My View

I was talking to a dear friend, whom I’m getting to know better and better, and we accidentally came across an expression for something we both found to be true. It goes like this: “God pools [people] for training, but scatters for mission.” I think this is very true. We need to be better at finding out whether God wants us to learn, or whether he wants us to go out and do stuff.

We can easily miss on both. We’re sometimes inclined to think that it’s a waste of resources to pool a bunch of highly competent people in one place. But I think it’s absolutely vital to get a big enough momentum, in order to be able to really change things.

The other big temptation is to never scatter, just keep holding all the good stuff in one place. At some point mature Christians, or mature whatever, have to scatter and plant something of their own. This goes for family, this goes for church, this goes for a lot of things.

The key is to know what phase you’re in. Is it a time of pooling or scattering?

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Sitting at the airport in Oslo, Norway, writing down some of my reflections from a great trip. It’s truly been a wonderful time meeting up with the national partners of LifeShapes in Scandinavia. We’ve had great fellowship, food and drink. And we’ve done what I enjoy most (almost); we’ve talked strategy. What’s God doing in Scandinavia at the moment? How is he transforming his church? It was also great to meet some of the people in Norway who have been affected by LifeShapes. They were mostly young (as in under 30) leaders with vision for change in themselves and in the churches and people they lead. Hearing people share vision makes my heart race, so you can imagine what this was like.

There’s hope for Norway!

The other thing that really struck me was seeing these guys really taking the simplicity of LifeShapes and using it. You can dig into a shape and study it for hours (or weeks or years), but you can also present the core of it in a few minutes. That’s potential for life changing discipleship if anything. Mike Breen has said that this is “simple and hard, not easy and complex”. Simple to grasp, hard (work) to implement, but not complex to grasp and easy to implement. So true.

If you haven’t run into LifeShapes yet, read A Passionate Life by Mike Breen and Walt Kallestad. Or even better, visit St Thomas’ Church in Sheffield, UK. It will blow your mind (both the book and the church).

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I promised earlier to get back to George Barna’s book Revolution. It’s an analyst’s view on why, as Barna puts it, millions of Americans are finding faith outside the church. Barna makes a distinction between “the church” (with a small c) and “the Church” (with a capital C). The “church” is the local congregational church. The “Church” is the global church of Jesus Christ. And there is one important point to be remembered; Barna discusses the church in the US, not anywhere else. In essence, Barna believes the glorious days of the local congregational church are numbered, and offers several reasons.

1. The local church has failed to produce disciples

Barna lists a number of points where he believes the local church has failed. The traditional methods of “doing church” have not produced discipleship. They have produced church members, people who have a faith in God and their salvation, but do not show any sign of transformed lives. A few examples:

• “The biweekly attendance at worship services is, by believers’ own admission, generally the only time they worship God.”

• “The typical churched believer will die without leading a single person to a lifesaving knowledge of and relationship with Jesus Christ.”

• “Although the typical believer contends that the Bible is accurate in what it teaches, he or she spends less time reading the Bible in a year than watching television, listening to music, reading other books and publications, or conversing about personal hobbies and leisure interests.”

• “Churched Christians give away an average of about 3 percent of their income in a typical year – and feel pleased at their ’sacrificial’ generosity.”

• “The most significant influence on the choices of churched believers is neither teaching from the pulpit nor advice gleaned from fellow congregants; it is messages absorbed from the media, the law, and family members.”

• “In an average month, fewer than one out of every ten churched families worships together outside of a church service; just as few pray together, other than at mealtimes; and the same minimal numbers study the Bible together at home or work together to address the needs of disadvantaged people in their community.”

Is he right on this one? I think Barna has a point (mild understatement) in recognising the lack of discipleship in the local church. The local church hasn’t produced disciples, people who are transformed by their faith, but believers. And this is a serious problem. We need to do something about it!

2. The local church is not in the Bible, we made it up

This is not a quote from Barna, it’s a very extreme intentional dramatization from my part. Barna argues that the local, congregational church as we have come to know it, doesn’t exist in the Bible. Barna writes:

However, you should realize that the Bible neither describes nor promotes the local church as we know it today. Many centuries ago religious leaders created the prevalent form of “church” that is so widespread in our society to help people be better followers of Christ. But the local church many have come to cherish – the services, offices, programs, buildings, ceremonies – is neither biblical nor unbiblical. It is abiblical – that is, such an organization is not addressed in the Bible.
In fact, if you scour the Bible passages included at the beginning of Chapter 3 [in the Barna book], you will find no allusions to or descriptions of a specific type of religious organization or spiritual form. The Bible does not rigidly define the corporate practices, rituals, or structures that must be embraced in order to have a proper church. It does, however, offer direction regarding the importance and integration of fundamental spiritual disciplines into one’s life. Sometimes we forget that the current forms of religious practice and community were developed hundreds of years ago, long after the Bible was written, in an attempt to help believers live more fulfilling Christian lives. We should keep in mind that what we call “church” is just one interpretation of how to develop and live a faith-centered life. We made it up. It may be healthy or helpful, but is not sacrosanct.

