Church Tackles Invasive Species
Sometimes, churches get it right. I’m pretty pleased to be a part of this project to restore native plants to a strip of land near our church. The area was completely overgrown with invasives that would have choked out all the wildflowers and shade trees. That’s a lose for everyone. The congregation loved shade (and the and the energy savings that came with it). The neighbors loved the wall of green that protected their homes from street noise (and increased their property values). The drivers on the parkway enjoyed the tall trees and greenery that make that particular stretch of Menominee River Parkway one of the prettiest, drives in Milwaukee. (Seriously. Driving that road will drop your blood pressure.) So what are we doing about it? We’re teaming up with the county, and with master gardeners around town, to reintroduce native plants. The process is already started, with most of the old stuff gone, and some new plants already taking root.
And now we’re getting good press for it. Tom Heine posted a story about it in his blog for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Thanks to Mr. Heine for the article, to the county for the help, to the workers for slogging through mud and rain, and to everyone who has donated money to get this project started. We’re not done yet! You can help by donating time, native plants, or money. Interested parties may contact the church.
Outsourcing Church
My last suggestions weren’t radical enough. The only pushback was Dave’s comment, “I guess the only one in your list I immediately balked at was the customization idea and the outsourcing idea, I could be reading it wrong, but it seems to demean the Church experience rather than enhance it.”
Economics teaches us that everyone benefits when people specialize. If I focus on sermons and the Beatles focus on songwriting, at the end of the year we write a large number of sermons and songs, some of which are good. If the Beatles and I don’t specialize, but try to do a little of both, we wind up with less total sermons and songs, and fewer of high quality. (On a side note, it’s oddly fun to write “the Beatles and I”.)
I’m not trying to demean the church. We already outsource. We let the preacher handle the sermons, the secretary handle the bulletin, the custodian handle the building. Sometimes we let talented volunteers step up: painters, carpenters, etc. But what if we didn’t limit ourselves to just church members, or local businesses?
What if you outsourced the sermon via the net? I know a lot of churches that can’t afford a full time minister. What would that even look like? I can’t imagine an aging country church gathering in the old building, watching a TV screen. Is there a situation where it would work? A strictly on-line church, maybe?
What if you outsourced the youth ministry? The majority of churches can’t pay a youth minister. Some churches already collaborate on youth events, but it would take an amazing amount of trust to send our kids to some other church for teaching. What if they never came back? What if they didn’t turn out like us? Is fear the only thing holding us back? Are we building God’s kingdom, or just protecting our institution?
What if you outsourced the book-keeping? I know way too many churches have no clue who their members are because their records are not up to date. A secondary advantage of outsourcing is that the specialists enforce appropriate standards. If we outsourced our financials, I bet those companies would require us to adopt some best practices to prevent fraud if for no other reason than to protect themselves from liability.
Are there some things that could never be outsourced? The sermon seems like a tough one in most contexts. The sacraments too, since by definition they’re live, in-person, experiences. No reason we all have to be in one room for board meetings. No reason we have to rely only on church members to do the administrative grunt work work of the church, especially if others can do it better. No reason that we all have to be in the same room to learn, or make friends. But the real work of the church (visiting the sick and the prisoner, serving the poor and the outcast , communal worship) cannot be digitized because we are not spiritual souls knocking around in a physical shell. I love my digital communities, but sometimes I need a hug.
The Church that Missed the Digital Age
In an earlier post, I talked about things hold value in a digital age, “generatives” that can’t be copied. From a Christian perspective, these are all chances to serve. Here’s my list of opportunities, and how we miss them.
- Having a wow experience: Was that a sermon or a sleep aid?
- Locality: If you church disappeared, would your neighborhood notice?
- Delivery: If by delivery, you mean we sit here and wait for you to show up, then sure.
- Personalization: What was your name again?
- Authenticity: Kids, behave. We’re in church.
- Rarity: A three point, alliterated sermon? What a delightful surprise!
- Immediacy: We’ll sing any hymn you want.
- Customization: Enjoy your pew.
- Interpretation: God said it, I believe it, that settles it.
- Simplicity: Going green? Great idea! Let’s run it past the subcommittee.
- Expertise: Well-trained to answer your questions about koine greek participles.
- Priority: Biblical wisdom whenever you want, as long as it’s Sunday at 9am.
