intersections

Missional Museums?

I have a new post at Allelon's Missional Journey blog called "Missional Museums?" As I mention in the article, I got this idea when a few of us from the Hollywood Church went to the Getty Center to hear our friend and artist, Man One, speak as part of a panel discussion called, "Art in L.A.: 1997-2007."

Here's an excerpt:

Last December, the Getty Center turned 10, which caused so small amount of reflection not only in the art community but in the architectural community as well. An article on the front page of the LA Times by the resident architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, caught my attention. As I read his article I had this impression that I was listening to a conversation I am frequently a part of – that of the relevance of the church as an institution in our communities.

Hawthorne opens his December 2007 article, entitled, “Getty at 10: Still aloof, yet totally L.A.”* like this:

During much of the 1990s, as the Getty Center was rising on its Brentwood hilltop, a couple of stubborn questions dogged the hugely ambitious project: Would Richard Meier’s design ever have anything meaningful to do with, or say about, the city over which it loomed? Or would it exist as an expensive import, a vast collection of smooth enamel and rough travertine conjured up by a New York architect who looked west for commissions but east, to Europe and its Modernist past, for inspiration?

Questions worth asking, to be sure. Questions church leaders would do well to ask as they are “building” their churches. I hear a lot of talk in my denomination and others about building a great, relevant, healthy, significant churches. But often it seems like we do nothing more than build “expensive imports” inspired by our “Modernist past” that have little do with the cities in which they exist.

Read the rest here.

Art in LA: last night at the Getty

Last night a few of us were at the Getty Center for a panel discussion about Art in LA in the past decade (1997-2007). The main reason we were there is because Man One, the artist we've hired to do our mural at the church, was one of five panelists (moderated by Patt Morrison in the bright orange on the right). The prior day a different group of us were at the Arts & Parks committee of City Council to give public comment to the committee about the problem the city is facing with murals. I don't have time to go into all that here, but sufice it to say, the City, in combating legal and illegal super-graphics and billboards that multiply like rabbits, has made it impossible (legally impossible) to get fine art murals on private property approved. Things have ground to a standstill, so we're involving ourselves in this political process to urge a rapid resolution to this process.

However, while we were at the event at the Getty, some other things were said about art in Los Angeles that got me to thinking about missional church. So, stay tuned for the next post, Missional Museums.

Really involving the church in the community

For two years the Hollywood Seventh-day Adventist Church has been working alongside an amazing community organization called LA Voice. LA Voice is one local affiliate of the PICO National Network.

PICO is a national network of faith-based community organizations working to create innovative solutions to problems facing urban, suburban and rural communities.
With more than 1,000 member institutions representing one million families in 150 cities and 17 states, PICO is one of the largest community-based efforts in the United States. Together we are lifting up a new vision for America that unites people across region, race, class, and religion
From The PICO Network about page.

Our affiliate works very hard on the issues that affect our members. In Hollywood we are particularly focused on the issues of homelessness and affordable housing but around the city our work includes youth violence, citizenship, public safety, health care and education. Our organization is comprised of 25 members congregations across the city. And we are growing. Recent additions to our organizing work includes the largest synagogue in the Western US - Stephen S. Wise Temple.

The video above was created by our church media team to help explain to our own members what LA Voice is and how this work is the work of the gospel in our community. LA Voice is now using this video to help explain their work to other congregations, foundations, and others in the community.

We have been very blessed, as a congregation, to participate in God's work in our community. I would encourage any Adventist congregation to get involved in this vital work by visiting the PICO website and see if there is an affiliate in your town or city.

Cross posted at the Spectrum Blog.

UPDATE: Mireya Pena, the Hollywood Church's leader of our community organizing work, has written a really good post about her perspective on this work. You can read it at our church's community blog - We Are Hollywood.

Crossroads @ HOLLYWOOD mural update...and more

Yesterday we had our second community input workshop. It wasn't as well attended as the first one - maybe 15 people. Man One was on hand with the first draft of the design. We don't have images to show online just yet of the design, but I can tell you that it is impressive. This guy is one amazing artist.

We've added a new page to the Crossroads @ HOLLYWOOD blog. It's an FAQ written by the team that is leading this project. It's well worded and I think really points out the missional quality of what we're doing here. Be sure to check it out. And subscribe to the RSS feed for the Crossroads @ HOLLYWOOD blog for all the updates we post there.

In other related news...

LA vs. WAR
There is an art exhibit happening this week called LA vs. War. You can read more about it here. Man One and the Crewest Gallery will be taking part in this.

It's this Thursday, April 10 through Sunday, April 13 downtown at...

