The MiWC meetings in Lusaka have drawn some interesting responses from around the world. It is heartening to see the global reach of Allelon’s friends in the missional conversation.

Numbers have written asking if they could participate in the Lusaka gathering. Some of you are deeply involved in these conversations even within Africa and thought that this was one of those events were you should be involved. We had little sense of the interest this would raise.

The web site has an extensive description of the project. It is a research-based project spread over some five years that will address Newbigin’s question of a missionary engagement with late modern, Western culture(s) from the perspective of the local, ordinary narratives of people in specific contexts. Six countries are involved. Each sends a team to two people to the yearly planning, design and reporting events we have (these are not conferences but working meetings that assess and move the project forward). Neil Crosbie (UK) and I are taking responsibility for shaping the planning of the event and the forward movement of the Project.

This year we are meeting in Africa at the invitation of our African project team Frederick Marais and Jurgens Hendricks. In the midst of the planning for this event, the African team saw this as a wonderful opportunity for those of us in North America and other nations to learn from African Christians about the ways the missional questions are shaped for many on that continent. At the same time we all saw this as an opportunity for a small number of African leaders to meet to discuss how the missional conversation might be moved forward in their own context. The African team selected these sixteen leaders. Allelon and our partners are underwriting the costs for their travel and accommodation in a desire to support this kind of opportunity.

Some of you have read descriptions of what we will be doing in Lusaka and wondered if this might be one more Western, North America attempt at going to Africa with our solutions. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are definitely not interested in a Western led group meeting that will reflect on Africa and then pontificate their findings. That would not be the spirit of Newbigin nor is it our intention.

We are seeking to do something quite different. We are meeting in Africa to do work on an international project. In that spirit we have spent the past several years asking each other how we cultivate a mutually critical dialogue. One of the criteria for this kind of dialogue is the capacity to create safe spaces were we can listen to one another as the ‘other’ in the conviction that it is this kind of listening that cultivates the dialogue and the hearing of the Spirit. It is in this spirit that are going to Lusaka. Certainly, from the perspective of North America, we realized early on in this project that we needed to learn new ways of attending to and listening with our other brothers and sisters if we were to discern the shape of the missional questions for us on the North American continent. So we are all gathering in Lusaka to learn with/among African colleagues about how we create tables and safe space for listening to the ‘other’. Indeed, I would say that this is where our African colleagues will lead us and, if there are solutions being given out, then our African friends have much to teach us about this kind of listening.

Our agenda has nothing to do with coming up with solutions to African issues. What we are doing is providing a venue for African leaders to meet in order to frame that side of the conversation for themselves. For those who asked, be assured we have NO agenda to help, fix or find solutions for others. One of the big learning experiences of this Project is that, while we meet as leaders from various nations, we know that we have to discover answers that are local and appropriate through a mutually critical dialogue. My sense from being in Africa is not that we have solutions to bring them (or the Australians, New Zealanders or Brits) but that my eyes have been opened to the narrow ways the missional conversation has taken form in North America. I have become more and more convinced that the ways we have framed the missional questions in North America are misguiding us and keeping us from hearing the hard and radical demands the Spirit might want to make on us.

Thanks, everyone, for all your emails and interest in this project. I trust we can keep the dialogue moving forward. This project is now entering the final stages of its designing phase. We will keep you informed and invite you to continue the dialogue with us.

On the weekend I had a chance to get back into Cavanaugh’s Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire. The blurb from CBD reads:“Should Christians be for or against the free market? For or against globalization? How are we to live in a world of scarcity? William Cavanaugh uses Christian resources to incisively address basic economic matters—the free market, consumer culture, globalization, and scarcity—arguing that we should not just accept these as givens but should instead change the terms of the debate.

“Among other things, Cavanaugh discusses how God, in the Eucharist, forms us to consume and be consumed rightly. Examining pathologies of desire in contemporary “free market” economies, Being Consumed puts forth a positive and inspiring vision of how the body of Christ can engage in economic alternatives. At every turn, Cavanaugh illustrates his theological analysis with concrete examples of Christian economic practices.”

