A couple of months ago I watched the movie “Milk”. If you saw the movie, you will probably agree with me that it is not an easy movie to watch. Even though some of the explicit homosexual scenes were awkward for me to watch, the most difficult part for me to watch was the reaction of the “Christian community.” I was fairly young when all of this happened, but I recall Anita Bryant and other who didn’t know how to react to homosexuality, so they just decided to attack. Evangelical churches as a whole had the same reaction. More recently we have seen other prominant Evangelicals declaring that HIV/AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality. As a result, nearly anyone could go into a church and find acceptance and healing. For the homosexual, however, there was nothing more than condemnation.
I struggle with this. I have friends who are homosexual and I know that the last place they think that they could find love is in a church. If the church is to live into the missio Dei, we have to ask ourselves some difficult questions about the nature of the church and how it reacts to people who have differing perspectives and even lifestyles. I know what scripture says about homosexuality, and I am not trying to make light of that. I wish I had some easy answers to this, but I do not have easy answers to this discussion. I do know that we are to be the body of Christ and I know that the church is meant to be a redemptive community. I have attached an interesting video clip from a conservative Christian who struggles with these same issues. This clip is primarily a promotion for his book, but I invite you to watch it and give me your constructive ideas about the Church, the missio Dei, and ‘others’.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
Photo Sensitivity
This has been R&R week at NTS. For some R&R means rest and relaxation, for others it means reading and research. I am in the latter group. I have spent this week trying to get caught up on PhD projects (the key word here is “trying”).
Some of the reading that I have been doing is related to short-term missions. Many of the initial research initiatives related to short-term missions have evaluated the growing phenomenon in relation to the self perceived outcomes of STM from the perspective of the short-termer them self. There is a very interesting body of literature which deals with how people experience short-term mission trips.
Interestingly, most people buy tickets and spend considerable money to go across the world, and then spend a high percentage of their time experiencing the new location through the lens of a camera or on the computer, blogging about the location. Many people find that the picture represents reality more than reality itself. The end result is that people have great pictures and great blog sites, but have very few real relationships with people since they have been treated like objects to be observed instead of people to know. The following are a few guidelines that may help those who want to experience real people and who also want to get good pictures:
1) Take time to see people as friends and not as objects to be photographed. Make it a point to learn about families, and culture before even using a camera. As this relationship builds, you may find it more natural to take pictures just as you would take pictures of your own family.
2) Find a way to ask if it is alright to take pictures that gives people the opportunity to say “no”. This may be tricky in some places since saying “no” is seen as offensive. A good rule of thumb is to ask a missionary or person who understands the culture well. Normally, however, if you have built a real friendship, people enjoy having pictures taken.
3) If you have to choose between taking pictures and spending time with people, there is no choice. Forget the pictures. If a camera can be used in a way that builds friendships, then go for it. At the end of the day, God’s mission is people, and respecting them as individuals created in God’s image.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Missional Church and Global Missions
The comments on Stetzer’s article were interesting and I would just like to make a few comments of my own. Several of you who commented noted the problems of imbalance in seeing missions as either global or local, and I would completely agree with those comments. Stetzer’s critique of emergent and missional movements is a concern that I share and a concern that we must address. As a Wesleyan, there are some nuances of Stetzer’s proposal, however, that I would not share.
In an earlier post, I wrote about the church as missionary or a missional ecclesiology. If we understand the church as those who are a sent community to be the people of the triune God who are primarily identified by mission, our very nature reflects the missio Dei (God’s mission). With this understanding, the missio Dei is not geographically limited. Throughout scripture, God is a missionary God who is concerned for “the nations” or “ethne”. He is constantly moving to restore the broken relationships in humanity as well as creation. If we are those “who reflect God’s glory”, then we too must share God’s desire for transformation, justice and restoration (wherever that may be). My understanding of a missional ecclesiology is that the entire church body is sent. As a body we all have different gifts and callings within that “sentness”, but we all are sent. Some are sent to be a Christian witness to cultures which require language learning and lifelong study of culture, others are sent to be a Christian witness and learn cultures of post modern friends and neighbors. I believe that God gives the church people who have gifts in each of these areas. The fallacy is when we assume that some are sent and others send. We all are sent and we all are involved in sending. Within the body of Christ, there has never been a category for spectators. We are mission or we are not the Church.