The Firehouse
710 S. Santa Fe Avenue
Los Angeles CA 90021

    All ages are welcome and admission is free. See also myspace.com/lavswar

The Arts in Los Angeles
On Thursday, April 17, Man One will be part of a conversation at the Getty Center entitled "The Arts in Los Angeles, 1997-2007", moderated by Patt Morrison of the LA Times and KPCC. This event is also free but reservations are required (click here). Parking is something like $7.

The Grace of Preaching the Lectionary

Today is Christ the King Sabbath - the last Sabbath of the Christian Year. Next Sabbath begins the new year with the season of Advent.

For approximately 13 months now I have been preaching from the Revised Common Lectionary. There are some amazing online resources that are incredibly helpful in preaching the lectionary. My favorite is a site called Text Week. In addition I have found the New Proclamation series of lectionary commentaries extremely helpful and insightful. But nothing replaces simply dwelling in the text and allowing the text to read your context and speak into the congregation's life.

I have been leading my congregation in the observance of Advent for the past 7 years and Lent for about the last 5 years, but this is the first year I have preaching an entire cycle through the lectionary.

I highly recommend this discipline. It is a rich gift that has been given to the church through the centuries. For myself and my congregation, we have found that God has met us in the text in surprising ways. Without fail the text for a particular week (and this year I have been strictly holding to the Gospel reading for the week) has been precisely what our community has needed. You would have to be here to fully appreciate the grace we have found in this.

The lectionary takes the the preacher out of the driver's seat and places the text of scripture in the central role. Rather than me trying to figure out "what my congregation needs to hear" we simply approach the text with hopeful expectation. I have preached more "difficult passages" this year than ever before in 13 years of ministry.

I frequently explain to my congregation what I am doing, but I'm not sure it has become part of their consciousness just yet. Others observe a change without directly referencing the lectionary. One member approached me with great surprise one day, saying that she heard some other preacher speak from EXACTLY THE SAME TEXT on Sunday that I spoke from on Sabbath. "Imagine that!" I thought to myself.

Next Sabbath begins my favorite season of the church year - Advent. It is also the richest season for Seventh-day Adventists. I will hopefully write more about Advent during the next four weeks. Hope is an Advent virtue, after all.

Anyone else out there preaching the lectionary?
If so, what have you learned?
Is anyone tired of trying to be clever week after week?

We Are Hollywood

Here is the promo video for a new ministry that our church is doing. Check it out, visit the website - WeAreHollywood.org, then read the story of what this is about and why it's come up, after the jump.

Bloggin' the 28 - The Church: Witnessing to the Reign of God

The Seventh-day Adventist Church has historically had a weak ecclesiology. This is due, in part at least, to the church’s eschatology, which made the church virtually irrelevant. Adventism arose as a movement, drawing attention to the nearness of Jesus return and preaching a message of personal preparedness for ‘the day of the Lord.’ The early Millerites had no intention of forming a new denomination.

Even after being expelled from their local Baptist, Methodist and other churches, these Adventists did not expect to organize a church. Questions of what it meant to be the people of God on this earth were far from their minds. Indeed, for nearly two decades after the Great Disappointment, the little band of Adventists resisted organization, claiming that organization was the first step toward becoming Babylon. Eventually, the need to sustain the work into the future made it necessary to organize and so, in 1863, the Seventh-day Adventist Church officially formed.

Still, ecclesiology did not register on the theological radar for over a century! It wasn’t until 1980 in the 3rd version of the Fundamental Beliefs that the church finally articulated it’s ecclesiology. Today our official statement reads as follows:

The church is the community of believers who confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. In continuity with the people of God in Old Testament times, we are called out from the world; and we join together for worship, for fellowship, for instruction in the Word, for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, for service to all mankind, and for the worldwide proclamation of the gospel. The church is the bride for whom Christ died that He might sanctify and cleanse her. At His return in triumph, He will present her to Himself a glorious church, the faithful of all the ages, the purchase of His blood, not having spot or wrinkle, but holy and without blemish. (Gen. 12:3; Acts 7:38; Eph. 4:11-15; 3:8-11; Matt. 28:19, 20; 16:13-20; 18:18; Eph. 2:19-22; 1:22, 23; 5:23-27; Col. 1:17, 18; Jude 24.)

I share that brief history to say this: the Seventh-day Adventist Church has, in my view, backed reluctantly into its ecclesiology. We hoped we would never need one. Due to this reluctance, we have still not done serious ecclesiological work (one exception being Richard Rice's small volume, Believing, Behaving, Belonging. Yet I believe there are, implicit in the Adventist psyche, the seeds of a robust ecclesiology that can give renewed meaning to a new generation of Seventh-day Adventists who wish to be the people of God, giving tangible witness to the present and arriving reign of God.

