12 Witnesses

[Please note:  I know this article is even longer than its predecessor.  If you don't want to read it all, I completely understand, but if you would skip to the concluding 1/3 of the article, you will find the overall point laid out there.  Obviously, the groundwork is important in my mind, but having become a skimmer of blogs I understand that you may not care to go that far.  If you are a member of Skelly Drive Baptist Church, particularly if you are in leadership or on a Search Committee, please try to wade through it all.  Thanks!]

I’ve decided to work through some more prolegomena* before running through the structural descriptions and illustrations.  I think this background will help with the overall picture as we progress.

Today, the subject is culture.  I think the word “culture” is often problematic because because it is accurately used in such divergent ways.  I hear and read traditionalists often use the word to refer to what the Apostle John called “the world” when he wrote:

15 Do not love the world or the things that belong to the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. Because everything that belongs to the world— 16 the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride in one’s lifestyle—is not from the Father, but is from the world. 17 And the world with its lust is passing away, but the one who does God’s will remains forever.   - 1 John 2:15-17 (HCSB)

Which is different from the way he uses it earlier in the chapter:

1 My little children, I am writing you these things so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ the righteous One. 2 He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for those of the whole world.    - 1 John 2:1-2 (HCSB)

Again, the use of the word “culture” in this way is not “wrong,” but it is a limited scope of the use that I will make of it.  So let me explain what culture is for our discussion.

I confess that the term was mostly abstract to me until this year.  When talking about culture, I thought of traditions and ways of doing things that are different from me.  Which is correct, but shallow.  For the greater part, I viewed culture as a matter of perspective.  You just see things a little differently than I do.  Also correct.  Kind of.

Perspective is actually more a result of culture, rather than the essence of culture.  You see things the way you do as a result of the culture into which you are immersed.  It is not the culture itself.

I didn’t really understand culture until February of this year.  In fact, unless you have had a similar experience, my description of this transformational moment may fail to help you grasp what I finally caught standing on the street in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Hanoi, like many places around the world, has a unique traffic … er … situation.  You see, the traffic in Hanoi has very little regulation.  The entirety of the city, at a population of 6.2 million (including outlying metro areas after an official merger in just a couple of weeks, which will double the official city population, according to wikipedia), has only a handful of stoplights, which have only recently been installed and to which only the majority of the population adheres, most of whom do so from the back of a scooter.  In other words, stoplights in Hanoi are just a suggestion to many, when they exist at all.

The entire flow of traffic is governed by a chaos theory that seems also to govern the flight of flocks of birds and schools of small fish that flow and turn together as both individuals and collective.  Well, it might help you to better see it in action, so here is a little YouTube video to help you get a sense of it.

I’ll follow this up with a couple of pictures I’ve produced here before of the exact same intersection:

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Now I know that you are already thinking about my last post concerning the individual and are speculating about how I am going to say that the Missional Church needs to act in a similar fashion with the individuals in fluid motion inside the whole - all moving together to accomplish the goal.  Great thinking!

But, no.

The revelatory experience as I observed the traffic in Hanoi was about the saturating nature of culture within society.  How do you learn to drive in such an environment?  You are immersed in it.  Everyone teaches you through trial and error (hopefully not critical error) and you learn.

Here’s the big point:  Culture is something that everyone in the society agrees upon as commonly accepted behavior.  You learn it as you go because everyone in the entire society teaches it to you.  No matter where you are, if you break the boundaries of what is commonly accepted, you will be corrected by those around you.  That correction may be verbal, hostile, kind, a gesture or something else.  It may come from relative, friend or stranger.  Nevertheless, everyone in society holds everyone else accountable for their cultural standards.

The results of which are key.

It is incredibly difficult, once something is ingrained in a culture, to remove it.  Look at tobacco in America.  There has never been such a targeted campaign to rid a culture of anything that has been sustained and fueled like the campaign to rid America of tobacco.  You could count prohibition, but I would argue that the majority of influential society was not actually on board with that campaign like the support the anti-tobacco campaign has.

Nevertheless, tobacco still survives the crippling lawsuits and picks up new converts daily.

