It's in the Genes

What does it say when your almost 5-year-old son's favorite shows are Extreme Engineering and How's It Made?

I always thought the fact that my brother and I turned out to be engineers to be a fluke of genetics, an anomaly from a family where the only engineers have been in-laws. But there must be some nerd-dom in there somewhere...because Jackson has it bad.

A Side Note on Authority

Before I move on to the next role in a renewed vision for five-fold ministry, I thought I'd take a slight detour and address something that came up in the comments of the previous two posts. The issue of authority came up, namely if you don't have one dude in charge somewhere along the line, what happens to aspects of these roles such as church discipline, doctrinal faithfulness, and obedience to a particular way of life? It's a good question and one I won't even come close to answering adequately in this post.

First of all, I appreciate the perspective of the person who brought it up who is a Catholic convert (Doug Coombs in the comments below). I certainly understand the argument that authority and obedience in spiritual matters is a tough pill to swallow in our culture. The god of autonomy is not something to be taken lightly. However, I wonder about the necessity of creating hierarchies of power in order for spiritual authority to operate the way God intends. Can spiritual authority operate among a group of people who are first and foremost committed to apprenticeship to Jesus and caring for one another without artificially constructed hierarchies? I believe it can. Abuses most often occur (both in Protestant and Catholic settings) when authority is assumed because of position and title and the Spirit is left out of the equation. This has happened in the church for a very long time.

Here's a example of how spiritual authority and the pastoral gift in a group context might work in the way I've been describing. A few years ago, a man in our church had an affair and was found out by his wife. We all were very close to this family and they were a integral part of our community. Myself and a few others counseled both him and his wife through the first few days and then we had our normal weekly worship gathering. I was quite unsure how the gathering would go or even if we should invite the family to come. Since we were a very small group, this event was devastating to everyone and had the potential to either draw us together or tear us apart. After receiving some counsel from some friends older and wiser than me, we decided to invite the couple to come. At the gathering, the community expressed a wide range of responses - anger, sadness, grief, but also joy that the truth had finally come out. There was great love expressed for the man and his family, but a recognition that his situation was grim if he did not turn away from the patterns he had developed.

In the end, the man did change and their marriage was saved. His choice to turn around his life was impacted greatly by the spiritual authority the group expressed, not by someone holding a title. A tremendous amount of authority resides in a group of people who have agreed to a certain direction or course of life. My research into Alcoholics Anonymous confirms how this is possible.

Hierarchies exist. No one can deny that or even their necessity to make things "go" in life. In the church, people exercise leadership gifts to make things "go". Sometimes they even need to rattle cages a little to stir a sleeping bride. It's easy to recognize these people and generally they are the type who just naturally lead like they eat, sleep, and walk. Within a community of faith, from time to time God needs to use an individual or a few to help the community navigate through a trial or difficult question. But it is my sincere belief that the Holy Spirit is perfectly capable of coordinating that leadership without our help. Rather, we should focus our attention towards "the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love."

Authority expressed by the Spirit through a community committed to maturity in Christ.

Family Photo Update

Finally!

Bishop Family Photos - Spring '06 - July '06

90% of workers can't afford typical home

This is the headline in our paper today. It is a very challenging problem. I wonder how we as a faith community could tackle this problem for real people. The COS community in DC (another very expensive place to live) has had millions of dollars go through their hands in order to help “real” people in their surrounding areas. They have purchased and gutted large apartment buildings and other crazy things for such a small group of people. Could we write grants and start some type of housing initiative? Maybe pool our resources and buy older homes in a depressed area and offer them at affordable prices? This is the reality in our area. How can we as the people of God respond? Anyone up for asking God what we can do? It will be risky because I am pretty sure His answer wont be to ignore it and say it is someone else’s problem.

Five-Fold Ministry – Part 2

In this second installment, I will talk about what the pastor role might look and sound like as a part of a new vision for five-fold ministry.  I know I’m skipping around a bit in the Ephesians verse, but it’s my blog.

I have a history with the word pastor because I was trained to be one, at least in the classic sense.  Again, from an evangelical perspective, the image that the word “pastor” invokes is fairly defined on surface issues yet carries with it a multitude of variations in its deeper practice.  Depending on your heritage, “pastor” might take on a dignified, elegant tone and bring to mind images of a gentle man presiding over a community’s spiritual needs.  It could also mean one who is an impassioned orator who weekly storms the stage pleading with the congregation to hear and live the word of God.  “Pastor” might look like a business executive, carrying out managerial responsibilities in the context of a frenetic entrepreneurial enterprise.  Or it could be the one the community looks to in times of crisis as a rock of stability and faith, having all the right words and prayers to say for any occasion.

