Missio Madison: Cohort for Missional Practioners

I'm excited to announce this project that has been in the works for more than a year! 

Missio Madison is an incubator and cohort for local missional practioners. We exist to provide a community in which followers of Jesus can collaboratively exegete Madison and discern God's call into fresh forms of Christian community and mission.  Launching in January 2020, the Missio Madison cohort will gather monthly on the fourth Friday (noon-4pm) through April for training and conversation. Participants will also meet monthly with a coach and two other participants to lean in to their growing edges. In addition, the cohort will experience an overnight retreat for spiritual renewal and discernment (March 23-24, 2020).

Missio Madison participants will:

• cultivate sustaining friendships among peers in local ministry and mission
• build relationships with coaches and context experts
• discover fresh practices of prayer and dwelling in scripture
• form habits of deep engagement in and reflection on Madison as a mission context
• encounter a range of missional models and examples to fuel creativity and innovation
• foster an ecclesial environment of ecumenical friendship and partnership
• identify and develop the skills needed for leading new missional initiatives

Missio Madison is made possible by the generous support of the Lilly Endowment and is an initiative of University of Dubuque Theological Seminary.

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Applications for the 2020 Spring beta cohort are due November 22, 2019. 

See www.missiomadison.org

My Book: Church Planting in Post-Christian Soil: Theology and Practice

National headlines regularly herald the decline of Christianity in the United States, citing historically low levels of confidence in organized religion, drops in church attendance, church closures, and the dramatic rise of the "Nones." Scarcely heard are stories from the thousands of new churches and new forms of church that are springing up each year across the country. In this book, Christopher James attends carefully to stories of ecclesial innovation taking place in Seattle, Washington-a city on the leading edge of trends shaping the nation as a whole. James's study of the new churches founded in this "post-Christian" city offers both theological reflection and pragmatic advice. After an in-depth survey- and -interview-based analysis of the different models of church-planting he encountered, James identifies five threads of practical wisdom: 1) embracing local identity and mission, 2) cultivating embodied, experiential, everyday spirituality, 3) engaging community life as means of witness and formation, 4) prioritizing hospitality as a cornerstone practice, and 5) discovering ecclesial vitality in a diverse ecclesial ecology. Stimulating, encouraging, and stereotype-shattering, this book invites readers to reconsider the narrative that portrays these first decades of the twenty-first century as a period of ecclesial death and decline, and to view our time instead as a hope-filled season of ecclesial renewal and rebirth.

Available here and here.

Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World by Alan Roxburgh (Review)

Alan Roxburgh has been writing books about how the church can respond to the massive cultural change afoot for two decades. His latest offering, Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World: The New Shape of the Church in Our Time, culls together the wisdom of his experience as a consultant in a highly accessible, slim volume.

Roxburgh offers a penetrating analysis of the "misdirecting narratives" that lead to dead-ends, as well as a series of practice guides to help the church reconnect with it's core conviction, that the Triune God is alive and active in the world, in their city, on their very block. 

Here in Dubuque, Iowa we've been using Joining God in the formation of a new missional community. The "ordinary people of God" that make up this fledgling group have remarked at the fundamental hopefulness of Roxburgh's vision ("places of unraveling [are a] prelude to God shaping a new future for God's people") and have been intrigued by the notion that "God is out ahead of us" and that our core task is to discern what God's up to. The temptation to leverage our expert strategies to "fix the church" hasn't disappeared--not by a long shot--but a growing imagination for joining God in the renewal of all things is beginning to displace this deep-seated default, and that's genuine good news.

Above all, Roxburgh's gift to the church in this moment is a practical resource for guiding the people of God into postures and practices of faith in the God who is once again leading the children of Abraham and Sarah into an unknown land.

The images below are photos around our local context--Dubuque, IA. All quotes are taken from Joining God.
 

Third Places and/as Sacred Spaces: Innovation among Neighborhood-rooted New Seattle Churches

Seattle is home to a number of new churches that are embodying their belief that the gospel is good news to neighborhoods. Seeking to incarnate the Kingdom of God, they fashion themselves as a tangible assets to their community.  Several do this by providing a "third place"-- a space that is open to all and fosters community and advances the well-being of the neighborhood. Here are some of the church-connected third spaces in Seattle.

