Missional Literature Review - Part 6 - The Church as Stewards of Change

The Church as Stewards of the Change

A final theme prevalent in the literature on missional church concerns how the church ought to respond to the changes taking place in culture and in the church. In choosing how to respond best, the church faces many temptations. One temptation is to resist the change, sticking to the old way of doing things in the name of remaining true to Scripture (Hall, 1999; Van Gelder, 2007). Resistance, though, will only keep the church separated from culture and will leave it no room to be influential. Another insufficient option is relevance. When the church tries to be relevant, it becomes both “captured” and “intimidated” by culture, not fully loyal to the gospel and not fully engaged in the context (Hunsberger, 1996). The third temptation of the church is simply to resign, give up, and let the changes run unchecked and keeping the Gospel from having its full impact. Instead of utilizing any of these strategies, missional authors suggest the church seek to “steward the change [emphasis in original], asking for positive meaning that is in it and endeavoring . . . to direct the process toward its potential goal” (Hall, 2008, p. 73).
To steward the change, the church first needs to accept the loss of its “old story” (Roxburgh, 2008, p. 76) and see its new “powerlessness” or marginality as a
creative opportunity for change” (Randall, 2007, p. 230). This acceptance requires dealing with the present crisis with the earnest sincerity without succumbing to it (Bosch, 1991). Van Gelder (2007) suggests the church should be both reforming (confessional) and forming (missional).

Though the voices calling for change can be pointed and harsh, in the end their tone is often optimistic. The goal of the criticism is not deconstructive, but constructive, seeking to build missional communities throughout the West. To best understand what missional thinkers hope to construct, it is necessary to take a detailed look at what defines missional living.

Missional Literature Review - Part 5 - Commonly Held Reasons for Change: Argument from Missional Hermeneutic

Argument from Missional Hermeneutic
The final starting point for those who call the church to adopt a missional lifestyle is a missional hermeneutic, “a framework within which to read the Bible” (Wright, 2006, p. 26). Recently, a growing number of major publications are centering full biblical theologies upon the mission of God (see Bosch, 1991; Wright, 2006; and, to a lesser extent, Beale, 2004). These works portray the Bible as a story of a missional God on mission in the world through a particular people.

Of this particular people, Wright (2006) states that the Bible is a narrative of the “indefatigable self-commitment of God to bless all the nations of humanity through the creation of a people as the vehicle of his goal of redemption” (p. 532). The pattern of God’s work is “in” to “out,” beginning with his people and moving to the families of the earth (Brownson, 1996). Abraham is called by God and told to become a blessing, Israel is redeemed out of Israel to be the covenant people of God among the nations, Jesus announces the coming reign of God for Israel and Gentiles, and the early church made Jesus’ proclamation a reality. Wright (2006) indicates the importance of the church recognizing the missional nature and pattern of the Biblical narrative, with the observation that “this is the people to whom we belong. This is the story to which we are a part. This is the mission in which we are called to participate” (p. 532).

Those who see a missional hermeneutic as a starting point for calling for the missional change in the church encourage Christians to see the Bible as more than just a bunch of facts and stories that can help them live good lives (McNeal, 2009; Wright, 2006). Instead, the Bible should be as a missional narrative that guides the community into missional living. In this approach, the Bible is seen to exist for a missional purpose, God is seen to be a missional God, and the people of God with whom the church shares an identity is seen as a missional people (Wright, 2006).

Missional Literature Review - Part 4 - Commonly Held Reasons for Change: The Argument from Personal Revival

Argument from Personal Revival
Comprising much less space in the literature than contextual change and institutional crisis, personal revival of faith is nonetheless a starting point that has led some authors, scholars, and practitioners to call for a missional transformation of the church. Part of the reason this starting point takes up less space in the literature is that it is much more difficult to identify and often cannot readily be separated from the other three arguments of context, crisis, and hermeneutic. It is in the literature being produced by practitioners that personal faith is most often a major starting point (see Chan, 2008; Halter & Smay, 2008; McNeal, 2009). Chan’s (2008) anecdotal beginning to his book on real Christian living, Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God, is a perfect example of this starting point:

We all know something is wrong.
At first I thought it was just me. Then I stood before twenty thousand
Christian college students and asked, “How many of you have read the New
Testament and wondered if we in the church are missing it?” When almost every
hand went up, I felt comforted. At least I’m not crazy. (p. 19)

Chan and the students to whom he spoke have what Junkin (1996) calls “restless, lonely, hungry hearts” (p. 309) that realize something different needs to take place in their faith and their churches. The realization of the need and the long for something different are the catalysts for the changes that take place in the practitioner’s life or ministry.

