StretchyChurch

A friend of mine–Kevin Womack at Fletcher Hills Presbyterian Church–just sent me this link about National Community Church in Washington, D.C. Mark Batterson is the pastor there and does some pretty creative stuff.

Since he was going to be gone one weekend, Mark did his sermon on video for that weekend. But instead of just standing in front of the camera talking, Mark did his sermon from all over the city. What a dynamic way of communicating a message, especially considering our culture and today’s younger generations!

Click here to see the video. On this page, click on “Watch Now” under the sermon “How To Manage Finances.”

This is hilarious! I just discovered this website with inflatable churches! These people have taken the concept of a “stretchychurch” to a whole new level!!

Check out the site here. And here are a couple of pictures:

I just found two great posts at the PGF Outbox.

The first one deals with the advantages a small congregation has in making a missional transition; click here for that article.

The second one tells the story of how Solana Beach Presbyterian Church (a large church here in San Diego) is using their small group ministry to begin making the missional transition; click here for that article.

Good stuff.

Woohoo! Check out the trailer for The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian! Click here!

A friend of mine sent me this link. It’s a spoof on the popular Mac commercials with “Relevant Church” having a conversation with “Sacred Cow.” Pretty funny! Check it out here.

Before I get to Cloverfield, I just want to mention that today has been a pretty good day so far–and it’s only 3:00 p.m.! This was my first Sunday back at church after a week of vacation and a week of study leave, and I was honestly really glad to be back. We had one combined service today (which was nice for me) followed by our annual Congregational Meeting.

This was my first time moderating a congregational meeting–and I think it showed! I had a lot of help from people in the congregation (the long-time members) reminding me of some of the things that had to happen–like declaring a quorum, appointing a clerk, etc. But it was all in all a good meeting. We talked a bit about our Appreciative Inquiry process (which we’re calling Positive Storytelling), and after opening up the floor for questions a lot of folks who have already done the AI interviews shared what a great experience it was! I was really excited to hear them share that!

After the meeting, I got a compliment from someone (although I’m not 100% sure it was intended as a compliment). A lady said to me, “I think that was the least Presbyterian congregational meeting I’ve ever been to.” I smiled and said, “Well, to someone like me, that’s not really a bad thing…”

So, I left feeling pretty good about the morning. Robin took the kids to see her brother and parents this morning, so I have the afternoon off. I headed to Panera to do some reading for class and suddenly realized, “Hey, I could go see a movie!” (something parents of young children rarely have the opportunity to do…)

So I popped into the theater just in time to see the 12:45 showing of Cloverfield.

It was a pretty fun movie, though rather simplistic. I can see the filmmakers working on the idea: “What if we make a giant-monster -destroys-the-city movie, but told it from the perspective of someone actually experiencing it with a video camera?”

The movie used every familiar giant monster sci-fi movie convention we know. In a sense, in order to understand this movie a person has to understand the conventions of 20th century sci-fi monster flicks. The only way to understand what was going on in this movie was to know what happens when a giant reptilian alien attacks New York city: it destroys buildings (a la King Kong, Godzilla, and one of my favorite 1980’s video games, Rampage). And how does this giant creature take control? Its offspring lays eggs inside human beings to multiply.

But this is never explained in the movie. One of the characters is bit by one of the spiderlike offspring of the giant creature and a few minutes later she explodes (all we see is the silhouette inside a tent). We’re never told what happens (we don’t even see the alien come out), but we all know that the alien spiders laid parasite eggs inside her that grew into full-grown alien spiders whose only way of escaping their host was to burst out of her abdomen (think John Hurt in Alien; here’s a picture).

Everything in the movie is predictable. But I think that’s kind of the point. The movie is essentially an experiment in telling a story that everyone already knows, but from one average Joe’s perspective.

And the movie ends without any answers. What was that creature? Was it from outer space? From 20,000 leagues under the sea? What happened to New York? Did they kill the creature? Did they save the city? The point is, the answers to those questions don’t really matter. We all know how the story ends because we’ve already seen it a hundred times.

Anyway, while it wasn’t the greatest movie I’ve ever seen, it was a pretty fun movie. And I’m just happy I got to see a movie in the theater for a change!

Crazy… Click here.

Not sure I’d want one, though…

Here’s a picture of the Missional Leadership Model that I discuss in this post (from page 41 of The Missional Leader). I told you I’d get it to you! Thanks to Tom for e-mailing it to me.