There are other images of course, but the one thread that runs through them all is the singularity of one man or woman fulfilling the vision of what it means to be pastor in their specific context.  Without going into tremendous detail, I want to propose that we first abandon this singularity in order to build tension with the surface-oriented images of pastor.  A pastor is not a person who leads the church, preaches, holds office hours for counseling, heads the elder board, visits people in the hospital, officiates at weddings, and puts on a nice face to people in the community.  Those activities may have pastoral elements, and certainly a pastoral gifting would help in order to carry them out, but a pastor they do not make.

As an aside, I want to use an example that shows how difficult it is to navigate the cultural expectations of the pastorate with the need to redefine how the role of pastor truly operates in a transformed paradigm of church.  Today I was reading an interview Christianity Today did with Mark Driscoll, the influential and often controversial leader of Mars Hill Church in Seattle.  Here is the first question of the interview and Driscoll’s reply:

CT:  “How will your book, ‘Confessions of a Reformission Rev’, help other ministries?”  MD:  “My hope is that it will point to Jesus and help others see that without Jesus as our senior pastor, we are doomed to fail.”

Driscoll’s answer surprised me based on my impression of his strong pastoral style and hierarchical male-dominated leadership structure.  The idea of Jesus as our senior pastor is indeed a good one, at least in the sense of Jesus being the central figure that our lives individually and corporately point to.  However, I wonder how this idea might filter into the actual leadership and structural fiber of a church such as Mars Hill.  After reading the interview, I followed a link at the bottom of the page to Driscoll’s blog.  The first post was titled “Elder Government” and gave a link to notes from a talk Driscoll did for the Acts 29 network he leads.  The opening paragraph elaborates a bit on this “Jesus as Senior Pastor” idea and throws in the Holy Spirit for good measure:

“Jesus Christ is the apostle who plants a church (Hebrews 3:1), the senior pastor who leads the church (1 Peter 5:4), and the head of the church (Colossians 1:4; 2:10, 19) who grows and builds a church (Matthew 16:18) or shuts it down for becoming faithless and/or fruitless (Revelation 2:5). Additionally, it is the Holy Spirit who convicts people in the church of sin, gifts them for service, empowers them for fruitfulness, and selects the elders who are to lead the church.”

This is a wonderful, scriptural depiction of Jesus and the Spirit’s activity within the church as a whole.  Then something curious happens in the next paragraph:

“Even a cursory reading of the Bible reveals that when God wants to get something done He starts by selecting a dude to lead that change and works through that dude. Examples include sparing humanity (Noah), founding a nation (Abraham), liberating a nation (Moses), establishing a throne (David), building a temple (Solomon), preparing hearts (John the Baptizer), reaching Gentiles (Paul), and redeeming creation (Jesus). Therefore, a church cannot be successfully planted and expect to survive if it is not led by a dude who obediently follows God as He speaks through Scripture and leads through the Spirit.”

On the surface, that appears again to be a perfectly agreeable depiction of a biblical idea.  Yeah, God uses people to do His will.  We become His “hands and feet” if you will.  However, did you notice the subtle shift that occurred by Driscoll making this exegetical transition to create a platform for the rest of his discussion on elder government?  Where did Jesus and the Spirit go as the “senior pastor”, “head of the church”, convictor, gift-giver, empowerer, etc?  Did he say that “a church cannot be successfully planted and expect to survive if it is not led by a dude…”?  I thought Jesus was “the apostle who plants a church.”

Driscoll’s exegesis is correct, yet incomplete.  The fact is, God used those “dudes” in the Bible because his preferred way of dealing with humanity was either being resisted or was simply unavailable.  God used Noah because humanity had entirely closed its ears to their creator.  He used Abraham because of his obedience, but any listening and obedient nomad would have done just fine.  Moses was used because Israel had grown up as a people in the wrong land and had become slaves.  David was a wonderful choice for king, but isn’t there something in there about the people of Israel choosing to have a human king rather than God alone?  Solomon built the temple, but “will God really dwell on earth?” (1 Kings 8:27)  John prepared hearts because the teachers of the law had lost sight of the “signs of the times”.  Paul pushed the church to open itself to Gentiles because the obvious was being resisted by the other apostles.

