Dan Kimball’s The Emerging Church has helped me realize that, as a church, we need to be doing something that is both overtly spiritual and suitable for inviting people to.

One of the most valuable insights I have gained from Pete Ward’s Liquid Church is the idea that people approach spirituality the same way they shop - looking for things that will be a good fit for them, ignoring things they don’t like or that don’t make sense to them. If we are to reach people in Seattle who are not interested in church or Christianity, we cannot simply do the worship service thing, no matter how cool we make it. The people who are interested in going to a normal worship service (or a cool one, for that matter) are probably already going to Mars Hill or some other church that offers a quality worship service. That’s not our calling.

There is a tremendous number of people who are interested in exploring spirituality, and even Christian spirituality, but are not ever going to pursue it through traditional church routes, through organized services or church programs.

Now, I have written on several previous occasions that I am no fan of worship services, because I do not see them as having any useful place in the life of the church, much less any biblical support. I am not suggesting that we need to start one, by any means. Allow me to elaborate.

I envision a gathering where people can come in at any time over the course of two or three hours, probably in the late evening. It would feature a variety of stations in a setting where people could read, pray, write, think, and focus on God. Some ideas include:
-A table with bread and wine for communion
-Crosses and other Christian symbols around the room
-Paper and pens for writing reflections and prayers
-A basin of water, with cards and a water-soluble marker, for confession - write on the card, then drop it into the water, which symbolizes forgiveness and reminds us of baptism
-An incense censer where people can offer or place prayers and light various kids of incense
-A station with texts to meditate on and respond to
-A wall with a scripture or quote, with post-it notes for people to post reflections and thoughts on
-A map of the world and a map of the city, with papers to pin up prayers for various people around the world and around town

I haven’t been very good in recent months about studying the Bible consistently. Kind of embarassing for a church planter, I know, but it just seems like other things get in the way and take precedence over spending time in Scripture, even though I know this shouldn’t be so.

A few factors are interacting here. First, Amy and I have been much better this year about getting up early to have breakfast, read, and pray before we leave for work. This time if often cut short by oversleeping or having to leave early, but it’s been very valuable to have a morning quiet time, even if it’s only 15 minutes. This has caused a problem in that I start to think that I’ve taken care of my God-time for the day, so when I come home all I do is zone out reading blogs =) until it’s time for dinner and to start planning for tomorrow. I need to let it sink in that a quick devotional reading in the morning is not enough.

I also outlined a few problems that may creep in when plodding through Scripture. When we get these misconceptions in our heads, even subconsciously, our motivation to spend time in Scripture decreases:
-Scripture as devotional book
-Scripture as a doctrinal treatise
-Scripture as an ethical handbook
-Scripture as a quick-fix guide for when you’re feeling down
-Scripture as rules for every aspect of life
-Scripture as stories for us to learn from and emulate
-Scripture as a handbook for society
-Scripture as stories of the ideal world, which we should try to emulate in our day

To some extent, Scripture can function in all of these ways, yet as a whole, it is none of them. The problem arises when I have in mind that the Bible is one of these things, and reading it will bring me a certain benefit - inevitably, I will come across a text that doesn’t fit that purpose, and I will be disappointed. If I want to feel better and be reminded that I’m loved by God, and I end up reading about Joab’s military exploits, I will be disappointed, and less likely to look to the Bible next time I’m seeking something.

So what is the Bible? I’m not content to say, with the Orthodox, that it’s simply a collection of Israel and the Church’s documents that were produced long ago for their benefit and ours. We cannot leave out the design God had in providing us with the Scriptures - they were not just products of the church; they cannot be, because they are too crucial to our life in Christ to not have been intended for our benefit. I choose to believe that God intended for us to have the Scriptures, and the specific ones that we received, because they are our primary sources for knowing what it means to be the people of God.

In order to understand Scripture properly, knowing what it meant to the original audiences, we must understand the culture and position of the people to whom it was written. Evangelicals have done an excellent job, all things considered, of embracing the ancient biblical world, with animal sacrifices, prophets, coats of many colors, Roman soldiers, and the other stage props for the story God has been writing in history. We understand the temple sacrifice system in order to understand the significance of the temple’s curtain being torn in two, and the church’s view of Jesus as the passover lamb. These things have meaning because we have done our homework on ancient Judaism.

