The Forgotten Ways
+ reactivating the missional church
by Alan Hirsch
Brazos Press Grand Rapids, Michigan 2006
A church which pitches its tents without constantly looking out for new horizons, which does not continually strike camp, is being untrue to its calling.
...[We must] play down our longing for certainty, accept what is risky, and live by improvisation and experiment.
Hans Kung, The Church as the People of God
The truth is that the twenty-first century is turning out to be a highly complex phenomenon where terrorism, paradigmatic technological innovation, an unsustainable environment, rampant consumerism, discontinuous change, and perilous ideologies confront us at every point. In the face of this, even the most confident among us would have to admit, in our more honest moments, that the church as we know it faces a very significant adaptive challenge. The overwhelming majority of church leaders today report that they feel it is getting much harder for their communities to negotiate the increasing complexities in which they find themselves. As a result, the church is on massive, long-trended decline in the West. In this situation, we have to ask ourselves probing questions: "Will more of the same do the trick? Do we have the inherited resources to deal with this situation? Can we simply rework the tried and true Christendom understanding of church that we so love and understand, and finally, in an ultimate tweak of the system, come up with the winning formula?"
I have to confess that I do not think that the inherited formulas will work anymore.
Even much of the thinking about the so-called emerging church leaves the prevailing assumptions of church and mission intact and simply focuses on the issue of theology and spirituality in a postmodern setting. This amounts to a reworking of the theological "software" while ignoring the "hardware" as well as "operating system" of the church. In my opinion, this will not be enough to get us through...how did the early Christians do it?
-
They were an illegal religion throughout this period.
-
They didn't have any church buildings as we know them.
-
They didn't even have the scriptures as we know them.
-
They didn't have an institution or the professional form of leadership...
-
They didn't have seeker-sensitive services, youth groups, worship bands, seminaries, commentaries, etc.
-
They actually made it hard to join the church.
What is becoming increasingly clear is that if we are going to meaningfully reach this majority of people, we are not going to be able to do it by simply doing more of the same. And yet it seems that when faced with our problems of decline, we automatically reach for the latest church growth package to solve the problem - we seem to have nowhere else to go. But simply pumping up the programs, improving the music and audiovisual effects, or jiggering the ministry mix won't solve our missional crisis. Something far more fundamental is needed.
Statistics...indicate that the vast majority of the church's growth comes from "switchers" - people who move from one church to another based on the perception and experience of the programming. There is precious little conversion growth. No one really gets to see the problem, because it "feels so right" and it "works for me." In fact, the church is on the decline right across the Western world, and we have had at least forty years of church-growth principles and practice. We can't seem to make disciples based on a consumerist approach to the faith. We plainly cannot consume our way into discipleship.
All of us must become much more active in the equation of becoming lifelong followers of Jesus. Consumption is detrimental to discipleship.
Strictly speaking one ought to say that the church is always in a state of crisis and that its greatest shortcoming is that it is only occasionally aware of it...
And if the atmosphere of crisislessness still lingers on in many parts of the West, this is simply the result of a dangerous delusion. Let us also know that to encounter crisis is to encounter the possibility of truly being the Church.
David Bosch, Transforming Mission
No one looking at the situation of the church today can say that over the last century or so things have not fundamentally changed. The reality we deal with is that after around 2,000 years of the gospel, we are on the decline in just about every Western cultural context.
Much ink has been spilled in trying to analyze the situation. But seldom in these assessments do we hear a call for a radical rethink about the actual mode of the church's engagement - the way it perceives and shapes itself around its core tasks. Rarely do we hear a serious critique of the often hidden assumptions on which Christendom itself stands. It seems that the template of this highly institutional version of Christianity is so deeply embedded in our collective psyche that we have inadvertently put it beyond the pale of prophetic critique.
I am now convinced that one of the major blockages... is our adherence to an obsolete understanding of the church.
People now identify themselves less by grand ideologies, national identities, or political allegiances, and by much less grand stories: those of interest groups, new religious movements (New Age), sexual identity (gays, lesbians, neofacist, eco-rats, etc.), class, conspicuous consumption (metrosexuals, urban grunge, etc.), work types (computer geeks, hackers, designers, etc.), and so forth. On one occasion some youth ministry specialists I work with identified in an hour fifty easily discernible youth subcultures alone (computer nerds, skaters, homies, surfies, punks, etc.). Each of them takes their subcultural identity with utmost seriousness, and hence any missional response to them must as well.
Speaking of the Alpha course, this remarkable evangelistic tool has been used to bring many to the faith. I understand that up to 3 million people have participated in Alpha courses in the United Kingdom alone. The way it is generally used by churches is as an evangelistic tool to contribute to the church's numerical growth. The interesting thing is that in the United Kingdom, Alpha is most successful among what has been called the "dechurched" rather than the genuinely unchurched - in other words, those who came within the m0-m1 framework. And in spite of its evangelistic power, viewed from a broader perspective it has not substantially added to church growth. There are certainly not 3 million new church members in the United Kingdom as a result of Alpha. In fact, the church there is still in serious decline. As such, Alpha, far from being an effective missionary tool, actually serves as a good example of how we don't reach very far beyond ourselves at all.
