Joining the Team [excerpt]

All institutions begin as some sort of movement or local effort. People believe in something or see a need and organize to make it happen. There is a common goal and mutual understanding. Often, in the terminology of 20th-century sociologist Herbert Blumer, there is then formalization and institutionalization. Movements become institutions in order to improve efficiency, secure funding, centralize leadership, etc.

However, over time, if people do not remain as active participants, or if later generations are not educated about the essence and purpose, they eventually disassociate themselves from the institution of which they were once a collaborative part. That which was once the work of the people becomes seen as a separate entity apart from the people, and sometimes even the bane of the people.

That’s an oversimplified version of how, for example, what started with the Hague Congress eventually became Brexit.

It’s also how a pledge of “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” and a Constitution for a new government, eventually became the wave of “don’t tread on me” hyper-individualism that we see today.

There is a lot of fear and anger, as well as dissatisfaction with the status quo. A lot about it is justified or understandable. But I fear it’s causing us to shoot ourselves in the foot... [read the full article at Baptist News Global]

Going to Bat [excerpt]

© 2006 Juan Antonio F. Segal +1 million views, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio

Many people have gone through life with few people who will go to bat for them. This is where we begin to see that there is more to being “down and out” than having run out of money.

Compassion International has tried to communicate this with its poverty wheel illustration. On a bicycle wheel, there are many spokes that hold the wheel together. The more spokes that are missing, the less the wheel is able to function. Material wealth is obviously one of the factors, but it is intertwined with many others.

There is an environmental spoke, for instance. If you live in an area without access to clean water, with high air pollution, or with no nearby healthcare, you are sick more often and spend more of your time, money and resources on that...

...But I believe one of the most crucial factors is the social aspect. From what I have seen, a strong social network of family, friends and professional connections is the one variable that can most significantly help people weather crises in other areas.

Only when people have your back are you able to look ahead...[read more at Baptist News Global]

To such as these [excerpt]

They were all dressed up in flashy tie-dye and other clothes from the “hippie era.” I had forgotten that the music program this year was a tribute to oldies and songs by the likes of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles...

This elementary school is very ethnically diverse. It is also a school with dual-language classes in which the students learn in both English and Spanish. There on the stage was a beautiful kaleidoscope of faces: white, black, Latino, Indian, Asian, even a few Spaniards. Every day they learn together, eat together, and play together. Now here they were on the risers belting it out as one group...

The contrast between the sight and sound of these children and the state of the adult world is just mind-boggling...[read more at Baptist News Global]

The serendipity of ministry opportunities

© 2014 sabin paul croce, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio

In Aurora, CO, church planter Reid Hettich ended up partnering with another non-profit and forming a new LLC called the Dayton Street Opportunity Center, which has a new building in an impoverished Aurora neighborhood and offers health care job training, ESL and immigration services, and several other community development ministries...oh, and a worshiping church!

In Topeka, KS, the local Rescue Mission, a church, a former crime prevention coordinator, a social worker, and several others all ended up descending on the city's poorest neighborhood where a school had just closed down. They ended up forming a new organization called NETReach that operates out of the closed down school. They are working with the neighbors to develop this neighborhood, which includes a comprehensive mentoring program that prepares and then pairs willing residents with a team of mentors who seek to encourage them, pray with them, and connect them with community resources that were previously out of their reach.

These are just two examples I've heard over the years of churches and Christian ministries finding some amazing opportunities and engaging in trailblazing ministry partnerships. Every time I hear such stories, I often first respond by asking myself, "How in the world did they do that?! How did they think of it? How did they make it happen."

Well, come to find out, no one could have ever planned these things. Instead, they honestly seem to come about as a result of God working in surprising ways in the midst of people who had sufficiently opened themselves up to such opportunities. To put it another way, most great ministries do not begin with an idea or a plan but with people creating the conditions in which such ideas and plans can emerge.