- Prestige/Reputation: Every funeral, an opportunity advancement.
- Power/Control: If you value your life, do not anger the kitchen ladies.
- Patronage: You can’t change the light bulb; my grandmother donated that light bulb!
Yeah, yeah, it’s fun (and easy) to point out the problems of church life. But lets take this seriously for a second. Suppose for a second that the church actually wants to be a part of the digital age. (Come on, in an infinite number of universes there’s gotta be one, right?) What might that look like? Let’s brainstorm.
- Having a wow experience: Honestly, I’ve already had wow experiences in church. A spot-on sermon, a touching song, unexpected forgiveness, close friendships, peace in the storm. Of course, any time a church actually follows the teachings of Jesus and feeds the hungry, visits the prisoner, comforts the sick, protects the alien the fatherless and the widow, that’s pretty much guaranteed to make people say wow.
- Locality: What if we expected church members to live close enough that they could walk to church? Then they’d have a vested interest in improving the neighborhood. What if the church got involved in local festivals, not to advertise, but to serve?
- Delivery: If the people are on the web, why isn’t the church? If the people are in the pub, why isn’t the church?
- Personalization: If your church gets big enough that it’s impossible for people to know each other by name, then don’t start a new service; plant a new church.
- Authenticity: What if church weren’t the place where we put on our best face? What if church were the one place we felt safe enough to take off the mask? Moments like that don’t happen in a pew. Maybe on a retreat, or in a small group meeting at someone’s home, but not in a pew.
- Rarity: How about silence? I can get preached at whenever I want. I can get music I like whenever I want. But how often can I find silence? When I speak, how often do I feel like anyone is actually listening? How often does someone spend time with me without wanting anything from me?
- Immediacy: You can’t get more immediate than live, so that’s something. But what about sharing that immediacy with people who can’t/won’t go to church? Streaming services with live chat rooms?
- Customization: How about a service that is planned like a choose your own adventure, where the people choose what happens next?
- Interpretation: What if we posted the sermon on Monday, invited rebuttals from different schools of thought to be posted Wednesday, opened the whole thing for comments, and gleaned the best of it all to share on Sunday morning?
- Simplicity: Honestly, I’m a bit stumped here because Christianity was never meant to make your life easier. Just the opposite in fact. It’s much easier to go with the flow. Following the way of the cross means running counter to the world, and suffering for it, intentionally. Maybe the simplicity comes from admitting it instead of trying to dress it up like a get rich quick scheme.
- Expertise: What if we outsourced the church? Outsource the money to an accountant, the building to a maintenance specialist, the endowment to a fund raiser, the advertising to an ad agency, the events to an event planner, the boards to an HR firm specializing in the care and feeding of volunteers, and let the pastor focus on prayer, scripture, and getting both as deeply embedded into the life of the church as possible.
- Priority: Another tough one. “The first shall be last, those who wish to lead should serve,” and all that. Maybe the idea here is helping people feel like they’re a priority, and not just someone to call when we need something. Maybe you email sneak previews of the sermon to a randomly chosen group each week and honor their feedback.
- Prestige/Reputation: We’ve got titles galore, but they no longer mean anything to the community outside the congregation. I’m not at all interested in returning to the “glory days” when you had to go to church or suffer social consequences. That’s not faith. That’s conformity under duress. How about we hold each other accountable, and stop making it as easy to join a church as it is to join the local racquetball club?
- Power/Control: We’ve got this one backward. We’ve got power and control locked down. Let’s spread them around a bit. How about arranging the service in such a way that questions are allowed, more than one opinion heard? How about a survey of the neighborhood asking them what’s the most annoying thing we do, and then stop doing it?
- Patronage: I’m honestly torn on this one. “The workman deserves his pay,” sure, but doesn’t it compromise the message a bit? On the other hand, patronage is a simple method for accountability. Maybe we endow the pulpit the way you endow the chair of a university? The pastor is still accountable to the congregation, but any growth doesn’t benefit him/her financially.
What do you think? Any in there worth exploring? Got any crazy ideas of your own to add?
Tosa Skateboarders Get Famous-er (and me a little bit too)
We made the paper! Walked into work this morning and our administrator showed me the article. Turns out someone over at the Journal Sentinel thought the story of a church that supports skaters was worth sharing. Why would a church give a care about a bunch of skateboarders? You’ll just have to read for yourself. Better yet, go out and buy a copy, then email Annysa Johnson to tell her what a great job she did writing the article, and then go to your church/business and challenge them to get on board too!
