Dear VUSA pt 2

Dear VUSA,

Hey, it’s me again.

I wanted to finish sharing my feelings with you. (part one here)

Before I get to that, I want to tell you why I’m writing you like this, I’d like to tell you why I am not writing this and then tell you about how I’m feeling.

And then I’ll just leave this with you and won’t bother you again.

VUSA, I love you. I believe in you. I really do. That’s the main reason I’m writing. If I thought you permanently sucked and I hated you, I’d just slip away.

VUSA, I’m writing like this because we have no ombudsman, no party that I know I can reach out to who will listen and will sit us down and help us listen to each other. As a system, you seem both impenetrable and impervious.

But I love you, I believe in you and I have a dream of how our relationship can be, therefore, I write.

I am not writing because I’m lonely or sad or going through a particularly hard time in my local church. I’m not writing you, VUSA, because I have no friends or I’m on the verge of a breakdown. I’m not writing you because I like to complain and want to be “that guy” that causes everyone to inwardly groan when they see he’s in the meeting.

I’m not writing to criticize people, the parts of your sum, VUSA.

This is important because 32% of our population will personalize what I am writing even though it’s not written about them or about any person. I am writing about a system. About VUSA.

You are a system and you have developed a mindset, an attitude, a personality, an existence that lives beyond the individual parts that make you up. You are a system that influences the people who live inside of you every bit as much or more than they influence you. That’s what a system does.

A wise person once said, “The way the kingdom comes is the kingdom that comes.” Systems are not neutral. Your nature will produce fruit after its kind. They way you do things shapes the future as much or more than the words or values you speak, no matter who the people are that are plugged into your system.

I’m not writing with the illusion that I can do a single thing about that, but I do believe that I am my brother’s keeper and if you see a brother, or system, that causes hurt feelings and you don’t speak up or try to speak up, you’re complicit. I don’t want to be complicit.

So this is the part where I finish telling you about how I feel about our relationship.

Once upon a time I went to work at a store and met some great people. Right away one guy invited me and my wife over for dinner. We were new to town and I was excited about the possibility of establishing new relationships.

We had a great meal, good conversation, funny stories but then after the meal the couple asked me and my wife to have a seat on their couch while they set up a white board on a stand. The warm hospitality suddenly felt awkward.

For the next hour we listened to their multi-level marketing presentation and heard about the incredible opportunity to be one of their “legs.” There were upline people at various levels from diamond to emerald but the goal, as they explained it to us, was to get our own legs and become uplines to others from whom we would eventually collect money off of their work.

VUSA, for me, this is how I feel about our relationship. I feel like my worth to you is in my potential as a leg in your multi-level church planting movement. I feel like I’m a downline. I’m a leg. I feel like my worth to you is based on my ability to produce and to purchase, to get more downlines, more legs planted, more resources flowing upwards to feed you. I’ve watched people diagram you VUSA, I’ve seen them use their hands to demonstrate the multi-levels of your system. I left a system like that in order to join the Vineyard.

And now it’s starting to feel to me like we’ve become what I left.

I’m not mad at you, VUSA, we are what we are and perhaps this is the way that all systems are eventually bound to develop.

I just have this dream that we will have a different sort of relationship where I don’t feel like I work for you but with you and that when you are making decisions that affect me and the church I’m in, you’ll drop us a line and ask for some feedback before it actually happens. I have a dream that our kingdom theology will influence you, our system, as much as it influences our local churches and our every day relationships and that it will influence me because God knows I need it to.

The hard thing is for those who are inside the system to be able to see or relate to what I am talking about. Place influences perspective and there are people who enjoy a connection to your system that can’t possibly relate to how I feel. I acknowledge and accept that. It’s part of the complex nature of family systems – we’re all in ‘normal’ families until we start to hang out with other families because we don’t know what we don’t know.

Our relationship with the couple who invited us over for dinner and a presentation didn’t develop very far because my wife, who has an aversion to multi-level marketing, said we weren’t interested.

And then they weren’t.

