Birkdale Baptist Church

Life, Heart and Hope in Jesus

It is now two years since the release of The Forgotten Ways and the book is still Brazos’ best seller, and has been so for the last eighteen months. I don’t say this out of any personal pride as I of all people know that the idea behind the book was something ‘given to me’ by God to both steward and to articulate. I am privileged to even be a part of it all–I am all too aware of my short-fallings and am constantly amazed that God would even use me. I suppose that’s what grace is all about. Can I also take this time to remind you of the really practical and comprehensive workbook The Forgotten Ways Handbook, that is about to be published. If you benefited from TFW, you will love this book and it will make it profoundly applicable in various missional endeavors. Anyhow, here are some of the reviews from various journals and commentators over ‘08…

“Captivating. . . . Hirsch creates novel terms, repackages discarded or unfamiliar words, and peppers the book with acronyms. . . . This is a powerful book that will provoke a lot of helpful thought.”
–Chad Hall, Leadership Journal

“I picked up this book with the fear that it was another book on the missional church that would lack biblical depth and cross-cultural topography. I was wrong on both counts. . . . Missionaries will both appreciate the cultural balance of this book and gain insights for planting and revitalizing cell, community and church ministry across cultures. . . . Hirsch is as adept at drawing upon church renewal writers . . . as he is at synthesizing the movement dynamics . . . or distilling the essence of current leadership authors. . . . His ability to integrate such varied and complex ideas succinctly into missiological practice is unmatched. . . . The global mission community is indebted to Hirsch for this seminal book. It is packed with solid exegesis and theological reflection and provides a fresh reading of contemporary Christian authors and a careful evaluation of paradigm-shifting authors from the leadership field. There is rich insight in each chapter for field practitioners and a fresh synthesis of the essentials of biblical missiology.”
–Steve Hoke, Evangelical Missions Quarterly

“[Hirsch] surveys the vast variety of experiments that constitute ‘the Emergent Missional Church (EMC),’ and he provides both fascinating insights and useful tools (relevant Web sites and blogs) to explore them further. Commendable is his commitment to theological priorities. . . . [He provokes an] important discussion.”
–Darrell L. Guder, International Bulletin of Missionary Research

“[Hirsch's] reflections are worth reading, reading again and most importantly acting upon. The Forgotten Ways is a welcome and significant addition to the literature on mission to the West written by a leading missiological strategist. It will prove to be a useful tool to help shape new forms of missional church–for church planters, those leading change in existing churches and all mission-hearted followers of Jesus.”
–Darren Cronshaw, Journal of the American Society for Church Growth

“The Forgotten Ways represents the potential that the emergent movement has for the renewal of the whole church. Replete with illustrations, graphs, diagrams, and insights wrought from experience, the book introduces the concept of Apostolic Genius, which exists, Hirsch argues, in all churches. The six elements of Apostolic Genius . . . make up what he calls mDNA (m is for missional). The organization of the book around each of these elements makes for clear, accessible, and practical reading. . . . There is very little to disagree with and much to celebrate in this book. Church leaders who desire to mobilize their people for genuine transformational ministry in this postmodern age need to read it. In fact, plan a staff retreat around it. Restructure and simplify the church according to it. Define mission by it. And then hang on as God moves in your midst.”
–Al Tizon, Prism

“The Forgotten Ways is not for the faint of heart. . . . This book has stretched my heart to conform to a model of church that is undeniably biblical, yet all but forgotten. This book is great for anyone longing to see a spiritual movement characterized by the rejection of those things in contemporary Christianity that limit the work of God among His people.”
–Marshall Fagg, On Mission

“Alan Hirsch’s inspiring work in The Forgotten Ways delivers for those interested in rekindling the heart of every successful church movement. Reading as part rally cry and part biology book, The Forgotten Ways takes transforming the church to the most detailed level. . . . Hirsch proposes no less than a complete, grassroots, put-up-or-shut-up, no holds barred, pull-out-all-the-stops reassembling of how we do church. But he makes it look possible. If you aren’t ready to go all-in on transforming the impact of your church, you need to stay away from this book.”
–Luke Trouten, YouthWorker Journal

“[One] of the most important books of this decade. . . . The questions [Hirsch] raise[s] and [his] critique of Western Protestantism is raising questions that will be dealt with for some time. . . . This is must read material for today’s conversation.”
–Bill Easum / Tom Bandy

“Hirsch presents a thoughtful reflection on how the Church might reconstruct itself in our current postmodern context while offering numerous insights that will be useful to those working in postmodern situations.”
–Gary McIntosh, Outreach

“The principles [Hirsch] presents could be used in a variety of church settings. The ideas are especially suited, however, for a movement that takes us into the future using alternative methods of gathering together, worship, and reaching those who are not Jesus followers. . . . [Hirsch] documents the struggles and ups and downs of discovering a new way of doing church, and his transparency is very refreshing. A comprehensive and growing Web site (www.theforgottenways.org) continues the discussion started in the book. . . . This book, a continuation of the ideas addressed with coauthor Michael Frost in The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church, is a must-read for those looking for effective ways to be the church and to reach an increasingly resistant and post-Christian Western population.”
–Timothy Friend, barclaypress.co

“[This is] a book to be read slowly and carefully, pondering and reflecting along the way. . . . I am convinced that every man and woman in America who desires to see the Kingdom of God impact our culture needs to read this book. . . . If you are a pastor, church planter, seminary student, or missionary to the peoples of the West . . . order this book, and read it. Thanks Alan for a prophetic voice through great scholarship and writing.”
–awaitingrain.typepad.com

“[This is] a book that I will read more than once. . . . The first section . . . is worth the price of the book. If you haven’t read the book already, you need to purchase it. For leaders of Christian communities, the book is that good and that revolutionary. The second part of the book is even better and gets at the heart of what needs to happen in more theological and practical terms.”
–jordoncooper.com

“In a captivating commentary, this Australian pastor and church planter argues that networks of believers play a more adept role at spreading the gospel than institutions. . . . One of the strengths of this book is that Hirsch doesn’t speak from an ivory tower but from the rough-and-tumble of a Melbourne neighborhood. . . . Hirsch’s ideas merit consideration as churches attempt to navigate their way through the confusing and often-hostile waters of adapting to the culture.”
–Ken Walker, churchcentral.com

“[This book] stands out as one of the best missions reads I have picked up in quite some time. . . . Hirsch’s work is both readable and seriously focused upon detail(s). Basically, the book is an accessible but scholarly read/analysis of the state of contemporary missions. It makes one think, to say the least. . . . Christians–all Christians–interested in evangelism and missions should read this book. . . . It is well worth the price, especially for those of us seriously interested in missions and the Church of Jesus Christ.”
–Shawn Anthony, lofitribe.com

“The Forgotten Ways . . . helps to plot a way forward for the missional church.”
–rodneyolsen.net

“I’ve now read through the whole of Alan’s book and can’t recommend it highly enough. For those of you who are leading churches or looking to pioneer new ones, this is must reading. . . . It’s thought provoking, challenging, and extremely stretching.”
–samradford.com

“Alan Hirsch brings a unique perspective to the emerging church discussion. . . . Hirsch is well read, an astute observer of society. This helps, rather than detracts from his ability to hear from God. He reminds me of Francis Schaeffer, who would probably say many of the same things if he were still alive today. . . . Hirsch’s message of The Forgotten Ways can be just as challenging to house church as to more traditional forms of church. Either way, if we are not being missional, we have missed our purpose and are mostly serving ourselves.”
–Steve Eastman, OpenHeaven.com

“I think you will find . . . The Forgotten Ways inspiring if you are as concerned as I am about reaching un-churched and unreached people with the good news of Jesus. . . . I wholeheartedly invite you all to raid your piggy-banks in order to purchase this book.”
–Floyd McClung, floydandsally.org

“In The Forgotten Ways, . . . Alan Hirsch emerges as a pace-setter. . . . He melds statistics, graphics and case studies with a creative, inspiring voice. . . . Hirsch’s writing is both imaginative and convincing. He builds his thesis with history, case studies and scripture, and one comes away from his book with a fresh look at century-old truths. . . . The Forgotten Ways acts as a dictionary and best-practices manual for emerging church in general. . . . Hirsch represents an erudite, theologically-deliberate side of emerging church thought. . . . I found Hirsch’s writing immeasurably useful and timely. . . . Hirsch goes beyond vague hints about church and culture to concrete dynamics, backing his points with the New Testament. . . . Hirsch’s work stands out as visionary, creative, and still applicable. Within the canon of emerging church literature, he is a unique voice, willing to enter postmodern culture while also critiquing it, willing to critique the church while also expressing a Christ-like love for it. The Forgotten Ways is a book I will revisit many times to refresh my memory. . . . Highly recommended.”
–Ariel Vanderhorst, bittersweetblue.blogspot.com

“Managing from the future”—establishing a compelling goal that draws the organization out of its comfort zone—is a key discipline in moving us to the edge of chaos and therefore is important in developing missional church. This means placing ourselves in the new future and then taking a series of steps, not in order to get there some day, but as if you are there already, or almost there, now. This is exactly the perspective of the Kingdom of God in the New Testament. In saying that the future (eschatological) Kingdom of God is already present in our midst, we are called to act in the knowledge that it is already here now and yet will be completed then. And so we are drawn up into God’s future for the world. This ‘now’ and ‘not yet’ tension of the Kingdom defines our reality and keeps us moving, growing, and adapting. It is in the language of living systems, our ever present strange attractor (innate guiding mechanism.)

