Special Speaker Announcement for the Unfinished Business Conference

I am very excited to announce another speaker confirmed for the conference. But I can't tell you who it is.

Seriously.

I was introduced recently to a woman who is a seminary student here in town. She was raised as an atheist in northern China up until the age of 12 when her mother became a believer. She herself came to faith later, and has attended House Church in China for many years. House churches are illegal in China, where only the state-authorized church bodies are allowed to gather openly. So to avoid putting friends and family at risk back in China I won't use her name or give her hometown online.

We will be greatly privileged to have her share her perspective with us at the conference!

Click here for details and to register.

Gina Mueller to Speak at Unfinished Business Conference

I'm beginning to get confirmations from the people who will be speakers at the Unfinished Business conference, and I'm delighted to introduce you to Gina Mueller. Gina will be one of our panelists, looking at the pros, cons and unanswered questions around Luther's house church proposal. Here's her bio:

"Gina Mueller is a national leader with 3dmovements. She trains leaders and teams how to create a culture of discipleship that results in a mobilized church. As a practitioner, she’s done the hard work of going first. Gina has led teams and served in various contexts - shifting the culture of a mega church as well as church planting. She is passionate about awakening the church to live into her sentness by activating the missional creativity of ordinary people. Gina has been building and multiplying extended families on mission called Missional Communities for almost 10 years. Gina loves hanging with her neighbors, her local coffee shop, and pizza night with her family!"

You can learn more about Gina's work with the 3dm discipling movement here. I have been working with 3dm materials and coaches for 5 years and HIGHLY recommend them!

Registration for the conference is now open. Come and be a part of the conversation!

Conference Announced! "Unfinished Business: Bringing the Church Home"

I'm very excited to announce a conference that I will be hosting in November to dig into Luther's proposal for house churches! (TLDR folks can get straight to the registration page here.)

It was nearly 10 years ago that I first posted on this blog the little-known proposal that Luther wrote, in which he described lay-led, home-based faith communities. Since then it's never been far from my mind.

Now it's time to start a conversation and see what emerges from that. Like when Luther posted the 95 Theses expecting to start an academic debate and things kinda took on a life of their own. Just a little bit.  ;)  So here's the lowdown:

Date: Saturday, November 18th
Time: 9am - 2pm
Location: St. Stephen's Lutheran Church
                 West St. Paul, MN
Cost: $10 (includes lunch)

Registration Page
Facebook Page

What to expect:

We'll set the table with some information, first by looking at the text of Luther's proposal and any historical attempts to put it into practice. Then we'll have a quick fly-by of contemporary groups that are exploring ways to be church that are similar to Luther's proposal. With that as a starting point, the main focus of the conference will be working together to assess the pros and cons of this approach, and the arguments for and against putting it into practice.

The conference is open to the public. It will be of particular interest to people who are looking for renewal in the Church, and for those who have become frustrated or disillusioned by the challenges of the "standard model" for congregational life, with it's dependence on property, programs, professionals and presentational worship. (These people are often referred to as the "Dones," as they are "done with church, but not with faith." For more on them see my posts here and here.)

When the conference is over, I  will have print materials, summaries of conversations, and no doubt video of some sessions/presentations that I will be making available. If you would like to be notified when these materials are available, just fill out the form below and I will keep you in the loop.

Hope to see you there, and please, SPREAD THE WORD!!!

Tim

Mailing list for resource updates:

The "Unchurching" Comic Book and the Unfinished Business of the Reformation

Friends - I've been mulling recently about what I consider to be the "unfinished business" of the Reformation as we are in the midst of the 500th anniversary of all that getting going. To me, the unfinished business is the empowerment of the "laity," which is the churchy word for "everyone who's not a clergyperson."

Luther himself proposed a bold move for that, but never launched it, and I've written about that on this blog before. That may be the most important post on this blog, come to think of it.

In the mean time, I want to lift up for you the work of Richard Jacbson who's written a really engaging book called "Unchurching: Christianity without Churchianity." There's a Facebook group and podcast around that now, and the latest incarnation is a comic book version that the focus of a Kickstarter campaign featured below.

I encourage you to take a look, and consider supporting this work! I for one believe it is past time for us to be asking better questions and launching bolder experiments in how we follow Jesus and bless the world. I salute Richard for being a part of that work.

