Church Planting
(posted for dialog)
NORTHWEST CHURCH PLANTING WORKSHOP
MARCH 17-18
CASCADE COLLEGE, PORTLAND, OR
Leonard and Holly Allen will be our presenters at this year’s Northwest Church Planting Workshop. Leonard, director of ACU Press, author, and Restoration historian will present lessons on How the Trinity Grounds God’s Mission and How the Spirit Empowers God’s Mission. These are fundamental, theological insights, not just for church planters, but for every church that is continuing to pursue God’s purpose and mission for them in their communities.
Please look through the attached pdf brochure for our other topics and workshop information. As well as an pre-workshop registration break, we are also offering a special registration price for Saturday only of $45. This includes the workshop notebook and continental breakfast as well as coffee and snacks through the day.
In our last email we considered the concept of DNA as an analogy to help us understand how and why we do the things we do as churches. I suggested that our DNA is derived from three sources: 1) our theology,
2) our history, and 3) our personal, church experiences.
One of my Harding graduate students asked a great question from that email. He is in a ministry that is working with some homosexually oriented people. This student pointed out that we accept the people, but work with them to change their behaviors to reflect God’s intent for their lives. We do not accept the notion that a person has no choice in the behaviors they display. And he’s right. The same goes for this analogy of DNA for churches. While our DNA highly orients us towards certain ways of believing, thinking, and acting, we are automatons, thoroughly at the mercy of our DNA. No, we are able to make choices. We are not destined to always be the same; by making different choices we change our DNA and thus help our churches continue to mature and grow.
Last week I had the privilege to attend and speak on church planting at the Oklahoma Christian University Bible Lectures. There were some excellent, thought-provoking presentations. Dr. Evertt Huffard, dean of Harding Graduate School, reminded us in his presentation looking into the future of the Churches of Christ that the western world around us is changing in the following three significant orientations:
1. The western world is becoming post-modern
2. The western world is becoming post-Christian and
3. The western world is becoming post-denominational
Let’s take some of the DNA strands within Churches of Christ and quickly look at how they connect (or not) with these three changes in orientation in our western world.
In our traditional, theological view Churches of Christ have held a high regard for scripture as God’s divinely inspired and authoritative word and human reason as the essential means for understanding God’s word. Our position has been the word is true. If a person comes to the word correctly, using their mind in “truth-oriented” ways, they will see the truth (just like we do) and obey it. But post-modern people accept neither the absolute, universal truth of the Bible nor do they trust human reason. In the modern world in which Churches of Christ developed our high regard for Scripture and for human reason spoke well to the people around us. Today’s post-modern peoples look upon these items with great skepticism. So here, one of our traditional, DNA themes causes us difficulty as we try to speak truth to people around us who do not view truth or reason in the same way we do.
The second orientation is that of post-Christendom. Europe is several decades beyond where we are in the United States in their post-Christendom mindset, but we are following after quickly. Europeans are highly skeptical of Christianity. From their viewpoint of a century of bloodshed and atrocities that were “Christian upon Christian”, Christianity lost it’s seat of ascribed power and status. They tried it and it didn’t work. That puts us as Christians not just at a neutral starting point, but at a negative starting point, as we engage people in dialog on God, faith and the church.
One of our major themes as a movement has been the concept of Restoration. So strong is this concept within us that we distinguish ourselves as a Restoration Movement fellowship. But how does the idea of Restoration, in all its meanings for us, sound in the ear of someone who has never experienced Christianity positively and for whom Christianity is often associated as the enemy? First, they see nothing to restore or return to (how well I remember our Back to the Bible campaigns, and they were effective in the 60’s and 70’s). Second, why would they want to return to something that demonstrated itself to be insufficient if not deceiving in its promise? The Restoration idea is perceived as irrelevant, meaningless or ludicrous to the post-Christian person.
Finally, we are seeing a post-denominational orientation developing in the United States. I’ll admit, I find it difficult if not impossible to think about the religious world without the idea of denominations. It is the world I grew up with. But my children do not think in those terms. Their religious world is constructed not of denominational divisions and boundaries but of religious experiences that are either closer or more distant to what they see in scripture. If truth be known, they are probably much better equipped to connect people with early Christianity, which did not have these sort of normalized divisions, than I could ever be. Here is where our Restoration theme would seem to have more to say. But, it is at this point that our second great historical theme, that of unity, is brought into play.
Our movement was birthed with the call to unity. Our belief, through Alexander Campbell, was that as the reason of the unfettered mind was brought to bear upon the Word of God unity in belief and practice would be the natural result. Others in our history saw different bases for unity, but Campbell’s was the one which took lasting root. But the world in which Campbell lived was the strongly, denominationalized world of modernity. That world is passing away and becoming post-denominational. How does our unity theme play out when the very structures which made it important and viable no longer exist?
So here we are. We are living in the west among people who are increasingly becoming more post-modern, post-Christian and post-denominational, but our DNA heritage prepares us best to speak to people in a modern, Christian, denominationalized context. What do we do? Do we abandon our heritage and seek for something else? Or, do we continue on unchanged, demanding that those “out there” come into our world if they want to converse? I believe we are called to do just what our heritage has prepared us to do well, to return again and again to scripture with these new questions, these new orientations, and to seek God’s will and God’s way afresh. This seems to be the essence of restoration, not the outward restoring of physical practices, but the seeking of truth and understanding that connects our God of unchanging truth to a world that is continually changing, challenging and demanding relevance to the questions of life. As my grandfather in Arkansas might say, “that Restoration dog will hunt.”
Stan Granberg
Kairos Executive Director
sgranberg@kairoschurchplanting.org
www.kairoschurchplanting.org
The Kairos mission is to recruit, equip and support church multiplication leaders to strategically plant new church planting churches of Christ in order to produce regional church planting movements.