be complete, not be church; instead it will become, as Conrad Wright said, merely a collection of religiously-oriented individuals (see his essay Walking Together in his book by that name) who, if they were to disappear, would not cause much of a disturbance in the lives of the people in their surrounding community. That’s a good question to ask at annual meetings and pledge dinners: are we creating the kind of disturbance in the world that if we were to disappear would be noticed and felt by people in our community, and who are the ones whose absence would be greatly felt?

Today we do celebrate one of these internal covenants, that of church and minister. Know this: this covenant will only be as strong as are all the others. Where any one of them is weak or broken, the others will suffer. Strengthen any one, such as this one we celebrate, and the others will be stronger. Especially, though, to strengthen this covenant do we now need to put a priority on the external covenants we have neglected so long, for they are the Ground of being for the others; they call church into existence in the first place and continually re-orient church toward others, and re-create it among others, as a manifestation of The Spirit’s very own nature as sending, giving, liberating, serving, restoring.

When we make the shift in priority from internal to external covenants, and let them guide how we become church, we shift from a church having a mission, one that it can change like it changes boards or plans or programs, or ministers, to The Mission having a church.

Put in your mind, heart, and lives the mission of healing a hurting world, even writ small in very local ways, and let that dictate everything else, no matter what may then need to be changed. Engage the parish deeply, and let that wisdom, those needs, then create whatever form of church is mandatory to carry out the mission, and whatever personal transformations are called for in order to be sustainable servants.

As you do this, be prepared to see your world anew and not turn away from what you see. This is true at least for those of us like me who were born before 1963 especially, born and raised in Churched Culture. We, who perhaps have been here the longest, and longest steeped in church, are actually now the immigrants, the pilgrims in what has been our own land. Those who have come after us, those who are not and may never be Churched are the natives of this new land, new culture, and if we are to survive and to thrive and leave a more loving world behind us, we will have to learn from the natives, and let them lead us. Without them becoming us, and without them losing touch wiwith their varied cultures so they can continue to be the church there. (For more on this metaphor of church pilgrims and natives, see Leonard Sweet’s Postmodern Pilgrims).

A come to us church could thrive in a churched culture with little variance between it and others; but in our world of great distance between our church culture and life beyond, a come to us church must have tremendous resources and resiliency to bridge that gap. And those are few and far between. But the good thing is that being church is older than our models of it, older than Plymouth, older than Wittenburg, older than Rome. Originally church was a “go be with them” people, and is becoming so again. (for discussion of the cultural variances in missional work, see the scale used in Right Here, Right Now by Alan Hirsch and Lance Ford)

Here is what we need to remember: The church is not, fundamentally, a 501c3 nonprofit religious organization; it can and has existed, ancient and emerging times, without bylaws, boards, budgets, and buildings, and clergy. Church does not have to be thought of as “a” church, that one “goes to” on the corner of this and that, and is even named a certain thing, but church can be lived out organically as a way people, two or more at a time, participate as expressions of “the church.” Imagine. Church anywhere, anytime, by anyone. For Church does not have to be only in the mode of help us to become bigger and better, more competitive, where people despite our best intentions become the means to some organizational end; that is to follow the default mode of consumerism; church doesn’t have to be about attracting and extracting people from one environment, at great expense, and placing them in our environment, always worrying they will leave us; church can be about helping others grow, serving the ends of others, giving ourselves away, incarnating who we are into the greater life, and of course inviting others to do so with us.

Church may in the end choose to fulfill its mission being an organization with boards, budgets, bylaws and buildings, and marketing campaigns, and to make its worship time so attractive it can compete with all around it and fill up its pews again, but when we expand the horizons of church and then choose which one to move toward we will--to use the words fashioned by your, our, ancestors in Scrooby—have done so as the Lord’s free people, knowing we have chosen to be the church in certain ways. In a changing world, we need all the options at our disposal and to exercise as many as possible, even emanating from the very same people. There is no longer a one size one kind model of church; especially not if it is seeking to make visible in the world a Free Spirit of both Intimacy and Ultimacy.

Of course, if Mission creates church, how do you know what the mission should be? Who decides?.
How can it not change, even as church changes to fulfill it? How can a non-creedal people walk together down Common Mission Road? I am tempted, on this occasion especially, to say that these questions are why you have called a minister and why he has answered both this call and his own calling. But the questions, real and honest they be, are signs themselves of our misplaced priorities, of our old habits, of turning inward, turning only toward concerns for one another and those internal covenants that keep us perpetual in an Identity Crisis, our favorite crisis.

Mission comes from the Greek word missio, being Sent, and so is rooted in those beyond us covenants with the World and with God. Mission becomes then clear and compelling. As writer on the missional church Reggie McNeal says, no church ever votes to become missional (from a workshop I attended by McNeal at Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa). It simply begins living it and soon becomes it. Living into being the likeness of God in the world; or moving the world a bit closer to the Sacred.

In the Jesus tradition I follow in freedom, we take our missional words from Jesus who took his from Isaiah: to take God’s world transforming message of good news to the poor, to heal the sick and broken hearted, to free the captive, give sight to the blind, and proclaim the year of Jubilee when economic justice abounds and even the land is made whole anew. We are to be a Loving Liberating Justice For The Poor God’s Sent People. We fail, because we are people. But our mission is clear. We may differ at times on ways to best carry out the mission, that’s healthy conflict that is externally-focused; but the core mission is a given. All I know is if we argue over what to call it, we will miss it calling us.

You might have qualms about the word missional; it smacks too much of missionary colonialism; coming from Oklahoma, I get that. Here is the key difference: we do not take our Truth out into a world without truth or God, to make people out there like us in here. History has shown that doesn’t work; and theology has shown it limits God and turns God into an idol, something that can be possessed and manipulated. Instead, we are sent into the world to discover and uncover and nurture God’s surprising presence becoming visible there through the mutual relationships of service and study and celebration with others, especially with those most vulnerable, and those most unlike us.

Going back to our metaphor of the church as ship, with the world as sea, and God as the wind, my own community has helped me push this metaphor even further. For in our world today, our task is not just to craft a ship in dry dock then launch it into the world, like ocean liners or even like schooners, worried that it might sink, worried about its captain and crew; so much of church planting and church transforming is like that; it is what happens when we put first changing the church, something we are always trying to do it seems as our starting point, instead of what the real starting point should be, about changing the world.

What if we viewed church as a group of swimmers already adrift in the sea, survivors of wrecked ships already, joined by others dropped in to help them, who band together and assemble in the churning waters makeshift rafts to hold them and what they can salvage; rafts that are built so if they capsize, and they will, oh they will, they will easily right themselves again, even as the wind and the waves take them toward distant shores toward which, like Plimouth, they didn’t originally intend to land.

These are exciting experimental times with many amazing radical stories of how people are becoming church like this in response to such a Mission. Some of these ways are known by names used, like Church Under The Bridge, Church Without Walls, Pilgrims in the Park, The Salvage Yard, The Simple Way, and my favorite based on a saying of St. Paul, Scum of the Earth. Our own small group in Oklahoma is now on its third or fourth name in eight years, now The Welcome Table to bring it in accord with the name of the community center we started and the name of the community gardenpark we have started where abandoned houses once stood. And we are in our sixth main meeting space in that time, though we have worshipped also at gardens, in streets, parks, and bowling alleys while also being in service there.

But some groups becoming church, becoming disciples of love and justice, have no name, fearing, with good cause, that naming inevitably turns us toward ourselves and turns us more into an organization than an organic movement.