Piano Keys and Faith Keys

Quite a while back my wife wrote a really nice reflection for her congregation about nurturing faith at home that I thought I'd share here.  (She refers to "Professor Martinson" who is Rollie Martinson of Luther Seminary in Saint Paul.)

Piano Keys and Faith Keys

My youngest daughter Rebecca began playing the piano about 15 months ago and is really enjoying the experience.  She has a weekly lesson with her piano teacher and has participated in 3 piano recitals so far with one coming up June 5. 

Sometimes it’s hard to fit in the practicing at home in between lessons but we keep finding that what’s necessary for her development as a piano musician is to keep up a consistent practice time at home. And we have found that it’s best when I sit down at the piano bench with her and help her.  We count out loud together.  I check her finger positions.  I ask her to read the notes out loud to be sure she’s got them right.  It just goes better in these beginning years when I can guide and help her.

This made me think about the way that the church “does” faith formation with our children and youth.  Somehow as parents we have the idea that if we bring our kids to worship or even just Sunday school, they will gain all that they need for a life of faith.  It’s like bringing your child to the weekly piano lesson but never touching the piano in between the lessons.

It takes time and practice at home to grow in piano skills and it takes time and practice to grow in faith.  So, as parents and grandparents, our “job” is to be that coach, that mentor, that helper in the home so that our children can learn and develop their faith practices.

What could that look like?  Professor Martinson outlined “4 Keys to Nurturing Faith” that families can practice at home:

• Caring Conversations
• Family Devotions
• Family Service Projects
• Family Rituals and Traditions

Over the next few months we will be exploring these “4 Keys” and sharing thoughts and ideas that you can practice at home with the young people in your lives.  The more we practice these 4 keys, the more we will grow together in faith.

I help my daughter with her piano practicing because it helps her master the piano pieces she has been given.  But there is an added delight!  The more time I spend helping her, the more my own piano knowledge (long forgotten) is rekindled and I relearn the old lessons from long ago.  And we get to spend time together, side by side.  We are even practicing a duet for the piano recital.

That’s what happens when families practice their faith together in the home. Not only does your child’s faith grow but your own relationships are strengthened from the time you spend together, loving and serving God.

 

So, let’s get ready to explore, practice and make some faith music together!

Blessings,

Pastor Kisten

Church Can Be Less Expensive

I just spent a couple days at Funding the Missional Church with a diverse group of church folks ranging from large conventional congregations to bi-vocational church plants.  Funding is a problem all around.  A lot of the funding problem is rooted in the assumptions we bring to church life  Assumptions that come with big price tags:

• The pastor must be full time.
• The pastor must be an academically trained professional and paid as such.
• You need excellent musicians.
• You have to have a building. and so on.

I noticed one assumption however that seems to keep escaping notice, and yet is a huge factor is setting the "cost structure" for a faith community:

• You have to gather the entire faith community for worship every week.

In my Lutheran Tribe, we like to talk (among the academically trained professional clergy, anyway) about the Freedom of a Christian. Well, what if we considered how we could serve the Kingdom if we explored the freedom we have from that fifth assumption?  Just as one example, what if the whole community gathered monthly on a Friday night, renting from an existing church, and home-sized groups gathered weekly, perhaps following the path described by Luther himself?  

Point is, church can be different, and it can be way less expensive.

Along these lines I am always glad to hear from my friends at Simple Church who are very big on keeping the Gospel as portable as possible.  So let me lift up a recent post from them on keeping things simple (which also tends to be less expensive) that begins with this wonderfully challenging quote from a Filipino church planter; "Never do anything in church that a one week old Christian would be unable to duplicate." 

Hyperbole?  Perhaps.  Worth reflecting on for people called to equip others?  Absolutely.

Community Pot Luck Accountability Experiment

Back in September I launched a little experiment in supportive accountability with some friends.  The idea was very simple: gather once a month for three months for a pot luck dinner, followed by a conversation.  The conversation was an opportunity for people participating to share some goals for their family faith life for the month, then report back at the next gathering.  I knew that was something I was wanting for my own family life so I was hopeful some others would want to give it a try as well.  I invited three other families, friends of ours with children around the same age as our daughters, and they all three signed on!  Woo-hoo!

Well, we finished our 3-month a couple weeks ago and will be re-upping for another round shortly which is a good sign.  And this time we're going to look for ways to gently lean our conversations towards more depth.  It's not like we were talking about the weather before, but it was clear that we were all drawn to the deeper sharing when it came about.  So rather than just let that happen whenever, we'll be looking for ways to nudge ourselves that direction without locking into anything rigid.  One idea that's been floated is to view the conversation time as a pot-luck too.  There's still an element of unstructured freedom at the core, but we would come to it "bringing something that we have prepared," be that a prayer, a question, a song or a thought.