Three missional themes found in the literature seem to be rooted in the author’s personal revival of faith, whether scholar or practitioner or both. These themes are eschatological hope, sacrifice and suffering, and social justice. Ma (2009) claims Christians need to recapture a “universal theology of hope” (p. 189) that points the church and the world to the future reign of God and prepares them for its coming. Laing (2009) also calls for a renewal of the eschatological perspective of hope, claiming its implication will be “missionary obedience” (p. 20) among believers.

As the church looks toward the eschaton, it is to sacrifice itself and offer itself up for suffering that it might be used in the redemptive purposes of God (Turnipseed, 1998; Waters, 2009). Instead of sacrificing, Turnipseed (1998) says Christians have too long allowed the poor, marginalized, and weak to be suffer and calls the church to “refuse to tolerate the sacrifice of others” (p. 532) any longer. If this call is to be heeded, the third theme, social justice, will also be realized.

Both in the church and in the world, people are exhibiting signs of increasing altruism, desire for personal growth, and hunger for spiritual vitality (McNeal, 2009). This increase is placing pressure on the church from all sides to become more missional in its nature and in its ministry. If the trend in the literature holds true, this will be a major theme in the literature, church, and world for at least the next few decades.

Missional Literature Review - Part 3 - Commonly Held Reasons for Change: The Argument from institutional Crisis

Argument from Institutional Crisis
While it is true that many call for the church to become missional in nature due to the contextual change taking place in the world, the main thrust of most authors calling for missional change concerns the institutional crisis in the church. The institutional crisis of the church is difficult to deny. Granberg-Michaelson (2008) claims that not a single county within the United States experienced an increase in worship attendance between 1998 and 2007. The continual decline of membership, financial viability, and societal influence can be traced all the way back to the 1960s (Dietterich & Ziemer, 1998). Not only is the church failing to shape society, statistics show it is “no longer the primary organizing principles that shapes the lives of most Christians,” who are instead influenced by the “dominant trends with in secular society” (Dinolfo, 1999, p. 261).

Within the vast amount of writing calling for the church to change due to the institutional crisis, both external forces and internal influences are identified as the causes for the ineffectiveness of the church. A brief look at the external and internal factors reveals both the variety and harshness of criticism being levied against the actions and inactions of the contemporary, institutional church.

Ineffectiveness Caused by External Forces

The changes in the cultural context of the church have, like a fierce whirlwind, irrevocably changed the position of the church within modern society. Once at the center of culture and society, the church is being pushed to the “sociological periphery” (Hall, 1999, p. 69). Randall (2007) says that the church is shifting from the centre to the margins, the majority to the minority, settlers to sojourners, and privileged to plurality. Having been pushed from privilege in the new, secular society, the old ecclesiologies, disciplines, practices, and organizational structures of the church simply are not working (Dietterich & Dietterich, 1994; Junkin 1996). Architectural evangelism and the “construct a program and they will come” (Roxburgh & Boren, 2009) mentality are increasingly ineffective, but the church does not seem to know how to move forward in new and innovative ways in the strange, new world. As Hunsberger (1996) aptly notes, the church is facing a “crisis of thinking” (p. 334) as to how it fits into the world.
Ineffectiveness Caused by Internal Forces

External factors may have pushed the church to the periphery of society, but many within the missional movement lay scathing blame upon the church for failing to recognize how accommodated it had become to the assumptions of the culture it supported (Hunsberger & Van Gelder, 1996). Hunsberger’s crisis of thinking facing the church is not only how to fit into the new world, but is a crisis in that the church “has not [emphasis in original] thought carefully, critically, or theologically about [its] assumptions regarding the church and [has] failed to noticed how much they have been shaped by the character of modern American life” (Hunsberger, 1996, p. 334). The failure to think critically seems to have allowed three forces to inhibit the effectiveness of the church from within: individualism, consumerism, and institutional idolatry.

