Church Sabbatical Musings by David Wild

Yet another analogy

2009-10-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

Here is another analogy that I found helpful in trying to understand what is happening at the moment (sorry for all the analogies, it's just how my brain works). Remember John Wimber's vision of the sky dripping with honey, with the implication there is far, far more of God's mercy he wants to give to humanity than he can presently, and that the problem is on our end? Well we can think of churches as plumbing and spigots for dispensing some of this mercy. Some churches have spigots that have got quite clogged and don't let much out. Some churches have quite effective spigots and are quenching much thirst. But the point is, that we can't possibly create enough churches to dispense all of the mercy that is on offer or that we need to receive. So we need to start to work on some novel ways of plugging into it that don't involve churches, just like when people started getting water pumped to their houses instead of having to use the village pump. So churches, try to support those trying to do God's work in opening up more plumbing into God's mercy that doesn't require mediation by churches, and whatever you do don't try to claim exclusivity over dispensing God's grace. And pioneers doing this work, don't reject the church, which is by far the best way to connect with God currently, and welcome all expressions of church that let the mercy out, even if you think it's just a trickle. There we go.

When Facebook is better than Church (and when it's not)

2009-05-22T06:06:00.000-07:00

The advent of social networking tools such as Facebook has been largely ignored by the church, or where they have been employed it has been as an extension of existing church structures (e.g. for a small group to keep in touch, or to disseminate church notices). However, I think we are vastly underestimating its impact (or potential impact). What about if social networking became one of the primary expressions of the church-at-large in the coming decade, because it can facilitate the work of the church in some ways better than our existing structures? How come? Well, first it is large: most of us have 100-200 "friends" on Facebook, all of whom have some kind of meaningful connectionto us; in a local church we probably have meaningful connections to 10-20 people. Second, it is integrative: when I post something, it goes to my high school friends I haven't met for 20 years; old friends from Sheffield; work colleagues; athiest friends; church friends; the whole lot. For too long we have led slightly different lives with our church friends and the "others" - now we break down this barrier, and rightly so. Third, it is immediate; I post the fact that I'm having a bad day and 5 people respond in an hour sending prayers (or good vibes for the athiests) my way. Fourth, and maybe most importantly, it is highly relational: it expands and deepens my relationships. I might not be able to actively keep in touch with 100 people but I feel connected to them just by reading their status updates; it does not replace immanent relationships, but enhances and expands them. So I think Facebook and its kin are amazing vehicles for expressing the relational aspect of church that completely break down geographic, denominational and artifical boundaries, that don't need a church structure, and to be frank seem to work better than physically going to a church building every Sunday. And why not? God is not constrained by location and now we can escape from that constraint a bit too.

So if we can download the best sermons from the web, and have a full relational experience through Facebook and informal, physical meetings, what is left for "church" to do? Well, plenty, I think. The intimacy of deep prayer, communion, laying on of hands, confession and absolution, communal worship needs a place. The magnitude of celebrations. Some waves of the Holy Spirit and healings seem to only spread by physical contact. A local gathering place in our local community. But let's be willing to realize when we need to let go of things and let God use all the tools at his disposal to do his merciful and loving work, and embrace the freedom that gives us to make the traditional "church" do those intimate, amazing, immanent things.

Here is a challenge. How about skipping church one Sunday, and instead get on Facebook, take some time reading your friends' posts, pray for them and post some responses? Or make arrangements to meet one of your local friends who is going through a hard time for a coffee? Okay, you don't have to skip church if you don't want to, but you see my point. In his 1980's book "The Harvest", Rick Joyner prophesied that in the next decades God would create a worldwide network of Christians and would bring together people in groups as needed to do his work. And that the church had darn well better adapt to that (my paraphrase: I'll try to get an exact quote). That was before the Internet, and well before Web 2.0. So let's get excited by the Web and listen to see what God might be asking us to do with it.

Why we can't settle in a church

2009-05-17T03:17:00.001-07:00

A recurring question for me at the moment is why I can't be comfortable settling into a church setting. There are plenty of very good churches to choose from in Bloomington; it's just that the structure of the church as a whole (sermons, weekly services, pews, small groups, etc.) doesn't seem sufficient at the moment and in some ways seems like a distraction. Something so central and important can't be centered on a weekly denominational meeting or be confined by traditional expectations. Previously, I have thought of revival in terms of getting people to come to church: but surely a true revival makes the church and society in all its color and complexity synonymous. It's not that I think the church is outdated or irrelevant; it's just there is far more work to be done than can be contained in its boundaries. So I think we are called to work on this "going beyond" the church structure which is why we can't settle at the moment.

