Nov 23, 2011
Posted by benrey on Nov 23, 2011 in Church Planting | 0 comments
My other job at Gordon College has been busy lately, so I haven’t had time to blog with Advent coming up, so I thought I would repost Fitch’s article since it was quite thought provoking. What do you think about his post?
From Why Missional Leaders Need To Get Over White Man’s Angst:
Young white males, coming out of seminary, can’t deal with the identity crisis they get when they are asked to pursue another skill or vocation alongside the pursuit of ministry. Somehow, to dive in and learn another vocation for the long term that shall feed into one’s vocation of ministry – is a compromise.
Fellow pastor Geoff Holsclaw and I were talking about this yesterday and he called it “the white man’s place of privilege.” We (white males) are used to being masters of our own destiny. We are told we can do anything if we work hard enough. So to pursue a vocation other than ministry that shall be part of ministry is a compromise. It detracts from a singular focus on ministry. It throws open the future. It disrupts the question “will this job fulfil me?” because there is no way this question makes sense anymore when we enter into Kingdom life in this way.
And yet this is exactly the path I believe many of us are called into when looking at the church through the eyes of post Christendom.
Nov 9, 2011
Posted by benrey on Nov 9, 2011 in Church Planting, Featured, Urban | 0 comments
This is a series on church planting in the city. While I am no expert, I hope this series will ask the hard questions about consumerism vs. discipleship, money, contextualized mission, race and the future of American cities. Every Monday a new topic will begin with further posts on that topic posted throughout the week. You can see a rough schedule of these posts here. Links are provided to the rest of the series at the bottom of the post.
Ecclesiology is the theological and Biblical study of what the Church is and for what purpose it exists. This understanding of the Church will dictate what the local church does on a Sunday, what the church does throughout the week and what the church encourages its members to do. In Evangelical circles there has been this tension between identifying the church as an cosmic/spiritual institution and as simply the gathering of believers. There are a host of movements where individuals feel no need to belong to a local church because they feel that the occasional gathering of like-minded Christians “counts” as church (I am by no means referring to the House Church Movement, which is completely separate). On the other hand, individuals believe that the Church only exists in its institutional form consisting of a three fold order of leadership (Bishops, Priests and Deacons) and in its proper administration of the sacraments in a specific way. But why is this important? This is important because when we begin to understand that an essential purpose of the Church is to be on mission, we begun to understand why church planting is a necessary action of the Church.
“Church is only society on earth that exists for the benefit of non-members.”
-William Temple
Jesus was incarnated and sent into our world in order to bring about the Kingdom of God. The central part of this bringing of the Kingdom was his atoning work on the cross. Jesus then established the Church on earth in order to facilitate Gospel growth and the Kingdom of God. His final commandments in Matthew 28.18-20 and Acts 1.7-8 send the disciples into the world. Now the Church is also essentially doxological and purposed to guide and aid in the sanctification of the People of God. However, each of these other two essentials encourages and facilitates mission. They are all in a feedback loop which each creates opportunity for growth in one another. Mike Breen calls these three components Up (doxological), In (sanctification/fellowship) and Out (missiological). When our ecclesiology forgets one of these, our church can get our of whack.
This Out is what drives church planting in a post-Christian context. In Christendom, church planting was often done to hold Gospel Growth. When sanctuaries grew too small or when individuals moved into new territories without churches (west coast expansion), churches were planted. It was an “In” decision. Not an “Out” one. However, in a post-Christian context like New England, churches are planted to facilitate Gospel Growth (Out). Ed Stetzer, Phillip Jensen, David Helm and others have all pointed out that generally there are great numbers of conversions in church plants for a number of reasons. So the call for church planting is both a contextual call (it’s what works in a post-Christiandom society) and a theological call (ourmissional ecclesiology). How does your ecclesiology direct your view of church planting? For your church/denomination, is Church Planting inside the “In” category or the “Out” category?
Posts in this Series
Sex in the City: Do We Still Need Urban Church Plants?