This concept of planning from the future is not just some obscure theological principle, but one of the key activators of mission in our lives and organizations and therefore a direct function of missional leadership. Leaders of God’s people need to make it a discipline in the way we do church and lead God’s people into mission. Here is an example of how it might work in developing organizations.

In 1987, inspired by a church service, a real estate lawyer, Billy Payne, set his sights on achieving a very large goal—he wanted to bring the 1996 Olympics to his hometown, Atlanta. As it turned out, he would receive no direct financial support from the city of the state. What is more, Atlanta had very few facilities suitable for the logistics of Olympic competition. Public debate and media criticism constituted a skeptical chorus during the start-up years. But piece-by-piece, Payne stitched the Atlanta games together like a patchwork quilt. He succeeded in part because his goal of bringing the Olympics to Atlanta was tangible and it connected with the strange attractor of southern pride and hospitality.

“With Coca-Cola’s commitment to sponsorship in 1992, Payne received his first seed money–$540 million. He solved the problem of too few facilities by spreading events as far as Washington, DC and Orlando, Florida. He had to create a $1.7 billion temporary organization, oversee projects involving 82,500 workers and 42,000 volunteers.” And he pulled it off with money to spare which he donated to his city. It was a truly remarkable feat born of a vision for his city. The thing is about Billy Payne, is that he understood what it meant to manage from the future. He says “I have always thought the way to engage life—in business and personally—is to set enormously high goals that seem absolutely unattainable, and work from the conviction that you’re going to pull it off. By doing that I’m convinced that you are going to reach half of them. As for the others, you’re going to go further than you would have otherwise.”

But the same dynamic exists in all great visionaries. They speak from the future. No less in Martin Luther King Jr. as in the founding of the Urban Neighbors of Hope, a missionary order to the poorest of the poor in Melbourne, or a local church plant with a vision to see people come to Jesus. The real power is this: that a compelling vision of the future is one way of generating genuine communitas by developing a corporate sense of mission that in turn ‘creates’ the future.

I have been reading (very slowly) Clay Shirky Shirky’s generative book on distributed organizations, Here Comes Everybody:The Power of Organizing without Organizations. The book looks at how people are organizing using technology, web, and other informal, non-hierarchical, ways. It has significance for movements and so I think it is important. Here is an excellent review, from Dave Mays, on the book.

This is a fascinating book, enlivened by real life stories, about how electronic communication tools have made amazing things possible that were impossible or cost prohibitive in the past.

The book begins with a 13-page story of how an enterprising young man using web tools was able to draw and sustain a crowd with enough people and expertise to pressure the New York City police into arresting a young woman and forcing her to return a cell phone to its owner.

“We now have communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities, and we are witnessing the rise of new ways of coordinating action that take advantage of that change.” “We are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.” (20-21)

“By making it easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort without requiring formal management (and its attendant overhead), these tools have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort….” (21)

“Most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.” (22)

“Group action gives human society its particular character, and anything that changes the way groups get things done will affect society as a whole.” (23)

Hundreds of pictures of the Mermaid Parade are hosted and organized on Flickr. No organization would have done this. The value is limited and the costs are high. Photos and descriptions of the London subway bombing were made available moments afterward by participants with cell phones. No media institution could have done this. But it was done.

In traditional organizations things get done because people cooperate. And people cooperate, generally, because they get paid. Thus there are ‘transactional (management) costs’ to getting things done. Many things aren’t worth doing because the costs are too high. “Small decreases in transaction costs make businesses more efficient… Large decreases in transaction costs create activities that can’t be taken on by businesses, or indeed by any institution, because no matter how cheap it becomes…there isn’t enough payoff to support the cost incurred by being an institution in the first place.” (46)

“Now that it is possible to achieve large-scale coordination at low cost, a third category has emerged: serious, complex work, taken on without institutional direction. Loosely coordinated groups can now achieve things that were previously out of reach for any other organizational structure…” (47)

“For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market.” Now there is a third alternative. “The scope of work that can be done by noninstitutional groups is a profound challenge to the status quo.” (47-8)

“The media landscape is transformed, because personal communication and publishing, previously separate functions, now shade into one another. One result is to break the older pattern of professional filtering of the good from the mediocre before publication; now such filtering is increasingly social, and happens after the fact.” (81) It also means that the traditional relationship between the government and the press is breaking down. Who should receive immunity from revealing their source when everyone is a publisher?

“Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn’t take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that’s taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can’t handle that one time thing. ‘What ‘pile’? It’s just a pebble!” (94-5 quoting Merlin Mann)

“The invention of a tool doesn’t create change; it has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen….” (105) “We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.’ (106)

“Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it.” “When new technology appears, previously impossible things start occurring. If enough of those impossible things are important and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution. The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the existing society.” (107)

“All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences–employees and the world.” (107)

Wikipedia demonstrates what noninstitutional groups can accomplish. “Like everything described in this book, a wiki is a hybrid of tool and community. Wikipedia, and all wikis, grow if enough people care about them, and they die if they don’t.” (136)

“Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process: if enough people care enough about an article to read it, then enough people will care enough to improve it, and over time this will lead to a large enough body of good enough work to begin to take both availability and quality of articles for granted, and to integrate Wikipedia into daily use by millions.” (140)

“Philosophers sometimes make a distinction between a difference in degree (more of the same) and a difference in kind (something new). What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind.” (149)

“Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies–it happens when society adopts new behaviors.” (160)

In May 1940 it took only six weeks for France to surrender to Germany. France had much better equipment, but the Germans had radios in their tanks and were thus able to communicate, respond in real time, and act as a coordinated group. (192)

“The more ubiquitous and familiar a communications method is, the more real-time coordination can come to replace planning, and the less predictable group reactions become.” (175)

This sort of thing is occurring today with “flash mobs.” By means of electronic communication, dispersed people with a common issue can be mobilized almost instantaneously. This is true of the Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights that came out of the 2006 American Airlines flight that was held on the ground in Austin for more than eight hours.

It also happens when political protestors stage an impromptu rally. It can happen so quickly and quietly that the powers that be cannot predict or prevent it.

“Any tool that improves shared awareness or group coordination can be pressed into service for political means, because the freedom to act in a group is inherently political. “We adopt those tools that amplify our capabilities, and we modify our tools to improve that amplification.” (187)

Further, it is easier for groups to form without social approval, for example a web site for Pro-Ana girls, those encouraging each other in their anorexic behaviors. (205) “Falling transaction costs benefit all groups, not just groups we happen to approve of.” (208)

“Our new freedoms are not without their problems; it’s not a revolution if nobody loses. Improved freedom of assembly is creating three kinds of social loss.” These are the loss of some occupations, the loss of current social bargains, and the loss associated with the increased flexibility and resilience of terrorist or criminal networks. “When it becomes simple to form groups, we get both the good and bad ones.” (209-11)

The Linux software, initiated by Linus Torvalds, which runs 40% of the world’s servers is a total volunteer group production, continually being improved and updated.