Aurora Commons 
This 'neighborhood living room' includes a public kitchen and lending library, as well as various programs. It was started by Awake Church along one of the city's most troubled streets, Aurora Avenue.









The Collaboratory

Billing itself as an 'incubator for social change' this space includes a co-working office, a learning kitchen, an events venue, and a community park and garden. It was started by Valley & Mountain in collaboration with Community Arts Create.

Pilgrim Coffeehouse 
Still seeking funding, this coffee shop along Aurora is an initiative of Epic Life Church.

The Green Bean Coffeehouse
This coffee shop in Greenwood--now in its third (re)location--was started by Sanctuary. 












 Fremont Arts Abbey
Officially a (reduced-rate) tenant of Church of the Apostles, Fremont Arts Abbey curates and offers creative performances and fulfills a portion of COTA's mission to serve the community.

Kakao and 415 Westlake
Kakao is a chocolate and coffee shop is located in the heart of South Lake Union. In the same building houses 415 Westlake, a venue for cultural and fundraising events.  Both were started by Union Church.



The Maple Leaf Living Room

Launched as Lux Coffee Co, but rebuffed by zoning issues, this space was started Lux Communities in a church building in the Maple Leaf neighborhood.

Port & Anchor
A community center and cafe inside the large church building serves as an art co-op and source for counseling services started by Emmanuel Church in Phinney Ridge.
















Q Cafe

A coffee shop and event venue located in Interbay and started by Quest.  (Unlike the other churches on this list, Quest's identity is less neighborhood-rooted and more strongly linked to their multi-ethnic composition.)


If you know of other third places/sacred spaces in the city of Seattle, please comment!

Check out the links below to learn more and catch some of my interviews about my research among new Seattle churches. 

Here's the King 5 News coverage of my research and several churches included in the study here.
Here's my interview with Marcie Sillman, of Seattle's NPR affiliate, KUOW, here.  
You can listen to the Rose City Forum interview here. 

Practices for a Missional Church Planting Order

What practices can sustain missional practice and spiritual vitality among church planters? Taking cues from Ignatius of Loyola, who gains authority by virtue of the missionary order he founded, as well as contemporary missional practitioners, this article proposes a rule of life for a church planting order that addresses the need for a foundational vision of God’s love and invitation to mission, structures life-giving fellowship with others and regards further spiritual practices and particular missional activities as best determined in community and targeted to the growth needs of the individual and the character of the ministry context.

Find this article online at the Journal for Missional Practice, an exciting new peer-reviewed journal for academics and practioners.  

Ecclesial Pioneers in the Pacific Northwest

If you're a church planter or doing ministry in Seattle or Portland, you should check out "Ecclesial Pioneers in the Pacific Northwest," which I wrote as a contributing editor for Christ & Cascadia, a new online collaborative journal thinking about God in Pacific Northwest culture.  The piece is based on my ongoing research on new Seattle churches (church plants, emerging churches, multisite churches, etc).  It explores why the Pacific Northwest is a uniquely fertile environment for religious innovation, points to some new churches in Seattle breaking the mold.

Defining the "E"-word: Evangelism as a Christian Practice

In this post, I offer my understanding of evangelism as a Christian practice. As I develop this understanding and situate evangelism within the broader calling and mission of the church, I will compare and contrast it to the theologies of evangelism offered by William Abraham and Bryan Stone.

Walt Klaiber is quite right when he notes that biblical usage of terms surrounding evangelism and mission are not uniform, and equally right when he suggests that it is less important to argue for a “right” designation of scope than to clarify how it is that one intends to use these terms.  In this spirit, I suggest speaking of the calling of the church as inclusive of worship, fellowship and witness.  Worship refers to those practices which manifests a proper love for God.  Fellowship entails the practices which express the church’s love for one another, and witness, includes the cluster of practices that enact the church’s love for the world. In an important sense, both worship and fellowship do witness, but they do so in a passive mode, since their orientation is more directly to God or the fellowship than to the “watching world.”  This passive witness is “before” the world but active witness is purposefully “for” the world.  Active witness can also be labeled mission and it includes the pluriform ways in which the church participates in the missio dei—God’s pluriform action in history toward the new creation.  Among these modes of active witness are included social action, environmental stewardship, ministries of compassion, and evangelism, among others. Evangelism, then, is the form of witness which hopes to join the missio dei in the creation of a new redeemed humanity.