Sailing in a new direction

2009-03-20T06:47:00.000-07:00

It's an awfully long time since I have posted anything here, and this is for several reasons, not least the arrival of our wonderful twin daughters Alina and Alexis, but probably more fundamentally because I feel like I've run out of important things to get of my chest. I think I really need to just make this blog more of a personal journey and stop trying to derive too many general principles. Thus it will be.

I am currently in a phase of life which is wonderfully rich, but leaves little time to reflect on the richness. I have an amazing wife, four beautiful children - which we had to fight for with our whole beings, but that is all part of the blessing; people who can support us and for whom we can have an impact on their lives; a nice place to life and a stable job, not to be sniffed at in the current climate. Life has borne fruit, we have a double portion and harvesting is hard work. The trick is keeping the richness and depth inside when so much of life is external. You have the fruit but are you taking the time to water the tree for the next crop?

Which gets to where I want "church" to be. It has to be logistically easy, has to be able to efficiently cut to the quick of what God is doing for a person, and has to impart real vision based on what God is actually doing, not some genericised form of it. It is so easy for vision to get fainter and fainter then it just goes poof one day and you hardly notice, except for the aching feeling of futility. I'd love for one of those waves of the spirit to come along and just do a whole bunch of internal reorganization for me with a lot of sobbing and presence of God. But maybe I need to put some effort into doing a bit myself to get things going. We'll see.

Music

2008-07-19T06:25:00.001-07:00

Since the earliest I can remember, music has been the most powerful way to impact me. My emotions can be changed and my perspective broadened in an instant by a piece of music. My only problem is in selecting what to listen to and remembering to do it (and getting the technology right - iPod? CD?). The interesting thing is the impact is always positive, no matter what I'm listening to. This is unlike other media which tend to be neutral and depend on content. Often a song will impact me on multiple levels at once. Here is an example - not the most profound, but one which is simple enough to describe. "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" (tight fit, etc) has always appealed to me for unknown reasons and has recently been one of those songs to twang strings in me. I found out the whole encouragement of the song is not that the lion is sleeping (i.e. is disabled) but that he is alive, and his presence is not felt only because he is asleep: he will spring to roar and defend in a moment. Now when I listen to it I'm hit on multiple levels: you get bogged down in the everyday and God seems far away, but he is there, powerful, and ready to wake when we are ready to roar with him; life might seem mundane but the lion will roar again; there is strength in community and family; etc, etc. Here is a version on Youtube. So the relevance here is I think music is hugely important to our lives, and we have in the West almost lost the ability to sing, dance and let music impact our souls particularly in community. Church has been one of the last places this has been preserved (albeit with rather flaccid 1970's folk music and rather archaic hymns if I may say so). So if Church is happening outside the "church" how do we not only preserve the music but widen its use?

It's been a while

2008-02-07T07:12:00.000-08:00

Well, for a variety of reasons it's been a while since I posted. The biggest change since the last post is that I've realized that there are many people thinking the same way about church (or similarly at least), and rather than being a lone warrior charting the future of the church, I'm probably a bit behind the curve just catching up! In particular, our friend Dave pointed me to a book called "The Shaping of Things to Come" whose authors have thought this through much more than I have. There is also a website called "Friends of Missional" and another author whom I haven't read called Donald Miller. It seems that this is being called the "Missional Church". I have some catching up to do.

Radio frequencies

2007-11-25T16:33:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I posted, so there are a few things to catch up on. The first is that it's about time I tried to convey something that came to me several months ago, but is quite hard to explain because it is a metaphor related to a technical aspect of radio communication (one of my hobbies). The short message is that we as Christians have been used to communicating with God on our different church frequencies - Vineyard, Pentecostal, Catholic, whatever, and then switching to "everyday" frequencies outside church. Just like radio frequencies, the church frequencies have various eligibility requirements to using them (baptism, confirmation, church membership, common values, whatever) and so are not accessible to those outside the church. God is however going to start communicating on the "everyday" frequency that everyone (church or non church) can tune into, but which currently contains mainly white noise. The implication is that we need to start listening for God on the everyday frequency and not just our church frequencies: eventually He might stop using the church ones altogether. In the meantime, we might need to operate as bridges, or "repeaters" between the two frequencies. I hope that made some sense :-)