The chapters are 1) Freedom and Unfreedom; 2)  Detachment and Attachment; 3) The Global and the Local; 4) Scarcity and Abundance.
Cavanaugh uses Augustine to address the concept of “freedom” and “desire” and he uses Augustine critically. He is both lucid and complex. I was reading along closely until I came to page nine. He writes,

Others are .. crucial to one’s freedom. A slave or an addict, by definition, cannot free him or herself. Others from outside the self — the ultimate Other being God — are necessary to break through the bonds that enclose the self in itself. Humans need a community of virtue in which to learn to desire rightly.

This latter phrase is a powerful articulation of something that has been in my head a number of times in the past few years. We call this community an interpretive community, but that phrase masks the forming power of culture and the need to create alternative cultures for this reason. Cavanaugh continues,

Augustine does not assume that individuals simply have wants that are internally generated and that subsequently enter the social realm through acts of choice. Nor does he assume that desires are simply real because people have them, not that what one really desires is fully transparent and accessible to one’s own self. For Augustine, desire is a social production: desire is a complex and multidimensional network of movement that does not simply originate within the individual self but pulls and pushes the self in different directions from both inside and outside the person. (9-10)

Cavanaugh then relates Augustine’s examination of his theft of pears. He concludes that his unknown deep desire was for love and acceptance that can only be found in God. The conclusion: we need a telos to distinguish between true and false desire.

A few weeks ago the Blind Beggar threw out a general invitation to bloggers interested in preserving the integrity of the word “missional.” The synchroblog list follows at the end of this entry.

As I pondered on what to say on “what is missional,” I decided to use the lens of pastoral theology. So much of what we are and do is shaped by our own need: need to see the impact of our actions; need to be relevant; need to be understood; need to be loved. But God’s goodness flows from a different place. I will speak of mission from John 15:4-6 and then talk about two movements that masquerade as missional.

I am going to sing to the Lord God Yahweh as long as I live!
I am going to serenade my God with music as long as I am here!
May my poetry make him happy..

–I, at least, am going to be happy and enjoy it with Him,
the covenanting One!     Ps.104 30,31

I’ve been known to whirl and spin my way across the living room. It’s one of those things I don’t advertise. I take a page from Carolyn Arends, “dance when no one’s watching.. nobody but You.”

It’s just the joy of life, and a brain that plays tunes on “random shuffle” in quiet moments, whether Arends, Bell, U2, Cockburn, Doerksen, or whomever. Really, June in Kelowna is stunning in a way unique to desert landscapes in the wet season. Wild flowers and cultivated flowers blossom everywhere, everything is green and vibrant, and now that sunny days have arrived, “the sky is a painful blue.”

One simply cannot not dance and leap and sing in such a world. It would be an insult to the Creator not to respond with celebration. In God’s world there is only the dance, and “we are the music while the music lasts.”

I know.. the connection to missio Dei isn’t quite articulate here. Or is it? If we define mission narrowly as something future or other-worldly, there is no connection. But if we use a different lens we might say that creation is, “the dance of the Lord in emptiness..” a dance all around us here and now. We might take a cue from Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove that, “The [spiritual] life is by its very nature “ordinary.” It is precisely the ordinariness of  … life that makes true conversion possible. When a person is no longer distracted by the emotional illusions that passing trends and extraordinary events create, she has the opportunity to cultivate a life of the Spirit.” Or we might take a cue from Hopkins and talk about the glory of God shining all around us: “glory be to God for dappled things!”

But the connection I had in mind when I started can be described in a single word: joy, and its near relative, gratitude. If we know these two words in our experience, they result in something spontaneous and profound, something so near to our hearts that when it bubbles up we can’t contain it: praise.

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him!

