One Lord, One Faith, One Mission

The subtitle to John Franke’s "acceptance speech" is "The unity of the Church and Missional Theology."  He’s had become an official professor of missional theology, so we should expect no less.

The Mission of God is what matters.  The Gospel threatens the rich and powerful because it challenges wealth and power.  The unity of the disciples should be like the unity of the Father and the Son.  This unity is missional.

We are sent out as disciples in the pattern of God’s sending of his Son: by the power of the Holy Spirit.  The phrase "body of Christ" is inherently missional—we are Christ’s presence.  Our unity is not knowledge and agreement, but found in a plurality and diversity of love.  Scripture gives wisdom to all who ask for it.  We must learn to live with the Christian "other," and the world’s "other," this being fitting because of the Trinity’s distinction: living and loving the Other.  The Trinity is united in their interdependence.  The unity called for is not about assimiliation or homogonization, it is about a diverse body working together in mission. 

This participation is found in three groups: Evangelicals, Mainline, and Emergent.  All three, through missional theology, are committed to one mission, this is the bringing together of the church.  We need to walk together in the mission of God and defend one another against each other, because at the end of the day we are part of one mission, and we need each other.  We couldn’t do mission without one another.  Those who aren’t against us are for us.

In Christendom we had the luxury of dividing the Body.  If we are committed to the mission of God in a post-Christian world we must work together, the love of God permeates all our differences.  The Church is to be a denomination for all people.  The unity of the Church is the will of God, the one mission of God.  The mission does not belong to us, it belongs to God, he invites us to take it up as our calling (by his Spirit).  We must learn to depend on God and others.  We must learn thanksgiving for the others.

An Epistemology of Love

Brian McLaren gave the following lecture with lots of slides containing quotes and pictures of Jane Goodall and her primate friends. 

Epistemology: a question of knowing.  What does it mean to know?

The early church is not homogenized, new believers are not mimics when converted, they remain unique people.  Whoever loves God is known by God.  Knowledge can destroy the weak Christian; therefore, how do we deal with people with different knowledge?

Different Knowledge—>Different Giftedness—>Different "Body" Parts—>Most Excellent Way—>LOVE

Christians have to face the fact that we’ve been wrong before.  In the Middle Ages knowledge was achieved through God-ordained authorities.  In the Modern Era knowledge was achieved by doubting authorities (skepticism) and experimentation (scholarship).  In the current context we are struggling between mystification and reductionism, underconfidence and overconfidence in regards to how to know what we know.

Derrida encourages humility when approaching "truth."

Do not capitulate yourself to doubt—think theologically about knowing.

"Deconstruction is not destruction.  Deconstruction is Love." -John Caputo

The person that pursues knowledge without caring about the effects does not love.  Christ informs our knowing, knowing is Christ-centered, love-centered.  Knowing equals doing equals loving.  -N.T. Wright (paraphrase)

Knowing needs to be uncluttered by reductionist, oversimplistic, mechanistic science.  As Christians we follow a way that says he who does not love does not know God.

The Promise and Threat of Missional Theology

Darrell Guder, a professor in missional and ecumenical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, delivered this well thought out vision for missional theology.

