Too comfortable?

About the time that things were coming to an end at Memorial I had a conversation with Ed White, the consultant from the Alban Institute who had come to Appleton in January, 2009 to lead our annual Officer’s Retreat. It was Ed who first provided the “frame” around my experience, suggesting that in anxious times congregations sometimes mistake personnel shifts for the systemic work that needs to be done in order to maintain the health of the community, while anxious leaders can sometimes personalize the conflict, allowing what are systemic issues to grow into a challenge to their leadership. It was helpful at the time and still rings true today.

In the course of that conversation, Ed pointed me toward a book I am quite certain I would never have picked up in other circumstances. The Forgotten Ways, by Alan Hirsch, is a probing critique of the ways in which the mainline denominations have or have not dealt with the unique challenges of the 21st century—a topic near and dear to my heart! Hirsch is an Australian, and according to the back cover blurb, he is “the founding director of Forge Mission Training Network. His experience includes mission and church planting to the marginalized as well as leading at the denominational level.” That denominational grounding for Hirsch is Pentecostal—not a tradition that would normally have drawn me in, but Ed thought it was an important book, and so I read.

At the core of Hirsch’s analysis of the growth of Christian movements is what he calls “Missional DNA”, and for the most part the book is a fleshing out of just what this “M-Dna” is. It might be worth a series of reflections on what this is all about, but what pushes my pen along right now is the closing chapter on “Communitas not Community.” One of the central ideas he works with in this chapter is “liminality”, an idea he borrows from anthropologists to describe the way in which most cultures have rituals that push young people beyond the walls of the community before they receive them in as adult members (think in terms of Native American “Spirit quests” for example). It is understood, Hirsch explains, at the limits of our comfort zones that real growth takes place.

The problem with so many congregations in the 21st century is that they seem committed to avoiding the uncomfortable or unpredictable places where any real growth can occur. The sentence that struck me was “equilibrium is a precursor to death.” (The italics are Hirsch’s.) Striving for institutional survival, instead of adapting to the environmental changes and threats in the world around us, leave us literally defenseless. Hirsch has the church as institution squarely in his sights for the majority of this book (and I admit that as I read and appreciated his critiques I was never quite able to understand what might take its place that was not just another iteration of an institutional church) but I think he deserves a lengthy hearing at this point:

“In so many churches the mission of the church has actually become the maintenance of the institution itself. This was never Jesus’ intention. Our goal in organizing as a people is not to set up, preserve, and maximize an institution over its life cycle, but to extend God’s mission into the world. Our primary aim is not to perpetuate the church as an institution, but to follow Jesus into his mission in the world.”

I’m not ready to jump ship just yet, but I do think we need to take a good long look at just what it is that we are working so hard to maintain, and just what the relationship is between the astounding Good News of the Gospel and what it is that churches are about in this world. I suspect that if it does not draw us beyond our comfort zones, if it does not challenge too-easy community with a transforming and radically inclusive communitas, if it sees the fundamental dynamic of mission to be pounding the world into a church-shaped mold rather than allowing ourselves to be molded into whatever shape God might need in order to bring light and leaven into the world, then whatever it is that we are about will ultimately be frustrating and frustrated.

Here’s my guess for today: the church God is calling us to be in the 21st century will be found in the messy in-betweens of the world and the church, and not in the hard and fast walls we manage to construct between the two. It will be as we engage in the crisis of our identity, and walk out into the wilderness, that we will begin to see the outlines of the new thing God is doing in our midst. And, if my wager is correct, the result will not be a church-less society, but rather a society in which the church has grown into its own as a tool of God’s saving work.