Rick Meigs at The Blind Beggar initiated a synchroblog on “What is Missional?” Busyness kept me from signing up, but I’ve enjoyed reading the answers others have posted. Though I’m not participating, I thought I’d offer the following quotation from Darrell L. Guder’s book, The Continuing Conversion of the Church regarding the good news of God’s mission in the world. Guder is something of a founding-father in contemporary missional discussions.

Through the particular encounter of God with Israel, the good news that God is loving and purposeful enters into human history and becomes knowable. Apart from such a particular history, Christianity has no universal message to proclaim. The Bible is not a collection of universal ideas cloaked in a particular culture. Universal ideas cannot be the good news that the concrete testimony of a particular people at a particular time can well be, if their witness is credible. Such universal ideas are merely the product of human imagination and creativity. Christian witness is not the interpretation of philosophy but the continuation of the event of God’s self-disclosure in human history. The historical experience of God is the surprising result of God’s initiation, God’s desire to speak and be heard. That surprise continues to define the concrete history of the world, and of the mission community within the world which is called to be the witness to God’s goodness, the “gospel of God.” God’s mission is good news because it is historical: it has been historical from the beginning and continues to be the history that defines our hope. We encounter God within that same history as God makes us part of salvation history for the sake of the world he loves. (29-30)

Over at Mere Mission, Todd Hiestand asks what the announcements in our church bulletins can tell us about how missional our congregations are.

Are all your announcements about things internal? While I’m a believer that discipleship and community life stuff is important for the mission of a local body, if all of the activities, programs, etc are pointed inward, this might be a good indication that the church needs to take some intentional steps outside itself.

This is a good question, in my opinion. If bulletins tell us what is happening in the life of a congregation from week to week, I think they can give us a sense of where our focus lies. This would be a challenging and life-giving experiment for many churches, I imagine.

Matt Barber sent me this GigaOM interview with director Brad Bird regarding how he engenders a creative environment. He sounds like a fascinating manager. Bird has made some of the most original and multifaceted films in the past ten years. He doesn’t receive the attention he deserves and I think that’s because his films are animated, as if that medium is somehow deficient compared to live-action movies. But Bird’s three films, The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, are testaments to his imagination and skill at inspiring people under his leadership to express their creativity. Here are a couple of their exchanges.

The Quarterly: Do angry people—malcontents, in your words—make for better innovation?

Brad Bird: Involved people make for better innovation… Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between—what they have in common is a restless, probing nature: “I want to get to the problem. There’s something I want to do.” If you had thermal glasses, you could see heat coming off them.

The Quarterly: How do you build and lead a team?

Brad Bird: I got everybody in a room. This was different from what the previous guy had done; he had reviewed the work in private, generated notes, and sent them to the person… I said, “Look, this is a young team. As individual animators, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, but if we can interconnect all our strengths, we are collectively the greatest animator on earth. So I want you guys to speak up and drop your drawers. We’re going to look at your scenes in front of everybody. Everyone will get humiliated and encouraged together…

What would it look like in churches if we employed similar ideas? It might be chaotic, but there is certainly something beautiful in Bird’s sense of we are stronger together than as individuals.

My good friend Eddy has a funny list of “Ten Reasons Why Men Should Not Be Ordained For Ministry.” It made me laugh. Here are a few items:

7. Man was created before woman, obviously as a prototype. Thus, they represent an experiment rather than the crowning achievement of creation.
6. Men are too emotional to be priests or pastors. Their conduct at football and basketball games demonstrates this.
5. Some men are handsome, and this will distract women worshipers.

I returned from a week in Chicago at the Evangelical Covenant Church’s (ECC) Midwinter Conference, our denomination’s annual pastors’ conference. I went to take a couple of ordination classes. The classes were more inspirational than informative, but I did come away with a better sense of how the denominational ministry offices help local congregations as they participate in God’s mission. I also was able to get to meet and spend time with some very godly and cool people. We heard some great speakers such as my theological crush Miroslav Volf and Mimi Haddad, the president of Christians for Biblical Equality.

As I’ve thawed from the freezing weather and reflected on the week, some thoughts have solidified. I am thankful that the ECC has put an emphasis on pursuing and embodying the integral connection between ministries of word and deed. I came away inspired from hearing stories of people open to having God break their hearts in the face of suffering and injustice and then having the faith to follow God in addressing these wrongs. Our denomination is rediscovering its missional roots and just last year, we created a new denominational ministry, Compassion, Mercy, and Justice (CMJ). CMJ is in a discerning and defining period, trying to learn from God what CMJ should be about and what it should do. I was able to participate in an important think tank on the matter since much of the work I do at Pasadena Covenant Church is in the areas of compassion and justice.

While I wish I came away with more specific next steps, last week lit a fire under me to pursue a life that embodies Micah 6.8, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (NRSV) I realize that matters of compassion and justice can be controversial, especially for someone like me who has a certain amount of power in this nation because of my sex and ethnicity. Moreover, I’ve noticed in my life and in others’ lives, that when we ask God to open our eyes to injustice in the world, the amount of suffering we will see is daunting. The oceans of injustice break many hearts and people feel helpless. All the injustice of the world is too much for us to address by ourselves. Establishing peace and justice requires God’s leadership and calling. And because there are myriad issues out there, let us not assume that we have to be perfectly righteous in each matter in order to act compassionately or justly at all. Let us in our lives, homes, churches, schools, and cities, ask where is God leading us, what situation does God want us to address justly? Some may be called to focus their attention to suffering caused by AIDS on other continents while others may be called to help the mentally ill for whom county jails are their hospitals. We should see ourselves as participating in the whole mission of the Church, not as solo actors who have to fix everything ourselves. Edward Everett Hale had this to say, “I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.”

