Our group here just had its first multiplication. It is quite a milestone as we have been a this thing for about 3 1/2 years. Needless to say, it has been quite a learning experience. I wanted to share the options we entertained as a group for how we were going to approach multiplying the group. They conveniently fell into a list of L's.

Launch. This option revolves around someone in the group feeling called to launch out away from the group and start another group from scratch, say two to three people. I would like to say that this is ideal, but that is my apostolic side coming out.No one in our group felt this calling, so we moved on to another option.

Like. This is when you mutliply based on existing chemistry between people in the group. This is a viable option, but it is a bit inward focused. We all did not like this idea as it lent itself to clicks and had the smell of bening self-centered. Not toally, but it smells that way.

Little Ones. This did play a factor in our multiplication process. Kids are a part of the community, and we try to include them in our discussions and factor them in to our decisions. Because we have a large number of kids in the group, we did not want one group to have all the kids and the other group to have none. Part of the reason for our multiplication was logistical issues like space. So to put all the kids in one group would create the same dilemma all over again.We wanted to make sure the kid factor was evenly distributed and did not duplicate some of our logistical issues.

List. This is where you pass around a sheet of pare with three lists on them. Group #1, Group #2, and "I'll Go Where I'm Needed." this is similar to the "like" option, but it does have a twist that allows people the somewhat anonymous option of saying, it doesn't matter. I know some folks who use this option and sometimes it works well. But it does seem to leave out a discussion about mission.

Leanings. This has to do with giftings and passions. We also listed off everyone's giftings from APEST typology to see what each multiplication options looked like and how the gifts would be distributed in each scenario.

Location. The other option was to multiply based on geography. We ended up doing it this way, but the kid factor was apart of this discussion. We multiplied the groups into a North Ikon and a South Ikon. We use these descriptors for communication purposes, as in our email lists etc. But there is no branding going on here. It is more in house language for distinction. Sort of the private face of the communities as opposed to the public face. there was some mission strategy involved here as we see ourselves being sent into our neighborhoods and 3rd places. When our groups begin to saturate the city, we will be strategically located to for community engagement. The location piece also vibed with our Leanings and Little one's. It turned out to be a great deal. But it did not come without much discussion and dissecting. Needless to say, some have more tolerance for dissecting than others ;-)

That being said, we are not opposed to the other models of multiplication. One thing we made sure to do was to draw this process out and approach it from as many angles as possible. It took us about a month to go through it all. We wanted to hit it from all sides because eventually each group need to revisit this process. It was sort of a foundational moment for us when it comes to multiplying a group.

I must say that I ma quite giddy about all of this and that I can't wait to see how the two groups take on a life of their own and begin to flourish in their giftings and callings. Our goal is a movement of multiplying disciples, leaders and churches. We are learning how to do this hands on, and it is quite an adventure. We are going to be drilling down deeper into multiplying on a disciple level, and not just a group level as well. This summer we plan to blitz some neighborhoods with prayer walking, and community engagement. Who knows what God is preparing for us!

Risk and Failure

Tim Catchim

March 5, 2010 by Tim Catchim Comments (24)

Risk, Failure, apostolic

100. Risk and Failure

I love this quote from Theodore Roosevelt because it captures the boundary crossing, entrepreneurial spirit of apostolic ministry. If you are not able to embrace risk and the possibility of failure, you will never be able to function apostolically.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

The Resurrection, the Grave and Culture from Schwager

Tim Catchim

January 17, 2010 by Tim Catchim Comments (0)

Man, this dude took a while to drop a jewel in this book, but he finally came through half way through the book. Listen to this piece on the resurrection and culture.

