Theological Minimalism for Mission

At some point, I need to make a collection of My Favorite Metaphors.  Here's one that will surely make the list.

The Library

  When Lewis and Clark set off in 1804 to explore the Louisiana Purchase and seek out the Northwest Passage, I expect each of them had a sizeable library in their homes.  I envision whole rooms of wonderful books on Art, Literature, Science, Philosophy, History and so on; books that they valued highly, and yet chose not to take along.  For a settled life in Civilization, all those books were a great asset, but for a journey across the wilderness those same books would be a liability.  For mobility and exploration, it’s important to travel light.

  The “missional Church,” like those explorers, possesses a vast and wonderful library of theology, practices, liturgies, hymns, traditions, stories and so on.  For a settled Church in a civilized Christendom, that depth and breadth is a wonderful gift to enjoy.  But for a Church on the move into uncharted territories, the “library” is too much to carry.  The missional Church needs a field guide for this venture, a “Boy Scout Manual” that can fit in a back pocket.  The lighter it is, the less it will slow you down.  But it needs to cover the basics: food, shelter, safety, and navigation.  Thus the theme of minimalism.

"Greenhouse" Organic Church Workshop offered in Minneapolis, March 2011

If you are interested in the simple/organic/house church movement and live in or around the Twin Cities there's an excellent opportunity coming up quickly for you.  Church Multiplication Associates is holding a Greenhouse Training March 18-20 in Minneapolis. It's a Friday evening, Saturday morning and afternoon, and Sunday afternoon.  

What's a Greenhouse?

In a nutshell, a Greenhouse training does two things:

• Helps participants to reground their thinking about Church in "organic" terms as a simple, living organism that readily grows and reproduces. Much of the time at the training is spent exploring how that looks in practice, both as outreach and as discipling believers.
  
• Invites participants to follow up on the training by gathering monthly through the following year for encouragement and supportive accountability as they begin to pursue this kind of "missional living" in the context of natural relationships.

I attended a Greenhouse some time ago and highly recommend it from that experience. The cost ranges from $110 to $150. It's worth it.

For more specific information, contact my friend Katie Driver who is the local coordinator and will be one of the presenters.  You can register here.  For more of my thoughts and opinions about it, read on.

Although the Greenhouse training has good content in several areas, that's not the main reason I suggest you go. Frankly, good content isn't that hard to find these days and you can buy a lot of books for the price of this registration. What makes this worthwhile is that it pulls together three things that I think are key to Kingdom work - whether you're talking evangelism, discipleship or social ministry for that matter:

Simplicity.  Lots has been written about simplicity.  That's ironic, that is. Simplicity is vital for something to be easily transmitted and replicated. That goes for churches as well as viruses. The Greenhouse training works with a very simple expression of church, simple in both written and in human forms. That's good.

Substantive Relationships.  Relationships where people feel safe enough to get below the surface of life are foundational, both for people to come to faith and for believers to mature in faith. This is one reason why conventional congregations struggle so much under the burden of maintaining a weekly large group gathering that inherently can't facilitate those kind of relationships. The Greenhouse training focuses on equipping people for exploring faith together in groups of 2 to 4 as normative. It offers one simple tool for people to use in self-facilitating such groups, but only as an example or as one resource they recommend.

Intentionality.  This truly is the linchpin. Even mediocre ideas that actually get implemented will probably show more results than great ideas that are left on the shelf. I think the Greenhouse folks know this, which is why the real goal of the training is not simply to deliver good content to people. It's to lay a foundation for the formation of supportive accountability groups. (That's my term. They call them Greenhouse Monthly Gatherings which sounds much more fun and friendly and is probably a better term for that reason.) At the end of the training, they invite those who are interested to begin meeting monthly to encourage each other as they work to live out what they have learned. And note how the monthly meeting is not the main event. Rather, it plays a supportive role to the weekly gatherings of people in groups of 2-4, most of whom have not had the Greenhouse training. That's the kind of flip-the-pyramid strategy that sent me off to learn about house churches in the first place, two years ago.

This is good stuff and these are good people. If you can get to a Greenhouse I think you'll be glad you went.

