Embracing Risk

I'm starting to understand why writers always post things about getting rejected a zillion times before they are finally published.  This is the second Reading Report I wrote for class.  Extra effort.  More explanation.  Better grammatical structure.  Less sleep.  More focus.  2 percentage points lower.

Lovely.

The mere fact that I am posting it anyway given my gunner tendencies should tell you how much I loved these books - highly recommend both.

SYNOPSIS/OVERVIEW:

     Arriving at a destination requires planning, intentionality, and a clear sense not only of where one is coming from, but where it is they wish to go.  This is as seemingly simple as it is obvious.  Landing on definitions of the means of transportation for the trip, however, can be a challenging task.  Both The Faith of Leap: Embracing A Theology of Risk, Adventure & Courage (“Faith of Leap”) by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch and Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church (“Kingdom Conspiracy”) by Scot McKnight set out on their own explorations of challenging readers to rethink the purpose of their own [missional] lives.  Is it about us, or is it about God?  The answer ultimately shapes not only our personal journeys but our corporate missional journey as well.

     Kingdom Conspiracy takes an ecclesio-centric view of the kingdom in an effort to refocus our attention back on the church as the crux of God’s plan.  McKnight immediately plunges into an extremely thinly-veiled and dichotomous stereotype of “Skinny Jeans Kingdom” (social activists) and “Pleated Pants Kingdom” (evangelicals), luring the reader into his point that “Kingdom theology” is on the rise.  But this statement begs the more pressing underlying question he asks and answers throughout the book… what is the kingdom? 

     In fact the more granular question both books seek to answer is this: what is kingdom in this world as it relates to the church and its mission?  McKnight argues that if we fail to understand the kingdom’s connection to the church, we will get lost on our journeys as we look to find the place of redemption.  “There is no kingdom outside the church,” he writes. (McKnight, 2014, p. 87). Frost and Hirsch agree: “The Christian community, at least as Jesus intended it, is one of the most exciting aspects of the gospel experience: the church is the frontier of the kingdom” (Frost & Hirsch, 2011, p. 22). 

IN CONVERSATION

     To illustrate his Skinny Jeans-Pleated Pants viewpoints, Scot McKnight recounted a dinner conversation among a group of pastors, whereby one pastor indicated that each of the seven mission trips he had been on “had nothing to do with telling people about Jesus or establishing a church or teaching the Bible, but with service projects like building medical facilities” (p. 3).  When McKnight asked that pastor if the young man leading those mission trips used the word ‘kingdom’ for what he was doing, the pastor responded affirmatively:  “Over and over” (p. 3).  Admittedly, McKnight says that the last thing the pastor uttered in summary was the most haunting to him:  “These young adults, God bless ‘em, think ‘kingdom’ has nothing to do with ‘church’” (p. 3).

     How anyone can miss this is an almost affront to the three authors; yet while in agreement over that conundrum, the approach of the books varies somewhat.  Kingdom Conspiracy does a fantastic job of pointing out what we all know but are perhaps afraid to say for fear of being socially/politically or hypocritically unacceptable, and that is - the Skinny Jeans activists are all about redeeming society while the Pleated Pants folks are all about redemption for the individual.  The brilliance of McKnight is that he says both are looking in the wrong place!  “The primary locus of redemption is in the local church” (p. 85). And, he further asserts in a bold reproach to the evangelical consensus (of “the kingdom of God” referring to God’s redemptive rule and not His people) that au contraire, you Pleated Pants wearers!…”The kingdom of which Jesus speaks is a people governed by a king” (p. 74).

     When critics and scholars lay out two opposing viewpoints, they typically compromise in the middle after pointing out each side’s strengths and weaknesses.  Scot McKnight doesn’t take that approach whatsoever.  Instead of arbitrating, he basically calls out all the players by telling them to get in the [right] game: the one which exemplifies the storyline of Scripture, precisely Israel’s story and what “kingdom” meant to the Jews. 

     To that end, while Kingdom Conspiracy goes on to discuss how the conveying and spreading of the kingdom story in an effective and contextual manner ought to be done, Faith of Leap primarily conveys how those doing it ought to live (adventurously, courageously).  McKnight’s opinion is that our understanding of the biblical storyline affects our mission insofar as it requires conversion (i.e. repentance and faith are described as a “surrender” to King Jesus) and discipleship (being mastered by the Scriptural story).  For him, spiritual growth is linked to the kingdom’s inauguration. “To the same degree that the kingdom has been inaugurated in Jesus, the kingdom can be realized among us.  To the degree that the kingdom has not yet been realized, it cannot be lived out in the present” (p. 39).  Frost and Hirsch meanwhile, continue to pump us up by playing to the inner adventurers and believers that we all are, or could/should desire to be by having courage and “learning to live for something that is more important than our own safety” (-Scott Bader-Saye, PhD, Duke University; p. 34).

