Category Archives: Church

Can we imagine a Mainline monasticism?

A couple of questions have bugged me for a while now: If we achieve the goal of everyone living a missional life then what is the purpose of the church as an institution? If the point is to work with God so that everyone is exhibiting the Kingdom of Heaven, then what do we do when that is the case?

My tradition is pretty clear that we understand the Church to be the “provisional demonstration of what God intends for humanity.” In other words: we are God’s demonstration classroom, the place people should be able to look and think, “Ah, that’s the way we should be doing this thing called life.”

And yet, we’re not really demonstrating anything. What we’re basically doing is fighting with each other over who’s got the right idea of how we can save all those darn heathens. It’s not a terribly productive strategy.

It is a strategy, however, is born from a belief that the Church is merely a more holy Social Service Organization. Many (if not most) of us believe that Church is little more than a glorified Rotary Club: We show up once a week, pay our dues, and do some service projects. I think we need to look beyond this. Rotary is great, but it’s not what the Church is called to be, I don’t think.

There is something exciting to me about the Church not being a Social Service Organization, but an intentional community of people sharing a similar space and working to rehearse life the way they beieve God intends it. But this would mean giving up the need to own every damn thing we want and be in control of everything. It would mean giving into collaboration and community in ways we have not yet been comfortable.

Among other things, this would change who we think the pastor is (not CEO, but Community Architect) and what we understand evangelism to be (not coercion…i mean conversion, but inviting them to be functional part of a community in order to possible start another one).

This is a place where I think the New Monastics have something to teach us. Can we learn it? What would a Mainline incarnational monasticism look like?

Creating space for good ideas

In the March issue of Wired, Jonah Lehrer recounts that statistician David Banks once wrote a paper on what he called the “problem of excess genius.”

Banks noted that the people who generate new ideas that radically change the world are not scattered evenly across time and space, but are clumped together in roughly the same times and places. Between 440 and 380 BCE, Athens produced Plato, Socrates, Herodotus, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Aristophanes. In Florance, between 1440 and 1490 CE, we were treated to Michelangelo, da Vinci, Botticelli, and Donatello.

Lehrer contends that, while this clumping of genius is a mystery, it’s not a total mystery. He says that the result of a flourishing in creative ideas is actually the result of the presence of “meta-ideas”: ideas that make is possible for other ideas to be born and spread.

As I travel around the country speaking to various groups, one thing I like to say is that there are a lot of people out there with good ideas about where the church can go. The problem is that there aren’t enough of those ideas. Having recently transitioned from “front line” ministry in a congregation to a level of my denomination that seeks to support these front line folks, this notion of meta-ideas is very important to me.

First, Lehrer raises the importance of “human mixing.” As he writes

Research indicates that in the overall population, a 1 percent increase in the number of immigrants with college degrees leads to a 9 to 18 percent rise in patent production. Open immigration policies are a feature, not a bug.

That is a serious stat, and it makes me think about my Presbyterian Church where we are around 95% white. If only a 1% increase in input changes the output by 9-18% we are stupid for not finding ways to encourage/invited/bribe persons who are not-Anglo to join our ranks.

As I wrote in Open Source Church, “diversity” is the number one criteria we should seek to fulfill if we are to become a wise crowd. Our denominations must develop and implement a comprehensive strategy for increasing the number of non-white persons in our ranks and particularly in our leadership.

The second meta-idea Lehrer notes is that each of the periods where geniuses were clumped were cultures who pioneered new forms of teaching and learning. Florence developed the master-apprentice model. Elizabethan England concentrated on educating its middle class, which resulted in a glover’s son being able to write Romeo and Juliet.

If we are going to produce a culture where genius can thrive we have to take seriously that our forms of theological education must be revolutionized. We have to take seriously the “witness” of the Khan Academy and other models of online education.

I know, I know: you don’t think that community and pastoral identity can be formed online. I challenge you to say that to all of us on Twitter who were devastated when Gideon committed suicide, or who have walked with each other through death of loved ones, death of marriages, and death of dreams.

Lastly, genius arises in cultures where there are institutions that encourage risk taking. Historically this meta-idea has taken the form of a protected patronage: Shakespeare got it; the Medicis gave it. Who will be the patrons of today? How will we create this culture of risk taking?