In all these cases, God used someone to do something that couldn’t be done the preferred way or to clean up a mess that was created when the people of God forgot who they were, forgot who was King, and forgot they were living in his eternal kingdom.  If God has to hand-pick a person to do something no one else will do, it is usually not good news.  This is not business as usual in the kingdom.  Driscoll’s argument is that God chooses a “dude” to become the chief “dude among dudes” to lead a church.  But where does that leave the idea that Jesus is the Senior Pastor with the Spirit facilitating the inner workings of people growing into maturity who then bear fruit?  The navigational difficulties now begin to become apparent.

As a part of my vision for a renewed five fold ministry, I want to suggest a pastoral role that fits within the paradigm of Jesus as head of the church and the only “Dude” worth having around.

Pastor -> Spiritual Orienteer

Orienteering is a sport that I have never tried but has always piqued my curiosity.  It is a simple sport, but holds the unique synthesis of physical stamina and mental acuity under pressure in order to complete the course in the shortest time possible.  The closest I’ve ever come to participating in something like orienteering would be the scavenger hunts we used to have in college in Campus Crusade.  Our campus director would provide clues pointing us to obscure locations all over Gainesville.  Invariably, we would run from one location to the next, sweating, panting, and trying to make sense of some crazy riddle.  Although stressful at times, the joy of the scavenger hunt was watching the unique talents emerge from the group along the way.  One person would hunker down as the riddle solver focusing all their mental energy and producing answers to guide us to the next location.  Another would have a knack for navigation on the crowded Gainesville highways.  Someone else would race from the car to the place where the clue was hidden and back before any other teams could get theirs.  The best teams were the ones who could manage the frantic pace yet keep a calm enough demeanor to not drive 50 miles out of the way because of a wrongly interpreted clue.

Spirituality is confusing, exhausting, and downright frustrating at times.  But as with orienteering or scavenger hunts, learning how the riddles fit together and the compass points us along the path to the next point of discovery can be an exhilarating experience.  A good working definition of “spirituality” is the comprehensive and concrete practice of living life with the awareness of the presence and interaction of Someone or Something who is involved in us and our world.  In Christian Spirituality, that Someone is God the Father through Jesus by the Spirit and He is intimately invested in a preferred outcome for our life – living as his disciples as agents of his kingdom.  We are to be changed, transformed, to become like him, to be able to naturally and freely love and do good.  However, the path to entering this kind of life is not without tremendous struggle and travail.  Sometimes the riddles just don’t make any sense.  We lose our compass in the mud.  We get blisters and ankle sprains.  We get into fights with our teammates.  It rains.  The other teams hide the clues to the next location (which happened on more than one occasion in our Crusade hunts).  And most often, we just give up because working through the course is just too damn hard.

This is why God in his infinite wisdom and grace does not intend us to have one “dude” pointing the way.  We were never meant to go along for the ride while someone else solves the riddles, checks the compass and the map, and then marks out a path to the next checkpoint.  Pretty soon even the most rugged and experienced guide will get discouraged.  However, the greater chance is that they will from time to time (and even frequently in some cases) just be dead wrong.  Fifty miles later and not a clue in sight, you begin to wonder why you’re playing the game in the first place.

What is needed in this climate of uprooted and teeter-totter spirituality is for spiritual orienteers to emerge who understand that the game they are playing requires a supernatural level of guidance, wisdom, and stamina that can only come from God Himself.  They are people who are learning how to play the game in harmony with other orienteers and with the Spirit.  These are not guides who see themselves as the only person who will get the team from point A to point B.  Nor do they reduce the game to an individual effort that destroys the free-flowing leadership the Spirit provides to gently nudge (or forcefully push) the team to each goal.

So what might this five-fold role look like in practice?  Spiritual orienteers are the extreme sport junkies of the church.  They are not content to plod along with the status quo, adding badges to their spiritual Boy Scout uniforms.  They dive into the depths of God’s riches in prayer, in the Word, in His mind and His thoughts.  Together they search for answers to the growing-edge questions posed by the community.  They pursue the wisdom of other saints and guides that have gone before and completed the course.  Some are gifted in understanding about how God works and what He cares about.  Others point out new pathways the Spirit opens to deeper maturity and fruit.  And some are like Forrest Gump carrying injured Bubba’s and Lieutenant Dan’s out of the jungle just as fast as their legs can go.  None of these orienteers need a title or a salary to do their job.  Some may be resourced by the community for a time for a particular purpose.  However, the true orienteer is in the game for the pure joy of getting to the next level and helping others do the same.  He or she has the same mindset Paul had in his Ephesians 4 vision for the church:

“…to prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”

This is true pastoring.  The “Dude” is Jesus.  We get to be in his game and play according to his rules, which really aren’t rules at all but a flowing stream of love, wisdom, and power that we collectively tap into.  The spiritual orienteers are the ones not afraid to get sweaty and dirty.  They often get tired, which is why there must be plenty of them to go around.  But their value to the community’s health and fruitfulness is essential and irreplaceable.  