“Because anyone can try anything, the projects that fail, fail quickly, but the people working on those projects can migrate just as quickly to the things that are visibly working.” “This arrangement allows the successes to become host to a community of sustained interest.” (258)

“Every story in this book relies on a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain for the users. The promise is the basic ‘why’ for anyone to join or contribute to a group. The tool helps with the ‘how’–how will the difficulties of coordination be overcome…? And the bargain sets the rules of the road: if you are interested in the promise and adopt the tools, what can you expect, and what will be expected of you?” (260)

“Any new claim on someone’s time must obviously offer some value, but more important, it must offer some value higher than something else she already does, or she won’t free up the time.” (262)

“There is not such thing as a generically good tool; there are only tools good for particular jobs.” (265) “By understanding the two basic constraints of group action–number of people involved and duration of interaction–any given tool, new or familiar, can be analyzed for goodness of fit.” (268-9)

“The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn’t until they have a critical mass of adopters, adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear.” (270)

“Starting with the invention of e-mail, which first functioned to support a conversation in a group, our social tools have been increasingly giving groups the power to coalesce and act in political arenas. We are seeing these tools progress from coordination into governance, as groups gain enough power and support to be able to demand that they be deferred to.” (292)

Is the explosion of new groups pursuing new promises with new tools a gain for society? “Societies before and after revolution are too different to be readily compared….” (297)

“The mistakes that novices make come from a lack of experience. They overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere, and they make this kind of mistake a thousand times before they learn better. But in times of revolution, the experienced among us make the opposite mistake. When a real once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, we are at risk of regarding it as a fad.” (303)

But cultivating a vigorous transformative vision can also create liminality along with the resultant communitas. Fritz Roethlisberger, the late professor at Harvard Business School and a pioneer in the field of organizational behavior, observed: “Most people think of the future as the ends and the present as the means, whereas in fact, the present is the ends and the future the means.” Translated, Roethlisberger is telling us that holding a definite sense of vision (a preferred future) and mission informs and alters how people think and how they will behave in the present. Viewed this way, the future is a means to alter behavior. The new behavior shapes the ends, which in turn alter the future, and the spiral continues.

One does not creep up on a big future. Rather, the future is boldly declared in a vision and serves as the catalyst for all that follows. “When President Kennedy announced his famous moonwalk vision, there were no solutions to the problems that lay ahead: Congressional approval, appropriation of funds, technological breakthroughs, and the rejuvenation of NASA were still needed to fulfill the vision.” Kennedy’s moonwalk vision, acting as a catalyst, gathered up a collection of emotions and aspirations, desire and excitement, curiosity, power, a quest for knowledge, a competitive wish to be the first country to walk on the moon, imperialistic lust, and focused all these disparate forces to trigger unified action. The same is true for Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. It acted as a strange attractor to provoke and initiate action on behalf of that vision.

We look back on such events as inevitable…things which just seemed to happen. But it is not so at all. We seem to lose perspective on the missional communitas that visions like these evoke. The authors of Surfing the Edge of Chaos profoundly note that “…enactment on behalf of a powerful goal alters the structure of reality” We, the people of God, are carried forward by a vision of the future that constitutes our mission. When we are caught up into it, and pursue it, we are changed, and we go on to enact history.

HT http://www.kinnon.tv/

Those who know me know that I have no patience with Christmassy kulcha of schmaltzcha. I seriously dislike the sentimentality of the season with its trivialization of the Biblical story. I think the reason I am so opposed to the ’silly season’ is because I so love the Reality of the Incarnation (light has come into our dark world) and I feel that the commercial crap that surrounds it obscures the wonder of God with us. So here is a reality check from my favorite theologian, Helmut Theilicke

“It is certainly remarkable but it is true God has become of concern to me only because he has made Himself smaller than the Milky Way only because He is present in my little sickroom when I gasp for breath or understands the cares I cast on Him or takes seriously the request of a child for a scooter with balloon tyres. He concerns me because Jesus Christ takes my speck of anxiety and my personal guilt upon Himself…It is Jesus’ greatness that His love encompasses even the smallest–all of the little and inconsequential people who suffer in their quiet corners–and that nothing is so small that He overlooks it….This is the miracle: Almighty God loves me so much that everything in my life is important to Him–not only the salvation of my soul but also my toothache and the slippery streets on which I must drive even the crocus that lifts my spirits in the spring or a cute note from a little child.”
–Helmut Thieilicke I believe

And…

. “Jesus put Himself in all these situations because He loved us. And men who sit in some black hole need no longer look upward to where a crack admits light and fresh air. They need only look down to the bottom of their abyss. There is Christ; there where the border runs between despair and disintegration. Therefore we can trust Him. And therefore it is no empty phrase that he is there for us and that He is our brother”
– H.Theilicke I Believe

If this is what Christmas is about, the happy Christmas my friends, for the true light that enlightens all, has come!!!

Hopefully by now we have grasped the concept of liminality and communitas. So, how does chaos theory highlight the role of communitas and liminality in shaping the church’s life and structure?’ We know from living systems theory that all living systems will tend towards equilibrium (and thus closer to death) if they fail to respond adequately to their environments. The law of requisite variety, an important law of cybernetics, states that “…the survival of any living system depends on its capacity to cultivate (not just tolerate) adaptability and diversity in its internal structure.” It also states that failure to do so will result in an inability to cope successfully with variety when it is introduced from an external source. The system in equilibrium simply hasn’t developed the internal resources or mechanisms to respond adequately to adaptive challenges when they come along and therefore faces potential demise. Hence, we can say that the survival of living systems favors heightened adrenaline levels, attentiveness, and experimentation.

For example, fish in an aquarium can swim, breed, and acquire food with minimal effort, and remain safe from predators. That’s cool, what’s wrong with that? Well, as all aquarium owners know, such fish are excruciatingly sensitive to even the slightest fluctuations in the environment. Owners have to regularly clean the fish tank, monitor the temperature, watch the PH, and feed the fish. This is because there is no natural ecosystem in the fishbowl—it is an artificial environment. On the other hand, the same fish in their natural environment (the ocean) have to work much harder to sustain themselves, and they are subject to many more threats. But because they have learned how to cope with more variations (temperatures, food-supplies, predators, etc.) they are more much more robust when faced with challenge.

Many of us have enjoyed the movie, Finding Nemo where young Nemo is captured by a fish collector and Marlin, his ever fretful dad, sets out to find and rescue him. Buoyed by the companionship of a friendly-but-forgetful fish named Dory, the overly cautious father embarks on a dangerous trek and finds himself the unlikely hero of an epic journey to rescue his son - who hatches a few daring plans of his own to return safely home. Finding Nemo is itself a great story of communitas because many creatures join together to aid in the rescue the young fish, but my focus here is more on the artificial environment which Nemo has been taken to. Recall for a moment the action of the other creatures when Nemo is first introduced from the ocean into the aquarium—they all recoil from him, fearing that he will bring diseases from the dangerous ocean and infect the fish tank. Unscrubbed, he is a danger to the fish in the tank because living in the safe environment of the tank they can no longer adapt to variation and danger, including normal bugs that their sea cousins cope very well with. So then Pierre the Prawn is called forth from his hideaway and subjects Nemo to a thorough cleanup. Only then, will the other fish dare to come close and chat with the disoriented youngster. Life in the fish tank is secure, except when the nasty Dentist forgets to clean the tank or to feed them, but on the whole life just goes on even though it is a bit sterile and boring. But some fish dream of escape and long to face the risky freedom of the ocean again.

Finding Nemo contains some lessons for us: Without any real engagement with the ‘outside world’, churches so quickly become sheltered artificial environments, ecclesial fish tanks that are safeguarded from the danger and disturbances in the surrounding environment. They become closed systems with their own peculiar cultures that have little relational, social, and cultural associations to the world outside (and we call this holiness) People coming in are perceived to be introducing worldly bugs into the church. So they ‘clean them up’ quick-fast. To push the metaphor just a little further, these closed systems are generally maintained by people, themselves significantly cloistered from the world, who feed the insiders, and keep things stable, nice, clean, and free from disturbances. I don’t intend to be mean and cynical here, but does this not at least sound like more than a hint of the average church? Honestly? My own experience says it does. And once again this does not imply that God is not to be found in such places—clearly He is. But it does seem that He is more often found in these places by the ‘found’ and not by the ‘lost’ because the ‘lost’ can’t seem to find their way to it.

Want to test this out? I heard recently that research in New Zealand indicated that 80% of the kids brought up in Christians youth groups who then go on to university lose their faith in the first year!. When this was mentioned to youth workers in America on a recent trip there, they confirmed that the attrition rate was similar in the US. These are startling figures. And even if the statistics vary from country to country we know this to be true. In youth groups we entertain the kids with loud music and games and teach them variations of ‘Jesus loves me this I know because the Bible tells me so’ and wonder why they can’t cope in the more caustic environment of the university. Talk about an artificial environment.