Consumerism, Competition and Celebrities
The Boston Shuffle
Why plant Churches? – Towards A Missional Ecclesiology
Nov 7, 2011
Posted by benrey on Nov 7, 2011 in Church Planting, Urban | 0 comments
This is a series on church planting in the city. While I am no expert, I hope this series will ask the hard questions about consumerism vs. discipleship, money, contextualized mission, race and the future of American cities. Every Monday a new topic will begin with further posts on that topic posted throughout the week. You can see a rough schedule of these posts here. Links are provided to the rest of the series at the bottom of the post.
The shuffle. Whether you are referring to cards, the iPod or the dance, the idea is the same. You are moving around pre-existing items and in the case of the iPod, you are randomly jumping from song to song until you find one you like. Unfortunately, an analogy can be made to many of our recent church plants. As I talked about in our last post, church planting is often overwhelmed by the consumeristic nature of the American church. Here me out, I am on the side of church planters, I really am. No one starts a church in the city with a desire for consumeristic Christianity. No one ever plants a church with the intention of taking Christians from other churches in the city or merely facilitating a “Christian club” atmosphere with little to no real engagement in mission. However, this is just what is happening and in Boston there is a name for it: The Boston Shuffle.
One reason for this shuffle is financial. Many urban church plants are like “start-ups” and begin with a full operating budget (or at least have their salary covered) from outside supporters for a period of 3-5 years. As soon they hit the ground, the clock towards self-sustainability starts ticking. Planters may have the best intentions to be missional and to reach out to non-Christians, however, to really reach Boston as a pastor means ministering to either disillusioned (by the sex scandal) Roman Catholics, legitimate post-Christians, and (though some camps marginalize this) reaching the immigrant populations. There is now a whole generation of Bostonians whose Baby Boomer parents have chosen to raise their kids without religion. In Boston, it would be wrong to assume an individual is familiar with the basic Bible story of Jonah, for instance. Once individuals realize the soil is slightly rougher than expected, they check the clock find their money is running out and are then left debating whether or not to encourage the addition of the already churched (and already tithing) vis a vie transitioning from a missional based model to an attractional based one.
Another reason for this shuffle is denominational change. According to the Pew Forum, roughly 44% of Americans now profess a religious affiliation that is different from the religion in which they were raised. This is especially true of the Anglican church (the denomination I belong to). We have seen tremendous growth over the last decade from either disenfranchised evangelicals yearning for a deeper understanding of church history or Roman Catholics who desire an evangelical faith with a familiar liturgy. In Boston, the “Anglo-curious”, as I call them, first come to church on Ash Wednesday, Easter Vigil or some other Feast or Fast day that isn’t celebrated in their evangelical denomination. The only problem is that many of these “Anglican converts” are better proselytizers of the liturgy than they are of the Gospel.
The Boston shuffle has actually become so bad in Boston that a well-known senior evangelical pastor and seminary professor does not encourage the planting of churches. He argues this is because they end up just shuffling people around from church to church. So what is the answer? I think it’s two-fold. First we just need to say no. When healthy evangelicals come knocking at your door looking to switch churches because of preference, kindly say no. Ed Stetzer recently wrote a similar post in which he had no problem saying no to an individual who wanted to join his church. Sure it sounds crazy, but trust me, it’s better than waking up five years later and realizing that your church has had no conversions or adult baptisms in one of the most unchurched areas in the United States.
Second, we need a culture change. Mike Breen writes in his book Building a Discipleship Culture, “If you make disciples you always get the church. But if you make a church, you rarely get disciples.” Our focus needs to be, once again, focused on drawing those who are far from God to God. In Boston, we are transitioning from a Christian culture to a post-Christian one. Pastors are no longer managers and curators, we have to be facilitators of mission (I would also argue that pastors should reflect mission in their own lives- a good question to ask is: Are your pastors on mission themselves?) The only way we can get our core group to be on mission is to encourage in them discipleship and be on mission ourselves. Our end goal shouldn’t be a building, a salary, a certain number of congregants, programs or staff members. Our end goal should be a movement of disciples making disciples which in turn leads to mission.
Posts in this Series
Sex in the City: Do We Still Need Urban Church Plants?