Individualism dominates the church’s current view of salvation as well as its models of ministry and is making the crisis worse, according to missional scholars. The focus on individual salvation and personal relationships with God failed to place importance on the community and the world, causing faith to become privatized (Hiebert, 2009). In a world of privatized faith, the church became nothing more than a “voluntary collection of individuals who came together to support and encourage development of their private faith” (Dietterich, 2002, p. 3) and ministry became defined as provision of “resources and services necessary to fulfill individual religious and spiritual needs” (p. 2). A loss of focus took the eyes of the church off the world and culture and placed them instead upon the individual.

Consumerism, the second internal factor inhibiting the effectiveness of the church, is the one word that can describe the major change of the ecclesial landscape during the twentieth century (Fredrickson, 2007). The consumerist church became a “vendor of religious goods and services” (Hunsberger, 1996, p. 334), focusing on raising the standards of worship services, offering more programs, upgrading buildings, and hiring professional ministers to run the church. As ministry staffs grew, Christians entered into what Hirsch calls a “Faustian bargain,” outsourcing ministry to the professionals. This in turn caused Christians to lack maturity and become weak in the faith. Weak Christians make for weak churches.

As individuals increasingly became church shoppers or consumers, heightened competition among churches arose over members. Maintenance and self-preservation of the institution became the focus of many small churches in a secular society. With numbers declining, the church constantly chased the “new and the next” (Roxburgh, 1999, p. 248) in terms of structures and programs to help facilitate church growth. Hall (1999) speaks to this endless need for church growth and success:
Locked into a culturally determined logic of progress, success, and positive
thinking, Christian bodies in North America regularly resist imaginative and v
viable proposal for the future of the church because they do not correspond to
the great expectations that have been fashioned by centuries of ecclesial
triumphalism. (p. 70)

Ecclesial triumphalism, or “expansionism” (Hibbert, 2009), stems from pride in a denomination or tradition and not from mission. When the church’s focus is upon maintenance or perpetuation of the institution, there is a lack of time, energy, and resources to “anticipate and participate in God’s mission” (Forney, 2008, p. 66). This focus upon the church instead of the mission of God can be called “institutional idolatry” (Forney, 2008, p. 63).
Steps Toward Effectiveness

It is worth briefly noting the two major suggestions critics of the individualized, consumerist, institutional church make to move toward effectiveness. First, the church is encouraged to abandon its cultural baggage and structural dependencies for a missional heart and perspective. This abandonment would entail focusing on God’s mission more than church growth (Barram, 2007). To make this shift in focus would include focusing on the external rather than the internal, people development instead of program development, and kingdom-leadership instead of church leadership (McNeal, 2009). Second, the church is encouraged to re-engage in theological study based on the Gospel and the Holy Spirit instead of contemporary church wisdom (Barram, 2007; Hall, 1999; Hunsberger, 1996; Randall, 2007; Van Gelder, 2008).

Missional Literature Review - Part 2 - Commonly Held Reasons for Change: The Argument from Contextual Change

Commonly Held Reasons to Adopt Missional Living
A review of the literature clearly documents a call for the church and its programs to change. The call for change most commonly begins from one of three starting points: contextual change in the West, the institutional crisis facing the Church, or a personal crisis of faith (Junkin, 1996). Though not as common as the previous three starting points, a missional hermeneutic is also beginning to gain ground as a foundation upon which the need for change is established. (see Wright, 2006). Though each of the four starting points are distinct, they are often connected and interdependent as they form one powerful argument concerning the need for the church to change in the West.

