is missional post-pastor?

At the heart of the 'missional movement' emerging in the modern church is the notion that ministry is worked by all believers. Thus, the challenge is to dilute hierarchy for the sake of empowering and equipping all who are part of the church for service. An immediate push-back to this idea is the lament of a loss of control and proper authority. I don't want to be one of those people. However, I also happen to think that this particular piece of becoming missional needs qualification - before it incorporates anti-intellectualism and relativistic-spirituality.

Recently I heard the missional approach discussed at a conference, where three leaders of this mind-set were presenting their perspectives on the church. One of them expressed his experience of letting-go of the control and oversight to allow the small-groups to be what they were. His story went on to talk about some of the surprise that he is often met with (that he would not have any proper oversight into the groups), to which he said it is not about the doctrine but about groups of people reading and living the Bible. This is done without curriculum, but with only Scripture and the Holy Spirit - just like the early church.

Let me first respond that we cannot make the simple claim that our ecclesiology (on any side of any issue) is best done 'just like' the early church. No matter what we do or what we say, we are not the early church and cannot simply copy those things that we know they did and expect them to be effective in our context.

It is true that the early church did not have professional clergy as in our modern sense. Yet, they clearly set aside the apostles for the sake of teaching and directing the believers. It is true that the early church only read Scripture (sans curriculum). Yet, they met together at least weekly to have the sacred texts read and explained. It is true that the early church did not have seminarians leading the charge. Yet, the average person had committed much of their Scripture committed to memory (a shockingly stark contrast to the modern believer).

(And, quite ironically, the early church did not have the New Testament - which is always included in modern attempts at doing church 'just like' the early church . . .)

Moderns typically think that the earliest believers had everything quite right and together, all without any bumps or challenges along the way. Such folks obviously haven't read all of Paul's letters - especially to that group in Corinth.

Are we living up to the standard of always being "prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have" if we are handing new believers a copy of the Bible and sending them out with the Holy Spirit? (It becomes a sort of Christianized version of James 2:16.) Or do we ignore that Philip had to explain the Isaiah scroll to the Ethiopian eunuch in order for that text to come alive in his life (Acts 8)?

Yes, it is exciting to consider the life of the Spirit exploding into the world. And I certainly rejoice with those in India who are experiencing more growth than Western evangelicalism can begin to comprehend. But we must not lose sight of the needs of our culture - which is the most biblically illiterate group of active Christians the world has ever seen - and the demands for making disciples of Jesus. It is different for us because we are not them. This is realism, not hubris, that says we are in our culture with our challenges rather than having the challenges of another culture.

Let me say that I believe that the role of pastor in our modern context is changing - some for the better, some for the worse. Such is the way of the world to see things change, and we ought not be bound to our churches or institutions more than we are devoted to the mission of God's kingdom. But we do not know what the pastoral role will look like until it makes the change. Much the like free-marketplace, it will not be mandated or special-ordered . . . the changes will come by way of supply-and-demand - pastor will morph into what the needs of the church and community become, just like the last thousand times the role has shifted. But I think it is a rather large mistake to think that the role will simply come to an abrupt end.

I have signed off to this missional movement. I'm a fan. But it will need its tempering if it is to work. Inflexible thought and theology always dies in irrelevance.

the great divorce 1

There has been a lot of recent discussion about heaven and hell, with various voices making every attempt to connect their position to history - either original meaning or great thinkers through history (usually both). Interestingly, one of the thinkers that is being used as a plumb line is C. S. Lewis - most notably, The Great Divorce (1945). I have come to realize that more people have read about CSL than have actually ready CSL (this is similar to the infinitely worse decision to reading about the Bible than actually reading Scripture itself).

In my undergraduate I took a course on the life and thought of C. S. Lewis. I confess that I did not understand everything I read at that time. Many years later I still do not consider myself in any sense an expert on his theology or ecclesiology, but I am willing to evaluate the words as they lie on the page and let the author speak for himself. At least then we can begin to see if Lewis' relevance is still powerfully among us.

For those unfamiliar with The Great Divorce, it is a work of fantasy in which the first-person narrator describes a journey in which he experiences heaven and hell. Conceptually, it is not unlike Dante's Divine Comedy or Milton's Paradise Lost. The basic plot is the pilgrimage of an individual in the after-life as he takes a bus ride from "grey town" to a strange "paradise" where a decision to move forward or return is required. The theology of the book is conveyed primarily through discussions and characterization, all to reveal Lewis' approach to heaven and hell.

1.

The story begins with the narrator standing in line at a bus queue, in the rain and at twilight. He recalls that he has wandered the dirty streets always in the rain and always at the point of sundown, before the "cheeriness" of lights comes into the dark. This is "grey town," which exists at the end of a day, waiting for the night to come upon it fully. The other people who are in line are rude, obnoxious and self-centered, constantly fighting over something (they all fight to get on the bus, even though it is only half-full when the do). It is a dull existence, but one which the citizens seem to prefer over any other possibility. As the bus begins to pull away the narrator notices that they have left the ground.

2.