The Sticking Point: Social Density

A Facebook group I belong to associated with Luther Seminary recently started a discussion on this question:

What are the sticking points of your community of faith that keep you all from becoming a missional congregation?

I thought I'd take a crack at that and here's what I posted:

The sticking point? If only there were just one! I see a host of impediments to the emergence of a missional culture - everything from clericalism and Biblical illiteracy to the hyperindividualism and consumeristic ethos of our civic culture. But there does seem to be one factor that exacerbates all the others and is the place I keep coming back to when I try to decide where to invest my energies.

There is a general lack of substantive relationships.

You can easily unveil this by looking at the one-anothers that describe healthy Christian community. For example, how common are relationships in our churches that are substantive enough to allow people to actually "admonish one another?" Not very.

Culture change - like faith itself - travels from person to person like a virus. You can stop a virus cold (so to speak) by isolating people from each other. Similarly, our community relationships are generally too distant to support a culture-change epidemic. We don't "breathe each others air" enough to transmit anything.

Our primary gatherings may look like good places to catch something - Sunday services are something of a crowd scene. But there is very little relational contact that can take place in that setting. You may catch a cold by passing the peace, but you won't catch a missional culture that way.

Invest in small groups? Of course. But that's typically done as an add-on to Sunday services, as icing on the cake of everything else that's already entrenched in conventional congregational life. Most of our time & energy goes towards the large gathering which tends to have a small impact on a large number of people. Small groups, that have a larger impact on a smaller number, get the leftovers. That's a fundamental mis-alignment. (To see it graphically as a napkin diagram, go here: http://bit.ly/Misalignment.)

To switch metaphors from infection, think in terms of a nuclear chain reaction. To make that take place, the atoms have to be at a high density, packed very tightly together. Then as the neutrons fly, they release even more and the reaction multiplies.

Our "social density" is not high enough to support a "chain reaction" of missional culture change. In contrast, that's just what you see when the Church is "packed very tightly together" under persecution, often resulting in "explosive" growth.

So if I had to pick one factor above the others to focus on, I guess it would be social density. That's why I continue to be drawn to the house church movement - an eminently Lutheran expression and a subject for another time!

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.

Viral Christianity

What would it take for the church to go viral?

That's on my mind pretty persistently these days. All the more so as I'm reading Frank Viola and networking with people pursuing "simple church" and "organic church" expressions. So I guess it's no surprise that even a political editorial can get me started down that track again. For example, here's what I read this morning in an article by Danielle Allen about Obama's use of the internet:

Over the last two years, the Obama campaign... used its website to disseminate tools for grass-roots organizing and made its campaign infrastructure infinitely expandable as groups replicated over and over, learning from and copying one another. The campaign infrastructure became, to a significant degree, self-organizing. This explains its remarkable people power.

Among the people I know in conventional church settings, self-organizing groups that learn from and copy each other as they replicate just because someone gave them the tools... well, it's pretty hard to envision. But among the simple/organic/house church people I encounter, that's not just what they envision, it's what they do.

Personally, I get an extra kick out of this because terms like "self-organizing" and "replicate" take me back to my days in grad school doing Molecular Biology research with an RNA virus. (Here's a little shout-out to all those Fan lab alumnae!) So when I muse about "viral Christianity" I don't just think about the internet and social networking. Visions of particles and genomes dance in my head as well.

So let me just try and wander my way into one point today. When you're a virus, "keep it simple" is an extremely powerful strategy. The smaller and simpler you are, the easier it is to make more of you. The smaller your genome is (the number of genes that make up your DNA or RNA), the less time and energy it takes to replicate it. The virus we worked with in my lab actually had only three genes. Three! Yet with just that it was able to infect a cell, instruct it to create a vast pool of virus components, assemble the parts and bud off mature virus particles capable of starting the next cycle.

"Viral Christianity," if it's to spread effectively will want to be as small, as simple as possible. Including blueprints for buildings, reproducing twenty-page constitutions, and requiring four years of grad school to train a leader before you can start is not simple, and simply ineffective. I am not saying those things are inherently bad. I am saying that if you require them or rely on them, you'll never go viral.

So. What is the smallest number of "genes" required for the church to be the church and to replicate, and what are those genes? That's what I think about.

I wonder if we can get it down to three?