The Pride of Europe

I watched the last 30 minutes of the World Cup final yesterday, about like when I annually watch the last three laps of the Daytona 500 or the Kentucky Derby. Sports I generally don't spend too much time following. So I guess I fall into the general category of "American Sports Watcher", which places football at the top, followed by baseball, basketball (college for me), and golf. Soccer is nowhere on the map. This hierarchy is looked at with much disdain around the world, particularly in Europe. After all, soccer is the more evolved sport, more universal, technical, revered for its elegance and grace than anything those silly Americans follow. Therefore, those who love and follow soccer must be more evolved, intelligent, or shall we say...enlightened.

Well, to use an enlightened British phrase...bullocks!

The last moments of the world championship for this supposed "highly enlightened sport" left me with hollow taste in my mouth, much like a cheap American beer. Sure, there was drama and a showcase of skill under pressure, but one moment spoiled the whole match, the World Cup in general, and why I have zero tolerance for soccer elitism.

Zidane's head butt was the single worst display of sportsmanship or discipline (and you could say maturity) I have ever witnessed in all my years of watching sports. You could name instances of equally shocking behavior on the field of play, but none that I can think of that were as devastating to both team and individual athlete. He lost the World Cup for France, period. France had Italy on the ropes and may have scored before the end of overtime had he not been ejected. According to the announcers, he was also one of their best penalty kickers which would have replaced the one guy for France who missed his kick. But the fact that he was playing in his last game seals the deal for me. What an incredibly selfish, childish act.

Hey, guess what Europe! Just because you sit at the top of the "world's sport" and look down your noses at us stupid Americans watching our football and baseball, don't think for a second you are immune from the ruin of the human soul, the self-absorbed infancy that comes through the worship of sport, talent, or any other human achievement.

Five-Fold Ministry - A New Vision

Church leadership debates invariably point to a well-worn passage written by Paul to the church at Ephesus:
 
"And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ..."
 
Three primary responses to this passage have become anchoring points for various facets of the church.  The fundamentalist or dispensational view holds that the roles of apostles and prophets were extinguished at the creation of the biblical canon, so any discussion about the need for an apostolic or prophetic gifting is quickly dismissed.  The pentecostal view holds these to be active, necessary roles for the church today and seeks to identify specific people and set them apart to operate full-time in these roles.  A third, middle-ground view sees the roles as available and necessary for the church today, but typically only names pastors, teachers or evangelists into full-time positions and not prophets or apostles.
 
The debate between the first two views is extraordinarily tired and I do not even want to broach the subject.  I have typically been a part of churches who have held to the third view, although I'm now beginning to see some definite problems with it in practice.  First of all, it is contradictory to make an argument why the prophetic or apostolic role should not be professionalized, yet place so much emphasis on the necessity for a professional pastorate / teacher.  There has been much discussion of late regarding the need to recapture the role of apostle in the church, although people who act as apostles are constantly tripping over themselves to not use the word "apostle" or "apostolic".  Prophets have a bit of an easier time, at least in charismatic circles.  But when was the last time you heard the word "prophet" in a conservative evangelical setting used as something other than a euphemism?
 
I would like to suggest a fourth way, playing off the third, that may be helpful for those of us trying to make sense of leadership that is biblical, non-professional, serves rather than governs, and fits within a variety of new paradigms of church.  This fourth way begins by renaming the roles in a way that better suits their operation within these paradigms.  Along with new names, I will provide some commentary on what these roles might look like in practice, who might fill them, and what might be some steps to seeing these roles mature if you are starting with a third view perspective.

Before I begin though, it might be helpful to pre-empt the conversation by making a comment about the nature of Christian leadership.  It is clear through even a casual reading of the New Testament that Christian leadership is unique as forms of human leadership go.  In fact, you could make the argument that using the word “leadership” might be overstated given the picture the New Testament paints of the five fold roles.  “Equipping the saints” is not as glamorous a job as it first appears.  Following Jesus’ wisdom, “The greatest among you shall be your servant,” the five fold ministries seem to fit better under the heading of “Maintenance Personnel” rather than “Managerial Staff”.  What if these roles comprise the public works of the church?  These are the men and women cleaning the sewers, stocking shelves at the library, teaching history to immigrants, policing the streets in the middle of the night.  Each task is critical and valuable, but mostly unseen and quiet.  The real work is done by average people doing the stuff “out there” in the real world.  Quite a different context for Christian leadership, don’t you think?