The problem is that when a system is closed and artificial, and has generally not cultivated adaptability and internal variety, it will ultimately deteriorate towards equilibrium. And in living systems total equilibrium means death—if your body is in perfect equilibrium you are officially…kaput. Contrary to what we might feel, danger and risk can be good, even necessary, for us. It is liminality that can create communitas or it can destroy us. Alfred North Whitehead once remarked that without adventure, civilization is in full decay. The same is equally true for the church. And once again, it is the largely because we have structured community in isolation from any real engagement with the world. We are missing a communitas experience because we are missing the missional component that takes us out of our safety zones into risky engagement with the world.

One of the mythic literary tales involving liminality and communitas is Richard Adam’s Watership Down. Fiver, a small nervous rabbit, has a premonition something terrible is going to happen to their Sandleford warren. And he’s right; a housing developer is planning to build on their field. Fiver tells his brother Hazel and they try to warn their aging Chief Rabbit, to no avail—he doesn’t believe them. Hazel and Fiver decide they must leave, and are joined by other rabbits in their search for a new home. And no sooner than they have left, the bulldozers come and destroy the warrens and all the other rabbits. To cut the long story short, the adventure takes the rabbits out of the safety of their warrens where they do very un-rabbitlike things; like crossing rivers, fields, and roads. (Rabbits, like the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings), seldom travel far from their burrows.) At nights, out of their burrows, and feeling very insecure, they comfort and encourage each other by re-telling tales of the adventures of the great rabbit hero; El-Ahrairah and they are inspired by his story to continue their journey. They come across many other warrens and they try to warn them. They even get imprisoned and escape, but they eventually do get to Watership Down which becomes their new home, and once they find females to mate with, they settle down and start again.

Once again, this children’s fantasy accesses universally mythic ideas related to adventure, the role of danger in personal growth, leadership, communitas, and the innate capacity of life to adapt when threatened by mortal danger. To my mind, this myth-laced story challenges us to get out of our burrows because of the coming danger (the adaptive challenge) and do things that defy our all too human instincts to burrow down in denial and our middleclass penchant for safety and security. We are inspired for this task by re-telling of the dangerous stories of Jesus Christ, the martyrs, and the great witnesses of the faith who did exactly the same things. All our heroes are people, who refused to settle down, people who lived dangerously, and who by doing so significantly advanced the mission of God.

Back to communitas: What it teaches us is that in contexts of where people face a common evil threat and potential obliteration, people can and do find new depths of their own humanity. This is not only true in the movies. It is true there because it is true to life. Liminality can bring out the very best in us. This is because danger highlights the paradoxical nature of good and evil—at least as to how we experience it. It highlights goodness and gives it a wholesome aspect that evil in itself denies. Or as the ever insightful C.S. Lewis says “I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, not love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.”

While danger and crisis necessarily exposes a person or a group to the possibility of destruction or failure, it also provides an opportunity for people to find the inner resources to overcome evil and enrich themselves as a result. And relationships develop into comradeships in such situations. Without using the word liminality David Bosch rightly notes that “Strictly speaking one ought to say that the Church is always in a state of crisis and that its greatest shortcoming is that it is only occasionally aware of it (Kraemer.) This ought to be the case because of the abiding tension between the church’s essential nature and its empirical condition…That there were so many centuries of crisis free existence for the Church was therefore an abnormality…And if the atmosphere of crisislessness still lingers on in many parts of the West this is simply the result of a dangerous delusion. Let us also know that to encounter crisis is to encounter the possibility of truly being the Church.”

But it’s not all about danger and crisis. There are more chilled versions of communitas that have real potency for missional restructuring of communities. Mark Scandrette is an amazing urban missionary in bohemian San Francisco. One of the projects he has helped initiate is a mural art cooperative that has come together to paint walls that the council gives them for a mural piece. This is how it goes: they secure the project with the council. They then bring the members of the cooperative (made up largely of non-Christian people) together to decide what they want to say through their art. After much discussion about politics, religion, meaning, etc. they all decide on a theme. Then they divvy up the mural so that each member of the co-op gets a section. It is their task to design their part of the mural and then make it fit in with both the general theme and the work of the other members of the team. Having done the conceptual design, they then take their Saturdays off, and armed with stepladders and paint, they spend their whole day going up and down the ladder, painting, chatting to each other, sharing lunch and a few beers at the end of the day. The project could take three months to complete, but by the end of it, they have delved deeply into each others lives, explored many themes that relate to life, God, and spirituality, and have become friends.

Other versions of this might be a communal vegetable garden, political activism, building houses together with a group of friends for the needy (as in Habitat for Humanity,) or just cleaning up the city with a group of other people interested in the environment. It’s not all that hard. Here are wonderful examples of how we might, together with others, take a learning journey and enter into a host of marvelous conversations. Here is communitas in everyday life.

Below is an interview that my co-conspirator, Michael Frost, did with Canadian mega-blogger Jamie Arpin-Ricci.  You can find the original on his blog here.

-I am sure you and Alan have much you could write about that is important to you. Why did you choose this topic? Why is it so important to you.
What could be more important to us than Jesus! Seriously, we think it’s the very thing that missiologists should be addressing. In our first book together, The Shaping of Things to Come, we presented a little maxim that I’ve seen repeated in a variety of places that goes: our christology should lead to our missiology which in turn will lead to our ecclesiology. In other words, the way we understand the gospels and the character of God revealed to us in Jesus will affect our way of thinking about our mission in the world. If we get our christology right, it will lead to a right missiology. If we engage missionally in a godly fashion, issues such as how to ‘do’ church (ecclesiology) will take care of themselves. In Shaping, we argued that a great many church leaders want to start with questions about how to ‘do’ church. We argued strongly that we need to go back to the gospels and let Jesus give rise to our missiology. ‘Doing’ church then kinda falls out the back of a biblical missiology. So it makes sense that our second book together should focus on a missional christology.

-How does this book complement “The Shaping of Things to Come”? And “Exiles“?
Well, as I just mentioned, it really is the next logical step on from Shaping. I wrote Exiles a few years ago as a way of trying to popularise the material in Shaping for a broader audience. Anyone who has read Exiles will know it begins with an extended reflection on how Jesus should shape us as missional exiles in a post-Christendom age. In fact, it’s often been mentioned to me that the early section in that book on Jesus is the most helpful. I think ReJesus is just the next step in this process. It takes what I’ve witten about before and expands it into a fuller missional framework for appreciating the person and work of Jesus. That is to say, rather than only ever approaching the biblical Jesus devotionally (as most Christians seem to) we also need to approach him missionally, as the template for all godly missional activity in this world.

-Who is this book primarily written for?
I guess it’ll get picked up by the missional church community and those who’ve valued the work that Alan and I do. But we wrote ReJesus with potential new readers in mind as well. You don’t have to have read Shaping or Exiles or The Forgotten Ways to appreciate this book. We are hoping for a wide readership for ReJesus because we think it goes to the core of Christian ‘business’ today - that is, the radical imitation of Christ by his followers. We dare to suggest that such radical imitation might actually contribute to the renewal of the church in the West. Anyone who’s into that agenda will value the book, I hope.

-If you were to be critiqued or questioned any idea(s) presented in the book, which would they be and why?
Some might ask why we’ve just leaped over 2000 years of church history and landed right back in the gospels again. Surely, they might ask, there’s much we can learn from church history and the various renewal movements that have happened throughout that history. I’d agree with them, in a sense. But David Bosch’s wonderful Transforming Mission, does exactly that - tracing missiology throughout its various historical paradigms. We want to suggest that the gospels should provide a constant troubler to the church’s soul and whenever we get too institutionalised, too arrogant, too far from Jesus’ vision, they should jerk us back into line. In the book, we refer to the booster jets on a spaceship. Apparently most spaceships drift off course quite regularly, drawn by gravitational pull, until their boosters fire up and push them back on target. We think the gospels should do the same for the church. Whenever we’re drifting too far off course, they fire us back on track.