And VUSA, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit worried that telling you all this will make you despise me. But I would feel much worse if I never said a word.

I’m one hundred percent sold out for the kingdom and for the Vineyard. The Spirit has used Kingdom theology to shape me and how I fulfill my vocation. I’m not going anywhere. That might be good news or bad news to you VUSA, but I really couldn’t carry on without telling you how I’m feeling.

So I offer both parts of this letter up to the interwebs with a prayer that the Spirit is at work in people AND in systems. I pray that there are better days ahead for us and that we can develop a healthy system that will facilitate our vocation into the future. I hope the same system that produced a booklet for guidance on having hard conversations is willing to embrace sitting down with downliners like me and having some of those hard conversations because the way the kingdom comes is the kingdom that comes.

Pastors (and other endangered species)

Among Paul’s list of the ways he had suffered on behalf of the church he drops this little line, “my daily concern for all the churches…”

The vocation of a pastor, when practiced by someone actually committed to that vocation, is a weighty thing.

Often, people remark about the appearance of a man who has been the President of the United States and how he has visibly aged, more noticeably than others his age, over the span of his time in office. I’ve seen the same kind of “road wear” on men and women who serve as pastors and I’ve seen it accumulate in far less time than it takes to become evident on those politicians.

I realize there are some “bad hombres” out there who have managed to get a gig or are serial gigging as pastors. Clear back in the book of Acts, Paul warns about “wolves” that will appear from among the leadership of a local church, dress up like sheep and turn the church into a mutton buffet. It’s not a recent development.  I have a friend who invests a lot of time gathering, illustrating and telling the stories of these carnivores to a receptive, appreciative audience of people who have themselves been cooked, carved and served up by some of these lupine in lamb’s drag.

But I love pastors.

I’m not oblivious to the wolves, I’m just in awe of the men and women who willingly choose to serve the flock of God of which they are a part. I’m in awe of their devotion to a vocation that is a 24 hour a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year vocation. As highlighted in Paul’s list of sufferings, even when they’re not right beside someone from the church, they’re still caring the church inside their hearts and heads.

These men and women don’t set the thermostat for themselves, they constantly juggle the needs, desires and expectations of a community of people, all at various stages of faith and spiritual, emotional and personal maturity. These men and women have been at the deathbed of more people than is normal. They have grieved and mourned with more families of saints and ornery buggers, seeking to comfort both, (sometimes at the same time) than is normal. They make every vow that they invite yet another couple to make sound as fresh and as hopeful as they did the first couple they married; despite the countless couples with whom they’ve suffered through divorce.

These men and women, most of whom serve in churches with fewer than 200 people in attendance, have often graduated with a degree that cost them more than they will be able to earn enough to repay on the salaries they will make.

They listen to horrific confessions and confer forgiveness and grace to  fallen saints without a hint of judgment or condemnation.

Their children live under microscopes and have to deal with spoken and unspoken pressures unique to them.

Pastors are often accused of things they would never dream of and they dream of things this life will never afford them. They anguish over decisions and work hard for things that will ultimately benefit others and not themselves. And regularly they get to entertain the wisdom of the “arm chair pastors” in their churches who tell them how it could, should, ought and would be if someone else was doing the pastoring.

These brave souls regularly get in trouble with those who want a human master to tell them what to do. Instead these pastors choose the harder but better work of walking beside people to help them make their own choices and their own decisions and take their own steps to grow up to be more like Jesus.

Week after week these pastors come up with one or two or three new messages to share with the church. Can you imagine being a pastor of a church of 75 people, counting everyone including the unborn, and preaching a new message every week to a YouTube and TEDtalk generation?

Imagine having people who compare you, generally unkindly, to the TEDtalk their friend just sent them a link to or the megachurch pastor they watched on the 'net. Usually they don't consider that mega-pastor has a team of writers working for him or that it was still his third service they broadcast because it always goes much better than the first two and by that time he hardly had to look at his notes at all. And they can always edit in a joke from the second service if it got more laughs.

