#innovativechurch

[becominghuman]

Are Buildings a Burden? (Part 3)

I’ve made two strong suggestions so far. Here they are again, for you to consider and chew on:

1) For all the promise a building offers, it binds us to a past reality that no longer exists. In a way, building-centric ministry is an inversion of the truth that young people will lead us into the unknown future.

2) The most important couple of questions to ask are: (1) How do we invest our resources, not in the past, but in the emerging future—the future our young leaders see clearly and are already experiencing firsthand? and (2) How do we free up resources to invest in the right people . . . the people that will lead us forward?

The APEST leadership styles found in Ephesians 4 is helpful here. (Pause. Just to be clear, a prescribed “leadership style” cannot be found anywhere in scripture. And it’s disingenuous to suggest such. However, what we get in Ephesians is a description of different roles in [one of] the first century churches, which is gently suggestive that perhaps different people—then and now—fulfill those roles as faithful participants and leaders in the body.) Ephesians 4:11 does undergird my experience that no two leaders lead the same. Every leader expresses different gifts, and yet most leaders favor one of the five APEST “styles”.

As we consider equipping young leaders to lead us into the unknown future, it’s essential to understand how our current paradigm for ministry may likely conflict with their particular skill sets and capacities.

APEST stands for:

Apostolic Prophetic Evangelistic Shepherding Teaching

Apostles are “sent ones” and they are always on the move.

They translate the Gospel into new contexts and always are looking for and discovering fresh ways to manifest the Kingdom. They are bridge-builders, innovators, and launchers. They are driven by what’s around the next corner and always looking into the future. They are often identified by their creative energy and comfort with change.

Prophets hear from God.

Or, more accurately, prophets are sensitive to what God is sensitive to and call the community of believers to do the same. Biblically speaking, prophets speak truth to power because they are not afraid to question the status quo, challenge assumptions, side with the suffering, and publicize lament. They are often activists and challengers, leading with their hearts and passion.

Evangelists are expanders and recruiters.

They are effective communicators of the Gospel with those that wouldn’t find themselves sitting inside a church. They are motivated by getting outside the church and finding “lost sheep” to bring into the fold. In this way they recruit and grow the church. But they also expand the reach of a body because translating the Gospel in the “secular” world comes naturally to them.

Shepherds nurture a community.

They find value in stability and maturity. They are particularly gifted at prioritizing healthy, long term relationships, and steering the church toward an emphasis on discipleship. Shepherds appreciate systems that support the network of the relationships that make up the body and highlight the need for loving environment for safety and healing.

Teachers have a keen ability to both understand the faith and communicate it.

They help ground the body in the historical faith, scripture, and wisdom. Because they are skilled at sharing the Gospel and transferring doctrine, they emphasize the intellectual aspects of the faith. Teachers can challenge the community through confrontational teaching, but they are more drawn to revealing the truth through discovery and education.

As you can see, while there are some similarities in the context of young leaders, there are differences in their capacities and dispositions.

Church buildings and building-centric ministries struggle to inform and prepare all five types of young leaders.

Buildings are a long-term investment. The fruits of church building ownership are not immediate but cumulative over time. This is obvious in a financial sense, as a building’s value appreciates over time. But it’s a socio-psychological investment too. A church building grows in familiarity and sentimentality, becoming associated over time with fond memories, meaningful anecdotes, congregational growth, and shared experience. The building’s emotional value appreciates. Unfortunately, this carries very little importance for apostles. Apostles are looking forward not backward, ahead not behind. Value is in innovation and being ahead of the cultural curve. Buildings, especially ones tied to sentimentality, are the antithesis of apostolic ministry

Buildings are a safe investment. They are a sure-fire way to secure a community’s wealth. Arguably, they represent good stewardship. A prophet, however, doesn’t see buildings as security but as misplaced value, inhibited resources, and even unjust. Prophets are always asking, What would God do with these resources other than hoarding them as wealth security. Training prophets to help us be more faithful will require a radical redistribution of our investments.

Evangelists want to expand the reach of the church and penetrate the community. Traditionally churches have often viewed their building as a gift-of-space to the community and therefore an evangelistic tool. The problem here is that the evangelistic imaginations of churches is too limited. The church uses the building predominantly for Sunday gatherings, and consequently understands its function through that lens. Evangelism is often reduced to inviting the community to “come see how we use this building” which is effectively an invitation to Sunday morning worship.

