Building True Community

Our Regional Assembly begins just over a week from now—in fact, tomorrow is the deadline for registration. If you haven’t registered yet, I urge you to do so!

Regional Assembly is the time where more than any other we can experience the following statements from our Vision Statement and Mission Plan:

Called by God’s grace to do together that which by God’s design cannot be done apart,

and led by the movement of the Spirit of God,

we proclaim the Northwest Regional Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

to be a community of communities,

valuing our strength in diversity,

honoring and acknowledging our various gifts,

offering them in faithfulness and service to the entire body.

We foster intentional relationships grounded in the love of Christ in all aspects of Regional life: between individuals, congregations, ecumenical and interfaith partners.

True Community is one of  the three elements expressed in Dick Hamm’s book, 2020 Vision for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and adopted by our denomination. Relationship is a central Christian value. As Christians, we reach out to and relate with people from whom we would be separate according to worldly values. This theme is expressed over and over in the New Testament: our recent lectionary text of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch is one example, and Paul’s statement “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” is another. And perhaps the most extreme statement of this is by Jesus: “Love your enemies.”

Our culture values getting things done. Christianity values relationship. My wife Kay has a motto: “relationship before task.” It has been a slow learning process for me, but I am finally learning to make that be a reality in my life. For us as Disciples of Christ, if we are to serve in making God’s realm a present reality, we need to realize that in order to be the body of Christ in this place, we must be in relationship beyond the doors of our individual congregations.

Thank you for reading my musings, and I hope to see you at Regional Assembly.

Living Forward

Philologists tell us that religious terms are typically the oldest words in a language. We see this in English—how many of us still say the Lord’s Prayer saying “thy” and “thine”—words that haven’t been used in non-religious contexts for hundreds of years. This points to the natural tendency of religion to be conservative—to look to the past, to tradition, and to be careful not to change things.

In some ways, this is a good thing. Our religion is valuable, the most central source of value in our lives. We don’t want to mess it up by changing things. And it deals with things we don’t fully understand, so we can’t be sure that any changes might not have unintended consequences. We can apply the statement, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Religions celebrate the past—the great prophets, saints, and teachers. Our knowledge of Jesus Christ comes from books written 2,000 years ago, and a consistent theme in the Old Testament is the remembrance and celebration of God’s mighty works of salvation. 

But the reality is that for religion to be vital, it must change. When Christianity is taken to a new country or a new culture, it has to express itself in ways that speak to their situation, their longings, their needs. Likewise, each generation calls for new interpretations of scripture, new forms of church, new patterns of practice. In fact, every sermon is a bridging of the language of scripture with a particular community in a particular situation at a particular moment of time.

Barton Stone and Thomas Campbell, the founders of our denomination, were Presbyterian ministers who found that the old forms of religion were no longer working. In that time of excitement a dozen years after the adoption of the American Constitution known as the Second Great Awakening, they felt the need to let go of denominations, creeds, and two thousand years of accumulated tradition, and to attempt to return to the vital roots of Christianity. This created a freshness, an aliveness, that led to tremendous expansion and to a deepening of faith for many, many people.

There is an increasing recognition that we are at a moment in time when the old forms of church are not working well in our time and place, but the new forms have not yet emerged. Of course, many of us still love the old forms—the old hymns, the structure of church with a professional pastor, a board, committees, a church building, a choir, and all the rest. But if we look at demographics, we see that increasingly we are becoming a minority. 

Certainly some people are trying new things or have ideas about what is needed. Phyllis Tickle, in her book The Great Emergence, says that the Church holds a “giant rummage sale” every 500 years, leading to major change in Christianity. Brian McLaren, who spoke at our last General Assembly, has been a key spokesperson for the idea of Emergent Church, with books like A New Kind of Christianity. Diana Butler Bass, author of Christianity for the Rest of Us and a Turner Lectures speaker, has a new book coming out February 14 called Christianity after Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. In it, she argues that we are at a critical stage in a completely new spiritual awakening, a vast interreligious progression toward individual and cultural transformation, and a wholly new kind of post-religious faith. 

We have made a commitment as a denomination and as a region to live forward into the future that God is calling us towards. In Dick Hamm’s Book, 2020 Vision for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), he asks the question “How do we go from being a church that is, is some ways a church of the 1950's to a faithful and growing church for the world that is becoming?” Part of his answer was to create a thousand new church starts and a thousand transformed churches.

