StretchyChurch

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.

Last weekend was kinda stormy (for Southern California). That meant lots of rain where we live, but it meant huge waves out in the ocean. Check out this article about some surfers who rode some 80-foot+ waves! Not something I’d ever try… Give me a nice 3 or 4 footer and I’m happy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/09/sports/othersports/09surf.html\?ref=sports

More great stuff today! To be honest, though, there’s no way I can really communicate everything I’m learning. So in these updates I’m just giving a small taste of what we’re covering.

Today we talked a lot about the Missional Change Model (primarily the model found on page 83 of The Missional Leader) which says, first of all, that change never happens in a straight line. First we move this way a little bit, then that way, then this way, then another way altogether until we finally reach a destination (although, to be perfectly honest, we never really reach a final destination–we’re always moving through change).

In a nutshell, these are the five stages of change:

1. Awareness - Begin where people are at this moment and help them become aware of where they are, what the reality of the situation is. This involves a lot of listening–listening to people’s stories and helping them to know the story in which they are living.
2. Understanding - This is an ongoing process of listening and reflecting. People begin to better understand where they are and begin to think about the implications of that.
3. Evaluation - The congregation examines current actions, attitudes, and values in light of new understanding. What does what we now know say about who we are as God’s people, as a community at this time?
4. Experiment - Risk some change. People are afraid of failure. As a result, churches generally create environments in which failure doesn’t happen. We need to create an environment in which it’s ok to fail. We also need to relieve people’s anxiety by letting them know we’re not changing things, we’re just experimenting.
5. Commit - Sign on to new ways of being church. Notice it’s not a commitment to doing new things, it’s a commitment to a new way of being.

We also spent a lot of time on the Pastor/Leader Survey that we were to have filled out by people in our churches, colleagues, etc. last fall. I, however, didn’t do this survey. The professors told me to wait a year until I’ve been at my church for longer than just a few months. That way people will better be able to gauge my leadership in this church.

In the evening the whole class went to see Atonement. Pretty cool movie. I thought it was going to be a chick flick. Not so. It was a love story, but it definitely wasn’t Runaway Bride.

All in all, another really good day….

Another great day of learning today! We talked mostly about frameworks, defined as a socially constructed way of reading and understanding the world (emphasis on the word “constructed”). In other words, we generally take for granted how we see the world. But how we see it and understand it is based on a perspective that has been constructed by our history, traditons, etc., etc…

The most interesting discussion had to do with strategic planning. The point that Roxburgh made was not that strategic planning is bad (he said, “Every time I get on a plane I thank God for strategic planning”), but that it’s bad when the church does it. The problem is that strategic planning basically objectifies the people God calls us to reach (”a narrative of objectification”) and assumes a certain “preferred future” (more members, more programming, better music, more diversity, etc.) without actually doing the necessary theological reflection needed to discern the initiatives of God.

Tomorrow we begin talking about what churches can do–the Missional Change Model.