Shepherds and teachers have historically thrived in space provided by a church building. There are classrooms for teaching, fellowship halls for conversations, offices for private conferencing, auditoriums for conventions and larger gathering opportunities, etc. With Sunday School attendance dropping, third space venues on the rise, and studies showing pastors spending more time in coffee shops and home offices than at the church, teaching and community building must also shift. Training shepherds and teachers must also be reimagined in new locations too.

Buildings are a burden because they rely on a conferencing paradigm. Because the building is no longer the primary place where communities gather (conference), leadership development for the future cannot successfully occur within a conferencing paradigm. Come, gather, and see is not a refrain that situates our congregations well in raising apostles, affirming prophets, encouraging evangelists, and equipping teachers and shepherds.

Perhaps a coordinating paradigm would be more effective. While conferencing assumes that the flow of energy and attention is always toward the church building on Sunday morning, coordinating assumes there are diverse contexts and locations necessary for training new leaders. All five types of leaders need different space and difference experiences to develop into the faithful leaders of tomorrow. The local church should consider itself the coordinator of those diverse contexts.

Coordinating doesn’t require a church building, but it does require space, facilities, and resource. What type of facilities are necessary? Where are they and how might they be used? Can the church’s buildings be converted or overhauled to suit the changing needs?

[becominghuman]

FOREST CHURCH? (Part 2)

Large, commercial berry farms are good at some things. Small, diversified market gardens are good at different things. In Part 1 of this reflection, I concluded that while large-scale farms and small-scale gardens are different models for church planting, we need more garden-like church plants. A lot of them . . . working together and focusing on the deep health of those that find sustenance in them. I want to push this thought experiment a little further.

From my desk, I see my market garden. I’m currently looking at a four-foot-tall row of snap peas. On the other side of those are seventy-five tomato plants, and on the other side of those are potatoes and lettuce.  All in all, I am growing over 40 varieties of vegetables. We work incredibly hard to manage our little slice of land.

Just past my garden is a thousand acre berry farm. I know it’s there because I drive by it everyday, but I can’t see it from where I sit. My view is obstructed by a forest. Maybe “forest” is overstated. It’s a strip of undeveloped land, and it serves as a hundred-foot-wide buffer of good ol’ native vegetation.

On the edge of the forest are an endless supply of blackberries for August picking. In the understory of the Maple, Douglas Fir, and Cottonwood trees are Lily of the Valley, which I just learned are edible and quite delicious. Next to the Lily is a patch of red clover, the flowers of which my girls love to add to their homemade pizzas. (No joke. You should try it. I recommend clover flowers that aren’t sprayed.)

I have put in a sum total of zero minutes cultivating the ground of that forest. No machine is required to harvest the berries. And the soil is spongey, rich, beaming with insect life and worms, and requires no fertilizer.

No tractors, no hoes and shovels, no compost, and no insecticides. Year in and year out, that little slice of forest produces the fattest blackberries I’ve ever laid my eyes (and mouth) on. It seems by all measurements, the forest between my garden and the commercial farm is the most successful “farm” of the three.  

Forget a “commercial berry farm church”. Heck with the "diversified, small-scale, vegetable garden church”. I want to plant a "forest church". (Really, the blackberries are that good.)

How do we plant churches like a forest? That’s an important question, but I believe it’s the wrong one. It assumes forests are planned? Or, running with the agricultural metaphor, a forest isn’t cultivated or planted at all. Part of their success is because they’ve been left alone. They are the antithesis to cultivation.  Forests succeed because it’s the way nature works, not because a “forest farmer” had a good idea.

The better question, in light of the forest succeeding at being extremely productive, requiring no work, and perennially contributing healthfully to its surroundings, is this: How do we create the conditions for which churches can thrive like a forest?

Well, I can wax on and on with the forest metaphor, but I’ll spare you and jump to where I think this line of thinking goes. We don’t plant churches so much as we create space for them to plant themselves, to spring up naturally because the environment around them promotes, resources, and nourishes their seeding.

We ought to do exactly what the forest does: Nothing!

A forest is not the result of human influence; it’s the absence of it. It’s not the product of human planning; it’s the product of nature’s planning. A forest is not strategic but it is opportunistic; it’s not planned but it does follow certain biological principles; it’s not cultivated but it is deeply nourished. A forest is always quietly, patiently putting in the seasonal “work” to build soil and plant seeds. Some sprout and thrive and contribute to the diversity and health of a forest, but most never gain any traction. And that’s okay. Under the right conditions, a thriving forest is perpetually regenerative. I’ve found that this is true with followers of Jesus, too. Cultivate health, inspire seasonal dreaming, and together they’ll be perpetually regenerative.

