Month: September 2008

Violence in Pop Culture – II

Posted on September 25, 2008

Editor of Paste, Josh Jackson, calls our attention to the prolific violence of American culture:

Violence in the media is a terrible thing. Except of course, for those great battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings…I am really repulsed by the idea of torture-porn flicks like Saw and Hostel, and don’t understand how anyone could enjoy watching them. And I’m bothered by games like Grand theft Auto that put you in the shoes of a gangster. Yet I gleefully watch Samuel L. Jackson burst onto the scene like the vengeful hand of God and lay waste to pathetic junkies in Pulp Fiction…From the Bible to the work of Cormac McCarthy, the best stories are filled with conflict, and often that takes the form of violent antagonists and heroes who fight for justice…So where’s the line?

Where is the line? For those that claim some kind of moral compass, where do we go when confronted by the onslaught of violence in media? Do we watch Ultimate Fighting or flip the channel? For the West, figures like Ghandi and Jesus seem to call us south of violence, to peace. Jesus commanded his disciples to put away swords, pursue peace, not be agitators, to turn the other cheek, and to set minds on things that are pure, and so on. When considering the Bible, there seems to be a conflicting ethic. War in the Old Testament and peace in the New. Does Jesus stand the OT war ethic on its head? I don’t think so. The descriptive war of the OT is not meant to be prescriptive for post-OT culture. After all the OT prophets longed for a time when “swords would be turned to plowshares.”There is a difference between Scripture using war imagery and actually watching war/fighting as entertainment.  For Christians, one question that needs answersing is: “Where is the ethical line between sport and violence in our imitation of Jesus?” Where do you draw the line in violence in pop culture, in the media? Why?

Stages of Organic Growth (or building missional teams)

Posted on September 24, 2008

In preparation for a Missional Core Teams workshop I am co-leading with Rick White at the Acts 29 Bootcamp in Dallas, I’ve been going back over my notes from the core team days of Austin City Life. For those interested, I am including a narrative timeline of our first 9 months of core team development. We tried to follow the Spirit organic style (and still try), so we never launched but have grown intentionally and steadily in gospel depth and number. Glory to God! So here are the Stages of Organic Growth we experienced.

Meals and Mission (1 month)

Our first three or four meetings focused on community and vision. Instead of holding “vision-casts” in which disconnected contacts came to an informational meeting and left disconnected, we started our meeting with home-cooked meals and fellowship. This became a hallmark of our missional communities (aka City Groups). The intention was to build the church on Jesus-centered community with a missional identity. We felt like we should emphasize relationships and vision first, which meant cultivating community and mission in the gospel.

Vision and Mission (2 months)

The next couple of months were spent imparting and discussing the core values of the vision of Austin City Life. This was conducted in a very dialogical fashion, which allowed the values to percolate and to be refined in our community. It also afforded us the opportunity to contextualize our values. For example, after a discussion regarding “truth,” “gospel,” and “word” as a core value, we deliberately chose not to use “gospel” terminology since “gospel” is so misunderstood in Texan Christian culture. We opted for truth. During this time I explored and encouraged non-Christian attendance. We had one conversion and several de-churched people attend or join. The resistant nature of many unchurched Austinites made building a mixed (Christian and non-Christian) missional core group very difficult.

Commitment Night

At the end of about three months, I met with each family and asked them to consider committing their time, creativity, spiritual gifts, and finances to the vision of ACL. This gave me an opportunity to field questions that had not been asked in public, filter prospective members, and receive encouragement regarding the Spirit’s work in our community. Then we had a commitment night in which we celebrated with a grand meal in our home, at a long table, and I gave some biblical and cultural reflections on being the church in Austin. I distilled the big vision into three very basic, biblical concepts that were easy to grasp. We ended with communion and worship.

