PGF Outbox

Gradye Parsons asks the wrong questions

If you are a member of the PCUSA, then you are probably reading the most recent statistics regarding how many people have left the denomination.  

What jumped off the page at me was not the numbers, but the questions Stated Clerk Gradye Parsons thinks are important to ask in response to the membership loss. 

Parsons insisted that “Presbyterians can be evangelists!”
“But we often stumble over the words. Can we not challenge one another to be able to answer these basic questions,” he said. “Why do I believe in God? Why do I go to church? Why do I go to that particular church?”

Of course Presbyterians can be evangelists, but how eloquent we are (or are not) is not the issue.  Dallas Willard spoke about this to a group sponsored by Presbyterian Global Fellowship at the Jesus Way Renovare Conference.  He said, the question for people in the postmodern world is not what is true but what is real.  To be effective witnesses of the Gospel, it is not what we can posit or defend theologically (although that remains important). Rather, to be effective witnesses of the Gospel in today's culture requires authenticity, deep relationships, and sacrificial action for the sake of others.  In other words, we can no longer enjoy the luxury of separating our thinking from our doing. This is much more eloquently flushed out in the Divine Conspiracy, which discusses how the imitation of Christ has lost its central importance in Christianity.  In short, I don't think the question is getting the words right.  I think we have to recover the ability to be Christ-like in world for the sake of our communities.  

The question, "Why do I believe in God?" is not the question being asked on the street in the post-modern world.  Rather, it is "What is the character and substance of the God you believe in."  Belief in general is not an obstacle to most people today.  The question is what do you believe (worldview) and who is at the center of it?  In our case, we have done a poor job of revealing Jesus to people.  As Ghandi says, "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ."  I don't think the question is helping people communicate WHY we believe in God but rather WHO Jesus is and how we desire (and try!) to be more like him. 

"Why do I go to church?" is indicative of the institutional and attractional model of church that is, according to the statistics, shrinking as an institution and failing to attract people to it.  The question missionally minded people would ask is, "How can we be the church for the sake of our community?"  God is alive and on a mission of love in the world. .  As disciples, we share in the joy of joining this Misseo Dei. The question is not how to get people to GO to church.  The question is how to BE the church in the particular context we are called to serve.  

Finally, "why do I go to that particular church?" can be a good question.  If the question is intended to elucidate the unique calling of a community sent into the world following Jesus Christ, then it is a great question.  Churches are not called to be "all things for all people."  Neither are churches supposed to look like every other congregation in its denomination.  Rather, each church is unique.  As Will Mancini likes to say, each church has a unique great permission within the great commission.  Each church will live out the great commission in its own way according its one-of-a-kind mandate from Christ.

However, I suspect that when many hear the question "why do I go to that particular church" thoughts turn to the preaching, the choir, parking, worship times, or programs for children.  While the practicalities of being the church are important and valid concerns, they are far from the central questions of what it means to be the church in community.  

Frankly, I think these statistical reports are not really helpful. They focus inward on attendance, buildings, and cash.  I would be far more interested in statistics that show how our churches are making a difference in the world for the Kingdom - child abuse rates down; shelters for homeless children out of business; food bank shelves stacked high.   Can we really measure how more Christ-like people become each year?Because at the end of the day, just because we gain members does not mean we have become any more like Christ or helped anyone else on their discipleship journey.   

PGF is a movement of people and churches that are pursuing missional transformation.  And it begins by asking the right questions. 

Leadership Traits of Effective Leaders

In reading about leadership, I stumbled upon research that studied people who led others out of danger. Specifically, the study focused on fires in underground mines. Stick with me, this really is interesting.  The leaders who successfully led others out of danger had 5 characteristics.  

#1:  "The leader of each escape may be described as an aware, knowledgeable person or as an individual who is alert to his environment, attentive, and discerning. This person notices things - more so than do other people." The researchers make a point that this characteristic is not limited to mines, but rather leaders are naturally curious and are able to learn on the fly.

The fact that the PCUSA is losing thousands of members each year (172,869 in 2008) is the analogous mine fire. To effectively lead people to be the church in a new cultural reality, the study suggests that we must be alert to what is happening in culture.  We have to be good students of our environment, which means spending a lot of time with people who are not in our congregation.  We have to discern their hopes, struggles, and experience with God.  We should enjoy our curious nature, despite the tendency for us to get bogged down by order, tradition, and memories of the way things were.

How does your work, home, and recreation environments help you lead?  How can we support each other to be natually curious and nimble in our current church culture?

Stay tuned for the next 4 characteristics of effective leaders from this study....

Renovare Day 2

Dallas Willard led the PGF sponsored workshop - Missional and Formational.  During his presentation he addressed how churches define success.  Too often it is the ABC's - attendance, buildings, and cash.  We count how many people are coming in, how much money is coming in, and how much people enjoy the performance each Sunday.  To that end, ministry is about getting people to do things.  

