the drum|rob fairbanks

Prodigal Christianity: 10 Signposts into the Missional Frontier

Over the last couple of months I’ve had the privilege of reading the book “Prodigal Christianity” with a group of my friends here in Spokane. All of them are good thinkers and we had a wonderful time processing the ideas by Dave Fitch and Geoff Holsclaw. 

The book is really an attempt to locate a way forward that is truly prodigal in today's Christianity, a third way if you will. A writing device the authors employed is a cyclical juxtaposition between a Neo-Reform perspective of Christianity (Piper, Keller, et al) and a more “Emergent” version (McLaren and Jones). Honestly, a device I am not entirely thrilled with and I would suspect the authors represented in the book probably were not wild about either. Nonetheless, while looking at both of these poled perspectives they seek to mine out an alternative way for the church to move forward in the undulating social challenges of Western society.

The authors capably lay out a progression of ideas tethered to the idea of Barth’s “Far Country.” They move from a theological orientation or baseline to the more practical issues such as homosexuality and social justice (both chapters are probably worth the price of the book), both I deeply appreciated. They refer to “Signposts” that assist us to navigate both the church and “powder keg” issues we currently face as Christians in the U.S.

As far as full disclosure, I must say that I've appreciated Dave Fitch’s ideas before I read this book (The Great Giveaway) and am a causal acquaintance of both authors. I have great appreciation and admiration for both of them. You can locate both men’s personal blogs at…Fitch - Reclaiming Mission & Holsclaw - Into the Far Country

One of the key elements of the book for me was the nuanced challenge to be present in every situation trusting God is there before us, an idea often called prevenience. I honestly think if each Christian person I know could embrace the idea that they are expounding it would change Christianity. I know that sounds like a stretch, but I truly beleive it. In Signpost #2, the missio Dei, Fitch vulnerably writes about learning how to pray for his neighbors;

"I had in mind that this meant to pray for my friends to somehow see their need for God's forgiveness and that I would have an opportunity to give them the answer: the gospel of being forgiven from sin. The friend challenging me said, 'No, God is already working there, in each person's life. Just pray that you will have eyes to see what God is doing so you can participate with a word, or a prayer, with laughter, or a tear.'  If the Triune God is already in mission, then I need to see the world in which I regularly walk as the arenas of the Spirit – places imbued with the presence of God. This was a fundamental shift. It changed the way I walked into every space of my life. Missio Dei means that God is already at work in our lives and the lives of all around us."

The other bit that I found quite significant about the book is the author's insistence that these issues that all of us face must be worked out in a local context, the local church. All of the jockeying for influence on the net or in celebrity Christianity is doing nothing more than exacerbating the problems that we have. These issues must be worked out with real people, in real time, in a real location. I could not concur more.

In summary, I would recommend this book with great enthusiasm to anyone trying to navigate the nuances of what it means to live life on mission in a postmodern context. Both Fitch and Holsclaw have grasped the idea that being a Christian today isn't about reactivity or in finding yourself in some sort of theological entrenchment, but in moving  into the “far country,” being prodigal in a nonreactive, loving, open…local way.

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How Do Beautful Words Affect Your Life?

Mary Oliver

I am embarking on a summer discipline of reading some poetry every morning in hopes of whetting my appetite for something other than “churchy, missional” stuff. I have never been good at reading anything other than non-fiction. So, in light of that of that goal I asked my good friend and author Shann Ferch to recommend his Michael Jordan of the poetry world.  He immediately suggested Mary Oliver. So far, he was spot on.  Here is just one of many amazing poems from her book Thirst.

The Vast Ocean Begins Just Outside Our Church: The Eucharist

Mary Oliver

Something has happened

to the bread

and the wine.

 

They have been blessed.

What now?

The body leans forward

 

to receive the gift

from the priest's hand,

then the chalice.

 

They are something else now

from what they were

before this began.

 

I want

 to see Jesus,

maybe in the clouds

 

or on the shore,

just walking,

beautiful man

 

and clearly

someone else

besides.

 

On the hard days

I ask myself

if I ever will.

 

Also there are times

my body whispers to me

that I have.

 

The last line somehow served as a tool to exhale my soul a bit.  Beauty, skill and wonder are in each line. 

What role do beautiful words play in your life?

Pete Rollins - Answers and Questions

(A blog I wrote before coming to Europe - a bit late, but better than never)

I got the chance to go to a couple of lectures a couple of weeks ago by Peter Rollins.  His latest book is entitle, Insurrection and has of late caught much of a certain stream of Christianity by storm.