As Wesleyans, we find ourselves in the “via media”. We cannot say that we are primarily concerned about evangelism or only that which leads to evangelism. We can say that our Christian vocation is to be a holy people who reflect God’s holiness and God’s nature of mission. We are called to BE a Christian witness.
I know that this is thinking completely outside of some of our normal boxes of understanding, and is radical if correctly understood. I hear many people say that the U.S. should start receiving missionaries from other places, and to a degree that is already happening. If, however, the church in the U.S. grasped hold of the idea that we are the missionary, and if the members of congregations began to function as missionaries who are the church in our communities instead of waiting for communities to come into the church building, we would see a movement of God which is not measured by church growth statistics, but rather by relationship in the life of the Triune God.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Why Missional Churches Don't Do Global Missions
David Wesley
An interesting characteristic of the missional and emerging church is that there is very little if any emphasis on global missions. This is surprising to me since the primary understanding of missio Dei is for the church to share God's passion for redemptive change in the world. The following is an article written by Ed Stetzer which addresses this same issue. I must say that I don't agree with all of Stetzer's perspctives related to missional church, but this particular article raises an issue that we must engage. I invite your comments/reactions:
I am writing this post from Taiwan. As I have been working with both local leaders and American pastors, I have been struck by a few things and thought I would share them with you.
First, I have traveled to Taiwan as a part of the Upstream Collective. The reason is to accompany American pastors with a desire to be missional on a cross-cultural, international encounter. (You can scroll down the last few posts to learn what we are doing in Taiwan.)
Each person on the trip has the missional impulse as part of their DNA, and they are here to consider how they might join God on his mission globally. While I admire the faithfulness of these men, I must admit my surprise to see that there is not a bigger interest in such global concerns among American pastors in general. My fellow travelers seem to be rare of a breed in ministry.
Second, when I blogged about this on Sunday, two readers contacted my hosts-- one working with the Presbyterian Church in America and one from the Oversee Missionary Fellowship (OMF). Why? Well, according to one email, the author explained, "I'm particularly interested in attracting young missional church planters here."
Third, I was recently told by a pastor who called himself "missional" that his church needed to pull back on their global mission support to help their people "be missionaries right here."
All this provokes me to ask, "Why are so many missional Christians uninvolved in God's global mission?" As the missional conversation continues and deepens, what has occurred that has led to our blindness to the lost world around us?
There are five reasons I think this has happened:
1) In rediscovering God's mission, many have only discovered its personal dimensions.
I don't mean they have somehow localized mission into their interior, "private" life-- that would make little sense. Rather, the encouragement for each person to be on mission (to be "missional") has trended toward a personal obligation to personal settings, rather than toward a global obligation to advance God's kingdom among all the nations.
"Missional" has merged with privatized Christianity to serve as the reason for personal projects carried out in personal spheres. This is not bad, necessarily. But when the missional impulse is not expanded to include God's global mission, it results in believers moved only to minister in their own Jerusalems with no mind toward their Judeas, Samarias, and uttermost parts of the earth (Acts 1:8).
2) In responding to God's mission, many have wanted to be more mission-shaped and have therefore made everything "mission."
Missions historian Stephen Neil, responding to a similar surge in mission interest (the missio dei movement of the 1950s and following), explained it this way: "If everything is mission then nothing is mission." Neil's fear was that the focus would shift from global evangelization (often called "missions") to societal transformation (often called "mission"). He was right.
Recently John Piper echoed these same concerns, differentiating between evangelism and missions. He reminded us that when "Every Christian is a missionary" equals "missional," then we have diluted the need for and specialness of missionaries to foreign lands. (Although I would want to nuance John's language a bit, I agree with his point.)