We are most of the way towards the first of these goals, and they are changing the nature of our denomination, as most are congregations of color, whether African-American, Latino, Haitian, Korean, or Pacific Islander. Our region’s Transformation Team is working with our existing congregations to lead to transformed congregations.

Speaking as a leader and participant in this latter process, I have to say that our challenge is to be bold enough to meet God where God is calling us. Our God parted the Red Sea so the children of Israel could walk safely through. Our God brought down the walls of Jericho with the blowing of ram’s horns. Our God healed people and raised them from the dead. So our efforts at transformation can’t just be “let’s make things a little bit better, bring in more members and have a bigger choir.” We need to be willing to stretch a lot, to let wildness into our hearts and minds, to create room for God to be as big as God is.

In Bob Dylan’s song, “It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)” he sang “he not busy being born is busy dying.” In Deuteronomy 30:19, God says, “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live…” As individuals, as congregations, as a region, and as the Church universal, we need to live forward, to choose life, that we and our descendants might live.

Tithing

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts; see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.’ —Malachi 3:10

“Pay yourself first” is a popular bit of financial advice. It refers to the idea of having part of each paycheck automatically transferred into savings or an investment account as a way of  ensuring that you keep your commitment to investment. However, for us as Christians, a better aphorism might be, “Pay God first.” Over and over, the scriptures speak about dedicating the first fruits of what you receive to God.

As Christians, we are generally less focused on religious laws we must follow in the way that our Jewish and Muslim sisters and brothers are. Instead, Jesus called us to focus on the spirit of the law more than the letter of the law—usually in a way that is even more demanding on us. But we do have spiritual practices that support us in living as people of God. One of those is the practice of tithing.

Tithing is first referenced about Abraham, following a military victory, in Genesis 14:18-20: “And King Melchizedek of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High. He blessed him and said, ‘Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand!’ And Abram gave him one-tenth of everything.”

If we think of our giving to church as part of our overall spiritual practice, it shifts our relationship with giving. We are expressing gratitude to God for the abundance God has blessed us with.

My personal experience has been that tithing is more a gift to me than a giving up. It has changed my relationship with money, and I feel far wealthier now than I did before I began it. I currently give 8% of my income as a pledge to my church, 1% to the Northwest Region, and 1% to my church by purchasing and giving things the church needs. Above this, I give to a variety of non-religious charities. I contribute to the general church only through my contributions to the Disciples Mission Fund. I would encourage every Disciple to contribute to their region about a tenth of what they contribute to their church, whether by direct contribution or through the special offerings.

I feel it is important that congregations, too, tithe, and I know that many of them do. Sending at least 10% of a congregation’s income to support the larger church, through region, Global Ministries, and ministries of the general church, lets us join forces to accomplish together things beyond the capacity of any single congregation.

For someone who is not doing it, the idea of tithing is frightening. Many of us feel that we are barely scraping by as it is, and it’s not clear what we could give up to allow us to tithe. There is certainly an element of trust in God in taking this step. For those willing simply to take the leap, I suspect you will be surprised at how God opens doors for you and enriches your life. But for those not quite ready to take that step, a good practice is simply to decide to contribute 1% more of your salary this year than last year. In other words, if your family income is $50,000, and you have been contributing $100/month to your church, by adding 1%, or $500/year, your new contribution would be just under $142/month.

Many of us feel shy about asking for money in church, and so “stewardship moments” are often safe and generic. But if we shift our perspective from thinking that we’re trying to get something for our church, to realizing we are trying to help congregation members by encouraging them to be better Christians and to lead more of the abundant life God has planned for them, it may change the way we approach these conversations.

Certainly stewardship is about much more than money. We are called to be stewards of God’s creation, of our vocation, of our church. As Disciples, we recognize that the earth and all it contains, and our very life itself, are all gifts from God, and we model our life and our stewardship on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Through this model of stewardship, we build up the Realm of God that Jesus initiated on earth. Being a Disciple means offering our very life to God. Dedicating our material well-being to God and in service to our love of our neighbors is only one way of expressing this, but it is an important one, and for many of us, may help us to understand more fully the other aspects of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

Evangelism

And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.' —Mark 16:15

My experience with Disciples in the Northwest is that evangelism almost seems like a dirty word to us. It’s what those other Christians do—you know, the obnoxious ones. We’re too shy to be evangelists.

But what we should realize is that the word evangelism comes from Greek roots meaning “good news.” If we have good news, we should be willing to share it. In fact, we should be excited to share it! And the good news of Jesus Christ is as good as news gets.

