i am “missional” because i love the incarnation of Christ here on earth & think that was the big idea that Jesus was getting at.  he “became flesh and moved into the neighborhood” and calls us to do the same. while i have a lot of friends who i deeply respect in the missional conversation, i am often annoyed because it seems like it’s becoming a new exciting trend for most attractional churches now.  of course there are a lot of fringe conversations i love & appreciate, but it seems to me that there’s a group of “louder” voices that i don’t really identify with because the power & voice tends to rest in the boys.  to me it also kind of feels a little like it’s become a new pet project for evangelicals, to become more “missional.”  sorry if that sounds harsh.  i love the incarnational thoughts but still think so many issues of power & equality & what it means to be “poor” aren’t being addressed.  some of the delivery seems to focus on “we are supposed to help those poor people” instead of learning that “we are those poor people.”

from Kathy Escobar, pastor, The Refuge in Colorado

 

Totally. Kathy, who is a friend of mine and who I will be seeing in just a couple of weeks at Convergence,  is one of the most missional-minded women that I know. A former megachurch staffer, Kathy and her friend Karl abandoned the supersize form of church with all of it's trappings with the hope of creating a faith community in the organic earth of the people who make it so. Thus, The Refuge was born, a church that "serves the suburban poor." 

Missional is likely to become the new darling of Christendom in the US.  This is not a bad thing. I'm not criticizing. I just wanna say that I hope the missional movement will not gentrify like the Emerging Church kinda did.

Gentrify :  renovate so as to make it conform to middle-class aspirations; "gentrify a row of old houses"; "gentrify the old center of town"

There are a lot of amazing missional writers, thinkers and most especially, practioners. Missional practiconers don't spend much time, I've noticed, pausing to analyze their missional strategey. They just do it. They just Be Jesus to the community and people they find themselves with. Theology is a sidetrip, not the whole journey, for people on mission.

Catholics are brilliant at the whole missional gig. They've been doing it for hundreds of years. My daughter attends a LaSalle Catholic high school that focuses on making a college prepartory education accessible for all, especially low-income families. This is because way back in the day in France only the elite and aristocratic were afforded educatoinal opportunities. No money, no power = no education. Jean Baptist De LaSalle felt a calling to enter the margins with the poor and focus on providing education for their sons. (not sure why not girls as well, but hey baby steps people, baby steps)  The point is that De LaSalle got close enough with a group of people that he was able to identify a felt need and then address it. He didn't start a seminary nor a conference. He organized curriculum, secured sites for study, found and trained teachers, and created ways for poor French boys to get an education. And there was resistance each step of his journey, with the academics and tutors of his time protesting and trying to block his way. imagine!

I would love to see a LaSallian mindset in the missional river as it fords it's way through byways and highways across America's landscape of Christians. Let there be radical inclusion of the practioners among us who do not have large platforms nor a large followership of Twitter fans. Let's promote the other rather than ourselves. If you have the mic, hand it off to someone who doesn't. If you have credentials, make room for some poor French boys (and girls) to learn from you. Give it away. To those who can't give you anything back.

The true manifestation of missional, of the Presence of Jesus, ought to bear some degree of obscurity and steadfast resolve to maintain always a posture of humility and servanthood. The best servants are invisible. They clean and scrub and wash up and cook and sweep and quietly do the unglamourous work of life without an announcement. Jesus served under the radar more often than not. He was a cryptic sort of mystic. Not a rockstar.

I feel Kathy's concerns. She and I, women that we are, can sit you down and tell you stories all day and long into the night of how our wonderful brothers unwittingly create brotherhoods and socieities that are exclusive of women and non-professionals. Missional cannot and must not become dominated by academia nor personalities. The Way of Jesus tells us a better way. That is my hope for the winds of change that are gusting up within and outside of That Gloroius Beauty aka The Church.

 

One of the current debates in churchdom will be whether or not Missional is, or will become a movement. Is it here to stay or will it go the way of Emergent/Emerging church, which started with a bang and is quickly becoming the Myspace of the church world—once the leading "next big thing" and now eating the dust of Facebook. My thinking is that what we are seeing with the missional conversation is the beginnings of wholesale change, which will eventually be a true movement. Missional is not mired in the theological debates that have sidetracked the Emergent conversation, and therefore has been able to run swiftly and less hindered by critique. The convergence of house church, simple church, and long-term missional practitioners is coming together and providing not only some solid theology, but also serious training and resources.

