Below are the rest of my notes from “The Shaping of Things to Come” by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch.  Still in the first chapter, I’ve been blown away by some of the things I’ve been reading.

Something important to note: This chapter deals with the concept of “Christendom,” that is, our cultural understanding of how we gather as believers. This has been called “institutional church” by other authors. The following notes are not focused on individuals, but on the praxis.

This was one of my favorite quotes in the chapter. Extremely challenging.

“If we once have the courage to give up our defense of the old facades which have nothing or very little behind them; if we cease to maintain, in public, the pretense of a universal Christendom; if we stop straining every nerve to get everybody baptized, to get everybody married in church and onto our registers (even when success means only, at bottom, a victory for tradition, custom and ancestry, not for true faith and interior conviction); if, by letting go, we visibly relive Christianity of the burdensome impression that it accepts responsibility for everything that goes on under this Christian topdressing, the impression that Christianity is a sort of Everyman’s Religious Varnish, a folk-religion (at the same level as that of folk-costumes – then we can be free for real missionary adventure and apostolic self-confidence…” – Douglas John Hall, “Metamorphosis: From Christendom to Diaspora”

Michael Frost goes on to explain that Christendom has negatively impacted Christianity. Instead of the Church moving forward, she has been moved into maintenance mode:

[Christendom's] type of leadership can generally be described as priestly, sometimes prophetic to insiders, but almost never to outsiders (no one “out there” is listening), and rarely apostolic. Christendom has moved Christianity into a maintenance mode.

Another quote:

The church is worse off precisely because of Christendom’s failure to evangelize its own context and establish gospel communities that transform the culture.

Another quote:

Christendom is not the biblical mode of the church. It was/is merely one way in which the church has conceived of itself. In enshrining it as the sole form of the church, we have made it into an idol that has captivated our imaginations and enslaved us to a historical-cultural expression of the church.

We have not answered the challenges of our time precisely because we refuse to let go of the idol. This must change! The answer to the problem of mission in the West requires something far more radical than reworking a dated and untenable model. It will require that we adopt something that looks far more like the early church in terms of its conception of the church (ecclesiology) and its core task in the world (missiology)

Main point of  the book:

The whole tenor of this book will be to call post-Christendom to see itself again as a missionary movement rather than as an institution.

I appreciated the approach towards discovering ecclesiology.  It is rooted in an understanding of Jesus and mission:

Christology determines missiology, and missiology determines ecclesiology. It is absolutely vital that the church gets the order right.

After a long hiatus away from contributing to RawReligion.com, I’m making a conscious decision to return to this blog. I use the word “conscious” because it’s a key necessity when talking about decentralized Christianity.

When you set out to pursue organic, simple, outwardly-focused models of “doing church” (i.e. ecclesiology) you find that it is your own responsibility to set the pace and sustain momentum. To respectfully paint a picture of this, you’re leaving the well-oiled machine of the traditional church, where procedure and sub-cultural expectations are defined and observed, and launching out into the great unknown where format is fluid and the modus operandi is undefined. You’ve set out on an pioneer adventure, there are no roads, and only you can “blaze the trail” westward towards the unknown.

This week, I’m traveling to New Hampshire to install a phone system (It’s my day job). I brought two books for reading, (1) Vol. 1 of the Ante-Nicene Fathers and (2) “The Shaping of Things to Come” by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch (n.b. hereafter referred to as “SOTTC”). The Ante-Nicene Fathers are good, but heady; the SOTTC is earthy, practical, and deeply prophetic. Not camel-skin-suit prophetic, nor expensive-suit-and-white-feathery-hair prophetic. The words of this book are a timely and much-needed wake-up call for believers to deeply consider the way we operate in our cultural context.

What follows are a few quotes and my own commentary on chapter one, “Evolution or Revolution?”:

D.H. Lawrence said as long ago as 1924, “The adventure has gone out of the Christian venture.”

I think most of us can relate to this feeling. Where is the excitement? Where is the lasting sense of adventure? We are overfed, overeducated, and jaded to the excitement of innate within the wild Mission of God. Hence, the reason for revolution.

[We must ask ourselves] “What has God called us to be and do in our current cultural context?” The issue of cultural context is essential because the missional church shapes itself to fit that context in order to transform it for the sake of the kingdom of God. By definition, the missional church is always outward looking, always changing (as culture continues to change), and always faithful to the Word of God.