Missional theology is not an academic exercise or word play.  It is a project.
Missional: mission as definition of church.
This is a time of profound change, a paradigm shift, where Christendom is eroding.  Missional theology is a project for working in a post-Christendom world. 
Westen theology is rooted in a tradition that neglects mission.  There is no mention of mission in the Reformed tradition until 1903, and this is a colonizing mention.  Missional ecclesiology is needed to do theology with the understanding that the church is mission.  It is from the Trinitarian God’s mission that our mission is defined.  The church is the instrument for God’s mission.  This is the fundamental calling of the church.  Missional theology is required to keep the church attentive to its calling.
Today we stand closer to the pre-Constantine church since the 4th century.  We can re-engage with the pre-Constantine Christian movement.  We are exiled from our kingdom (Christendom).  This is helping us find out what was going on in the pre-Constantine church and peel off the layers of lenses added to the church during Christendom.
The apostles did not go out to save souls, they went out to start saving communities.The New Testament is the voice of the Spirit to saving communities.  We may find ourselves energized by the "cosmic" implications of the gospel.  It is God’s desire that all should be healed.  It is time to reclaim our vocation under God’s Lordship.   We do not take Christ with us, we go to where he already is.
Missional theology will investigate the complexity of Christendom, as heirs of this long journey we are its interpreters.  Christendom is God’s story—we would not have the gospel or Scriptures without it.  Our task as the heirs of Christendom is to take our position as interpreters seriously.
Christendom reduced ecclesiology to the mainenance of the saved.  We have to both appreciate and criticize the Christendom that shaped us.  The problem of Christendom is: dichotomies, reductionisms, and equations.  A seperation of theology from practical theology is an unbiblical distinction Christendom makes.  We have equated gospel equals culture equals church.  Missional theology says gospel does not equal culture does not equal church.

Missional theology poses a threat:

-to Christendom.
-to the Church as a servant of culture.
-to our position as chaplian of society.
-to our unrepentant state.  The Church is called to repentance and conversion just as Israel was—the gospel is always before us—we will have Josiah experiences and celebrate the recovery of our Word and vocation; this is a change that threatens.
-the silos of theology.
-the attempts that treat the fall of Christendom as a problem to be solved with strategy and quick-fixes as they try to preserve the status quo.
-to Barthian theologians.  Specifically, when we read Scripture missionally church history becomes mission history and the Scriptures become our text to equip us for vocation.  Doctrinal theology finds its primary purpose not in knowledge but in equipping us for vocation.  Barth was the only 20th century theologian to recognize missions as important.  Barth wrote to prepare the church for its vocation after the fall of Christendom: "the gospel must lead into vocation or it is not the full gospel."
-to the communities that act like Christendom never happened—this is a denial of God’s presence in Christendom.
-to Church triumphalists / Christianists.

The commitment of missional theology is that one day there will be a time when the term is no longer necessary, for theology will be only understood as missional.

Aside 1: It is always reductionistic to define yourself by what you are not.
Aside 2: Romans 12 applies to Christendom.  We must pull ourselves out of the culture plagued Christianity of modernity and renew our minds to discover a Christianity that is both forward-looking and based in the missio dei.

“Leadership, the Local Church, and the Crisis of Imaginiation”

Tim Keel presented this lecture in full preacher form.  It was powerful.  My personal favorite lecture from the day for the passion involved.

The Incarnation links Academics and Art, Head and Heart together.
The most significant crisis we are facing in the church today is one of imagination.
Imagination, a definition: the faculty of creating new things, words or actions, of seeing things that have not yet happened.
/metanoia – expand, open up, repent.
\paranoia – retract, implode on oneself.
We need to stop being paranoid and start being metanoid.

Imagination is critical to leadership.  Our leadership imagination has been domesticated.  What we have tried to do is domesticate the Holy Spirit in three ways: Our committment to modern rationalism and epistemology, our acceptance of American pragmatism, and our isolation.  The Holy Spirit is the source of our imagination.

Instead of imagination, we make decisions using modern epistemology: we are rational and objective to the point we create a culture of reductionism.  Truth & Knowledge become universal and generic guides and three-step plans become the norm.  A perfect storm has developed that effects the local leader.  Leadership becomes the right application of technique and models instead of a desire to be imaginative and follow the leading of the Holy Spirit. This creates leaders who follow experts blindly.  We do not truly believe with our hearts and minds that God’s Spirit is alive and active where we are. 

Instead of imagination, we make decisions using American pragmatism (aka Pastoral Titilation): we strip great ideas out of there context and apply them to places where they don’t fit.  We are engaging with what is out "there" instead of looking for what the Spirit is doing "here."  How doe we posture ourselves as the Church Fathers and leaders yet do not imitate the way they made decisions: by the Spirit and in community.  When we posture ourselves and listen to God and look for him we will find the vision God has for us.

