May 29, 2007

Vintage Consumerism

We caught up with Dan Kimball, pastor of Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California, and author of They Like Jesus but Not the Church (Zondervan, 2007), at a conference where he was talking to other leaders about consumerism and the church. Kimball says the size of a church isn’t what makes it consumer driven, but how the leaders define success.

You’ve been talking to other pastors about consumerism in the church and the impact it’s had on our theology. How do you begin to recognize that impact?
You hear a lot of the complaints and valid criticism about the church being “a provider of religious goods and services,” as Darrell Guder says in the Missional Church. I started thinking about my own church and asking could the leadership be the ones who are really guilty of this? How did that happen?

I began to think about our meeting spaces. The early church met in homes where it is easier to participate, people can contribute, can be more vocal, make a meal, whatever. And then worship moved to the Roman basilicas and the format changed. People became more passive, but they still walked around and engaged. After the Reformation pews were brought in and people began to understand church different because they become passive. Expectations of a pastor and a leader become different. People expected us to do things for them.

So how has that translated into the church today?
We’ve been taught that this is how church goes. This is what you’re supposed to do. But now we’re making it better and bigger—better seating, better lighting, better sermons, better parking, better children’s ministry, better youth ministry. We’re simply fueling the whole thing.

But all of the consumer assumptions underneath are the same.
Yeah. And we haven’t yet challenged those assumptions. But my bigger question is what is this producing? Is it really producing people who are living and demonstrating the fruit of the Spirit in their lives? Are they loving one another and loving God more? What are we looking at for success?

So what is your sense? Are the ‘bigger and better’ churches producing the fruit of the Spirit?
I think it depends on the church leadership. As you talk to different leaders you pick up what they focus on. Ask them how they define success or what are they most excited about. That’s an interesting question. It reveals a lot. You can have a church of twenty thousand but what are you looking at as success? If I walked up to a person at your church would they say I’m here to get my religious goods and services. Or would they say I’m an active participant in the mission of this church, and this big worship meeting is just one part of it. Of course you can go to a small worship meeting and have the same exact thing. So it’s not about big church or little church necessarily.

So what are you guys doing at Vintage Faith to question those underlying assumptions of consumer faith?
We are asking God to transform us into a worshiping community of missional theologians.

Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Say that again.
We’re asking God to transform us (because it can’t be done through human effort); into a worshiping community (because we want to be worshipers first); of missional theologians (because if we’re on a mission in our culture we have to be thinkers).

We’re calling the church more of a missional training center as much as we can. We’re launching community groups. We’re calling them "community groups" even though we see them as house churches, but that name has weird connotations for some.

And what about your worship on Sunday, does that look different too?
Not really. Sunday meetings are just one part of the rhythm of the wekk when we all gather together, and we try to express worship to God and to teach in ways that creatively reflect who we are and the values we are striving to hold. Sundays are about community, care, worship and Scripture. But I’d hope that if you were to walk up to someone in our church and ask them “What is church?” they wouldn’t talk about the big meeting but about being on a mission.

Posted by UrL at May 29, 2007 | Comments (10)

May 23, 2007

Happy Shiny Pastors

Last month the Chicago Tribune reported that pastors are the happiest people on earth—really. Research done by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center found that clergy ranked highest in job satisfaction and “general happiness.” They even out ranked highly paid professionals such as doctors and lawyers.

The article reports:

Eighty-seven percent of clergy said they were "very satisfied" with their work, compared with an average 47 percent for all workers. Sixty-seven percent reported being "very happy," compared with an average 33 percent for all workers.

"They look at their occupation as a calling," Carroll said. "A pastor does get called on to enter into some of the deepest moments of a person's life, celebrating a birth and sitting with people at times of illness or death. There's a lot of fulfillment."

Can this possibly be true?

Since I entered seminary I’ve been bombarded with the horror stories of pastoral ministry. Like the enlisted men trembling as General Patton pontificated about the brutality of war, new seminarians are told the sobering statistic about ministry burn-out, moral failure, divorce, and depression. Ministry, we are told, isn’t for the weak. Only a clear calling from God will keep us in the game, because apart from that there is little for church leaders to rejoice about. Shepherding sheep, they say, is a dirty job with few earthly rewards.