How can this be? A major part of the problem is that although largely dechurched people do come to faith in Jesus through Alpha, it seems that they still don't want to "go to church." It's that darn "Jesus, yes. Church, no" phenomenon again. People will come to faith in small, intimate communities of friends but generally don't want the organized-religion part of the deal. This swapping of agendas has sometimes been perceived as a "bait and switch" strategy, which is generally considered unethical in the commercial world. So we have now reached the vexing situation that the prevailing expression of church (Christendom) has become a major stumbling block to the spread of Christianity in the West. Applying the grid of Apostolic Genius, I find myself asking the question "What if instead of just being a church growth tool, Alpha became a church multiplication movement - a new church emerging out of the original Alpha group and reproducing itself from there?" My guess is that with a different paradigm driving it, it could really take off. It has so many elements of Apostolic Genius latent in its structure but is hindered by a more institutional understanding of church. Here we see the clash of the paradigms in stark form.
When all their external reference points are removed, when most of their leaders and theologians killed or imprisoned and all access to outside sources is cut off, they are somehow forced through sheer circumstance to unlock something truly potent and compelling in the message they carry as the people of God. The result is a Jesus movement unparalleled in history. What is going on here, and what can we in the West learn from this?
...in order to survive in the context of persecution, they also have to jettison all unnecessary impediments, including that of a predominantly institutional conception of ecclesia. But perhaps even more significantly, they have to condense and purify their core message that keeps them both faithful and hopeful.
Therefore all unnecessary complexities are extracted, and in the process a miracle happens - the people discover their true message, and the movement is born. Faith is once again liked in utter simplicity to Jesus, the author and completer of the faith.
But something else is unleashed in this recovery of simplicity, namely, the capacity to rapidly transfer the message along relational lines. Freed from the philosophical density of the academy and from dependence on the professional cleric, the gospel becomes profoundly "sneezable." This reference to sneezing is not just whimsical. We know from the study of ideas that they spread in patterns very similar to that of viral epidemics. We also know that in order to really take hold and become an "epidemic," they have to be easily transferred from one person to another. And to do this they need to be profound and yet simple - easily grasped by any person, and in many cases illiterate peasants.
The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief. T. S. Eliot
C.S. Lewis rightly understood that the purpose of the church was to draw people to Christ and make them like Christ. He said that the church exists for no other purpose. "If the Church is not doing this, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time."
For the follower of Jesus, discipleship is not the first step toward a promising career. It is in itself the fulfillment of his or her destiny.
Church growth exponents have explicitly taught us how to market and tailor the product to suit target audiences. They told us to mimic the shopping mall, apply it to the church, and create a one-stop religious shopping experience catering to our every need. In this they were sincere and well intentioned, but they must have been also totally ignorant of the ramifications of their counsel - because in the end the medium has so easily overwhelmed the message. Christendom, operating as it does in the attractional mode and run by professionals, was already susceptible to consumerism, but under the influence of contemporary church growth practice, consumerism has actually become the driving ideology of the church's ministry.
The very shape of the church building gives us away (refer to the diagram of the church building in chapter 1). Ninety percent or more of the people who attend our services are passive. In other words, they are consumptive. They are the passive recipients of the religious goods and services being delivered largely by professionals in a slick presentation and service. Just about everything we do in these somewhat standardized services and "box churches," we do in order to attract participants, and to do this we need to make the experience of church more convenient and comfortable. It is the ultimate religious version of one-stop shopping - hassle-free. But alas, all we are achieving by doing this is adding more fuel to the insatiable consumerist flame. I have come to the dreaded conclusion that we simply cannot consume our way into discipleship. Consumerism as it is experienced in the everyday and discipleship as it is intended in the scriptures are simply at odds with each other. And both aim at the mastery over our lives, only in marketing it's called brand loyalty or brand community.
How have we moved so far from the ethos of discipleship passed on to us by our Lord? And how do we recover it again?
The answer to the first question is that Western Christendom was so deeply influenced by Greek or Hellenistic ideas of knowledge.
The assumption in Hellenistic thinking is that if people get the right ideas, they will simply change their behavior. The Hellenistic approach therefore can be characterized as an attempt to try to think our way into a new way of acting.
So what is that better way? You will not be surprised to find out that it is found in the ancient art of disciple making. Disciple making operates best with the Hebrew understanding of knowledge in mind. In other words, we need to take a whole person into account in seeking to transform that person. The way we do this, indeed the way Jesus did it, is to act our way into a new way of thinking. This is clearly how Jesus formed his disciples.
...[T]he most probable assumption is that no currently working business theory will be valid 10 years hence...And yet few executives accept that turning a business around requires fundamental changes in the assumptions on which the business is run. It requires a different business.