Another result of the saturation of culture, is that churches have a culture of their own, and that culture has some specific elements to the local church, but also participates in concentric and overlapping circles of culture that radiate out through the local context, denominational influences and even the churched society of America inclusive of all denominations over the last 50, 100, 350 years.  As a matter of fact, most of the “decline of the American culture” emails, rants, sermons… even songs, that I pick up on are really decrying the fact that American culture doesn’t reflect the church culture the way it once did.  It is not that American culture is dead.  We still have national values.  Those values just don’t reflect the values of the people in church.

For evidence of this, look at the recent move toward conservationism and the typical response of the evangelical community.  America values “eco-friendly” lifestyles, but the church doesn’t.  In broad terms, anyway.  Read this article on the Eco-Justice Blog for a brief example.

Now, as it relates to Missional and Institutional Church structures, there are a few consequences of church culture.  Of course, it means that the church has to work to understand the culture it is trying to reach - Breaking the Missional Code - so to speak.  That’s the easy part.  Or, at least, the point most obvious to those interested in Missionality.

The more difficult part is deciphering your own church culture, or at even getting the church to realize that it has its own culture.

Because culture is saturation, most people assume that the way they think is “normal.”  It is, for their context, but what they don’t realize is that they are a part of a commonly agreed upon system of values that has them convinced that those values are “RIGHT” and violation of those values is “WRONG.”

For those saturated in the church culture, it means that certain songs, worship styles, modes of dress, lingo and even the evaluation of staff (”working” in the office during office hours, as opposed to being in the community, for instance) becomes something that is “right” because it is what they have always seen and done.  This is most humorously and sadly seen in the comment, “We’ve never done it that way before…” in response to a desire to make a change in any process of the church.

For the individuals and the church as a whole to accept the fact that the things that they have learned from each other and held as valuable are not necessarily right but just what they are used to doing is probably the most significant yet overlooked step in getting a church and its individuals mobilized in the community.

The failure to identify church culture is a de-motivator as well as a barrier to missional engagement.  It sucks away motivation because individuals look at those outside the church as living “wrongly” and their solution is to simply tell them that they need to get into the church and live “rightly.”  This mires the church and the individual into an attractional mode, at best, and can trend to move the church and individual into a judgmental attitude.  This creates an almost impenetrable barrier between the church and its internal culture and the unchurched and their culture, with very little national or local culture to act as a common bond between them and no motivation by either to break through that barrier.

Thus, the best, first thing that a church can do is identify and then evaluate its own internal culture and see what things might need to be excised from itself.  As I mentioned with the tobacco issue in America, simply identifying the ingrained value as needing to be gone is not enough.  It takes time, teaching and will sometimes take the absence of those unwilling to see beyond their raising before the culture becomes able to embrace a new system of values.  We see this taking place in the Exodus as the adults of Israel, despite the plagues, despite the pillar of smoke/fire (glory of God’s personal presence), the protection against the armies of Egypt by the separation of the two by the pillar/presence of God still complained that they would rather be slaves.  After the Red Sea and the destruction of the Egyptian armies, they still refused to take the promised land even with God as their head, and so, ultimately, God had to allow those who were saturated with the slave culture to die off and raise up a generation who were saturated with a culture that depended daily on Him for their very provision, via manna, quail, water, etc.

Sadly, churches in transition may well have to experience similar absence of those who can not introspectively evaluate their own church culture.

Still, the first major undertaking is personal self evaluation and the comparison of that which is demanded of God to that which is normative for us as dictated by that in which we were raised.

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*prolegomena - For Vicki and Tiffany, this word means “stuff you have to talk about so that the stuff you are going to talk about later makes sense.”  By defining the individual previously and culture now, it will be easier to understand the conversation about transitioning between structures later.

Who knew Systematic Theology would pay off?

I know, dear reader, that I have been woefully negligent in my blogging.  Even after I promised that I would return with passion loaded, I found myself awake at midnight on Sunday evening and not having written for the day or week ahead.  At all.

It was not a matter of not caring, either.  Rather, I found myself consumed by responsibilities in ministry, family and even simply personal.  Yet, I had one of the most profound weeks last week, in spite of its demands.

Though it is all still in process, I think I have finally adopted a Missional philosophy that I can call my own.  It’s two, four, ten and thirty years in the making, depending on your starting point of choice.  Nevertheless, it has finally gelled.

What’s more, I think that I am mostly unique in my thinking.  A long conversation, Providentially arranged, helped me to realize that my core values and theories of efficiency are moderately distinct from many other leaders in the Missional movement, though similar to a minority.