-I’ve read in a recent review a concern that the books emphasis on Christology might lack adequate to a Trinitarian theology. How would you respond to this concern?
Well, it’s a popular attempt at a missional christology - that is, how the church must be shaped missionally by Jesus. I think if it was attempting a more scholarly and thoroughgoing christology a sustained discussion about the Trinity would have been more appropriate. But we are taking a more narrow focus in this book. In a relatively short book we are wanting to inflame our readers with a desire to re-Jesus their churches and their lives. Now, some would argue that any biblical missiology must be anchored in a trinitarian theology and I couldn’t agree more. But I think the likes of Bosch and Newbigin and others have made that case quite clearly. I detect a growing awareness that the primary motivator for Christian mission must be located in the character and nature of the triune God. Assuming that, we are digging a bit deeper into the gospels to explore what mission looks like when lived out by the enfleshed God. I think the review you read (if it’s the same one I read) is criticising us for what we don’t say in ReJesus rather than for anything we do say. I think that’s a bit tough. I think it’s perfectly legitimate to write a book emphasising that God is Jesus-like without providing a sustained treatment of the Trinity. The danger is that we might have ended up with some lofty high-falutin ontological discussion of the mysterious nature of the Godhead and lead our readers away from where we wanted to go - to a practical, action-focused framework for mission-in-the-way-of-Jesus.

-Tell your readers something odd and unique about you they might not have read or heard before.
Frankly, I don’t think there’s anything odd about me, although I recall Alan Hirsch once telling me I was a “strange man”. I wasn’t sure what he meant, and when I asked, he just repeated, “Frosty, you just are a very strange dude.”

[Alan] He is a strange, yet very lovable, man.

Dan Kimball has posted some of his misgivings about the effectiveness of the missional church on the Out of Ur blog.  There is an excellent conversation going on there about it.  Here is my comment…..

Dan, as someone who comes out clearly for the missional reframing of church, I do share some concerns about reproduction (fruitfulness).  Anyone concerned with Jesus’ commission should be.

The comments so far are excellent and so I will just add a few more.

* I centainly don’t believe that attractional is not working.  What I have said is that it has appeal to a shrinking segment of the population, and that persistence  with a church growth style attractionalism, is in the long run, a counsel of despair. Are you suggesting that we simply stay with what we have got?  Surely not bro?

* If we persist with our standard measurements for mission, we will miss the point.  The issue is what idea of church is more faithful to the Scriptures. Genuine fruitfulness, surely, cannot simply be measured by  numbers but by ‘making disciples.’ How does one measure that?  By all accounts, current churches are made up largely of admirers of Jesus but few genuine disciples/followers–this is not a biblical idea of fruitfulness!

* Besides, the early church would not measure up to the current metrics!! If Rodney Stark is right, there was only 25,000 by year 100AD.  Not exactly mind boggling church growth.  Some attractional churches are larger.

* If we stick with the prevailing measures, we will miss the level of incarnational engagement with quantitative measures alone. How do we measure that?  Incarnation takes time and loving presence (witness) among a people. Working with post-Christian folks ain’t easy because we have lost our credibility and have to work darn hard to regain it.  I think there is much work to do here.

The only other thing I will say is that we as believers, live by a vision of what can be…we cannot allow ourselves to be constrained by pragmatics alone. Vision precludes that and is driven by holy discontent to see a greater manifestation of the Kingdom.

With love and respect.
AH

Having seen communitas for what it is, it is hard not to spot this type of communal experience in so many aspects of our lives. Already mentioned are those times of great social upheaval and disaster awakens something in us and calls us to find ourselves in a new way: the tsunami, as tragic as it was, called something really good out of us. But communitas can be found in far more common and less hazardous situations like sports teams where a group of otherwise individualistic people band together to achieve a common task. They become a team around a common challenge. This is mirrored in common work practices where a group of people in a corporate situation are called together to do something which they could not do alone. The deadline in this situation creates the ordeal where people working together can really become good colleagues. The same dynamic is at work in adventure camps and in short term missions where people are taken out of their normal safe environments and put in situations of disorientation and marginalization. So many people who go to visit the slums of Mexico are deeply and profoundly changed through that experience.

The devotees of the Burning Man phenomenon that takes place annually in Black Rock Nevada experience the mystical joy of liminality and communitas that binds them together as they share radically in what they call a ‘gift economy.’ Burning Man they claim “is a community, that although temporary for six days each year, remains connected during the rest of the year to keep the fire burning.” Their website goes on to say that

There are no rules about how one must behave or express oneself at this event (save the rules that serve to protect the health, safety, and experience of the community at large); rather, it is up to each participant to decide how they will contribute and what they will give to this community. The event takes place on an ancient lakebed, known as the playa. By the time the event is completed and the volunteers leave, sometimes nearly a month after the event has ended, there will be no trace of the city that was, for a short time, the most populous town in the entire county. Art is an unavoidable part of this experience, and in fact, is such a part of the experience that Larry Harvey, founder of the Burning Man project, gives a theme to each year, to encourage a common bond to help tie each individual’s contribution together in a meaningful way. Participants are encouraged to find a way to help make the theme come alive, whether it is through a large-scale art installation, a theme camp, gifts brought to be given to other individuals, costumes, or any other medium that one comes up with. The Burning Man project has grown from a small group of people gathering spontaneously to a community of over 25,000 people. The impact of the Burning Man experience has been so profound that a culture has formed around it. This culture pushes the limits of Burning Man and has led to people banding together nation-wide (even internationally) and putting on their own events, in attempt to rekindle that magic feeling that only being part of this community can provide.

We will explore some the mythic dimensions of communitas in specific movies and literature below, but note here that while not actually using the language of liminality and communitas, a great many movies are actually built around these themes. We all know the storyline so well don’t we? A man is on the run from rogue elements in the CIA. In a situation of desperation he gets assistance from a bystander, who also happens to be a beautiful woman, and so she gets implicated by association with him. They both hit the road together. Dodging bullets and keeping one step ahead of their pursuers, the man and woman in having to rely on each other actually get to ‘find each other’ and in doing so eventually resolve the situation. In fact most adventure stories involve a group of disparate people who have to work together to overcome danger. From The Bourne Supremacy (with Matt Damon) to the heart wrenching Saving Private Ryan, from Russel Crowe’s great performance in Master and Commander to Zion’s courageous stand against the machines in the Matrix series. Communitas features in just abut every movie involving as aspect of adventure you can think of. And these stories have real power over us because they awaken something very deep inside us—the abiding human need for adventure, journey, and comradeship. Its classic. And it has all the hallmarks of liminality and communitas.

This claim that communitas and liminality are normative for God’s people recently stirred up a bit of a storm in a recent speaking tour.  Some people in the audience responded with real vehemence when Michael Frost and I proposed this way of understanding of Christian community. This negative response forced a deep reflection on the validity of these ideas but after much searching I have to say that I have not fundamentally changed my mind. On the contrary, this clash in conceptions in relation to the purpose of the church has forced me to conclude that for many of our critics, Christian community has become little more than a quiet and reflective soul-space (as in Alt Worship circles) or a spiritual buzz (as in Charismatic circles) for people trying to recuperate from an overly busy, consumerist, lifestyle.  But is this really what the church is meant to be on about? Is this our grand purpose, to be a sort of refuge for recovering work addicts and experience junkies? A sort of spiritual hospital? I believe that the reason for the strong response in our critics is that they actually did ‘get the message’ about missional church but didn’t like it because, in this case, it called them out of a religion of quiet moments in quiet places and into liminality and engagement.

But the primary reason for not changing my mind is not because I simply disagree about their sense of the purpose of God’s people (I do) but rather because I have come to believe that communitas is thoroughly biblical and is inextricably linked to Apostolic Genius (the latent potency that energizes world-changing Jesus movements). When we survey Scripture with liminality and communitas in mind we must conclude that the theologically most fertile sections where in those times of extremity, when people were well out of their comfort zones. The main clusters of revelation seem to come in times of liminality (e.g. Patriarchs, the Torah, the Prophets, Jesus, Paul, John, etc.) and most of the miracles in the Bible are recorded in situations of liminality. (e.g. Exodus, Exile, the Gospels, and Acts) And when we consider the stories that have inspired the people of God throughout the ages and we find that they are stories involving adventures of the spirit in the context of challenge. In fact that is exactly why they inspire (e.g. Heb.11.)

