intersections

Contributing to a new blog

I was recently invited to be one of fourteen bloggers for a new Allelon blog called, The Missional Journey: Thoughts Along the Way.

This blog focuses on:

» mission-shaped leadership;
» re-connecting and engaging the “worlds” in which we live;
» stories of engaging and listening to our context(s);
» the gospel and our modern Western culture; and
» Allelon initiatives.

I wrote a post just today called, "We Don't Really Have Bible Study." Let me know what you think.

And if you haven't heard of Allelon or visited their website recently you should definitely check it out. It is the premier place for all things missional!

Cruciform Leadership

A wonderful friend and fellow laborer in God's field sent me this great quote today from H.M.S. Richards, Sr., under the title, "Keep At Your Work." (I'm not going to end it this for gender inclusiveness - you can translate on the fly!)

The Lord has given to every man his work. It is his business to do it and the devil's business to hinder him if he can. So surely as God has given you a work to do, Satan will try to hinder you. He may present other things more promising, He may allure you by worldly prospects, He may assault you with slander, torment you with false accusations, set you to work defending your character, employ pious persons to lie about you, editors to assail you, and excellent men to slander you. You may have Pilate and Herod, Annas and Caiaphas all combined against you, and Judas standing by ready to sell you for thirty pieces of silver; and you may wonder why all those things come upon you. Can you not see that the whole thing is brought about through the craft of the devil to draw you off from your work and hinder your obedience to God?

Keep about your work. Do not flinch because the lion roars; do not stop to stone the devil's dogs; do not fool away your time chasing the devil's rabbits. Do your work. Let liars lie, let sectarians quarrel, let corporations resolve, let editors publish, let the devil do his worst; but see to it that nothing hinders you from fulfilling the work that God has given you.

He has not sent you to make money. He has not commanded you to get rich. He has never bidden you to defend your character. He has not set you at work to contradict falsehood which Satan and his servants may start to peddle. If you do these things, you will do nothing else; you will be at work for yourself and not for the Lord.

Keep about your work. Let your AIM be as steady as a star. Let the world brawl and bubble. You may be assaulted, wronged, insulted, slandered, wounded and rejected; you may be abused by foes, forsaken by friends, and despised and rejected of men, but see to it with steadfast determination, with unfaltering zeal, that you pursue the great purpose of your life and object of your being, until at last you can say, 'I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do.'

I can't express how timely this quote is for me. This is the heart of cruciform leadership. Are we greater than our Master? Should we expect to be treated differently than he was?

Also, I think this is what it means to say that "we believe in the communion of the saints." Though Elder Richards has long since gone to his rest, awaiting the great resurrection, his ministry continues to speak to me, sitting under the weight of leadership in the urban jungle of Los Angeles. I'm sure Elder Richards could barely imagine the circumstances under which we do minstry today, but he at deeper level, he understood exactly. And today he has encouraged me to "keep at my work!"

Henri Nouwen - The temptations of leadership

I don't know if today is just a day for good quotes, but I can't resist sharing this one. If you get Sojourners' Verse & Voice, you've probably seen this already. After the quote, a few thoughts.

Too often I looked at being relevant, popular, and powerful as ingredients of an effective ministry. The truth, however, is that these are not vocations but temptations. Jesus asks, "Do you love me?" Jesus sends us out to be shepherds, and Jesus promises a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hands and be led to places where we would rather not go. He asks us to move from a concern for relevance to a life of prayer, from worries about popularity to communal and mutual ministry, and from a leadership built on power to a leadership in which we critically discern where God is leading us and our people.

- Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus

A few members of our leadership team had a conversation last evening in my office. It's a conversation that happens fairly often, in various ways. Someone had said something about "how different" the Hollywood Church is from anything they've experienced before. Some use words like "raw", "authentic", "messy", and "unpredictible." Of course, those words aren't good news for everyone.

I think one of the intangible differences about Hollywood is that we give quite a bit of time and energy to learning how to lead in the ways that Henri Nouwen describes above. I spent the better part of 10 years doing exactly what he describes - worrying about being relevant and effective...maybe even popular.