Well, more on that later in the series.

Right now I simply want to lay the foundation of the entire thought of reformatting the church structure:  The Individual.

The Missional Church is, fascinatingly, made up of missional individuals.  I know.  Shocker.

Suffice it to say that the thing that sets the Missional Church apart has to be the goal of mobilizing the individual to engage people living apart from God.

Then to address structure, the Missional church has to be one that facilitates the efficiency of individual mobilization.

The rest of the series is intended to discuss the structural details, so I will not start that here.  I will simply say that the primary issue of the shift between what I call the “Institutional Church” structure and the Missional Church structure is the removal of barriers that inhibit the personal engagement of the individual.  Ok.  More on that later.

Speaking to the issue of motivation, the Institutional church - that is the church that runs everything through the structure of the Church, from evangelism to discipleship to fellowships to worship to ministry opportunities - de-motivates its congregants with the provision of, and reliance on, the structure of the church.  The “outreach” is done (poorly) by a handful of people on a given night of the week by knocking on doors (which is unwelcome in today’s American culture) and going through a scripted presentation of the Gospel - if the people will let them in.  This creates, in the minds of everyone else, that the “outreach” is taken care of and they don’t have to particpate or even worry about it.

For the Missional church, the primary motivator for individual engagement is teaching God’s Word, which is full of the Missio Dei - the sending of God, or the Mission of God.  As Milfred Minitrea said, the church doesn’t have a mission.  It’s God’s Mission.  To make it ours is to make it small.

The combination of teaching and opportunity will, prayerfully, create engagement.  When opportunity is taken by the individual, when they participate in God’s Mission of redemption toward His creation, the experience becomes its own fuel.  How many times have you seen someone share Christ for the first time and become absolutely addicted to the experience?  How many “Mission Trips” have you seen revolutionize the lives of the teenagers who are its participants?

So I had been teaching for a while that we were all “Missionaries.”  Then it hit me one day after returning from Vietnam.  We’ve got to quit using the word, “Missionary.”   I had been with a former IMB Missionary, now heading up Northwood Church’s NGO:  Glocal Ventures, Inc.   We had discussed how, through the years, we had been taught that Missionaries were the top tier of holy servants of God.  Pastors were next, followed by secondary staff and then the deacons, Sunday School teachers, Nursery workers and various and sundry other servants in some miscellaneous hodge podge of lesser Christians.  Also, the culture there prohibited us proclaiming the “M” word as it was a barrier to us engaging those living there.

I began to think that the same word was a barrier to us here - both for those in the church (because we have “them” on an unrealistic pedestal) as well as those out of it (because of its “churchified” lingo).

So, one day I announced that we weren’t going to call ourselves “Missionaries” any more, even though I had been saying that we would for about a year.  Rather, I said, we will now call ourselves “servant messengers.”  The sermon, as you might surmize, was on the value of serving people as a door to personal engagement.

Afterward, one of our senior adult ladies came up to me and said, “You know, Pastor, you kept saying that we should all consider ourselves as missionaries, and I just couldn’t picture myself like that.  But then today you said that we were servant messengers and I thought, ‘Now I can do that!’”

I wish I could tell you all of the stories of people who are beginning to engage the world around them.  I’ve already made this article longer than it should be, so I won’t.  Let me just say that the reason I couldn’t sleep is because I got a call at 9:10 pm tonight telling me of how one of our Youth Workers saw some Hispanic kids playing soccer on our church grounds tonight and, prompted by the Holy Spirit, she walked over and started talking to them, shaped the conversation toward God and shared the Gospel.  She also invited them to participate in some of our stuff and told them that they were welcome any time.  Of course, we are not stopping there in God’s pursuit of them, but the point is she saw the oppotunity and, following the Holy Spirit, she let God use her in His Mission.

Structurally speaking, we have not really made any changes yet.  Two years in, and we are just getting started, but at least in theory, I think I understand where we are going.  As I said before, more on that later.  Nevertheless, the motivation is taking root and God is on the move.

How many times have I heard Ed Stetzer and others say that we need to exegete culture? Many, I assure you. Let me also assure you that I am not against exegeting culture. I’m for it.

But how far? How much culture can we truly decipher before we are spending all of our time trying to figure out minutiae? What about culture that moves quickly? Too much time studying a trend and it is out of style before you can apply anything relevant.