From an arial perspective "grey town" could be seen as a great expanse of (a sort of) civilization. It is explained to the narrator that the quarrelsome nature of "grey town" leaves people to move further from each other, producing empty streets and expanding the parameters of the town (those who have been there longer continue to move further and further away). One of the hallmarks of this place is that an individual does not need to live with any other, so there is no potential of quarreling less. It is at this point that a great secret first begins to be discovered - that night is actually coming upon the twilight of "grey town."

3.

The bus comes to a rest on a hill, where the brightness and freshness of springtime is almost overcoming of the people, who all fight to disembark the bus. At this point the narrator discovers that the fellow passengers are simply ghosts, "man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air." Nothing in that environment was disturbed by their presence - the grass did not bend, the flowers were unmovable, leaves were to heavy for them to disturb. The narrator also notices that he himself is one of these ghosts, just as one woman went scurrying to the bus never to emerge again. In the distance there is another town, and over the hill a group of solid and bright people came to meet the ghosts.

imitators of his patience

"Let us then continually persevere in our hope, and the earnest of our righteousness, which is Jesus Christ, 'who bore our sins in his own body on the tree,' 'who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth,' but endured all things for us, that we might live in him. Let us then be imitators of his patience; and if we suffer for his name's sake, let us glorify him. For he has set us this example in himself, and we have believed that such is the case." (The Epistle of Polycarp 8:1-8)

We fill our spiritual lives with all sorts of talk, mostly about how we should be more like Jesus. Typically this includes various items like praying more, giving more, not having bad thoughts, etc. I wonder how much of our spiritual growth follows the instruction of Polycarp here. He is calling believers to be imitators of God's patience, enduring suffering for his glory and following the example of Christ.

How is our kingdom-work affected by our impatience? If we are unwilling to trust in the providence of God's time, we will most certainly fail in living the very nature of the kingdom that of which we are a part. That is to say, failure to wait upon the Lord for strength is to rely on one's own strength which, by definition, is worthless. True faith begins with the willingness to wait upon the Lord - a stance which is not characterized as passive, but which operates in the context of God's eternal presence.

Scripture beckons us to wait upon the Lord for strength, for salvation, for life. It is the path to an uplifting from the mire of corruption, sin and earth. And here, the early Christian writer believes that this patience - this waiting upon the Lord - is imitation of God himself. Perhaps we have missed one of the fundamental aspects of the quiet, insomuch as it brings our noisy fallenness closer to the calm of the divine presence in order that we might connect with him.

Still, I remember the apostle: "The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). That reads a bit differently now.

carded and discarded

I'm getting tired of trying to process the notion that God wants to use us. It's as though we are envisioning our lives as something that are valuable only to the point that we have accomplished some piece of God's will, and then we are discarded so that the next part of God's will can happen. So, I think that it simultaneously gives us too high a view of our own significance, and too low a view of the amount of love God has for each of us.

Rich Mullins once said, ". . . and eventually we'll all be dead, and it will probably matter very little any of us actually lived - except to God who made us."

The notion that we 'do ministry' is a way of segmenting our lives so that we can be a disciple at certain points, but not completely. If our entire existence matters mostly (at some point only) to God, then we must pause to ask what he wants from us. And if he made us who we are, then the way to bring him pleasure and glory, as well as discover the fulfillment of all of the passion he has put within us, is to become who we truly are.

It appears that much of church is defined with one of two extremes on this. We either make the experience of discipleship so 'non-threatening' that it matters very little if we follow Jesus or not, or else we make it so that discipleship is framed as a complete break with any personal distinction of the individual at all. There seems to be a life more abundant that is found between these two poles, where passion and purpose are discovered around the uniqueness of the person.

N. T. Wright said of the transformation of character, "This revolutionary vision of virtue thus enables us to shift attention quite drastically away from the idea that Christian behavior in the world is basically about 'good works' in the sense of good moral living, keeping the rules, and so on, and toward the idea that Christian behavior is basically about 'good works' in the sense of doing things which bring God's wisdom and glory to birth in our world. (After You Believe, 71, emphasis in original).

Now that I have set up that context, let me say that I do in fact think that God does use our lives to bring about his purposes and advance his kingdom in the world. My point here is simply that we become too focused on that narrow understanding of things, assuming that we are not spiritually successful aside from some specific accomplishments in our lives. But I happen to believe that God loves us more than our dos and don'ts - much more than we love ourselves. And he is looking for a people who will live as he made them, on the higher plane of his kingdom.

I think that is why he set eternity in the human heart (Ecc. 3:11), bestows his Spirit so that we might see visions and dream dreams (Joel 2:28), and shows us himself that we might be filled with laughter (Ps. 126:2).

I think that Scot McKnight has it here as well, "Forget 'church' and forget 'Sunday morning service' and forget 'Christians' and forget church history's major mistakes, and for right now just connect these terms: Jesus and dream and your One.Life" (One.Life, 22, emphasis in original).

Thus, it is about being who we are in the place that we are . . . all to the glory of God and the renewal of heaven and earth. And then to follow the desires of our hearts, he begins to strip away our phony image of ourselves and gives us a life more abundant. ". . . and if God wants you to go to Egypt, he will provide eleven jealous brothers and they will sell you into slavery" (Rich).