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Where
We Are
At the
start of the twenty-first century, the church in North America finds itself in a
very different place than it used to be. Fifty years ago, the church enjoyed a
privileged place in our culture. Many people went to church. The social norms
were that “good” people went to church. People looked up to and respected the
church. The culture listened to the church. Politicians and government
officials wanted the church on their side. The church was very much at the
center of public life, and church life was booming. That world no longer
exists.
It has
been said that the “church that is married to the culture of one age, becomes
the widow of the culture in the next age.” We have seen that maxim come true.
The church that was so effective in ministering to the “Christendom culture” in
North America fifty years ago, today finds itself struggling to relate to a
culture, now that the sands have shifted. The church has been moved to the
sidelines of public life, and many are openly wondering about the future
viability of the church we love so much. The church is like Rip Van Winkle
waking up from a twenty year nap. We are living in the same country, but it is
a completely different world. We don’t recognize it, and we’re not sure what to
do about it.
Today, I
look out at the churches around me, and I want desperately to help them. I love
the church very much. I care so much about the Presbyterian Church (USA). But,
I see so many congregations that are struggling. They don’t seem to know what
to do. They don’t seem to know how to change. They seem to have lost their
imagination about how God can transform their congregation, their ministry, and
their people. What can we do? How can we help?
What
We Know
We know
that the culture we live in is so dramatically different than the culture most
of us were born into. Our parents could never have imagined the world we live
in today, and our children cannot imagine the world our parents lived in.
Change used to happen slowly and incrementally. It was methodical and
predictable. We used to be able to make five-year plans, and almost guarantee
where a church could end up in the future, if it only followed the prescribed
steps. Today change takes places rapidly, discontinuously, instantaneously, and
haphazardly. It is chaotic and unpredictable. We cannot plan ahead more than a
year or eighteen months at a time, and there is no way we can predict what the
outcomes will be.
So many
changes have happened to us all at once, that we have not been able to sort them
out and deal with them and their implications for the church. We have been hit
with globalization, pluralism, rapid technological change, postmodernism,
staggering needs, loss of faith in primary structures, the democratization of
knowledge, and the dislocation of our known world.
We know
that our seminaries used to do an excellent job of training pastors with what to
do when people came to church. We raised a whole generation to be chaplains to
the culture, care-givers to the Christians and to those who temporarily wandered
away from the faith and the family. To be a “good Christian” was to be a good
American citizen. Today we need to train pastors how to go out and find people,
because they do not show up in church on their own. We need to train people on
how to be apostolic witnesses in a secular and pagan culture. Many people have
never been a part of the faith or the family. They have never heard the stories
of our faith, and don’t understand why we do what we do.
Somewhere along the way, those of us in the church have forgotten who we really
are. We have forgotten the scriptural narrative. Many people in our churches
today do not really know the Bible. They have not been taught the stories of
the people of God. They do not know how to study the Word on their own, or
understand how it relates to their life today. We have never adequately dealt
with theological pluralism or how the scriptures are normative for our world
today.
There is
much grieving going on in the church, because what once was, is no more. We
have lost something very valuable and meaningful. We don’t know how to get it
back. There is much confusion in the church, because we have been educated and
trained for the old world that no longer exists, not the new world we currently
live in. We need skills we do not have, and we need insights that we cannot
imagine. We are afraid. We don’t know how to verbalize the feelings we have.
We are filled with questions like “is truth just what our group determines?”,
“can people really be transformed by our God?”, and “will our grandchildren have
faith?”
What
is Emerging
Out of
this rapidly changing cultural context and declining church context has emerged
what has come to be known as the missional church movement. The missional
church movement takes seriously the need to recover the stories of our faith
that we find in scripture. Rather than succumbing to the old problem of
“theology divides, mission unites”, the missional church movement realizes that
any healthy mission is theologically grounded. Belief and behavior cannot be
separated. Theology and mission cannot be bifurcated. They are always linked,
whether we can see that or not.