Peter Drucker,"A Turnaround Primer"
...religious institutionalism happens when in the name of some convenience we set up a system to do what we must do ourselves so that over time the structures we create take on a life of their own.
In order to remain truly missional, established organizations need to be very aware of the dangers of institutionalization. Harvard's David K. Hurst (Crisis and Renewal - Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 2002) talks about the shifts in emphasis that take place in institutionalization in the metaphor of moving from being hunters to becoming herders. In his analysis the marks identifying this transition are that
Walter Henrichsen points out that "the reason that the church of Jesus Christ finds it so hard to stay on top of the great commission is the population of the world is multiplying while the church is merely adding. Addition can never keep pace with multiplication." (Walter Henrichsen, quoted in N. Cole, Cultivating a Life for God (Elgin, IL: Brethren Press, 1999),22
It is the unknown that defines our existence. We are constantly seeking, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions. We are explorers...
Cmdr. Benjamin Sisko, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Although we often hear about successful attempts to revitalize existing churches, the overall track record is very poor. Ministers report again and again that their efforts at organizational change did not yield the promised results. Instead of managing new, revitalized, organizations, they ended up managing the unwanted side effects of their efforts. At first glance, this situation seems paradoxical. When we observe our natural environment, we see continuous change, adaptation, and creativity; yet our church organizations seem to be largely incapable of dealing with change.
A lot of energy (and money) is put into the change program, with all the usual communication exercises, consultations, workshops, and so on. In the first few months, things seem to be changing, but gradually the novelty and impetus wear off and the organization settles back into something like its previous configuration. The reason for this is simple,though often overlooked - unless the paradigm at the heart of the culture is changed there will be no lasting change.
I discovered this time and again while working with my denomination. My aim was to try to cheat history by recovering a missional mind-set and a movement ethos as the central paradigm of the denomination. On reflection, we managed to get the missional part of the equation into the center, but we were not able to instill a movement ethos because of a deeply entrenched institutional paradigm at the heart of the organization. The problem is that most people see the church as an institution and not an organic movement (a living system), in spite of the fact that the Bible is replete with organic images of church and kingdom (body, field, vine, soil, etc.). In such a situation, all efforts at other changes are doomed to failure. The structures just revert back to default once the pressure of change is alleviated. The fact remains that for this very reason the vast majority of Christian institutions throughout history never renew and change. The institutional systems story informs so much of what we do. Machiavelli was right: "Nothing is more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than achieving a new order of things."
Ivan Illich was once asked what the most radical way to change society was; was it violent revolution or gradual reform? He gave a careful answer. Neither. Rather, he suggested, if one wanted to change society, then one must tell an alternative story.How true. We need to retell the story of the church and mission in light of the organic living systems perspective if we are to evolve into a genuinely missional church.
A note of warning for those leading in established churches: what Western Christianity desperately needs at the moment is adaptive leadership - people who can help us transition to a different, more agile, mode of church. Such leaders don't necessarily have to be highly creative innovators themselves, but rather people who can move the church into adaptive modes - people who can disturb the stifling equilibrium and create the conditions for change and innovation. By and large, many leaders in church organizations, particularly those with strong caring and teaching gifts, can exhibit a tendency to avoid conflict and too easily soothe tensions. Left unchecked, this can be lethal, because it caters to equilibrium and therefore ultimately to death.
Most churches start from dynamic and exciting adventures in evangelism and church planting, and at the end of their organizational life cycle they are usually miserable, static, institutions. And it appears that an essential part of the process is the movement form the early, more unstable, disequilibrium to that of a stable envionment of equilibrium. The early days of most churches or parachurches are experienced as unpredictable and wild but at the same time seem to filled with a kind of spiritual energy.
The history of missions is quite clear about this: Christianity is at its very best when it is on the more chaotic fringes. It is when church settles down, and moves away from the edge of chaos, that things go awry.
By and large, churches are very conservatine organizations, and after they have been around just a few years they can quickly become institutional...
...their primary orientation is often backward to an idealized past rather than forward to a new vision of the future. As such they are classic, often inflexible, institutions that enshrine an inherited tradition.
Here is the deal: the basic Christendom mode of church is simply unable to respond, because it was not made for this kind of fluidity. Most churches are too institutional, and therefore too clumsy in their inherited form, to be able to adapt and respond adequately to this missional environment. A useful comparison is between a supertanker and a speedboat. The tanker takes many miles just to stop or turn, but the speedboat maximizes on responsiveness. Our situation requires agility and adaptation and not solidity and fixedness. It's the age of the speedboat-style church. And it is happening ... a new species of Christian community is being born, and to use the technical phrase of this chapter, it is emergent as well as adaptive. Interestingly, the same process is happening in the corporate world. Tom Peters (Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution, London: Pan, 1987, 355) notes that excessive, unwieldy structure is "management's time bomb" in a rapidly changing, global environment. The smaller, more responsive organizations are the ones that will thrive in the new millennium.
No comments:
Post a Comment