-Lance Ford in the most recent Shapevine newsletter

 

My friend Mimi talks about the whirlwind wind fling she had with with the Emerging Church movement. A blip on her radar, and though it was short-lived it was for sure a part of the detoxification she had entered after she left her megachurch career behind.

Mimi and I are part of a rowdy little church in Portland, Oregon known as The Bridge. Planted by Ken and Deborah Loyd, two sages of faith and missional pioneers in the sense of they just did it without talking about it or studying a course, The Bridge has been in existence for eleven years. Ken and Deborah both moved on in the last couple of years, handing over the reins to younger and less experienced leaders.

The Bridge is distinct as a missional faith community in that the Loyd's successfully crossed over into a culture of angsty post-modern, creative-musician Portlanders who cuss. A lot. And drink. And challenge every belief system and insist that God must be able to speak into their effed up lives seven days a week and not just during the ninety-minute holy hour of Sunday morning.

Music is homegrown at The Bridge, lyrics filled with laments and groanings and hollerings that bleed all over the carpet. Todd Fadel, who together with his wife, Angie, are the leading musical force at The Bridge, said in a recent interview that "The things we sing are not what we are aspiring to. They're usually what's actually going on."

(click HERE to see the short video interview as well as hear some of the sound that is the Bridge worship sound)

There has been some resonance at The Bridge with some of the Emerging Church movement. Many in our community have faith backgrounds and most have been in the throes of deconstructing their beliefs to some degree or another. The main drive, though, is not to craft a new belief system, but rather to throw off the trappings of human constructst that get in the way of experiencing God and experiencing one another.

The missional mindset, as Lance writes about in the current Shapevine newsletter, has yet to prove if it will have staying power. As the EMC conversation has grown dull and tiresome, many are now saying, No more talk. Let's do it. That sounds a lot like a transition from a posture of analysis to an active involement of good old "git 'er dun."

The Bridge does not define itself as emerging or post-modern or missional or anything other than as a tribe of believers who have insisted on living out the scandalous grace of God with each other seven days a week.

This has made The Bridge a gut-wrenching collection of authenticity practioners. Many of our Sunday mornings as well as our other gatherings,  often involve whoever is talking - leader or layperson - being vulnerable about the weakness in their own lives. So many of us at The Bridge have barely survived any kind of relationship to the body of Christ because of the acute pressures in the evangelical culture to measure up to some kind of super human portrait of Christlikeness. The disclosure of failure and weakness from the pulpit is a rarity in many churches; at The Bridge, it is the norm.

We're not for everybody. Despite being around for more than a decade we're still on the smallish side, about 50 or so, with dozens of others who float in and out from week to week and month to month. Some have judged us as being unsuccessful or as an ineffective witness of the Gospel and point to our lack of robust growth as evidence. While others, me among them, see it another way. We see the smallish, intimate communtiy of The Bridge as a distinctive. We are not meant to be big. Then we would not be The Bridge. But we have multiplied, with three other distinct churches, not Bridge churches, but three other unique faith tribes that are missional to the people they find themselves serving.

Besides, being small means things get done faster. A couple of weeks ago some of us said hey, why don't we have some morning prayer before our service?  Ok, done. Now we're doing it. Antoher time someone said, Hey, I know some grocery stores that will give us their old food.  By the next week we had drivers to go pick it up. That was three years ago. Food Church was born in the organic bullshit of our everyday lives. And now the anarchists come stand in line every week outside our door waiting for us to stop singing and talking so they can get free groceries. No strings attached. (and they have no idea we are praying blessings for them behind their backs!)

Is missional here to stay?  Does it matter? It's just a word, a label, to identify a group of people who have found a forgotten way of collecting ourselves together to discover the power and presence of God in one another.

***For more stories about The Bridge click HERE to read them at my blog

My friend Jim Henderson of Off the Map fame is very talented at critical thinking, especially when it comes to evaluating churches and their practices.  With his flair for PR and knack for mass communication, Henderson is leading the charge for a structured approach to rating churches for those pastors curious enough to know what the outsider (and insider!) really thinks about them. Introducing Church Rater: Find a Church that Fits:

 

Every Sunday close to 350,000 churches open their doors to the public. How do you know what you’re walking into? What will the pastor be talking about? What kind of people attend?