This came up as I led discussions about community partnerships during the 2015 Mission Summit of American Baptist Churches - USA. The theme I latched onto in one group conversation was the serendipitous nature of these opportunities. Several in the group have seen great partnerships develop that no one ever expected and that no one could have forced, but came about because 1) pastors and congregants were intentionally present in their community, 2) were open to innovation, and 3) had their antennas up for where the Holy Spirit was working. One pastor shared this story:

A person in the community had committed suicide. When this happened, the police dispatcher actually called the pastor because she had been at a meeting with him where he had read a poem about death that was meaningful to her. "You should go over there because you're the death expert," she said. After ministering to this family and coming to understand the circumstances they had faced, the pastor ended up writing a letter to the paper about a need to more directly address issues of mental illness and substance abuse in the community. As a result of that letter, people started contacting him about a task force. They brought together many different stakeholders, knowledgeable experts, and community leaders. They decided to launch a cross-sector, community-wide initiative. When word got around of the new initiative, a friend of the grieving family to whom the pastor had ministered approached him and offered to fund it for the first few years.

They couldn't have planned that. They DIDN'T plan that. But it can be traced to a Christian leader who was intentionally present to his community and had his antennas up for where the Holy Spirit was working.

I"m reminded of Joseph Myer's book Organic Community where he differentiates two types of approaches in leadership: the master plan mentality vs. an organic order mentality. He writes, "Master plans intend to control the future. Master plans provide specific answers to future questions that may not have been asked yet...A master plan does not allow for flexibility, uncertainty, or serendipity--ingredients of the aha moment...Organic order, on the other hand, presents a language of possibilities."

A lot of people say, "God works in mysterious ways" and that "all things are possible." But I've seen how opportunities come about most powerfully for people who doggedly believe that.

Avoid Thy Neighbor? [excerpt]

© 2010 opensource.com, Flickr | CC-BY-SA | via Wylio

Occasionally, someone will ask a question about what to do about this or that person walking down the sidewalk. The community officer asks, “Have you ever said hello?” Basic friendliness is such a novel idea. But the officer has tried to emphasize that speaking to people you don’t recognize can deter criminals because it shows your ownership in the neighborhood. “Well, no,” comes the response, “I just didn’t think he belonged here.”

While the community officer always encourages the neighbors to call him when they have a concern, they sometimes get these calls of “general suspicion” and he has to explain that one needs a substantive reason for asking an officer to make contact with someone.

In a TED Talk, longtime Baltimore police officer Melvin Russell lamented similar experiences:

There is no way in the world that we, as a community, should be calling the police for kids playing ball in the street. No way in the world that we should be calling the police because my neighbor’s music is up too loud, because his dog came over to my yard and did a number two. We have surrendered so much of our responsibility.

In other words, people just avoid each other anymore and don’t have enough of a relationship with their neighbors that they could comfortably go talk to them about a minor problem.

[Read the full article at Baptist News Global]

A Little Conformity Might Do Us Good

These days, and among younger generations, one of the worst insults you could heap upon someone is to call them a "conformist."  This is the age of individuality, being your own person, and not caring what other people think of you.  Becoming one's own unique person is the goal, and any hint that you are borrowing identity or beliefs is an insult.

Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of the non-conformist culture is in the realm of religion.  For more and more people, it is a sign of weakness and conformity to be involved in organized religion or to claim a traditional, already established religion as one's own.  Instead, in order to be a unique individual, people create a hodge-podge of beliefs, coming up with a new name for what they believe, or they may even start their own religion.

There's one big problem with the idea that we choose our own path, think for ourselves, and find our own beliefs: It's not true.

The fact of the matter is that our context, relationships, and experiences have a huge influence on us, almost to the point of being determinative.  Sociologists have known this for a while; the rest of us have missed it. Sociologist Inagrace Dietterich once wrote,

"The modern emphasis on the autonomous self too often ignores, or even denies, the formative power of the various communities in which we participate.  We assume that our "habits of the heart" - the notions, opinions, commitments, and desires that motivate, order and guide our lives - are chosen and formed in isolation from other human beings and social realities....[But] the question is not whether we will be socialized, but what kind of society will have its way with us."  