     Contextually, McKnight shows how Jesus’ kingdom story set him against five competing stories (including the Pharisees, the Essenes, and the Zealots) and surmises that likewise, faithfulness in the kingdom mission means we must embed kingdom realities in our own context, purposefully countering the ruling stories at work in our world today.  Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch call that “holy urgency,” and they could not be more adamant about its importance in the combined realms of living, learning, and leading in all areas of missional orthopraxy.    

     Faith of Leap has one primary focus as it relates to kingdom and church – the inhabitants.  Frost and Hirsch bravely venture into relatively uncharted waters by exploring the risk, adventure, liminality and the absolute necessity of communitas people are willing to take for church, discipleship, mission and themselves.  Between examples of men from Abraham (his somewhat “unbalanced” action put him and his large household at risk) and J.R.R. Tolkein (his Lord of the Rings Trilogy exemplifies the struggle of good vs. evil and requires nothing less than everything, the “giving up” of our lives in favor of a quest that is never a matter of one’s own desire but rather one’s calling), their book inspirationally screams to its readers that we have become complacent in the church today because the church today is not in crisis.  There is no tension.  The Western church and its inhabitants have been cruising along at such a big, safe, fictitious-growth-results rate that it has not only become stagnant, it has become the most vulnerable it has been in longer than anyone living today can remember.  The real outcome (and rub) of that vulnerability is that we find ourselves right now, in this day, in the position “of the utmost missional importance for church (people) to be as we are meant to be, yet we live in a post-Christian, post-Christendom world, and the result is that seventeen centuries of “Western church” have effectively inoculated our culture against the gospel (p. 21).

     That prevention of gospel-spreading, Faith of Leap (and I) would argue, stems from the absence of any real tension or liminality in people.  It is exactly what is rendering church, kingdom, people and mission paralytic.  Hearts are unmoved.  Where are our hearts?  They are bored, they are selfish, they are safe, and they are uninspired.  Thus, we are unable to breathe any new life into anything or anyone.  There is no [communitas] quest which requires a “by all means necessary” sacrifice, which in and of itself is mind-boggling.  How can we know the gospel message and NOT employ that mentality to share it with those who don’t?   As Frost and Hirsch say, “it is clear that opting for more of the same is not going to resolve our problems.  We must be willing to dream again, to innovate, and to risk the rejection of peers who think that the status quo is sufficient to the task” (p. 24).  Crisis in some real sense was normative for the church of Jesus, just as it is today where gospel growth is highest – in persecuted churches in persecuted countries.

     “Rediscovering the meaning of the word “movement” and relinquishing being administrators of a stifling status quo, or worse, purveyors of fine religion,” is what Faith of Leap urges us to do, because if we do this, we will experience the same spiritual renewal and passion pervaded in the New Testament (p. 24).  Frost and Hirsch further remind us that we are people born of the missio Dei, which means that the church is a result of the missionary activity of God and not the producer of it (p. 21). Thus, the church is defined by its mission and not the other way around!  The mission of redemption is not yet fulfilled; therefore, we are still on the Journey and we had better get a move on, i.e. act instead of sitting around doing more of nothing.

SUMMARY/BUILDING/OUTTAKES

     Summarily, perhaps the best statement to describe the heartbeat of both books is as follows:  “In order to rediscover church as missional adventure, we will have to start by reJesusing the church” (Frost & Hirsch, p. 24).  As we have seen, the church equals kingdom equals people; thus people – as in we, the communitas “we” - need to start by reJesusing ourselves.  We need to stop asking ourselves the wrong question of where the church fits into society.  Why would we want to fit into society anyway…has anyone seen it lately? Seriously, do we even have any vision?

      Instead we should be asking how society is summoned into God’s society (McKnight, p. 111).  We must risk ourselves to the truth that we believe is true, and we must stake our lives on the person and promises of God.  For in order to take a proper Faith of Leap, we have to have the courage to see things differently and step out into the unknown with little more than a commitment to the vision of what Jesus wants from His world.   

     Is it about us, or is it about Him?

WORKS CITED

Frost, Michael and Alan Hirsch.  The Faith of Leap: Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure, & Courage. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011.

McKnight, Scot.  Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church.  Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2014.

Subjective Grading

So the good news is, 97% is still an A and the color gray continues to work on my former-entire-life-black-and-white-wait-why is this not 100 percent?-mentality.  All I gotta say is, there must be a reason the colors of a rainbow are ROY-G-BIV.

If you want to check out two good reads about some different viewpoints on how to "do" evangelism, I recommend these two - just not as much as the next two I'm about to post.  Oh and P.S.  "glocal" is a word even though your brains and spell check will tell you differently...