My favorite story in this category comes from the book Exiles: living missionally in a post-Christian culture by Michael Frost where a young man had grown up having a hard time, as a sufferer of ADD, sitting still in worship every Sunday in the spectator-manner of his church, and so when he became a young adult he decided that he didn’t have to keep “going to church” and so one Sunday he followed the invitation of a friend to go out on the lake in a boat; while out there, in a lull from swimming, his old habits reared up and he felt guilty for not “being in church” and he asked his friends if he could say part of a psalm and then say a short prayer, and his friend said sure, and he asked his friends if there was anything he could include in his prayer for them, and he did so. And he went back swimming and partying. Next Sunday the same thing happened, but this time he had also brought a Bible with him, and after a short time reading and praying they kept on partying. Gradually more and more friends were joining them. Gradually the prayers had more things mentioned. Soon they were spending time at the lake helping tow boats that had broken down, and were cleaning the park, looking for other ways to do random acts of kindness. They began to take time out for more bible reflection and they held communion on the picnic tables, and they kept partying before and dduring and after. Pretty soon worship was more party than program. And all the while his worried family kept bugging him to “come back to church.” They thought church is something you attend; but it is something you become.

Is that young man and his friends still there doing that? I don’t know. Maybe not; maybe they spun off and did the same thing in other places and ways. Was it a transient thing? Perhaps. But their story has lasted, and inspired, and that is a powerful thing, the most powerful change agent. The world now needs such random acts of church. And now think of something like that story, and like many other different ones in all kinds of places and times, happening not just accidentally or spontaneously, but intentionally too, from here, seeded even by people who love the pews they can’t any longer sit still in.

Reggie McNeal, in Missional Renaissance, writes: “An explosion of missional communities…will occur. These will be groups of believers and nonbelievers who will operate in noninstitutional settings. They will range in size from a handful of participants to a few dozen. Gatherings will take place in homes and restaurants, bookstores and bars, office conference rooms and university dorm rooms, hotel meeting space and downtown Ys, and yes, even churches. Their community life will center on an intense desire to grow spiritually and to aid the community. Some will be connected to churches; many will not be. Affinities will be common passions and similar life rhythms. Leadership will emerge from within.”

What this requires is nothing new, but that we begin again, as we did 400 years ago, gathering people in a new way for a new way, people willing to turn default modes of church upside down and inside out compared to the dominant way of being church at the time. What this requires is that we begin once more sending out such a people again out into the world, even sending them out as small groups while others stay in more familiar land in order to support them. What this requires is being willing to find home again in different harbors than we first imagined. And we require leaders again to remind the people of these requirements, these covenants, these compacts.

Like Abram after Babel, we too live in a changed and much more scattered and diverse world. Like Abram, we have settled into our ways, with our father’s calling unfinished. The mission, the adventure, is a distant fading memory. Until, until, the Voice is heard that says Go you forth, from your land, from your kindred, from your father’s house, to the land that I will let you see.

[For more on missional and progressive faith and book and web lists and more for learning further see www.missionalprogressives.blogspot.com]

Sustainability, Sacrifice, Privilege: Where The Rubber Meets the Road

2011-03-01T19:49:00.000-08:00

This is another kind of "Beyond the Story" reflection growing out of issues raised in the UU World cover story on us at http://www.uuworld.org/.

Let me begin with a quote from Right Here, Right Now by Alan Hirsch and Lance Ford about the disconnect between the ideal of missional life and communities, even after someone takes the red pill, and their current life. They say for most "the idea of missional discipleship seems like a far-off dream because they work most of the time, come home exhausted, spend what little spare time they have with family and kids, and don't seem to have any time for anything else.

"Now I don't mean to diminish the sacredness of work and family," they continue. "but if work is too demanding for us to involve ourselves in being authentic disciples in realms other than work, is is the dominance of our work that should be questioned and not the viability of our discipleship. Work like this is more of an enslaving thing than it is a means of living. We can all live with a lot less. Work four days a week instead of five, if only to find more space for God in your life, let alone serve others. Much real life, relationships, and spiritual meaning can be added by simplifying our lives in order to engage more fully in Life."

As I was quoted in the UU World cover article on our missional community here, I am privileged to be aided in both this work and in life by being married, by being in a two income family (when many of my neighbors are in families with little to no income), with one of our incomes coming from a VA doc salary. Being aware and acknowledging these blessings, these privileges, I hope helps all others, and I mean all of our neighbors, to recognize their own blessings and privilege--it will be different from mine, but theirs is comparative real as well. The joy is to work not out of any sense of shame or deprivation or constantly judging who has what and who hasn't, but to look at how to use our blessings and privileges in service. For in doing so, we also all can live sacrificially as well.

We live where we do so that in large measure we can spend more of our joint incomes in ways that reflect our values of community with others especially the poor, rather than putting those same resources into our own real estate property values or other things, and so that we can have some resources to more easily spend on things that we do enjoy personally, such as travel, gifts, eating out, which would otherwise also be sacrificed to be able to live in other places. It is hard to use the word sacrifice when talking for example about how we moved with our teenage daughter from a new suburban home of $150,000 into an abandoned home and property for $28,000 when we love where we live, how we have been able to work on fixing it up, even though tens of thousands of dollars of repair and fixing it up turns into zero gain in property value because of the "comparables" around us :), and as we feel so blessed by our surroundings. We could live anywhere, and choose to live here. But then I remember that sacrifice means making sacred and it seems more apt.

On my part putting together a "cobbled ministry" of part-time paid work has been both a difficult choice when I think of income "lost" over the years but it has also been a blessing by being able to focus more time on the unpaid part time ministry. The choices have been easier for me, I believe, than for others in other circumstances, but as Bonnie was quoted in the article, if we made do personally with even much less in order to engage in this missional community life we would, and it all makes me marvel and worry about how so many of our leaders in more traditional churches work 40 to 80 hours a week and then still put in/are asked to do so many hours through the church and other groups. If they can do that (though with Hirsch and Ford, I have to challenge its sustainability and wisdom) then we as missional leaders can look for ways to reorient and make space in our lives for the missional callings we are feeling. Besides, going bi or tri vocational, especially in non-churchy work, becomes a benefit in missional church, not a liability. It puts us, whether we would seek it or not, in spheres with others perhaps not so like us, and allows us to make some of the first steps in bridging the "cultural distance" so important in missional church. I will post later about the ways Hirsch and Ford discuss cultural distance.

Missional Practices and Habits

2011-03-01T19:08:00.000-08:00

In Right Here, Right Now, Hirsch and Ford reuse the practices Michael Frost outlined in one of his previous books that his missional community has adopted: taking the acrostic BELLS....

Bless: do three acts of blessings daily, one may be simple email of encouragement, or a gift, be creative; Eat, share meals at least three times a week with others and themselves; Listen, one hour a week through prayer walk or solitude time; Learn, bible study and other works such as fiction and nonfiction too; Sent, record how in their daily interactions they have worked with and against Jesus. In community, share with one another your BELLS.

Practice Integration....Work on bringing cohesion into your life. Shop and eat at the same places. Purchase services from the same providers. Call workers by their names and make sure they know your name...Start a game night, book club, monthly recipe swap party, invite from all spheres...

Organize sharing...create a neighborhood asset and skills inventory for neighbors to post items and services they are willing to share, such as construction and mechanic tools, gardening tools, vans or trucks (offer yourself and your vehicle once or twice a month for neighbors who do not own one but are in need)...Tutoring, tax preparation, minor household fixes, office equipment such as fax or copier [Ron note: that is important here because there are no office places to go do that even if people had money to do it]...Music lessons.