Argument from Contextual Change
The notion that the world is changing is certainly nothing new to most contemporary people. It might seem, then, that the call for the church to change that arises from an analysis of contextual change in the world is unnecessary. However, the authors from whom the contextual analysis come claim that the change currently taking place in the world is abnormal, “discontinuous change” (Roxburgh, 2006, p. 7). Roxburgh (2006) categorizes discontinuous change as “disruptive and unanticipated” (p. 7) and claims it always challenges commonly held assumptions.

Though no one seems to be able to define, list, and name the discontinuous change in precisely the same way, the same general culprits of change are often repeated: globalization, religious and cultural pluralism, relativization or democratization of knowledge, advances of science and technology, the collapse of Enlightenment and modern principles and worldviews, growth of postmodernism, secularization of the West, dominance of capitalism and the continue presence of a huge gap between the rich and the poor, and the loss of confidence in primary social structures and relationships (Bosch, 1991; Dietterich & Dietterich, 1994; Hirsch, 2006; Roxburgh, 2006, 2008; Turnipseed, 1998; Van Gelder, 1996, 1998). Summarizing these changes, Wright (2006) says the Enlightenment Tower of Babel built in modernity has collapsed into the fragmented world of post-modernity.

Within the new, fragmented, and confusing world, the position of the church in the West has been drastically altered. Religious diversity has created an environment for individualized faith to flourish and true religion to fade in the light of uncertainty (Turnipseed, 1998). Secularization has de-Christianized the West, leading to a commonly held belief throughout the world that Western theology is suspect at best (Bosch, 1991). It is in this light of a new world and a new position for the church that the call for a missional change comes. The church must realize the West is a “mission field” (Roxburgh & Boren, 2009, p. 75) and should see itself with “exilic eyes as ‘resident aliens,’ an adventurous colony in a society of unbelief” (Hunsberger, 1996, p. 18).

Missional Literature Review - Part 1: Introduction

As part of an Action Research Project being done for the completion of my M.A in Ministry degree, I am researching churches that are transitioning to a more missional identity and structure, particularly in the area of small groups. Over the next several days, I will post short sections from the literature review portion of the paper. If you would like information on any of the cited references, I would be happy to assist. Also, I would love to hear your response to what the literature seems to be saying.

INTRODUCTION
Criticism of the small group movements of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s is growing increasingly strong. For instance, Boren (2007) writes, “In short, good old American pragmatism [has] turned small groups into a modernistic program that leaders could control and produce growth. … Most of us bought into a set of small-group myths that resulted in growth but little radical transformation” (p. 10). Hirsch (2007) is another example, claiming small groups were used as nothing more than “prop-ups to the ‘real-deal,’ weekend-based church” (p. 4). Smith (2007) is perhaps most scathing of all, saying small groups quickly became “protective, hoarding, territorial and inwardly focused” (p. 15) in the old system.

In addition to this critique of small group movements, Paul M. and Inagrace T. Dietterich (1994) comment on the nature of the church of recent history in the West and call for a missional transformation, claiming the church is caught in “the trap of success” and suffers from “success syndrome [emphasis in original]: a pattern of organizational thinking, behavior, and functioning” (p. 5). Symptoms of the syndrome include insular thinking, parochialism, complacency, and belief in infallibility (Dietterich, 1994). Churches caught in this trap rely on what worked in the past when confronted with new challenges and are unable to be open and creative or accept new ideas and insights. Such churches need a “dramatic shock” to challenge and change the “theological self-understanding” of the church body and bring it into an “entirely new frame of reference” (Dietterich, 1994). Many authors contend that a transition to missional living in congregations is the needed corrective for the problems facing both small group ministries and the institutional church (see Barrett, 2004; Boren, 2007, 2010; Carter, 2009; Dieterrich & Dietterich, 1994; Halter & Smay, 2008; McNeal 2009; Rouse & Van Gelder, 2008; Van Gelder, 2007).