Imagine having to answer more than once the query of a well-meaning church goer, “Why can’t your talks be as engaging as a TEDtalk?” Imagine having to answer them with a kind tone in your voice after having been out the night before at the hospital beside a family whose oldest teenage daughter tried to OD herself into eternity.  Imagine having someone critique the energy you brought (or lack thereof) to the morning service and responding to them gently while you are still thinking about the couple you sat with the night before and tried to help them navigate the meltdown of their marriage and guide them into a healthy conversation.

Imagine the restraint it takes not to suggest they call Brene Brown the next time they are in crisis so you have time to polish up your talk.

Proverbs says that if you find a good wife you’ve managed to do something extraordinary.  Can I suggest that it’s also true that if you’ve found yourself a good pastor – someone who cares more about your soul than you do, who listens to you, who seeks your best and wants to see you discover and fulfill your vocation, who wants to help you grow up and not stay a perpetual baby in Christ – that you’ve found yourself something miraculous.

I love pastors for who they are, for what they do and for all the crap they put up with to do it.  Shepherds get dirty, there’s no way around that. True shepherds don’t grind on about the smell, the mess, the poo, they just embrace the vocation and get on with it. To those men and women pastoring day in and day out, I say, thank you. You are a gift from God to all of us, whether we ever meet or not, you have made the world a brighter and tastier and more creative space for being in it. Thank you for the gift of life you bring, however perfectly imperfect that you do it. You are a gift, a treasure, a little wind of heaven into the souls of the men and women, boys and girls that you pastor.

I have a pastor friend who was senior pastor of a very large church in a very large city. One Sunday morning, between one of their three morning services, while my friend was running down a hallway from visiting with people in the lobby as they left and re-entering the sanctuary for worship, he was stopped in the hall by a woman he recognized as an occasional attender at their church. "I'm so glad I caught you," she said, "my mother and I were wondering if you could do something about the volume of the music and get  someone to turn it down?" I know my friend well enough to know a million appropriate responses ran through his mind but what he chose to do was answer firmly but kindly this inappropriately timed request. Now imagine this happening to every pastor, every Sunday times infinity.

Cheers to you, pastors. I admire each one of you.

I'm going to be launching a podcast soon where I'll be exploring my admiration for pastors and their stories more in depth.  If you've got a question you've always wanted to ask a pastor, leave it in the comments and I'll pass it along.  Stay tuned.

Dear Friends Who Preach and Who Listen to Preaching

I’ve said before how much I love preaching as an art.

As a result, I listen to a lot of preaching, past and present, and find something beautiful in almost every message. 

Almost.

There’s a contemporary trend that seems to be wildly popular and often the homiletical approach of some preachers of very large churches – as well as some very normal sized churches. 

Honestly, it has much more to do with orientation than it has to do with size.

This trend usually develops a message in one of two ways with both achieving the same broken result.

The first way which seems very popular today is the allegorical sermon.  These practitioners and artists will spend a lot of time in the Old Testament turning the narrative into allegories about modern day struggles and issues and how to overcome them, how to live in victory, be a success, get a win. 

It’s very American, very much in tune with our modern zeitgeist.

The second way which also seems very popular today is (what I will call) the therapeutic sermon.  These practitioners and artists will take a relevant, contemporary topic and piecemeal scriptures together (or sometimes not) that support their thesis about how you and I can deal with common problems, struggles and issues we face and come out as winners, overcomers and with the best life now.

Several years ago, I was part of a 3-week summer English camp in mainland China.  Our goal for the camp was to teach conversational English to teens and young adults as a means to building relationships and sharing our faith.  One method we used was to share Bible stories as English lessons and in the midst of our lesson, bring up our faith.  I was surprised, the very first time I did this, to discover that my “atheist, communist” students already knew the stories I was telling them.  Instead of being surprised by the parables or the stories, they spoiled the endings which they knew by heart.

I was confused. So I asked them to tell me more.