Church Rater lets you read what others say about the church and rate your own experience. ChurchRater lets you talk back after sitting through a sermon. Church Rater lets you...  find a church that fits.

The seed for Church Rater's birth goes back to an interesting experiment Henderson did in 2006.

He  took an atheist on a tour of ten churches around  America (including mine!) in an effort to see the evangelical world through the eyes of an outsider. That adventure resulted in a book called Jim and Casper go to Church: Frank Conversations about Faith, Churches and Well-Meaning Christians.

I reviewed the book when it came out. Here's an excerpt:

I liked what they wrote about The Bridge. They almost caught the energy of who we are and what we are like. They made a good go of it at taking a quick snapshot of what our Sunday morning gig looks like. I could focus this entire review on The Bridge, and say a whole lot more, but then that would make this a chapter review rather than a book review.

Besides visiting my church, Jim and Casper visited 11 other churches from the east coast to the west and down south in Texas as well as up here in my beloved Pacific Northwest. Their book is an account of what they found, a kind of report and review of how Casper, the friendly atheist, interpreted his observations, unfettered from the bias of an evangelical worldview. Jim, the seasoned vet of the faith, is his tour guide into the Sunday morning culture of church. This book accounts their conversations and questions to one another as they try to hear and see what the other is downloading.  (to read the whole review go HERE)

Jim has tried to launch Church Rater before back in 2006 with writer and Christian thinker, Peter Walker.  Dust storms of criticism rose up immediately. Peter handled it diplomatically pointing out that  "Christians are way too easily offended."

Interest fizzled out as Church Rater struggled for people willing to critique churches in an open forum as well as some potentially sticky legal issues that begin to ominously gather like storm clouds against a Seattle skyline.But over the past nine months there has been a quiet reformation of CR as Henderson brought a small team of church insiders and outsiders together to once again make evangelicals do what most human beings avoid doing - to look at ourselves in the mirror with raw honesty.

Earlier this month, Henderson placed ads on Seattle's Craig's List advertising for church raters... paid church raters.  $50 a pop. Credentials needed - to be a non-church goer and not hate Christians. 

Seattle Times columnist, Danny Westneat recently gave Church Rater a shout-out:

Henderson had to take the site offline for a time because of "slanderous stuff about some pastors." He relaunched a few months ago with more stringent monitoring.

You can't muzzle the crowd, he says. Not in the digital age. Plus there are other church-rating sites (the most popular is Ship of Fools, the British "magazine of Christian unrest," with its cheeky reports by anonymous "mystery worshippers.")

"When people go to church they go out to lunch afterward and they dish about the sermon, the music, whether the pastor was boring that day," Henderson said. "We're just a vehicle to let people do in public what they already do in private."

Seattle television station, King 5, also did a feature about Church Rater. In the comments section of their write-up one commentator said,

Churches have been driving Christians away for years with outdated dogmas and and rules. Not to mention interpretations of the Bible contrary to the scriptures. You go to church for fellowship in the worship of the Lord. Not to be told how to vote or have other parishioners report any activities that the church rules forbid.

(the anchor in introducing the news video said, "where Yelp meets Yahweh. That made me smile.)

What do I think about Church Rater? 

I'm not totally sold on it. It seems gimmicky.  In a world of spinmasters and marketing gurus, isn't CR just another clever publicity ploy to sell books or get web hits?

I texted Henderson today. I asked him, "What's the takeaway message of Church Rater?" Messages are only as relevant as they are heard by the intended audience. CR already has a host of critics who think it's more Church Hater than Church Rater, including those who are friends and fans of Jim Henderson and Off the Map. Like Jason Clark, a progressive Christian leader of church formation and theology who hails from Surrey,  England. At his blog, Deep Church, he offered a gentle yet critical review of ChurchRater:

... there is the nature of ‘rating’.  I know I’m not interested in someone visiting one Sunday service and giving us a 5* rating.  I fear it undermines something else Off the Map was set up for, deep and thoughtful reflection and critique of Church.  Church needs critique and I love the kind that Off the Map introduced me to.  However this way of assessing churches, seems captive to the problem of the way we select out church involvement, and undermines the best (at least for me) of Off the Map..