Foster neighborhood interdependence....start a neighborhood blog or facebook page where neighbors can list job needs and opportunities, babysitting, the skills inventory, DVD and book sharing, the affinity groups, events...start a regular weekend bike ride; organize a summer movie under the stars with projector, lawn chairs and refreshments...

Move Out, Move In, Move Alongside, Move From

2011-03-01T18:30:00.000-08:00

Four basic moves of the moving missional church, from Right Here, Right Now, the latest book by Alan Hirsch this time with Lance Ford as co-author. It offers a template for looking at how fully you are living missionally with others.

Move out (into missional engagement): learning the art of the small---one person can make an impact, concentrate your efforts on smaller and smaller areas; try to find an area that will cause a tipping point; focus on small changes that will spread

Move in (burrowing down into the culture): find a subculture or tribe, ie affinity groups, and join and relate and serve with and learn from, connect with things you love to do, find or create and reside in one of the third places; learn the lingo; all mission is cross-cultural.

Move alongside (engaging in genuine friendships and relational networks): if you need to, seriously consider relocating to where neighborhoods are in need. You should live where you want to serve. You should bump into people in local ways. Three practices of incarnational engagement: proximity, frequency, spontaneity.

Move from (challenging the dehumanizing and sinful aspects of our culture): sometimes we must move from aspects of culture, such as consumerism, presenting different way than dominant culture in terms of sex, money, and power. Living in community is one of the main ways to subvert the dominant culture that wants to break down authentic community.

More to come.

Communion, Caring, and Celebration: The Core of Missional Communities

2011-02-17T20:16:00.000-08:00

A small excerpt from Reggie McNeal's already classic Missional Renaissance: This section is a good little gem that describes the touchstones here in our small expression of The Welcome Table Community, http://www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com/. Before this he has laid out many different manifestations of how a variety of groups are going missional, particularly existing established churches, and what the new spectrum of churches will look like in the future. But here he picks up on some of the more under the radar gatherings:

"An explosion of missional communities (MCs) will occur. These will be groups of believers and nonbelievers who will operate in noninstitutional settings. They will range in size from a handful of participants to a few dozen. Gatherings will take place in homes and restaurants, bookstores and bars, office conference rooms and university dorm rooms, hotel meeting space and downtown Ys, and yes, even churches.

"Their community life will center on an intense desire to grow spiritually and to aid the community. Some MCs will be connected to churches; many will not be. Affinities will be common passions and similar life rhythms. Leadership will emerge from within. Biblical teaching will be imported through podcasts, DVDs, and books.

"MCs will order their lives around communion, caring, and celebration. Communion will include eating together as well as sharing the sacraments. Caring will be lavished on each other but also extend to people beyond the MC as part of the group's expression of following Jesus. As a result more people will become Jesus followers. Celebration will highlight the work of God in the lives of those in the MC as well as rehearse God's revelation in history and in text. MCs will routinely serve together and with others while participants will be cheered to be missional in their own lives as Jesus followers. Networks of these missional communities may be sponsored by large existing churches; others will form in regions along relational lines." [And RR here: I might add across denominational lines].

I will try to post later his other findings surveying the missional map of our times.

10 Most Common Mistakes Made By New Church Starts

2011-02-17T18:12:00.000-08:00

By Bill Easum and Jim Griffiths. Summation of very sound advice and experience. While it is focused on more normative understandings of church than in missional communities, I think there is a lot that can be applied to those looking to form MCs, whether coming out of an existing church or from exiles. Here are their top 10 with my reflections on them:

1. Neglecting the Great Commandment in pursuit of the Great Commission....putting numbers before love, putting ourselves before others, (and especially as I include the parable of the Samaritan as part of the Great Commandment passage, this means putting others who are different from us, and the places that are different from our places, first in who we plant with, and where we plant).

2. Failing to take Opposition Seriously. This is the spiritual warfare section; you don't have to buy the theology to confirm that when you seek to make a transformation, you will get resistance; people, including you as leader, love homeostasis; know the toil it will take on you, how you yourself will be your own worst obstacle and enemy, and so many beginnings I know of have been derailed or almost so because of family issues, health issues, money issues, stress will be high and trigger all your addictions or compulsions. Go in to it expecting a perfect storm. As I have written elsewhere though, if you wait for perfect, you will never begin; perfect is the enemy of good.

3. A love affair with one's fantasy statement blinds the planter to the mission field. Yes, all kinds of vision and mission statements and plans are good for one thing: they are the scaffolding that helps erect the building, but the plan isnt to erect scaffolding but a building; they are drafts only helpful primarily so the planter can better understand and incorporate the direction needed. Be flexible. Be ready for surprises. Be willing to change everything.

4. Premature Launch. An oldie but a goodie still. Part of the problem is connected with number three; we force things and timing in order to let the plan be fulfilled, and it kicks us into attractional mode rather than incarnational, circumventing relationship building. usually also signifies surrending to anxiety among your own group.

5. evangelism ceases after the launch. connecting with others doesn't stop once you have instituted something, and you can't expect that the people who you being to partner with will naturally go out and spread the news and help you partner with others; whether you are trying to get people to worship or to serve others with you, it is the same.

6. No plan for the other six days of the week. For the missional community, maybe this is reversed; no plan for sabbath. How can you embody a seven day faith with your own disciplines and service and together with others? There are a lot of ways to weave mission and/or church into a daily consciousness and contemplation and even action. I will follow up on this one later, but use your imagination; technology can help facilitate this.

7. Fear of talking about money until it is too late. constantly give people opportunities, nudges, reminders, callings to give. We are in a new realm of the spirit where people want to give, to deepen generosity, to join with others to give in ways to do more than they can alone; we can't hide it. also for missional communities, money is a key into understanding the culture we are operating in and against and trying to subvert with an www.economyoflove.org and sharing resources and being engaged in redistribution as one of the three Rs, see www.ccda.org. specifically for traditional church planting, the authors focus on the need for the planter to raise half of their salary themselves.

8. Failure of the church to act its age and its size. Don't get on the treadmill of anxiously pushing to be more and have more and do more, so that you are unable as leaders to feel refreshed in spirit for your service. Don't let your success become your downfall. Act bigger to get bigger is an old maxim; it has to be balanced with going deeper yourself and as a small missional group so you can grow others.

9. Formalizing leadership too soon. Another way of trying to relieve uncertainty, stress and anxiety, and you will begin to forget to pay attention to the edges and the fringes of the ones you are connecting with which is where the best ideas and leaders will come from. It also puts the emphasis on institution over organic expressions, makes you reliant on bylaws for example rather than cultivating the DNA of the group or mission. A corollary: the project leaders at the beginning may not be the ones best to take it to a next level.

10. Using the Superstar Model as a Paradigm. Or any model. Don't get stuck in what has worked for others and think it will work for you. You can't borrow the vision. Be indigenous. Which means know well the culture you are incarnating a missional spirit into.

I have made and continue to make all of these mistakes. They continue to be the sources of questions to ask yourselves. They seem to circle around the one question: what is it you think God really wants as an outcome from your church or mission plant?

Becoming Missional and Progressive and Church For The New Year

2011-01-01T08:53:00.000-08:00

Being missional in its essence means finding and growing and expressing your identity as church in service with and to others, primarily the underserved. It means both loving the world and others in it, and simultaneously being at odds with those powers and principalities, those forces and groups in the world, including the church itself, that work against the poor (including being against all those things that keep the well off from knowing they are well off and being able to share their blessings with those who aren't; so being missional may mean also living counter-culturally among the well-off, and being against those habits and attitudes of scarcity engrained in many of the poor themselves).

