Spiritual Formation

My own personal spiritual formation is an issue that I have struggled with and continue to struggle with: in the midst of life and all its demands, and in light of my own self-centeredness, how do I establish a rhythm or routine that enables me to encounter Christ and be formed spiritually?  I have been working through this for quite some time, and this semester was reintroduced to the work of Ruth Haley Barton called Sacred Rhythms.  Actually working through this book has been so refreshing for me, has introduced or re-introduced several spiritual disciplines that I think will be so helpful for me, and has laid the groundwork for me to incorporate a rhythm into my life that will enable me to grow.

I won't bore you with the details of my own journey, but I wanted to share that in case this book could help prod and encourage anyone else in their spiritual journey.  I'll post a link to it on Amazon below...

Is Hunting Off-limits??

So I have never hunted before.  Let me preface this post with that admission, or claim to the moral high ground, however you see the issue personally. :)  I have never given much thought to the ethical dimensions of hunting, probably because I have never been that interested in environmentalism.  I am starting to wake up to the importance of this issue, although I still am not as cooperative as I should be in the recycling my wife tries to do.  I see how important it is to value and treasure the earth, since it is the only earth God has given us and we are the stewards of that gift (in a similar fashion to how we have been given one physical body and must be good stewards of that).  But I have been slow to act on my realization of the importance of this truth.

I have been even slower to recognize how important it is to treasure animals and all of God's creatures.  Part of this stems from my strong negative feelings toward the "pet idol" movement I have observed in America: pets are like people, and we value them to such a great extent that they become an idol for us, something we value more than human relationships.  Despite that unhealthy tendency, though, it is true that God's creatures are valuable in his sight--all creatures, both human and animal--and we must value them and treat them with respect.

I just read a quote that got me thinking of all this, and here it is:
"The Noachic covenant [God's covenant with Noah found in Genesis 9] emphasizes reverence for the mystery of life, symbolized by the blood.  Permission is given to human beings to slaughter meat for food, but with appropriate reserve and reverence (Gen. 9:4-5).  Their God-given freedom does not entitle them to kill for sport or to destroy species.  The nonhuman creation is not there simply for humans to use or exploit.  Animals too are precious in God's sight, and this valuation may extend to trees, flowers, and other parts of 'nature.'  In short, human beings are caretakers of God's creation... This is what is involved in being made in the image of God: to rule the earth in wisdom, justice, and compassion so that the rule of God may be manifest in human actions" (Bernard Anderson, Contours of Old Testament Theology, 95).

Wow.  That's a great quote in my opinion.  The comment near the end about being made in the image of God goes back to his earlier discussion of what this phrase means.  To be made in the image of God, in Anderson's view, means to have a function or role, to represent God on earth, "just as a child represents the parent on a family estate" (90).  In this view, man "is not an autonomous being, at liberty to rule the earth arbitrarily or violently.  On the contrary, human dominion is to be exercised wisely and benevolently so that God's dominion over the earth may be manifest in care for the earth and in the exercise of justice" (91).

This is what all goes back to hunting!  If we are not free to treat the earth how we want, whether through treating animals violently or through raping the earth's natural resources in whatever fashion we want, then that certainly has implications for how we live.  We must do what we can to treasure the earth and its creatures, both in our own lives and through the laws we support.  And maybe we should take another look at hunting and the underlying assumptions behind it.  I have always felt a little uncomfortable with the idea of killing an animal for fun, but Genesis 9 seems to instruct us to treat the blood of animals with great respect, for the life given to it by God is in its blood.  It is one thing to kill an animal to nourish our bodies.  I believe this is absolutely okay, mainly because Scripture says it is okay and because I do believe that animals are subject to humans, since God set it up that way.  However, does our "dominion" over animals give us the right to kill them for fun?  Isn't there something about this that fails to treasure God's creation?  Isn't there something about this that fails to rule the earth in wisdom and compassion?  I'm just asking the question...

Purpose of the Church: Michael Frost

I just posted a mini-review of the first section of The Shaping of Things to Come, and this post is about a youtube video I just watched with one of its authors, Michael Frost.  Michael talks about the purpose of the Church in compelling ways, ways that challenged me, and I wanted to share some of his thoughts.  If you'd like to watch the video for yourself (it's only 3 1/2 minutes), you can go here.

“The purpose of the Church, I think, is to alert people to the universal reign of God in Christ, in the same way as that was the purpose of Israel—to alert people to the universal reign of Yahweh…The gospel for Israel was that Yahweh reigns…over all kingdoms and dominions.  The Christian message is the same, except that reign and rule is exemplified and confirmed for us in the death and resurrection of Jesus.”