Let me be explicit about this: mission is the overflowing joy of a Trinitarian God manifest in the material world. It is founded on the spontaneous and extravagant abundance of love and joy in the eternal relatedness of Father, Son and Spirit. It is the river of God’s goodness flowing between heaven and earth, founded in covenant love (”Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven”). Mission is the earthly fruition of an eternal dance.

Henri Nouwen comments on John 15:4-6,

Speaking of himself as the vine and his disciples as the branches Jesus says:
“Make your home in me as I make mine in you.” This is an invitation to intimacy. Then he adds: “Those who remain in me with me in them, bear fruit to plenty.” This is a call to fecundity. Finally he says, “I have told you this so that my own joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.” He promises ecstasy.” (Lifesigns, 11)

Missio Dei is nothing more than our participation in the joyful, ecstatic, overflowing fruitfulness of God. “Those who remain in me bear fruit in plenty.” Our task in response to this overflowing joy of God is to invite others to dance. In Henri’s words, we invite them to the house of love.

There are only two houses in the world: the house of fear, and the house of love. Even those of us born into caring families soon learn that the world isn’t entirely safe, and that our families are not perfect. We begin to search for a true home.

In this world millions are homeless. Some are homeless because of inner pain, while others have been driven from their homes by war. Others experience homelessness in prisons, mental hospitals and nursing homes. Some of us have experienced it in large congregations while wearing masks that say, “I’m ok.”

And our world is filled with fear. The evening news celebrates it. We ask many anxious questions about the survival of our families, our environment, and our world. Nouwen writes, “We are so accustomed to fear that we do not hear the voice that says, “Do not be afraid…” Yet it is this voice that announces a whole new way of living…” Jesus invites us to the house of love.

Fear prevents the fruitfulness of mission and has two results: sterility, or productivity. Nouwen writes,

“Sterility is the most obvious response to fear. When we feel surrounded by threats we close ourselves off and no longer reach out to others, with whom fruitful relationships might grow. The more afraid we become, the more we withdraw.” (45)

The experience of sterility is like a living death. We are not truly alive, and therefore we cannot give life. Nouwen comments that even in the First World this is a common experience. Many have lost any hope of actively participating in the shaping of a good future. Being bored while being busy is an ominous symptom of this disease. Nouwen relates the story of the woman at the well in these terms. Jesus recognized her spiritual sterility and offered her the possibility of fruitfulness: “the water that I shall give will become an inner spring” (John 4:14). She moves from the house of fear to the house of love and becomes a fruitful missionary to her village.

But the opposite impulse is also born from fear: productivity. A call to live a fruitful life is not necessarily a call to be productive. In our world productivity looks like success. But this is not always the case. Nouwen writes,

“In our world, everything can become a product: not only cars, houses, books.. but also friends.. and important decisions. They can all become something we have “made” [and] gives us a sense of being acceptable [that] we are what we make. Productivity.. takes away our fear of being useless. But if we want to live as followers of Jesus, we must come to know that products, successes, and results often belong more to the house of fear than to the house of love.”

Here Nouwen strips away the veneer of success and the apparent relevance of busy lives. In a world dominated by technos and the myth of progress, we cease to know ourselves except through our acts. But the house of love calls us to a deeper place.

In the same way, joining in the missio Dei is not a call to productivity. It is the call to know and be known and to allow God’s joy to fill us, so that all we do is an expression of his life in us. When we abide in the house of love mission becomes a spontaneous expression of the dance of God in emptiness (it’s no coincidence that Philippians 2 contains an early hymn).

Those of us in any of the streams of renewal, whether it be missional, monastic, or emergent, are tempted to become activists in view of the need for change. But Nouwen would remind us that the world desperately needs “irrelevant” leaders. Elizabeth O’Connor writes,

“We are not called primarily to create new structures for the church in this age; we are not called primarily to a program of service, or to dream dreams or have visions. We are called first of all to belong to [worship] .. to belong to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and to keep our lives warmed at the hearth of his life. It is there the fire will be lit which will create new structures and programs of service that will draw others into the circle to dream dreams and have visions. ” (Call to Commitment, 94).