Today we are wrestling with the invitation found in this quote - an invitation to vocation. The last line is so revealing. We are learning, as a leadership community, what it means to embrace a vocation of leadership "in which we critically discern where God is leading us and our people." This is no easy task. It is messy and raw, though we certainly don't set out toward messiness and rawness as objectives.

How do you understand the distinction Nouwen is making in your own live and vocation?

Intuitive Leadership, by Tim Keel

I just finished reading the latest book in the Emersion series from Baker - Intuitive Leadership, by Tim Keel. Tim and I have spend a little time together over the years at various Emergent events and the like. I first met Tim in October of 2001 at The Ooze gathering in Seattle. We happen to meet up at a coffee shop just before the opening day of the conference and we hung out a bit at that time. They were just getting their new church started back then. Now, seven years later, God has done some pretty remarkable things at Jacob's Well.

For those who are used to reading books about leadership, this is not what you're thinking. The subtitle says it all: Embracing a Paradigm of Narrative, Metaphor and Chaos. Tim has spent some time with Alan Roxburgh in recent years. Alan also wrote the forward to the book. Since I have been a doctoral student mentored by Alan for the past 4+ years I can definitely see some of the influence. The truly amazing this is that Tim was intuiting many of these things before he met Alan. I needed 2 hard years with Alan before I started to get it. I knew I was completely fed up with and frustrated by the "church growth" models I had been exposed to. Natural Church Development was more of the same (to give just one example). I just never realized how embedded in a modern, corporate mentality I was until stepping into the space that my D.Min. afforded me.

What Tim does in this book is basically share his personal journey and the journey of the church that he leads. However, I suspect that many readers will be disappointed that he doesn't let us in on more of what Jacob's Well has done and is doing. This is intentional. Instead, Tim offers what he calls "postures" of intuitive leadership, like "A Posture of Learning: From Answers to Questions" or "A Posture of Surrender: From Control to Chaos." In fact, this chapter is really the gem of the book, I think, for those who are wanting to come away with something to do. The first revolution is internal. Leaders need to find ways to change they way they think about the task of church leadership. Our role is no longer devising strategic plans, getting the congregation lined up, and pursuing some ideal future. For one thing, we're discovering that there is no "ideal future." There is only the future that God is bringing to pass in your time and place.

I would highly recommend this book to any pastor who is struggling with corporate, managerial leadership styles that they've inherited. Many of the ways of being church and being in leadership that Tim describes here are the same things we are learning in Hollywood. I can affirm the truth of everything Tim says because we are beginning to live these realities as well.

I'll end with a couple of choice quotes.

We have a mounting leadership crisis in the church. We are facing a crisis of imagination, an ill-fed spiritual attention span nourished by novelty. I believe this dynamic has debilitated local churches....

We are missing prophetic leaders who are able to read the signs of the times, who listen carefully, thoughtfully, and theologically, who respond in faithful and creative ways based on an imagination baptized and engaged in a missional reading of scripture, the environment, the people God has provided in their midst - not to mention the resources at hand that God has supplied....

At it's worst, this reduced pictures of reality has drained the landscape of color and creativity under God, and imagination has been lost in favor of a very small and uniform version of life. Our churches are the religious equivalent of strip malls with the same ten massive retailers located in Anytown, USA (76-77).

How well do our organizations create spaces that allow for diverse people with varied experiences and multiple intelligences to gather in order to discern signs of life intrinsic and extrinsic to our communities? How willing are we to do the hard and long-term work of creativity and contextual engagement? Will we create systems and structures that allow for a new imagination to emerge?

The reality is that creatives walk into our communities, systems and structures all the time, and when they do, they intuit the environment we have created and know immediately whether there is space for them. Most often, they discover there is not (209).