The critique levied against the small groups and the institutional or “Established Church” (Dietterich & Dietterich, 1994) by missional scholars and authors is pointed and clear. Less clear, however, are the solutions offered or the changes proposed. Roxburgh and Boren (2009) admit that the missional concept is hard to define and avoid limiting their thinking to models and structures, leaving many pragmatists wondering how to do missional living in their churches. The missional concept is compared to a flowing river (Boren & Roxburgh, 2009), “not a what but a who,” [emphasis in original] (McNeal, 2009, p. 20), and a Spirit-led initiative unique in every local context (Van Gelder, 2007). Trying to identify clear proposals and solutions to problems in missional literature can be much like grasping at air. Those who write in this field not only recognize this difficulty, but also celebrate it as a move away from the rigid programs in recent church history and toward a more contextual ministry (e.g. Roxburgh & Boren, 2009).

Though writers at times attempt to refrain from limiting missional concepts to definitions and models, a review of the literature seems to show commonalities among scholars, authors, and practitioners alike. The commonalities occur in the areas of why the church needs to live missionally, what missional living looks like, and how Christian communities can begin the missional transition process.

Gracious Intrusion

     Genesis is an absolutely fascinating read. The author of Genesis, traditionally believed to be Moses, used a literary device to clearly mark ten headings (like chapter titles) throughout the book. The Hebrew phrase ‘elleh toledot occurs eleven times in the book of Genesis (2:4; 5:1; 6:9; 10:1; 11:10; 11:27; 25:12; 25:19; 36:1 [36:9]; 37:2) and has been translated in many ways including “these are the generations of,” “this is the family history of,” “this is the history of the descendants of” and “this is the account of.”  When these headings are in view, the structure of Genesis is seen as follows: a prologue describing the significance of creation, followed by ten stories of the people of God.
     As the ten stories (or chapters) of Genesis are read, a pattern becomes evident.  One author described this pattern as the sovereign and gracious intrusion of God into human history.  God did not simply create humans and then step back and allow them to do their own thing.  Instead, God worked to ensure humans would fulfill his purposes, despite their obvious sinfulness and short comings.  This is most clearly seen with Abraham and his descendants.
     In Genesis 12, God promises Abraham that He will give him a land, make him a blessing, and grow a nation or people through him.  The rest of the book of Genesis details God building the nation/people.  Constantly God is forced to overcome threats to this promise created by human sinfulness or stupidity.  For instance, Abraham and his descendants are constantly taking matters into their own hands, instead of seeking out God's plans.  Abraham sleeps with his maidservant to have a child, believing Sarah to be barren.  God intervenes to build the lineage through Sarah. Threat solved.  Then God tells Abraham to kill his only son, Isaac.  This is an obvious threat to the lineage.  God provides a ram - threat solved.  One day Abraham thinks it would be a good idea to tell a foreign king Sarah is his sister.  The king takes Sarah as one of his lady-friends.  Again, God has to act, sending a sickness until the king figures out what has happened - threat solved.  Surprisingly, Isaac will do the same exact thing with his wife.  Jacob steals the blessing of Esau, causing enmity between the two brothers.  Jacob's father-in-law later tries to hunt him down. Joseph's brothers sell him into slavery.  Enslaved in Egypt, Joseph is falsely accused and thrown in jail.  Meanwhile, his family is about to start starving due to a famine.  What does God do?  He graciously intervenes each time his people are threatened and builds them into a great nation.
     Through the story of Joseph, Jacob's people, the descendants of Abraham, end up in Egypt.  Once in Egypt, they are incubated for about 400 years until God releases his huge nation from their captivity to fulfill his purposes in the world.  God graciously intrudes into human history to ensure his purposes are realized on this earth.
     God still graciously intrudes into this world to see his purposes fulfilled and he continues to build his people to carry out these purposes.  The church is one mechanism of God's gracious intrusion into the world.  Therefore, I contend it is the responsibility and role of every Christian and every Christian community to graciously intrude into the lives of their family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, sports teams, social clubs, etc.  In recent history, a growing number of voices are calling for the church to begin to refocus on graciously intruding in the lives of those in the community.  I agree, and often find myself asking, Who's life am I intruding with the grace of God?  My guess is we should all be asking this question.