The
missional church movement takes seriously the sociology of the massive culture
shift we are undergoing. A cultural earthquake has rocked the very foundations
of our society, and we find ourselves with more questions than answers. The
missional church does not quickly discard the questions, or jump on easy
answers. It wrestles with each question seriously, in light of scripture and
prayer, looking for the new thing that God is doing in our midst.
The
missional church movement realizes that we are no longer chaplains to a
Christian culture. We must be a missionary people in our own land. Every
congregation needs to be cross-cultural missionaries to its own community. We
must move from the mindset that the church is a provider of religious services
to Christian consumers to the shaper of an apostolic people on a mission to a
fallen world.
What is
emerging is the stories that best inform our context today are the stories of
the exodus and the exile. The Israelites spent 40 years in the desert, trying
to get 400 years of Egypt out of their system. They had old habits, old ways of
thinking, old customs that simply would not work in the new world. They lived
in between two worlds. When Judah was carried off in exile into Babylon, they
spent 70 years as a minority in a foreign culture, getting their old religious
world out of their system. They lived in between two worlds. Today in North
America, we live in between two worlds. The old world has definitely passed
away, but we don’t know exactly what the new world will look like yet. We are
trying to see, as best we can, but our vision is still blurry, and the fog has
not yet lifted.
What
Is Happening
A number
of conversations have begun around the Presbyterian Church (USA), asking
questions about what it means to be the missional church in North America
today. What does it look like? What does it feel like? How is it structured?
How is it different? How can it transform church members individually and
congregational life collectively? How can we think about everything the church
does in missional terms?
This is
a slow process of conversation, thinking differently, dialoguing with each
other, and getting people on board. This process involves reading new books,
asking new questions, and training a core group of people to think differently.
This is a process that seeks to learn new skills that we have not needed in
ministry before. This is a process that seeks to educate what we have not been
taught before. We need to stimulate the imagination and creativity that has
laid dormant for too long.
The
missional church approach is not an easy answer approach. It is not a quick fix
approach. It is more concerned about the long term than the short term. It is
as concerned about process as product. It realizes you cannot throw away the
current church structures and start over. Division and schism will not solve
our problems. Neither is peace at any price a real peace. Unity without common
values, beliefs, and behaviors is not a real unity. The missional church
approach is honest about our cultural obsession with pragmatics and numbers. It
realizes that change comes from the bottom up, not the top down. Renewal comes
from the edges to the center, not from the middle to the fringes.
What
Does This All Mean?
There
are many, many implications of the Missional Church movement for the future of
the Presbyterian Church (USA). Among them are the following:
1)Our
church needs to be transformed. This will not happen from the top-down. This
will not stretch from the “center of power” to “can anything good come out of
Nazareth?”. It will begin with people on the edges. It will be “edgey”. It
will begin in congregations.
2)The
missional transformation of our denomination will be firmly rooted in
scripture. It will not be a-theological. It will not be “whatever theology
seems good to you”. It will happen through long conversations about scriptural
stories, grounded in the orthodox creeds that have stood the test of time.
3)It
will take a long time. It will not happen quickly. We do not yet know what the
answers are. We do not yet know where we need to go. The answers will emerge
as we move through this process together.
4)The
church needs a time of dialogue and conversation. This must be different from
former attempts at dialogue that did not work. It must address different issues
that have not been addressed before. It is a conversation with no hidden
agenda. It has no predetermined outcome, other than to listen and find out what
the Lord is calling the church to be and to do.
5)The
missional change of the church will probably not happen without the assistance
of an outside change agent to guide the process. Those of us within the system
have too many biases, blind spots, and ingrained habits to guide it effectively.
Those who have tried to bring about change in complex systems like
presbyteries, know the value of an outside agent, who can train people on how to
follow a missional change process, that will keep us from producing the same
answers we always come up with.
The
missional church movement offers real possibilities for getting to the root of
our struggles, and helping us find a faithful way through them. May God lead
us, as we seek to follow Christ together!
Rev. Dr. Clark D. Cowden
Evangelist Presbyter
Presbytery of San Joaquin |