What about this one? I believe this is the point that Barna has been most critized for. And I believe it is very important. Barna is right in that the cultural form of the local congregational church isn’t in the Bible. We made that up. Or someone did, a long time ago. And he’s also right in his admonition that the Bible isn’t about doing church, it’s about being church. I think most of Barna’s critics have misunderstood him here – fellowship is important, and vital, according to Barna. He’s isn’t about to abolish the local church. But he is frustrated with its rigid form, and by Christians being obsessed with “belonging to a church” as something salvational. This is simply just another form of “no salvation outside the church” as taught by the Catholic church for centuries. The church doesn’t save anyone, Jesus Christ does. Belonging to a church doesn’t (according to Barna’s studies) transform your life (with e.g. same divorce rate for churched people and non-churched people in the US). Following Christ does.

So what does it mean to follow Christ? And what does Barna mean by the term Revolutionary? I’ll get back to that in a separate post.

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Read an interesting post on a US emerging church site. This post was written specifically for Lutherans (which is my heritage). The post talks about a survivor mentality that longs for the times when there were “more lutherans than people”. A church that is into survivor mentality won’t engage in mission, because it’s hoping for a turning back of the clock to a christendom culture (when society in general was christian and supported the church).

I see quite a lot of this in my work with the Oasis network (see below for a brief description of Oasis in Finland). The church in Finland hasn’t yet come to a point of facing reality, and facing the future. The reasons, I think, can be illustrated by describing three groups of people:

1. Some simply refuse to believe that society has changed. They close their eyes and act as if the church was still “in the center of the village”, in terms of the church’s relevance in society. “The church has always been central to our culture, so how could it possibly not be in the future. After all, we have God backing us up, and there is no salvation outside the church.”
2. Some lament the changes, but can’t see any hope in the postmodern changes in society. I think the post that I referred to above deals with this group of people. They are longing for “the olden days”, and praying to God for a turning back of the clock.
3. The people who want change. They are for the most part leaving the church. Most of these just stop attending any church thing. They risk becoming something George Barna calls “backsliders” in his book Revolution. Another group are people who are drawn to another church, or to some alternative way of expressing their faith in a community. So the people who want change are for the most part not in the church anymore.

So where is all of this going? Is Barna right (I’ll get back to his book in a separate post soon) when he says that the local church will become less and less relevant within the next 20 years? He most certainly will be, unless the churches start taking the needs of a postmodern society seriously. The clock won’t be turning back. The church will need to find a way to foster discipleship, community and absolute truth in ways very different to the established ones. Now would be a good time to start. It might soon be too late.

(The Oasis network is a movement within the Lutheran church of Finland. The vision of Oasis in Finland is to inspire churches to look at new ways of doing church, fresh expressions of church, in a postmodern world.)

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My brother-in-law wanted me to watch 2 DVDs with stand-up comedy. There are worse ways to spend an evening, I thought, so why not? The videos were “Dress to Kill” and “Glorious” by Eddie Izzard, a British stand-up comedian. If you haven’t seen anything of Eddie Izzard before, prepare for a shock. He’s not the conventional type of guy. He describes himself as an executive transvestite, whatever that means.

But he’s funny, extremely so, and in an intelligent type of way. Not below the belt, or insulting people, but bright. I liked him. Something of an intellectual court jester.

My favourite sketch is one where he tries to imagine the Church of England doing a “Spanish Inquisition”. Dress To Kill transcript from auntiemomo.com.

“Cake or death?” That’s a pretty easy question. Anyone could answer that.

— “Cake or death?”
— “Eh, cake please.”
— “Very well! Give him cake!”
— “Oh, thanks very much. It’s very nice.”
— “You! Cake or death?”
— “Uh, cake for me, too, please.”
— “Very well! Give him cake, too! We’re gonna run out of cake at this rate. You! Cake or death?”
— “Uh, death, please. No, cake! Cake! Cake, sorry. Sorry…”
— “You said death first, uh-uh, death first!”
— “Well, I meant cake!”
— “Oh, all right. You’re lucky I’m Church of England!” Cake or death?”
— “Uh, cake please.”
— “Well, we’re out of cake! We only had three bits and we didn’t expect such a rush. So what do you want?”
— “Well, so my choice is ‘or death’? I’ll have the chicken then, please.
— “Taste of human, sir. Would you like a white wine? There you go, thank you very much.”
— “ Thank you for flying Church of England, cake or death?”

Hilarious.

But as always, it got me thinking. Where do these comedians get their stuff from? Eddie Izzard makes fun of the church pretty rough (especially Church of England). But it’s not in a “facing ridicule in the footsteps of Jesus” -kind of way. It’s laughing at the church because it very often IS ridiculous. Totally out of touch with culture, hypocritical, and lame.

I want to change that.

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