At last... a breath of fresh air

Sue has been reading a book called 'Authentic Relationships' by Wayne Jacobsen and Clay Jacobsen and she then looked up Wayne's website and found an article that almost entirely expressed my feelings but better put than I could entitled 'Why I Don't Go To Church Anymore: Living in the Relational Church - Part 6'. It felt like a breath of fresh air. Here was somebody expressing almost exactly what I have been feeling in so much better ways than I can.

Here's the core of it:

Where do you go to church?

I have never liked this question, even when I was able to answer it with a specific organization. I know what it means culturally, but it is based on a false premise--that church is something you can go to as in a specific event, location or organized group. I think Jesus looks at the church quite differently. He didn't talk about it as a place to go to, but a way of living in relationship to him and to other followers of his.

Asking me where I go to church is like asking me where I go to Jacobsen. How do I answer that? I am a Jacobsen and where I go a Jacobsen is. 'Church' is that kind of word. It doesn't identify a location or an institution. It describes a people and how they relate to each other. If we lose sight of that, our understanding of the church will be distorted and we'll miss out on much of its joy.

Yes exactly the core. But I think that many people feel threatened by this approach. Maybe I would have done a few years ago. Wayne continues:

So should I stop going to church, too?

I'm afraid that question also misses the point. You see I don't believe you're going to church any more than I am. We're just part of it. Be your part, however Jesus calls you to and wherever he places you. Not all of us grow in the same environment.

The only issue he doesn't address is this - 'I believe I should strongly encourage poeple to go to church and even if you don't I think in general people should'. Now I have a big problem with that. I really don't believe it's right to strongly encourage people to go to church because it gives them a totally erroneous perception of what church is. Since it's not something that can be 'gone to' encouraging them to 'go to church' gives them the perception that its possible. This I feel is dangerous misleading and has led to many of the problems we see in the church today.

There is all the world of difference between encouraging people to go to church and saying something like 'A bunch of us are getting together on Sunday, would you like to come along?' But not taking no for an answer and repeating this ad nauseum is as bad as strongly encouraging or pressuring people to come.

Some people would see this as quibbling with words. Or a different communication style. I think the words are important. Wayne again:

I know it may only sound like quibbling over words, but words are important. When we only ascribe the term 'church' to weekend gatherings or institutions that have organized themselves as 'churches' we miss out on what it means to live as Christ's body. It will give us a false sense of security to think that by attending a meeting once a week we are participating in God's church. Conversely I hear people talk about 'leaving the church' when they stop attending a specific congregation.

But if the church is something we are, not someplace we go, how can we leave it unless we abandon Christ himself? And if I think only of a specific congregation as my part of the church, haven't I separated myself from a host of other brothers and sisters that do not attend the same one I do?

The idea that those who gather on Sunday mornings to watch a praise concert and listen to a teaching are part of the church and those who do not, are not, would be foreign to Jesus. The issue is not where we are at a given time during the weekend, but how we are living in him and with other believers all week long.

In the Evangelical church they used to have a word for them 'backsliders'. And some were. But some may actually be 'frontsliders' ahead of those locked into an inaccurate perception of church.

Recently I have seen some of the emerging church meetings and been thinking more and more this is changing the colour of the icing [frosting] on the cake not changing the cake. Even that is a bad analogy, but I mean that the 'event' is still and 'event' and the focus seems to be on the 'event' rather than the relationship.

Well... we'll see where the journey leads. I'm not sure I'm yet at the place of feeling/seeing/knowing the path I'm walking is right, but I do feel that I have been pushed off the wrong path and now see others walking a similar path and don't feel quite so alone. Maybe when I am more confident that this path is part of the journey for me I will become more relaxed. Certainly not going to Sunday meetings has made me significantly more relaxed and if only I weren't surrounded by a bunch of people who see 'going to church' as important maybe I could see the path more clearly.

Learning styles

Why is a Sunday church meeting so screwy to me? I have been looking at learning styles and done a couple of inventories:

• www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html
• www.learning-styles-online.com/inventory/

Here are the results from the first:

| ACT       X                             REF
|     11 9  7  5  3  1  1  3  5  7  9 11
|                   <-  ->
|
| SEN                                  X  INT
|     11 9  7  5  3  1  1  3  5  7  9 11
|                   <-  ->
|
| VIS    X                                VRB
|     11 9  7  5  3  1  1  3  5  7  9 11
|                   <-  ->
|
| SEQ                               X     GLO
|     11 9  7  5  3  1  1  3  5  7  9 11
|                   <-  ->

The results state:

If your score on a scale is 9-11, you have a very strong preference for one dimension of the scale. You may have real difficulty learning in an environment which does not support that preference.