But we have not done it consistently, or deeply enough. There are far too many nuances of the ancient near east that are well-known to scholars and help illuminate bizarre things we find in Scripture that most Christians are totally unaware of. There are far more significant cultural differences than many of us are willing to admit between our society and ancient Israel. Failure to grasp this concept is the reason people view America as a modern-day version of ancient Israel, God’s nation where attack or tragedy represents judgment for rebellion. I’ve stopped counting and paying attention to the times people have staked the survival of America as a nation on a particular moral issue, as if God is going to smite us because Britney is showing too much skin or because Wal-Mart carries too many CDs with Parental Advisory labels. Yes, this happened to Soddom and Gomorrah (the smiting, not Britney Spears), but they were in ancient societies operating as theocracies under the wrong theo, or unfaithful to the correct Theo. This is not the world we live in; God’s way of constituting his people has shifted from being nation-oriented to being based on discipleship to Christ.

N.T. Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus has made it clear to me that Jesus’ message was filled with specific political statements of immediate relevance for Israel and Jerusalem’s pending destruction at the hands of the Romans. For example, when Peter drew his sword at Jesus’ arrest, Jesus said (Matt 26:52) “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” We cannot interpret this as a blanket command of pacifism, for Jesus had told them to bring swords (see Luke 22:36-38). Instead, Jesus was saying that his triumph as Israel’s Messiah would not come about with the help of swords, nor would it be in any sense a military assault on the occupying Romans.

So our reading of scripture can be much more motivating, much more formative, and much more rewarding if we take the time to study it, to dig into the background of Christianity’s Jewish roots and the worldviews of ancient near eastern peoples. I’m looking forward to ordering The Context of Scripture, which promises to be a massive scholarly work aimed at helping us understand Scripture, or [in thick southern accent and KJV English] “rightly divide the Word of truth.” Amen.

Today we celebrated Christmas with my family, and we had a nice, quiet day at home to reflect and spend time together. I worked on my SeattleScience.com website, and we visited my grandmother.

Grandma has Alzheimer’s Disease, and can no longer speak or understand much. She still walks around, almost constantly. It’s good because she gets exercise, and there’s another resident, a very tall man named J.T., who also walks. Hand in hand, they shuffle around the nursing home hallways. They do not speak, but they support each other in ways that no one else could - suffering through the same horrible disease that eats at their minds, hanging on to what health they have by pacing the halls.

I can never say that we get much out of visiting grandma, because she never remembers us, and she never says anything coherent. But perhaps “getting something out of it” is not the point of visiting grandma. There is something strangely spiritual about visiting the infirm, the sick, those who are unable to give anything in return. It is not something I do often - seeing grandma twice a year when I visit my family is about it. I need to do this more.

Dan at Signposts also has a grandma post.

“At Starbucks, I ended up encountering a community full of post-Christian people who had little trust in organized religion and couldn’t care less what I had to say. I learned that there was absolutely no interest whatsoever from them in attending a church.” –Daniel Hill of Willow Creek’s Axis, in The Emerging Church

I don’t get the impression that they early Jerusalem church was a particularly “organized religion.” They had leaders/elders, people in charge of various functions (deacons), and a fairly large membership, even by today’s standards. We’re not working against any of the ways they did things, but we do have the culturally familiar, and often unappealing, ways Western Christians have done church in recent centuries. A lot of people will never connect with them.

That may explain the recent emergence of the concept of “missional communities,” which are explained in Darrell Guder’s Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America. Basically, these are grassroots groups organized by Christians (as well as non-Christians) for the purpose of building community, forming relationships, and usually doing something else worthwhile, like supporting the arts or working for the environment. They aren’t churches, and they never will be. But the idea is that, after spending time with Christians and seeing that perhaps Jesus is worth investigating, some people will seek to know Christ as a result of the group.

What do you think of the “missional community” concept? What else can we do to add a more-than-a-housechurch level of collaboration to our churches without making them into an alternative “organized religion”?

Where do open-minded and free-thinking people fit into the modern church? At my parents’ church last Sunday, it seemed like people who had ideas of their own (!) would have a hard time fitting in at a large traditional church where everything was formalized and structured.

Dan Kimball has long realized that many people are insulted by the level of intellectual conformity required in churches, and the relative shallowness of evangelical sermons’ theology:

Don’t insult people’s intelligence or desire for spiritual depth. If I went to a Buddhist temple to have a deep spiritual experience and upon walking in received a fill-in-the-blank sheet with an easy-to-remember acrostic for the three steps on how to “M-E-D-I-T-A-T-E,” I imagine it woudl catch me off guard. if I were then subjected to an upbeat, seminar-style teaching message with a flashy PowerPoint presentation, I’d feel a little confused and let down.