What I discovered was that in the same way I had been taught Aesop’s fables or tales of Greek mythology, like Pandora’s Box, these students had been taught a lot of the Bible but it hadn’t told them anything about Jesus.  The story of the Prodigal Son was, for them, a lesson on the importance of family loyalty.  David and Goliath, overcoming adversity.  Loads of Bible.  No Kingdom.  No Jesus, the Autobasileia.  It was like getting a vaccination, just enough to immunize us from the real thing.

And this is what scares me about a lot of preaching I listen to.  Lots of stories with life lessons, lots of allegories that turn the Bible into a cleverly disguised self-help book, great moments that would easily make an Oprah segment or a TED talk, but they’d play in atheist classrooms in China as easily as a gathering of saints in Chicago. As a pastor I get emails offering to teach me or sell me programs of successful preaching plans for a year.  Ways to plan your preaching around peak times of the year for visitors and ways to capitalize on the natural rhythms of holidays and special events to build interest and attendance.  I have friends who visit other churches or watch them on-line like I do and I inwardly cringe as they extol the buzz they feel coming away from these services that are obviously designed to, like Hans and Franz, pump *clap* you up.  But my taste in Germans leans much more towards Bonhoeffer than it does Hans and Franz.

My personal litmus test has become “David and Goliath.” If a preaching pastor takes that text and turns into a Malcolm Gladwellian story of triumph over adversity or any version that makes the story of David about how you and I can face down the giants in our lives, I know that the paramount goal of the message is not the Kingdom, it’s the crowd.  It’s not telling the story of Jesus, it’s telling the story of me, in which Jesus briefly appears as a supporting character.  It’s not about transformation, it’s about self-actualization.

If the medium is the message, the message is, “it’s all about you.”

Stanley Hauerwas once said, “…the story that we should have no story, except the story we chose when we had no story, it is a story that has at its heart the attempt to make us tyrants of our own lives. But no one is more lonely than tyrants. Since they must always distrust everyone around them, because they know that they want their place…” The unintended consequences of preaching us into the center of the story is, as Hauerwas observes, that we are made tyrants of our own lives. This kind of message, unintentionally, does not bind us together, it drives us apart. We’re always at odds with each other and in conflict or tension with one another as we vie for our place at the center of the story. And there can be only one.

But Jesus tells a better story, Jesus is a better story, and his Kingdom offers a better story than our self-centered services and self-centered messages tell. Jesus is the center of the story, and we’ve all been invited to join a story that formed us and forms us, we did not form it.  We become a part of the story and that story makes us open to the stranger, the other and causes us to recognize that this isn’t my story, it’s not about me, my rights, my destiny but about Jesus, the Kingdom and his story, the one he tells and the community tells together.

There is a better story than the one that’s all about you, and I’m very sure there’s a better story than the one that’s all about me. And I think the best preaching we can all do is to tell the story of the Autobasileia. That means we’ve got to immerse ourselves in our story and live that story, not just talk about it. Especially not just talk about it.  That story needs to permeate our day to day lives, our relationships, our vocations, our conversations, our calendars and our check/cheque books.

I know, I'm not the official voice on "how to preach right," I'm just a nobody who isn't impressed with the Emperor's new clothes. And I'm convinced if I let the Emperor go out like that, I'm complicit and responsible by virtue of my silence.  There is a better story.

When a Movement Stops Moving

What makes a Movement a Movement and not an Institution or Organization?

It seems like there are a few key differences but I think what best sums them all up is the presence of what Walter Brueggemann calls, “Prophetic Imagination.” A Movement possess it, an Institution eliminates it.

Initially, it seems that a movement begins when a grass roots felt need is met by a catalyst, develops critical mass and is captivated by prophetic imagination – things can be different than they are now. The danger, as Brueggemann points out, is that which is developed from the prophetic imagination tends to become the enemy of that prophetic imagination as it settles into an institutional rather than prophetic shape.