Stories from the grassroots: Forming missional imagination

My last post was a rather generic report about the march and prayer vigil that we participated in on Tuesday. Well since that time, one of my church members, Kirsten Salvador, wrote an amazing report which I think really gets at the anatomy of missional transformation. Her story contains huge clues about how even children can understand the radical nature of the gospel and be formed in new ways being Christian in the world. Here are a few excerpts from Kirsten's story (after the jump). You can read the whole thing on her Cafe Mom page.

Kirsten pointed me to this music video she found on YouTube which really depicts what she's describing.

Conversations: Walking Hollywood with Steve Taylor

After 3 1/2 hours of hard work cleaning up outside the Hollywood Church I had the privilege of spending about four hours with my friend across the seas, Steve Taylor (aka e~mergent kiwi). In fairness, it's not like we're 'old mates,' or anything. I met Steve around this time last year when he was teaching a class called Living the Text in a Postmodern Context at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena. I was only able to spend one day in his class, but I learned enough in that one day to know that Steve was someone I wanted to keep listening to. I recently finished reading his book, which I highly recommend. His Ph.D. is on new forms of church and this book is a distilation of his research and personal experience, written for the layperson. (Actually, I'm guessing here. I've never read his dissertation, but it seems like this is likely.

Anyway, Steve is back to teach the same class again. He arrived in the US a couple days early to allow for biological clock adjustments. He is the pastor of the Opawa Baptist Church in Christchurch, New Zealand and the author of Out of Bounds Church (2005).

Recently, Alan Roxburgh interviewed Steve for his blog, The Roxburgh Journal - you can hear it here.

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Since it's difficult to show people Hollywood except to take them shopping, I did what I love to do most with visitors - show them "my" Hollywood - the Hollywood that I know and love and interact with each and every day. We essentially walked around my block and explored the diverse community that is our ministry context.

After touring our church building and our community, it was time for coffee (of course).  So we headed off for my new favorite coffee shop - Capprezio - just a short walk from my church office. Finding that they are closed on Sundays, we continued our walk just one more block to my next favorite coffee shop - Sabor y Cultura. We spent the next two hours there sharing stories from our research and ministry.

Amazingly, Steve's research and experience in emerging and missional forms of church directly parallels the work that Alan Roxburgh and Mark Lau Branson have done. This, to me, is an unmistakable evidence of the hand of God over this conversation.

We talked about the joy and struggles of ministry in the Hollywood Church. He gave me a lot to think about regarding missional leadership. I'll save some of those insights for another post (when I'm not so hungry.

Allelon Summer Institute - a progress report

For the past two days I've been at Fuller Seminary attending the Allelon Summer Institute. It has been an interesting and stimulating experience for me for a number of reasons.

First, it's been about 5 years now that I've been on this journey toward missional church. For the past 3 1/2 years I've been in a Doctor of Ministry cohort here at Fuller in Missional Leadership. (By the way, for you clergy types out there looking to do a D.Min., I highly recommend this - click here for more info). So, to be in this conversation this week with that background gives me a unique perspective. What I am realizing out of all that is that I still have so many questions myself, after 5 or more years. The old ways of being the church are so deep inside of me that my imagination about church tends to default back to what I know. I've only been a pastor for 13 years. Imagine how hard it must be for someone like Walt Kallestad, who spoke to us the last two evenings, who has more that twice the years under his belt that I do. I'm a GenXer who grew up questioning these institutions and I still find myself defaulting back to what I know best, which is attractional church, control-based leadership models.

Second, I've enjoyed the diversity of people in this conversation. Last year in Idaho it seemed to me that it was primarily mainline clergy. Here there is a broad spectrum of folks from evangelical churches, independent, non-denominational churches, mainline churches (Disciples of Christ, Presbyterian) and so forth. That mix makes for a rich conversation.

Third, some in the room are really struggling with what's been shared. This is so great! This reminds me of the agony I was in nearly 4 years ago as Alan Roxburgh virtually tore our hearts out with his analysis of the contemporary church. Today I understand it a lot better and I see the same agony on other faces. I found myself praying for them, that they would hang in.