One American church's website recently identified their ministry as missional, which they proceeded to define as "reaching out to the community to invite them to come" see what is happening in the church. Another's young adult community service project consisted of landscaping the church grounds. Inviting people to church and cleaning up the church are noble endeavors, but passing them for "missional" and "service" is ministerial naïveté at best. It demonstrates the fuzziness that creeps in when labels become catch-alls. And as the outer edges of the missional label gets fuzzy so does mission to the outer edges of the world.
3) In relating God's mission, the message increasingly includes the hurting but less frequently includes the global lost.
One only needs to watch the videos to see the emphases: global orphan projects, eradicating AIDS, Christmas shoeboxes, etc. All of these causes now have advocacy groups, and rightly so, as they are important. However, their vocabulary and frames of reference do not frequently make room for evangelizing the very people they touch. The message of world evangelism, actually, seems more common in legacy/traditional churches than in missional churches. Missional churches seem to speak more of unserved peoples rather than unreached peoples. As we engage to deliver justice, we must also deliver the gospel regardless of anyone's status in a culture.
4) In refocusing on God's mission, many are focusing on being good news rather than telling good news.
St. Francis allegedly said,"Preach the gospel at all times; when necessary, use words." Interestingly enough, Francis never actually said this, nor would he have done so due to his membership in a preaching order. But it is a pithy quote tossed into mission statements and vision sermons in missional churches all around my country. Why? It seems that many in the missional conversation place a higher value on serving the global hurting rather than evangelizing the global lost. Or perhaps it is just easier.
I am not urging a dichotomy here, only noting that one already exists. It is ironic, though, that as many missional Christians have sought to "embody" the gospel, they have chosen to forsake one member of Christ's body; the mouth.
5) In reiterating God's mission, many lose the context of the church's global mission and needed global presence.
For whatever reason-- the admirable one of commitment to the local church or the ignoble one of commitment to personalized consumeristic Christianity-- we have lost the grand scope of the entire family of God. While Christ calls people from all tongues, tribes, and nations, we have become content with our own tongue, tribe, and nation. Many churches are wonderfully embracing the missional imperative, but as they seek to "own" the mission by adapting their church into a missional movement in their local community, some inadvertently localize God's mission itself and lose the vital connection all believers share together. A hyper-focus on our own community results in a, have lost vision for the communion of the saints.
So how do we fully embrace missional without losing the mission? The Mission Exchange (formerly the Evangelical Foreign Mission Society) asked me to talk to their global leaders on the topic "How to Put 'Missions' Back into Missional." In my talk, I proposed four principles we needed to consider:
First, recognize it is God's mission, and we need to be passionate about the mission as He describes it. We don't own mission and it is not ours to define. A church vision statement is fine, but God's mission is better and bigger. Our first task is to submit to God's mission.
Secondly, evangelicals have understated the call to serve the poor and the hurting and need a stronger engagement in social justice. This sounds counterintuitive if we are seeking to remedy the loss of concern for articulated evangelism. But social engagement entails relational engagement, and relational engagement entails opportunities to share the gospel. The successes and experiences in our communities should awaken hearts and minds to global needs. We just need to maintain the reason for social justice: the glory of God in the worship of Jesus.
Third, share God's deep concern about His mission to the nations-- that His name be praised from the lips of men and women from every corner of the globe. Feel the Great Commission in your bones. Ask God to turn your heart to those you cannot see. As Paul did, develop ways to "struggle personally" (Colossians 2:1) for those far away.
Fourthly, churches that are serious about joining God on his mission will obey his commands to disciple the nations. The end product of missional endeavors should be a thriving Christian ready to produce more thriving Christians.
It appears to me that many missional churches are missing the Great Commission in the name of being missional. That makes zero sense. It is a huge (but historically common) mistake.
If we are truly interested in being missional-- in joining God on His mission-- our efforts should actually reflect His stated mission. We are bound to the Great Commandment as the fullest human expression of God's love. But the Commandment is not hermetically sealed off from the Great Commission. Rather, the Great Commission provides the what of mission, while the Great Commandment provides part of the how. Answering the age-old question of "Who is my neighbor?" should result in the desire to "make disciples of all nations."