Could our church be like this… Please?!
When I talk about the third way, about waging peace, about radical transformative love, this is the kind of stuff I’m imagining.
God Makes Dead Bones Dance
Date: March 9, 2008
Text: Ezekiel 37:1-10; John 11:1-6; 17-45
Title: God Makes Dead Bones Dance (audio)
Lent is a great time to talk about death. We’re walking week-by-week closer to the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Many of us have been struggling throughout lent to give something up, which is a small kind of death, a death to self. It’s good that lent only comes once a year because it’s hard to talk about death. It is also good that lent comes each year whether we like it or not, because death is something we need to talk about.
We live in a culture that minimizes death and idolizes youth. Death to self? We’d much rather talk about self-esteem, self-awareness, and self-actualization than self-denial. We distract ourselves from the world’s suffering with fancy toys. We distract ourselves from our own brokenness with frenetic activity. We need to stop at least once a year and try to see things as they really are.
We have a church without martyrs, a world without justice, and wars without end. These are easy to get excited about, obvious. Preachers stand up and say, “It’s a sin and a shame. We sit here in luxury while others starve.” And everyone nods their heads and agrees that it’s a horrible shame and a tragedy and we should all feel rotten for enjoying the privilege of being born American.
That’s the goal right? To make people feel ashamed? If everyone feels guilty, they’ll want to be forgiven, they’ll seek out a priest. This is the trap we call religion. Religions set themselves up as mediators between God and humanity. They claim a monopoly on forgiveness. So, it’s in their best interest to make you feel guilty. That’s what keeps you coming back.
You feel good while you’re here and then you walk out the door and it’s not five minutes but you’ve done something wrong again. And the wrongs just keep piling up until you can get back to church again on Sunday and get forgiven.
That’s the easy way. You just make people feel vaguely guilty and you offer them vague forgiveness, and send them on their way. Or you could go with the even easier way. You make people feel really guilty once and then promise them forgiveness forever.
Just pray the prayer written on the back of this tract and you’ll go to heaven. If you’ve ever committed the tiniest of sins, ever stretched the truth, ever had a sexual thought about someone who is not currently your spouse, ever failed to do something good when it was in your power to do it, then you’re a sinner worthy of the flames of hell. Better pray that prayer quick because you might die at any moment. You might die while you’re sitting right there in that pew, and if you haven’t prayed the prayer then you’re going to experience eternal conscious torment. All you have to do is pray the prayer.
See how easy that is? But there’s still a catch. What if you didn’t pray well enough? What if you prayed, but then you forgot? What it you prayed it and you meant it, but then you changed your mind. Do you have to pray again? Once you claim your get out of hell free card, is it possible to lose it? Uh oh. I’d better go to church. It’s the religion trap all over again, only I don’t have to make you feel guilty every week; you feel guilty constantly all by yourself!
I’m not here to make you feel guilty. I’m not here to offer forgiveness. Forgiveness is already offered, without limit, without price tag. I’m in no position to barter between you and God. God has come to earth and eliminated the middle man. I’m here to say that this is the place where it’s ok to tell the truth… about what’s going on in the world, about what’s going on in our lives.
So let’s tell the truth for a minute. Half the world really does live on two dollars a day or less. But asking God’s forgiveness for children starving in Africa is like political campaigners spouting vague platitudes. “I’m a candidate for change. I want children to get a good education.” Wow. What a revelation. Just once I’d like to see a campaign ad that said, “Reading. Who needs it?” “A vote for me is a vote for stupidity.”
I hope we all agree that’s just a little bit ludicrous. So just for a few moments, lets stop beating ourselves up over the fact that we happened to be born American and some other folks weren’t. If we’re going to look for problems to solve, then lets look closer to home.
What’s the most common problem in our church? People are too busy. I didn’t say it’s our worst problem. We’ve got our share of baggage, just like everyone else. But our most common, most visible problem is we are horribly overbooked. We are running ourselves ragged. We feel disconnected from our friends and families, especially our families.
Can I bring you a message from your kids? If you gave them a choice between increasing your net worth by ten thousand dollars and having you home more, they would pick you. Unless you’re a jerk of course, then they’d take the money.