To illustrate the popular rhetoric Pastor Darrin Patrick from The Journey in St. Louis compiled this list of statistics from organizations like Focus on the Family and Barna Research:

• Fifteen hundred pastors leave the ministry each month due to moral failure, spiritual burnout, or contention in their churches.

• Fifty percent of pastors' marriages will end in divorce.

• Eighty percent of pastors and eighty-four percent of their spouses feel unqualified and discouraged in their role as pastors.

• Fifty percent of pastors are so discouraged that they would leave the ministry if they could, but have no other way of making a living.

• Eighty percent of seminary and Bible school graduates who enter the ministry will leave the ministry within the first five years.

• Seventy percent of pastors constantly fight depression.

So, what is the truth? Are pastors the happiest and most satisfied people in the world, or the least? Are the statistics about pastoral burn-out and depression inflated? Do we overstate the hardships of ministry as a perverse way to make us feel more noble and courageous for continuing? Or, are most of us actually experiencing deep contentment, pleasure, and spiritual satisfaction in our labors?

Perhaps there is another explanation for the disparity in the statistics. Maybe the University of Chicago polled pastors on Saturday, and Barna polled them on Monday?

Posted by UrL at May 23, 2007 | Comments (30)

May 22, 2007

How Teenagers Transformed the Church (part 3)

In this final installment of Angie Ward’s report on the impact of youth ministry on the American church she talks more with Tic Long, Youth Specialties’ president of events. Long shares his thoughts on the lasting impact youth ministry has had on the larger church, and what current trends among teens will continue to gain momentum among evangelicals in the decades ahead.

As youth ministry becomes firmly ensconced in middle age, it is appropriate as in any mid-life crisis to pause for reflection and evaluation. Indeed, youth ministry has made quite an impression on the American church landscape. Here are some of its greatest legacies thus far:

1. Better preaching and teaching.

“They’re going to kill me for saying this,” Tic Long said, “but youth workers are often better communicators than pastors. They may not be better preachers, but they know how to grab the attention of middle-school and high-school students pretty quickly; kids who aren’t in the habit of being polite to just listen.

“As a youth worker, you learn to be a good communicator,” he continued. “A lot of the good communicators today cut their teeth communicating to students.”

In addition, youth workers such as Bill Hybels initiated the movement toward application-oriented communication. If God’s word is not viewed as relevant, people will not be interested in hearing it.

2. Teenagers as catalysts instead of reactors.

Instead of waiting for teenagers to “grow up” before assuming leadership roles, youth culture and youth ministry emphasize the potential of young leaders. This emphasis has often trickled down (or up?) to the church as a whole, and entire churches can be inspired by a generation of young people who are desiring and daring to change the world.

“Working with teenagers is about more than telling them to not be on drugs and not have sex,” Long said. “Youth workers want to see teenagers change their world. Sometimes that comes in conflict with an older generation, but when that moves up, that pushes the church outside its walls.”

3. Indigenous ministry.

The United States is an extremely diverse collection of cultures. Whereas in the past, it was primarily foreign missionaries who spoke of an indigenous approach to evangelism, youth ministry has brought that philosophy home to the American church.

“We are in a culture that is just so diverse, and there have to and should be diverse expressions of faith,” Long asserted. “What youth workers do on a smaller scale, and what we need to embrace, is that there are a number of different ways into a person’s life....We get in trouble when we market and sell a certain way instead of letting things be organic.”

So, what’s next? Long believes that the larger church lags youth ministry trends by approximately 15-20 years. Regardless of the time delay, here’s what it appears we can expect to see in the future of the church:

• An increase in social action and social justice. The emergent movement has called churches outside of their own walls and back into the community. This trend will continue, as indeed it is continuing among current teenagers who are far more globally aware and active than their parents.

• A continued emphasis on relationships over programs. “Good youth ministry is community and relationships,” Long said. “It’s creating this community where relationships can evolve. In essence, all good ministry should do that. People want to connect, they no longer want to just watch....even at Youth Specialties, I think the movement has healthily begun to de-emphasize programming.”

• A movement toward intergenerational ministry. “Part of the adolescent thing is independence, but not completely. Youth ministry should be more purposeful and integrative, so that it is not just an appendage of the church, but is part and parcel of its identity,” Long stated.

Only time of course will tell how or even whether these trends will impact the greater church, but if history is any indication, teenagers, and the people who minister to them, can change the course of history.