The purpose of the Church, then, is to alert people to the reign and rule of God in Christ.  This is “more than church growth, attracting more numbers, more than saving the lost.”  He says there are two ways we alert people to God’s reign: we announce it and declare it, through relationships and public praise and proclamation, and we also demonstrate what the reign of God looks like.  If the reign of God is characterized by love, justice, mercy, grace, then we as the Church ought to go and act that out now, demonstrating for the world what the reign of God looks like: “show people what the world to come looks like here in the midst of the disorder of this world.”  Arguments about whether the Church should do social action or evangelism have no place.  The Church ought to be like a trailer for the greatest blockbuster movie in history—the world ought to look at the Church as it demonstrates what the universal reign of God looks like and want to participate!  “People ought to look at the Church—they ought to look at individual Christians—and they ought to see a trailer of this world to come.  They ought to see peace, justice, love, mercy, kindness.  They also ought to see celebration and joy, delicious flavors and beautiful life.  They ought to look at it and think, ‘I’d like to see the whole thing!’  I think that’s the purpose of the Church: to announce and to demonstrate the universal reign of God in Christ.  And then, if the Church grows, it’s incidental.  I think it will grow… But the primary goal is this alerting people to this irreversible truth of God’s reign.”

This is a beautiful way to see the purpose of the Church in my opinion: to announce and demonstrate the reign of God in Christ.  Personally, I think a big part of announcing is going, and as we go we also must demonstrate as a community this reign of God already being played out in our midst.  Too often the Church has stayed stagnant, attempting to announce from our pulpits and demonstrate from our cozy church buildings the reign of God.  We must do so by going and through proactive relationships with our neighbors, friends, colleagues, family members, etc. 

One of his most crucial points for me is that our focus has been skewed for too long, and we have made church growth and numbers our focus.  If we are living out the universal reign of God in our midst, demonstrating a radically loving, just, sacrificial community, the church will grow.  We'll never need another outreach "program" or church growth plan.  May we as individuals and as the Church be this trailer for the world, both announcing and demonstrating the wonderful, freeing, righteous reign of God.

The Missional Church

So I read a book called The Shaping of Things to Come by Frost and Hirsch a while back, and I am going through it with some friends right now.  I wrote out a few thoughts pertaining to the first section of the book, and I thought I would share those thoughts here as well.  The book certainly has some ideas that I don't wholeheartedly agree with, but on the whole it hits the nail on the head and makes some very important challenges to the way the church in the West is currently operating.  I invite and encourage you to get this book and work through it.  There is a link to buy it at the bottom of this article...

Thoughts on The Shaping of Things to Come through page 107

This book was like a breath of fresh air for me.  It addressed many areas I have been working through and trying to come to grips with.  Though it didn’t answer all my questions, and though I didn’t agree with every point or resonate with every idea, I was incredibly refreshed by the authors’ fresh vision for the Church.  This book introduced me to the idea of the “missional church,” which is summed up very well by Rick Meigs on his website www.friendofmissional.org.  Part of his description says: “At its core, missional is a shift in thinking. This shift in thinking is expressed by Ed Stetzer and David Putman in their book, Breaking the Missional Code (Broadman & Holman, 2006) like this:

From programs to processes

From demographics to discernment

From models to missions

From attractional to incarnational

From uniformity to diversity

From professional to passionate

From seating to sending

From decisions to disciples

From additional to exponential

From monuments to movements”

This is a good way to introduce this stream in the church that is moving in a powerful way.  It is in part a reaction against the institutionalized church, and I feel that Hirsch and Frost have summed up its main thrusts very well in this book.

My journey has played a large part in the ways that this book has challenged me, shaped me, and set me on a path toward being involved with a new kind of church.  For my entire life, I have always been an integral part of whatever church I have attended: I was a leader in my youth group as a student, I was at a small church while at college where I was well-known and then was a youth pastor after that.  I was always sort of in a privileged position, and it was easy for me to get to know people—in fact, people were seeking out relationships with ME mostly! 

Then we moved down here to Kentucky, not really thinking about the transition to finding a church.  We had a very difficult time.  We went from church to church trying to find a community of Christ-centered people who would embrace us and whom we could embrace.  We signed up for welcome classes that got cancelled, we signed up for small groups and were never placed in them, we sought out friendships and were turned away.  We felt like we were finally encountering what it must be like for people who are trying to “break in” to the culture of the church.  It was tough!  Because we are committed followers of Christ, we kept looking and eventually settled on a church merely because we were able to get into a small group there.  We have become hungry for community, a genuine community of Christ-followers who are focused on loving God, loving each other, and loving the world.  This has been hard to find, and this vision is what I feel the authors tapped into for me.  I am so tired of churches worrying about sustaining themselves (as institutions), focusing on the building of buildings and the budget and the maintenance of the programs of the church.  I know these things have their place, and I certainly have played my part in sustaining these aspects of the church.  But they seem to take over and mask the entire nature of the church!  The church is not an institution—it is a living organism, a community of people, a family.  I personally feel like this nature is hidden in the vast majority of churches by its own programs and goals and budgets and passions.