Evangelism, as a Christian practice, is fundamentally a dimension of the Church’s participation in the activity of the Triune God.  Therefore, the primary agent in evangelism is God, who brings humans “from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the Son.”  I describe this divine work, employing language familiar to evangelistic literature, as a holistic conversion.  I must immediately clarify that this conversion is not to be regarded, as it has regularly has, as a mere decision of the will, or cognitive assent—though both will and mind are deeply involved.  Conversion is a holistic process akin to learning a new language, joining a new social group, receiving a new history, and undergoing a paradigm shift.  [I've posted on conversion here and here.]

The church’s practice of evangelism, then, is a stewardship of and a participation in God’s holistic work of conversion within people by which they become full citizens in the reign of God, through and in the church.  The church’s participation with God’s work of holistic conversion takes the primary forms of invitation and initiation.

Two substantial proposals, those of Abraham and Stone, contribute to development of these two modes.

Is Missional Good for Us? or Is Missional Life Abundant Life?

I’ve been a Christian as long as I can remember, but one of the important moments in my faith life was when I was in ninth grade… I had always been a good kid, but that year it came to my attention that being a Christian wasn’t like being white or Korean, it wasn’t something that you were just born with, but something more like being a soccer player—something that you actually do. And the first things I realized about what it meant to be a Christian was to have a relationship with God which you were supposed to do through reading the bible and praying. So for the first time I started reading the bible on my own.  And I read it quite a bit.  In fact, being the good kid who does what he should, I read the whole Bible cover-to=cover in 9 months.  But about 1 month in, I realized something.  I realized that if I kept reading the Bible, I’d just keep discovering more things that I should do, more things that I would be accountable for.  And it would become a never-ending list of things I should be doing.  But I was stuck now in a Catch-22.  Now that I knew I should read the Bible, there was no way out.  And I decided to submit to this.  This put me on a journey. 

It’s funny because this was a really important moment on my journey with Jesus—it was the beginning of my discipleship, really, and yet from where I stand now, I can see that resigning yourself to a bunch of obligations isn’t what following Jesus is all about.

And yet persistent guilt about what we should be doing is one of the things that plagues a lot of Christians.  Ever had thoughts like these?  I should be praying more.  Or maybe: I should be reading the bible more.  I should be giving more.  I should be spending more time with my family.  I should be taking Sabbath.  I should stop that dirty little habit. Oh yeah, and I should be missional. 

Identity and Practice in New Churches: My Dissertation Proposal in Brief

I'm officially ABD (all but dissertation) which means I'm being asked regularly what my dissertation is on.  Here's a shortened version of the "statement of the problem" from my prospectus. 

At the beginning of the 21st century in the U.S., despite historically low confidence in organized religion and the rise of the “Nones,” new churches and new forms of church are springing up across the country. Many of these assert the centrality of missional identity and practices of Christian witness, but the effects of such missional priorities on the faithfulness and spiritual vitality of these churches are uncertain. As a project in “practical ecclesiology” this study of new churches will utilize both sociological and theological methods to explore the dynamics between ecclesial identity—a church’s corporate self-image and implicit ecclesiology—and practices of mission, community and spirituality. My thesis is that some of the resources needed by Western Christianity in 21st century are being developed by the newest cohort of churches, but that uncritical adoption of their practices and perspectives in pursuit of effectiveness is theologically (and practically) perilous.

The project will develop in three moves. First, using survey and qualitative work in Seattle churches founded after 9/11/2001, it will offer an interpretive typology of the ways in which corporate identity and practice are related in ecclesial life, thus making a contribution to congregational studies research, which has given limited attention to new churches. Second, departing from the productionistic logic prevalent in church planting literature, this project will contribute to this field by offering robust theological assessment of the types and practices of new churches, drawing upon scholarship in Christian witness, Luke-Acts, missional ecclesiology, Christian spiritual formation and missional spirituality. Third, and finally, this project will draw from the ecclesial practices and the theological literatures to make constructive and practical proposals for church leaders seeking to lead the Western church into missional faithfulness and spiritual vitality in the 21st century.