Angie Ward is a pastor's spouse, leadership coach, and founder of Forward Leadership. She lives with her family in Durham, North Carolina.

Posted by UrL at May 22, 2007 | Comments (5)

May 18, 2007

How Teenagers Transformed the Church (Part 2)

In part 2, Angie Ward continues her reflection on the emergence of youth ministry and its impact on the church. The first generation of youth ministers, she points out, grew up to lead the seeker-driven movement that has dominated evangelicalism for 30 years. And now we are seeing the second generation of youth pastors bringing their own new ideas to the church. Although the seeker church movement and emerging church movement appear quite divergent, their common roots in youth ministry mean they share a common value—innovation.

“In youth ministry, you get permission to break the rules,” explained Doug Pagitt, a former youth worker and now the founding pastor of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis. “Youth pastors get to do things that other people don’t get to do. Youth ministry requires that you break the conventions to connect with teenagers. If breaking the rules is permissible in youth ministry, then why is it not permissible in a broader scope of ministry?”

Tic Long agrees. “You experiment and question a lot in your teens and twenties, and a lot of youth workers are in their twenties,” he said. “They don’t have all the vested interests and encumbrances that the larger church or the senior pastor has. They’re not running the budget; they’re not responsible for the whole machine. I think it’s a breeding ground for creativity.”

In 1972, a college-aged youth worker named Bill Hybels started a youth program at South Park Church outside of Chicago. Similar to the para-church model popularized by Young Life and Youth for Christ, Son City featured high-energy games, skits, and a dynamic, engaging talk by the young Hybels. The idea was to make the program so good that Christians would invite their non-Christian friends to the event. It was Jim Rayburn’s ministry philosophy, “It’s a sin to bore a kid with the gospel,” applied to the church. And it was a huge evangelistic success.

Three years later, Hybels took his idea of a “seeker service” and started Willow Creek Community Church. The rest, of course, is history. Willow Creek now ministers to nearly 20,000 attenders each weekend at a variety of services throughout the Chicagoland area. The seeker-driven movement has revolutionized the church. Even churches that are not explicitly seeker-focused have been challenged to give greater priority to evangelism in their ministries.

But Hybels is just one of many first-generation youth workers who went on to become senior pastors. Indeed, while one of Youth Specialties’ founding beliefs was that youth ministry is more than just a stepping stone to the “real” pastorate, the reality is that many youth pastors did become senior leaders in the church – and their churches are now among the largest, fastest growing, and most influential congregations in America.

Meanwhile, youth ministry was growing up. By the late 1980s, youth ministry was its own full-fledged profession, even an academic pursuit. Christian colleges and seminaries had begun to add youth ministry classes, majors, and degrees to their curricula. Professors of youth ministry, originally an affinity group meeting as part of the North American Professors of Christian Education conference, organized as the Association of Youth Ministry Educators, complete with their own professional journal and annual conference.

Youth Specialties also continued to expand, adding one-day training events and a book series to its menu of services to youth workers. But ironically, as the field of youth ministry continued to become more professionalized, Youth Specialties found itself becoming a grown-up institution. And some of the early leaders began to face criticism from a new generation of leaders who sat under the ministry of those first-generation youth workers.

Criticism generally followed two consistent themes. First, the rise of the mega-church in America meant the need for more programs and structures to support these large organizations, thus opening them to charges of becoming too institutional and program-driven at the expense of true spiritual maturation. Second, the focus on events sometimes led to an inward-focused approach that forgot the urgency of evangelism, rather than an indigenous, outward-focused ministry philosophy.

This new wave of thought came to be known as the emerging church movement and was (and is) espoused initially and primarily by baby busters, the generation born between 1965 and 1982 and sometimes referred to as Generation X.

Pagitt believes that these criticisms emerged because a formerly innovative approach had become the status quo. “Even though Youth Specialties had a programmatic approach, it was programmatic in a very rule-breaking way,” Pagitt observed. “But some people had only grown up with those programmatic experiences, so those rule-breaking experiences became the norm.”

Long agrees with some of the criticism, while also acknowledging that his counter-cultural organization has now become a cultural institution.

“In good youth ministry, you go where students are, you don’t have students come to you,” he said. “So many churches still operate on a model where, you try to do a really good program, so people will come to it. And there is still a portion of youth ministry that is very program-driven. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just a thing.