This simple no-pressure accountability scheme of our first round really helped me to move on some of the things I've wanted to do, but never quite got started.  The simple presence of a kind of "due by date" on the calendar got me to follow through on my desire to have a monthly service project of some sort as a family. That part worked well.

Another part didn't work as well, and that turned out to be very instructive.  I kept setting a goal for having one or two intentional faith conversations per week with my daughters - to talk about different ways to pray for example - and those conversations just weren't happening.  And of course, by the end of the month it was too late to "catch up" before the pot luck!  (After all, what's a deadline for if you can't cram everything in just before it hits?)  So I changed the goal.  Rather than a goal to have conversations, I made the goal to set target dates for the conversations.  And the key here was to link the scheduling task itself to a fairly stable weekly event which we had in place around the Monday grocery shopping run.  So it went like this: once a week when my wife and I sat down to figure out the family schedule (who's home which nights; who's cooking what for dinner...) we also looked for two days per week to have a conversation, typically at dinner.  The goal was simply to plan which days we were going to shoot for having the conversations.  If they actually happened, that would be good too but the main thing was to have them in sight - it was what we needed to move our desire into a specific intention.

Well, it worked pretty well!  Most weeks now we are having these conversations on purpose with the girls and that's been a real treat.  And I've learned some good points about intentionality and the value of building off of existing schedule patterns.  But I probably wouldn't have gotten that worked out if not for trying and failing and reporting on it for three months in a row.

It's just a pot luck and a conversation, but it makes a difference.

Does Your Marriage Strengthen Your Faith?

I think the idea that a shared faith life can strengthen your marriage is pretty common, but I've been musing about the reverse:

Do you intentionally look to your marriage as a "platform" from which you pursue your faith? Put another way, is your primary life partner your primary faith partner?

I came to this from a curious direction. I think a lot about small groups and house churches. More recently I encountered suggestions for "Three is Enough" groups as well as "Church of Two." One thing that seemed to be in common across all of these is that you have to begin by finding one or more people to team up with, and then spend some time building a significant relationship of trust. With that foundation established, you can work together to pursue your faith with support, encouragement and sharing of ideas, insights etc.

Eventually, I wondered why not start with an established relationship of trust that a great many of us already have in place: our spouse? And I'm not talking here about sharing a life of faith as a way to strengthen the marriage, though it certainly will. Rather, the focus is on intentionally turning to the marriage relationship as a resource for pursuing faith. After all, there we hopefully already have someone who knows us well enough to "speak into our life" as they say. Hopefully, with enough trust built up to be able to "speak (and hear) the truth in love." And generally, someone you can get quality time with fairly easily (even though we often don't.)

Wouldn't that be easier than trying to find someone, find a place and time to meet, and start building a deep, faith-based relationship?

I'd love to hear from others who have though about this, or better yet begun to live that way. What have your experiences been? What kind of practices have you found helpful (or not.) What challenges have you encountered?

Home-Based Faith Formation

An interesting conversation has been taking place on Facebook that I wanted to share with you. Here are some excerpts:

Chris: I'm amazed at how many congregations are challenging parents to invest in their kid's faith formation. Almost viral actually!

Melissa: Why are you amazed? That's a good thing, right?

Chris: It's a GREAT thing!

Tim: (That's me) I think it's great too. Sadly, somewhere along the line we got into a mode culturally in the church of "outsourcing" faith formation from the home to the sanctuary.

Melissa: That's what I thought! I am so happy to be teaching my children & husband about FAITH.

Susan: And watch how parent's faith will grow expotentially as they teach their children:)

Lisa: And maybe the parents will start investing in their own faith formation as well.

Tim: Being forced to teach is one of the most effective ways to learn. So home-based faith formation will absolutely be the best thing for both kids and parents. Clergy (and congregation) can then serve in the "equipping the saints for ministry" mode ( See Ephesians 4). Also, HBFF sets you up for both "vertical" and "horizontal" transmission as in viral infections. Vertical is from one generation directly to the next. Horizontal is among peers: imagine couples sharing ideas & issues with each other about how to raise their kids. In the peer-to-peer conversations all kinds of ideas, values and beliefs can get transmitted.