Systems and structure

My friend from Scotland and I have had an ongoing conversation about how to do church. The one thing that we've tried to do is to hear what God is saying about the mission and purpose of the church that we attend. This has been an ongoing conversation, and now we are widening the conversation to a few others to help us know if we are hearing right. I think we are.

But, our greatest frustration is getting others to focus on what the church should be about. We find that the more we focus on the mission and purpose statements of the church, the more resistance to change we encounter.

Last night we had a particularly "spirited" conversation about the topic, and I sensed that as we parted company, we were both a little frustrated and feeling down about our seeming lack of progress.

The conversation continued this morning, and one thought came out of all this. We have been focusing on changing the system, and not the people. The passage that came to mind was Eph. 6:12:

12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

What this tells me is that we are trying to change the system, and not the people in the system. In other words, we are fighting a losing battle. As long the system is our focus, we are lost in a quagmire that will only drain us and spit us out like a seed from a piece of fruit.

The result is that we have to change our focus to not simply addressing the problem by writing a vision/mission/purpose statement for the system, we need to make our main focus the need to disciple, mentor, do spiritual formation, make disciples, etc., in order for change to happen. This will happen because we need to make the role of the Holy Spirit in each person's life of paramount importance.

So, structure is good, it is necessary, but that isn't what we are called to do. We are called to introduce people --not the system, to Christ, so that we all may experience abundant life.

What this makes me wonder is, how many times in the past I've looked directly into the sun and not seen it?

Structure and Design

Bob Robinson over at Vanguard Church has posted an interesting article on structure and design, part of his continuing exploration of Appreciative Inquiry. My response is that the process of AI often leads one back to issues of structure and design of the church.

It isn't always WHAT we are doing, but WHY we are doing it.

About the same time I also received the monthly newsletter from Gary Collins, which contained an article about decision paralysis. His focus as a coach is on working with people who have difficulty making decisions. Collins says that this issue is often one of the reasons why churches falter in their mission and ministry.

A lot of churches are good at giving you a lot of generic ministry. For example, sermons seem to be based on some nebulous, distant purpose or idea, but do not seem to have much to do with why the church is in town. There may be a lot of activity, but the attention span of the members of the church seems short lived, and the church has to reinvent itself in the Fall or Spring, and come up with another set of new programs

I find what Collins has to say interesting:

At times every coach works with people who have difficulty making decisions. This decision making process is hardest when a client, organization or business must choose between options that are equally attractive. ...as people face a variety of options they can become overloaded and tyrannized by “decision paralysis.”

We think we know what we need to do, but faced with the problem and possible alternatives, we slow to a crawl and either cannot make a decision or we develop a generic, one size fits all, type of ministry. It fails to have structure or design.

For Collins, if a church wants to have structure and design, then, one way to "...make tough decisions easier is to be guided by a clear, concise, easy-to-remember mission statement."

The mission statement helps us to make decisions about who to reach out to, what to teach, where to focus our energies, and what path is best for the church ministry.

As Collins says, "The best mission statements don’t just hang in a frame on the wall. They can be useful guides for making decisions and reducing decision paralysis."

Or to put it another way, how do you encourage people in a church to be all God wants them if you don't know what you want them to be? That's where a mission statement comes in to play.

The point of all this then is to say, AI can lead you to discover the various processes and strengths of a church, but if you don't know where you are going, one place is as good as another.

Structure

Another post in my ongoing struggle for clarity in understanding the function of the church.

Below I have listed some of the characteristics of the emerging church as seen through the eyes of Scot McKnight (see here and here for more).

1. Prophetic rhetoric. Christians believe the church needs to change, and they are beginning to live as if that change had already occurred.

2. Postmodernity cannot be reduced to the denial of truth. Instead, it is the collapse of inherited metanarratives (overarching explanations of life) like those of science or Marxism. Why have they collapsed? Because of the impossibility of getting outside their assumptions.