“The issue becomes when you stop at the program, or you think that by moving people through programs you have introduced them to Jesus or have impacted their life,” Long continued. “Program should be a means, one of the steps, not the goal.”

Angie Ward is a pastor's spouse, leadership coach, and founder of Forward Leadership. She lives with her family in Durham, North Carolina.

Posted by UrL at May 18, 2007 | Comments (6)

May 16, 2007

Out of Context: Mindy Caliguire

"With the performance pressures church leaders face today, it's a wonder more are not flaming out. I wish more churches could talk honestly about the ministry systems that perpetuate the problem. What will have to happen before we change? For how long will we ignore the health of our leaders' souls and focus only on their performance?"

-Mindy Caliguire is a director with the Spiritual Formation Alliance. Taken from "Soul Train: Learning to minister at the speed of your soul." in the Spring 2007 issue of Leadership journal. To see the quote IN context, you'll need to see the print version of Leadership. To subscribe, click on the cover of Leadership on this page.

Posted by UrL at May 16, 2007 | Comments (7)

May 14, 2007

How Teenagers Transformed the Church (Part 1)

Seeker churches, emerging churches, ancient-future churches, mega-churches, house churches, Boomer churches, Gen-X churches. There is a debate occurring in American evangelicalism about the future of Christianity and what form the church should take within our culture. But is it possible that these divergent philosophies of ministry actually originated from the same source? In the coming days Angie Ward will be sharing multiple reports about the emergence of youth culture, and youth ministry, in recent American history and how this phenomenon gave rise to both the seeker movement and later the emerging church.

The end of World War II ushered in the beginning of the baby boom: 76 million American babies born between 1946 and 1964. As these baby boomers grew up, they gave birth to their own youth culture. The advent of youth culture gave rise to a new profession: youth ministry.

Fast forward nearly 40 years. Some of those youth leaders have become some of the nation’s most influential pastors. Meanwhile, many of their former students have themselves gone into ministry, not without their own adolescent rebellion in the form of a movement toward ecclesiological deconstruction. And now a third generation of youth, the millennials, is just beginning to make their mark on the church.

Youth ministry has significantly altered the course of American church history. The youth group of today is the church, and its leaders, of tomorrow. How did this shift occur, and what can we infer about the future of the church based on current trends in youth ministry?

By the mid-1950s, the first wave of baby boomers was nearing adolescence. In 1955, Warner Bros. Pictures released Rebel Without a Cause, the landmark film featuring misunderstood teenager Jim Stark, played by James Dean. If Rebel launched the youth culture, Elvis Presley solidified it a year later when “Heartbreak Hotel” sold 300,000 records in its first week.

Meanwhile, innovative Christian leaders were expanding the boundaries of traditional ministry through the inception of organizations which sought to reach teenagers outside the walls of the church. In 1938, a young seminary student in Texas named Jim Rayburn began a weekly club for high school students who had no interest in church. Three years later, Young Life was born.

Rayburn is perhaps best remembered for his assertion, “It’s a sin to bore a kid with the gospel.” Young Life club meetings featured singing, a skit or two, and a simple message about Jesus Christ. The idea was that faith could be life-changing and fun.

Over the next three decades, dozens of para-church ministries sprang up across the country. Christian camps emphasized the adventure of the Christian life. Radio ministries took advantage of the technology’s expanded popularity to spread the gospel over the airwaves. Saturday night evangelistic rallies challenged young people to commit their lives to Christ. These rallies then spawned local youth clubs, which provided regular spiritual follow-up and encouragement. Preachers such as Billy Graham (Youth for Christ), Jack Wyrtzen (Word of Life), and Percy Crawford (Young People’s Church of the Air, Pinebrook Camp) became household names to Christian teenagers of the era.

Yet while these para-church organizations flourished from 1935 to 1967, the church was not ready for the shift toward a youth-driven culture. “The post-war baby boom caught the church without a strategy for dealing with the sudden influx of people whom the media began to call ‘teenagers,’” writes Mark Senter in his book, The Coming Revolution in Youth Ministry. And when the church finally did begin to change, it was through the influence of para-church leaders.