So, if you are still reading, let’s dive into the roles themselves.  I’ll present one today and more in successive days as I have time.
      
Apostle - Wide Area Networker

Paul lists apostle first, which should automatically tell us something important about apostles.  We typically think of the early apostles as having this happy-go-lucky lifestyle, traveling all over the Mediterranean, preaching, planting churches, healing people, and writing scripture on the side.  Something tells me they wouldn’t have seen it in exactly the same light.  I love Paul’s reality check in 1 Corinthians 4:

“For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men.  We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are wise in Christ.  We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute.  To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands.  When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat.  We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things.”

Wow, that sounds attractive!  Sign me up!  But yet we still have this glamorous, idealized image of apostleship that distorts an indispensable role necessary for the church’s bleeding edge.  Instead of abandoning the role, what if it was recast as someone who gives themselves to connect the church in life-giving ways?  We might call such a person a “Wide-Area Networker”.

All of us live in an immense web of interconnected networks that relate on countless levels and through a variety of means.  It is still shocking sometimes to think that only four years ago I was unsure if anyone outside of my immediate context or direct relationships had similar questions about church and the Christian life as I did.  Within weeks of starting our first blog, I was getting emails from all over the U.S. and as far away as New Zealand giving us encouragement and sharing similar stories.  Now, some of those connections have turned into deep relationships between people and faith communities that will last for life.  The speed and accessibility to people and ideas the internet provides has literally made some of the more formal and traditional means for connection obsolete.  If we take seriously what Paul says is one of the aims of the five fold ministry, to “attain to the unity of the faith,” then the internet is potentially one of the most powerful tools available for encouraging that end.  Petty theological arguments aside, those with a mind towards connecting the church for the sake of the kingdom have at their fingertips an incredible advantage over their counterparts just a short ten or fifteen years ago.

Wide-Area Networkers (WANs) function very much like the servers they utilize to transfer emails and data from the web all around the world.  They are the servers of the church, creating pathways for people to be in communion with their brothers and sisters who gather in homes or ornate cathedrals and everything in between.  In this way, their function is extremely utilitarian relative to the real work of the church – announcing the kingdom in word and deed.  They may garner recognition and admiration for their abilities, but in the end they are really not much more than a conduit for relationship, blessing, encouragement, compassion, grace, and love to pass between outposts of God’s church.  A spectacle indeed.

So who can fill this role?  Well, it certainly doesn’t require a degree or a full time salary.  However, it does require a willingness to drop some of the traditional ministry aspirations that plague the church’s ability to facilitate unity.  WANs are not primarily concerned with building their “brand” (i.e. denomination or particular church flavor).  Instead, they seek to enable productive interactions between dissimilar segments of the church in order for the focus to be shifted back towards God’s purposes and his heart.  It’s about the kingdom, silly!  Typically, WANs have a very simple and singular message.  They tell stories – the same stories – over and over and over.  But it is these stories that get underneath the skin of sectarian tendencies and draw the church together.  Pretty soon, you find Catholics and Baptists sharing notes and trading ideas, Vineyard people and Presbyterians confessing their love for a particular author, or a house church leader and a megachurch youth pastor sharing coffee at their favorite cafe.  

One excellent example of a fairly well-known WAN is Andrew Jones.  The tallskinnykiwi is a blog-father to many of us, but I believe his greater gift has been to model what it might look like to be a connecting node in the wide area network of church and to culture in general.  His contribution to the emerging church conversation (not simply to the organization called Emergent, but to the conversation regarding how the church transitions in light of a rapidly changing society) is incalculable.  As I’ve read his blog over the last few years, I’ve noticed him continually building up those he comes in contact with and spending time encouraging pilgrims and kingdom workers from all over the world.  His family has moved too many times to count, but it seems that everywhere they land they immediately begin ministering locally while continuing to connect globally.  There is an inherent playfulness in Andrew’s reporting of their life and ministry that seems to come from a deep awareness that he is not building God’s kingdom, but is simply living in its ebb and flow.  That awareness is the key to fruitfulness as a Wide Area Networker.

More to come…

I'm Not Dead

We did make it home okay. And I am working on a new blog post today...hopefully finish it up tonight.

It's raining now. I like rain.