Review: Sustaining Grace

December 9, 2020December 8, 2020 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Sustaining Grace: Innovative Ecosystems for New Faith Communities, edited by Scott J. Hagley, Karen Rohrer, Michael Gehrling. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2020.

Summary: A collection of articles arising from conversations among church planters, traditional church leaders, denominational leaders and academics connected, in most cases with the Presbyterian Church (USA), 1001 New Worshipping Communities, and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

Church planting has become a focus in many church denominations. One thing all of them have had to face is the challenge of sustaining the efforts of planters and the communities they plant. The contributors of this book view planting as taking place within an ecosystem of traditional congregations, denominational structures, and the sustaining grace of God.

Scott Hagley, a professor of missiology, opens the collection by explaining the ecological metaphor. He goes further and argues that in a secular age where traditional churches are struggling, new worshipping communities may be God’s fresh breath of life, even as they depend on the resources, and as Karen Rohrer advocates in the next essay, the endowments of established churches. She is joined in this by Barry Ensign-George, who contends for the independent nature of these efforts. Scott Hagley contributes a second essay on stewardship framed in God’s gift economy of interdependence rather than a secular capitalist economy that prioritizes self-sufficiency.

The second part of this collection turns to the formation of those engaged in planting. Michael Gehrling argues for the vital importance of vulnerable truth-telling and truth-hearing among those who lead planting efforts. Aisha Brooks-Lytle emphasizes both the centrality of prayer and the vital importance of play, the enjoyment of God. She highlights four types of prayer–strategic, sighing, spiritual warfare, and silence. Kristine Stache examines the call of Moses, and the critical role of listening in this story as Moses hears God’s call to join him in what he will do for Israel. David Loleng proposes that simplicity of life and margin in one’s time allows for the generosity of life we would cultivate among God’s people.

The final part focuses on leadership development. Michael Moynagh call for the democratizing of church planting, shifting it from the preserve of gifted specialists to ordinary people. Beth Scibienski describes shaping collaborative efforts around the particular mix of gifts and skills in a group. Jeya So describes stewarding the culture of a church to develop the leadership within, dealing with place, pain, and potential.

Some of the essays early in this collection have a bit of an “inside baseball” feel, reflecting the discussions going on within Presbyterian circles around its 1001 New Worshiping Communities effort. Yet if you are engaged in planting efforts, you are likely to have these conversations. Two distinctive themes stood out to me in this collection. One was that of ecosystem, and the idea that the ecosystem within which planting occurs can result either in mutual thriving or mutual unsustainability. The other was that stewardship involves far more than financial capital, and indeed, if not set within the economy of God’s grace in our whole lives, it can easily degenerate into capitalist self-sufficiency. There is the wonderful picture of generosity as the overflow of simple, bounded lives of prayerful dependence on God. This is a slim volume, but one rich in insight for all those in the ecosystem of church planting.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Church as Movement

August 21, 2017August 20, 2017 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

The Church as Movement, J.R. Woodward and Dan White Jr., Foreword by Alan Hirsch. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press (Praxis), 2016.

Summary: An interactive guide for communities wanting to learn how to become “missional-incarnational movements” rather than “Christian-industrial complexes” through growth in eight competencies.

J.R. Woodward and Dan White Jr. believe there is something fundamentally wrong with an American church model focused around the metrics of “buildings, butts (in the seats), and budgets” (as one friend describes it). They refer to this as the “Christian-industrial complex” that has indeed become big business to the point that it shapes how Christians pursue life together and mission, and engage society. In this interactive guidebook, the authors propose a model of church as movement–one that focuses on our communion with God, our sentness as a community, and our co-mission to live as a “sign, foretaste, and instrument of his kingdom in ever-expanding geographical areas” (p. 23).

This happens as groups grow into eight competencies, around which the book is organized:

Movement Intelligence: Movements are on the street rather than the stage, multiply as they move outward and leverage a five-fold set of people gifts.
Polycentric Leadership: Movements organize around many centers of leadership in a flat structure rather than around a single leader over a hierarchical structure.
Being Disciples: Movements recognize that one must be a disciple to make disciples, growing in inward, outward, and upward journeys, overcoming soul pressures, and becoming sacred companions who experience a depth of vulnerability that enables people to embrace their true selves.
Making Disciples: Movements make disciples through “meta, reflective, and experiential” learning (a pedagogy used in this guide), build on a scaffolding of safety and stretching, and gather and develop discipleship cores through phases of forming, storming, norming and performing.
Missional Theology: Movements understand the missional story of which they are a part–God’s social and sending nature, the nature of his kingdom, the holistic gospel (in six acts), and the sacramental markers of baptism and the Lord’s table.
Ecclesial Architecture: This is not about church buildings but the structuring of a movement’s life around communion, community, and co-mission, the gathered and scattered rules of life that constitute a movement, and the different spaces of belonging (intimate, personal, social, and public) in which it exists.
Community Formation: Movements develop a common life, a shared table and learning, healing, welcoming, liberating, and thriving environments. Movements are characterized by trust-building, truth-telling, and peacemaking.
Incarnational Practices: Movements come NEAR their neighborhoods: they learn its Narrative, Ethics, Associations, and Rituals and learn to be present in that context, often with the aid of a person of peace.

The guide follows a three-fold formational learning approach.