In the late 1960s, two Youth for Christ youth workers, Jim Burns and Mike Yaconelli, realized the tremendous untapped potential of churches to reach teenagers for Christ. Burns and Yaconelli borrowed money from their relatives and self-published their first Ideas book for youth workers. In addition to selling the books, they began holding seminars to show leaders how to use them. Youth Specialties was born in 1969.

At the time, only a few large and usually urban churches even hired youth directors. At best, youth ministry in the church was seen as a stepping stone to “real” pastoral ministry, usually a senior pastorate and one’s own pulpit.

The founders of Youth Specialties worked to convince church boards and senior pastors that youth ministry was vital to the health and future of the church. As a result, over the last 38 years Youth Specialties has been almost singularly responsible for the professionalization of the field of youth ministry in the church.

Tic Long, Youth Specialties’ President of Events, has been with the ministry since its early days and remembers its first National Youth Workers Convention in 1970. “When youth workers used to get together before then, it was always at camps. When we did the first convention, we said, ‘Let’s go to a hotel, let youth workers get a mint on their pillow, and tell them, you are in a profession that is not just a stepping stone.’”

In the early days, Long remembers, Youth Specialties’ focus was youth programming: “How do you develop a program, how do you get people resources, how do you run a meeting, how do you lead discussions and do special events?” Long said.

The efforts of youth ministry pioneers like Yaconelli, Burns, and Long began to bear fruit in the local church as youth ministry rose in importance in many churches. But the first generation of church youth workers also began to have a noticeable impact on the Church at large, as they began to take their innovative approaches beyond the walls of the youth room and into the sanctuary.

Angie Ward is a pastor's spouse, leadership coach, and founder of Forward Leadership. She lives with her family in Durham, North Carolina.

Posted by UrL at May 14, 2007 | Comments (14)

May 9, 2007

Getting the Gospel Right

A few weeks ago Dave Johnson questioned our adherence to a gospel that does not call forth or expect transformation in our lives. In this post professor and blogger extraordinaire Scot McKnight continues the discussion. He contends that many of the problems facing the contemporary church can be traced to the individualistic gospel we preach. Both Johnson and McKnight will be featured presenters at the upcoming Spiritual Formation Forum in June.

When I was in high school, my youth pastor – may his soul rest in peace – opened his home to me and my girlfriend, Kris (now my wife). David King became our personal theologian and one thing that impressed me deeply at the time was this contention of his: he often contended in a rather robust manner that every problem that he encountered as a pastoral counselor could be traced to a “spiritual” problem.

Most of us would not agree with this conclusion, but many of us would contend that we do need to do more “systemic” analysis to find the underlying issues that give rise to many of the problems we now face in the Church. I’d like to suggest a significant underlying issue that gives rise to more than one problem today.

Because of some research I did on the “gospel” in the Bible, leading to a book called Embracing Grace, I have come to a conclusion not unlike that of David King: namely, when I see “problems” or “issues” in the Church, I often say to myself, “What kind of gospel would have been preached and responded to that would give rise to this kind of practice, problem, or theology?” At the bottom of lots of our problems is a “gospel” problem. Students of mine that grow up in Christians homes often admit to me that the gospel they grew up was this: Jesus came to die for my sins so I could go to heaven. This parody of the biblical gospel, I contend, is at the heart of many of our problems.

Example #1: We often hear pastors today wondering why Christians are not more committed to the local church and seem to have so little time for anything extra?

Example #2: We routinely are reminded that 11am on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of America’s week.

Example #3: We often observe that there are far too many Christians who “have it together” with God but are “relationally a mess.”

Example #4: Many evangelical Christians feel “most spiritual” when they are praying or reading the Bible and do not see their marriage relationship, their parent-child relationships, their sibling relationships, or their relationships with others – in the Church and outside the Church – as part of their “spirituality”. Instead, those elements are at best “implications” of their relationship to God (which is the focus of spirituality) rather than central to that spirituality.

But, we must be more willing to ask this question: Why all the emphasis on love and peace and reconciliation and community in the Bible if these elements are not central to the spiritual life? Is not the Bible’s emphasis less on the individual being transformed than the community being created in which that individual finds transformation? Do our spiritual formation courses adequately address community formation?

My conclusion after studying the Bible on the meaning of “gospel” is that one of the major reasons for each of the above examples is a gospel that gives rise to (1) a radically individualistic understanding of the meaning of life, (2) a non-communal perception of what the gospel is intended to accomplish, or (3) a God-only understanding of the gospel.