Heeding the cultural context is important for two reasons. One, it implies that we as the people of God are looking outward, outside the physical or societal walls of our group. Two, it recognizes that the expression of Jesus’ Bride will be different depending on the cultural context it is within. Missional church can (and should) look different across cities, countries, and people groups.

Albert Einstein, one of history’s greatest thinkers, once noted that “the kind of thinking that will solve the world’s problems will be of a different order to the kind of thinking that created those problems in the first place.” … If Einstein was right, then the problems of the church, like all real problems in any context, cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created those problems in the first instance. In other words, boxlike thinking simply cannot solve the problems of the box.

Mr. Einstein, there was a deposit of the wisdom of God in you. However, the record still stands that King Solomon was (and is) the wiset man who ever lived.

A metanarrative is an overarching story that claims to contain truth applicable to all people at all times in all cultures.

A definition like this forces us to ask ourselves what the gospel REALLY is. How much of what we preach as doctrine is rooted in our own cultural norms? Can we be focused (and brave enough) to challenge the sacred cows in our ecclesiological praxis to whittle things down to the essential gospel of God, that spans culture?

Table 1: Depicting Three Phases of the Church and its Characteristics

Many of the items are the same between the “Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Mode” and the “Missional Mode.” This is not illustrated in an attempt to prove that the missional mode has it “all correct,” but rather that the missional mode seeks to restore some of the timeless principles that were in operation in the early church age.

Christendom thinking…assumes that the church belongs prominently on the main street, and it claims that the church has the right to take over a public space and clean out the local people while creating a so-called sanctified religious zone.

What do you think about this (above) statement?

The missional church always thinks of the long haul rather than the quick fix.

As believers, we must be after lasting change. It takes a summer to grow a zucchini, but generations to establish an oak tree. What is our goal? Are we willing to invest time and resources without the reward of instant gratification?

Below are fifteen hallmarks of a missional church. I won’t comment on them in this post. I believe they can stand on their own and challenge our current understanding of “church.”

1. The missional church proclaims the gospel.
2. The missional church is a community where all members are involved in learning to become disciples of Jesus.
3. The Bible is normative in this church’s life.
4. The church understands itself as different from the world because of its participation in the life, death, and resurrection of its Lord.
5. The church seeks to discern God’ specific missional vocation for the entire community and for all of its members.
6. A missional community is indicated by how Christians behave toward one another.
7. It is a community that practices reconciliation.
8. People within the community hold themselves accountable to one another in love.
9. The church practices hospitality.
10. Worship is the central act by which the community celebrates with job and thanksgiving both God’s presence and God’s promised future.
11. This community has a vital public witness.
12. There is a recognition that the church itself is an incomplete expression of the reign of God…
13. The missional church is incarnational, not attractional, in its ecclesiology…
14. The missional church is messianic, not dualistic, in its spirituality. That is, it adopts the worldview of Jesus the Messiah, rather than that of the Greco-Roman empire. Instead of seeing the world as divided between the sacred (religious) and profane (nonreligious), like Christ it sees the world and God’s place in it as more holistic and integrated.
15. The missional church adopts an apostolic, rather than a hierarchical, mode of leadership. By apostolic we mean a mode of leadership that recognizes the fivefold model detailed by Paul in Ephesians 6. It abandons the triangular hierarchies of the traditional church and embraces a biblical, flat-leadership community that unleashes the gifts of evangelism, apostleship, and prophecy, as well as the currently popular pastoral and teaching gifts.

Matthew’s Comments:

When I read this article, something deep inside agreed with what Milt was saying.  His words remind me of the situation our Lord put His disciples into.  “Wait in Jerusalem until you are clothed with power from above…”  They were told to strategically wait.

What Milt has to say in this article carries with it, I believe, the wisdom of Jesus.

Root Before Fruit
Source: Milt Rodriguez’s Blog by Milt Rodriguez

“I am the vine; you are the branches.” – John 15:5a

My wife and I came to Christ in 1973, when we were twenty years old. It was during the Jesus People movement in Southern California when many young people were coming to the Lord.

By the time we were twenty-one, we were the worship leaders at our church. We quickly got involved as cell group leaders and were having weekly meetings in our home. I also volunteered to take care of the tape ministry for the pastor.

I preached my first message in 1975 and it was on John 15; the vine and the branches. I had no idea what I was talking about! (Back then, of course, I believed I was an expert on that text). In the next fifteen or so years, we were very busy doing Christian work. I served as a deacon, an elder, a worship leader, and a preacher.