We are to become ourselves in the world, but not be made of the world, not letting its standards be ours. Instead we need to keep these two standards before us as we discern how we are living up to our missional calling: 1. how much and how often are we in the world as a people, working together two or more, to be blessings in the world? And 2. how are we resisting the dominant culture values all around us?

What about us and the ways we are a people keep us apart from the world and keep us slaves to its ways at the same time? These questions should be our resolutions for the new year.

The church is only the church as it is a reflection and creation out of God's mission. That mission was Jesus'...to heal the sick, set free the captive, bring sight to the blind, and proclaim the Jubilee year of renewal and economic justice.

If the heart of the church is missional, so I believe the heart of the church is progressive, meaning radically open to others with no creedal tests, learning from others. Being progressive and missional are redundancies; it is only as the church is not living up to its true calling to be radically missional that it is not progressive, and only that it isn't living up to its true calling to be radically progressive that it is not missional. Fear keeps the leaders of missional church from embracing the church's progressive identity (fear of heresy, fear of truly losing one's former self, fear of slippery slope thinking and believing the force of spiritual progressiveness leads to being of the world). Fear keeps the leaders of progressive churches from embracing the church's missional identity (fear of not being perfect and making mistakes when being in relationship with others, fear of others who don't share one's politics and class especially if you are in an area where you are already the minority culture, and especially if you yourself have grown and emerged from such cultures in your own journey and fear unresolved family of origin issues).

The beauty of the way toward integration of missional and progressive is that it is best done in small ways, in small groups, in small acts. May 2011 be the year you grow smaller in order to reach out to so many more. You don't have to change your whole church, or your whole family. But find a few others to adventure with intentionally this year, serving together, studying together, socializing together, and celebrating God together.

Ministry With Others For Others

2010-12-01T20:14:00.000-08:00

Partnering Churches and Nonprofits for Social Justice
Notes by Ron Robinson for a collegial presentation

...Why partner with other nonprofits in your community, particularly other faithbased and secular nonprofits?

Our covenants of the free church (for those of us in this congregationalist tradition):
one of the main four is church and church, but that grows out of the colonial period when wider parish and church were strongly connected, so there is a covenant implicit in our being between the gathered church and its surrounding/supporting community. (which begs the question: what are the boundaries of your parish, your service area, your wider community of focus? and what happens when you don't make distinctions? what are prime needs or gaps in wholeness in that particular community?)....when one of the covenants is weakened, it affects the others, and vice versa, when we strengthen one of our core covenants it will strengthen others.

The Holy is present in many ways and places and persons beyond the gathered church; our mission is to nurture the Holy.

We can help grow our own gifts through partnerships with others.

Ecumenical difficulties…Used to be that churches could band together into partnerships and then through these partner with nonprofits or create their own nonprofits, but as ecumenism has suffered and culture changed from churched to unchurched culture and competiveness increased and church resources dwindled, especially for volunteers and volunteer time, this approach becomes more difficult though it still is present...so more churches partnering directly with nonprofits, or creating their own.

...Ministry Partnership Lessons, from Churches That Make A Difference, by Sider, Olson, and Unruh of Evangelicals for Social Action

1. few churches have resources to carry out their vision by themselves.
2. expand church opportunities to form relationships (that may lead to evangelism, but can hinder it as people may feel stigmatized and not equal with church members unless friendship formed first, sometimes form alternative worship services just for them, invite recipients to social events, invite them to serve alongside church members)
3. prevents duplication of services and focuses the church resources where they are most needed.
4. church ministries are more effective when they cooperate, rather than compete, with local efforts. help local residents grow to help themselves.
5.expose church members to needs and issues outside their usual context
6. working with established agencies can help churches learn structures, and get their feet wet for creating more novel partnerships.
7. there is a supportive climate for faithbased partnerships now

types of partnerships:
1. partner comes alongside a church with the resources the church needs to flesh out its vision for holistic ministry. eg food banks, music ministries for festivals...annual or one time connections...
2. church supplies the partner with volunteers or funding,and in return the partner provides the church with a ministry outlet that does not require much administrative effort. eg habitat for humanity
3. church allows partner to use its space
4. church is the parent of a ministry program that spins off to become its own entity.
5. partnership grows out of a history of cooperation and joint project sponsorship, based on personal relationships and shared ministry goals....individual church member creates entity

How are we doing partnering…
with denominational programs
with businesses to help with jobs for those in need, round out their growth
with public schools, universities
with community coalitions
with ministry coalitions
with church coalitions
with clergy coalitions
with community organizing coalitions
participation on public boards and committees
with national organizations...host for mission trips, or going on them
with government
with urban-suburban partner

qualities of good partnerships
1. have a compatible core mission
2. don't hinder the witness of the church: state rules may treat people differently than church values
3. mutual trust and respect
4. sense of ownership on both sides: small church partnering with large agency may feel dependent
5. partnerships don't substitute for gifts and resources of congregation: don't subcontract evangelism or social action, fill in the congregation gaps and multiply congregation gifts not become a crutch for its inadequacies.
6. clear communication and accountability

http://www.faithlinksok.org/ for those in oklahoma

Starting a Nonprofit At Your Church: Drawing More Resources to Meet Increasing Community Needs
by Joy Skjegstad