As Merton puts it, “We are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds, and join in the general dance.” (New Seeds of Contemplation, 297)

Participating Bloggers

Alan Hirsch
Alan Knox
Andrew Jones
Barb Peters
Bill Kinnon
Brad Brisco
Brad Grinnen
Brad Sargent
Brother Maynard
Bryan Riley
Chad Brooks
Chris Wignall
Cobus Van Wyngaard
Dave DeVries
David Best
David Fitch
David Wierzbicki
DoSi
Doug Jones
Duncan McFadzean
Erika Haub
Grace
Jamie Arpin-Ricci
Jeff McQuilkin
John Smulo
Jonathan Brink
JR Rozko
Kathy Escobar
Len Hjalmarson
Makeesha Fisher
Malcolm Lanham
Mark Berry
Mark Petersen
Mark Priddy
Michael Crane
Michael Stewart
Nick Loyd
Patrick Oden
Peggy Brown
Phil Wyman
Richard Pool
Rick Meigs
Rob Robinson
Ron Cole
Scott Marshall
Sonja Andrews
Stephen Shields
Steve Hayes
Tim Thompson
Thom Turner

See the earlier post for some background discussion based on Tom Sine (The New Conspirators) and David Dunbar’s Missional Journal.

After my first post I was left running a structural taxonomy in my head, so I scribbled it on paper last night. What this requires is some kind of consensus on essential characteristics of each stream. In some ways, this is like trying to describe a face. You know your brother-in-law when you see him, but if you didn’t know what he was wearing and he was average height and build, it would be difficult to offer a short list to a stranger to assist finding him in a crowd.

Ah well. Fortune favors the bold (and angels rush in…) Here goes. If we take the Missional conversation to be characterized by an emphasis on..

the Missio Dei
the Gospel of the kingdom
Leadership
Covenant Community…

And we take the Monastic movement to be characterized by

Vows
Place
the Poor
Prayer..

And we take the Emergent conversation to be characterized by

Place
Participation
the Arts/Mystery
Alternative/Subversive concerns…

Then we can begin to think about how these various conversations will look as they cross pollinate. My particular interest is the unique contribution of each conversation and the convergence zone between the conversations. It’s intriguing to me as I write this list that traditional hot topics like “charismata” and “worship styles” don’t enter my head.
A helpful approach would be to think about each movement or conversation in terms of particular foci. So, for each conversation, what are essential..

* theological and philosophical emphases

* practices

Remember that Pete Rollins made a helpful observation when he remarked that the emergent conversation is a revolution of the “how.” He wrote, “This is not then a revolution that seeks to change what we believe, but rather one that sets about transforming the entire manner in which we hold our beliefs.”

Allelon’s Summer Institute in Kansas City has just wrapped up, and some early reports from attendees are out. Mike King reports Mission-Shaped Groups and Missional Theology, saying,

I’m sitting in class with two dozen, mostly friends and associates, studying Missional Church Theology. Our instructors are Dr. John Franke from Biblical Seminary and Dr. Alan Roxburgh from Allelon and the Allelon Training Center. We are launching an ATC in Kansas City through Jacob’s Well. This is some amazing content and wonderful dialogue about what it means to cooperate with the Mission of God.
 
The reality is that being Missional is first and foremost about God. This is not the Churches Mission, it is God’s Mission missio dei. John Franke dealt with the most important question for those hoping to embrace a missional way of life, a missional church. The question is, “Who is God?” We focused on the Trinity and entered into a discussion on the Eastern view that God is social not solitary. God is love and God is radical sociality. The Trinity - God is one by virtue of their interdependent sociality. Alan states that it is essential to start with the “Who is God?” question instead of the common mistake of hyper-focusing first and almost exclusively on ecclesiology.
 
This conversation is compatible with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s three questions (in order of priority): Who is Jesus Christ?; Where is Jesus Christ?; What then shall we do? Bonhoeffer says the “How question” (the important question for many fearful that this conversation is a “slippery slope”) is a question of doubt, a question of idolatry.