I don’t want to pretend to do a book review.  That is not what this is.  I have read only half of it and it is interesting, but not paradigmal shifting. What I want to do is simply share a few observations from the lectures.  

Before I do, let me say that I am by nature quite cynical and have to battle it everyday, so, I came to the lecture a bit skeptical.  That being said, I was and am committed to listening and thinking through important issues as even-handedly as possible.

First Impression:

Pete Rollins is short. I don’t say that pejoratively (ok, maybe a wee bit), but just a general observation.  You know, when you hear of someone and you create a mental picture of what they might look like.  I guess I was just a wee surprised (notice that I will use “wee” in this post to relate to Peter a wee bit).

Second observation:

Pete Rollins is a master storyteller.  He is VERY entertaining, scattered, but entertaining. I felt like s Ping-Pong ball, and laughing out loud several times (which is hard for me because it is like kryptonite for my cynicism).  A couple of times I literally had to think about something else to keep from going into “outside laughing mode” – you know, the kind that makes everyone else in the room start looking around trying to spot the disturbance and saying under their breath, “What the hell!”

Third observation:

Pete Rollins is self admittedly not a theologian. All of his degrees are in theoretical disciplines.  That being said, he travels into the theological often and, from my humble perspective misses a wee (Ok, I'll stop with the "wee" thing now) too much breadth of thinking. If I would have had more time, I would have wanted to ask him about his view of grace, more about participating in the cucifixtion of Christ (a part of his book - p. 23) and does he actually believe in the historic view of the Rez. 

Fourth observation:

I got the feeling (although, this is conjecture) that his context was overly affecting much of his system.  He is a philosopher/theoretician AND from Belfast.  Much of what he is about is against false religion and if there is anywhere in the world that has unfortunate religious scaffoldings, it is the city he grew up in (Protestant v. Catholic).  All of us are products of our background and environment to be sure, but Belfast is more different than anywhere else I’ve been in the west.  No, seriously!  There is much diversity in the west, but as someone who travels for a living, Belfast ranks as one of the most interesting and acute contexts I’ve had the privilege to visit. From my perspective, the “religion” that those of us in the PNW of the U.S. experience is only a shadow, a glint of what happens in the name of religion in Belfast. I felt like some of his profound reactive points could possibly be tracked back to this context. 

Lastly:

I didn't feel like he was too weird.  I would love to hang out with him. I came in quite guarded, but came away quite connected with his ideas, particularly his existential bit. 

Ok, a 2nd and 3rd lastly (or some odds and ends):

Here is part of a short email interchange that I had with one of our church planters, Steve Hart of Vintage Faith. Steve is a good thinker and I think he captures some other important elements to consider.

Here's my 2 cents: I appreciate Rollins' desire to show how easily we use God as a means to an end, and that God is actually refusing to do that, and that there is a death that happens as we realize that... But the solution is not to then sit in our brokenness with others and extend grace (that we've not received!) to one another. Confessed brokenness does not bring about Redemption. The solution is to look to the God who is actually there, who is actually putting us to death for the sake of resurrection, so that God becomes not a means but an end in himself. Christianity begins not when we come to God to get stuff, but when he shows us the stuff is killing us and that the only thing God offers us is Himself - and that is all we need! God gives peace, joy, life, meaning, etc, but not as a product. He gives it when he gives us Himself.

You can check out a thoughtful/scholarly book review from Jason Clark here: http://theotherjournal.com/churchandpomo/2011/10/31/book-symposium-peter-rollinss-insurrection-2/

If you have read his book or heard Pete lecture, what are your thoughts? 

Is he in "left field" (heretic) or is he offering a helpful corrective to many of the cultural co-opting’s that exist in the western church? 

Rob Bell is NOT a Universalist (and I actually read “Love Wins”)

On the basis of a publisher’s promotional paragraph and an advertising video in which Rob Bell questions someone’s certainty that Ghandi is in hell, Justin Taylor sounded the web-wide alarm that Rob Bell’s forthcoming book Love Wins espouses universalism (the doctrine that everyone will eventually be saved). Though he too had not yet read the book, John Piper followed up with a puzzling melodramatic tweet bidding Rob Bell “Farewell“. An avalanche of tweets ensued — all (so far as I could discern) by people who had not read Bell’s forthcoming book — to the point that this yet-unpublished book became one of the top ten tweeted topics. (If this was planned by HarperCollins, the publisher of Love Wins, it was brilliant!!!)

via www.gregboyd.org

Ok, in poking around I found this post by my friend Greg Boyd. He has actually read the book. :)

Rob Bell and Love Wins

Here is what I have to say about Rob Bell's latest book...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the love of God and all that is holy, stop it.  It is simply amazing how many people have piled on about this book before they have actually read it...soley based upon the video promo.  I guess the trailer did what it was supposed to do - piqued interest.  I will pick it up at some point and maybe, perhaps comment, but this firestorm is crazy.