An Incarnational Community – Being the Body of Christ
The official Adventist statement of belief begins by saying the church is “the community of believers.” The important word there is community. The Apostle Paul frequently refers to the church as the Body of Christ (ex. Rom 12:5; 1 Cor 12:12,27).

The literal body of Christ became known to human beings through the incarnation – “the word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14, The Message). When the Father and the Son gave the Spirit to the church after Jesus’ ascension to heaven, the church became the incarnation of God on earth – the body of Christ.

The key implication for the question we are addressing in this series is that the church is the church only as a community. Individually I am not the church. As people enter the church through baptism, they die to self. They are joining themselves to a social reality that places togetherness and community above individualism.

This is especially important because of the radical individualism that characterizes Western culture. The church becomes a place where my individualism gets challenged. This is why churches that make their whole ministry about catering to people’s “felt needs” are in many ways not the church at all. This is a serious challenge to our ways of worship, theory of church growth, our reasons for meeting in “small groups,” and so much more.

An Alternative Community - the Church as Embodied Witness
The Seventh-day Adventist Church is not historically a mainstream movement. Deep in the Adventist psyche is a sense that we are different. Some have even observed a sort of inferiority or martyr complex. We’re not like other churches. We’re not Catholic. We’re not like those “liberal churches.” We’re also not Pentecostal and many are uncomfortable with being labeled Evangelical. We worship on a different day, we eat different food. We have been patently sectarian in almost every way.

While many of us (myself included) have attempted to throw off the stricture of sectarian identity in recent years, I have come to realize that this “differentness” is a resource.

One theological imagination about the church is that, in the words of Peter, we are a “peculiar people.”

But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Peter 2:9, KJV).

The central task of the church is “witness” – or in the Greek, marturia. Part of being witnesses is to demonstrate, in our communal life, what the kingdom is like. The body of Christ is called to be a demonstration – an embodied witness – of the loving reign of God. This leads many theologians, like Stanley Hauerwas, to assert that the number one thing the church can do to give witness to the gospel of the kingdom is to be the church. When the church is focused on being the church – and not trying to be a corporation or an amusement park or something else – the world is able to see what God has in mind of the whole world. In this way, the church is a foretaste of the coming kingdom.

What kind of embodied witness does scripture call for? The New Testament is loaded with these narratives and mandates. The church witnesses to the forgiveness of God by being a reconciling community; a community that knows how to receive and extend God’s forgiveness. The church witnesses to the grace and hospitality of God by receiving strangers and extending God’s hospitality to ‘the other.’ The church embodies God’s future reign of peace and justice by being agents of peace and justice in the world today. The church gives demonstrable witness to God’s intention to heal all creation by being agents of healing and wholeness in our communities, caring for the environment and bringing God’s healing to the point of the world’s greatest pain.

We are also called to give witness in ways that are even more “alternative” and counter to the prevailing culture. It is not enough for the church to witness to God’s kingdom by the things it embraces. We are also called to the more difficult task of bearing witness through resistance.

There are some things that are just inconsistent with the gospel of the kingdom. For example – and here again, Adventists are uniquely positioned to be this embodied witness – followers of the Way of Jesus cannot embrace our world’s way of violence. Jesus was a person of uncompromising peace. He was a pacifist. Our Adventist forebears understood this. And so we are called to give witness to God’s reign of peace by resisting war and other forms of violence and exploitation.

The calling of the church is always unique to time and place. Our time is a time of globalization and the near deification of free markets. This has led, culturally, to a moment in time when virtually everything, including human relationships, have been turned into objects and commodities. It is my feeling that the gospel requires the church to be imaginative about the way it lives its life in the midst of this kind of global capitalistic empire. Too many Christians, and churches, drink far too uncritically from the cultural well of capitalism without asking some basic questions about what it means to be God’s peculiar people.

I don’t know all the ways that this plays out but I’m pretty sure it means that churches that are serious about witness must question the unrestrained consumption that characterizes our society. We have to question our energy consumption. We need to question our living patterns that have placed us in gated-communities, far from our places of work and worship, which require long commutes which fragment our lives and destroy the environment.

So, being an alternative community is about both embrace of certain ways of being in the world and well as resistance to the ways the world attempts to “force us into its mold.” Sabbath can help us learn to resist and “unplug” from these destructive patterns of life.

In all these ways – and many more – the church is designed to be an embodied witness to the reign of God. This is about more than simply being social activists. It is also about more than proclaiming a reduced gospel of “saving souls.” No one but the church can do this work. Only by taking seriously the question of what it means to be the people of God in a place can the church move past narrow and reduced forms of witness, to a fully rounded demonstration of God’s future.