Herbert Blumer described the four stages of a social movement, these have been refined or simplified by other scholars but maintain the same basic meaning.  They are: Emergence, Coalescence, Bureaucratization, and Decline.  The story of Israel, Brueggemann says, illustrates this movement.  It started with Moses and a vision of a “free God” and that life didn’t have to be “this way.” Then, as this new Movement pursued the prophetic vision and a “free God,” they eventually morph into Solomon’s monarchy, and a consolidation of power wherein the former slaves became the oppressors and the Tabernacle was replaced with a Temple and God was ‘permanently’ anchored in place. The Movement experienced both its highest and lowest point at exactly the same time, albeit from two different perspectives.

Eventually, it seems, Movement becomes Empire.

Then, two things happen.  1) The Empire has to marginalize the voices of dissent.  Ultimately, the Empire must eliminate the dissenting or prophetic voice as they clearly endanger the well-being of the Empire. And 2) The prophetic voices begin a race to the bottom to be sure they aren’t the last one standing who is compelled to tell the Emperor that he’s naked.

To resist the gravity that pulls us towards being an Empire, Movements need to be able to carry on what the catalyst started, to nurture the prophetic imagination, to be self-correcting – like science – and invite dialog, facilitate the prophetic imagination and reform accordingly.  But this is almost impossible because the Empire is convinced of their rightness, their efficacy and their sense of an almost divine approval by which they do what they do.  We can tweak the Empire, but we cannot dismantle the Empire, we’ve invested far too much of our resources and our ego.

So, what do we do to get a Movement moving again?

1) Listen to the Artists.  I don’t mean to say that we have them submit papers or proposals or give them 30 minutes to present something to our board or executive council.  I mean that we create Artist collectives and we engage in conversation, listen to the music, observe their dance, walk through their galleries.  Where the Arts are not fostered you can be sure that Empire is gaining ground.  To move, we must let the songwriters and the painters, the dancers and the musicians, the wine makers and playwrights, tell us what sort of future they imagine for us.

2) Listen to the Scholars. Why oh why have a body of scholars developed within the midst of a Movement and then not consult and listen to them?  Empire develops scholars to legitimize themselves and their actions, as needed.  A Movement consults and seeks consensus, it looks for the synergy that comes from a collective who may not agree on every point but who embody the heart of where we are going with a deep knowledge and understanding of from where we have come.  Scholars, however, are often early adopters of the prophetic imagination and this, quite simply, makes them dangerous to the Empire.

3) Listen to the Story.  Stanley Hauerwas writes about the effort of modernity as, “the attempt to produce a people who believe that they should have no story except the story that they choose when they had no story.” We have a story but the Empire is a revisionist or a redactor or simply in denial because it suits the Empire to be what is, what was and what is to come.  We need to revisit the work of our storytellers and realize that what we had at the beginning of our story may be because of what we did at the beginning of our story.  We should not think the way forward is through nostalgia or trips down memory lane, these actually serve to reinforce the Empire.  Rather, we need to let our story remind us of the prophetic imagination that once served as catalyst for our Movement and let that be all the permission and authority we need to begin to prophetically imagine what can be.

4) Empower the Imagineers.  Most of us don’t like tension.  But tension is where all the good stuff usually happens. Gather the Imagineers and create time and space where dreamers can dream and sacred cows can be put on the grill for burgers and steaks. Yes, this is scary.  Yes, it may mean uncomfortable change.  Yes, there will be some people who are committed to the Empire and they will threaten to take their toys and leave.  You can’t be a Movement if you’re being held hostage by people who threaten to quit and neither can you be a Movement if you put a gag on the dreamers – overtly or covertly simply by never making space to listen or to act on what comes from them.

Final word goes to Walter Brueggemann, from The Prophetic Imagination, “…every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist.  It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”

What future are you dreaming of?

When Is Your Tribe Not Your Tribe?

About 20 years ago I walked into my first Vineyard Church meeting.  My story is like the story of many others who did the very same thing and suddenly realized, “This is my tribe! These are my people!”