As the old (and biblical) saying goes, "There is nothing new under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 1:9).  Any time we "think for ourselves," we are merely processing knowledge, data and thoughts that have been passed onto us by someone else.  (It's kind of like making a recipe: the result might look unique and impressive, but it's really just age old ingredients prepared in a certain way). As we age and "become our own person," we are often merely becoming an adult version of our younger self and we still live and repeat the same patterns we learned there. Couples who do counseling with me are often shocked by the connections I'm able to make between their behavior patterns in their family of origin and the current relationship.

Similarly, any time we become our own "spiritual individual," we are merely rearranging what's been passed down to us and what we've been exposed to.  Everything is borrowed.  If we come up with something that's new to us, it is just that: new to us, but trust me, it has been thought of before, and we were only able to think it because of what we have gleaned from others.  I would argue that "free thinking," as the term is used in our culture, is not possible.  We all operate within what Peter Berger called "plausibility structures."

In a Christian Century article dated Sept 1, 2011, Lillian Daniel wrote a masterful piece about this phenomenon of people saying they're "spiritual, but not religious" and rejecting anything that seems to be "organized religion."  He talks about a man who came into his office to announce his departure from the church and that he had come up with his own beliefs:  Daniel writes, "He dumped this news in my lap as if it were a controversial hot potato, something shocking to a minister who had never been exposed to ideas so brave.  Of course, this well-meaning Sunday jogger fits right in to mainstream American culture. He is perhaps by now a part of the majority."

Daniel goes on to say something that rings very true with my own experience:

"If we made a church for all these spiritual-but-not-religious people, if we got them all together to talk about their beliefs and their incredibly unique personal religions, they might find out that most of America agrees with them. But they'll never find that out, because getting them all together would be way too much like church. And they are far too busy being original to discover that they are not."

There is truth to the tongue-in-cheek quip that non-conformists are all alike. Sure, they might have a few personal tweaks here and there and motives that are genuine, but it's all taken from the same ingredients, and if you have your "own religion" or you have rejected religion all together, you are no less influenced by your context than I am. Your influences have just been different. I remember as a teenager getting a kick out of the so-called "goth" dress that some of my fellow students were donning. When asked, most of them would tell you that they are dressing that way in order to assert their individuality. I'm not ridiculing them, but it was always amazing how similar they all looked.

There's an important distinction to be made between "default" and "choice" when it comes to people's beliefs.  For example, there's a big difference between an atheist by default and an atheist by choice.  A default atheist is someone who was perhaps raised in a non-religious home where God was never discussed, so even though they might often hear people speak of God and faith, it's just not part of their contextual framework.  An atheist by choice, on the other hand, is someone who - regardless of their background - has critically engaged the question of religion and belief and made a decision to be an atheist (though often in opposition to a default religious context).  But due to our culture of individuality and non-conformity, people often end up rejecting their default belief system simply because it's the default, not out of careful consideration. It's important to own our beliefs. Contrary to the attitude of Christian apologists who try to beef up our young people with ready answers to the intellectual challenges they'll face in college, it is quite healthy and necessary for people to go through a period of disillusionment and questioning with respect to their default belief system. This can and should happen. But there seems to be this idea today that we're supposed to leave our default belief system behind, whatever it happens to be.  If we don't, we're being submissive conformists.  I've seen people leave Christianity simply because it was their "default"--what they were raised in--and they don't see a way to move from default to choice without also moving to another religion (or none at all).  Like many young adults, I've also made the journey from default to choice. It involved much questioning, doubt and anxiety. But for me, it did not involve leaving the faith I was raised in altogether, nor did it have to.