As Disciples of Christ, we are called to share the Good News. It is an essential part of our role as Christians. The word gospel, too, means good news, so sharing the Gospel and sharing the Good News are synonyms.

Now every time I visit a new church, I listen to hear what the good news is that is preached and communicated by that church. Is it that the Book Club is meeting Thursday night? Is it that we raised $483 through the bake sale? Is it that Jesus Christ died for our sins? Is it that our God is a loving God, forgiving, generous, welcoming us home with open arms? Is it that this community welcomes me as a child of God? Is  it something else? Or do I even hear good news at all?

To share the good news, we need to be clear within ourselves what the good news is. We need to be able to share it with people who don’t know it. In order to do that, we need to be able to share it without using churchy language, or canned speeches. In fact, we’re usually best off by remembering the sentence attributed to St. Francis of Assisi: “Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.” But still, there is a time when talk is necessary.

I go to many churches where the people are very friendly. Churches often use the word welcoming to describe themselves. But being welcoming is only half of our responsibility. We also need to be inviting. The days when we can say of churches, “If you build it, they’ll come” are over. We need to invite people. Invite our friends. Invite new acquaintances. Invite strangers. Invite neighbors. And we need to invite them by communicating good news.

We don’t need to go to foreign lands to act as missionaries. We need to recognize that we are living in a post-Christian culture. We can’t assume that people we meet have ever heard the good news of Jesus Christ. Sadly, that’s often true even for people who grew up Christian. I meet many people who have been wounded by the church, who wear the scars of their childhood encounters with it and want to stay far away. I meet many others who say, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” But there is good news these people are longing to hear. If we don’t tell them, who will?

How can we change our church’s culture from a culture of reserved politeness to one of sharing and invitation? How can we empower every member of our congregation to know they are called to be witnesses “from our doorsteps to the ends of the earth?” There are plenty of practical answers to these questions, from Bible study and education to having practice sessions in sharing good news with one another. But what is most important is that we ourselves remember the good news we have been given; reflect in gratitude on how much richer and fuller our lives are because of that; and realize that we have the possibility of loving and serving our neighbors by sharing that gift with them.

Sharing

Filled with the joy of God’s presence with us
we share together in hospitality, worship and praise
enriching our lives with scripture and prayer
singing songs of hope, faith and celebration
joining in the gifts of loaf and cup
inviting our neighbors to experience God’s abundance.

You may have heard the story of the man who was taken to visit hell. He was surprised to see huge banquet tables spread with all kinds of delicious foods. But the people sitting around the tables were thin and haggard, and had looks of anguish on their face. Each of them had a six-foot long fork attached to their right hand and a six-foot long spoon attached to their left hand. They could pick up the food with the fork or the spoon, but they couldn’t get it to their mouths because the handles were too long.

Then he was taken to visit heaven. What did he see? You’ve got it. There were huge banquet tables spread with all kinds of delicious foods, and the people all had six-foot long spoons and forks attached to their hands. But these people looked well-fed and their faces were filled with joy. What was the difference? They were feeding one another with their long forks and spoons.

Even though we read in the Bible that our God is a god of abundance, I often experience a sense of “not-enoughness” when I visit congregations in our region. Our sense of mission is limited because it seems that it takes everything we have just to run the church—pay the staff and cover building expenses. Sometimes it even seems like a squeeze to do that much!

But the reality is that collectively, we have far more than we need. If we simply developed a strong habit of sharing, we’d know that.

For example, I have a lawn mower. So does almost every family on my block. I have a weed trimmer. So do many others. I don’t have an edger or a hedge trimmer. If we simply shared these tools, my block watch friends and I could lower our expenses, have higher-quality tools, not need so much storage space—we would all come out ahead!

Our churches are the same way. It would be great if a soloist from a nearby church came to sing at my church every few months, because we don’t have a strong soloist. The head of our Sunday School recently went to talk with the head of the nearby UCC Sunday School about joining forces for a youth program, since we have only a couple of teenagers. Some churches have members with real skills at developing websites, or photography, or making banners.

Talk with your local churches! You might make a plan for each church to create a list of gifts and assets, and of needs and wishes, and come together to see how more can be shared. We are here to serve as examples of God’s realm, living out God’s abundance, generosity, and love.