Consumerism, Competition and Celebrities
The Boston Shuffle
Nov 3, 2011
Posted by benrey on Nov 3, 2011 in Church Planting, Featured, Urban | 0 comments
This is a series on church planting in the city. While I am no expert, I hope this series will ask the hard questions about consumerism vs. discipleship, money, contextualized mission, race and the future of American cities. Every Monday a new topic will begin with further posts on that topic posted throughout the week. You can see a rough schedule of these posts here. Links are provided to the rest of the series at the bottom of the post.
Let me begin with an apology. I wrote on Monday that I would post again on Wednesday, however yesterday was my birthday and between being bi-vocational and celebrating with my wife, I didn’t get around to posting. Ok. Here is a quick recap on Monday: I summarized various sources, including Tim Keller, who believe that the city has shifted dramatically in the last 10-15 years and part of that shift has been an influx of what I am calling evangelical suburban tourists. “Evangelical” because they would self-identify as church goers at one of the many non-denominational megachurches (50 percent of churchgoers attended the largest 10% of congregations – 350 regular participants and up) or large conservative mainline denominations (PCA, etc). “Suburban” because this is their place of origin, where they were raised and most likely where they went to college. In fact, I can think of only a handful of evangelical seminaries in cities and only one on the “other side of the tracks”. The suburban way of life (personal space, reliance upon cars, monoculturalism, definition of time, etc.) is vastly different than the urban life. And finally “tourists” because an extremely large portion of these individuals and families are moving to the city for a short period of time, anywhere from 1-5 years on average (and subsequently fail to really engage with the city, but instead engage marginally). Overall, cities have increased in their young adult population (18-34), but have shrunk in what is typically the age of adults who have school aged children (35-45) (studies found here). Now obviously there are many systemic factors at play (education being a major one), but the fact is that many of these individuals are not moving to the city to set down roots, raise a family and eventually die – even though there is extremely compelling evidence as to why living in the city is advantageous.
Yet I left Monday’s post by saying we still need to plant churches in urban areas and we do for a number of reasons. First, since 2007 more than 50% of the world’s population resides in cities and many estimate by 2050 it will be close to 85%. Second, cities are the arteries of our country. The best way to change a region is to first change the major city (see the book of Acts). Third, the two most unchurched regions of America (Northeast and Northwest) are home to major cities that have influence over the entire nation. While I hate to give statistics, I am certain that under 20% of Bostonians attend any sort of church on Sunday. Finally, there is indeed a lot of systemic change that is needed in our cities and our calling as Citizens of the Kingdom demands that we push (with humility) to enact those changes. The problem is that if we continue to plant temporary holding pens for suburban, evangelical tourists we will fail to ever engage our city.
Before I go on, let me offer a caveat. I love the suburbs, grew up in the suburbs, and think the Gospel is doing some amazing things in the suburbs. But the devil is also doing some amazing things in the suburbs and some of those things are affecting the culture of the American Church(Note: These things are affecting the culture of the city as well, but I am talking here about their suburban manifestations with are being immigrated into the city). Three of these things are consumerism, competition and celebritism. If you do a simple Google search for the church and these three things, you will see plenty (and I mean plenty) of articles and blog posts about them, so I’ll be brief in diagnosing the problem. These three things are not simply endemic of the church, but of the American culture in general. Our whole society is built upon consuming, competing and making celebritism the end goal in life. This is then manifested in the church as members view Sunday as the main event in which they drop something in the basket and obtain an experience in return (of course we always talk about not wanting to be this, but if we were realistic often times this is what the church becomes especially in the fight of the business of the city). Churches are then encouraged to compete with each other to see who has the bigger building, the larger staff, the flashier website and the most sermons downloaded or books sold. This then means that pastors become celebrities who can say no evil and do no evil. In fact, the goal of many individual members is to become a celebrity themselves by singing on stage or becoming a “leader” in the church. Sound hopeless? Well it’s not.
What if we planted churches that engaged the city on the city’s terms? What if we planted churches that looked like its neighbors, that had local leaders and that sought to affect systemic change? What if these churches, in turn, transformed these suburban tourists into disciples and they, in turn, moved back into the suburbs with a radically contagious faith?
This is where we are going because my purpose in this series is to do more than diagnose, but to propose a way forward. However, one more diagnosis has to be made…and that is on contexualization. See you Friday…
Posts in this Series
Sex in the City: Do We Still Need Urban Church Plants?