Dallas challenged us to remember that we have an audience of one and that ministry is not about getting people to do things, but  helping people to discover how God is moving and working in their lives.  The Kingdom of God is at hand and ministry is the joy of helping people grow close to God in his present kingdom.  Dallas said, "The Kingdom of God is not about Jesus coming back to bail us out.   Rather, the Kingdom of God is how God's hand will move in my present spot."

What would our church look like if we defined success not in terms of activity, but in terms of how well we help people discover God at work in their lives? How would this change our session meetings and presbytery meetings?  What if our primary activity when we meet together is not to govern and manage each other, but to pray and encourage one another seeking the kingdom?  That's a missional vision....

Renovare Day 1

Steve Hayner, the recently appointed President of Columbia Seminary and founder of Presbyterian Global Fellowship, recently blogged here about PGF as a non-anxious presence in the church. 

This afternoon at the sold-out PGF workshop track at Renovare, Todd Hunter said, "God is not stumped and the Kingdom of God is not at risk."   He assured the 200+ people gathered that in the midst of all the anxiety, change, and questions we are facing, God is not pacing and worrying about the future of his Kingdom.  

He was affirming the fact that society is undergoing a massive cultural change as people move from a modern to a postmodern world view.  The change is directly affecting how we share the good news of the gospel.  It is very unsettling.  Everyone is feeling it and reacting in different ways.  Some are leaving the church, blaming the pastor, and/or adding more programs hoping to attract new people to the old way of being church. 

Some are  coming to PGF events and conferences, like Renovare, looking to discern in fellowship the missional calling.  PGF has been described as a think tank and a support group for people and congregations seeking to make the shift from attractional to missional.  Like Todd, we are confident that God is stumped and the Kingdom of God is not at risk as we figure this out.  What we are confident about is that God's mission is exciting, ongoing, and life-giving.  

So, if you are interested in a missional journey then we are excited to join you.  Check out PGF, affiliate, and make the fellowship stronger.  Confident, not anxious, we rely on the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the leadership of Jesus as we seek to be his disciples. 

Stay tuned for more updates and thoughts from the Renovare Jesus Way Conference this week from San Antonio, Texas. 

Twittering in Church, with the Pastor\'s O.K.

Twittering in Church, with the Pastor\'s O.K..

Instead of reminding worshippers to silence their cell phones, a small but growing number of churches across the country are encouraging people to integrate text-messaging into their relationship with God

Gen Y - An Article in the London Times

How does this affect how we understand the church, its mission, and how it communicates that mission?  Would love to hear your thoughts. 

It is copyrighted, so I am providing the link.  

The A to Z of Generation Y -Click Here

Context is Everything

On my recent mission trip, I read a wonderful book called The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramos.  In it, he describes an experimental psychologist named Richard Nisbett, who studied how our cultural backgrounds condition the way we think.  He discovered that there are fundamental differences in the way that Westerners and Chinese think.  While the Chinese believe in constant change, Westerners believe that we go through periods of change and equilibrium.  Westerners believe in a more deterministic world, thinking that we can control events because we know the rules that govern the behavior of objects. 

 These observations came out of a series of experiments that Nisbett ran with Western and Chinese college students, where they looked at pictures that changed every thirty seconds.  What he discovered was that Westerners focused on the main object in the foreground of the picture, and often missed what was in the background.  The Chinese, by contrast, usually looked at the environment around the main object first, and then moved to the object in the foreground.  He discovered an expression of one aspect of Chinese philosophy and art that says our environment is far more powerful than any individual.  In other words, context is everything. 

This view contains the idea that constant change is a given.  The environment contains clues about what is about to happen next.  The more we pay attention to our communities and our neighborhoods, the more we will understand the changes that are coming our way.  The more we follow the traditional Western thought patterns of ignoring our context, the more we will be surprised by the next wave of change that is coming. 

In Numbers 13-14, we see Moses sending out 12 spies to scout out the Promised Land before they made their decisions about what to do.  They understood the importance of the environment.  As Oriental people, the Hebrews knew they needed an understanding of the land and the culture.  They needed a sense of the context in which the people were living in, before they knew what their next steps would need to be.

The same is true for us today.  In our church world, we often hear of good ideas that some church is doing, and if they are successful, we automatically want to copy them.  This doesn’t work because context is everything.  What works in one place does not work in another place.  Sometimes we can pick up some good ideas that may stimulate our thinking, but we always have to change them some how to fit our specific community, our specific people, and our specific place.  Otherwise, the idea will fail. 

One of the most crucial tasks for us as a group of congregations is to understand our context.  That may sound easy, but often it’s not.  Unconsciously, over the years, many North American churches have become isolated from their own neighborhoods.  The level of interaction between church and community is very minimal beyond letting some local group rent out the church facility.  If we want to reverse the membership decline that most of our congregations are experiencing, then we have to discover once again how to move back into the neighborhood.