Partitioning of the Church

2007-10-07T09:29:00.001-07:00

Each week, God seems to be really challenging an assumption I have about the Church. This week it's that the Church is necessarily composed of a set of independently-operating churches. I just got a sense of how odd it is that we affiliate ourselves so strongly with membership of a particular denomination or church: "I belong to such-and-such a church". Then we really don't have much to do with people outside that church, except in a vague sense of being part of a "greater body". This division is less pronounced in the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, where membership is of the catholic, or universal church, and division is geographic. The problem here is that since the reformation they don't represent the full breadth of the church. My feeling is that traditional church delineations will start to be dissolved: not because there is anything intrinsically bad about them but because they will be unnecessary as God arranges groupings as necessary (interestingly, this was mentioned by Rick Joyner in his 1989 prophetic book, "The Harvest"). This doesn't mean we should close our churches down, but we might want to think more loosely about membership and emphasis on pulling people into our "silos".

Power, wisdom and the University

2007-09-23T09:22:00.000-07:00

It struck me today that a philosophically simple way to impact current society positively (particularly intellectual communities like the University) is to combine wisdom with the power of the Holy Spirit. The latter enables God to break through into situations that we can't fathom or which are beyond our power, and the former allows us to understand the world (including the spiritual realms) as best we can, and to know when to apply the latter. In the Evangelical church, we have generally narrowly defined wisdom as learning which comes from the Bible (which is of course extremely important) but there are other kinds of wisdom: the wisdom that comes from a lifetime of seeing how God works; the wisdom that comes through suffering; the intellectual wisdom that helps us understand the way the world ticks (see the John Templeton Foundation); the wisdom the comes directly from God. In a "restored" state we would imagine universities being places where all these kinds of wisdom are nourished. Practically, it is really just the intellectual wisdom which is pursued, and that in a very narrow fashion. This partially gets to the issue of whether science (and academic learning) has a monopoly on knowledge: the problem of ontological and epistemological scope. In engaging with University communities, I think expansion of such scope is a gift we can give, along with allowing the direct power of God to come into individual situations. Perhaps those of us in the University can start by starting our days praying for the divine power of God in the situations that need it, and an expansion of real wisdom for us and others. This should both help our work and our souls! [Footnote: of course, in Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, we see Wisdom personified in God, so the source of both power and wisdom is the same, but we tend to process them differently]

Sacred Spaces

2007-09-09T08:44:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about sacred spaces, particularly as they pertain to the place of the local church and the internet. By a "sacred space" I mean a place where an individual or set of people can connect with God in a direct, tangible way. Churches are natural sacred spaces, but they can also be created in an "ad hoc" way: we have all felt the presence of God in situations quite different from church. However can these spaces be created "virtually" on the internet? I suspect not, as I think there is something special about physical co-location, and also it's difficult to be still when on the internet: you can always be checking email, or doing one of a multitude of things on the side. One special thing about church is that you are forced to sit in one spot for an hour or so with a minimum of distractions. Interestingly the sermon (at ECC early service) today was about Jesus and the money changers in the temple: that is, clearing out the clutter from the sacred spaces. I wonder what the clutter is in our sacred spaces today. I can think of one obvious one: shopping. On Sunday morning the fat paper arrives full of flyers with weekly bargains to attract you to the stores. It's easy to get drawn in and turn the day into a shopping day. I think one of the most important things we can do today as Christians and as a Church is to work hard (and we will have to!) to create sacred spaces where we can commune with God with a minimum of clutter. Part of this is discipline, part is an honest look before God at the content of our lives and by extension churches, and part is pure creativity.

Hang the DJ... or at least outsource the sermon

2007-08-19T09:50:00.000-07:00

Today we visited the Evangelical Community Church in Bloomington. An interesting mix: seemingly non-denominational, obviously protestant-derived (i.e. emphasis on the word and the sermon), great worship, a touch of liturgical feel (but nothing quite concrete enough to identify). Nice to see some diversity in the church.