Let us not suppose that any of these examples has simplistic explanations, but let us think a little more systemically: if we preach a gospel that is entirely focused on “getting right with God” but which does not include in that presentation that God’s intent is to form a community (the Church) in which restored persons live out this Christ-shaped and Spirit-directed spirituality, then we can expect to hear lots of pulpit rhetoric exhorting us that the Church matters. And, if we discover on Sunday morning that everyone in our church is the same ethnically and economically, we can be sure that we are preaching something that is attracting only those kinds of people. And if we are hesitant to admit the implication of this ethnic, economic reality, then we need to be more honest with ourselves. We get what we preach. And we perform what we preach. How we live reveals the gospel we responded to and the gospel we believe.

Let me suggest, then, a more complete view of the gospel – one that focuses much more on the community of faith – that, if we give the permission to seep into every inch of our ministries, will perhaps lead to the day in our lifetime when these four examples will not be our present problem but our history’s memory. Now a definition: The gospel is the work of the Trinitarian God (a community of persons) to create the community of faith in order to restore humans (made in God’s image) through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ as well as through the empowering gift of the Holy Spirit to union with God and communion with others for the good of the self and the world. And all of this to the glory of God.

What then is Christian spirituality? It is the person who is restored to God, to self, to others and the world – all four directions for all time – by a gospel that emerges from a “communal God” (the Trinity) to create a community that reflects who God is. Do we preach a gospel that gives rise to holistic restoration and that can create a fully biblical spirituality?

Scot McKnight is the Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies at North Park University in Chicago. He will also be a presenter at the Spiritual Formation Forum in Milwaukee June 6-8. You can learn more and register at the Spiritual Formation Forum website.

Posted by UrL at May 9, 2007 | Comments (19)

May 5, 2007

Good Things Come in Small Congregations

Crack your knuckles and prepare to type your comments. Pastor/professor David Fitch is back with his take on why leading a small church is more difficult, and more rewarding, than being a mega-church pastor.

My recent conversation with Bill Kinnon over the big church superstar mentality spurred me on to think of my own experience as a church planter. I have often pondered the church planter's task versus the mega church pastor's. To me, what the smaller, organic, missional community leaders do is much more difficult. Here's why.

It is more difficult to take 10 people and grow a body of Christ to 150 than it is to transplant 200 or 300 people and then grow that congregation to 5,000. A crowd draws a crowd. From day one if you have all the bells and whistles, 5 full time pastors, a youth program, and a charismatic speaker with spiked hair (a shot not aimed at anyone in particular) and you don't mind putting the smaller community churches out of business, it will be harder to stop attracting a big crowd.

(BTW, did you know that statistics say that small church growth (from 10-150) is where the conversion growth, as opposed to transfer growth, occurs? Why then do evangelicals exalt the mega congregations as the answer to reaching those outside of Christ?)

It is more difficult to preach a sermon to 100 people than to 8,000 people. Of course, there are some of my emerging co-laborers who don't believe in preaching per se. I believe in proclamation of the new reality, the calling of truth into being, and my thoughts on expository preaching are already out there. My point here is that preaching to 100 people you actually know and live with is a lot harder than preaching to 8000 people, 99% of whom you don't know. It is not that it is harder to be vulnerable in a larger crowd. It is that in a space of 100 people you are more vulnerable when so many know you. You are naked.

And I might add, I've preached for our own congregation of 100+ and I've preached for 1000+, and my experience is that a joke is 10 times easier to pull off in a large audience than in a small one. (Not that I should be trying to tell jokes in my sermon but you all know what I'm talking about.)

It is more difficult to deal with conflict and leadership in a small church where our conflicts, our vision, our weaknesses must all be talked about and worked through. In small, organic, church leadership we must do the hard work of owning our weaknesses and speaking truth in love to other leaders. It's hard but we grow. In mega-sized corporate churches leadership and organization is much easier because you can just fire people/employees.

It is more difficult to build a live body of Christ where his powers are made manifest and his mission is sent forth, and poor people are actually recognized and loved, and where a politic takes shape which subverts the consumerist depersonalizing forces of our day than it is to build large mega churches that play on the consumerist forces that rule our culture and play right into church marketing programs.