Take Abram for instance, who with his entire extended family (estimated to be about 70 people and their belongings), is called by God to leave house and home and all that is familiar to undertake a very risky journey to a land that at that stage remained a mere promise by an invisible God. And when we look at the various experiences they have along the way, stories that have shaped all subsequent faith (e.g. the offering of Isaac), they are not safe little bedtime stories.  Rather they call us to a dangerous form of faithfulness that echoes the faithfulness of Abraham (Gal.3:15ff, Heb.11:9-13.) Or when we explore the profoundly liminal Exodus experience we find that this very tricky journey indelibly shaped the people of God, and continues to do so to this very day.  It was also the context of the substantial revelation of God in his covenant with his people. The same can be said of the exile into Babylon many centuries later—this was an extreme situation which changed the whole way Israel related to her God, and still does. The prophets spoke the Word of God into such contexts of extremity. And the fact it was precisely when the people of God settled down and ‘forgot YHWH’ (Dt.4:23-31) that they had be spiritually disturbed once again by the prophets. To awaken the people to their lost calling, the Prophets recalled the dangerous memories about fires on the mountain and pursuing armies and a God who lovingly redeems a people to Himself and enters into a sacred and eternal covenant with them.  This sounds pretty liminal to me.

Consider the lives and ministries of Samuel, Elijah, Samson, David and his band, and ask what conditions they encountered and we come up with the consistent themes of liminality and communitas. And when we come to the New Testament we need to look only to the life of Jesus, who had nowhere to rest or lay his head, and who discipled his followers on-the-road in the real dangerous conditions of a occupied land and against a hostile and dodgy religious elite. So much so, that discipleship ala Jesus looks awfully like those risky initiation rites that the African kids have to go through. It was both costly (‘deny yourself and follow Me’) and dangerous (‘if they hated me, they will hate you too’) but it came with the territory of discipleship. But to find these themes in abundance, look at the life of Paul.  He describes it pretty vividly for us in 2 Corinthians. Whippings, beatings, imprisonment, and shipwrecks can hardly be called ‘safe, secure, comfortable and convenient’ and yet through these experiences he and his apostolic band totally realign the course of history around the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Book of Acts is so brimful with communitas and liminality that it reads like a rollicking adventure story.

And the point of all this is that these are prescriptive descriptions for the church because it seems that liminality and communitas are normative for the pilgrim people of God in the Bible and in the Jesus movements of history.  It is so deeply ‘there’ that I am simply at a loss to explain how we lost this perspective. I have come to the conclusion that the clash of images of the church experienced in the recent ministry trip just serves to highlight how far we have moved from the biblical imagination and experience of Church.

In order to really get to grips with the dynamics of these primal shifts (two posts ago) in community dynamics, I have found the anthropologist Victor Turner’s ideas of liminality and communitas particularly useful Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, Cornell University Press, 1969 ). Turner was an anthropologist who studied various rites of passage among African people-groups and came up with the term liminality to describe the transition process accompanying a fundamental change of state or social position. Situations of liminality in this context can be extreme, where the participant is cast out of the normal structures of life, is humbled, disoriented, and subjected to various rites of passage, which together constitute a form of test as to whether the participant will be allowed back into society and to transition to the next level in the prevailing social structure. Liminality therefore applies to that situation where people find themselves in an in-between, marginal state in relation to the surrounding society, a place that could involve significant danger and disorientation, but not necessarily so.

For example, in some tribes younger boys are kept under the care of the women until initiation age—around thirteen. At the appropriate time the men sneak into the female compound of the village at night and ‘kidnap’ the lads. The boys are blindfolded, then roughed up, and herded out of the village and taken into the bush. They are then circumcised then left to fend for themselves in the wild African bush for a period lasting up to six months. Once a month the elders of the tribe go to meet them to help debrief and mentor them. But on the whole they have to find both inner and outer resources to cope with the ordeal pretty much by themselves. During this time, the initiates move from being disoriented and individualistic to developing a bond of comradeship forged in the testing conditions of liminality. This sense of comradeship and communality that comes out of the shared ordeal Turner calls communitas. Communitas in his view happens in situations where individuals are driven to find each other through a common experience of ordeal, humbling, transition, and marginalization. It involves intense feelings of social togetherness and belonging brought about by having to rely on each other in order to survive. If the boys emerge from these experiences they are reintroduced into the tribe as men. They are thus accorded the full status of manhood—they are no longer considered boys.

So the related ideas of liminality and communitas describe the dynamics of the Christian community inspired to overcome their instincts to ‘huddle and cuddle’, and form themselves around a common mission that calls them onto a dangerous journey to unknown places. A mission which calls the church to shake off its collective securities and to plunge into the world of action where they will experience disorientation and marginalization but also where they encounter God and each other in a new way. Communitas is therefore always linked with the experience of liminality. It involves adventure and movement, and it describes that unique experience of togetherness that only really happens among a group of people inspired by the vision of a better world actually attempting to do something about it. (Remember the response to the tsunami.) And it is here where the safe, middle-class, consumerist, captivity of the church is so very problematic. And it is here where the adaptive challenge of the 21st Century could be God’s invitation to the church to rediscover itself as a missional communitas.

While some missiologists use this idea to describe the experience of transition the church in the West is currently experiencing in moving from one state (Christendom) or mode of church to another (missional), the emphasis has generally been on the new state of the church at the end of the process and so liminality and communitas are viewed as temporary experiences. From my perspective, significant manifestations of Apostolic Genius teach us that liminality and communitas are more the normative situation and condition of the pilgrim people of God. This is certainly the case for the phenomenal Jesus-movements in view; it is in the conditions of shared ordeal that these Jesus movements thrive and are driven to the activation of Apostolic Genius. What is clear is that both the Early Christian movements and the Chinese underground church experienced liminality through being outlawed and persecuted.

In this perspective, the phenomenal Jesus movements were/are expressions of communitas and not community as we normally conceive it. And as far as I can discern it is always a normative element of Apostolic Genius. The loss of communitas leads to a diminution of the total phenomenon of Apostolic Genius—the life force of the authentic Christian movement wherever it truly manifests.

I have been reading a book by the brilliant Catholic theologian and ethicist George Weigel called Faith, Reason, And The War Against Jihadism: A Call To Action. It just so happens that I was reading it as the Mumbai terror attacks happened and so I post the headings of his insights here. His issue is not with Islam in general, but with the particularly dangerous brand called Jihadism, and I do find these insights very honest, insightful, and confronting. I am inclined to agree. What think ye?

• Lesson one: The great human questions, including the great questions of public life, are ultimately theological
• Lesson two: To speak of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the “three Abrahamic faiths,” the “three religions of the Book” or the “three monotheisms” obscures rather than illuminates. These familiar descriptions ought to be retired
• Lesson three: Jihadism is the enemy in the multi-front war that has been declared on us
• Lesson four: Jihadism has a complex intellectual history, the chief points of which must be grasped in order to understand the nature of the threat it poses to the west
• Lesson five: Jihadists read history and politics through the prism of distinctive theological convictions, not through the lens of western assumptions about the progress of dynamic of history
• Lesson six: It is not “Islamophobic” to note the historical connection between conquest and Muslim expansion, or between contemporary jihadism and terrorism. Truth-telling is the essential prerequisite to genuine interreligious dialogue, which can only be based on the claims of reason.
• Lesson seven: The war against jihadism is a contest for the human future that will endure for generations
• Lesson eight: Genuine realism in foreign policy takes wickedness seriously, yet avoids premature closure in it’s thinking about the possibilities of positive change in world politics
• Lesson nine: In the war against Jihadism, the political objective in the middle East and throughout the Islamic world is the evolution of responsible and responsive government, which will take different forms given different historical and cultural circumstances
• Lesson ten: in the war against global Jihadism, deterrence strategies unlikely to be effective, because it is almost impossible to deter those who are committed to their own martyrdom
• Lesson eleven: Cultural self-confidence is indispensable to victory in the long-term struggle against Jihadism
• Lesson twelve: Islamist salami tactics (also known as the salami-slice strategy, a divide and conquer process of threats and alliances used to overcome opposition) must be resisted, for small concessions in the name of a false idea of tolerance inevitably lead to further concessions, and into further erosions of liberty and security
• Lesson thirteen: We cannot, and will not, deserve victory (much less achieve it) if we continue to finance those who attack us, therefore, a program to defund jihadism by developing alternatives to petroleum based transportation fuels is a crucial component of the current struggle
• Lesson fourteen: Victory in the war against global jihadism requires a new domestic political coalition that is proof against the confusions caused by the Unhinged Left and the Unhinged Right
• Lesson fifteen: There is no escape from US leadership

Here is a pdf summary of the above weigelfaithreasonjihadism and you can listen to him speak to the topic here.

