What does it take to make mission missional?

Not everything the church does in the name of mission or outreach is missional. A group of friends and I recently brainstormed a top-ten list of things churches think are missional but actually aren't:

10 - Outdoor worship services

9 – Ecumenical worship services

8 – Prayer walks

7 – Serving a meal to the homeless

6 – MCC school kits and relief kits

5 – Community fundraisers

4 - Small groups

3 – Contemporary worship

2 – Handing out tracts

1 – Inviting people to church.

“What!?!,” you may ask. “How is inviting someone to church not missional? And what do you have against small groups?” I in no way mean to suggest these aren't good or important things. I for one love the way our congregation collects school kits for MCC every year. I further agree that many of the things on this list are ways of offering care to those in need. Many of these things represent a service to others. Many of these things show Christ-like love and compassion. Some of these things are even done in public. It doesn't mean they are missional.

To be missional is about recognizing what God is up to in our lives and in our communities, and then responding in faith to the movement of God's Spirit. To be missional requires that in order for our light to shine our hearts and habits must be transformed more and more to be like Jesus. In its very essence, to be missional is to intentionally make disciples of ourselves and our neighbors.

In the book The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, the late Mennonite missiologist and seminary professor Alan Kreider paints a picture of the early church that is virtually the exact opposite of many churches today. Kreider documents how the early church's mission focused on making disciples. New believers attracted to Jesus or to the church went through a lengthy multi-year process of chatechesis and character formation. The goal of this process was for candidates to undergo a transformation that resulted in new habits and dispositions. Only then was a person baptized and admitted into the worship life of the church. The effect of this approach was that it cultivated a culture of discipleship that ensured robust witness to the reign of God in Christ. That's missional.

My, how times have changed. Many churches today are concerned primarily and sometimes solely with how to get more people to attend worship. They think about ways to make their worship services attractional, seeker-sensitive, family friendly, contemporary, relevant, or any other of a host of buzz words. I don't think any of those words could be used to describe the early church, and yet its growth and witness was phenomenal.

Many churches today simply want to get people in the doors, or get more young people to serve on committees, in the hopes that they will develop into mature disciples of Jesus. But as Alan Hirsch warns, “If you start with mission, you get the church. But if you start with the church you don't always get mission.”

It's not that the top ten things I listed at the beginning are bad, or that they can't be missional. But often it requires some important shifts in how we approach them. Are your small groups really deepening discipleship and drawing others in? Or are they a platform for friends to eat and pray together? (again, not a bad thing, just not missional.) Does your volunteering at the local food pantry or homeless shelter result in the spiritual transformation of both served and server? If so, praise God! If not, then we should acknowledge that it is an important act of charity, but not missional. Does your worship form patient, loving, kind, and joyful people in a world of outrage and hostility? Or does your worship merely cater to the consumeristic patterns of empire?

Taking a hard and honest look at those questions is one of the first necessary steps on the road to becoming missional. 

Jesus Fatwa

I often find my head spinning in an era of fake news, alternative facts, and a never-ending stream of media (social and otherwise).  We live in an age of information overload and information manipulation.  My brain just doesn’t have the bandwidth available to process and evaluate all of it.   

In the midst of this flood I am attempting to build an ark to take shelter in.  Rather than just barely treading water trying to make headway into the sea of noise, I have chosen instead to direct my energy by looking backwards to the origins and history of our faith.  I don’t mean or intend to ignore serious issues in our world today, but I need to find a way to rise above and to not be held captive

So I have decided to study church history.  And I have chosen Justo Gonzalez’s Story of Christianity as my guide. 

I’ve only made it through the first 200 years of the church.  But during that time, the experience of the early church was one of being misunderstood, misrepresented, and scapegoated.  The young Christian church, being a minority faith throughout the Roman Empire, was an easy target by those in power.  Christians were misrepresented as…

     atheists - because they didn’t believe in the Roman pantheon of gods; 

     cannibals - because they were said to eat flesh and drink blood when they gather for worship;

     incestuous - because they spoke of love toward “brothers” and “sisters”     

These outlandish rumors were more or less easy to refute.  Harder still were the philosophical misunderstandings that they were haters of human kind and were presumed to have worldviews that were incompatible with Roman civilization. 

At extreme points persecution broke out, Christians were scapegoated for disasters and tragedies, and restrictions were placed on where they could live and/or travel. 