All around the country, church congregations are establishing separate 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations in order to draw new funding, new people, and new partnerships into the ministry of their church. In these difficult economic times when community needs have increased and the amount of money given through the Sunday offering has decreased for many churches, setting up a church-based nonprofit can be a creative way to bring more resources to your community ministry efforts when your congregation may be less able to underwrite the cost of those ministries.
Through my consulting work around the country, I have witnessed the power of the church-nonprofit structure in bringing new ministry into being and helping it grow. Congregations develop a wide variety of ministries under their nonprofits: schools and day care centers, housing and youth development programs, job training and placement, food shelves and feeding programs, health clinics, and a host of other initiatives.
Many of these congregations have found that the church-nonprofit model brings together the very best aspects of the church with the outside resources that a nonprofit can draw. Congregations bring a great deal to the relationship. Churches frequently have the trust of the broader community in ways that few other institutions do. Particularly if your ministry dream is to offer social service programs, the nonprofit's connection to the church may help you draw participants who wouldn't feel as safe approaching a secular nonprofit, a government agency, or a school. Churches also have "captive audiences." A congregation is a ready-made group of workers, donors, and supporters. If you prepare them, communicate with them and inspire them, your congregation can exponentially increase the power of your nonprofit ministry.
When I served as executive director of the Park Avenue Foundation, a nonprofit connected to Park Avenue United Methodist Church, church members served as a core group of volunteers for foundation programs. Volunteer tutors, mentors, lawyers, doctors, and nurses were all mobilized from within the congregation to do good works every day of the week in the church building. I believe their connection to the church made many of the volunteers more dedicated—they were proud of their church and wanted to ensure that the programs offered were of high quality.
The nonprofit part of the structure brings a lot to the organization's effectiveness, too. You'll be able to attract resources from funders that would not support a church directly. New collaborative partners will become interested in what you are doing, and there will be opportunities to recruit volunteers from new sources. One of the most important advantages is the ability to attract the skills you need through new staff and board members from outside your church.
Securing new financial resources for ministry is the most common reason that congregations choose to set up a nonprofit. Particularly now, when your congregation members may not be able to fully underwrite your vision for community ministry, outside funding sources—including foundation grants and gifts from individuals outside of your congregation—may allow you to move forward. However, many foundations and corporations will not make grants to congregations directly (with some it is a stated policy). Other funders have no formal policy against this, but they are uncomfortable giving to religious groups because of fears that contributions for one purpose may be used for something else entirely. Funders might worry that their gift for a church-based job training program might be spent on the Sunday school curriculum or choir robes, for example. A separate legal entity with its own set of books, governance structure, and board members from outside the church will make many funders much more comfortable about giving to a program connected with a church.
Having a separate nonprofit may also allow you to recruit new volunteers from organizations that might be reluctant to send people out to a church. At a time when many congregations are needing to trim their budgets and rely more on volunteers, the ability to attract more people who are willing to give of their time is a real advantage to the church-nonprofit model. Many churches I have worked with found they could recruit volunteers for community programs and services much more readily from other churches, local businesses, corporations or service clubs once they had set up their nonprofit. This is because outside groups are more willing to devote “people power” to programs that are set up to benefit the community, not just the members of one congregation.
Being able to recruit board members from outside the church is another strength of the church-nonprofit model. A church-based nonprofit can choose to have its own board of directors that has at least some members from outside the congregation. These "outsiders" can bring new expertise, connections, and resources to your ministry work. For example, if you are looking for an accountant to serve on your nonprofit's board, you may not find one in your church congregation, but you might find one outside the church, in a nearby business or congregation. A wider variety of board members can also help connect you to more funding sources and potential partnerships with other congregations and nonprofits.
Having a separate nonprofit may also help you collaborate with some organizations that would be reluctant to partner directly with a church. When a group of like-minded people get together to address a community issue, coming under the banner of the nonprofit might make others at the table less suspicious of your motives for involvement. Some people automatically assume that the hidden agenda behind any congregational involvement is recruiting new church members. If your separate nonprofit has the mission of "responding to the foreclosure crisis in the community," for example, it makes your purpose clear and shows others that you are willing to devote time and resources to a community issue that others care about as well.
Partnering with other groups is essential right now—collaborations can provide services, resources, and expertise to make up for what has been trimmed out of your own budget. For example, your congregation may provide job training and placement to community members but may no longer be able to offer a feeding program. A partnership with another congregation or nonprofit could allow you to connect your participants with other resources that they need.
If your congregation aspires to develop more community ministry but needs outside funding, people, and partnerships to do it, starting a nonprofit connected to your congregation could help provide some of the resources that you need.

Cautionary point from Lyle Schaller, small congregation, big potential:
partnering with other churches or organizations in order to keep maintaining the status quo may prevent a church from facing the transformative challenges to its very existence that is needed.
If goal is not maintaining status quo internally, but affecting external community than partnerships can be vital.
might stunt member giving and growth by thinking others outside will provide
also partnerships, in cultural context of contract rather than covenant, litigious society, can tend toward unhealthy conflict

Why Should You Survive?

2010-11-24T21:21:00.000-08:00

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fwp-dyn%2Fcontent%2Farticle%2F2010%2F10%2F23%2FAR2010102304108.html&h=59c32

‎"Why should you survive?" the consultants got the church to ask themselves. Excellent question. But perpetuates the problem. They need to find ways to ask the same question of their/our/your congregation to others in the community they serve and listen to the hard answers from that most important place. Good article though, skimming the surface of so many vital aspects.

A form of missional church....

2010-11-24T21:12:00.000-08:00

http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20101123_81_A9_CUTLIN542411

Good use of merging secular sacred, serving others first.

White, Middle Aged, Eurocentric, Well Educated, Suburban Immigrant Churches?

2010-11-24T19:04:00.000-08:00

In Robert Putnam's newest book, American Grace, he quotes the work by Oscar Handlin on the religious effects of the great migration of immigrants to America around the turn of the 20th century, namely "Struggling against heavy odds to save something of the old ways, the immigrants directed into their faith the whole weight of their longing to be connected with the past."...

If, as Leonard Sweet uses the terms native and immigrants in his book Postmodern Pilgrims, to mean immigrants are those of older generations who do not feel this is their home culturally anymore and natives are those younger generations whom are right at home in the "cloud culture" of social media and experientialism, participation and interactivity, image-driven, and communal....

Then, putting the two together, it might explain the deep-seated resistance in established churches where the majority age are those born before 1963, hence the new cultural immigrants, to missional transformations in the church--which are even more revolutionary than "mere" worship wars in the church, or its corrolary in some liberal churches over conflicts on what language is used, what is taught, etc.

Immigrant churches served, and serve, a purpose. Putnam cites how one German Lutheran church in Houston still fosters a lot of German language in its hallways even four generations after its founding, to prove the continuing attachment of them.

Perhaps we should consider the established churches today as immigrant churches and seek not to change them missionally. If anything, this might free them up, from anxiety or other emotional reactiveness, to support to the best of their abilities the manifestations of missional church beyond themselves, as community ministries, the same way the old established churches supported missionaries abroad; now they could support missionaries in neighborhoods and hear reports from those missionaries, but maintain the ways of the "old country."

Nurturing A Common Life

2010-11-24T14:10:00.000-08:00

an excerpt from Common Prayer for Ordinary Radicals by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and Enuma Okuro, used as part of communion homily at our worship welcome table Nov. 21, 2010:

In reading this excerpt I am particularly mindful for the Thanksgiving Season, remembering our religious ancestors who formed a free church (and a "commonwealth") with a covenant, not a creed, in Scrooby England in 1606, travelled to Holland, then on a journey to a new continent with the ringing words from their Pastor John Robinson who said "more light and truth are yet to break forth", who gathered inside the Mayflower and signed their Compact for a "civil body politic" in November 1620, enduring loss and hardship through bonds of community, both with members of their church and with those who had travelled with them to new shores, and who discovered a thanksgiving with others already here, where God was already present waiting to be discovered by them. We are in many ways pilgrims today, envisioning a new kind of common life possible, on new shores amid the wreckage of the American Empire. This is a vision, an aim, both idealistic but also grounded in the utmost realism of what is necessary, what hasn't worked before, and what is worth pursuing. Common Good may require Common Life.

"Nurturing a Common Life":

Independence is a value of our culture, but it is not a gospel value. Jesus lived in community and was part of a village culture...Jesus' culture was more like the Bedouins than the Burbs.

The Scriptures teach us to value interdependence and community more highly than independence, and tell us that we are to lose our lives if we want to find them. Forming our lives around something other than our own desires, jobs, and goals is radically counter-cultural. Even our architecture is built around individual families, not around community. But for many Native Americans and tribal cultures, society and architecture are built around a village. Individual dwellings...are very small, and they are built around a central common space where people eat, dance, sing, and tell stories. The rampant individualism of Western society is a relatively new thing, and its emptiness is increasingly evident. We are wealthy and lonely. But God invites us into a common life with others.

Rather than build our lives around the individualistic dream of a house with a white picket fence, we can build our lives around God's vision for community.

We dream of a holy village in the middle of the urban desert, with a little cluster of homes sprinkled about and a neighborhood where folks are committed to God and to each other. Some folks are indigenous to the neighborhood. Some are missional relocaters. Some have gone off to school, trained as doctors, lawyers, social workers, or business folk, and then returned to the neighborhood to offer their gifts to the work of restoration. The houses are small, but that is all we need--a place to lay our heads--because most of our lives are lived on the streets, on the stoop, sweating in the practice of resurrection. Village life begins by greeting the day in morning prayer, and in the evenings we share a meal or grill out on the street. Maybe there is a village center where folks can cook healthy breakfasts for the kids as they head off to school. Perhaps in that center there are laundry machines that we can all share and a game library where kids can borrow a game for the afternoon. Maybe there's a tool library so folks can check out a saw or drill for the day; maybe there's an exercise space for lifting weights or taking an aerobics class to keep our bodies healthy. It's a dream for a village that shares things in common, a space that makes sure possessions and privileges are available for all, a place on earth where there truly is a "common wealth."

