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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 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.
Oct 26, 2011
Posted by benrey on Oct 26, 2011 in Anglican, Church Planting, Featured, Urban | 1 comment
Mike Breen at City Collective
On Monday I wrote about the importance of listening and learning from other church planting movements and how hard it can be to be aware of innovative and effective ministry outside of our networks. I want to continue by introducing you all to Mike Breen. Mike is considered by many to be one of the initiators of the missional movement. In 1994, Mike became senior pastor of St. Thomas Sheffield, an Anglican-Baptist church. Mike is a CofE guy, but has never been afraid to try innovative things that draw those far from God to God. He began experimenting with clusters and those eventually become missional communities back in the 1980′s. His two most famous books are Launching Missional Communities and Building a Discipleship Culture. Oh and Mike will be a main speaker at the Anglican 1000 Summit this year. Again, introductions aside, Mike led our time of teaching at the City Collectivetwo weeks ago in NYC and I wanted to share my reflections from that time.
Building a Discipleship Culture
While Mike may have become known for his work on the missional church, he firmly believes that one cannot have mission without discipleship. He recent posts on “Why the missional movement will fail” emphasize this. One thing you will quickly realize about Mike is that he is not playing around. Mike firmly believes that the church’s task is to disciple its people and then to send them out on mission to draw those far from God to God and to then disciple those new Christians to go out again. At one point during our morning someone asked him what we should say to individuals in our church who don’t have time for discipleship, and he replied that we should encourage them to find another church.
Cultural Idols
Mike began the morning by sharing out of Luke 4 on the Temptation of Jesus. He said that the three temptations can be summarized as Approval (“throw yourself down from here and God will save you” i.e. that is how you will know he approves of you), Ambition (“bow down and all the kingdoms will be yours” and Appetite (“turn this stone to bread”). These three things are actually the root idols of every culture. He said this is manifested in Britain as “Order/Class”, “Duty/Manipulation” and “Stewardship/Scarcity”. I’ll have to trust him on that, I mean he is British. In America, he believes that these idols are manifested as Celebrity (Approval), Competition (Ambition) and Consumerism (Appetite). Now it took him about 30 minutes to move from the Temptation of Jesus, through a brief history of western civilization and finally to America’s idols, but when he finally got there I think he was right on. The problem is that the American church is not immune from these three idols, so we need to build a culture of discipleship that wars against these idols.
Building Disciples vs Building a Church
If you want to build a church, according to Mike, it’s quite easy. Find a talented public speaker to be the senior pastor, a semi-sexy and gifted worship leader to lead music and finally make easy, attainable goals for the people to consume. If your primary goal is building a church, you won’t be able to make disciples. However, if you start by discipling people, you will eventually get the church. But how do you disciple people? Mike’s model of discipleship is built upon three things: Information: You need to know who Jesus is through the study of God’s word; Imitation: You need to have an example, another disciple, who you can model your life after; and Innovation: Disciple making and risk taking are one and the same. You need to take risks and push boundaries (personal, familial and communal) to fight the idols of our culture. The problem is that most of our American disciple making is focused only on transmitting information. Michael Rudzena, a pastor at Trinity Grace tweeted, “The lack of discipleship in America essentially boils down to a lack of lives worth imitating.” And he is dead on.
A Few Critiques
I was really excited to hear Mike at the City Collective and this was one of my most anticipated moments of the weekend. Mike is a great speaker and very relational, but there were times when I felt like he was pointing out the obvious as he transitioned from one point to another. Now this might be because I read his blog, but I was hoping he would get past his “shtick” and into some of the more difficult moments of actually creating a culture of discipleship that seriously takes on America’s idols. Maybe I just needed to get a pint with him and push him on a few of his points. The only other area of criticism was his sweeping summary of western civilization. Now he did make a disclaimer at the beginning by saying he wasn’t an expert, but there were several moments where I looked at my wife and thought, “where is he going with this?” He did however, finally “land the plane”- as they say in homiletic’s class – and make his point.
Mike Breen continues to bless the Church by challenging leaders to build a culture of missional discipleship and I, for one, am thankful for that. If you want to continue to learn more, pick up his latest book and check out his blog.
Oct 24, 2011
Posted by benrey on Oct 24, 2011 in Anglican, Church Planting, Featured, Urban | 1 comment
There is a lot of good work going on in church planting these days and some especially good work happening in urban centers. However, those of us who are in the trenches don’t often have enough time to look and see what exciting and innovative things are going on around us. This is especially true when one is part of a particular denomination or church planting movement. I remember when I was at a meeting of Anglican pastors and one of them mentioned they had recently discovered AWANA. I was shocked, I thought everyone knew about AWANA, but it showed me how narrow our networks can be.