SYNOPSIS/OVERVIEW

     The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the following two books:  Christian Mission in the Modern World (“Christian Mission”) by John Stott, updated and expanded by Christopher J.H. Wright, and Global Church:  Reshaping Our Conversations, Renewing our Mission, Revitalizing Our Churches (“Global Church”) by Graham Hill.

     Insofar as the ongoing and apparently age-old deliberation between “evangelical” and “ecumenical” churches are concerned with uncovering the best approach to mission, likewise are both books.  At the highest-level and briefest first-blush description, Christian Mission is evangelically skewed while Global Church is ecumenically skewed…and that might be the understatement of the year.  Stott was writing in the context of the 1960s and 1970s and states in the preface that he was “immediately plunged into the thick of contemporary debate about the meaning of mission” when he found himself amidst one of four experiences which served as catalysts for his writing.  Out of the gate, Stott acknowledges unapologetically that he is a Christian of “evangelical” conviction, but seeks only to be fair in his assessment of other viewpoints while, at the same time, critical of himself in the process.  The book’s undertone was successful in doing so, yet his emphasis on biblical revelation at the forefront of all mission temperature-taking could not be concealed.  He states that a broader consensus on the meaning and obligation of “mission” is unlikely ever to be reached unless “an agreed biblical hermeneutic is found.”  While many points in his book are valid and presented both clearly and fairly, as fairly goes in this debate, the resounding oxymoron in his chief concern of bringing ecumenical and evangelical thinking to the same “independent and objective test: that of biblical revelation” could not be missed.

     Nor could one miss any of the blatant non-objective viewpoints which Graham Hill brings to the table in Global Church.  The dedication to “the African, Asian, Caribbean, Eastern European….” was a pretty clear indication of how the book was going to be presented, and it did not disappoint!  Just as one may read works by Gloria Steinem and think, “Wow, she hates men,” likewise when reading Global Church it is exceptionally easy to think, “Wow, Graham Hill hates the Western church and all its elitist mentality with a fierce passion.”  However, as you dig deeper into what Gloria Steinem’s underlying declaration of equality was truly about, you find a much larger message behind the defensive façade of rejection, disunity, and opposing sides.  And so too is it the exact case with Graham Hill’s Global Church.

IN CONVERSATION

     Even though both books come across to the reader with a different spin on mission and how one ought to spread the gospel, the authors agree on both interesting and substantial points.  Firstly, they wholeheartedly are in tandem with regard to the integral mission itself.  In in simplest form, it is agreed that there must be a proper understanding and communication of the Christian faith, i.e. The Gospel.  While there is definite variance in form when it comes to the communication portion of that statement, they are both unwavering in what is to be understood as paramount to the overall mission:  that there is a responsibility among human beings to be salt to the world in a transformational way.  Contextualizing that effort will look different in its manifestation, but the incarnation of God’s love for the world manifested in Christ cannot be denied.  “Contextual mission is incarnational.” (Hill, 2016, p. 52).

     Hill points out that “the words and deeds of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit show us the ultimate form of contextual mission.” (p. 52).  That words and deeds need to constantly and continually match in order to be true to our mission was easily agreed upon in both books.  GlobalChurch states the integral mission “has to do with the basic issue of the integrity of the church’s life, the consistency between what the church is and what it proclaims, (FN); Christian Mission clearly points to Jesus coming to serve “in deeds as well as in word, and it would be impossible in the ministry of Jesus to separate his works from his words” (Stott, 2015, p.24).  The sense which was intimated throughout both reads is that mission, no matter the difference(s) in approach, cannot be hypocritical.  Where Stott sees social action as a partner of evangelism, Hill sees the two as each demanding integrity.  The integrity of the church’s life (i.e. mission) must maintain consistency between what the church is and what it proclaims.  Word must match deed.  Do what you say.  Say what you mean.  Do not waiver when you are in a Western culture nor when you are in Majority World culture – but make no mistake, go to both.  Do not be a hypocrite and expect others to either listen or believe you’re without agenda when you are acting in just cause to meet the world’s social needs.

     To that end, both authors understand that there is a necessary combination of acting and speaking the gospel.  It was resoundingly evident that Hill believes Western churches fail miserably in thinking about let alone addressing in action the social injustices in our world today.  And while both author’s agree that God’s primary relationship is to the world, Stott believes that the priority of evangelism (as seen in the Lausanne Covenant which both books also address) should be in the knowing, i.e. speaking, of the gospel because in his view, “Is there anything so destructive of human dignity as alienation from God through ignorance or rejection of the gospel?” (Stott, 2015, p. 58).  He welcomingly goes on to say, “the fact that God disclosed himself in terms of particular culture does not give us another justification for rejecting his revelation, but rather the right principle by which to interpret it, and also the solemn responsibility to reinterpret it in terms meaningful to our own culture. (Stott, 2015, p. 63).  