The explorations of communitas (the theme for the next series of posts around The Forgotten Ways) took on a very personal form in my own experience as leader of South Melbourne Restoration Community (now called RED), the church I had the privilege of leading for 15 years. When I look back to the early dynamics of that vibrant community, especially as it was still forming, we were functioning as missional church in a very naïve, pre-cognitive, and instinctual kind of way. All we did was set out to build a community that was radically open and engaged with all kinds of people on the edges and fringes of society. Things happened. It was exciting— the community was focused and sharpened by a sense of destiny and mission and as a result we grew in a strange and wonderful kind of way. We were missional, even though at the time this was as yet largely unarticulated, and as a result we experienced a remarkable form of community.

But something seemed to change as we grew and self-consciously became a more trendy, pomo, Gen-X church. For understandable reasons lots of grounded middleclass Christians from Melbourne’s Bible belt moved to the inner city to be part of what God was doing—and we welcomed the newfound stability in what was to that point a very chaotic experience of ecclesia. These were established Christians weren’t needy and that was a wonderful change for us and we basked in a period of sublime stability. But something shifted as we became more stable. And while we gained a lot from the participation of these wonderful people, nonetheless something significant was inadvertently lost as the church culture changed and became more middle-class and steady.

There is something about middle-class culture that seems to be contrary to authentic gospel values. And this is not a statement about middleclass people per se; I myself am from a very middleclass family, but rather to isolate some of the values and assumptions that that seem to just come along as part of the deal. In the chapter on discipleship we noted that much of what goes by the name middle class involves a preoccupation with safety and security developed mostly in pursuit of what seems to best for our children. And this is understandable as long as it does not become obsessive. But when these impulses of middle class culture fuse with consumerism, as they most often do, we can add the obsession with comfort and convenience to the list. And this is not a good mix. At least as far as the Gospel and missional church is concerned.

Operating under the influence of these ‘bugs’ in our middleclass software, our community became a marketer of particularly zesty religious goods and services vying for the attention of discerning spiritual consumers. Flattered by the numerical growth, and driven by our own middle-class agendas, we thoughtlessly followed the ‘gather and amuse’ impulse implicit in church growth theory and so we grew in numbers, but something primal and indispensable was lost in the bargain. We got more transfers from other churches, but the flow of conversion slowed down to a trickle and then ran completely dry. Paradoxically, we became busier than ever before, but with less and less real missional impact. We had moved from the missional idea of ‘me for the community and the community for the world’ to the more consumptive ‘the community for me’ and it just about destroyed us. We recovered only by recalibrating the community along fundamentally missional lines, and this was not achieved without pain and numerical loss. But in doing so, we moved from an experience of church as community to that of communitas.

I am about to start blogging on the whole idea of communitas as one of the key elements of Apostolic Genius (the latent power inherent in God’s people). But I can’t get beyond a few quotes which I put at the top of the chapter. I love them…here they are.

“That which does not kill you will make you stronger”
- Friedrich Nietzsche

“The ship is safest when it is in port. But that’s not what ships were made for”
- Paulo Coehlo

“It is the unknown that defines our existence. We are constantly seeking, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions. We are explorers…”
- Cmdr Ben Cisco, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

These seem to get at the heart of what this aspect of human (and missional) experience is on about–the whole idea of communitas focuses on putting the adventure back into the venture.

OK, at last reJesus is now available in the US via Amazon, Christian Book Distributors, Barnes and Noble, etc.. I understand it will be available in non-US countries sometime in December-early January. Just thought I’d let you know. Its does feel like a birthing. I feel that this is a really radical book in the best sense of the word–it takes us back to our Radix/Root and connects us with our most primary impulses. Just don’t drop it–it explodes!!

BTW, you can download the introduction and the first chapter just under the icon on the right of this post >>>>

Here is a review of Tim Keller’s book, The Reason for God, reviewed by my industrious friend David Mays. this is probably the best apologetics book in a decade.

Tim Keller is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. The church began in 1989, has 6000 regular attendees, and has spawned more than a dozen daughter churches. See www.redeemer.com. Tim’s book is a well reasoned apologetic that grants dignity and respect to all people, regardless of their theological, cultural, political and personal perspectives. The first part of the book examines seven major objections to faith. The second part describes evidence for God and Christianity. This is an excellent book to give to thoughtful skeptics.

“The world is polarizing over religion. It is getting both more religious and less religious at the same time.” (x) “Both skeptics and believers feel their existence is threatened because both secular skepticism and religious faith are on the rise in significant, powerful ways.” (xiv)

People are opting for a nonreligious life, for a non-institutional, personally constructed spirituality, or for orthodox, high-commitment religious groups…. Therefore the population is paradoxically growing both more religious and less religious at once.” (xv)

“Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts–not only their own but their friends’ and neighbors’.” “Only if you struggle long and hard with objections to your faith will you be able to provide grounds for your beliefs to skeptics, including yourself, that are plausible rather than ridiculous or offensive.” (xvii)

“Skeptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning. All doubts, however skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternate beliefs.” “The reason you doubt Christianity’s Belief A is because you hold unprovable Belief B. Every doubt, therefore, is based on a leap of faith.” (xvii)

“My thesis is that if you come to recognize the beliefs on which your doubts about Christianity are based, and if you seek as much proof for those beliefs as you seek from Christians for theirs–you will discover that your doubts are not as solid as they first appeared.” (xviii)

Part I. The Leap of Doubt

1. There can’t be just one true religion

Exclusivity is a big issue. Believing one has the truth can easily lead to stereotyping, caricaturizing, and demonizing others which can spiral down to oppression, abuse or violence. (4)

“What is religion then? It is a set of beliefs that explain what life is all about, who we are, and the most important things that human beings should spend their time doing.” (15)

“Broadly understood, faith in some view of the world and human nature informs everyone’s life. Everyone lives and operates out of some narrative identity, whether it is thought out and reflected upon or not.” (15)

“It is common to say that ‘fundamentalism’ leads to violence, yet as we have seen, all of us have fundamental, unprovable faith-commitments that we think are superior to those of others.” (19) “Which set of unavoidably exclusive beliefs will lead us to humble, peace-loving behavior?” (20) Christians have within their belief system the strongest possible resource for practicing sacrificial service, generosity, and peace-making. At the very heart of their view of reality is a man who died for his enemies, praying for their forgiveness. Reflection on this can only lead to a radically different way of dealing with those who were different from them.” (20)

2. How could a good God allow suffering?

Some say suffering proves there is no loving, all powerful God. In other words, “If our minds can’t plumb the depths of the universe for good answers to suffering, well, then, there can’t be any! This is blind faith of a high order.” (23) “Many assume that if there were good reasons for the existence of evil, they would be accessible to our minds,…but why should that be the case? (24)

“With time and perspective most of us can see good reasons for at least some of the tragedy and pain that occurs in life. Why couldn’t it be possible that, from God’s vantage point, there are good reasons for all of them?” (25)

“Lewis recognized that modern objections to God are based on a sense of fair play and justice. People, we believe, ought not to suffer, be excluded, die of hunger or oppression. But the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak–these things are all perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust?” (26)

“If we ask the question: ‘Why does God allow evil and suffering to continue?’ and we look at the cross of Jesus, we still do not know what the answer is. However, we now know what the answer isn’t. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us. … God takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he was willing to take it on himself. [on the cross].” (30) “Embracing the Christian doctrines of the incarnation and Cross brings profound consolation in the face of suffering.” (33)

3. Christianity is a straitjacket.

“Many say that all truth-claims are power plays. When you claim to have the truth, you are trying to get power and control over other people.” (37) “If you say all truth-claims are power plays, then so is your statement.” (38) “All denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind…” (38, quoting G. K. Chesterton)

“In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions.” “Instead of insisting on freedom to create spiritual reality, shouldn’t we be seeking to discover it and disciplining ourselves to live according to it? (46-7)

4. The Church is responsible for so much injustice.

There are three issues to consider: the behavior or character flaws of Christians, the issue of war and violence, and fanaticism. (52)

It is argued that religion tends to make cultural differences into a cosmic battle. However, Communist, Russian, Chinese, and Cambodian regimes of the 20th century rejected all organized religion yet produced massive violence against their own peoples. When the idea of God is gone, a society will make something else the transcendent ideal. (55)

“In Jesus’s and the prophets’ critique, self-righteous religion is always marked by insensitivity to issues of social justice, while true faith is marked by profound concern for the poor and marginalized.” (60) “The shortcomings of the church can be understood historically as the imperfect adoption and practice of the principles of the Christian gospel.” (61) “To give up Christian standard would be to leave us with no basis for the criticism.” (62)

5. How can a loving God send people to Hell?

“In our culture, divine judgment is one of Christianity’s most offensive doctrines.” (69) There are a number of hidden beliefs inside this critique.