My leadership style tends to seek out consensus as much as possible, but at times that style can stall with people-pleasing. I don’t want ministries of compassion and justice to be unnecessarily divisive, but I understand that not everyone will agree with us, and more to the point, some may try to hinder justice in any way they can. The story of the Israelites in the book of Exodus reminds us of this fact. So while I believe it is important to try to bring all people along, I am beginning to see that God wants us to act righteously now and not wait for everyone to get on board first. That does not mean we leave opponents or the hesitant by the wayside, but their sincere questions should not keep us from following God’s Spirit in working for wholeness and welfare of our world. The costs of stalling are too high. I pray that this Lenten season will be one in which our hearts break because of the injustice around and within us and that God’s grace will lead us to hope and action.

In her presentation regarding evangelicalism, Haddad cited the following quotation from William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army and a hero of mine who never saw ministries of word and deed as separate endeavors,

While women weep, as they do now, I’ll fight; while little children go hungry, as they do now, I’ll fight; while men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I’ll fight; while there is a drunkard left, while there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I’ll fight—I’ll fight to the very end!

Erika Haub is kicking your butt, and you don’t even know it.

She is a fantastic blogger with lots of great earthy-spiritual insight. Check out these posts for a sampling:

1. Good enough.


2. One more.


3. Does Sunday morning really matter?

Out of Ur posted an excerpt from an article by Sally Morgenthaler. The title of the blog post is, “Does Ministry Fuel Addictive Behavior?” It’s well worth the read for anyone in a congregation. If you’re in a formal ministry position, it’s a great piece to remind us of self-care. If you’re a congregant, the post will hopefully open one’s eyes to some of the pressures those in formal ministries face.

Image building is a dangerous game. And it’s at the core of addictive behavior. Addictive family systems are built on image, from the practice of keeping secrets (the “no-talk” rule), looking good to the community at all costs, to living a double life. If a pastor comes into the ministry with an addictive family background or has otherwise developed addictive tendencies, a congregational system that requires him to uphold an impossible, squeaky-clean image is going to function like a match to gasoline.

While studying at UC Davis (Go Ags!) I caught wind of a growing trend of evangelicals leaving their churches and denominations of origin and joining more high church traditions such as Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, or Eastern Orthodoxy. [1] I first heard of this phenomenon in the pages of the now defunct journal re:generation Quarterly, which was a fantastic publication. Then I began to see it with my own eyes as a few friends discovered that they resonated greatly with the liturgy, history, theology, and traditions of these older expressions of the Church. It seems the exodus is still happening, though I haven’t seen hard numbers on the matter. David Fitch wrote about the phenomenon for Out of Ur in the column “Evangelical Immigration” a couple of weeks ago and he proposes that we all stay in our traditions and try to bring about change rather than leaving. (For what it’s worth, I tend to like the term immigration, for it seems to respect the seriousness of changing traditions without overstating the fact like the term “convert” does. See the discussion of terminology in DP’s post.) There has been much discussion regarding the reasons of the immigration, but I find something lacking. I believe that there is another reason, but it is a reason strongly related to those one finds in the descriptions of the immigration.

When we come and participate in and as church, we bring assumptions of what church is and means along with us. These assumptions act as lenses through which we see, understand, and speak of our congregations. Many times, we never say these assumptions and I believe that many of our conflicts in church stem from people with different understandings of what the church is supposed to be interacting with each other. These differences often do not diametrically oppose each other and in fact I believe they are generally complementary.

Last night I was able to participate in my church’s confirmation class by facilitating one of the lessons. My time with the students—mostly junior highers or high school freshmen—was fun and refreshing. I haven’t had the opportunity to spend much time with people of that age group and I greatly enjoyed just being a fly on the wall as we ate dinner prior to the lesson. I listened with a growing smile as the students expressed their opinions on recent episodes of Gilmore Girls, as they shared what songs they were singing in school choir, and as they tried to explain to one another why you can’t divide by zero with surprising verve.

The confirmation curriculum, which lasts for a couple years, follows a biblical overview, then moves into some basic systematic theology, and finally ends with the specific theology and history of the Evangelical Covenant Church. Last night we looked at Jesus’ baptism and temptation in the Gospels, but the curriculum also used the biblical narratives to explore the topics of baptism and temptation in general. The students’ interaction with the material was impressive. They shared profound questions and showed a willingness to wrestle with difficult material. There is joy when you see sparks of wisdom and insight come to people as they consider what they believe. And, the students were funny in the blissful way that only people that age can be. It is a humor that comes out loud and often unfiltered and borders on obnoxious, but it is pure and hints at the wonders of that period of early adolescence, so full of mystery, change, and terror. (It is also a period I honestly wouldn’t wish on anyone.)

And for those wondering, unlike when I recently preached, I didn’t cuss during the lesson.