I applaud the way today's cultural trends have heightened our awareness of a bad type of conformity; that is, mindless submission. But I think we've lost the value of another kind of "conformity."  The good kind.  I think the valuable truth we're missing in this hyper-individualistic culture is that we were made for community, and that our faith journey finds fulfillment and meaningful expression in the context of community.

This false idea of the autonomous individual can be found just as strongly present in the church as outside it. You hear it in Christian theology through phrases like "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" (a phrase found nowhere in the Bible). We see it in the way the church is treated like a dispenser of religious goods and services rather than a collaborative effort in faith formation. We've totally lost the communal aspect of faith development and even salvation. That's why Christians today are confused when we read verses like Acts 11:14 or Acts 16:31 that talk about whole households being collectively saved.  In fact, the Bible is chock-full of examples of God relating to, teaching, and shaping people in the context of a community or people group. Whenever God did relate specially to an individual, it was for an eventual communal purpose. Churches have strayed a very far distance from the early church as described in Acts 2:42-47 and Acts 4:32-35, so much so that groups of Christians who do operate as the early church is described are often not referred to or thought of as a church.

When we see ourselves as totally autonomous individuals and act as competing, individual kingdoms, nothing gets done. This is why ministry (and other things that involve working with volunteers) feels so much like herding cats these days. We need to experience conformity again, in its good sense.  Modernity and the focus on the individual were not a completely bad thing; to be sure. It heightened our awareness of personal rights and freedoms and that we should never force people to do something. However, it has gone way too far, and it's time to reclaim and live in awareness of our mutual dependency.  It requires putting some personal preferences aside and holding our beliefs tentatively, and many are not willing to do that.  But it's community where we "spur each other on toward love and good deeds" (Heb 10:24-25). It's where we learn the value of mutual submission (Eph 5:21). It's where we seek and find truth.  It's where we bring together our gifts and talents to accomplish more than we ever could on our own (Romans 12:4-5). Jesus prayed that all believers would be "one" (John 17:20-21).

In short, I think a little more "conformity" might do us some good.

Two or Three (a parable)

A young and vocationally successful young man named Zete was relocated to a different state. As he worked to pick up, move, and settle in a new home, one of his first priorities was to find a "worshipful" church. He had grown up in church and had made the faith his own, and so he quickly began asking around for recommendations. He searched online and jotted down information about several churches, one in particular that he really wanted to visit. But several people he talked to told him he should seek the advice of a woman named Konia, thought by many to be the wisest and most faithful Christian they had met. So Zete sought her out.

Konia insisted that Zete come to her house. He arrived and knocked on her door. As soon as the door opened and Zete first saw Konia's warm smile and outstretched hand, he surprised himself by how he felt so immediately at home. Her welcome was not one of usual formalities and plastered smiles, but she instead had a demeanor such that Zete felt like he was walking into his own home. Konia offered him food and drink, sat down, and begin to ask him questions. Not the normal questions like "What do you do?" or "Where are you from?" but questions that invited Zete to reflect on his life, who he was, his hopes and his dreams. He couldn't remember the last conversation he had where the focus seemed to be totally on him, and he felt a strange combination of uneasiness and vulnerability along with peace and safety. After Konia asked Zete what his troubles are and how she can pray for him, the two even shared some time in prayer together and sang a few of Zete's favorite songs. As this time passed, Zete's eyes scanned her house from time to time, a house filled with pictures, memorabilia and many other trinkets that seemed like gifts. He found it odd that he couldn't find any picture that Konia herself was in. He also noticed that she hardly had anything else in the house - just the bare necessities, really.

As the conversation drew on, Zete told Konia of his desire to find a "worshipful" church here in his new home. With an enthusiastic smile, Konia put her cup down, leaned forward and said, "I would be delighted to take you around to see some of the most amazing places of worship I know."

"Wonderful!" Zete said excitedly. "By the way, I researched some churches, and there is one that I would really love to go to. It had an impressive website with many programs; it's the one on the far edge of town."