All of that is introduction, believe it or not!  J  Let me move on to talk specifically about the book’s first 107 pages and what struck me the most.  I found the discussion at the beginning about the Burning Man festival interesting.  Of course such a festival is not the church, but I resonated with the authors’ connection between this festival and the longings of humanity, specifically in our postmodern world.  The most powerful longing I think this festival displays is a longing for belonging.  We all want to be a part of something with others, to be in community, and to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.  I also resonated with the festival’s focus on the experiential and on celebration—I think these are longings that the church too often ignores…

I really appreciated their discussion on Christendom, and from my education in church history I found them to be right on target.  They said that through the shift under Constantine, “Christianity moved from being a dynamic, revolutionary, social, and spiritual movement to being a religious institution with its attendant structures, priesthood, and sacraments” (8).  This is key to me, and points to the source of many of the problems in the Church’s focus and understanding of its nature and mission 1700 years later.  We must regain our focus on being a missionary movement rather than an institution.

While I disagree with their sweeping assessment that the church planting movement has gone bust to a large degree, I agree with them on their point that most church plants are merely carbon copies of the dominant Christendom model, “duplicating a failing system” (18).  They seem to still be advocating church planting, in fact, although a missional type of church, one that abandons the Christendom assumptions and sees the nature and purpose of the church as a church sent “to bring healing to a broken world” (18). 

Their summary of what this missional church will look like is spelled out on page 22, and overall it’s a vision I get very excited about: it places a high value on communal life, has more open leadership structures, and values the contribution of everyone in the community.  It is experiential and participatory in worship and is deeply concerned for matters of justice and mercy.  These are the things I have been longing to see the church focus on, moving away from its “come to us” mentality and its institutionalized focus.  I believe existing churches can begin to make these changes, but it will take serious shifts in the way we look at ourselves and the purpose and function of our churches.  We must begin to see the church we attend not as a club you can join but as the corporate community of individuals following Christ…

Their focus on the church becoming incarnational was a little confusing for me as I read back through it, but I appreciated the descriptions on page 38 of what they meant—we must truly become a part of the people group we are trying to reach, identifying with them in real ways as Christ identified with humanity in his incarnation.  In other words, we must not stand apart from our neighbors or call out to the not-yet Christians among whom we live, telling them to come to church!  This has been the attractional model: we have the goods, and you need to get with the program and come to us if you want those goods.  Instead, we must enter into real relationships with them and identify with them in true ways if we ever hope to invite them to know Christ. 

Beyond this, the church must turn its gaze toward this incarnational stance; we must not stand apart from our culture or neighborhoods but must become enmeshed in them.  “Jesus moved into the neighborhoods; he experienced its life, its rhythms, and its people from the inside and not as an outsider” (39)—we must also do this if we hope to do the work God has called us to.

The graphs on page 41 sum up the difference between attractional and incarnational: the mission mode and impulse in the attractional model is inward, seeking to get people to “come to church,” while the mission mode and impulse in the incarnational model is outward, seeking to go and share life with the communities of which we are a part.  Through this shared life we can invite our friends to join us in the journey of following Christ. 

Frost and Hirsch say: “We believe that the web of relationships, friendships, and acquaintances that Christians normally have makes up the net into which not-yet Christians will swim.  We believe the missional-incarnational church will spend more time on building friendships than it will on developing religious programs” (44).  This is a beautiful challenge to me, and a needed one.  We need to regain (as individual followers of Christ who are a part of his body, the community, the church) our focus on relationships with others, in the process sacrificing some of our focus on programs and planning and productivity.

One more thought and then I'll stop.  The authors provide a very powerful discussion about the way we view the Church and the world, ourselves and our neighbors.  They express that for too long Christians have bought into a faulty way of thinking, which they refer to as the "fence" mentality.  In other words, those who follow Jesus are "in" the fence, and those who do not are "out" of the fence.  This in/out, us/them mentality has led directly to the institutionalization of the church, to viewing the body of Christ as something you can become a member of, a sort of social club.  Rather, we ought to view the journey of faith in terms of a "well."  Jesus is the well, and there are no fences.  Some are close to the well, connected with Christ on an intimate basis, and some are far from the well.  But all are on the journey, and it is our role as Christians, as the Church, to draw those who are far from the well toward it.  We are missionaries, going to all who are far from the well (not-yet-Christians, rather than "unbelievers" or "non-Christians") and inviting them to know Christ.  We are not an institution, waiting for those who are "out" to come to the source and get the goods...

I again invite you to buy this book and read it.  At the very least, it is challenging and insightful.  If you have thoughts about the book or about what I've written here, I'd love to hear your thoughts...