Shaping a life together sometimes begins simply by creating a space for community. For many intentional communities, that means that we work only part-time so that we free up time for things we don't get paid to do, like welcoming homeless folks for a meal, helping neighborhood kids with homework, planting gardens on abandoned lots, or praying together each day. Sometimes we have to remove some of the clutter that is occupying our time and energy, like getting rid of the television. But then, as we say no to some things, we say yes to others--cooking meals, painting murals, playing games. And most people don't miss the old life much anyway. A reporter once told Mother Teresa, "I wouldn't do what you do for a million dollars." She responded, "Me neither." We live in community and among the suffering because it is what we are made for. Not only does it give life to others, but it gives us life as well."

from "Living Mission" ed. by Scott Bessenecker

2010-11-10T21:08:00.000-08:00

http://www.amazon.com/Living-Mission-Vision-Voices-Friars/dp/0830836330/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1289452399&sr=1-2
Excerpts from the new book about the visions and voices of the new friars movement among the world's urban poor.

"Walking with friends who wanted out, we started to dream together: what could this place become if we stayed here together?...Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove..."rethinking church means rethinking Christian mission"

"They are artistic, entrepenuerial, international, ecumenical, contemplative misfits. They are apostolic activists with a vision to see the flourishing of God's shalom among commercial sex workers, refugees, street kids and their neighbors trapped in poverty--communities committed to work toward systemic change in the halls of power." Scott Bessenecker

"Mother Teresa's sisters pray six hours and work five hours. Protestants, by contrast, enter mission "teams" not communities, and then they "work" or found "works" as if they were starting a business...We formed Servants as a movement...based on a lifestyle of incarnation, community, simplicity, suffering and sacrifice." Viv Grigg

Craig and Nayhouy Greenfield share about the helpful frame of John Perkins' 3 Rs or relocation, redistribution, and reconciliation, but also how Perkins has a 3rs of Relocation itself--relocaters who move into poor areas to live incarnationally; returners (like Bonnie and I) "who were born and raised in the community and then left for a better life...yet choose to return; and remainers, who could have fled the problems of the community but have chosen to continue living there incarnationally. The three types working together in an area help keep the privilege of middle Class in check so it is not always at the core of the communities. But each of the three types of experiences is important to the other two and bring special gifts to a community. They write: "The incarnational approach is more than the sum of its parts. The value of incarnation lies not only in the immediate relationships developed but in the symbolic nature of the act. When the nonpoor reject their position of privilege and move toward the poor, they encourage others to do the same and model a way of life that values the poor and underprivileged."

"Ivan Illich, the philosopher and social theorist, was once asked, "What is the most revolutionary way to change society: Is it violent revolution or gradual reform? He gave a careful but very insightful answer: "Neither. If you want to change society, then you must tell an alternative story."...Mahatma Ghandi once commented on this when he said: "You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilization to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature." Indeed, it seems that a significant number of Christians have accepted Christianity as a religious belief system--a little Jesus to spiritualize their life and a little extra God to give them peace in a stress filled world. But they have not allowed the biblical message to transform their underlying worldview, the framing narrative or storyline that continues to shape the way they really live their lives....
[This leads to] eight categories of transformation: 1. reproducing transformational communities of people following Jesus. 2. increased civic participation for the common good. 3. improved accessibility to education that equips and enhances life. 4. expanded opportunities to achieve economic sufficiency. 5. increased spiritual and psychological health and freedom from destructive patterns. 6. increased family health and well being. 7. improved environmental and community health. 8 presence of political, economic, and legal systems that work for the poor and vulnerable. --Derek Engdahl and Jean-Luc Krieg

"People may come to our communities because they want to serve the poor; they will only stay once they have discovered that they themselves are the poor. And theyn they discover something extraordinary: that Jesus came to bring the good news to the poor, not to those who serve the poor" Jean Vanier..."It is only when the church relinquishes the privilege of the world's power centers that we can denounce its tactics. It is only when we Christians detach ourselves from the world's claims on us that we can find the power to criticize its values...The madate for the margins is not simply a strategy to get the gospel out to the whole world; rather, the movement toward the margins is primarily a reflection of God's heart for the world. When we walk with God, we are directed toward the margins because this is the way God works in the world. And when we see God on the margins, we find that what the world calls marginal is central for the church." Christopher Heuertz and David Chronic

"Activism without contemplation opens us to the risk of imposing our will on the world. If we are blind to our distorted compulsions, even our very best intentions and deeds can have self-ish motives and exploitative effects. These hidden motivations deceive us in the moment but are glaring in the rear-view mirror of history--like the dark side of colonial and imperialist missionary endeavors....What would it be like for our socieites--even our churches--to quiet our frantic frenzy down to a whisper? Imagine the impact of a church whose activism flowed from a life of devotion rooted in contemplation." Phileena Heuertz and Darren Prince.

"Incarnational, missional, marginal, and devotional--taken together, these signs amount to heady wine and require an appropriate wineskin. It is challenging to wrap these powerful currents into cohesive community. But without careful attention to the wineskin, the new wine spills onto the ground." Jose Penate-Aceves and John Hayes.

"Can I share my biggest fear in contributing to a book like this?...What I fear most is that people will read this book and live vicariously through the few of us who are already out there and overwhelmed by what is in front of us. Reading is not the same as living your faith....(quoting a professor in a class attended by Elias Chacour: "If there is a problem somewhere, he said with his dry chuckle, this is what happens. Three people will try to do something concrete to settle the issue. Ten people will give a lecture analyzing what the three are doing. One hundred people will commend or condemn the ten for their lecture. One thousand people will argue about the problem. And one person--only one--will involve themselves so deeply in the true solution that they are too busy to listen to any of it. Now, which person are you?"

What conservatives are learning and progressives need to about community

2010-11-02T22:14:00.000-07:00

http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/conservatism-and-the-quest-for-community

This is a call for conservatives to welcome in a new kind of community to help make their values real, speaking of ways their sphere, especially its libertarian circles, will be challenged by these new kinds of local intense transforming communities. They see this as a wave of the future for conservatives at a time when progressives are turning, in their view, to more national rather than local community identity and solutions. The political conservatives are seeking to learn from new forms of religious community as well as the megachurch model of community village. There are some parallels I believe with how mainstream and progressive religious denominations also turn toward the national identity and put emphasis in a one size fits all branding and campaigns rather than shifting resources to develop these local high demand high relationship communities.

Food for thought.

As missional communities of faithfulness, perhaps we even have put so much stress on the missional component, and its differences with traditional modern attractional church, that we have not put that focus on the inner shape of the community itself as a community. I sometimes catch myself in trying not to be like traditional church neglecting the real cultivation and nurture of the bonds of the community. Communitas yes, but it is still a community even though turned outward.

Food for thought.

Restructuring Boards and Leadership for Mission and Growth by Freeing the Social Entrepeneur

2010-11-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/freeing_the_social_entrepreneur/

A fine article about the ways missional communities can form their leadership core team in order to keep on track and continuing fulfilling the mission and not get sidetracked; imagine replacing an organization's pres, vp, sec, treas, etc. board positions with 1. evangelist, 2. scaling partner, 3. connector, 4. program strategist, and 5. realist. all committed to the mission of the group. It has an aura of Ephesians 4 about it where early Christian groups were designating partners with a specific purpose such as evangelist, pastor, teacher, prophet, apostle. This also, as opposed to the old modernist roberts rules of order-esque approach of officers, puts the focus of leadership firmly facing outward rather than taking care of its own organizational needs which can be handled other less visible and authoritative ways.