This history of our faith stood out to me even more by attending the recent Jesus Fatwa events held at the Masjid Saad Foundation in Sylvania.  “Jesus Fatwa” means “Jesus Commandment.” Specifically, you shall love your neighbors as yourself (Mark 12:31 and Matthew 22:39).

It wasn’t a dialogue per se, but rather a chance to listen and learn more about the faith and practice and experience of our Muslim neighbors.  We have many Muslim neighbors, after all; Toledo is home to the number two per-capita population of Arab and Muslim Americans in our country.

It is said that one of the greatest gifts that we can give to another is to truly listen to them.  So while the Jesus Fatwa event wasn’t intended to be a true dialogue, it was nonetheless a significant way to practice Jesus’ commandment to love your neighbor. 

As I listened, one of the things that became very clear, is that Muslims in our world today feel compelled to speak up and defend themselves against being misunderstood, misrepresented, and scapegoated.  The reminds me of what I'm reading about the history of the early church.  The persecution may not be as intense or violent, but the underlying social and relational animosity and mistrust towards this religious minority in our country is very real and alive today.  I don’t think I’m saying anything new by naming this. 

There were times during the Jesus Fatwa events that I became frustrated.  Particularly when some people would make comments like “well, we pretty much all believe the same things.”  There are significant differences in our faiths, so I find such simplistic clichés to be unhelpful and also dishonest. 

But that’s not to say there aren’t many significant similarities.  In regards to Christians and Muslims, our shared history of needing to defend ourselves against false stereotypes is one of those significant similarities. 

In an October 2015 speech, Iranian Muslim scholar Navid Kermani gave a speech upon accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade association.  In his acceptance speech, he held up the example of an Orthodox Syrian priest named Father Jacques Mourad.  Father Jacques’ community in Syria was facing persecution by ISIS.  Yet even up unto his point of abduction, Father Jacques continued to stress how ISIS was distorting true Islam.

Navid Kermani expressed his disappointment when other Muslims like himself brush aside the horrors of ISIS by simply saying that violence has nothing to do with Islam.  In his view, for him as a Muslim to simply dismiss it is not enough.  However, when a person of another faith, a Christian Priest, who is currently under threat from ISIS, defends Islam, that kind of defense of one’s enemy displays inner greatness.

Navid Kermani goes on to say, “Love of one’s own – one’s own culture, one’s own country, (one’s own faith), even one’s own person  - proves itself in self-criticism.  The love of the other – of another person, another culture, and even another religion – can be far more effusive and (generous).” 

These words of the Muslim scholar Navid Kermani remind me of something Jesus said about removing the log in one’s own eye before removing the speck in your neighbors eye. 

As I think about what this means for how we love our Muslim neighbors in our city and in our country, I think it leads us to three very practical and basic postures. 

1. Listen.  Listen to our Muslim neighbors as they defend themselves against misrepresentation.  And listen to our Muslim neighbors as human beings full of hopes, fears, and daily concerns just like everyone else.  
2. Let Muslims interpret their own faith to us.  Much as we Christians have ways of understanding the violence of the Old Testament in light of the fuller revelation of God in Christ, many Muslims like Navid Kermani, and those who presented at the Jesus Fatwa, have resources within their own faith understanding to self-correct and self-interpret.  I don’t like when non-Christians, Atheists, or other faiths presume to tell me the true meaning of Christianity.  And we are called to treat others as we want to be treated – another one of Jesus’ fatwas. 
3. Finally, we love our Muslim neighbors by sharing our faith openly and honestly with them.  It does no good to lie or ignore serious differences.  And why would we not want to share the ways that Jesus has transformed our lives by the grace and truth of God?  For true dialogue to take place, we must not only listen but also speak.  But we must keep in mind that this takes time.  This is not just a matter of listening once or twice and then concluding that we’ve gotten that over with, so now we can get on to the business of speaking and arguing.  With centuries of tension, misunderstanding, and misrepresentation in both directions, this takes time.  But perhaps, if we do steps one and two regularly, and over time, God will open up doors to move into this third step. 

Much like with the early church, people who are willing, wise, and mature, can easily distinguish ridiculous rumors from truth if they just take the time to do so.  Deeper philosophical and theological differences will naturally require more serious engagement with respect and honesty.

My take-away from this learning event is this: 

Let us as Christians take Jesus’ words seriously.  Let us love our neighbors as ourselves.   The early church faced gross exaggerations and mischaracterizations.  Let’s not do that to our Muslim neighbors.  Let us hold ourselves accountable to refute and resist the ridiculous rumors of our Muslim neighbors that circulate within our own churches, families, and friendships. 