"In accordance with Girards theory of the sacred, cultures were regularly erected over the graves of the slain victims, as they presuppose that the society has reached an inner peace, which spontaneously sets itself up by means of the violent driving out and sacralization. The grave, which covers up the corpse , thus become son the one hand the symbol of that great process of veiling on which every society is based, and on the other the first clearly defined cultural sign, because with it the distinction between sacred and profane is symbolically pinned down: Culture always starts form the grave. The grave is always the first human memorial, which has to be erected over the victim who has been driven out, the first, most elementary, most fundamental layer of cultural signs. No culture without a grave, no grave without culture. If the sealed grave is really the great symbol of the sacred cultures, insofar as they cover something over, then it is more than an accidental detail that the accounts of Easter in the gospels begin with the narration of the opened grave, in which there is no longer a corpse to be found. ... In a violent conflict, the murdered corpse is the emperical sign there from the very beginning, that there has been a victim and that some one else was the victor. Talk of an Easter victory can not therefore lightly pass by this sign....the opened grave has, against the background of Girards theory, an important symbolic meaning. It shows that the new beginning constituted by Easter reaches so deep that the ultimate foundations of human culture itself, until now veiled, are laid bare" p. 129-130

Another sign pointing us to the fact that we have not even begun to understand the riches and wisdom and depth of the gospel. The incarnation, Ministry, Death, Burial, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus are saturated with the mystery of God and the concrete ....everything. WOW! is all I have to say.

Atonement and Assortments

Tim Catchim

January 8, 2010 by Tim Catchim Comments (0)

Atonement

I kind of like this presentation from James Choung. It hits a few of the models of atonement, but leaves out the penal-substitution model, which I am not too excited about these days actually :) I think we need to explore and emphasize other models of the atonement, and dive deeper into Christus Victor for example. Can you tell me what model of atonement this guy is alluding to with his presentation? If not, then you probably familiar with only one model of the atonement. This should bother you as there are multiple images and models used in scripture to help us understand what Jesus did.

Legos of Beauty and Hope

Tim Catchim

January 6, 2010 by Tim Catchim Comments (0)

Hope, art

This is a great picture of what it means to be salt and light in the world. These pictures are from Tel Aviv, an area that has felt the brunt of violence and war. There is a small movement called Dispatchwork where people go around with Legos and patch up the holes and craters in walls and monuments with a colorful mosaic of plastic art. It is a refusal to let the effects of war brand an area with destruction.

They are filling in the wounds and scars of war with a creative, beautiful touch of art. It is a testimony that beauty can emerge after tragedy. This is exactly what Jesus does in our lives.

Template of a Missional Community from Mark 2

Tim Catchim

January 5, 2010 by Tim Catchim Comments (2)

missional community, Innovation

Spent a good bit of time meditating on Mark 2 this past month. This is what I came up with.

Four people: Missional communities can be large or small, but they function well in small bands of people. The power of small.

Paralytic: People are unable to make it to Jesus on their own. It takes a community effort, which is contrary to the hero myth of evangelism that it is a one person show. When a small community is involved, it diffuses the needs of the person among the group, lightening the load that would typically fall on one person. "Paralyzed" people are people with strongholds, they are high maintenance. This means one person is not dynamic enough to transport them to Jesus. They need multiple connections for the journey.

They Uncovered the Roof: Innovation and creativity. They say that necessity is the mother of invention. These four friends created an innovative strategy to get their friend to Jesus. It did not include the crowd or the conventional entrance. They bypassed all of this. They were unconventional, yet highly successful.

When they had broken through: Innovative strategies take time. Digging through a roof was no easy task, but they were determined to see their friend come to Jesus. In time, a breakthrough will happen.

They let down the bed: Working with "paralyzed" people sets you up for co-dependent relationships. They were willing to let go of their friend once he made it to Jesus. Their role was to get him to the healer. They stayed on the roof, a healthy distance, while Jesus did his work.

Arise, Take up your bed: If you have been paralyzed, the last thing you want to do is carry your mat around. It is the symbol of your hurt and disappointment. Why did Jesus want him to carry his mat? From the paralytics stand point, it showed his mastery over a situation that once mastered him. But you know eventually someone was going to ask him "Why are you carrying that mat around?" Being transparent about our past is what gives us the opportunity to share about what Jesus has done for us.