Rustin Smith records some highlights from day two of the Summer Institute:

- “Our primary commitment is to the relationship of Gospel to Culture. We have no stake in ‘how’ church is done. There is no experience/notion of church apart from the interaction between Gospel & culture.”
 
- One could argue that the first century Jerusalem church, the fourth century council of Nicaea, the Irish monastics, 19th century English church, 20th century African church – although they looked completely different (save some key practices - Eucharist for example) were nevertheless faithful to the heart of Christianity (as expressions of ‘church’) in their own contexts.
 
The focus of the missional conversation is nearly completely theological in that it is preoccupied with questions like “Who is God?” and “What is the gospel?” In light of that (and only secondarily), “What does it mean to be human, or church?”
 
Alan Roxburgh had a great piece today about the “other” and its ten-dollar counterpart “alterity.”

This was the first of our two Summer Institutes being offered this year — the next one takes place in Hamilton, ON with Pernell Goodyear and Alan Roxburgh this July 7-11th.

Jeff and Dave discuss being helpless and hapless…among other things. Also, Jeff has a bit of a problem when he ‘rants’ about God’s goodness It is a TMAP first! You can listen to the show from the box on the right, or by going here.

Dan Steigerwald and I chatted on SKYPE on Monday morning for about 90 minutes, tossing some rule frameworks around and sharing knowledge and questions. The further along I travel in exploring this direction, the more questions I have.Dan has also had a look at the ToM website, and chatted with some people involved. For both of us, looking around the material makes us tired. It seems overly complex and detailed. It’s as if every dimension of life has to be analyzed, plotted, and then integrated and diagrammed with spiritual practice.

We are asking a number of similar questions about missional orders and making some similar observations. Some rules are simple, some complex. Some seem to start from a devotional center and move outward (ToM); others seem to begin from a missional center then move inward (Northumbria). Some emphasize the rule as the center; some seem to use the rule to work at rhythm and relationships. Some seem more focused on process, others on the goal. Some seem to invite creative participation; others invite subscription. Some prescribe, others describe.

Perhaps missional orders and the rules they generate vary as much as the personalities and conditions that forged them. It’s more than packaging: a rule evokes an ethos and appeals to different personalities differently. For those newer to the journey or coming out of chaotic situations, structure is preferred. For those longer on the journey or who have a sense of inner structure and direction, flexibility is preferred; structure is sacrificed in favor of shared intention. Any structures we build must serve us and our purposes, and not we them, and probably they will have a limited shelf life.

What would a rule look like if it was drafted by Tom Wright? I can’t help thinking it might look much like that of ToM. What would it look like if it was drafted by Donald Miller? Perhaps more like that of Northumbria.

I do feel that the process is as important as the goal. Evolving an order should involve the journey of a small company of people who are reflecting together on the inward and outward journey, and who are asking similar questions about the gospel and culture, mission and formation. Shared memory and shared context will help if we are attempting to forge something that makes sense to all of us. We must reflect on where we are and where we are going, as well as the resources it will take to get there. This requires some theological clarity, but also a reasonable critique of culture and knowledge of the way people work.

We build for a future not our own. What we build must have some resonance across generations, and in particular for leaders younger than us. At the same time, we don’t want to build for ease of use or best mileage; we want to be faithful to the call we have experienced and the need of the moment under the hegemony of Empire in a culture where the church is a purveyor of “religious goods and services.”

Simplicity and portability are important. Some rules seem to work well within local and homogeneous communities, some seem better designed for life on the road and for dispersed community. The latter is what we need.

And the simpler the rule, the lighter it travels. I suspect that a statement like that of the Northumbria community that expresses intention more than detailed practice will allow the greatest adaptation in local contexts. If our specific practices remain few, then we invite creativity and participation on the ground in substantial ways. To me that is a wonderful way to combine rule and rhythm and relationship: invite an organic process of unfolding and iteration by defining intention and purpose and then trust the Spirit to take flesh in local contexts.

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