- note: the source for Stetzer's article is
http://blogs.lifeway.com/blog/edstetzer/2009/09/five-reasons-missional-churche.html
An interesting characteristic of the missional and emerging church is that there is very little if any emphasis on global missions. This is surprising to me since the primary understanding of missio Dei is for the church to share God's passion for redemptive change in the world. The following is an article written by Ed Stetzer which addresses this same issue. I must say that I don't agree with all of Stetzer's perspctives related to missional church, but this particular article raises an issue that we must engage. I invite your comments/reactions:
I am writing this post from Taiwan. As I have been working with both local leaders and American pastors, I have been struck by a few things and thought I would share them with you.
First, I have traveled to Taiwan as a part of the Upstream Collective. The reason is to accompany American pastors with a desire to be missional on a cross-cultural, international encounter. (You can scroll down the last few posts to learn what we are doing in Taiwan.)
Each person on the trip has the missional impulse as part of their DNA, and they are here to consider how they might join God on his mission globally. While I admire the faithfulness of these men, I must admit my surprise to see that there is not a bigger interest in such global concerns among American pastors in general. My fellow travelers seem to be rare of a breed in ministry.
Second, when I blogged about this on Sunday, two readers contacted my hosts-- one working with the Presbyterian Church in America and one from the Oversee Missionary Fellowship (OMF). Why? Well, according to one email, the author explained, "I'm particularly interested in attracting young missional church planters here."
Third, I was recently told by a pastor who called himself "missional" that his church needed to pull back on their global mission support to help their people "be missionaries right here."
All this provokes me to ask, "Why are so many missional Christians uninvolved in God's global mission?" As the missional conversation continues and deepens, what has occurred that has led to our blindness to the lost world around us?
There are five reasons I think this has happened:
1) In rediscovering God's mission, many have only discovered its personal dimensions.
I don't mean they have somehow localized mission into their interior, "private" life-- that would make little sense. Rather, the encouragement for each person to be on mission (to be "missional") has trended toward a personal obligation to personal settings, rather than toward a global obligation to advance God's kingdom among all the nations.
"Missional" has merged with privatized Christianity to serve as the reason for personal projects carried out in personal spheres. This is not bad, necessarily. But when the missional impulse is not expanded to include God's global mission, it results in believers moved only to minister in their own Jerusalems with no mind toward their Judeas, Samarias, and uttermost parts of the earth (Acts 1:8).
2) In responding to God's mission, many have wanted to be more mission-shaped and have therefore made everything "mission."
Missions historian Stephen Neil, responding to a similar surge in mission interest (the missio dei movement of the 1950s and following), explained it this way: "If everything is mission then nothing is mission." Neil's fear was that the focus would shift from global evangelization (often called "missions") to societal transformation (often called "mission"). He was right.
Recently John Piper echoed these same concerns, differentiating between evangelism and missions. He reminded us that when "Every Christian is a missionary" equals "missional," then we have diluted the need for and specialness of missionaries to foreign lands. (Although I would want to nuance John's language a bit, I agree with his point.)
One American church's website recently identified their ministry as missional, which they proceeded to define as "reaching out to the community to invite them to come" see what is happening in the church. Another's young adult community service project consisted of landscaping the church grounds. Inviting people to church and cleaning up the church are noble endeavors, but passing them for "missional" and "service" is ministerial naïveté at best. It demonstrates the fuzziness that creeps in when labels become catch-alls. And as the outer edges of the missional label gets fuzzy so does mission to the outer edges of the world.
3) In relating God's mission, the message increasingly includes the hurting but less frequently includes the global lost.
One only needs to watch the videos to see the emphases: global orphan projects, eradicating AIDS, Christmas shoeboxes, etc. All of these causes now have advocacy groups, and rightly so, as they are important. However, their vocabulary and frames of reference do not frequently make room for evangelizing the very people they touch. The message of world evangelism, actually, seems more common in legacy/traditional churches than in missional churches. Missional churches seem to speak more of unserved peoples rather than unreached peoples. As we engage to deliver justice, we must also deliver the gospel regardless of anyone's status in a culture.