Meta-learning is identifying the overarching essential truth in each section for one personally.
Reflective learning explores how what you are learning makes you feel including points of conflict, clarity, or confusion.
Experiential learning identifies real time action steps a group will take to attempt to put into practice what they are learning, and the learning that comes from this experience.

Each of the eight competencies has several sections concluding with a set of formational learning questions following this three-fold pattern. It is suggested that people work through this material with a group. Groups meeting weekly can take a section at a time and complete the guide in eight months. Alternately, groups meeting twice a month might take a chapter each time they meet and complete it in four months. The latter approach seems less workable to me because each competency provides several sections of content, difficult to cover adequately, and more difficult to experience in a single session every two weeks.

I can see several settings in which this might work. One would be for a church leadership team trying to make the transition from industrial complex to movement, to practice first within themselves and then to multiply through their church. A second would be for a small group within a church (or network of groups) who want to become “missional incarnational communities”. It would seem important after several weeks of meetings to “storm and norm” to get to a place of group ownership. Finally, a group, perhaps set apart by church to plant in a nearby community, might use this as a guide for laying the groundwork to plant.

What is helpful for all these groups is an approach that focuses on shared competencies rather than merely planting or growth strategies. Actually most of these flow from the practice of the competencies in a particular neighborhood context. So often, in the eagerness to “do something,” these competencies are neglected. Disciples are not developed. A nimble leadership is absent and there is a reversion to hierarchy, and often burnout. Instead of a compelling story, we recycle nostrums. Woodward and White, out of their own extensive experience of growing such movements provide a comprehensive guide for others warming to God’s missional heart.

Review: Contagious Disciple Making: Leading Others on a Journey of Discovery

January 26, 2015 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

The main idea of “contagious disciple making” is both simple to summarize and presents a real challenge to the contemporary church. It is to model and encourage trusting obedience to Christ as we discover his will in scripture, and to share these discoveries with others. This simple and compelling idea is a breath of fresh air for a Western church long on talk and short on obedience.

The authors (father and son) have been involved in church-planting movements throughout the world resulting in thousands of churches being planted under indigenous leadership in each country. This was not always the case and the first part of the book recounts the “re-thinking” that took place for them in moving from attempting to plant churches that conformed to Western ideals to launching Disciple-Making Movements. They argue, to begin with, that the task of church planters is not to contextualize the gospel but to “deculturalize” it–to help people discover the message without Western cultural or denominational accretions.

What is crucial is simply building relationships within the appropriate structures, often family or tribal or village, where one can lead people in discovering for themselves from the Bible the basic message of the gospel, and even as they are learning it and beginning to act on it, to share it with others. Even before becoming disciples, proto-disciples are making disciples. From the start, and at every phase, an emphasis on obeying what one discovers, and inviting others to discover and obey is central.

The disciple-maker facilitates discovery and encourages obedience. This is so different from a teacher-student model that focuses around transfer of knowledge. Instead of creating perpetual learners, disciples quickly learn to become disciple-makers themselves and continue to perpetuate this with those they lead in discovery. The approach is one that respects and holds up the priesthood of all believers rather than a cult of experts.

The second part of the book explores practices around this core mindset that have proven important to these movements. Parts of this reiterate the focus on disciple-making from the first part and seem repetitive at times. But the authors also cover the importance of prayer movements, the nature of discovery groups, how churches are established out of these, and the development of leadership through mentoring that concentrates not simply on action but also character.

I found two sections particularly thought-provoking. One, concerning engaging lost people, talked about identifying the “silos” in which they live — the different affinity groups by family, village, or interest that bring people together. Rather than seek to “extract” people from this group, the Watsons advocate disciple-making within these groups so that families, villages or significant parts of affinity groups come to faith, rather than isolating a single convert from the former “silo” of which they were a part.

The other section concerned finding the “person of peace” in this silo, the person sufficiently spiritually receptive to host the disciple-maker as they form discovery groups. They recommend not attempting to plant in a particular “silo” without having the support of such a person.

There was much that I found to be refreshingly helpful. I work in university ministry that incorporates much of what these authors recommend, building groups around discovering what it means to follow Jesus in scripture, defining leadership in terms of those who are making disciples with others, doing all this in a context of prayer, and even thinking about the different “silos” on a university campus.

At the same time, I found myself wrestling with a tacit anti-intellectual, anti-theological emphasis that focused on the Bible and nothing but the Bible. I’ve seen too many unorthodox movements that are able to appeal to the Bible to say that relying on people’s personal discoveries from scripture to counter false teaching.

Also there is the question of Christian witness and discipleship in centers of learning and culture. While it is true that unlearned disciples who had been with Jesus confounded the religious elites of their day (which underscores the priority of trusting and obeying Christ!) I would contend for the value of coupling that devotion with the development of a Christian mind that is both theologically acute and culturally astute for engaging these culture-shapers. Just as a willingness to learn gaming is important to reaching a “gamer” silo (an example used by the authors), this intellectual work, which underlines the value of the theological enterprise and the intellectual work Christians are doing in many fields, should be encouraged for those engaging the intellectual world.

Yet the authors’ challenge to churches long on words and experiences and short on consistent obedience is one that needs to be heard. The authors contend that “A church that condones disobedience to God’s laws cannot stay a church. A church that does not practice grace and mercy cannot stay a church” (p. 159). Any of us seeking to plant or develop a ministry or church do well to heed this.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookLook Bloggers book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”