     Again, there is consensus among authors that all cultures must be addressed, with less concern for the “results” of evangelism and the utmost concern for the truth of the good news, delivered by culturally relevant means.  It is a global world, and while sometimes that is scary in its perceived “preoccupation with social change that leaves little or no room for evangelistic concern,” we certainly cannot fail to have “comparable concern or compassion for people’s spiritual hunger.” (Stott, 2015, p. 19).  Polarization is not a workable solution. Both authors quote Rene Padilla with regard to the ethical aspect of mission in a global world.  Padilla states that “without ethics there is no real repentance.”  And clearly since biblical ethics includes more than just our own personal piety, as in also our social engagement, he goes on to make this significant and provoking assertion: “Thus social responsibility becomes an aspect not of Christian mission only, but also of Christian conversion.”  On this, both authors stand arm in arm.  It’s just that Hill’s arm span seems to be a little longer and his grasp a little tighter…

SUMMARY/BUILDING/OUTTAKES

     GlobalChurch asks, in sort of an all-encompassing question for which both books ultimately seek the answer: “how do we deliberately cultivate glocal conversations in our biblical interpretation?” (Hill, 2016, p. 39).  The inverse can be asked as well (as one might rightly deduce would be found in Christian Mission), “how do we deliberately cultivate biblical interpretation in a glocal world?”  Intentionality.  Or, as Hill refers to it – attention.  “Glocal theology does NOT need to accept all the assumptions or assertions of postcolonial or Majority World thought, but it DOES need to engage with them and take them seriously.  We need to practice the art of attention, being especially attentive to those who are different to us” (Hill, 2016, p. 39). 

     Our views can, and often do, become so narrow in focus that we fail to realize God created the whole world, not just the rural county in which we live.  He created literally everything, and, as both authors also concur, our responsibility as missionaries (because we all are) is to be the salt and light of the world, acting and speaking in solidarity.  Individual cities sitting on a hill reaching each and every city, people group, environment – all of creation - below it.

     At one point, Hill discusses the observations he had while in the Majority World.  Specifically, he was astounded that folks in those areas are intimate with their bibles.  They are intimate with each other.  They are intimate in corporate, community, and neighborhood prayer.  They are intimate about living.  That in and of itself is different for many people living in the Western world.  Perhaps if we depended on God and His Word as much as others in our world demonstrate on a daily basis, we would actually know how to respond – in both word and action.  And perhaps that is exactly the point Hill was trying to unabashedly make.  I think the guy would actually help us get up from that bus which he so skillfully threw us under.

     But then again, maybe some of us deserve to hang out there a while.  Or at least long enough to be transformed by the understanding that mission is not black and white.  Instead of looking through our own shallow lenses, we would be best served by ditching our own taxonomies in favor of simple obedience to the totality of the Bible’s commission on the lives of God’s people.  For ultimately, those partners in evangelism are for life. 

WORKS CITED

Stott, John and Christopher J.H. Wright.  Christian Mission in the Modern World. Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2015.

Hill, Graham.  Global Church: Reshaping Our Conversations, Renewing Our Mission, Revitalizing Our Churches.  Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2016.

Inhumane

I had the pleasure of attending Mars Hill church in Grand Rapids this morning.  Peter Rollins delivered the message.  If either he or Mars Hill are new to you, Google them because a) you should and b) I'm too mentally drained to hit the link icon on here.  One of us gets to be lazy right now, and I vote me.

His message was this: don't change.  We each are already accepted.  Just as we are.  We spend countless sleepless nights and wasted daytime hours trying to accept the fact that we are accepted. And we fail to believe it - over and over again.  Even though we know better, our pasts have dictated otherwise, so we exert repeatable behaviors to our continued demise.  Our continued, ridiculous, exhausting, saddening relational demise.

Here's the rub.  If we don't choose to fully believe it (i.e. behave differently, as in be transformed), then we wreck our relationship with God.  And if we don't choose to fully believe it with others, we wreck our relationships with them.

Does anyone else's head never quit?  Like it's a freaking tennis match and the volley is literally never going to cease?

I find myself playing the worst match of my life right now - trying to use this semblance of athleticism to run all over the court, left, right, front, back, faster, faster, get there!  Seriously, just hit the stupid ball and score already!...instead of skillfully relying on the past knowledge that I have played tennis before and that even if I hit a terrible shot or throw multiple games because my head is directly up my rear, my partner still accepts me.

Peter Rollins started out his phenomenally delivered message by saying humans are a mess.  It's why there's no such thing as "indogmane" or "incatmane" - only inhumane.

Maybe that's why old single dudes end up with the proverbial man's best friend and old single chicks end up with 30 cats.

Thank God I am not an animal lover.