It is more difficult to organically engage people's lives than it is to become a media figure for Christians looking for the next hip thing. They can simply buy your book and drive to your church. Then you do not have to deal with everyday details of people's lives. You take the show on the road to promote the idea that you started this church and overnight it turned into 4,000 people and you couldn't stop it. The mythology grows and young church planters with visions dancing in their heads become depressed and defeated when the same things do not happen to them.

It is more difficult to build a gathering that is a mission in the world, than it is to build a gathering that comes to see the show. It is more difficult to build a gathering into being the Body of Christ than it is to build a crowd around a personality. Yes it is more difficult, but in the end so much more satisfying. And when you're gone this community will keep reproducing the love of Christ, the fruits of the Spirit, and the leader(s) to carry on the transformation of the world until Christ returns.

For these reasons, to me the real heroes are the missional pastors who raise up the organic communities that take different shapes and manifest the presence of Christ in their neighborhoods. Yet status quo evangelicalism knows no other way but to extol the virtues of the mega-sized personalities at mega-sized conferences. In the process those who would be missional church pastors are demoralized, leave the pastorate, or just give up.

Have I overstated my rant? If so I apologize ahead of time. May the Holy Spirit burn away any chaff that I have written and use the rest to encourage any discouraged missional community leaders for the glory of His Kingdom.

Editor’s note:
Please keep your response succinct as comments exceeding 250 words will likely not be published.

Posted by UrL at May 5, 2007 | Comments (33)

May 3, 2007

The Next Caption Contest

What are your captions for this cartoon by Dik LaPine? We know Out of Ur and Leadership readers will have some great ones on this theme.

Winning entries will be published in the Summer 2007 edition of Leadership. Please include your name, your church’s name, city, and state.

Posted by UrL at May 3, 2007 | Comments (44)

May 1, 2007

Lights…Camera…MISSION!

Films have been a popular subject on Out of Ur. That might seem odd for a blog devoted to issues facing church leaders. But in recent years films have become a testing ground for evangelical engagement with popular culture—a topic ripe with implications for our philosophy of ministry and approach to mission.

Our colleagues at Christianity Today Movies have a thought provoking article about the lucrative niche market for Christian films. Some of Hollywood’s evangelical insiders gathered for a conference in Los Angeles recently to discuss the trend, and CT’s Jeffery Overstreet was there. His full report can be read on the CT Movies site, but we’ve included a few excerpts below.

It is a complicated, difficult, exciting time for Christians involved in movies, TV, and digital media. As Hollywood rushes to capitalize on money to be made in the "faith market," each of the panel's experts has been caught up in the action.

The panelists agreed that Christians must overcome many challenges in order to make faith an acceptable topic in American art and entertainment again. But how should Christians go about that? And are these new "faith-based entertainment" divisions at major studios going to help us?

Some envision the Christian film industry following the trend of Christian music—an industry whose products are largely produced by Christians, for Christians.

Even if Christian filmmakers produce powerful movies, they face difficult choices about how to proceed. Should they allow their projects to be swept up by the new faith-based media divisions and marketed primarily to churchgoers? Or do they want to fight for a mainstream spotlight alongside Hollywood's heavy hitters?

The idea of marketing "faith-based" entertainment specifically to Christians has inspired a wave of new "niche market" ideas, many of which were discussed by conference guests. Some even spoke about the possibility of a new movie theater chain: separate cinemas for Christians, built within churches.

This would represent an interesting shift for Hollywood. Up to now big-budget productions have been marketed through churches as an outreach tool. Films like The Passion of the Christ, Narnia, and even The DaVinci Code were pushed on pastors with the promise that the church could leverage the film to advance its own mission to spread the good news. But films developed strictly for Christians—do we need that? Apparently we do.

"We live in a world of niche content," says Cooke. "We have outdoors channels, gay channels, women's channels, men's channels, sports channels, movie channels. There's no reason in the world that the Christian audience should not be a niche market. If people feel called to make stuff for an explicitly Christian audience, I say 'Go for it.'"

McKay sees value in entertainment designed specifically for the churchgoing audience. "There's still a market to write movies that only Christians will enjoy. And what's wrong with that? Christians need entertainment, too."

Read the rest of "Christians as a 'Niche' Market?" here, and share your thoughts with us.

Posted by UrL at May 1, 2007 | Comments (10)