My own journey with God had taken me from a Cessationist movement and into a desert where my faith was deconstructed.  It turned out that my desert was in an ocean all along and God was engaging me in a process of formation that continues until the Last day. But I’ve enjoyed this feeling for two decades – I am part of a Tribe that gets me, that connects with God the way I connect with God, that lets God define himself rather than the boxes we build for him.

As I have lived and grown and been changed, I’ve found my Tribe within the Tribe: the Vineyard Scholars.  From a certain perspective, I might be a scholar.  I am not a theologian, but I do love theology. But what makes this Tribe within the Tribe dear to me is that, in hanging around them, reading them and engaging with them in conversation, I feel at home in both my head and my heart. This group is a grace from God to me.  They make me feel sane, they challenge me, they remind me what I have always loved about the Vineyard from the very first day I walked into my very first Vineyard Church meeting.

But lately I feel I am standing at a crossroads. I feel like I am standing at the center of an X where trajectories would appear to offer alternate futures from this time and place we’ve been sharing together. I love my Vineyard Tribe, but the question I contemplate a lot is this: what happens when your Tribe stops behaving like your Tribe?

From my perspective there are 4 Vineyards within the Vineyard today.  Let’s call one “Vineyard Classic.”  That’s the Vineyard that Carol Wimber gathered in her living room and connected with God in worship using 3 chords and a lot of hunger.  I’d call number two “Vineyard lite”, we maintain our continuity with our history but we’ve pursued legitimacy and reputation over our values.  We’re much more about church growth than we are about Kingdom theology.  The 3^rd version I see on the go and growing is “Baptiyard,” a strange Baptist/Vineyard hybrid that references the Holy Spirit, teaches on the Holy Spirit but utilizes the Spirit as a tool and more likely to listen to experts on “exponential attendance growth” than waiting on the Holy Spirit. This group is invested in a primary goal, being a new mega-church (or at least a mini-mega-church). Finally, the 4^th stream that flows is what I would call “Bethyard,” another hybrid, this one a mix of Bethel and the Vineyard.  There have always been some in the Vineyard who want more, more experiences of the “glory cloud/gold dust/angel feathers/stick quarters to the wall” stuff.  Who believe “everyone gets to play” but seem to think one or two of us are better at playing than the others. In the Vineyard we have embraced the Already and Not Yet of the Kingdom of God: an enacted inaugurated eschatology.  The Bethyard folks have simply concluded that in the Vineyard we’ve emphasized the “not yet” too much and they, like Bethel, prefer a realized eschatology and land heavily on the “already.” The trouble, of course, for the Bethyard folks is this – what do they do when a Bethel gets planted nearby? Why will people stick around for the hybrid when they could have the real thing?

Back to me. (…cause, y’know, it’s all about me…)

Seeing this all play out around me, like a stranger in a strange land, has me contemplating these days, wondering what happens when my Tribe doesn’t feel or behave like my Tribe anymore? These are probably the growing pains of any movement, we are young at this in the Vineyard. But for sure, some of us have already decided to take our stuff and go elsewhere.  And a recent letter let us know that some Vineyards haven’t been contributing their 3% and if it that doesn’t change by October, they will be presumed dead (my expression, not the Vineyards). Can a relational movement, as I have perceived it, survive when consultation and conversation is replaced by position papers and mass emails?  Or were we never a relational movement and I’m simply deluded?

In May, I participated in a two-day workshop hosted by my regional leaders and led by Derek Morphew. It was brilliant and I was reminded by both the content and the participants why Vineyard is my Tribe. But for me it was also bittersweet as my perception is that the content that focused on Mark and Kingdom theology is becoming an ever quieted voice within our Tribe and the values that pulled us all together with Jesus at the center, is becoming something other than what it once was.  We all grow, we all change, life is a process and this is not an ode to the good old days. This is just me, a little voice out on the edge that feels deeply indebted to my Tribe, deeply appreciative for who I perceive we are, but I am feeling increasingly doubtful that when I show up for the next reunion the Tribe I once discovered will be the Tribe I will find.