 

I would like to be a part of a church that has an excess of genius, wouldn’t you? That would be the classic “good problem to have.” So, I ask, what are the steps we take to get there?

You know that great idea you have for a church? It’s probably not so great…

…but it’s okay. There’s a way around that.

Last fall, I read a great book on startups called The Lean Startup by Eric Reis. I know, I know – you have problems with the mash up of business talk and church talk. I do, too. The great thing is that this book hates “business talk” as well.

Everything Reis writes is based on the idea that traditional business practices are good for traditional businesses, but that start ups are completely different beasts. Much of what he offers is golden, but here is the most golden thing:

The #1 job of a startup is to learn.

Here’s what Reis has to say on theleanstartup.com:

Too many startups begin with an idea for a product that they think people want. They then spend months, sometimes years, perfecting that product without ever showing the product, even in a very rudimentary form, to the prospective customer. When they fail to reach broad uptake from customers, it is often because they never spoke to prospective customers and determined whether or not the product was interesting. When customers ultimately communicate, through their indifference, that they don’t care about the idea, the startup fails.

I think this has HUGE implications for starting new churches because it is the difference between emphasizing the product and the people.

About a year and a half into my ministry at the church I was serving, I tried to reframe the way our congregation did missions work. Influenced by my time at Covenant Community Church in Louisville and the work of The Church of the Savior in Washington, DC, I was convinced that the best way to help persons engage in service to the world was to help them arrange themselves in to smaller “intentional communities.”

To that end, I embarked on a months long planning and implementation process to help persons discern their gifts and the needs of the world, to train them to lead communities, etc. When all was said and done no one took advantage of the training I had given them by starting a community.

The hard lesson I learned was that the people I was serving wanted to serve God’s world, but they didn’t want to do it through these intentional communities.

The Lean Startup method suggests that every entrepreneur begin with a “minimum viable product” (MVP). The MVP is a bare bones, rudimentary version of the product that allows that startup to learn whether they have a sustainable model on their hands. By placing the MVP into the hands of a continuous series of customers, they will learn what does and does not work or whether they are even in the right market sector at all.

As I wrote in Open Source Church, I happen to think that the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the point of the church is to actualize freedom. Given this, what is the church version of the MVP?

Top 5 things I’ve learned from 6 months of being nobody’s pastor

About six months ago, I left the congregation I had been serving to begin service to a regional level of my denomination. This is the first time in almost 10 years that I’ve not actively served a local congregation (in some capacity) on a regular basis, and a few things have brought themselves to my attention.

I’m a firm believer in the Pareto Principle. Most of us know it as the “80-20 Rule”, and it states that 80% of the output is the result of 20% of input. I look at everything this way, constantly trying to pare down the things I’m doing to what is actually effective and beneficial.

Naturally, attending other churches with the kind of insider knowledge I have means that (for a while) I’m looking at what can be improved upon and what is working well. For six months I have been given a perspective on congregational life that few pastors get. And so, in hopes that it will be helpful, here are the Top 5 things I’ve learned about church in the last six months:

  1. Preaching matters. A lot. I’m not saying you’ve got to be Anna Carter Florence or anything, but if you half ass the sermon, shame on you. This is your number one job.
  2. If the folks you serve don’t know how to be hospitable, it’s over. And the bigger you are, the harder it is. Think about it like the way you want a server at a restaurant to behave: attentive to what you need and willing to get it, but not too chatty that they smother you. It’s a fine line and it’s hard to find, but that’s no excuse.
  3. Casual or informal worship is fine. Unintentional and watered down is not. Plus, anything that smacks of a performance? Boo.
  4. All things to all people just doesn’t work. There are a gazillion churches out there. Not everyone is gonna love the kind of stuff yours offers and that’s okay. Do what you do, do it well, and make it easy for folks to get involved. This is particularly applicable to Christian Education programs. Multiple offerings is fine, but come on – Some of us are ridiculous.
  5. Every congregation needs a mission project to rally around. Of course, given my belief in open source methodology, congregations should have a culture of experimentation and permission, but a lot of people are not “starters” and need something to latch onto.

These, in my opinion, are the 20%. They are not earth shattering, but in this changing landscape of whatever church is and is becoming I have to admit that I was surprised by a couple of these.