3. Praxis - what most characterizes the emerging church is the stream best called praxis—how the faith is lived out. At its core, the emerging movement is an attempt to fashion a new ecclesiology (doctrine of the church). Its distinctive emphases can be seen in its worship, its concern with orthopraxy, and its missional orientation.

Orthopraxy - is right living. The contention is that how a person lives is more important than what he or she believes.

Worship - Evangelicals sometimes forget that God cares about sacred space and ritual—he told Moses how to design the tabernacle and gave detailed directions to Solomon for building a majestic Temple.

Missional - by participating with God in the redemptive work of God in this world. In essence, it joins with the apostle Paul in saying that God has given us "the ministry of reconciliation" (2 Cor. 5:18).
Second, it seeks to become missional by participating in the community where God's redemptive work occurs. The church is the community through which God works and in which God manifests the credibility of the gospel.
Third, becoming missional means participating in the holistic redemptive work of God in this world. The Spirit groans, the creation groans, and we groan for the redemption of God (see Rom. 8:18-27).

4. Post-evangelical - The emerging movement is a protest against much of evangelicalism as currently practiced. It is post-evangelical in the way that neo-evangelicalism (in the 1950s) was post-fundamentalist. It would not be unfair to call it postmodern evangelicalism. This stream flows from the conviction that the church must always be reforming itself.

5. Political - A final stream flowing into the emerging lake is politics. Emerging churches are regularly told that the emerging movement is a latte-drinking, backpack-lugging, Birkenstock-wearing group of 21st-century, left-wing, hippie wannabes. Put directly, they are Democrats. And that spells "post" for conservative-evangelical-politics-as-usual.

One of the reasons for this post is that I downloaded Windows Live Writer, another Microsoft idea's on how to take over another aspect of the E-world. I was somewhat cynical about the program (as I am of almost anything Microsoft), but this program helped me write a blog and post it with out all the processes and aggravations that are found on Blogger. It does make the blogging process easier, so maybe something good can come out of Galilee after all.

Disclaimer: No bloggers were hurt in the writing of this blog.

Why Architecture Matters

Chapel at Ronchamp, France

I borrowed this title from a couple of articles that I found at the Clapham Institute website, which you can find here and here.

I think the articles are worth a read for several reasons, since architecture reflects the same philosophical and intellectual processes that produce the literature, music, cinema, and the rest of our contemporary culture.

There is also the persistence of modernism with its philosophical underpinnings in architecture, which result in buildings that exhibit an extreme abstraction, that pander to the fetish of technology, marking humanity as alienated, and portray a utopian view of society that sees prior wisdom and tradition as something to be discarded or swept away.

A question posed in the articles is "how, specifically, does architecture fulfill the creation mandate?" The author, David Greusel, states that Genesis gives us the mandate to cultivate and subdue the earth. He says that...

our cultivation of the earth includes not just planting, tending and harvesting crops, but also the creation of our shelter, our garments, and our various arts and sciences. So architecture, the design of space for human habitation, certainly fits this broad range of activities mandated by God.

Greusel says that God is a designer, and design is important to him. God placed Bezalel, a skilled craftsman in wood, metal and precious stones, in charge of the making of the tabernacle, and that he also taught other workers, and Oholiab to assist Bezalel in the design and construction of the tabernacle, its furniture and furnishings. This was after he filled them with his Spirit. To quote Greusel, "So God is not only concerned with our structures, and wit their specific details, but he has given the Holy Spirit to men to create artistic designs." As a result we need to pay attention to how architecture impacts and affects the way people live.

How do designers reflect God as a designer? "The work of the French architect Le Corbusier gives us a case in point. For example, the photo to the right is Le Corbusier's plan for Paris. The Île-de-la-Cité is in the lower right. Notice that the place where Nôtre-Dame sits is empty in his model. Le Corbusier wanted to demolish Nôtre-Dame.

In fact, Le Corbusier wanted to tear down all of Paris and replace it with his Bauhaus-School architecture. He was able to convince the French government to use his designs for public housing in Marseilles. This "stacked ice cube tray" design became the model France used for public housing in the suburbs. What was the impact of this architecture?