Likewise, people in emerging generations attending a worship service hunger for a deep experience of God’s wisdom. If we distribute sermon notes, they should be comprehensive and give the historical context for the Scripture passages we use. The Emerging Church, p178

If you want to grow a group of people who all think the same and don’t question what the group does, it’s not hard. That’s exactly what I saw on Sunday. There are many intelligent and open-minded people there, but that almost seems to be an accident, and even the ones in leadership positions tend not to rock the boat. The average person-in-the-pew, even after many years of following Christ (for that is what they are doing - I don’t want to give the impression that they’re selfish or uncommitted), does not have even the slightest idea that there may be other, equally viable groups of Christians outside our denomination, or that scripture can be interpreted in multiple ways, one of which is not necessarily totally correct to the exclusion of others. The message is, “What our group teaches is truth, and others don’t have it. If you bring up something other than what we all agree on (though we never actually discuss it), you’re strange and out of line.”

Kimball encourages me with this quote, headed “The importance of developing a culture which encourages questions and thinking.” He mentions the famous Bereans and their inquiry into scripture as examples for the church today:

We must cultivate a culture that allows dialogue. Evangelicals have been criticized - many times rightly so - for being dogmatic and closed-minded. For too long we have been doing all the talking, without any dialogue. We are now serving generations that have serious trust issues, and trust is not earned by talking just one-way. We must disarm this criticism and regain trust. We need to encourage, not discourage, people to think, to question, to discover. Why are we so afraid of encouraging people to think for themselves? We may need to set up open forums in which people can engage in deeper dialogue about the message. I’m sure Paul the apostle used dialogue in certain preaching settings. At the very least, we need to constantly encourage our listeners to check out our teachings for themselves, measuring them against Scripture. p193

I could go on with this quote, but it would get quite long. Very good stuff here. Kimball next cites the Jewish Midrash, the “tradition which emphasizes struggling with numerous possible interpretations of the Scriptures” (193). He encourages dialogue, questions, and a less-fearful attitude about people’s questions and interpretations.

What I’m reading here reminds me of Grenz and Franke’s Beyond Foundationalism. Much of the fear that people have of open-minded inquiry is that the “foundations” of their faith will be eroded or damaged, and the whole belief system will come crashing down. Isn’t this ironic - that, in the name of ensuring faithfulness to the truth, people would mark off inquiry as a dangerous and subversive activity?

Jim Henderson is hosting an Off The Map gathering with Brian McLaren and Todd Hunter at Q Cafe in Seattle. I am unspeakably excited - giddy, even. I’ll probably get over that soon. I hope.

At any rate, this is a welcome surprise, because David and I were unable, despite our wanting to go, to attend the recent Allelon gathering in Eagle, ID (where Todd Hunter currently lives).

If it’s anything like Jim’s Missional Co-Op Party, it will be a fantastic learning and networking opportunity. Brian McLaren and April Stace (”Alice” the seeker, of More Ready Than You Realize fame) will be discussing how their email conversations have influenced them up to the present. This is especially cool because April is married to Nuc, and they play with Nuc’s brother Posido as Harp46. Nuc teaches at the same school I do. How cool is that?

The Un-Churches made the front page of the Denver Post on Sunday.

Thanks to Chris from Harding for the link. The article is definitely worth the read, as it highlights the link between established churches and emergent churches. For example, Ted Haggard’s New Life Church (11,000 members) has a gathering called Saturday Night, a kind of mega emergent church.

Check it out.

What do you think of this interaction between boomer megachurches and emergent churches - and mega emergent churches?

My wife thought of this one. “Which is the true grail? Whichever one you want when you order from Communorama!”

For an excellent parody of the modern state of communion, see SheepComics’ Flock Rx and Eucha-Sol episodes.

In other contest news, Richard Hall expounds his “seateriology” in the comments section of the original post:

It’s a little known fact that the most divisive issue at the Council of Nicaea in 325AD was not the Arian heresy or the true nature of the Trinity, it was the question of which was the properly ordained, catholic and apostolic seating for the church. This issue was not properly resolved and flared up again at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 , where once again no satisfactory resolution could be found. This controversy has continued to be a source of tension in the Church, and it was Luther’s outburst “Here I sit” which sparked the Reformation.
Church leaders and theologians have conspired to cover up (with fabric and foam padding) the part that seateriology (as it is technically known) has played in the continuing life of the church. Even so, modern congregations have an instinctive understanding of the issues, which explains why changing the style and colour of church seating is almost always controversial.

To which Rodney Olson responds:

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.

But his delight is when he walketh on the democratically chosen carpet weaved by the craftsmen at Bob’s rugs, when he standeth behind the large ornately carved pulpit from Pulpits’R'Us and he sitteth on a chair from Church Chair Industries (Inc), the original church chair specialists.

This is getting good!