It seems these past few days that everything I do and see passes through the filter of everything we talked about in my D.Min. class last week (by the way, I never got a chance to report on Day 5, but there wasn’t much to say–mostly just talked about completing our final paper for the class).

So we went to Sea World with this afternoon and had a great time. The Clyde and Seymore (seal and sea lion) show was funny. The Pets Rule show was impressive. And the Shamu show… well, it made me want to trust Shamu as my personal savior! (Or something like that…)

Let me back up just a little. If I had to summarize what our professors want from us this first year of the D.Min. program, it’s that we learn to see the world “from the balcony.” In other words, we’re to get outside of ourselves–get a top down view on our culture, our church, our denomination, our assumptions, our beliefs.

And what I’m finding when I do this is that we all live within certain stories. As Americans, for instance, a huge part of our national story involves heroes (George Washington, Abraham Lincoln) and battles for freedom (Revolutionary War, Civil War). So it seems natural to us when, just before the Shamu show, the trainer honors our military heroes who are fighting for our freedom. Don’t misunderstand me–there’s nothing wrong with that. But the reason we as Americans value that is because it’s part of the story we live in. (Canadians, as I understand it, for example, don’t have the same values because they live in a different story. They don’t have heroes or fights for freedom in their story because Canada emerged as an independent nation in a way very different from the United States.)

Anyway, finally the Shamu show starts and the theme for the show is–”Believe!” Sounds very Disney to me…

The show was almost like a worship service. Beautiful music. Inspiring. Engaging images on the screens. And the message that when we believe we can accomplish anything. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I got a little misty-eyed a few times. And if Shamu had offered an altar call, I would have been the first one up there! (Okay, maybe not the first–but one of the first 50…)

So then I thought to myself, “Wow! The Christian story is still running through Americans’ blood!” Except that now we channel that desire to believe into things like Shamu or Mickey Mouse (I remember hearing the story of a mother who told her child at Disneyland, “Don’t worry, dear. If you get lost, Mickey will protect you.”).

So, now I have to ask the “balcony” questions. What does this mean? Is this the new American experience of spirituality? Does this reflect a longing inside people to connect with something bigger than themselves? Or is it just a therapeutic way of making us feel good about ourselves?

And what can the church learn from this? If we mimic what Sea World does with the Shamu show, are we being effective evangelists because we’re connecting with our culture, or are we becoming captive to something outside God’s plan.

I don’t know the answers to these questions. I’m not even sure these are the right questions to be asking. Let me know if you have any thoughts on this.

Today we continued to talk about Roxburgh’s Missional Change Model (found on page 41 of The Missional Leader). I tried to find an image of the model on the internet, but no such luck. I’ll do my best to describe it. Keep in mind that this is only a model and doesn’t necessarily describe (nor prescribe) what every church experiences.

Generally, however, a church will begin in the “Green Zone” in which new actions bring about new and exciting life. As the church grows it moves into the “Blue Zone” where it begins to add structure to the growing congregation. This is not a bad thing; in fact, it’s necessary in order to maintain growth. Effective and efficient performative skills are important in this zone.

At some point, however, the church will begin to plateau and cease to be creative. The structures in place are important, and in order to regain growth, a church will implement rules and regulations to try to control what is happening. Eventually, the church will reach a crisis. All this is the “Red Zone”.

The crisis, however, is not necessarily an event. It is a recognition that what we’ve been doing is no longer working–we must do something different. After the crisis, the church moves into a time of confusion–what do we do now?

This is a very important phase. I think that my church is probably in the confusion stage right now. We’re not quite sure how to handle the realization that the way we’ve always done church is no longer working.

Here’s the weird thing. You have to stay in this confusion stage for a while in order to successfully move into the next stage. Living in the confusion–dealing with it, wrestling with it–is critical. We have to deeply examine ourselves, talk with each other, listen to one another before we can permanently and effectively leave this time of confusion.

Eventually, the church can move into the Transition Organization stage (back into the “Blue Zone”). Here the leaders implement some stability while at the same time inviting people into some experiments. And finally, a church can move back into the “Green Zone”–the Emergent Organization stage, which leads again to the New Actions stage where we started.

The model looks like a figure 8 on its side, but I’ll try to put up an image of the model in the near future so you know what I’m talking about.

This model, of course, led to some great discussion in the class and some deep personal reflection for myself.