4) In refocusing on God's mission, many are focusing on being good news rather than telling good news.
St. Francis allegedly said,"Preach the gospel at all times; when necessary, use words." Interestingly enough, Francis never actually said this, nor would he have done so due to his membership in a preaching order. But it is a pithy quote tossed into mission statements and vision sermons in missional churches all around my country. Why? It seems that many in the missional conversation place a higher value on serving the global hurting rather than evangelizing the global lost. Or perhaps it is just easier.
I am not urging a dichotomy here, only noting that one already exists. It is ironic, though, that as many missional Christians have sought to "embody" the gospel, they have chosen to forsake one member of Christ's body; the mouth.
5) In reiterating God's mission, many lose the context of the church's global mission and needed global presence.
For whatever reason-- the admirable one of commitment to the local church or the ignoble one of commitment to personalized consumeristic Christianity-- we have lost the grand scope of the entire family of God. While Christ calls people from all tongues, tribes, and nations, we have become content with our own tongue, tribe, and nation. Many churches are wonderfully embracing the missional imperative, but as they seek to "own" the mission by adapting their church into a missional movement in their local community, some inadvertently localize God's mission itself and lose the vital connection all believers share together. A hyper-focus on our own community results in a, have lost vision for the communion of the saints.
So how do we fully embrace missional without losing the mission? The Mission Exchange (formerly the Evangelical Foreign Mission Society) asked me to talk to their global leaders on the topic "How to Put 'Missions' Back into Missional." In my talk, I proposed four principles we needed to consider:
First, recognize it is God's mission, and we need to be passionate about the mission as He describes it. We don't own mission and it is not ours to define. A church vision statement is fine, but God's mission is better and bigger. Our first task is to submit to God's mission.
Secondly, evangelicals have understated the call to serve the poor and the hurting and need a stronger engagement in social justice. This sounds counterintuitive if we are seeking to remedy the loss of concern for articulated evangelism. But social engagement entails relational engagement, and relational engagement entails opportunities to share the gospel. The successes and experiences in our communities should awaken hearts and minds to global needs. We just need to maintain the reason for social justice: the glory of God in the worship of Jesus.
Third, share God's deep concern about His mission to the nations-- that His name be praised from the lips of men and women from every corner of the globe. Feel the Great Commission in your bones. Ask God to turn your heart to those you cannot see. As Paul did, develop ways to "struggle personally" (Colossians 2:1) for those far away.
Fourthly, churches that are serious about joining God on his mission will obey his commands to disciple the nations. The end product of missional endeavors should be a thriving Christian ready to produce more thriving Christians.
It appears to me that many missional churches are missing the Great Commission in the name of being missional. That makes zero sense. It is a huge (but historically common) mistake.
If we are truly interested in being missional-- in joining God on His mission-- our efforts should actually reflect His stated mission. We are bound to the Great Commandment as the fullest human expression of God's love. But the Commandment is not hermetically sealed off from the Great Commission. Rather, the Great Commission provides the what of mission, while the Great Commandment provides part of the how. Answering the age-old question of "Who is my neighbor?" should result in the desire to "make disciples of all nations."
- note: the source for Stetzer's article is
http://blogs.lifeway.com/blog/edstetzer/2009/09/five-reasons-missional-churche.html
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Something to think about....
::: Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approximately two thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.
After 3 minutes:
A middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.
4 minutes later:
The violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.
6 minutes:
A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.
10 minutes:
A 3-year old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children.. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.
45 minutes:
The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.
1 hour:
He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.
No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before, Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.
This is a true story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people's priorities. The questions raised: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?
One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made..... How many other things are we missing?
After 3 minutes:
A middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.
4 minutes later:
The violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.
6 minutes:
A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.
10 minutes:
A 3-year old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children.. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.
45 minutes:
The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.
1 hour:
He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.
No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before, Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.
This is a true story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people's priorities. The questions raised: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?
One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made..... How many other things are we missing?
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