(read the entirety of Jason's critique here)

I'm kinda on the same page as Jason. Jim and the Off the Map crowd have been some of the most refreshing voices to me and thousands of others in regards to leading the conversation of what needs to be addressed in the modern American evangelical movement. Does Church Rater help advance that effort or take away from it?

Jim texted me back. In less than 140 characters he answered my question about the takeaway message of Church Rater.  "Help people find a church that fits and help churches see themselves through the eyes of outsiders." 

Ah, there it is : helping churches see themselves through the eyes of outsiders.

Some have pointed out that it is not fair to judge a faith community based on a 90-minute Sunday service. But like books that are judged by their covers, Church Rater is simply going for the obvious, the Sunday morning religious theater that happens across America every week.

Henderson himself has pointed out that it's after service during the Sunday brunch that parishioners and congregants review the experience with one anothe anyway. "I didn't like his sermon...the music was wonderful...the prayer was too long...the air-conditioning was too high...there wasn't anyone to greet us today....and on and on and on....Henderson is right. Most of us are guilty of rating a church service... especially when we are on the hunt for a new church. I've joked with friends that it is easier to find a husband a home, then it is to find a church!

Church Rater is just a systamatic approach to doing what is already happening around the faithful's Sunday dinner anyway. Henderson's just being very public about it. And that's what he does best, what Off the Map is genius at: facilitating public discourse for and about Christians on those subjects that make us  oh-so-squirmy.

Church Rater or church hater?  You decide for yourself. As for me, I'll stick to rating the raters.

A successful corporate executive, highly respected in his workplace and one who carried tremendous influence in the business world, was the picture of the ultimate power broker. Everyone knew his name. He had his own parking place, and whenever he entered a crowded elevator, people would respectfully move to the side in order to give him greater standing space.

His power in the corporate world was nearly palpable. When he entered a room, his reputation proceeded him. A fierce businessman, his colleagues admired him and feared him. His temper was the stuff of myths. Prone to moodiness, his staff worked hard to keep things moving smoothly. He was a man of power.

But, what no one in his high-powered corporate world knew was that this iconic-like figure was living a double life. They did not have a clue about his secret, his hidden passion. They would have been shocked had they known how this intimidating figure of a power broker spent his Sundays.

He'd been doing it for years, these secretive liasons, unbeknownst to even his closest confidants.

Every Sunday, for the past four years, this corporate executive, who lived alone, took off his expensive clothes and traded them for a pair of worn out blue jeans and comfortably faded t-shirt. He would slick back his $200 a pop styled hair and don a Yankees baseball cap. He'd grab a pair of sunglasses, reaching for the cheap pair he'd bought at a corner market rather than his high-end expensive pair.

Then he'd call a cab to come fetch him from his luxurious home in his exclusive neighborhood. He'd direct the taxi to take him to a working class neighborhood on the other side of town, far removed from his wealthy neighborhood. Then he'd walk a few blocks towards a strip mall where to a bus stop for city bus number five. Quietly he would sit on the bus stop bench, an anonymous everyday man just waiting for the bus. If any of his colleagues had passed by they would not have recognized the simple, regular guy as the high-powered corporate exec they were familiar with.

One Sunday, one of the cleaning staff sat down on the bench, He recognized her from the night cleaning crew from the many nights he had worked clear through to meet an impossible deadline. He did not know her name. She sat down, two kids in tow, and glanced over at him, giving him a polite smile and nod. He smiled back. She had no idea.

Every Sunday he lived this double life. He told no one about it and went to special lengths to conceal his secret.

That secret was that every Sunday, while his colleagues played golf or drank expensive whiskey to while away the afternoon at the golf club, he was secretly helping out at a small soup kitchen operated by a group of Benedictine nuns.

He'd show up, put on an apron, and get to work helping with prep in the kitchen for the six o'clock meal. Then, when it was serving time, he would go from table to table, ladling up generous helpings of hot, home cooked food for destitute guests who counted on that Sunday meal.

It was his life's biggest secret. He reveled in it. He reveled in his secret Sundays of living a life unnoticed along side some of the most invisible citizens of his city.

The big corporate executive, for a few hours each week, went unnoticed.