Bible Study (2 months)

Next we moved into a phase that increased the elements of church by adding the authoritative component of teaching. I led them through a study I developed called Themes in Luke-Acts: The Seeds and Shape of the Missional Church. It was didactic and dialogical. It allowed our people to get a sense of my ability and style of teaching, as well as to grasp the biblical foundations for missional ecclesiology. Many remarked how studying the Bible strengthened their convictions and practice of missional church. Eventually this grew into a full-blown service that met in a really ugly office building, but it was centrally located and free. The main intention behind this meeting was to provide a final component of extended worship and preaching. We had 20-25 core people and floating visitors.

Strategy and Community (3 months)

After a sufficient depth of community and practice in mission was established, we introduced a strategy/community meeting that met for a much shorter amount of time during the week. This meeting ran in addition to our Saturday Bible Study/service and was aimed and cultivating deeper community, missional health, and ministry basic structures and leaders. I developed some Missional and Structural Health Indicators to guide us toward a “launch.” This ensured that basic ministries would be in place once we went public (Children, Worship, Hospitality). We corporately wrestled with timing of launch and if a launch was even necessary. During this time we introduced a monthly prayer meeting, training for City Group leaders, and deployed the City Groups prior to a public service. This was an intentional move to build the church on missional communities, not on a service.

Services and Children’s Ministry

We eventually moved into a city center location that we had been praying about for months. God dropped a killer theatre into our lap for way below market value. We moved into that venue and initiated Sunday morning services once our missional and structural health was in place. We did no advertising and simply invited people in our social networks, believers and unbelievers. We began to grow in our service and in our City Groups from the beginning. Children’s ministry took a lot of energy and was worth the effort. Lay leaders were critical.

This is an excerpt of a slightly longer document called Stages of Organic Growth.

Burn the Books!

Posted on September 24, 2008

Torch Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Book People! What if we burned books instead of read them? What if reading and reflection became passe? How would you fare? What if, instead of putting out fires, firemen started fires; they burned books and houses that had books in them? If they followed this set of rules:

  1. Answer alarm swiftly.
  2. Start fire swiftly.
  3. Burn everything.
  4. Report back to firehouse immediately.
  5. Stand alter for other alarms.

This is the world that Montag lives in, the world of Fahrenheit 451, until he meets a renegade thinker, a free-spirited girl who sometimes just sits and thinks. Sometimes she just puts her head back..and lets rain fall in her mouth. “It tastes like wine,” she says.

Have you tasted wine in the rain lately? Have you marveled at the rubbery, bifold shoot of St. Augustine grass that simply grows? Most of us would rather be distracted from reflection that reflect on distraction. As Mortimer Adler has pointed out, most of us would read for entertaiment and information, than for understanding and reflection. Yet, there are a myriad of soul-thrilling thoughts to be had, if we just stop to think. Moving beyond entertainment and information, in an age of information and entertainment, is certainly going against the grain. But so is burning books. Maybe it’s time we revisit our rules, to make sure we aren’t burning the wrong things.

Missional Church Refresher

Posted on September 23, 2008

The most helpful, readable introduction to missional ecclesiology I have found is Craig Van Gelder’s The Essence of the Church. Many readers were grateful for my partial review of his book The Ministry of the Missional Church. In The Essence of the Church, Van Gelder explains what the church is, its historical development (pros and cons), articulates a clear missional ecclesiology, and charts a way to organize the missional church.

I am currently working on a master document that re-roots our functional ecclesiology in biblical theology, while also outlining a long-term vision of mulitiplication and growth. I forgot that Van Gelder does some of this in Essence. I went back to Van Gelder for a refresher and have been wonderfully refreshed. He describes the church as “a people of God created by the Spirit to live as a missionary community.” Though this description doesn’t include the gospel, it captures the missional nature of the church very well. He certainly is gospel-centered and warns us that “Failing to understand the anture of the church can lead to a number of problems. Defining the church functionally—in terms of what it does—can shift our perspective away from understnading the church as a unique community of God’s people.” A good word. A good book, for that matter.