I think we’re entering a time when forest-like churches are needed more than ever, which, again, is not so much a planting strategy but the promotion of a particularly healthy environment where (God’s) nature takes root in the soil (of human hearts). If you’re thinking to yourself, “How do you control for that, facilitate that, and monitor that?”, you’re thinking too much like a farmer.

Now is not the time to cultivate measurable rows of crops. Now is the time to watch closely where the Spirit is moving, where young people are gathering, where energy is palatable, where change is underway, where passion, voice, and hope are coalescing . . . and cordon off those places and protect them, affirm them, and resource them.  It is from within that slurry of energy that seedlings with sprout and take root.  It’s there, in that holy mess that a forest is being planted.  

We sure do have a lot to learn by observing the natural landscape between our properties. 

[becominghuman]

Things I Learned from Young People about Faith . . . Because I Asked (Part 3)

In my last two reflections about young adults (YAs) and faith, I learned six preferences of the younger generation. Here they are:

YAs prefer dialogue over doctrine.

YAs prefer creative solutions over criticism.

YAs prefer community over church

YAs prefer inclusion over exclusion

YAs prefer people over polemics

YAs prefer reconciliation over resentment.

To be clear, these are not my preferences. This is what I learned about people younger than me because I was willing to sit for hours and listen. I’m merely a student trying to understand. And in that vein, I’m sharing what my teachers have taught me, which is why this project is more than “ethnography”. There’s a profound gift of generous insight in these six preferences.

Many of the YAs I interviewed were raised going to church. The Christian church has helped shape these preferences in the emerging adult generation. Do you see the gift? Like good teachers, the YAs are holding up a mirror to the students, should we choose to look.  

These preferences are the results of late 20th and early 21st century church youth and children’s ministries. We only have ourselves to thank.

And that begs the question: What do we observe when we look at these ministries (and ministry in general) in the mirror?

Doctrine simply means teaching. But now it can be tweeted and weaponized, reduced to sound bites and social media posts. YAs consider doctrine generally unhealthy. They crave dialogue, not more doctrine. They are not mutually exclusive in theory, but what we learn by looking in the mirror is that doctrine is code for “we have it figured out”. Ministry in the future must hold its doctrines at least loose enough for exploration, questions, and conversation. Even further, ministry ought to be the place that facilitates sincere exploration. No more staunch positions . . . at least those that are inhospitable to inquiry.

Enough with the aggression, the arguments, and defensiveness. God and the Bible (and especially the Spirit) don’t need your protection. Young adults have watched for decades the likes of Rob Bell being thrown under the bus as soon as they color outside the lines. Those seeking creative solutions to complex problems are the first to get ostracized. And there's a generation that doesn’t have an appetite for that kind of infighting. YAs long for creativity, collaboration, and new takes on complex problems we all face.

Church is not necessarily community. Sometimes it’s the most hostile (in really polite ways) place to be. YAs want community, connection, support networks, mentors, meaningful relationships, touch-points, check ins, and solidarity. But what they’ve seen is something quite different. For YAs, church is another word for the community that is integral to their religious imagination. There is no “going” to church. Church is authentic community, seeking truth and meaning and change. Which means, of course, church can be found outside of “church”. (And YAs are happy to go somewhere else to find it.)

Inclusion is moral. Inclusion is theological. Inclusion is biblical. When we look in the mirror, we often see exclusivity, shaming, and judgments. Here’s a really important point: exclusivity and shaming don’t have to look like finger-wagging and verbal assaults. Often times it’s subtle references, side points in a sermon, unintentional language in curriculum, dismissive postures toward alternative perspectives, name-calling, ignorant social media behavior, and selection of biased news sources. Accumulatively, though, what YAs have seen is a spirit of exclusivity. And they’ve had enough.  

Arguments are unnecessary. Not that they aren't important to have, but they are simply uninteresting to YAs. They grew up on a diet of seeing friends and family hurt by the church . . . and often it was packaged as an “argument for the truth”. An argument makes no room for listening. As for YAs, the barometer for healthy theology is listening to those it influences. Does it hurt? Then it can’t be right. Does it give life? Then we’re headed the right direction.  When we look in the mirror, we should probably see a long history of bad listening skills and a resistance to hearing about our shortcomings.

YAs are basically begging faith communities to lead in discovering and implementing solutions to the biggest problems in our world today. As it stands, they don’t believe the church has the chops to even engage substantively in the debates. And here’s why: Repairing the world in the ways we injured it is one of the most important ways YAs believe faith-based communities can make their way to the table of change. That requires, at the very least, confession on the part of faith communities and their leaders. While YAs crave social change, justice, and healing, the church has been afraid to even use these words, let alone facilitate the conversation about how to realize them.