Fourth, I've enjoyed the mutual learning. As we have shared our leadership case studies in our groups I realize that we are all facing essentially the same challenges. It's almost as though you've been trained to read a map, and then when you pick up the map to go somewhere, the roads have been moved. Now what? I think this is a good description of what is happening in Hollywood. When the maps you've been given no longer define the terrain you're navigating you need a radically different kind of tool for navigation. In our case, it calls for a radically different kind of leadership. That's what missional leadership is about.

If you're new to what Allelon is and what Missional Church is, there are a host of multi-media resources (created primarily by my friend Bill Kinnon, who is technical wizard). Everything on the Allelon website is free and there for you to benefit from. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you check it out. And now, speaking to my "Sevy" friends, I would love to host a conversation among Adventist pastors (online or whatever) about what you're experiencing in your congregational leadership and how we might learn from each other about ways of leading our congregations that are appropriate to our times. Leave a comment or email me if that sounds interesting to you.

Finally, it has been a great experience to be with friends. Two of my fellow cohort members, Tom Allen and Donald Moy are here and it's been great catching up with them. We had dinner on Monday night. Bill Kinnon, who I mentioned earlier, is here too, and I had the privilege of eating lunch with him yesterday. I really enjoyed getting to know him better. I met Bill this past January at Fuller while I was in my D.Min. class. He came along with Alan to shoot some video and I've been reading his blog ever since.

There are numerous other reports on the Summer Institute. If you link to Bill Kinnon's blog here, you see links to other bloggers who are talking about the Summer Institute as well.

(L to R: Scott Cormode, Eddie Gibbs, Richard Beaton, Alan Roxburgh)

Dissertation underway...

I passed a major milestone today. I submitted the Introduction and first chapter of my dissertation. Some of you have been asking what my dissertation is about, so I'm going to post the Introduction after the jump. Like most dissertations, it isn't necessarily the most thrilling reading, but I think the Introduction is actually pretty interesting and does explain our missional transformation process.

For those of you who don't know, this is to complete my Doctor of Ministry at Fuller Theological Seminary. A D.Min. is not a Ph.D. The difference is roughly equivalent to the difference between a Ph.D. in Medicine vs. an M.D. or a Ph.D. in Law vs. a J.D. I would appreciate your reflections on what I'm working on, if you care to share.

There's no such thing as an ideal church

I returned Wednesday from a short trip to Andrews University where I had the privilege of speaking with some D.Min. students for about 3 hours about our work in Hollywood and what it might signal for ministry in the West for the foreseeable future. It was a fun challenge, given to me by Dr. Jon Dybdahl, friend and mentor.

It was fun to reconnect with some friends as well. About a fifth of the class were people I knew from other times and places and being able to share our journey with friends made the trip even better. Below is a short outline of the things I shared. Some of this is unique to Hollywood and some are things you will probably recognize as issues no matter were you serve in God's beautiful world.

If you had three hours to share your theology and practice of ministry in your setting, how you would express it?

MISSIONAL CHURCH
As pastors we’re always asking the question, “How can I get the church to work?” This is a second order question (at least). There is a prior question, which is, “What is the church for?” So, we have spent a lot of time working with Newbigin’s triad of gospel, culture and church, or church between gospel and culture (Reference: Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society).

• Focus on neighborhood – what is God doing here?
• Church serves the kingdom rather than the reverse
• Church is sign witness and foretaste of what God is doing and will do for all creation

Procrastination is not Anticipation

Advent is a season of anticipation; of learning to wait well. Procrastination is something completely different - a strategy of avoidance. That's what I'm doing right now. Instead of working on the first draft of my thesis proposal, which is due on Friday, I am writing this post to show off our family's new crèche which is hand carved from olive word by artisans in the West Bank. I bought it at Ten Thousand Villages in Pasadena (a fair trade store). It's all very exciting! We decorated the house for Christmas on Monday night and now we're completely in the Advent/Christmas mood. I have a longer piece I want to write about the importance of Advent in our time and place, but this will have to wait until after I put in more work on my thesis proposal. In the meantime, if you care to see pictures of my family decorating, click here.