The Rise of the "Nones": Change is a comin'

The so-called "Rise of the Nones" as been all over the news lately, thanks to new research released by the Pew Forum on Religion, which found that the number of US adults who claim no religious affiliation has almost reached 1 in 5, the highest in American history.

Even more striking is the clear age correlation to the trend; younger generations have increasingly higher unaffiliated rates.  That means that as the next decade or so at least progresses this number is sure to move from 1 in 5 toward 1 in 3, the current ratio for those between 18-29. Other key findings from the study include the historic new reality that Protestants make up less than half of Americans for the first time since the nation's founding and globally "Nones" now make up the third largest religious affiliation behind Christianity and Islam.

Religious leaders have reacted in diverse ways to this news, ranging from: hand-wringing to hallelujahs!  However you interpret it, one thing is clear...change is a comin'.  The question I believe Christians must face is how to faithfully and humbly follow the way of Jesus in our new post-Christendom, post-Christian context.  

Charles Finney's on Revivals of Religion: Summary

This post offers a biographical sketch of Second Great Awakening revivalist Charles Finney and summary of his most important book.

Charles Grandison Finney was born in Connecticut on Aug. 29, 1792 and died Aug. 16, 1875 in Ohio.  After a brief stint teaching, Finney studied and practiced law.  In 1821 he underwent a religious conversion and dropped his law practice to become an evangelist and was licensed by the Presbyterians. Finney was most active as a revivalist between 1825-35 and was known for his innovations including having women pray in public meetings of mixed gender, development of the "anxious seat" (a place where those considering becoming Christians could come to receive prayer), extemporaneous preaching and public censure of individuals by name in sermons and prayers. His revivals achieved spectacular success in large cities, and in 1832 he began an almost continuous revival in New York City as minister of the Second Free Presbyterian Church. His disaffection with Presbyterian theology and discipline, however,

Theologies of Church Planting: Comparing Malphurs and Murray

Two frequently recommended texts in the burgeoning church planting literature are Aubrey Malphurs’ Planting Growing Churches for the 21st Century:  A Comprehensive Guide for New Churches and Those Desiring Renewal and Stuart Murray’s Church Planting: Laying Foundations.  This essay seeks to engage with the theological proposals evident in these two books by identifying the foundational theological ideas and assumptions in each, contrasting them, and offering fresh critical reflection.  

Mission-Shaped Church 2: Book Review

This is part two of my engagement with Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions in a Changing Context.  This post offers a critical assessment of the incarnational principle found in Mission-Shaped Church. Find my summary of the book here.

With the previous post's summary in view, this post will consider one of the most central missiological challenges with which the report grapples: contextualization.  Bishop Graham Cray, chair of the committee that authored the report, captures the challenge of contextualization when he says in the introduction: “The gospel has to be heard within the culture of the day, but it always has to be heard as a call to appropriate repentance.”[1]  Thus, mission modeled after the incarnation is not simply a matter of accommodating the forms of the church to those resonant with contemporary life, but also to ensure proper dissonance between the church and wider society.  Citing Newbigin, the report acknowledges “In the attempt to be “relevant” one may fall into syncretism, and in the effort to avoid syncretism one may become irrelevant.”[2]   Mission-Shaped Church seeks to walk this fine line, but settles for too-easy distinctions and a resolution that is perilously close to cultural accommodation.

Mission-Shaped Church 1: Summary

Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions in a Changing Context is a rare example of a denominational report written by a committee that actually has gained a wider audience and affected considerable change.  First published in 2004, this report was written to address the challenges facing the Church of England in a changing context.  This post reconstructs the report’s the major argument in the terms of a practical theological project, and a follow up engages critically with a central theme with significant implications: what the report dubs “the incarnational principle.”

Neil Cole's Organic Church: Summary & Review

Neil Cole believes “that church should happen wherever life happens” (24).  As founder of the Awakening Chapels network and Church Multiplication Associates which claims 700 churches in 32 states and 23 nations, Cole is a leader in what is most-often referred to as the house church movement.  He dislikes the “house church” designation—citing the fact that many of the churches in his movement meet in parking lots and bars not houses and the connotations “house church” carries of disillusioned and disgruntled defectors from the mainstream church—preferring instead to call them “organic churches” (22).  This brief essay will explore some of the key theoretical and methodological proposals found in Cole’s most widely read book, Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens (2005) and offer a critical insights.