Go to your house: Jesus did not extract him from his setting. He sent him back into his oikos, his relational hub, to be a living testimony of what Jesus could do.

We never saw anything like this: Jesus has the power to transform people in amazing ways. But you have to wonder if part of their amazement included the innovative and passionate ways in which that small, missional community got him to Jesus. Jesus has the ability to not only transform people, but also our strategies of getting people to him.

The Symbolic Construction of Community

Tim Catchim

December 28, 2009 by Tim Catchim Comments (1)

gospel, community, Symbol

76. Symbols and the Construction of Community

Revisited a book I read a while back for the book I am working on about Apostolic Leadership. This guy is so thorough in his analysis about how symbols foster, maintain and hold community together, that it is sort of hard to find a good summary quote. Symbols are those clandestine meaning transmitters and they work in such an ambiguous way that when you stop to look more deeply into how they operate and what it is exactly that they do, you begin to see there power and presence on almost every corner. This quote is from Anthony Cohens book The Symbolic Construction of Community.

"Symbols are effective because they are imprecise. Though obviously not content-less, part of their meaning is subjective. They are, therefore, ideal media through which people can speak a 'common' language, behave in apparently similar ways, participate in the 'same' rituals...wear the same clothes and so forth, without subordinating themselves to a tyranny of orthodoxy. Individuality and community are thus reconcilable. Just as the 'common form' of the symbol aggregates the various meanings assigned to it, so the symbolic repertoire of a community aggregates the individualities and other differences found within the community and provides the means for their expression, interpretation, and containment. It provides the range within which individuality is recognizable. It continuously transforms the reality of difference into the appearance of similarity with such efficacy that people can still invest the 'community' with ideological integrity. It unites them in their opposition, both to each other, and to those 'outside.' It thereby constitutes, and gives reality to, the community's boundaries..."

An interesting question to entertain is, how does the symbol of the gospel function in this way? Symbols are fused with meaning by someone. The strength of symbols is that they can store and communicate multiple meanings at once. Their weakness is that meaning can get away from what produced the symbol in the first place. A good example of this would be the cross. Still a vibrant religious symbol in Christianity, it has been emptied of its original meaning and loaded down with centuries of domestication and cultural baggage. The most vivid display of this would be the prosperity gospel which manages to skirt the cross altogether most of the time, bypassing it for a direct line towards the resurrection, giving it a lopsided theology of naked power and naive triumphalism. Weakness and suffering, non-violent resistance and loving sacrifice seem to escape this particular ideology altogether. Instead, the prosperity gospel liquidates the meaning of the cross and shrinks it down to a purely transactional affair to secure personal salvation and forgiveness. It is a side note to the "power" of "abundant living." The current Protestant versions of the gospel have fallen into this same trap. This is quite a downsizing when compared to the massive implications Paul and other writers of the NT draw from this powerful symbol. Joel green and Mark Baker are quick to point out a foundational source of this tragedy in their book Recovering the Scandal of the Cross.
They say that part of the problem is the way in which we construe the human dilemma. Explanations of the solutions offered by the gospel are directly linked to how we understand the problem. Before Christ the human dilemma was understood within a broad spectrum of categories, including, social, physical, political, emotional, and psychological. The spiritual dimension is always present, but at times it is single voice among many. Explanations of the meaning of the cross need to first wrestle with the entire human situation in relation to God, creation and humanity. The fall reaches into every facet of our existence. It only seems right to expect the gospel, as the power of God for salvation, will speak to these categories. In fact it does. The word salvation is a medical term that is akin to the Hebrew version of shalom. Wholeness and harmony are intimately tied to the gospel, yet they are framed by a crucified messiah. A paradox indeed. The critical flaw in the prosperity gospel is that it approaches the human condition outside the framework of a crucified messiah. It is a contemporary version of the Corinthians "realized eschatology" which wants to live as though the new creation is entirely accessible in the here and now. We live between the times. We have experienced the power of the age to come, but the age to come still has yet to fully "come." We live under the sign of the cross, the spirit transporting the power of the new age into our presence, giving us a foretaste of what is to come. We have to acknowledge this tension. New life has begun, but it has infiltrated a cosmos still suffering from the brunt of the fall.