An Eschatological Community – Witnessing to the Telos of God
And speaking of God's future, an Adventist theology of the church must include an understanding of what it means to be an eschatological community. From our initial days as a people, Adventists have had their eyes on God’s horizon. We are a people oriented toward the future of God and how God’s future is approaching us in the present.

As such, our sense of what it means to be the church cannot be short-sighted. This is where our embodiment of God’s kingdom goes beyond mere social activism. Our witness is pointed forward to God’s ultimate future, which is now only seen “through a glass darkly.” As one theologian friend of mine is fond of saying, “Jesus said the kingdom of God is at hand, not in hand.” Some churches have acted as though the kingdom of God was in hand – that is, they were bringing the kingdom of God into being. Other churches have behaved as though the kingdom were not even at hand, but something far in the future and unrelated to life today. Jesus teaches us that the kingdom, while not yet in hand, is certainly at hand.  This is what makes our Christian witness unique and important.

Adventists are perfectly positioned to speak of the church as an eschatological community, oriented toward the telos – the purposes – of God. The church is always doing many things at once: forming people in the narrative of God through worship and other practices, so that they can witness to what God is up to in the world now and ultimately what God has in mind for the whole world in the future.

Being a Missional Church
What I have shared is just the tip of the iceberg about the church. While I have not used the language of “missional church” in this essay until now, all that I have said is about what it means to be a missional church.

I will get one more stab at some of these themes in a few days when I write on the doctrine of Baptism. More could also be said about the church as politics, the church as a community of practice, the importance of Eucharist and what it means to be a Eucharistic community, and so much more.

For now, my argument is that the church is essential. We cannot carry out God mission in the world without the church! After all, it is "His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Eph 3:9-11).

My report from the Allelon Summer Institute now online

The good folks at Allelon asked me to write a short report from the Summer Institute in Pasadena, California, held June 11-13. I'm happy to say it's now online and you can access it here.

Also, my good friend and webmaster for my church's website, Todd Hiestand also has a piece published on Allelon's site called, The Challenge of the Missional Church in Suburbia. It's really an excellent piece of work. If you are working in the suburbs and are thinking about how missional church takes shape in that context, Todd has some great thoughts. He is the pastor of a church called The Well in suburban Philadelphia, near my former church in Bucks County.

There are so many great resources on the Allelon website, so please visit the site and start digging!

New Markers of Missional Faithfulness

A little while back I listened to this Allelon Netcast, in which Al Roxburgh interviews Pernell Goodyear, pastor of an emerging Christian community called The Freeway in Hamilton, Ontario. Since then I've been checking in on his blog. Today I ran across this post entitled, Missional Church? Be Prepared to Lose -

We decided we could likely not continue to measure "success" as we always had - by attracting numbers: money, people, programs, projects, mission trips, souls saved, etc. We needed new markers, as it were, to know if we were becoming more Jesus-y.

I was immediately intrigued. He goes on...

In other words, rather than counting the number of people who come in to consume church programs, etc. we would celebrate people who left to follow to Jesus outside of the church walls. This shift meant several changes in the way we had always done things and the "results" we had always seen (some of which we would never have been able to anticipate ahead of time).

Our impulse to count things and measure our success by our numerical growth in any of these categories belies our addiction to modernity and its relentless commodification of everything. In modernity, if a thing can't be counted, it doesn't exist. We are so entrenched in this mindset that it's hard to imagine evaluating a congregation in another way. Clearly, the Bible is concerned with numbers and even names the numbers of people who were added to their communities of faith, but I seriously doubt they had the same hangups about numbers that we do, concerned as we are about market share, winning and loosing, and staking our identity on the 'unqualified good' of limitless growth.

Please read the whole post and look at what they have come up with as new markers of faithfulness. My heart is stirred by these things. However, I have a few questions....

Urban Ministry - a research report

As regular readers of this blog know, we had a seminar this past Sabbath in the Hollywood Church entitled, Ministry to Metropolis. It was a wonderful day with beautiful weather, an unusually high attendance (much of it coincidental), an amazing fellowship dinner during which we ran out of tables for people to sit at, and a great seminar in the afternoon. Approximately 25 people stayed for the seminar. There was just enough information and a good interaction amongst the participants.

For more photos of the day, visit www.hollywoodsda.org. Below is my report on the afternoon seminar.

Monte began the seminar by presenting some of his latest research findings after interviewing nearly 1000 congregations in the "urban corridor" from Boston to Washington, D.C. Much of the research was conducted when I was a pastor in that corridor.

A couple of the most significant findings that Monte presented are related to church growth. The strongest "church activity" that correlates to church growth is (drum roll please...)