In other words if the church is creating an environment that is at variance to my results then I may have real difficulty learning there.

The scales come out that I am an Active Intuitive Visual Global learner, with Intuitive Visual Global as fitting into the category of real difficulty if the environment is Sensing, Verbal and Sequential. Ooops... anyone see any similarity with church?

In the second inventory it is shown as a graph, with the numeric results alongside:

Numeric results:

Visual 18

Social 10

Physical 3

Aural 3

Verbal 12

Solitary 8

Logical 7


Anyone want to guess how much of regular church is aural and physical? OK, so I know if you like icons or stained glass then they are visual - I don't like either. If you like liturgy they are verbal - maybe - not sure about that. I don't like liturgy either. I like discussion - which happens at a house group but not at 'church'.

Why are churches constrained to only suit certain types of people, alienating others?

Group 3 - non-conformists or rebels?

In the post Three groups... one church? I suggested that there are three different types of person within the church and that the third is 'People who don't believe it right to be told what to do by Group Two and who don't want to tell Group One what to do'.

My youngest son branded them rebels - a term I was not happy with as it expressed something unintentional. After discussion with him we realised group three included both non-conformists and rebels.

Thinking back on this a few days later I am now unhappy with the term non-conformist. Wikipedia puts it thus:

Nonconformist was a term used in England after the Act of Uniformity 1662 to refer to an English subject belonging to a non-Christian religion or any non-Anglican church. It may also refer more narrowly to such a person who also advocated religious liberty. The term is also applied retrospectively to English Dissenters (such as Puritans and Presbyterians) who violated the Act of Uniformity 1559, typically by practising or advocating radical, sometimes separatist, dissent with respect to the Established Church.

Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers (founded in 1648), and those less organized were considered Nonconformists at the time of the 1662 Act of Uniformity. Later, as other groups formed, they were also considered Nonconformists. These included Methodists, Unitarians, and members of the Salvation Army.

Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, Unitarians and the Salvation Army all have groups one and two as the majority. To call them nonconformists doesn't fit with the group three definition. We need another word.

Is the emergining church an echo of the future?

"This is an SOS distress call from the mining ship Red Dwarf. The crew are dead, killed by a radiation leak. The only survivors were Dave Lister, who was in suspended animation during the disaster, and his pregnant cat, who was safely sealed in the hold. Revived three million years later, Lister's only companions are a life form who evolved from his cat, and Arnold Rimmer, a hologram simulation of one of the dead crew."

[BBC comedy 1988]

When Red Dwarf gets to be traveling faster than the speed of light the future catches up with them. When Lister sees himself dead in the future it doesn't seem so appealing. These are future echoes.

LISTER: Well there you go, I won't wear the hat.  Then it
can't happen, can it?  I can live without a hat.
RIMMER: Lister, it *has* happened.  You can't change it,
any more than you can change what you had for breakfast
yesterday.
LISTER: Hey, it hasn't happened, has it?  It has "will have
going to have happened" happened, but it hasn't actually
"happened" happened yet, actually.
RIMMER: Poppycock!  It will be happened; it shall be going
to be happening; it will be was an event that could will
have been taken place in the future.  Simple as that.
Your bucket's been kicked, baby.

For years we have heard the church is dying. Is the emerging church a future echo? When we see the future is it appealing or frightening? Or both?

Knowing you're gonna die, how do you stop it? And if the future echoes are modified so you don't die, then what? Return to Red Dwarf...

LISTER and RIMMER walk in.  LISTER is jumping up and down
like a maniac, RIMMER looks disappointed.

RIMMER: I don't know why you're so chirpy.
LISTER: I'm not gonna die!  I'm not gonna die!
RIMMER: But for how long?  It'll probably happen tomorrow
or Thursday.
LISTER: Maybe it's not going to happen at all!

When I hear the reactions of many in the institutional or attractional church to the emerging church I feel I hear them yelling with glee 'Maybe it's not going to happen at all!' Yet I am convinced that there is an alternative future echo that is not a continuation of the present. That future is something very different to today.

I'm writing a book 'In the image of a creative God...' My son Daniel pointed me to a web post from emergent village entitled The circle of inclusion. It concludes:

But when we begin with love, we step into a very different way of operating. We begin with the idea that we are each created in His image. Differences don’t define us. They express the subtle facets of a different part of God’s image working its way out.

The implication appears to be that the attractional or institutional church does not operate within a context of love, which would be patently untrue. However, having grown up in a modernist culture where the absolute truth about God [and many other things] could be known, I did continually feel alien. It was like I kept having flashes of future echoes that shook up my current reality. Not that I didn't believe in ultimate truth [as some within the attractional church appear to believe we believe] but that it couldn't fully ever be known in this life.