Best example: When I moved from rural Kentucky to Charlotte, NC (still in Youth Ministry) I went up to some of my older guys and said, “What up, dog?” They burst out laughing and one of them literally took me by the shoulders and said: “Never again. Ok? Never again.”

Relevant in Kentucky, way past relevant in Charlotte. A little trend that I had failed to grasp well had done much to convince my teenagers that, while I loved them, I knew little of their world.

And then there is the whole postmodern aspect to trends. What they mean to you, what they were originally intended to mean, is not what they mean to many who are participants in them.

I remember when the Lance Armstrong LiveStrong yellow armbands came out. I had a teenaged girl in my Youth Group who showed up one Wednesday night wearing one. Thinking that I would find a point of relationship with her, since my family has been rife with cancer, I approached her and asked who she knew that struggled with cancer.

Blink. Blink. Dumbfounded look.

“The LiveStrong bracelet?”

More blinking.

*sigh*

Foiled again.

So at what level and to what degree do you pay attention to trends? Enough, but not too much?

Here’s a quote from the Washington Post Article:

The study detailed Americans’ deep and broad religiosity, finding that 92 percent believe in God or a universal spirit — including one in five of those who call themselves atheists. More than half of Americans polled pray at least once a day.

This is what comes when attending church becomes the culture instead of the Church shaping the culture via the proclamation of the Gospel which results in the salvation and then sanctification of the lost.

Read the whole thing here: Most Americans Believe in Higher Power, Poll Finds

If you are looking for info on the SBC this week, I am sorry that I will not providing the blow by blow for you as I have the last two years.

On the other hand, if you want some long term thinking about the SBC, I can’t recommend any higher to you this post by my friend, Marty Duren:

ie:missional » Dallas Morning News on Denominational Decline

We’re having VBS this week, and we’re off to Falls Creek for camp next week.  Yea!

Give up your preconceived ideas. These guys are techy enough to eliminate their boards from this video. It’s amazing.

What else might you not know about skaters?

Did you know that more kids skateboard than every other sport in the US?

From the Skit Guys:

Something crossed my mind the other day and I just couldn’t let it go. In a discussion over a year ago on Missional Cooperation, a Seminary Student included this thought in a comment left on my blog:

“by giving to the cp, they are already giving to ‘their mission dollars to missions they themselves are doing.’”

Apr 10th, 2007 at 8:03 am

I really could not forget that statement and the mindset it represents. Finally, I would just like to put it to be by saying a hearty:

“NUH UHHHH!”

Participation in the Cooperative Program is not doing missions. It is paying someone else to do missions. I’m not saying supporting missionaries that live in a context of lost people is a bad thing. Quite the contrary, I think we should be giving much more to the field.

However, sending money is not the same as personal engagement. We need to be a church that is engaging people in Tulsa, North America and around the world, as described in Acts 1:8. Us. Our church.

The CP has done amazing things, but one of the negative consequences is that our people have become convinced that they do not need to actually get up and do something but by sending some money to the CP, they’ve done missions. and. that. is. a. lie.

Pardon the interruption of the Better Blogging series, but I need some discussion here.

My wife got into a spiritual conversation with some co-workers and one asked this question: “Why didn’t Jesus write the New Testament?” Her co-worker said that it would have been easier for him to trust the Bible’s accuracy and weight if he knew that Christ had written the New Testament, rather than having it left to people to remember what He said and record it.

Bonnie’s response, off the top of her head, was that the people didn’t understand Jesus and His mission until after the resurrection, which gave validity to the claim of Godhood. Before that, His writings might not have had the weight that even the Apostle’s writings had after the the resurrection.

I thought that was not bad.

Another co-worker speculated that He might not have been able to write, as the son of a carpenter.

I told Bonnie when she related the story to me that I thought that the Bible would lead us to believe that He was educated, unlike the delineation for Peter and John in Acts 4.

My simple answer is that we don’t know “why” God does anything, but that answer doesn’t always satisfy the curiosity of those seeking. In fact, we can never fully satisfy a seeker, but the Holy Spirit must convict and draw them to the conclusion.

Still, I think this is a great discussion. So how would you answer this question from an earnest seeker of truth?

Sympathetic to All

Jargon-less Communication

Real Concern for the World (not just the lostness of the “World” - e.g. John 3:16) that shows itself by getting involved.

Did I miss anything?

HT: David Phillips