Apostolic leaders must learn how to embed the gospel in ways that reflect its multiple meanings, guarding and preserving its original potency to speak to the human condition in relation to God, people, systems and the creation.

Organizations as an escape from our mortality

Tim Catchim

September 23, 2009 by Tim Catchim Comments (3)

Organization, Institution

Been Reading Morgan Gareth's book Images of Organization. One of his chapters is entitled Organizations as Psychic Prisons. I was immediately all ears on this one. Check out this quote:

"...they encourage us to understand many of our symbolic acts and constructions as flights from our own mortality. In joining with others on the creation of culture as a set of shared norms, beliefs, ideas, and social practices, we attempt to locate ourselves in something larger and more enduring than ourselves. In creating a world that can be perceived as objective and real, we affirm the concrete and real nature of our own existence. In creating symbol systems that allow us to engage in meaningful exchanges with others, we also help to find meaning in our own lives. Although we may in quiet times confront the fact that we are going to die, much of our daily life is lived in the artificial realness created through culture. The illusion of realness helps disguise our unconscious fear that everything is highly vulnerable and transitory."

Basically, from this angle organizations can function as a distraction mechanism aimed at avoiding our mortality. Listen to some more of his jewels.

"This perspective suggests that we can understand organizations and much of the behavior within organizations in terms of a quest for immortality. In creating organizations we create structures of activity that are larger than life and that often survive for generations. In becoming identified with such organizations we ourselves find meaning and permanence. As we invest ourselves in our work, our roles become our realities, and as we objectify ourselves in the goods we produce or the money we make, we make ourselves visible and real to ourselves. No wonder that questions of survival are such a high priority in organizations, for there is much more than survival of the organization at stake."

Wow! this guy is touching on some very core issues facing churches and their institutional arrangements. As I stated in an earlier post, organizations can be a form of idolatry, and this guy really spells that out for us. I guess we see this in Genesis 11 with the Tower of Babel.

He goes on to talk about how the act of organizing ourselves is not neutral, but a reaction to our values, fears, insecurities and interests. It reminds me of the quote "Organization is the mobilization of bias."

Distilling Discipleship

Tim Catchim

August 17, 2009 by Tim Catchim Comments (0)

discipleship, making disciples

Think of someone looking into the sky and discovering the big dipper. Out of what seems to be random collections of stars, there appears a pattern or shape. The same thing happens when we look at what appears to be random stories, metaphors and commandments in scripture. We look at it long enough and we begin to notice patterns,shapes, themes and concepts. For example, look long enough in scripture and you will notice a common theme of love.

Then think of this star gazing person coming to you and sharing what they saw and experienced. They describe to you in a short, memorable way what the big dipper looks like and how to find it. Then, based on their description, you look up into the night sky to find it. Scripture is like the night sky, and we look into the story and pages of scripture and we see patterns or shapes of what Jesus is all about. Our task is to describe what we see in scripture, especially the life of Jesus, come up with a constellation of metaphors and concepts that describe who Jesus is and what he is about. This constellation then gives birth to habits, practices and rhythms that help us to be like him. Living into these habits is the process of discipleship.

Making disciples happens after we notice these beautiful patterns and shapes, and in turn try to come up with ways of helping other people, in short and memorable ways, see what we have seen. Imagine looking up into the sky with someone next to you and saying "Now look to the left a little, see the really bright one, now look to the right and up...." Making disciples is helping people see what we have seen and go through the process of distilling these shapes into visible habits and rhythms.

The goal of course is not to get it all right. If you remember the old days, sailors would learn the stars to help them get where they were going. We want to discover the shapes and patterns of Jesus and discipleship in scripture not as a end in and of itself, but as a means, or tool for us to find our way into becoming a new creation in Christ. Like the sailors of old, the journey is towards a new heaven and new earth. This is the destination!