I did evangelistic work with street preaching, door-to-door, and tract distribution. I worked helping the poor through World Vision, a local rescue mission, and sponsoring Cambodian refugees. We also traveled and shared our music ministry and ran a halfway house for wayward youth.

By the time we turned thirty-eight, we were exhausted! We left the institutional church because we really felt that there had to be something higher that God wanted.

It was then that we made a startling discovery. After all those years, we realized that we didn’t know our Lord very well at all. Oh, we knew a lot about Him. We knew the Scriptures (at least we knew them along certain lines). But what had we been giving those people to whom we had ministered? Had we given them Christ? Or had we given them doctrines, rules, regulations, and systems of self improvement? Since we ourselves had not experienced Christ in a deep way, how could we give Him to others in a deep way? There was no lasting fruit to show for those 17 years of hard work. Click here to read more…

It was an exciting time in my life.  I was 20 years old and working long hours at Applebees as a closing server in the smoking section.  I sold a lot of alcohol and had many opportunities to share Jesus with my co-workers.  Most of them were party people who drank and lived loose lifestyles.  Often the Lord would give me dreams or prophetic words which would touch their hearts.

Stephanie was one of my managers.  Many a midnight she and I would be the last two people in the restaurant.  I would be rolling silverware as she had her last smoke of the night.  We would talk about God, healing, angels and demons.  One day she gave her heart to Jesus.  Elated, I proceeded to encourage her to come to the church where I was attending.  She never came and I assumed it was some kind of “rebellion” in her heart. The idea of starting a church around her never even crossed my mind.  I never thought about how scary it might have seemed to Stephanie to leave her own friends to integrate herself into “my” church.

Then one day she said, “hey, I wanna get baptized; couldn’t we just do it in my sink?”  I enthusiastically promised her that my pastor would baptize her if she came to church. I could tell she was disappointed but I was convinced I had done the right thing.  She needed to submit to the authority of the church before she could get baptized, right?!  Besides, well-meaning leaders would deem me as being very presumptuous if I went so far as to baptize her myself, in a sink nonetheless!  Who was I to do such a thing?  That is the job of pastors and trained clergy, wasn’t it?

Shortly after our conversation about baptism I left Applebees.  We kept in touch for awhile but then Stephanie moved and changed phone numbers so we lost touch.

I’m heartbroken that I allowed that opportunity to pass by. I know that God causes all things to work together for the good of those who love him, but I hope to never make that mistake again.   Perhaps my story can keep others from making similar mistakes.

Stephanie, wherever you are, tearfully I want to say that if you still have a desire to get baptized, I would love to baptize you in your sink.

The Word tells us in John 16:24; ” Until now you have asked for nothing in My name; ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be made full.”

And in James 4:2, although he is speaking to issues of worldliness in this passage, I think I can apply the scripture; “You do not have because you do not ask” to this discussion.

I often have people ask me how I get the connections with folks to help them start simple/missional/organic life. My response; I ask God to send them to me, and I ask Him constantly for that privilege.

A few years ago, I tried to meet with, activate, gather people I knew had leadership gifts, or had been seeking simple church life into action. Very little fruit resulted from that. They were very frustrating years and I struggled with the desire within me to get people moving and functioning in the Kingdom.

However, I was seeing God use me in this motivation in other countries, where I was constantly in contact with people who were “ready” to go and it was just a matter of having enough time on my part to get to all of them.

I realized that in this “mission midset”, I continually asked God to lead me to the right people, or to bring them to me when I was on one of these “mission trips” that I did to extend the Kingdom and release the Body into their places within. Since I knew very few people in these countries, I was dependent upon God to bring these divine appointments to me.

When I was home in the States, I prayed similar prayers but in reality, relied more upon my knowledge and preconceived beliefs that God would of course use this or that person that looked to me like someone who was ready to serve.

I began to ask, and seriously ask…..beg, if you really want to know, for God to send to me “workers of the harvest” and especially those who didn’t require a long “detoxification”, a lot of personal healing, or paradigm shifting.

I can only say; God is faithful and has answered those prayers with “more than I could ask or imagine” Him doing.

Last night, for example, we met with a couple who contacted me a few weeks ago with interest in simple church. They are just an average, ordinary couple who when after listening to them discuss what they were desiring in living “church”, I said; “you can do that here, in your home with those elements you desire,”. They lit up with excitement and replied; “We can?”

“Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened.” Mt 7:7