I do need to have a rant, not about ECC specifically but about sermons. This reflects my current feelings and others might have quite different experiences. Being in the University, I'm quite used to colloquia, seminars, and such like, where each week an expert in some field or other gives a talk on his or her area of expertise. These can be quite inspiring or quite dull, but inevitably over time the talks are quite varied. I usually go to one when I feel I need to step out of my research niche and see what other people are doing. Now imagine such a colloquium series where the speaker was the same person each week, giving their opinions on whatever topic was scheduled. The series would very quickly be considered a ridiculous enterprise, unless the speaker were extraordinary and gifted (one might imagine it would work with Albert Einstein for instance).

So why does it work in church? Presumably for historical reasons in the protestant church, congregations have become used to teaching being a central part of the church service, and through necessity that teaching being done by one individual. But objectively it does seem a bit silly. Do we really think every person ordained as a pastor is gifted with a special ability to engage and teach? Should we burden them with such an expectation? Is it reasonable to let pastors assume they have an hours' worth of wisdom to impart each week? As I have noted before, with podcasts and sermon transcripts online we could truly leave the teaching to the few with an extraordinary gifting from God, and spend our time in church rather more productively. 47% of American adults now have an internet connection (Pew). Many more can listen to CDs or tapes.

So here is my idea of church: worship, communion, confession, absolution, prayer and donuts and coffee. Have a sermon when absolutely necessary. Encourage people to get teaching elsewhere. In some ways this is a return to the traditional church (long sermons being a product of the reformation), but maybe less formal and without the austere surroundings.

The church of Panera Bread

2007-08-12T09:22:00.001-07:00

As part of our sabbatical, we today visited Sherwood Oaks church, a large, well resourced and modern church in Bloomington. This church is undoubtably doing great things in all kinds of dimensions (mission, etc), but whilst 10 years ago a church like this might have fit me like a glove, we now feel like outsiders trapped in a timewarp. Somehow it seems like the format of worship and sermon is becoming outdated (even in such a modern church!) even if it is so well done. This is no criticism of the church itself, it's just it seems like church as we know it isn't the next thing for the church. To emphasize this, after church we went to Panera Bread for a bagel or two. We somehow managed to connect with almost everyone in Panera Bread, mainly through people admiring our kids and talking to them. We made more connections here than at Church. So why can't church be as simple as we turn up at a certain time at Panera Bread on a Sunday and whoever wants to come along can? It seems like every important function of the church can be done there: encouragement, healing prayer, discussion, building relationships, confession ... maybe with the exception of the liturgical or musical forms of worship. Maybe this is naive, and maybe it isn't inconsistent to have both forms of church, but certainly church for us this morning seemed to be at Panera Bread. Next stop... one of the Korean churches

A change in the air

2007-08-12T09:13:00.000-07:00

Sometime in 2002, we got a clear signal from God that he wanted us to start preparing for the "next thing" and not worry too much about the "current thing" with regard to church. At the time, this meant winding down our commitment to some ministries and stepping back a bit to the fringes rather than the center of the church. Since then, we have had a growing sense that God's work for us lies predominately outside the church as it exists in its current form. In some ways we feel that the winds are changing, and that God will increasingly lead the Church to operate in a simplified but more effective way outside its traditional structures. Further, some things central to the church today (like teaching) might become irrelevant at the local level, since one can now obtain all kinds of teaching on the internet as podcasts and the like (see for example Ann Arbor Vineyard, our church before we moved to Bloomington, which makes sermons available as podcasts and transcripts, organized by theme). Also, why do we need to work to bring people to church? Why do we need to go to great efforts to integrate them into an institution (even a modern one) when God is perfectly available to anyone who calls on him? Could we not just work in the everyday world to help connect people with God? How much of the other stuff is really necessary? And how much no longer needs to be local now we have the web? Of course we're not the first ones to think like this - the emergent church has been thinking like this for a while - but for us these are now becoming imminent questions rather than philosophical musings.

A sabbatical year

2007-07-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

After feeling God pulling us to explore some new territory in our relationship with him, others and with his church, Sue and I have decided to take a "sabbatical year" in which we will take some time to consider our place in the wider church and our call to the local community, visit various churches of different kinds in the Bloomington area, examine some postmodern and emerging church themes, and spend time with our family. Whilst most things will go on as before, it means we won't be committing ourselves to church responsibilities or necessarily regular church attendance during this time. I will use this blog to jot ideas and observations as they emerge, particularly relating to thoughts about the nature of church at the moment. The first few entries in this blog will be retrospective: i.e. detailing thoughts from the past year or so.