Instead of imagination, we make decisions by Isolation: this is Protestantism’s dirty little secret.  The logic of Protestantism is to break fellowship.  The greatest sin in the Western Church is heresy, to disagree.  The greatest sin in the East is schism, to break unity with the Church.  A healthy organism grows around the breaks in fellowship, like a tree growing over its wounds.

Imagination requires hope, you imagine a future and believe you can actually get there.  We discover context, specificity, localization, and narrative.  We should commit ourselves to a locale, living life as a community in practices that shape us as a community and help us see God.  We begin to base community in an organic, mutual abiding between individuals, community, and God.  Our individual practices are an outgrowth of our communal practices, not the other, and more common, way around.

Missional Church in Suburbia: Are You Kidding?

Todd Hiestand, a fellow PBU alumni, and Gary Alloway co-lead the following breakout session:

Are you fed up with suburbia?  Don’t hate, dig deep and explore its culture.  Engage it to find ways to bring the gospel.
Consumerism is killing suburban culture.
The suburbs are made to be comfortable.  Theologically, Comfort is the god of suburbia.
There is very little cultural awareness in suburbia.  It is a-cultural.
In suburbia your identity is based on somewhere "other"; i.e., living in a suburb you always tell a stranger you live in Philadelphia or "near New York City" (I say that one all the time).
We drive by the poverty of suburbia to get to the poverty of the city.  We help the city out…we need to help suburbia out…by:

• Canvasing the town—mission is right in front of you, O suburbanites!
• Pointing theology outward: our preaching must point outward into the community.
• Going on a local missions trip focused on local mission.
• Asking non-profits about how to best serve the community.
• Fostering small groups that enhance locality.
• Remembering, God is present long before we ever get there—we must partner with what God is already doing.  If we don’t know our communities we don’t know what God is doing.

Todd Hiestand and Gary Alloway gave an excellent talk on how to be missional in suburbia.  You can read more of Todd’s thoughts on suburbia at toddhiestand.com and subtext, while Gary blogs at There And Back Again.

An aside: Gary’s thought concerning identifying with the other has a colonial/colonizer aspect to it.  In his Marxist history of colonisation Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson describes this as attaching culture to the metropole.  Areas like Vermont or the Amish Country are so beloved because they have untied themselves from the metropole and become their own regions, cultures, and found a unique identity apart from the dominant discourse.

The Pope Gets Missional

Hat Tip to Dave Opderbeck at Through A Glass Darkly for finding this quote from one of Pope Benedict’s latest speeches:

We may put it even more simply:  Scripture requires exegesis, and it
requires the context of the community in which it came to birth and in
which it is lived.  This is where its unity is to be found, and here
too its unifying meaning is opened up.  To put it yet another way:
there are dimensions of meaning in the word and in words which only
come to light within the living community of this history-generating
word.  Through the growing realization of the different layers of
meaning, the word is not devalued, but in fact appears in its full
grandeur and dignity.  Therefore the Catechism of the Catholic Church
can rightly say that Christianity does not simply represent a religion
of the book in the classical sense (cf. par. 108).  It perceives in the
words the Word, the Logos itself, which spreads its
mystery through this multiplicity and the reality of a human history. 
This particular structure of the Bible issues a constantly new
challenge to every generation.  It excludes by its nature everything
that today is known as fundamentalism.  In effect, the word of God can
never simply be equated with the letter of the text.  To attain to it
involves a transcending and a process of understanding, led by the
inner movement of the whole and hence it also has to become a process
of living.  Only within the dynamic unity of the whole are the many
books one book.  The Word of God and his action in the world are revealed only in the word and history of human beings.

The whole speech is found here.  David has a larger quotation here. A long distance hat tip goes to Voice of Stefan for tipping David off to this.