Essential theology books of the past 25 years | The Christian Century

via www.christiancentury.org

I thought this was an interesting piece entitled, "Essential theology books of the past 25 years," from The Christian Century.

If you were to give your top 3-5 theological books, what would they be?  Take a look at the ones suggested here and then share your top ones!

The Holy Spirit and the Task of the Church

 God doesn’t give people the Holy Spirit in order to let them enjoy the spiritual equivalent of a day at Disneyland. Of course, if you’re downcast and gloomy, the fresh wind of God’s Spirit can and often does give you a new perspective on everything, and above all grants a sense of God’s presence, love, comfort, and even joy. But the point of the Spirit is to enable those who follow Jesus to take into all the world the news that he is Lord, that he has won the victory over the forces of evil, that a new world has opened up, and that we are to help make it happen.

via ryansblog.hohousehold.com

An N.T. Wright quote... I love the last sentence.

 

Missional Theology: Concepts of the missio Dei - Pt 2

Here are several seminal statements about the church from Karl Barth’s "Church Dogmatics" as cited in the book, The Witness of God; The Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth and the Nature of Christian Community .

“The community is alive, there, and only they are, where she is engaged in recruitment and when she strives for this recruitment especially in the apparently darkest areas of the world: in places where the Gospel is still completely unknown or completely rejected, in medio inimicorum. The community is this such a missionary community, or she is not the Christian community.”

“[T]he community which has not existed in the interim period as a missionary community as such, whose witness has not been invitational or persuasive according to the measure of her power, with the return and final revelation of her Lord will be banished into the darkness, where there can be only wailing and gnashing of teeth instead of the promised banquet.” 

 

A summary statement by the author, John Flett:

“Mission is not a second step in addition to some other more proper being of the church, because, as the living one, God’s relationship to the world belongs to his eternal being. The Christian community is, as such, the missionary community, or she is not a community that lives in fellowship with the triune God as he lives his own proper life.”

These concepts and these statements are obviously related to a Trinitarian view of theology. The concept of the Trinity informs all of the language of the "missio Dei." Hopefully, as these quotes are communicated on my blog you will get a more full or complete understanding of what it means to be Trinitarian, living the life of God in specific context or place.

Missional Theology: Concepts of the missio Dei

I'm reading a book right now called, “The Witness of God; The Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth and the Nature of Christian Community." It's written by John Flett. 

There's much written about the "missio Dei" right now, but quite a bit of it resides on a superficial level. To hear people talk about the concepts basic to the missio Dei – “…the Father sends the Son, the Father and the Son send the Spirit, and the Triune God sends the church,” is good!  There has been a wonderful correction in theology as a result of the missio Dei concept, but often times the superficiality of describing it misses some essential elements. In this book there is a deeper, more full-orbed exploration of the notion. This book is not necessarily for the casual reader, but I think a significant contribution to the field of missiology.

 

While I'm reading the book my intention is to insert a quote or two from each section I'm reading. Here are a few from the first couple chapters:

 

Flett quoting Bosch: 

“’Our mission has no life of its own: only in the hands of the sending God can it truly be called mission.’” He continues (his own words now), “Mission is not something the church does, dependent on ecclesiastical management and developed according to some notion of the efficient use of resources. It is justified by neither human capacity nor historical accident.”

 

This is also from Bosch: 

“’The recognition that mission is God's mission represents a crucial breakthrough in respect of the preceding centuries. It is inconceivable that we can again revert to a narrow ecclesiocentric view of mission.’”

 

Lastly he writes, 

“The church's call to echo in time the communion that is God's life in eternity: she is called to be a being of persons-in-relationship which receives [her] character as communion by virtue of [her] relationship to God and so is enabled to reflect something about being in the world.”

 

There you go for now.  I will cite several allusions from Barth that describe his understanding of mission from the next section.

Peace!

 

The Preaching Event - Finally Comes the Poet

 I am reading a book right now entitled, Finally Comes the Poet, by Walter Brueggemann. It’s not a new book. It was actually written in 1989, but so far it has truly captured me. Brueggemann writes with such elegance and fluidity that it seems like I can’t read enough of his stuff.  The book is about the daring and important work of preaching the word of God.

