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Soak it up. Here is the first installment of resources from the Total Church Conference. You won’t agree with all of it, which is exactly why you need it. Timmis’ session on the Community-centered Gospel had a significant effect on me.
We just finished up Part II (Part I – Missional Leadership) of our Summer Leadership Training on Pastoral Leadership. It was a rich time of equipping our leaders to think and practice “pastor one another.” This was for all of our leaders, but is especially appropriate for our City Group Leaders. The first practice of City Groups is to share life and truth. This training equipped our people how to intentionally share life and truth. Unfortunately, most of us don’t naturally want to share our lives or our gospel hope with others; we’d rather, at best, talk around it or about it. But talking about sharing life and truth doesn’t produce gospel-centered community. We have to practice it by pastoring one another–speaking the truth in love. This was our over-arching question: “How do we speak the truth in love to one another?” We answered it in three ways:
- Context of Pastoral Leadership: Community-centered Pastoring
- Content of Pastoral Leadership: Gospel-centered Pastoring
- Contour of Pastoral Leadership: Where and How it Happens
Some reflection from (1) – The Context of Pastoral Leadership.
The vision of Austin City Life is to cultivate communities of Spirit-led disciples who redemptively engage peoples and cultures through Christ for the glory of God. So, what does it mean to “cultivate communities”? Cultivation is a horticultural metaphor. To plant a church is to cultivate a community, not launch a service. Church planting requires sweaty work with people; patience, allowing the plant to grow; and tenderness with the plant. In other words, if we want to cultivate community, it will require more than going to a church service on the weekends and attending a weekly meeting. That’s hardly community; it’s just a couple of meetings, a few hours a week.
We first have to be convinced that the church is a community, really. We are converted, not merely to Christ, but also to his body—the church—to a community of Spirit-led disciples who follow Jesus. Consider the numerous “one another” commands. Consider the nature of Scripture. When Paul wrote a letter to New Testament churches, the pastors did not take it, mimeograph, and hand out individual copies to the church members, and then tell them to take it home and study it. No, the pastors read the letters aloud in the community to the community. The second person plural pronouns “you” were heard, not primarily as a collection of individuals, but as a community of disciples who shared life and truth and mission. They implemented Paul’s commands by loving, exhorting, encouraging, and serving one another, not by privately memorizing Scripture, having quiet times, and attending church. The context of their pastoring was one another. The Word has a community context, and as Tim Chester puts it, “The gospel is a community-centered Gospel.” To pastor one another, then, is to be community-centered. The context of pastoral leadership is community.
In this article Joe Thorn provides 8 areas that conversations can naturally lead to the gospel and provides suggested transitional statements!
I’ve been eagerly anticipating Moo’s new commentary on Colossians and Philemon. For my Th.M thesis I wrote about 150 pages on this letter, which has profoundly shaped my theology, ministry, and everyday life. I did email briefly with Moo about getting him to review my thesis for the commentary, but alas, the manuscript was already dedicated. I am moving towards publishing an article on my research, and will be eager to see how much I line up with Moo. His Romans commentary is among the best single volumes on that letter.
Anyway, I called Eerdmans yesterday and got a copy shipped within 24 hours of the book being published, fresh off the press. Amazon doesnt even have it yet! Excited to take and read; I’ll be preaching through Colossians this Fall.
I recently met with someone who is looking for a new job and considering a move, which provoked some community-centered counsel regarding job-hunting and a move. I prefaced my comments by saying that they would be very unAmerican and unpopular. Here’s the crux of the counsel: don’t pick a location based on vocation; pick location based on community. In other words, be community-centered, not vocation-centered in making decisions about finding a new job and place to live.
Instead of sending resumes to the four winds to be blown to the city of our whim, what if we put community over personal preference in selecting a new place to live and work? What if we took the church so seriously that we made vocational and relocation decisions based on participation among a people on mission for God? Our cities, communities, churches, families, and lives would be very different.
My counsel was: “Find a gospel-centered community that you can do life and mission with, then a job, and then move there.” Now, I did provide an important caveat. Community is not sovereign; God is. So, if you aren’t getting resume or job traction in the church location you are aiming for, don’t just move there anyway. The church isn’t sovereign over the details of job offers; God is. If things don’t pan out, then you are probably aiming for the wrong community. God wants you in community and on mission elsewhere.
Tim Chester recently used a phrase that is becoming commonplace among our leaders to describe what we are trying to cultivate—steady state community. We are trying to cultivate communities that share life and truth throughout the week, not just on Sundays and City Group days. We are kidding ourselves if we really think that showing up to two meetings a week and engaging in a missional partnership once a month is really living in Christian community. So, we are trying to cultivate steady state community, which requires much more than preaching on it. We envision shared meals, leisure, mission throughout the week. How?
In order to cultivate steady-state, gospel-centered missional community, just about everything in a church has to be reconfigured. Traditional paradigms and practices wont work; they are bent around a different ecclesiology. So, in order to think things through, I recently sat down with my friend Mark Moore at Total Church conference in San Diego and fired away with a list of questions. Here are a few of the insights (framed by the Q&A, not verbatim):
The Crowded House advocates a non-membership, community-centered, consensus decision making governance. You still have membership. Why and how do you develop members?
Man, we’ve got to take what Crowded House (CH) is doing and contextualize it. In America, well at least down South, especially in the Bible-belt, there is still a paradigm for church membership. It’s jacked up and needs to be tweaked, but people still come to church expecting some kind of membership, no matter how bad it is. So, we can work with that. What we (Providence Community) do is hold a six week class that goes through Gospel, Community, and end with a session on Church Planting. Then, what we tell them at the end of the class that your participation in this class doesn’t make you a member. What makes you a member is being in a missional communty.