Along with torched cars and Molotov cocktails, France's grim housing projects have come to symbolize the discontent that erupted in recent riots across depressed, mostly immigrant neighborhoods (CBS News).

On a more spiritual note, Le Corbusier was asked to rebuild a chapel in the mountain village of Ronchamp, France (see photo above). Charles Downey writes that...

Le Corbusier, a staunch atheist, at first had refused to accept the commission to rebuild the chapel, destroyed during World War II. But a visit to the site and the promise of total artistic freedom in designing the building ultimately convinced him... It was controversial, since a petition against Le Corbusier's chapel went all the way to the Vatican. The work began four years later, with the architect hoping to calm the polemical battle.

In a region with a fairly traditional mindset, Le Corbusier's chapel was received rather poorly. But the residents of Ronchamp today understand that they have a treasure high up on their hill," says Stéphane Potelle, a historian specializing in Le Corbusier, whom he calls "an agnostic architect who was steeped in spirituality.

The key phrase here, of course, is that he was "steeped in spirituality." How does this relate to the issue of God as designer, or how one reflects the idea of God as designer in their work? Is the spirituality of the designer or architect the issue, or is the spirituality that the building design elicits from visitors the point of all this?

Does God give his spirit to men to create artistic designs? Is anything that is done as art have a spiritual quality? Is it assumed that they are done in God's name? Greusel also points out that architects honor God and imitate him by bringing order to their designs. Are we to assume that anything creative is spiritual, reflecting the glory of God? Or is it more that the creative process reflects the divine mandate to create, subdue, and cultivate the earth? Bezalel and Oholiab aside, I don't know too many architects who would own up to this, or theologians for that matter.

Greusel is right, most acts of architecture are substantial public acts, and they impact shared environments as well as the lives of thousands of people. We shape our buildings, but they shape us as well. How do we infuse a witness into our creativity without making it a Sunday morning worship service? There are many cathedrals and churches in Europe built with this thought in mind, and today most sit empty (including Sunday morning) except when the tours march by.

Read Greusel's articles and think about them. It's a good take on the role of architecture, but for me, how do we address this task? How does architecture have a biblical witness?

Life at 60

This cartoon used to be funny.

As you may be able to discern, this is the day of my 60th birthday.
There is supposed to be a party tonight with family, friends, and few others, which will be nice.

Quite frankly, other than a painfully sore back from picking up my grandson, I don't feel much that tells me I'm sixty.


Gerd Lüdemann has published a review of Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict's book, Jesus of Nazareth. I know Ratzinger more as a theologian than as a Pope, and although I am not a Roman Catholic, I have respect for his writing and thinking. I wish I could say the same for Lüdemann. He is a prime example of a good scholar who has enshrined Reason as the mirror and filter for his thinking, so much so that his scholarship ends up as a procrustean bed for religion, especially Christianity.

The reason I mention it is that the spring 2007 (34) issue of the Karl Barth Society Newsletter has a discussion on the theology of German theologian Wolf Krötke, who spoke about the "inarticulate, amorphous and diffusely vague" atheism that marks the situation of the church in eastern Germany, a kind of atheism that offers no arguments against God, for it is simply assumed that God is not there. This is the impression that I get when I read Lüdemann.


Anyway, having said all that, just as a way to celebrate another boundary marker, here is a song from my younger days that I enjoyed/enjoy, so take a look and listen.

Ants, Orcs and Al Qaeda: God’s Prophets?

Le Ron Shults' website has a blog about the topic of swarm theory, which I blogged on a while back. Take a look at it and tell me what you think. I haven't had much more than a cursory look, but it looks like we covered much of the same territory, although his blog does have a longer discussion. I have planned to return to this topic at some point, but not until I return home from the US in October.

Anyway, give it a read and let me know what you think.

Reincarnation?

The MSNBC website reports that the Aug. 20-27, 2007 issue of Newsweek has this article:

In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission.

You have to read it to believe it. I swear, I am not making this up.