As the title suggests, Organic Church is as much about ecclesiology as church planting methodology.  Cole finds the list of characteristics

Ed Stetzer and David Fitch on the Missional Church

It's a good discussion.



Ed Stetzer & David Fitch - a missional conversation from Missional Tribe on Vimeo.
There are two more videos, click Continue.

Ed Stetzer's Planting Missional Churches: Summary & Review

As an updated and renamed version of Stetzer’s 2003 text, Planting New Churches in a Postmodern Age, Planting Missional Churches seeks to ride the wave of enthusiasm among evangelicals for all things “missional” and seemingly targets an audience of young conservative (male) would-be church planters.  As a result, the writing style is down-to-earth, pastoral and practical rather than deeply theological or academicly sophisticated.  With twenty nine chapters, there are few, if any, aspects of starting a new church that Stetzer doesn’t treat.  Given that each chapter can not be addressed, this summary will focus on the five “major messages” of the book which Stetzer identifies in chapter one.  He links each with a key word: missional, incarnational, theological, ecclesiological, and spiritual (2-3).

Missional
According to Stetzer, being missional means assuming the posture of a missionary—one sent—as Jesus was—to “seek and save the lost.”  Stetzer’s opening chapter seeks to establish church planting as the most appropriate missional response to what he portrays starkly as a North American church in decline and growing ranks of non-Christian Americans.  Being missional, for Stetzer, means taking action to reverse these trends, and he presents planting new churches as the proper remedy, touting it as both the “most effective method of evangelism” and the biblical response to the church’s “decline” (14).  Chapter two is devoted to “redeveloping a missional mind-set” and invokes classic quotes from Newbigin, Bosch and Kahler to present the church as the sent agent of a sending God, and as the instrument of the missio Dei, a popular term which Stetzer invokes but leaves disappointingly unspecified.    

Video: The Future of Theological Education

JR Rozko, a friend, blogger and co-creator of this video penned these provocative words about the future of theological education:

"to the extent that our current systems of theological education have been shaped by Christendom presuppositions, they have lost their missiological bearings and are wholly inadequate to prepare Kingdom leaders. Incremental changes and clever adaptations to these current systems only serve to distract from the opportunity we have before us to develop a Kingdom, and therefore missional, vision of theological education. At the heart of this vision is the conviction that the proper telos of theological education is an “accreditation” of students based not merely on the degrees they earn, but on the development and fit of their character and competency for life and leadership in the Kingdom of God.""

For a visually compelling expansion along these lines, check out the video he collaborated on, as well.


Re-Imagining Theological Education | 3DM from 3DM on Vimeo.

Alan Hirsch on Incarnational Mission

Mission is the "what" but incarnation is the "how."

Too much talk about the centrality of mission to ecclesiology and discipleship comes off as imperialistic and colonizing because it fails to reflect the fact that, as Alan Hirsch points out, when God's mission landed on planet earth in Jesus Christ, he stayed incognito for thirty years.  What if churches were as committed to incarnational missiology as they are to missional ecclesiology?

Whose Mission? What Church? Hoekendijk, Blauw, and the WCC on the Missionary Church

This post explores the way the church and mission are related and developed in three documents written between 1951 and 1967: “The Church in Missionary Thinking” by J. C. Hoekendijk (1952), The Missionary Nature of the Church by Johannes Blauw (1962), and The Church for Others, published by the World Council of Churches (1967).  In conclusion, I offer reflections on the resonant and discordant perspectives therein.

In “The Church in Missionary Thinking,” J.C. Hoekendijk lamented how ecclesiology had, in recent decades, swallowed up mission.  It had done this, he points out, by using such concise verbiage as that offered by Dr. Durr: “Mission is the road from the Church to the Church” (324).  Indeed, the church had, in his view, both eliminated the world by making it a “a sort of ecclesiastical training-ground” and dealt with the kingdom by either subsuming it within its ecclesiastical bounds or relegating it to far off in the eschatological distance (324).  Hoekendijk labeled this way of thinking church-ism, and asserted that younger churches had assimilated it to the point of expecting an independent church to be a “Church-free-from-the-Mission” (327).