So in the spirit of moving outside our networks, I want to introduce you all to two exciting church planting movements. Today is Trinity Grace Church (TGC). TGC has planted five churches in New York City in five years and each of them are self-sustaining (with two more on the way). Then on Wednesday, I am going to introduce you all to Mike Breen, who is the leader of 3DM and is the father (grandfather?) of the missional movement (Mike Breen will also be speaking at the A1K Summit this year). So while Trinity Grace and Mike Breen are not officially connected, they share a similar ethos. I was able to be with both of them last weekend in NYC at the City Collective gathering. Introductions aside, my hope in this post is to describe the distinctives of Trinity Grace. A quick note: Jon Tyson, the Senior Pastor of Trinity Grace, is Australian and I know the Australian culture (unlike our American culture) abhors gushing reviews. So while this post will be positive, there will be a few things I will offer as a critique as well. And another note: Jon is about to blow up with his recently published book, his speaking at Catalyst and articles in Christianity Today. Don’t forget you heard it here first.
The TGC Structure
The best way to describe Trinity Grace Church is that they are a network of churches in New York City. They are more than a network though, because each of the five churches have their own leadership and authority, but they are connected to one another as a larger urban church. They put it this way, “The model envisions one urban church community consisting of several neighborhood churches that network together for the common good and renewal of the city. The city parish church is diverse in its essential nature, uniting women, men, and families from various cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds across a major metropolitan area.” TGC calls this model the “Parish Church” and I think it’s quite brilliant. Cities are made up of very different neighborhoods and this model allows each neighborhood to have a completely contextualized church. The worship is contextualized, the sermons are contextualized and the outreach and discipleship are contextualized. However, each neighborhood is also part of this larger city, and the fact that TGC gathers together once a quarter for city-wide allows them to work together to tackle systemic issues, to engage in the various industries of NYC (business, art, fashion, finance, etc) and to be a witness to the city at large. You can read their white paper on this model here.
Missional Communities
Another distinctive of TGC are their missional communities. They describe these as “mid-sized groups of 15-40 people that exist to love God, pursue wholeness and transformation, care for one another, and serve our neighbors while promoting justice in our city.” These mid-sized groups are centered on mission. The idea is that most New Yorkers have no reason to show up for church out of the blue on a Sunday, even if they are invited. The Sunday gathering just isn’t a natural place for New Yorkers to first meet Jesus. At the other end of the spectrum, small groups are an equally difficult environment to first introduce New Yorkers to Jesus. They are often too small to feel welcome and either too awkward or too intimate to effectively welcome newcomers. Additionally, Sundays focus on worship and small groups are focused on discipleship, which leaves no venue for mission. Enter the mid-sized Missional Community. These communities each have a geographical missional focus and offer a place where there is enough people-power to mobilize mission (it’s a lot easier to volunteer if your group is 35 people as opposed to 10) and also a bigger group to welcome those asking questions. These groups meet both for missional purposes (bbq’s to welcome to people or volunteer work) as well for mini-worship gatherings during the week. Jon breaks this concept down really well in his 2008 talk at Catalyst.
Theology of Work
The final distinctive I want to hit on is TGC’s focus on a Theology of Work. Their tagline is “Joining God in the Renewal of All Things” and they believe it is vital to have a theology of work. This makes total sense because most people spend anywhere from 2-5 hours a week at church or small group and 40-70 hours a week at their job. If we don’t have a theology that encourages our engagement at work, we are seriously missing out on the Kingdom of God. TGC quickly gets beyond the notion that the only way to engage the workplace as a Christian is to share the Gospel with your co-workers and seeks to find the redemptive edge in each industry or field. They recently preached a sermon series on this topic entitled Joining God in the Renewal of All Things.
A Few Critiques
Overall, TGC is doing amazing things. I mean five churches in five years and they are all sustainable? That is nuts. But each of these five churches was planted in very affluent areas of New York City. That is both a feat and a concern. A feat because the rich are often the most difficult to reach, but a concern because these are the neighborhoods of t.v. shows, movies and music. When one thinks of NYC, they usually think of Manhattan, fashion and affluence. I hope TGC continues to plant churches in other parts of NYC that are contextualized to those neighborhoods, but still connected to the larger TGC network. My second critique, which is connected to this, in that their Theology of Work is also an affluent theology. What I mean by that is that they do a great job of creating a theology for artists, musicians, business people and others whose jobs include the engagement of the mind. But what about the custodian or the butcher? What beautiful things are they creating for the Kingdom? Again, this is obviously connected to the areas where they planted churches and might change as they plant in other neighborhoods.
If you are ever in NYC or looking to plant churches in a city check them out. TGC has been extremely helpful to me and I hope my relationship with them will continue to grow.