A couple of days ago while Robi and I were driving to Seattle, I read a portion of the book to her out loud.  It was a strong experience – I literally was gushing as I read, being moved by the ideas.  In the book he talks about the need for the poetic in preaching. When he says poetic, however, he is actually referring to the idea of being prophetic. He relates the poet to the idea of the prophet in the Old Testament.

He identifies four partners in the preaching event. He writes, “The meeting of the community of faith is a speech meeting. We gather for speaking and listening of an odd kind. That meeting has the potential of evoking the new humanity. There are four partners who need to be present in the meeting so that the new reality can be birthed.”

He says the first partner is the text. Part of the problem for most Christians is that they gather with too much familiarity with the text. They’ve heard it before, so they have become desensitized to its effect. Brueggemann writes, “All week the ideology of our nation, our class, our sect, our sex has seemed closed, settled, and ready for defense. We trust excessively and vigorously in our ideological commitments, which we accept as a rendering of the text.” In other words the text gets co-opted, or reduced to fit into our ideological framework.  We see that all to readily with folk from the political right and left seizing the text to squeeze it into their small-box, small-headed perspectives.

The second partner is the baptized. He refers to the gathered people who are weary, but needful of the recalibrating of their lives to a different, wilder story.  He writes, “The community gathers to be shaped by text that addresses us, an articulation of reality that lies outside of us that we cannot conjure and need not defend.  The ones gather have been baptized.”

The third partner, he would call the specific occasion. Brueggemann explains; when the music stops and the rheostat (I have no idea what a rheostat is, but the context seems to suggest the idea of lighting or heating – your guess is as good as mine) is turned down, then there is this precious, awesome movement of speech. It is not time for cleverness or novelty. It is not time for advise or scolding or urging, because the text is not any problem-solving answer or a flat, ideological agent that can bring resolve. This moment of speech is a poetic rendering in the community that has come all too often to expect nothing but prose. It is a prose world for all those who must meet payrolls and grade papers and pump gas and fly planes. When the text, too, has been reduced to prose, life becomes prosaic that there is a dreaded dullness that besets the human spirit. We become mindless conformists or angry protesters, and there is no health in us. We become so beaten up by prose that only poetic articulation has a chance to let us live.”

The last partner, he would say is this better world given as fresh revelation. He explains, “Something is revealed, we know not how: a probe behind the closed parameters of religion too-long settled and politics too easily comfortable.  It is not only truth disclosed, but it is life disclosed… As I am addressed by the Gospel, I hear anew that possibility overwhelms necessity in my life. The only available absolute given me is a fiction to which I must trust myself–a gracious fiction on which I stake my life, authored by God who also authors the text and speech.”

 He breaks out in this beautiful picture of what happens in this preaching event when he declares, “…again, as the word is spoken one more time, we move through the wearisome death ridden days of our life and come back once again to Easter to be stunned in disbelief, and then beyond disbelief, to be stunned to life, now filled with fear and trembling.”  He goes on, “The meeting involves this old text, the spent congregation believing but impoverished, the artist of new possibility, the disclosure. The Prince of Darkness tries frantically to keep the world closed so that we can be administered. The Prince has such powerful allies in this age. Against such enormous odds, however, there is the working of this feeble, inscrutable, unshackled moment of sermon. Sometimes the Prince will win the day and there is no new thing uttered or heard. Sometimes, however, the sermon will have its say and the truth looms large–larger than the text or the voice or the folk had any reason to expect. When that happens, the world is set loose toward healing. The sermon for such a time shames the Prince and we become yet again more nearly human. The Author of the text laughs in delight, the way the Author has laughed only at creation and Easter, but laughs again when the sermon carries the day against the prose of the Dark Prince who wants no new poetry in the region he thinks he governs. Where the poetry is sounded, the Prince knows a little of the territory is lost to its true ruler. The newly claimed territory becomes a new home of freedom, justice, peace, and abiding joy. This happens when the poet comes, when the poet speaks, when the preacher comes as poet.” 

It seems so often; in today’s church the preaching of God’s Word takes a backseat to many other things. In fact, for many it just isn’t cool to teach the Word of God, but I think that we may be missing something in this regard. Something genuinely mystical and sacramental happens when the Word of God is declared with clarity and beauty. It doesn’t have to be cutesy, or clever, or funny, but it does have to be truthful and passionate. When a person speaks from the Scriptures people should come away from the meeting having truly grappled with text…the mystery of God spoken in the body of believers.