StretchyChurch

I’ve finally started making new videos! And I’m having so much fun doing it!

I uploaded my two newest videos to YouTube and have embedded them here. The first one is the song, I’ve Always Loved You, by Third Day. We used this video to open our Ash Wednesday Service, and it set the tone beautifully for that service.

The second one is the song, Breathe Deep (the Breath of God), by Lost Dogs. We’ll be opening the service this Sunday with this video. I’ve posted some thoughts on this song in an earlier post called “Breathe Deep the Breath of God.” (Apparently the video I’d embedded in that post has disappeared. No matter. You can enjoy the video in this post; it’s much better anyway! Heh heh…)

Anyway, here are the videos….

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.”

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

So it begins!!

Today was my first full day of class for my Doctor of Ministry in Missional Leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary with Alan Roxburgh and Mark Lau Branson. And so far I love it!

What I love most so far is the cohort aspect. That is, we meet and interact with the same group of students for the entire four years of the program. It creates a great sense of camaraderie. And I love that, while we all come from very different contexts, we’re all wrestling with the questions of what it means to be the church in our world today.

Alan Roxburgh and Mark Lau Branson are terrific, as well. We got together for dinner last night and a time to introduce ourselves to the rest of the cohort. Today we reflected on and discussed the reading we’ve been doing so far–what gave us insight, what motivated us, and what questions we still have.

But the best part, I have to admit, was our time dwelling in the Scriptures first thing in the morning. Roxburgh said that this was not simply a devotional time that we do before we get down to the work of the class–this time of indwelling is part of our work. Our time in the Scriptures informs and shapes our discussions and our learning this week.

So for half an hour we went off and simply reflected on Psalm 1 (a Psalm written, surprisingly, during the Babylonian Exile–which adds a much deeper layer of meaning when we understand it in that context). Then we came back together to discuss our thoughts and reflections with the rest of the group.

I can tell this is gonna be a great week! Not only in terms of being with the rest of the cohort, but in terms of the learning. I think that my thinking is going to be significantly challenged.

I find myself somewhat stuck in my need for a program or model of ministry to follow in order to make our church successful. But a missional approach doesn’t provide a model. What does it provide? As Roxburgh puts it, it provides a space for discovering God’s mission in the world–or something along those lines.

Part of the challenge is the “fuzziness” of missional. While the idea of missional doesn’t lend itself well to definitions, explanations, or models of ministry, it does open the possibility to discover God in the mystery–to let God be God and do what God is doing without us fourcing our programs on his working.

Anyway… I hope that makes sense. In any case, it’s gonna be a great week!! I’ll keep you posted.