Why is missional seemingly so foreign to progressives, and why each need the other in the conversational community

2010-10-07T18:36:00.000-07:00

Pay attention to this quote from "Understanding North American Culture" chapter two of Missional Church; this section written by Craig Van Gelder:

"Freely choosing, autonomous individuals, deciding out of rational self-interest to enter into a social contract in order to construct a progressive society, became the central ideology of modernity."

Read it again.

So much of so-called mainline and progressive church, including my own tribe of Unitarian Universalism on the far spectrum of that but squarely in the center of having created and shaped American spiritual landscape, fits that description to a tee. Our churches in the progressive and mainline mode are embedded in modernity. What happens when that is no longer the air around us in which we must breathe? We bottle what we can of it and subsist on it? But for how long? At what cost of cutting us off from the new air and lifeblood of new creation emerging around us.

Missional church is embedded in a different culture, though still navigating through the wreckage of modernity. In this postmodernity missional church finds its DNA not in Reformation and Renaissance and Enlightenment, but in the DNA of premodernity which shares more with the current and coming culture(s) of our context than does modernity. As a Christian I can say that the roots of my faith are back with the murky missional ways of the Jesus communities before and after 70 CE, and so though I am born once into modernity because of my age and location, I am born again, through the missional church, into deeper sense of relationship and inheritance and belonging with those earlier times, fully realizing that our call is not to go back there, because we can't and wouldn't want to go back to that home again. But it can nurture us and help us use the developments of the renaissance reformation and enlightenment without having to be used up by their ghost.

Until progressives become born again of a different source, missional will seem a far land they have been exiled from.

Progressives can, however, draw from our own church history to feel supported in missional work. Witness the Cambridge Platform of 1648. Two major things occurred in the creation of the founding document of American congregationalism that shaped our whole civil society as well as a few religious movements. The Puritans gathered and without ado adopted theologically the confessions of orthodoxy of Westminster; this in a way freed them to do the second thing, to be groundbreaking and experimental in adopting a new kind of polity and ecclesiology (new, but one that they were at pains to point out were rooted in the early church, and in the inspiration of the Hebrew scriptures). Of course you can't separate ecclesiology from the theological web and so that new polity over time and with other influences affected the original orthodoxy as well. So progressives have precedent at plunging into the waters of reforming ecclesiology.

The mainstays it seems of the missional church are doing a similar two-step dance today. They are saying we are not going to address theological confessions of orthodoxy and adherence on creeds which have given us our identity and connected us to many of our brothers and sisters in Christ; we are going to accept those and move on, and not get caught up in the cultural battles over role of women, for example, or gay and lesbian et al, but will focus on the reformation or at least extension of what it means to become the church. However, at the root of the missional worldview, is the primary context not of the church for itself but of the world as it is waiting for the service of the church to change itself so it can change the world and bend it back toward the lovingkindness and justice of God. Progressives have gifts of how to engage with all of the world, in all its pluralisms, that the non-progressive missionals need in order to better know and love the world and become the church in the process. Otherwise so much of the world to be missional within will be left behind. And part of that progressive gift is the gift of theological pluralism itself surely as much a challenge to missionals, as the challenge of postmodernity is for the progressive church that can only see itself as a church of modernity.

So, not freely choosing but Chosen; not autonomous but inherently and primarily relational and communal, and finding deeper definitions of freedom in that; not individuals but persons, with personhood possible only as a relational self that is formed in community; not entering into community out of rational self-interest but to give up ego and to give one's self to all that the culture of consumerism and self and nationalism says does not make sense; covenanting to imitate and in doing so help initiate the "empire of God" or beloved communitas, taking a central stance in the new context of postmodernity.

A diverse set of resource links on the missional church

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http://jrwoodward.net/2008/11/a-primer-on-todays-missional-church/

A whole semester's worth of reading through the link above :) but a good way to search and find conversation partners and how missional church is being lived out, thought out.

Women Voices in the Missional Church Movement

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Someone asked for missional links from women in the movement...got these below from a great source of all links missional: http://jrwoodward.net/2008/11/a-primer-on-todays-missional-church/

Two of the six essays in the foundational anthology Missional Church ed. by Guder, 1998, are by women: Mennonite Lois Barrett and United Methodist Inagrace Dietterich. And also important especially in feminist perspectives and missional church is Cathy Ross of the London School of Theology.

A Former Leaders Journey – BarbA Silly Poor Gospel – Peggy Senger ParsonsAdventures In Mercy – Molly AleyAuthor Intrusion – Lisa SampsonBeyond the 4 Walls – Lyn HallewellDecompressing Faith – Erin WordDry Bones Dance – Christy LambertsonEmergent Self – Judith Hougenemerging sideways – bobbieEmerse – CynthiaEternal Echoes – Sally ColemanGodspace – Christine Sinehappydaydeadfish – Holly Rankin ZaherHow God Messed Up My Religion – Pam HogeweideHeadspace – Lainie PetersenKingdom Grace – GraceLive With Desire – Heidi DanielsOnehandclapping – Julie ClawsonRedemption Junkie – Heidi ReneeRun With It – Cindy BryanSecret Women’s Business – Janet WoodlockSpiritual Birdwatching – MariaSwinging From the Vine – Makeesha FisherThe Best Parts – Tracy SimmonsThe Carnival In My Head – Kathy EscobarThe Margins – Erika HaubThe Margins – Erika HaubThe Virtual Abbess – Peggy BrownVikingFru’s Place – Lori Bjerkander

Missional Church Links: Where to Start

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Begin at http://missionalchurchnetwork.com/ Lots of foundational blogposts and links from there to many of the authors listed down below in the starter books post.

See the basic frequently asked questions about "The marks of missional church" at
http://thebolgblog.typepad.com/thebolgblog/2006/01/marks_of_a_miss.html by Ryan Bolger, now at http://www.ryanbolger.com/.

Also for a good place to use as a hub go to http://www.friendofmissional.org/ especially for the conversation about whether or not, or how, a "traditional" meaning modern-era church can become missional.

See www.missionalchurch.org.

Also check out, especially the descriptions of the churches in the network over at,
http://www.ecclesianet.org/

Imagine connecting the insights here with the insights of the progressive Christian movement, http://www.uuchristian.org/ or http://www.tcpc.org/, or denominations on the cutting edge of theological engagement with pluralism in the 21st century.

For a Unitarian Universalist side of things, who works with different denominations, someone who gets it, check out the recent work of Michael Durall at http://www.vitalcongregations.com/

A brief summary theological history and explanation of Missional Church

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The missional church grows out of a new reforming movement in Christianity that began in both England and the U.S. in the 1980s.

At that time in particular church leaders realized that "Christendom" (an environment of a predominantly churched culture that set the cultural markers) was over. Most church identity and life had been molded in the world of Christendom where the church was seen as primary, and because of its primary influence in the culture little effort was needed to attract people who often inherited their faith and church loyalty. (This could be the case whether or not one was any particular kind of church or whether or not one was Christian; the cultural influence was the same). Any mission to others, especially in other parts of the world without churches, was seen simply and secondarily as a program of the church.

Thus were born individual missionaries of the church.