How do you reinforce that the church is not a Sunday morning service?
One of the things we do is spotlight a missional community every week. For about five minutes someone comes up and shares something, typically about mission, from their missional community. That way, everyone coming to the service gets to hear what they are missing, to hear from the church about the church. [I asked, "Do you script this or go over it with them beforehand?"] No, and, man, sometimes people say something that doesn’t really make sense, but that is just an opportunity for us to be a real community, and if it’s really bad I can transition making some editorial comments.
How do you view yourself, as a pastor/elder, in steady state community?
My role is a shepherd, my identity is a sheep. So I try to relate to them as a fellow sheep not just as some inaccessible professional pastor. I also make sure that when I meet a dude or someone on Sunday morning that I get them connected to their missional community leader that morning, if possible. They need to know that the pastor of their missional community is the best person for them to relate to.
Austin City Life has incorporated all of this at various levels of participation and church life. Mark’s comments spurred me to spotlight our City Groups every week and not just on occassion. Our leadership has soaked up the steady state community idea, and we are working on implementing it. What a privilege!
Boundless is running my new article: Fight Club (technically doesn’t release until tomorrow).
Elsewhere I have posted on some of the emerging scholarly debates regarding a counterimperial impulse in Paul’s writing. Of late, I have been reflecting on this theological trend. Why such a preoccupation with counterimperial theology? Is this a product of anti-American sentiment? Perhaps a resurgence in Greco-Roman backgrounds for NT scholarship? Or maybe a political hermeneutic? I suspect all three are at play and that there is no consensus explanation for the spate of literature on counterimperialism in Paul.
However, I am more concerned about hermeneutics than motive. Did Paul intend to convey counterimperial ideas when writing his epistles? Was his word selection based on Greek or Jewish lexicography? Is it an either/or, after all Paul was both missionary and theologian. I engaged some of these issues in my Th.M thesis, Creation in Colossians, and was struck at the time by the hyper-counterimperialism of Walsh and Keesmaat’s Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire. At times, they confuse contemporary implication with Pauline meaning. That said, I have room for Pauline contextualization, which is often counter-cultural; however, I have been careful to not confuse his intended theological meaning with his missiological orientation.
Denny Burk has provided some critical reflection on what he dons “The Fresh Perspective,” language taken from Wright’s writings on Paul. In this issue (vol 51) of JETS, Burk published:“Is Paul’s Gospel Counterimperial? Evaluating the Prospects of the ‘Fresh Perspective’ fro Evangelical Theology.” Although Burk states in anti-imperial thesis up front (314), he adduces convincing reasons to be suspect of the FP hermeneutic. Here are a few:
- Caution of the use of parallels. Just because a biblical word or concept has a Roman parallel use does not mean that Paul intended it to be an anti-Roman polemic, especially when the word or concept has a rich Jewish origin. After all, Paul quotes and theologizes extensively from the Septuagint (Greek version of the OT). Burk identifies the key linguistic issue: “To what extent are the parallels due merely to the fact that Paul and the imperial cult were drawing from the common stock of Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern part of the Roman Empire?” (317)
- Caution about the distinction between meaning and implication. Citing E.D. Hirsch’s landmark work on literary interpretation, he writes: “An implication, however, differs in that it is not a part of the author conscious intention, even though it is established by a type that derives from the author’s willed meaning.” (320) In other words, get the author’s intended meaning first, then consider implications second. Make the distinction; don’t confuse possible implication with intended meaning.
- Caution about the hermeneutics of the FP. Burk points out that much of the hermeneutical ethos of the FP has been generated by the Paul and Politics group from SBL. Richard Horsley, a leading scholar among the Paul in Politics group, clearly articulates a political agenda in the fresh perspective of counterimperial studies: “The aims and agenda of the Paul and Politics group are, broadly, to problematize, interrogate, and re-vision Pauline texts and interpretations, to identify oppressive formulations as well as potentially liberative visions and values…” And here is Burk’s concern–Horsley’s elevation of the post-colonial readers of Paul to the level of “the text being read in the work of interpretation” in Paul. In other words, by trying to accomodate the political concerns of readers, Horsley and his colleagues give those popular readers’ concerns a prominent place in the interpretive task.
This article contains more insight about the nature and practice of the church than video venue wisdom. Bob’s comments regarding community, missionaries, and preaching. Here are some of them:
Preaching: “Some churches grow faster than they can find, train, and send church planters who have the same teaching talent as the “main guy.” But what if instead of asking “Can he preach as well as me?” you ask, “Can he or she, with a team of others, lead a Christ-centered community that starts small and grows, reproducing itself before becoming unmanageable and outgrowing the gifting of its leadership?”
Missionaries: “I know, a lot of people love your preaching and want to hear it. Let them get saved and discipled at your community, or spend a season there, and then point them to your pod/vodcast, sending them as missionaries to reach their local communities.” I would add that instead of pointing them to your cast, point them Christ, their community, and their mission. We have made preaching too central in the Ministry of the Word. Tim Chester has made some great points on this subject.
Churchplanting: “One of the main justifications for video venues is that upwards of 70 percent of church plants fail. Giving people a “brand name,” proven communicator makes more sense. But do church plants fail because of the planter? Or is it because of unreasonable expectations, unsustainable “big launch” methods in which thousands of dollars are pumped into new churches in an effort to make them big, fast… because of the consumer mindset…” I would agree and add that plants can flourish when the bar of church is lowered and the bar of discipleship, community, and mission is raised. Convert people to Jesus and in the same breath, to Jesus-centered communities on mission to the city, world, not to your preaching.
HT: Judd Rumley
Check out Tim Chester’s comments regarding community and the centrality of Christ here.
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