Too many of us are disconnected, stretched thin, dried out, scattered around like a bunch of dry bones. We’ve all got places in our lives that feel dead. And sooner or later, we’re all going to be dead.
But we don’t talk about it. Wouldn’t be polite. We just pretend everything is ok. Which is why so many of our young people cut themselves. They know the world is messed up, they know that they are at least in some way complicit, and they know they’re not supposed to talk about it. Especially if that brokenness extends into their own home. They’re job is to smile and get good grades so they can get a good job and afford the kind of life they’ve become accustomed to. So they take all those negative feelings and they stuff them until they go numb, until pain feels better than feeling nothing at all.
Death is the inescapable truth of the world we know, the world we live in every day. But our readings claim that death is no longer the supreme constant. It has been overthrown. Ezekiel and John both watch, jaws agape, as God reverses the flow of human events, repeals the second law of thermodynamics, and returns life to that which had lapsed into nothingness.
That’s the Bible in a nutshell: God created the world, but it became broken and began to fade, and now God is restoring it. God is pulling the scattered bones together, building connections, adding muscle, uniting us into a body. God breathes new life into us. At least that’s the plan. We still have a choice. We can collaborate in this work, or we can fight it.
Jesus stands at the tomb of Lazarus, orders them to roll the stone away, and calls out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!” Then silence as everyone holds their breath, wanting to believe, hoping it could be true. The silence stretches on for what seems like an eternity. And so Jesus calls again, “Lazarus, come forth!” Again silence. And a tiny voice calls out, “No thank you. Nobody here but us dead people. Nothing to see here. Move along. Don’t forget to roll the stone back on the way out.”
The church is not a building. The church is not an institution. The church is you and me being transformed into light and life and love. It’s not enough that we come together. It’s not enough that we move with purpose. God breathes the Spirit into us. And if we will only allow it, that Spirit will transform our lives from the inside out.
If we can accept that we are already forgiven, already loved, already alive, then we can stop hiding in tombs and join the celebration. We can watch as God changes our lives and our priorities. Perhaps we can learn to slow down, enjoy our lives, enjoy the young people. Perhaps we will see less war and less poverty. But changes like that only begin here, between hearts brave enough to be honest, and humble enough to be healed. May God make it so in us today.
What’s an Emerging Congregationalist?
The congregation I serve is a part of the NACCC .
The books I’m reading (besides the sci-fi of course) are mostly in connection with the emerging church (more info at Emergent Village).
I’m trying to foster a connection between these two groups. Why?
Basically, I’m hoping that ongoing engagement with Emergent will help the NA remember itself. The folks engaged in the emergent conversation are intuitively practicing the kind of free fellowship that was the hallmark of congregational (also called federal) theology. Unfortunately today, the Congregational movement is fractured. The UU, the CCCC, the UCC, and the NACCC all claim roots in that heritage. Given the choice, obviously, I’d pick the NA, but even here we are commonly less than Congregational; We are independent. On a personal level this sounds like, “I’m a congregationalist. That means I can believe whatever I want.” On a congregational level this sounds like, “We’re a congregational church, that means no one can tell us what to do.”
That’s garbage. (In the “We’re too nice to translate skubalon correctly” sense of the word.)
Sometimes people explain it by saying, “We’re an association, not a denomination.” Translated, that means, “We work together because we choose to love each other, not because we’re bound by some top-down structure.” Unfortunately, most people hear it more like, “We’re not like THOSE people. We’re the REAL congregationalists.”
What we have (that we often fail to recognize/remember/use) is an incredible history of people trying to work out a federal/covenant bond in real life. Over the years, they discovered a lot of what doesn’t work, and a few things that work surprisingly well. They uncovered a pretty amazing balance between the autonomy of the local church and that church’s free and loving responsibility to live in relationship with her sister churches.
With their emphasis on relationships and networking, the emerging churches are discovering and practicing some of those same ways of being Christian. Perhaps by living with them, the NA can remember itself. Perhaps in remembering itself the NA can uncover some of the hidden gems of practical, lived theology that made Congregationalism a robust and faithful way. Perhaps those gems might even be of use to a fledgling group like emergent as it continues to define itself.
WARNING!
This is a journal. As in, personal opinions. As in, NOT the official stance of anybody but me. As in, NOT my final answer on anything. As in read at your own risk, your mileage may vary.