“In ancient times it was understood that there was a transcendent moral order…built into the fabric of the universe.” Violation of this order brought consequences. One had to learn to live in conformity with this reality. Modernity, presented the natural world as ultimate reality and we could mold it to fit our desires. We now think we can control the spiritual world too. It seems unfair that there should be a God who would punish us. We believe in our personal rights! “Not all of humanity has accepted modernity’s view of things.” “Why should Western cultural sensibilities be the final court?” (71-2)

“God’s wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer…which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with his whole being.” (73, quoting Becky Pippert) “He is angry at evil and injustice because it is destroying its peace and integrity.” (73)

“The biblical picture is that sin separates us from the presence of God, which is the source of all joy and indeed of all love, wisdom, or good things of any sort.” “if we were to lose his presence totally, that would be hell–the loss of our capability for giving or receiving love or joy.” (76) “Hell, then, is the trajectory of a soul, living a self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on and on forever.” (77) “In short, hell is simply one’s freely chosen identity apart from God on a trajectory into infinity.” (78)

“It is not a question of God ’sending us’ to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.” (79, quoting C.S. Lewis)

6. Science has disproved Christianity

“Must we choose between thinking scientifically and belief in God?” (850

“It is one thing to say that science is only equipped to test for natural causes and cannot speak to any others. It is quite another to insist that science proves that no other causes could possibly exist.” (85)

In the statement, “miracles can’t happen,” there is a premise that “there can’t be a God who does miracles.” (86)

It is one thing to say that I will look for my car keys under the streetlamp because the light is better there. It is another thing to say that the car keys cannot be elsewhere because I can’t see there!

7. You can’t take the Bible literally

What people mean is that the Bible is not entirely trustworthy because some parts…are scientifically impossible, historically unreliable, and culturally regressive.” (99-100)

“I find more people now especially upset by what they call the outmoded and regressive teaching of the Bible. It seems to support slavery and the subjugation of women. These positions appear so outrageous to contemporary people that they have trouble accepting any other parts of the Bible’s message.” (109) “Many of the texts people find so offensive can be cleared up with a decent commentary that puts the issue into historical context.” (110) “Some texts do not teach what they at first appear to teach.” (111)

For many, “their problem with some texts might be based on an unexamined belief in the superiority of their historical moment over all others. We must not universalize our time any more than we should universalize our culture.” “To reject the Bible as regressive is to assume that you have now arrived at the ultimate historic moment, from which all that is regressive and progressive can be discerned. That belief is surely as narrow and exclusive as the view in the Bible you regard as offensive.” (111)

“To stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible’s teaching is offensive to you assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you. Does that belief make sense?” (112)

In addition, we should distinguish between the major themes and message of the Bible and its less primary teachings. …consider the Bible’s teaching in their proper order.” (112) “It is therefore important to consider the Bible’s core claims about who Jesus is and whether he rose from the dead before you reject it for its less central and more controversial teachings.” (113)

Intermission

“Underlying all doubts about Christianity are alternate beliefs, unprovable assumptions about the nature of things.” (115)

The second part of the book exercises a “critical rationality” that “assumes that there are some arguments that many or even most rational people will find convincing…. It assumes that some systems of belief are more reasonable than others….” But, of course, these do not eliminate all counter arguments. (120)

“When a Russian cosmonaut returned from space and reported that he had not found God,…this was like Hamlet going into the attic of his castle looking for Shakespeare. If there is a God, he wouldn’t be another object in the universe that could be put in a lab and analyzed with empirical methods. He would relate to us the way a playwright relates to the characters in his play. We (characters) might be able to know quite a lot about the playwright, but only to the degree the author chooses to put information about himself in the play.” (122)

“In the Christian view, however, the ultimate evidence for the existence of God is Jesus Christ himself.” ‘He wrote himself into the play as the main character in history….” (123)

Part 2. The Reasons for Faith

8. The Clues of God

There are no incontrovertible proofs for God. But when we looked at them as clues, “cumulatively, the clues of God had a lot of force to them.”

The Big Bang is a clue. That the cosmos is fine-tuned for life is a clue. The regularity of nature is a clue. Beauty is a clue.

“…the very fact that the universe had a beginning implies that someone was able to begin it. And it seems to me that had to outside of nature.” (129, quoting Francis Collins, The Language of God.)

Richard Dawkins says there may be trillions of universes and some of them may be fine-tuned to sustain life. “Although organic life could have just happened without a Creator, does it make sense to live as if that infinitely remote chance is true?” (132) [I don't think it is scientifically possible for life to have happened. dlm]

“Evolutionists say that if God makes sense to us, it is not because he is really there, it’s only because that belief helped us survive and so we are hardwired for it. However, if we can’t trust our belief-forming faculties to tell us the truth about God, why should we trust them to tell us the truth about…evolutionary science?” Or any scientific theory at all? (138)

9. The knowledge of God

Keller demonstrates that deep within us we already know there is God.

“The secular, young adults I have known have a very finely honed sense of right and wrong. There are many things happening in the world that evoke their moral outrage.” (144) “…but unlike people in other times and places, they don’t have any visible basis for why they find some things to be evil and other things good. It’s almost like their moral intuitions are free-floating in midair….” (145)

“I think people in our culture know unavoidably that there is a God, but they are repressing what they know.” (146)

If there is no creator God then there is no sound rationale for moral obligation or human rights. Who says so? In fact, nature itself is terribly violent.

“If a premise (’There is no God’) leads to a conclusion you know isn’t true (’Napalming babies is culturally relative’) then why not change the premise?”

10. The problem of sin

“Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from him.” (162) The primary way to define sin is “the making of good things into ultimate things. It is seeking to establish a sense of self by making something else more central to your significance, purpose, and happiness than your relationship to God.” (162)

“Every person is desperately seeking…’cosmic significance.’” “Our need for worth is so powerful that whatever we base our identity and value on we essentially ‘deify.’ We will look to it with all the passion and intensity of worship and devotion, even if we think of ourselves as highly irreligious.” (163, citing Ernest Becker)

“…sin destroys us personally. Identity apart from God is inherently unstable. Without God, our sense of worth may seem solid on the surface, but it never is–it can desert you in a moment.” (164) “There is no way to avoid this insecurity outside of God.” “An identity not based on God also leads inevitably to deep forms of addiction.”

“Building our lives on something besides God not only hurts us if we don’t get the desires of our hearts, but also if we do.” (166) “…if you don’t live for Jesus you will live for something else.” (172)

11. Religion and the Gospel

12. The (True) Story of the Cross

“Why would Jesus have to die?” is a very frequent question. (187) If someone damages you, you can get revenge–which goes on and on–or you can forgive. But someone pays for the damage. To forgive is a form of suffering. You have both the damage and you forgo revenge. It hurts. Someone pays.

“Forgiveness means bearing the cost instead of making the wrongdoer do it, so you can reach out in love to seek your enemy’s renewal and change. Forgiveness means absorbing the debt of the sin yourself. Everyone who forgives great evil goes through a death into resurrection, and experiences nails, blood, sweat, and tears.” “Everyone who forgives someone bears the other’s sins.”

God himself absorbed the pain. “This is a God who becomes human and offers his own lifeblood in order to honor moral justice and merciful love so that someday he can destroy all evil without destroying us.” (192) “There was a debt to be paid–God himself paid it. There was a penalty to be born–God himself bore it. Forgiveness is always a form of costly suffering.” (193)

13. The reality of the resurrection

“If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.” (202)

“The only way anyone embraced the resurrection back then was by letting the evidence challenge and change their worldview, their view of what was possible. They had just as much trouble with the claims of the resurrection as you, yet the evidence–both of the eyewitness accounts and the changed lives of Christ’s followers–was overwhelming.” (211)

14. The dance of God

“I have been arguing that the Christian understanding of where we came from, what’s wrong with us, and how it can be fixed has greater power to explain what we see and experience than does any other competing account.” (213)

“If God is triune, then loving relationships in community are the ‘great fountain…at the center of reality.’” (216)

God calls us to glorify, praise, and serve him. “And the only way we, who have been created in his image, can have this same joy, is if we center our entire lives around him instead of ourselves.” (218)

A cartoon by Thom Tapp in these hard economic times….HT