But in a post-Christendom world, as in a pre-Christendom world before the Roman Empire coopted the church, Church is not primary; instead now, as in the first 300 years, Mission is primary. However, it is not the church's mission; it is, rather, the Mission's church. This is the difference between missional church and a church that does outreach programs. The missional church is an effect, a creation itself, called into being out of a deeper identity and sense of mission. That mission comes from the very "missio" nature of God, using the Greek word for "being sent." God sends God's self into the world, which is also known as incarnation. And especially is God's self sent into the world of suffering, of the poor, the outcast, as evidenced by the presence of God in and through Jesus. As God is, then, so should be the church.

Rather than creating and sending out missionaries as before, the church at this point thus becomes itself wholly missionary.

But the forms and practices of most church life today in the European and North American context, because they have been created by and in the context of Christendom, often stand in the way of the church as a people being sent into the world together to gather with the suffering, the poor, the outcast. The missional church, which also comes in different forms itself, including more organic than organizational relationships of people, turns the Christendom model inside out and upside down. Now the church only exists when it is gathered from out of the midst of the very vulnerable ones where God is already at work. This is its mission: serving others, finding God at work there, and joining with God and all, and in gratitude celebrating through worship that refreshes the spirit for the cycle of more serving, more finding, more worship. See how that inverts the "usual Christendom model" of resources and identity and church life that focuses first on worship celebration, then the "finding" one another and belonging, being taught, only then serving others.

But if that is the case, that the church only exists when it is gathered in the midst of being with the most vulnerable, then all its forms and practices, its leadership, its resources of people and space, its activities, should be directed toward and reflected by that mission.

Finally then, as opposed to the centuries of Christendom culture and history, it is the mission that converts the church.

That Troublesome Word Church

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So, the description says we are re-imagining and re-incarnating "church." Does that mean this blog is only for Christians, especially those of a progressive bent, or Religious Communities? Can you be a missional progressive and not "believe" in God? (I hope so, for even for this specific Christian Theist Jesus Follower, there are those days..., days I actually affirm my doubt).

I have wished at my own particular blog called progressivechurchplanting that I hadn't used the word church. It reflects a particular now a decade old mindset about "planting a church" even "planting a church that plants churches." I am now more interested in planting mission, planting communities, planting relationships, ones that may not, probably won't be, 501c3 or otherwise organizations, and may not be set up to "last forever" in a single identity, geared to grow the numbers of members of a group.

So while so much of this movement has been rooted in the soil of the Christian movement, and I suspect much of what we share here will continue to be in and of that movement which is itself undergoing so much change anyway, the portals are open for those progressives who are engaged in missional re-imagining and re-incarnating of communities and relationships, perhaps just their own life at the moment, without any theological tests. If you are in such a tribe, others of us who aren't need your learnings and sources, as you will ours. In the spirit of generosity and hospitality, we allow for "the shaping of things to come."

This is one of those frequently asked questions of missional progressives. I am sure there are others to come.
Ron R.
(who will try to remember to sign posts that come from me, as i hope we soon have other major post threads originating from others)

Common Misperceptions of Missional?

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For some the word missional itself will conjure up images of colonial imperialism. We intend to use it actually as the very opposite. Not as ways to seek power over, but as a means of serving the powerless. As ways communities, relationships, can undermine the "Empire" of The American Dream of Affluence, Achievement, Appearance, The Corporate Culture of Individualism and Coolness that influences church as well as state. We use the word in its Greek sense of missio, being Sent, being Sent to Serve love and justice.

In The New Conspirators, Tom Sine creates a spectrum or river that includes such streams as "emerging" "mosaic/multicultural" "missional" and "monastic". For missional see his article here at http://msainfo.org/articles/the-new-conspirators-missional-church. Basic missional characteristic, from Sine and Reggie McNeal's work (see book list below) is a turning inside out of time, talent, and treasure from building up "a church" to which people come, to building up "the church" which goes to become itself in the world. Particularly the world of the poor.

Have you encountered other common misperceptions? Issues in trying to "explain" it other than "come and see"? Wouldn't it be, really, so much easier if there were a "red pill" to take? What or who has been your "red pill?"
Ron R.

A Few Starter Books on Being Missional

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Just a few of the many, many out there. Generally missional, not all progressive. But definitely places to begin from the realm of recent books. Check out their bibliographies and footnotes for many of the ones that have laid the various groundwork. Comment and add your own I haven't.

The Shaping of Things To Come, by Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost
Missional Renaissance by Reggie McNeal
Missional Church, ed. Darrell Guder
The New Monasticism by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne
Organic Church by Neil Cole
The New Conspirators by Tom Sine
The New Friars by Scott Bessenecker
Living Missionally, by Scott Bessenecker
Exiles by Michael Frost
The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch
Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood, Alan Roxburgh
Tribal Church, Carol Howard Merritt
Right Here, Right Now, Alan Hirsch and Lance Ford
Wide Open Space, Jim Palmer
Divine Nobodies, by Jim Palmer
Revolution by George Barna
Change The World, Michael Slaughter
Discontinuity and Hope by Lyle Schaller
churchmorph by Eddie Gibbs
The Tangible Kingdom by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay
The gathered and scattered church, Halter and Smay
The Almost Church Revitalized, and Church Do's and Don'ts by Michael Durall
Let Justice Roll Down; With Justice For All; Welcoming Justice, all by John Perkins
Take This Bread, Sara Miles
Jesus Freak, Sara Miles
Emerging Church, Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger
A New Kind of Christianity by Brian McLaren
Inside The Organic Church by Bob Whitesel
The Small Church at Large by Robin Trebilcock
Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor
An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor
Under The Radar, Bill Easum

Introduce Yourself and Your Missional Lifework and Dream

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I will start us off. I am Ron Robinson. You can follow my particular missional church experiences via http://www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com/ here in Turley/NorthTulsa, Oklahoma. We transformed from small attractional oriented church to an incarnational oriented church in 2007, creating a community center for our 74126 and neighboring zipcodes, and meeting for worship gatherings inside the center or out wherever we were doing "small acts of justice with great love" in our area.

The dream continues. We are about to move again, we hope, soon into an even bigger space, with a dedicated chapel space, along with community center and health hub, food justice center, and more. Even the chapel space will primarily be oriented toward the wider community. We also just bought a block with abandoned homes and are turning it into an outdoor community center space for gardening, kitchen, play and parkspace here. You can follow also our community renewal focus at http://www.turleyok.blogspot.com/, but look for a new website for it soon.

Introduce yourself first in the comments here. I may then move them into posts of their own for more specific followup commenting.

Contribute To The Conversation

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Besides commenting to posts here, or simply sending to me at revronrobinson@aol.com links to share here from your own blogs, consider also writing and sharing pieces originally for us. Just send them to my email address and I will make a post for them here. Of course, be a follower, and share us with your social and email networks and link to us.
Ron R.

Welcome

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We are in that "hinge of history" when new incarnations of "church" are being grown all over, or are sprouting in the hearts and minds of many people of diverse backgrounds. This is simply a place to connect with one another to help tend this common garden for one another. We hope it helps our seeds of mission wherever and however sown.

But why specifically for progressives? So much of the inspiration, and experience, of the missional church has come from the more theological conservative end of the spectrum. God bless them for this. We need their companionship and inspiration and even challenge still. But we need a place to be unapologetically progressive in our sharing too; where we know it is the norm to be affirming of diverse religions, sexual orientations, genders, ethnicities, etc., so we can channel our energies not into these issues but into the creation of relationships and communities of all kinds that reflect these core progressive values.