And if we do that, and do that well, consistently, and with conviction, then I believe we will then get on to more mature matters of engagement and dialogue.

Spiritual Resistance: Flipping the holiday script

Twenty to thirty years ago when I was growing up in the Mennonite church, we rarely observed Lent or Advent.  As a child I asked my mom why all my Catholic friends give up something for Lent but we didn’t.  She said, “Well, we try to live our whole lives in Lent.” 

Certainly there is much to ponder in that statement in terms of simple living, but the underlying reality was that Lent (and to a lesser degree Advent) where things that other Christians do but we Mennonites (and Evangelicals) don’t.

That’s no longer the case today.  Over the past generation more and more Mennonites (and Evangelicals) are recovering the traditions of Lent and Advent as periods of prayer, preparation, and spiritual renewal leading up to the two biggest Christian holy days. 

I believe that one reason for this recovery is that we are far enough removed from historical animosities to realize that there are good things in those “high church” traditions.  We are now able to admit that we’ve discarded too much over the centuries. 

But I also believe that another reason for this recovery is because we intuitively know that we need fully-formed religious practices to withstand the forces of commercialization and consumerism that continue to co-opt our holy days.

Our somewhat-Christian but secular and consumeristic culture lacks patience.  Therefore, a typical lead-up to and celebration of Easter goes like this:

Spring sales, candy, flowers, egg hunts, pictures with the Easter bunny, then off to church on Easter Sunday, followed by dinner at grandma’s, then it’s all over. 

This sequence is even worse for Christmas:

Thanksgiving, black Friday, cyber Saturday, more shopping, office parties, school plays, lights, more shopping, hot mocha peppermint lattes, shopping and finally some more shopping, then Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, then it’s all over.

Our society celebrates too early and ends too abruptly.  As a result, we suffer from post-holiday let-down.  The end result of the holiday is more disappointment and emptiness than lasting joy and fulfillment. 

The church needs disciplines of spiritual resistance to come out from this pagan rhythm and flip the cultural holiday script.  We can do this in two steps.

First, we resist the temptation to celebrate too early by observing the seasons of Lent and Advent.  Our worship and discipleship should mine these spiritual seasons for depth in order to curb our appetites and focus our hearts. 

Then, we resist the let-down of ending to abruptly by prolonging the celebration.  Easter should not just be one day of worship but a season of basking in the resurrection.  Sing Easter songs for weeks after Easter Sunday.  Don’t buy or use any Easter decorations or candy until after Easter (you’ll even save money by getting everything on clearance).  Have people over for dinner the Sunday after Easter Sunday.    

Do similar things for Christmas too.  Christmas is not just one day of presents but a time of resting in Christ’s presence.  Don’t sing Christmas carols until Christmas, but then keep singing them through January.  Recover the 12 days of Christmas and give one present each day for 12 days starting on Christmas. 

Flipping these holiday scripts would remind us as the church that though we are in the world, we are not of the world.  We may not be able to totally buck the system of consumerism around us, but we can set up spaces of sanctuary from the chaos around us through worship, prayer, and spiritual discipline. 

Easter Message

It is not the goal of the church to say anything new on Easter.  Rather it is the goal of the church to say something faithful to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. 

The church gathers for worship on Easter to keep the memory and hope of resurrection alive. 

This is a vital act of faith; to proclaim the suffering love of God and God’s redemptive victory within the world of death.    

Jesus stresses three times throughout his ministry that it is necessary for the Son of Man to suffer, be rejected and crucified, and to rise again on the third day.  Jesus warned and told his disciples about this, but they were slow to download this message into their hearts and lives.  How could they?  This was complete and utter newness beyond their wildest hopes and dreams. 

Our society and culture worship at the altar of the new and the novel.  The world competes after hot takes and first scoops and innovative technologies.  Trendy is the currency of the day.  Something that is old is assumed to be obsolete. 

The gods of mammon and consumption, whether of things or ideas, and the systems of market production and technological progress have invaded imaginations.  And let us be humble enough to admit that these gods have infected our faith at times as well. 

The wisdom of scripture proclaims that there is nothing new under the sun. All this competition for the newest and latest is really the age-old human quest for power.  It is really just the age-old race to the top; the top of politics, the top of the market, the top of the academy, the top of the family, the top of our friendship circles, etc.    

All this has been done before, and so it is, in fact, all so very old.  This obsession, this race for the new and the novel has left a wake of disaster and will leave you stretched thin, tired, anxiety-ridden, and driven toward despair and nihilism.