Evangelical Christianity claimed ultimate truth could be known from the revelation of the Bible. Some more honest evangelicals will admit it is more complex than that, but some still stick to a naive belief that we can interpret the Bible fully, accurately and completely. That this is leading people down a dangerous path is, in some cases, potentially harming them.

Having moved into post-modernity, is it any better? My son, born into post-modernity doesn't like it.

I have several sets of glasses, and I can put them both on. Neither of them really fit my nose, but without them my sight is so poor I can barely see anything. Everything looks distorted, confused, and wrong when I wear the glasses, and I don't want to settle on any one of them.

Bridget, friend of his [and mine] with her own blog, [where she writes poetry and prose to express her feelings] responded with this:

Sanity, the Penguin says hello.
Currently he's being hung by a frog. One you and El Presidente gave me incidentally.
Nevertheless, he seems quite happy.
So does the frog.

In echoes from the past, the black slave being hung by the Klu Klux Clan member was definitely not happy! Nor the Christian or Jew in Auschwitz.

I wonder how long it will take to catch up with our future echoes and see not an emerging church but a reborn church. The bride of Christ, not as an institution, but as a body of people interacting with God through His Holy Spirit and with each other as He inspires us in love. Will what we call the church today seem hollow and empty? Sometimes I think the church is culturally like the Arabic peoples... with no future perfect tense to express a future echo, just a past and present.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

Romans 8:22-25 (NIV)

The whole creation groans as it sees the future echoes, waiting for the church emergent.

Missional and Attractional Church

There's a big debate going on about missional and attractional church... kind of the way of looking at regular church or emerging church, but not quite:

For instance Tylers 'My Problem with the Missional Church', Jonathan Brinks 'Missional/Attractional Debate' and others around the net.

This article started off as a comment on Tylers article, but is now expanded.

It seems that in some ways people are using the word missional to be emerging church and attractional to be regular church. Missional because the emphasis is on going out to the world and attractional because its attracting people to some sort of programme or event. I certainly have problems with the programme or event oriented groups who call themselves churches and who pressurise people to attend some sort of Sunday gathering. I've just been thrown out of a fellowship group for vigorously disagreeing with this approach.

However, I think I really have problems not with the word missional or attractional but with the word church. Most of the time I read in scripture the word church referring to all the followers of the Way in a town or city. So… everyone who follows the Master in a town or city or village is part of the church in that town, city or village. Whatever you do or don't do on a Sunday or other day of the week with other followers doesn't stop you being part of the church in that area.

When we use the word church attached to a congregation – be it missional or attractional we somehow elevate that structure and give it power. That power can and does get abused. The ‘church’ then wants to own every gathering of followers of the Way that it can – the ‘house groups’ are house groups of such and such a church… the mother and toddler group is the mother and toddler group of such and such a church. Now I know that the so called attractional churches are criticized [as I said, I have done it myself] for being programme orientated, and this is a valid criticism, but the real problem is the understanding of structure rather than dialogue.

What do I mean by that? I mean that if we truly saw the radical shift of our Lord from a special priesthood to a priesthood of all believers, everyone with direct access to our Father, then we would see structure in radically different ways. Whether missional or attractional the structure would be eclectic – there would be may different expressions of the body of Christ [which we might call the church] in our town, city or village. Those expressions would be administratively light, led, not by some sort of hierarchical leadership, but by the Holy Spirit indwelling each and every follower of the Way.

What would this look like in practice? It might mean there are many house gathering of believers in a town… and members of them might go to different congregational meetings on a Sunday, or not if they don’t meet God through singing songs and listening to a talk… the congregational leaders would have a lighter job as they were responsible for what happens on a Sunday, not all the other activities of the church… the church being the sum total of all believers in that town.

Maybe too… we would see people less tied up in activities to keep some kind of Sunday Club running through the week and therefore more time to spend with those people who don’t yet love and follow our Lord. Maybe then the church in that town, city or village would be both missional and attractive.

Three groups... one church?

It seems to me that there are three distinct groups of people within the church [actually probably in the world in general].

• Group One: People who like to be told what to do and are happy doing it.
• Group Two: People who like to tell others what to do and are happy doing it.
• Group Three: People who don't believe it right to be told what to do by Group Two and who don't want to tell Group One what to do.

Group One people are generally happy. Group Two people are generally happy. Group Three people are generally unhappy!

So where am I going with this? Well in Larnaca in Cyprus I am regularly meeting people who appear to be group three people... people who are fed up with with the church leaders who all appear [to them] to be control freaks who dictate what goes on and what to believe to the others.