Book Review: Missional Communities

Missional Communities: The Rise of the Post-Congregational Church, by Reggie McNeal (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011)

The idea of missional church has been spreading rapidly, and dozens of books on the topic have been published since the first book by that title published in 1998. The missional church concept is being adopted by Christians of every stripe, from evangelicals to mainliners, from megachurches to house churches. Our Disciples of Christ denomination has made it a priority in many ways. Not only did they offer a learning track on missional church at this year's General Assembly, but they also announced a new ministry called The Hope Partnership for Missional Transformation, and we in the Northwest Region will be one of their first pilot project groups.

The idea of missional church can be understood in the light of Jesus’ saying, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” We are a people sent to be the light of the world, and to be the salt of the earth. We are sent to demonstrate and embody God’s realm here on earth. We are sent to love God and to love our neighbor. We are sent to bring good news to the poor. We are sent to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.

Many of the books on missional church or missional communities are theological in nature, but this one is not only eminently practical, but it consists largely of inspiring descriptions of missional communities. As the subtitle makes clear, not all of these look like churches in the conventional sense, but all are involved with living the gospel and witnessing in the wider community around them. I found this an exciting book, one that I strongly recommend.

To give you an idea, I will give a summary of Chapter 5: "Mission Houston: Missional Communities for Spiritual Formation and Community Transformation."

Mission Houston is a missional community in Houston, TX. It began four years ago this month with a group of 18 people who came together for a three-day retreat. It was based on two ideas—first, that the church needed to be making more of a positive impact in the community beyond its walls, and second, that personal transformation results in and accelerates community transformation. They had two questions: “What is a disciple of Jesus, and how do you make one?” and they ended up putting together a process of deep spiritual formation called Faithwalking,

People come because they have met others who have been transformed by this process. It begins with a 3-day retreat, called Faithwalking 101. When that is over, participants are invited to participate in a 26-week small-group experience called Faithwalking 201, which is further supported by weekly conversations with a personal transformation coach. These experiences not only ground participants in spiritual practices of solitude, worship, prayer, fasting, study, confession, giving, and celebration, but also prepare them to join or establish a small missional community that both continues the spiritual formation process and also focuses on community transformation through the group’s contribution to the common good of the city.

Their purpose of these small missional communities is to serve a need or people group for the long haul, not just work on “projects”—to enable the outer community to experience the realm of God coming on earth as it is in heaven. At their meetings, they focus both outwardly, with questions like, “What are the needs? Are we reaching our goals? What things are we measuring? What adjustments need to be made?” and also inwardly, with questions like “Whose story haven’t we heard? Can we do that over a shared meal? Is there any conflict we need to attend to? How are we each holding up under this load?” and “How can we pray for one another?” These communities too have a coach who supports them in their process and makes sure they are accountable, including seeing how each community has decided to develop metrics for measuring its activities and impact. The model that underpins their strategy and process has three components: Radical obedience, which leads to a missional life; a reflective life, where you increasingly co-create the world with God, and authentic community, which leads to shared vision.

In these last four years, Mission Houston has held fifteen additional retreats with 191 participants, who have given birth to over thirty missional communities, many of them focused on children and their needs. So far, all 30 of these 30 communities are still going.

Social Justice

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? – Micah 6:8

As we contemplate vision and mission, there are a huge number of potential social justice issues that we might choose as our special focus. Picking just one of these and really becoming deeply involved in it creates the possibility not only of having a much greater impact, but also of we ourselves being transformed. Here is just a partial list, excerpted from the book Social Justice Handbook: Small Steps for a Better World, by Mae Elise Cannon:

List of Social Justice Issues Abortion  •  AIDS  •  Capital Punishment  •  Child Soldiers  •  Class Systems  •  Consumerism  •  Disaster Relief  •  Domestic Abuse and Violence  •  Drugs and Addiction  •  Environmental Justice  •  Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide  •  Female Genital Mutilation  •  Genocide  •  Globalization  •  Health Care  •  Homelessness  •  Human Rights  •  Hunger  •  Immigration  •  Incarceration  •  Microfinance  •  Physical Disabilities  •  Poverty  •  Prostitution  •  Refugees  •  Religious Persecution  •  Sex Trafficking  •  Slavery  •  Urban Decay  •  Water  •  White Privilege

Frederick Buechner, in his book, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, says: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

This vocation, or calling by God, is what we need to discern. Looking at the place where our church is located, and seeing which of these issues is a real need, and which touches our hearts and matches our gifts, could lead to a profound engagement in mission that would both change us and change the world, helping to bring about the realm of God.