It will, in the end, kill you. 

On Easter (as we should every Sunday) the church steps out of this very old race for the illusion of the new and the novel.  Instead of saying anything particularly new today, the church aims to say something specifically faithful. 

The church proclaims Christ crucified, Christ executed, Christ assassinated, like a common criminal, like a disturber of the peace. 

The scripture makes clear that he was executed by a perversion of justice between religious and political powers; a collusion of church and state.   

What was his crime?  He healed the sick and spoke good news to the poor.  He welcomed the outcasts and ate with sinners.  He spoke against sacred institutions, preached openly about the coming Kingdom of God, and called all to change their hearts and lives. 

           

But on that first day of the week as recorded in the gospels, something changed.  For the first time something new actually happened. 

On the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared, but they found the stone rolled away from the tomb.  Suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them.  The women were terrified, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” (Luke 24:5). 

“Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

It’s not there.  You won’t find it there.

The body of Christ is not to be found in that which is dying and decaying and fading away.  Rather the living of Christ is to be found out beyond the tomb, out beyond the places of death.

           

Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed! 

So why look for the living among the dead?

That is the Easter question.  That is the Easter question that summons us to true newness. 

           

So often in our human quest for power we look for newness and significance among the tombs.  We settle for a mere resuscitation of what has already been tried before, but is merely repackaged and re-branded as something novel.

But Easter is not just one more go-round with resuscitated, old ideas.

Easter is about resurrection! 

John of Patmos recounts the words of Christ in the concluding witness of all of scripture, “See, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:5).

This is Easter: Complete and total newness.  Not a resuscitation of old ideas.  Not a recycling of old and tired games into new and fancy packaging.   

Easter is about resurrection.  Easter is about Jesus, the son of God, entering into creation, suffering and dying at the hands of that very creation, but being raised up again to redeem, ransom, and transform all of creation into something completely new. 

Each of us must consider the burdens and sorrows that we carry.  Each of us must examine the sin that weighs on our conscience.  Each of us must name and lament the miscarriages of justices that are heavy on our hearts.  It is on account of these that Christ died.  But it is in spite of these that Christ now lives and calls us to follow him in newness of life. 

Because the resurrection is God’s answer and God’s solution to all our personal, social, and yes, even our political problems. 

It is only the hope by which our lives and our world are transformed. 

This is the resurrection.

And I believe in the resurrection.

And I have hope in the resurrection.

Both for this life, and in the life to come. 

Thanks be to God

Christ is Risen!  

AMEN  

Zurich

After our trip to Bodensee, we decided to take a spontaneous trip into Switzerland to visit Zurich.  This wasn't an original part of our sabbatical plans, but we were only 1.5 hrs away and it's Zurich... why wouldn't we go?

So on Tuesday April 7th we cleared out of our vacation home in Bodensee, Dave and Rebekka and their kids drove back to Bammental, but we loaded into our VW Passat for a day in Switzerland.


I'm glad we did.  Zurich was amazing.  One of, if not the, most beautiful city I've ever been in.  We had a wonderful day too; it was a bit cool, but not cold, and very sunny.  I wish we would have had more than 4-5 hours there.

Walking around a city is not Roslyn's favorite thing to do.  In fact, she hates it.  We knew this going into it.  But still.  It was worth dealing with her tantrums and fits for the opportunity.

Zurich is also an important city in Reformation/Anabaptist history.  To the left is a picture of the Grossmunster, the cathedral where Ulrich Zwingli began his reforms in Switzerland.  Zwingli was an influential leader and peer to Martin Luther during the Reformation.  He also was the teacher of Felix Manz and Conrad Grebel, students of his who would go in a more radical direction and become leaders in of the Anabaptist Movement.  Several debates between Zwingli and the Anabaptist ensued.  Eventually, the Anabaptist broke with Zwingli and his reforms.  The Anabaptists wanted a free church that was separate from state influence/control, rejected the use of the sword as a tool of the church, and advocated baptism for adults upon an open confession of faith.

Sitting outside the Grossmunster, I imagined what it would be like 500 years ago when these men worshiped, studied, debated, and argued together in this very place.

Just beind the Grossmunster, on a small street called Neustadtgasse, was the location of the first adult re-baptisms ever recorded.  On January 21, 1525, on the street pictured to the left, Conrad Grebel baptized George Balurock in the home of Felix Manz's mother.  After Blaurock was baptized, he then baptized the others present.  This was a powerful rejection of the state-sanctioned baptism of the Catholic and Reformation churches of the day.  It also marked a significant moment in the development of the Anabaptist movement. And it all took place on this little alley right in the shadow of the Grossmunster itself.