So, we are inviting every one of you to join us for a two day consultation in San Diego on August 21 and 22, that we are calling Moving Back into the Neighborhood.  For only $75 (and every fifth person from the same congregation comes for free), we will give you some concrete steps that your church can begin to take to engage your local community in fresh ways.  Alan Roxburgh and Mark Lau Branson will be our main presenters.  They will give us a much food for thought.  But rather than being passive spectators who listen to a series of lectures, we will be active participants who discuss and interact with ideas that will fit our specific congregations and our specific communities.  Each church will walk away with some concrete next steps of missional experiments that you can begin to try, that will help you connect with your community.  You can register now to attend at www.pgfconference.com or www.presbyterysd.org.

 Why?  Because context is everything.  If you don’t understand your neighborhood, your ideas will fail.  If you don’t understand your community, your vision statements and mission statements and strategic plans will be meaningless.  We need to become more Hebrew (Oriental) in our thinking.  We need to get in touch at a deeper level with our own surroundings.  Without this, our congregations will continue to struggle.  This is one of the key first steps to a more vibrant future for our churches.  I hope you will register now to join us in August.  I hope you will look around your community with fresh eyes.  We usually begin our planning with the church, and this one of our major mistakes.  We don’t get anywhere when we begin with the church.  We must always begin with our neighborhood.  We must understand it.  We must listen to it.  We must see how God’s Holy Spirit is already at work in it.

Once we have developed some awareness and understanding of our community, then we can take some worthwhile steps.  Then, we can know what direction to take.  Then, we can know how to follow the Lord.  Because God is already at work in our world.  Christ is already on the move.  And context is everything.

 

No Easy Task

Yesterday at Columbia Theological Seminary, we completed another round of what we call The Thompson Scholars.  This is an annual, endowed and subsidized program in some facet of evangelism which we do for 15 pastors each year.  It is a terrific and intensive time of community building, coaching and training.  I am always pumped up (and exhausted) by the end. 

 

Every time as we do this I learn more about the “practical” issues and barriers in helping churches become more “missional”.  This year (again) I was reminded that “being” missional is a whole lot different than doing missions—and that perhaps the greatest barrier for churches is in changing our view of “what is the church”.  The default for virtually every church I know is that the church is an institution/club which is there to meet the needs of those who are members—and that the pastor is their chaplain.  In this understanding, baptism is our initiation rite, budgets are our voluntary dues, committees are our key organizational structure (and the heart of “church work”), and our buildings are the clubhouse which we actually call “the church”.  “Mission” is our social service (and sometimes recruiting) activity which we do much like the Rotarians or any other social service club.  Evangelism is “membership management”—how we attract more people in the front door, and keep them from going out the back, so that we can collect their dues and keep the doors open.

 

The “missional church” has a very different self-identity.  Truly missional churches see their purpose as “joining Jesus in his work in the world”.  It’s not really about us, though the great thing about the gospel is that as we give ourselves away we also discover ourselves and we experience healing and joy.  Instead of mission being out of our “extra”, it is the center of what we are about, because mission is the center of what God has always been about as he reaches out to the world.  Ultimately God even came into the world in human form to give himself to and for us.  “Incarnation” becomes the ultimate model for what it is that we are called to do.  “Baptism is our ordination” (quoting Luther) in which we identify with Christ, with Christ’s people and with Christ’s work of reconciliation, compassion and justice.  The purpose of the church is not essentially “worship” or “fellowship” or “prayer” or “training” or anything else.  These are all gifts to help us to follow Jesus more closely, to be transformed more fully into his likeness, and to be empowered to join him in mission.

 

I’m commencin’ to preachin’ to the choir here—but it was underlined for me again this week just how hard this identity transformation actually is for churches (and for their pastors).  Being “missional” almost always defaults to doing a few more programs, instead of seeing ourselves (both individually and corporately) as missionaries to our own culture and across cultural barriers.  Pastors are “affirmed” if the club thrives (measured by the numbers in worship and education programs, the balance of the budget, and the upkeep of the buildings) rather than if the Kingdom is advanced.  We “commission” people mainly to hold office in the club rather than to pursue Christ’s call to live out our faith in homes, neighborhoods, businesses, and “third spaces” (stores, recreation, etc.) in our communities. 

 

Bottom line:  I am constantly looking for help in encouraging this identity shift.  There are a growing number of books available, though like most great books on marriage, they are most useful for those who identify most with the experience of the authors.  Transformation takes a more personalized path than the one-size fits all approach.  And a whole lot of people don’t read books anymore anyway.  Through PGF, we are doing all we can to help church communities and their pastors on this journey of transformation through conferences, seminars, webinars, coaching—and whatever else we can do to come alongside and encourage the church to BE the church.

 

Joyfully,

Steve Hayner