"Oh yes, I know the one," Konia said. "But I'm not sure it's what you're looking for. If you're sure you want to go there, we should probably go there last."

The next day, Zete and Konia drove up to a housing development on another side of town.

"I've participated in some amazing worship here," Konia said.

At first, Zete said, "Where is the church building?"

Konia looked as if she was expecting the question and asked, "Remember, Jesus said, 'Wherever two or three are gathered in my name..."

"'...there I am also.'" Zete, being a veteran church-goer and knowledgeable about the Bible, finished the verse for her and felt a little put to shame by not remembering it in the moment.

"Right!" Konia said. "So let's go and meet them."

Konia took Zete in to meet a very kind and enthusiastic Latino community. As they talked and as he saw the community worship together, Zete couldn't help but think of the passage about the early church from Acts 2:42-47. As a group they gathered for teaching, prayer, and the "breaking of bread." They were together with much in common, they met in their homes, and they shared with those in need. They seemed to know each other intimately. But joy quickly turned to tears when they spoke of their family. They spoke with longing about spouses, children, and cousins who had been separated from them, how they longed to see them again, and how they worried for their safety. As they all spent a few hours together, Zete felt very different from them but at the same time felt very at home.

As they left the community, Konia asked Zete, "What did you think?"

"Well," said Zete, "they are obviously very godly people, but it just doesn't seem quite right. It's not like the kind of 'church' I'm used to. I would still love to visit that one church in town."

"OK," said Konia, "but I'm not sure it's what you're looking for. Let me take you at least one other place first. We will have to go on Saturday."

So, on that Saturday, Konia took Zete to a building downtown that seemed fairly old and had no signage on the outside. Curious, Zete followed Konia inside to what he could only surmise was some kind of Christian gathering of troubled teens. Zete hadn't felt this uncomfortable in a while, but could also sense that his presence was welcome and even appreciated by some there. This group had it all: the alcohol-addicted boy who was still hungover for this meeting, the pregnant teenage girl whose mother still raged with anger, the abandoned twins living with a distant relative, and the boy who had been arrested several times for violent behavior. As they began to talk, share successes and failures, and encourage each other, it felt to Zete that the group was picking up where they left off in a conversation that had been going on a long time. They knew each other intimately. Their time together, led by a few volunteer adults, included intense moments of crying, praying, shouting, singing, and sometimes utter silence.

As they left, Konia asked Zete, "What did you think?"

"Well," said Zete, "as powerful as that experience was, it's not like the kind of 'church' I'm used to. I would still love to visit that one church in town."

Uncharacteristically, Konia's face fell somewhat as she said, "Yes. If you insist. There is a service this evening if you would like to go."

"Yes, please, " Zete said, "I'm very anxious to visit it based on what I've seen."

So that night, Konia took Zete to the church he had been wanting to visit. And what a place it was! Zete was not disappointed, and it was even better than he thought. This church truly brought him back to what he was used to growing up, and it felt so much more in his comfort zone. He was blown away by the music. Several groups performed as the people sat looking forward and listening, each one at top notch quality, and all were followed by applause. At other times, all the people raised their hands and voices in praise. The pastor was an incredibly dynamic speaker that captivated everyone's attention with his style, visuals, and illustrations. When the sermon was over, Zete found himself wishing he could listen to more. Zete and Konia joined the others as everyone walked back out to their cars.

"Wow," Zete said. "I'm so glad we visited this church! I had a great time! Too bad I didn't get to meet anyone..."

"Yes, that is too bad." Konia said.

Zete could tell that Konia did not seem to share his feelings about this church. "What's wrong?" he asked. "You know, I sought you out because I was told that you were the wisest and most faithful Christian around. You helped me remember what Jesus said about 2 or 3 gathering in His name. Here at this church, there seems to be plenty of people, and it was an amazing experience for everyone!"

Konia looked up at Zete. "Yes," she said. "But you see, that was not a gathering of two or three. It was a crowd of ones."