The Anabaptist leaders were ordered to stop their baptizing, teaching, and evangelism or leave Zurich.  When they refused, they were further threatened with imprisonment, fines, and even death.  Still, the Anabaptists refused and remained true to their convictions.

In particular, Felix Manz continued to preach and baptize and give leadership to the Anabaptist movement.  He was eventually arrested, imprisoned, and put on trial.  In the picture to the left, the two towers are cathedral spires of the Grossmunster, the bridge is the place where Manz was sentenced to death, and the place where I took the picture is the place where he was drowned in the Limmat river on January 5, 1527.  For all it's beauty, there is a tragic history that took place here.

But it's not without hope.  When I was in the Grossmunster, after admiring the architectural beauty I went to the book table.  On the table I saw the book pictured to the right, which I bought. It is true that steps toward reconciliation have happened.  The Reformed church has made official confession of their persecution of Anabaptists, and Anabaptists have also expressed a commitment to walking together in peace.

I had a brief conversation with the man at the book table in the Grossmunster.  Through a combination of his broken English and my limited German he made sure I had the directions to the Shipfe, the location where Manz was drowned.  It was a moment in which I felt like we both owned our common history together and are striving to learn and grow from it.

Frohe Ostern!

On Easter Sunday we attended worship service at Dave and Rebekka's church.  We got really good at saying "frohe ostern" which is German for "Happy Easter."

Like any pastor, Dave and Rebekka were busy during Holy Week.  But once Easter Sunday was over, their schedules freed up.  To celebrate we all took a road trip to the very south of Germany to Lake Constance.  The Germans call it Bodensee, which literally means "bottom see" because you can see the bottom through the crystal clear water.




Bodensee isn't internationally know, but it's a place where Germans go to vacation.  I would compare it to Sleeping Bear Dunes in Northern Michigan (only substitute the sand dunes for medieval towns and castles).  Rebekka's mother works at managing vacation condos, so she hooked us up with a last minute deal for all of us to go down for two nights.

When you look south across the lake, you are looking at Switzerland to the SW and Austria to the SE.  You can also see the snow-caped Alps in the background.  The view was much more magnificent than what my Sony Cyber-Shot 10x zoom could capture.

We met Rebekka's parents and sister at their home, and the kids had an Easter egg hunt.

Rebekka's mom served us Kaffee and Kuchen at 4:00.  It consisted of rolls, danishes, and "bee-sting cake," which is a delicious honey cake as the name implies.

I thought this would be our supper for the day, so I ate a lot.










But I was wrong.  Because at around 6:00 they served us a full-on Aben Brot, which means "evening bread."  This is the typical German supper that consists of fresh bread, sliced meats and cheeses, lots of butter, fruits and veggies, and other sides such as olives, pickles, etc.





The next day we were able to work off some of the food from the night before by walking around Bodensee and the town of Meersburg where we toured a castle.

Back in Toledo

We've arrived safely back to Toledo.  Our 9-hour return flight from Frankfurt to Detroit went smoothly, mostly because Roslyn watch TV for six of those nine hours.  We landed yesterday at 3:00 Eastern Time, which is 9:00 Germany time.  The girls both fell asleep in the car on the way home from the airport, and that helped us stretch to 7:30 before going to bed.  Then the girls got up a little before 5:00 am this morning, but that wasn't even so bad.  

What an amazing trip!  It's hard to even describe it at this point.  In total, we spent 50 days abroad in five different countries speaking three different languages.  We had four flights, two train rides, one long-distance bus ride, a boat ride, dozens of hours in cars, and numerous trips on subways, trams, and buses.  We slept in 8 different locations, and I lost count of how many homes and restaurants we ate in.  We saw amazing beauty in very different climates, and of course we interacted with amazing friends all over the world.  Such and adventure!

I've fallen behind on some posts, so even though our travels are over now I still plan to write a post about our trip to Zurich and a post about some other events in Germany.  

Since our girls were up early, and we had no food in the fridge, we went out for breakfast at Uncle John's Pancake house in Toledo.  Emiley and I were craving biscuits and gravy.




Then we went to the Toledo Farmers Market to buy some food for the week.  It was fun to see the vendors we've come to know at the market.  Now it's 10:30 and I'm not sure what we'll do for the rest of the day ahead.