Over the past couple of years I have also met with at least one largish mission agency where some of the members were complaining the same thing about their leaders.

The question this actually raises is about the role of leadership and the way it is implemented in the church, as well as what we mean by the church.

Years ago I heard a quote 'Bad leaders lead from the back, good leaders lead from the front, but of truly great leaders they say we did it ourselves'. Martin Luther King, Jr. said something like this 'A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a moulder of consensus'. When we look at Jesus we see someone both leading from the front but more importantly motivating and encouraging his followers to 'do the stuff'.

Today I don't see this in the church. What I see is leaders dictating to others what to do. Frequently those of us in group three question whether the proclamation is from God, or indeed if the Lord has really appointed this person to be a leader. Blindly following people who you do not believe are appointed by the Lord creates stress. Yet this is what many seem to want from us.

Where do we go with this. Those of us in group three love the Lord. We believe in His leadership not man's. We believe in the priesthood of all believers. Yet more and more we are edged out of the Sunday performance by those we see as controllers we don't believe God appointed to the role they have assumed.

Some of those in group three are comfortable with this separation. They are confident with their own position and don't take any notice of the leaders anyway. Others, like me, long for leaders who mould consensus. We long for people in the pattern of Jesus whose desire is to see others 'doing my Father's will'.

For now I don't see that. For now I just see the pain caused by these controlling leaders.

The Sunday performance

I've just about had it up to here with the Sunday performance! Ever since my voice broke I have been unable to sing in tune. What's worse, I can hear that I am out of tune but cannot persuade my voice to co-operate. So I hate singing. I really hate singing. It's not a pleasant sound to me. What's more I can hear that other people cannot sing in tune. So, first off the singing at the Sunday performance is like a cacophonous noise to me. I like music. But this is not.

Then there is the Sunday oratory... even assuming that the person speaking is not wildly misquoting scripture its just so boring. When I was at school I hated lessons - listening to a teacher was about the worst way for me to learn and listening to the Sunday oratory is similarly unhelpful.

But those who run what we call churches seem to have this idea in their head that the Sunday performance is the key event of the week. For me it's not even really church. The early followers of Jesus met in each others homes, shared meals together, talked and learnt from each other. They shared their needs and prayed together. Sounds like a million miles from the Sunday performance.

And in that way leadership was different. You didn't need the mega-star leader who proclaimed from the front and was six feet above contradiction. Maybe occasionally there would be someone who had something valuable to say and would give a talk but on the whole it bore little resemblance to what we call church and so the leadership was truly servant leadership.

Now on a Friday evening a bunch of us followers of the Way meet together for a meal. We pray together and then study the Scriptures. All except for me go to one specific Sunday performance. One of the members of this group repeatedly tries to coerce me to come on a Sunday. Sometimes I go to a different Sunday performance, but increasingly I am tiring of the same platitudes and misquoted Scriptures.

So why not just abandon the Sunday meeting and church together on a Friday? Well, actually I could go further... since I work with a group of other followers of the Way during the week, we church together every weekday. My weekdays are worship and glorifying our Lord. Saturday is the day I enjoy Him - normally we sail together. I love the sea that He created. There are more references to Him spending time on boats in the Gospels that teaching in Synagogues!

So why not just abandon the Sunday meeting and church together on a Friday? Well, I feel guilty if I miss the drudgery of a Sunday performance. Somewhere deep in my psyche I am programmed that the Sunday performance is a must. Even though it makes me feel further from God... even though I come back feeling angry with the world... even though more and more I meet loyal followers of the Way who have abandoned this in favour of churching together at other times. Still I feel I should go. And hate it.

The other problem is that those people who do get a buzz out of the Sunday performance continually make it sound like that is the main thing. Last Friday evening during the time we were sharing almost everyone was buzzing about their church... and then turned to me about the place I do sometimes go to on a Sunday. No, I didn't even begin to feel the same way they expressed. And then I felt guilty I should feel the same as they do. I feel isolated from them. Alienated.

I'm tired of this... I long for a gathering of followers of the Way who cannot stand the Sunday performance. I long for people who love the Lord and don't try to persuade you to attend a meeting which phenomenologically looks like a theatre show or sing-a-long concert. Then I would feel at home in family.

I recently saw a website entitled Church 2.0. A church without leaders. A church that sounded quite a lot like I have been feeling. Searching for Church 2.0 in Google I see a lot of people thinking about a reinventing of the church. Theologians call this 'repristinization' - making the gathering new for each generation. Why, oh why, is there nothing like that here? Are we totally away from the moving of the Holy Spirit in Cyprus?