Category: Gospel and Culture

What Good is Truth in Hard Times?

In Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, the central character tries to escape an oppressive government by crossing the border with forged documents. She recalls her family’s drive to the border: “We turn onto the freeway, head north, flowing with not much traffic. Since the war started, gas is expensive and in short supply. Outside the city we pass the first checkpoint…Back on the road, he squeezes my hand, glances over at me. You’re white as a sheet, he says. That is how I feel: white, flat, thin. I feel transparent. Surely they will be able to see through me” (85). Eerily close to home, isn’t it. Gas prices up, the war, tension, insecurity, longing for escape?

A recent study from the Pew Foundation reveals that middle-class Americans believe that they are “not moving forward in life.” Of course, we don’t need statistics to tell us that when one look at the media frenzy over U.S. economics and consumer spending will do. Nevertheless, the point remains. There is tension at home. Gas prices are going up. Some of us are driving less, a malaise of economic insecurity coats the country. Some of us feel like escaping, but to where? Nothing like financial insecurity to push out our greater insecurities, our lack of hope for the future. So what do we do? We make up a better future. The Pew Foundation reports that despite current feelings about personal progress, many of “the American middle class are optimistic about the future. Most are confident that their quality of life in five years will be better than it is now. And, gazing farther ahead, most expect their children to do better in life than they themselves have done.”

Where does such blind optimism come from? We can not see 2013, much less the age of the next generation. What are we to do? Create hope out of thin air and breathe on it for good luck? Or is there something more hope-worthy in what seems to be hard times? Regardless of our economic future, we are always in need of security and peace. And, it seems to me, that those things spring from truth, not optimism. We can feel secure about things we know are true because they are reliable. Middle-class wish-fulfillment is not reliable. What is reliable is truth.

This past weekend I attended a family birthday celebration of my grandfather’s 80th birthday. You’d think he is 65 by his healthy glow, amazing. Just prior to dinner, George Dodson stood up and shared three things with us. I’ll comment one one. We were rapt in attention. Sage words from eighty year soul we all love and respect. He quoted a verse of Scripture from 3 John 4: “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.” He looked out over his posterity, full of emotion, and exulted in children who walk in the truth. Striking.

He did not say he was full of joy because of the great future of our careers or families. He did not exult even in the character and fortitude of his offspring. Instead, he took heart in truth, truth in Word and in his children’s ways. Why? Because truth lasts and truth blesses. In the same letter, John goes on to encourage the church in missional acitivity—putting others needs before their own in order to secure for them a future grounded in truth—and then closes with a benediction of “peace be to you.” Peace? How? Peace in persecuted times, peace in our times? And so my grandfather closed his remarks: “There may not be peace in this country, but you can always walk in the truth.”

Consolations of Theology

Robust theology meet real life. This anticipated volume tackles practical issues such as Anger, Obsession, Despair, Anxiety, Disappointment, & Pain with historical-theological acumen. Drawing from the wisdom of Augustine, Bonhoffer, & Lewis, erudite theologians show just how nitty gritty theology can get. The Consolations of Theology is due out in June. Click here for the TOC.

Cultivating Missional Communities

In order to lead the development and multiplication of healthy missional communities, it is critical to understand what a healthy missional community is and how to cultivate missional communities. Good friend and former church planting “partner”—during college, in a minority neighborhood, living in a sub-health code trailer, in Denton, Tx, without a clue about what church planting was—Michael Stewart, has done a five part post on MCs that will helps us answer these questions.

Leading Missional Communities

Leading our church into somewhat uncharted waters, I am constantly on the look out for helpful influences in cultivating missional communities, what we call City Groups. City Groups are local, urban missional communities of disciples who redemptively engage people and culture. These groups are intended to foster the church being the church to one another and to the city and world. They meet in homes three weeks in a row and on mission in their communities every fourth week. Each CG has been charged with the task of finding a strategic social partnership, through which they can be a blessing to the social needs of Austin, while also learn how to love the city better. City Groups are the lifeblood of Austin City Life.

The influences I have found profitable are few and far between. So many models and methods of the church are not based on missional ecclesiology. However, the resources that have shaped my thinking and our practice have been good. Churches like Soma, Providence, and Kaleo. Books like The Missional Church, The Forgotten Ways, Exiles, Missional Leader, Total Church have been a help. But nothing beats personal reflection and prayer as we do our best to express the call of the church in the world.

I am currently working on new curriculum for our City Groups that covers the biblical storyline, while also discovering the place of the 21st century North American in that larger Story. It’s called The Story of Scripture and Our Place in It. Tim Chester’s The World We All Want has been some help as I reflect on how to cultivate gospel thinking and living at the intersection of the biblical and personal stories. The challenge is to always keep the missional nature of the church in view as I write the material. It is so easy to fall back into “Bible Study” mode. Yet, as Alan Roxburgh has pointed out, “these ministries of leadership are given to enable the church to carry out its fundamentally missiological purpose in the world: to announce and demonstrate the new creation in Jesus Christ” (Missional Church, 185). Alan also points out that “leaders will need to become like novices, learning to recover practices that have become alien to current church experience…it requires waiting and listening to the Spirit’s directions…in a strange land” (199).

My hope and prayer is that we are listening to the Spirit’s directions in Austin. That direction has led us to build our church on City Groups, not Sunday services. These City Groups are based on four principles and four practices (that will, no doubt, be revised in the months and years to come), which shape our identity and practice of being a missional church. I look forward to continuing to learn from and with Austin City Life and the larger missional Church.