Consumerism, Competition and Celebrities
Oct 31, 2011
Posted by benrey on Oct 31, 2011 in Church Planting, Featured, Urban | 4 comments
This is the beginning of a series on church planting in the city. While I am no expert, I hope this series will ask the hard questions about consumerism vs. discipleship, money, contextualized mission, race and the future of American cities. Every Monday a new topic will begin with further posts on that topic posted throughout the week. You can see a rough schedule of these posts here.
There has been a swell of urban church plants in the last ten years. I was recently talking to an older church planter in Boston. He moved to the city in the 1970′s, when the South End was still a slum, and has been a part of multiple successful church plants that cross racial and denominational lines. The old joke was that in the 80′s and 90′s a certain wealthy, southern denomination would load a church planter up with several hundreds of thousands of dollars and send them to Boston to “save the city”. The planter and his family, who would have been severely ill-equipped to handle urban Boston, would spend 1-2 years floundering in the city and would then move back home. This was apparently repeated every 5-7 years. The few church plants that were successful were usually led by people from Boston who reached out to the city’s middle and lower class. And then something changed…
In the last 10-15 years more and more church planters with suburban backgrounds moved to the city and began planting large, successful churches. These churches were located in the center of the city, desired to love the city and sought to engage the finer points of culture in the city (i.e. art, the academy, etc.). But a question that needs to be asked is, “What changed?” Maybe it is that more and more church planters are being trained to understand the city? Maybe church planters have lost the messiah complex and no longer see the city as a broken, evil thing crying out for a savior? I think the answer to many of these types of questions is…yes…but I also believe this has changed because there has been a significant demographic shift in America’s cities over the past 10-15 years.
Dr. Anthony Bradley, Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics at The King’s College, has blogged on this very topic. Dr. Bradley quotes Joel Kotkin who in an article on urban upward mobility writes,
America’s largest cities are increasingly divided into three classes: the affluent, the poor, and the nomadic class of young people who generally come to the city for a relatively brief period and then leave. New York, the aspirational city of my grandparents, now has the smallest share of middle-income families in the nation, according to a recent Brookings Institution study, with Los Angeles and San Francisco not far behind. In 1980 Manhattan, New York’s wealthiest borough, ranked 17th among U.S. counties for social inequality; by 2007 Bloomberg’s “luxury city” was first, with the top fifth earning 52 times the income of the lowest fifth, a disparity roughly comparable to that of Namibia.
What has happened is that wealthy (wealthier) Evangelicals who formerly resided in suburbia and attended suburban, Evangelical churches have now moved into certain sections of urban America – areas commonly called “city-centers” (the Manhattans, Back Bays and Lincoln Parks). These Evangelicals desire to attend church and they want this church to be a more hip, urban version of their suburban church. They want a suburban church, but one that has the sexiness of the city. Essentially what is being argued is that urban church planting has now become suburban church planting in city centers. The people are no different, just a slightly different geographic context. David Fitch, a church planter, seminary professor and blogger has also noted this phenomena and writes that this has resulted in urban church plants full of a young, transient population who have moved to the city for an education, job or for all of the lights and plan on leaving again once they have children. Urban church plants are not growing because the unchurched are converting, but because Evangelicals have found the city to be sexy and are moving there in droves. Church planting ‘guru’ Tim Keller actually affirms this in a comment on Fitch’s blog:
…starting in the mid- to late 1990s things definitely changed in the big cities including NYC. Young adults began to pour back into center city areas as the cities regenerated and got safer. And along with them came a good percentage of young adults from the south and midwest with evangelical backgrounds. Starting in the late 1990s, I noticed for the first time “shoppers”–people moving here and beginning to look around for a church… Today it is very possible to start an center city church simply by attracting people from evangelical backgrounds to live and serve in the city. You can gather a church without actually evangelizing the residents.
So the question becomes: Do we need to plant urban churches if the only ones coming are suburban evangelical tourists? Individuals who come to the city to get something (education, job, the notoriety among their friends for living in the city, etc.) and don’t really desire to give back to the city? Individuals who end up pricing the urban middle and lower class out of their own cities.
Well my answer is yes. Yes we still need to plant urban churches…but you will have to wait till Wednesday and Friday to hear why and how.
