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Evangelism

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

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How an ancient liturgical custom prepares us for Christmas—and for evangelism.

I was on sabbatical recently. Well, OK, not a real sabbatical. It was only four hours long. It was actually a “Brown Bag Sabbatical,” one of the innovative programs being offered by Wycliffe Serves!–the new department I direct at the college.[i] But that mini-sabbath served the same purpose as a longer sabbatical: refreshment, fresh ideas and (as of this moment) writing.

The day was led by Sister Constance Joanna from the Sisters of St John the Divine in Willowdale, in the north of Toronto, and she introduced us to the “O antiphons.” That may be an unfamiliar term, but if you have ever sung “O come, O come, Emmanuel” at this time of year, you are in fact already familiar with the O antiphons, since the hymn is based directly on them.O come emmanuel2

Obscure liturgical trivia?

The O antiphons probably came into being in monasteries of the early church and were used widely by the eighth century, as a way of preparing for Christmas. An antiphon is the short piece of choral music sung immediately before and after each psalm and canticle, often a single sentence, to introduce and then to reinforce the theme of the psalm. The O antiphons were just such pieces, one for each of the seven days leading up to Christmas Day, and sung at evening prayer before and after the Magnificat, Mary’s hymn of thanksgiving in Luke 1. And the “O”? Quite simple, really: each one begins with an “O.”

So why is this more than an obscure piece of liturgical trivia, useless in our more streamlined world? And how on earth might it have anything to do with evangelism?

Listen first to what the antiphons say:

  1. O Wisdom, from the mouth of the Most High, you reign over all things to the ends of the earth: come and teach us how to live. 
  1. O Lord, and head of the house of Israel, you appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush and you gave the law on Sinai: come with outstretched arm and ransom us. 
  1. O Branch of Jesse, standing as a sign among the nations, all kings will keep silence before you and all peoples will summon you to their aid: come, set us free and delay no more. 
  1. O Key of David and sceptre of the house of Israel, you open and none can shut; you shut and none can open: come and free the captives from prison. 
  1. O Morning Star, splendour of the light eternal and bright Sun of righteousness: come and enlighten all who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death. 
  1. O King of the nations, you alone can fulfil their desires: Cornerstone, you make opposing nations one: come and save the creature you fashioned from clay. 
  1. O Emmanuel, hope of the nations and their Saviour: come and save us, Lord our God. 

Three aspects relate to evangelism.

The O’s speak of Jesus

First, each antiphon focuses on a characteristic of Jesus Christ: he is Wisdom, he is Lord, he is Branch of Jesse, he is the Key of David, he is the Morning Star, and he is Emmanuel.

Evangelism, whether in conversation or in preaching, is not in the first place about trying to prove the existence of God, or wrestling with the problem of evil. In the first place, it is helping people see what Jesus is like. And this is what he is like.

One Muslim convert to Christianity saw the implications of this, perhaps more clearly than long-term Christians do, when he said, “I am a Christian for one reason alone—the absolute worshipability of Jesus Christ. By that word, I mean that I have found no other being in the universe who compels my adoration as he has done.”[ii]

The Jesus of the O antiphons is supremely worshipable. Our brown bag meditation on the O’s reminded me of this truth.

The O’s remind us of the whole story

Second, the whole of the Christian story is told in the O antiphons. They begin with Jesus as Wisdom, the agency of creation (Proverbs 8:22-31). The next three speak of God’s calling of the people of Israel. He is their Lord, who called them, sought to teach them the law, and set them free from captivity. Then Jesus is the “branch of Jesse,” a king descended from David and destined to rule over the world in righteousness. And this same king is the “key” of David, with power and compassion able to set the captives free.

The last three speak of Jesus more directly. He is the Morning Star, the first sign of the dawning of God’s new creation. He is King of the nations, in submission to whose rule is found world peace. And finally—the climax of the seven—Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us.

These days, we often speak of “the Christian story” instead of “the Christian faith.” And conversion is not so much “accepting the faith” as “allowing God to work my story into his Big Story.” It’s a very useful metaphor.

But what is that Big Story? The O’s remind us: it is a story of a good world gone wrong, the story of a creator who takes upon his shoulders the responsibility of putting things right—even at the cost of his own life. God’s story is about the Spirit of Jesus at work in the world, drawing men and women together into a new community of apprentices who work with God towards the renewal of all things. And it is a story with the ultimate happy ending, when all wrongs are put right, God brings down the curtain on this story, and a new one opens.

Evangelism is not talking about the forgiveness of sins, or discovering meaning in life, or finding hope beyond the grave, in isolation from the telling of the whole story. Sin only makes sense if this is God’s good world which we have messed up. Meaning in life can’t be divorced from the purposes of God in the world. And the resurrection is not just a guarantee of life after death, but the turning point in God’s bringing about a whole new creation. The O antiphons remind us of this big picture.

The O’s and the logic of prayer

Finally, the O antiphons speak of prayer. Each one begins with “O,” but each one includes a “come”: come and teach us how to live; come with outstretched arm and ransom us; come set us free and delay no more; come and free the captives from prison; come and enlighten all who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death; come and save the creature you fashioned from clay; come and save us, Lord our God.

I confess that, when I teach about evangelism, I don’t say enough about prayer. But my hunch is that most people don’t come to faith unless someone is praying for them. And what is conversion to Christ except learning to pray: Lord, please accept me; Lord, forgive me; Lord, take my life. The O’s remind me that once I realise who Jesus is, I cannot help but see my neediness—and that in turn leads me to prayer.

I have a fancy definition of evangelism that I teach to students. But someone recently suggested a much simpler one: “evangelism is overflow.” And that’s right. Overflow of awareness of the majesty of Jesus Christ. Overflow of wonder at the big story that the love of God is writing about this world. And overflow of prayer, both praise and petition, to this same God made known to us in Jesus Christ. They’re all there, in the O antiphons of Advent.

O come, O come, Emmanuel.

 

[i] For details of Brown Bag Sabbaticals and other Wycliffe Serves! programs, see wycliffeserves.ca.

[ii] Quoted in Max Warren, I Believe in the Great Commission (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1976), 152.

Ignatius for Evangelicals?

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How do you nurture your spiritual life moment by moment? A 16th century Roman Catholic has something surprising to offer to Christians of different traditions, even today

Ignatius Loyola (1491—1556) is often seen as head of the Pope’s anti-Reformation shock troops in the 16th century. Like most one-line characterizations, however, that is a caricature. Certainly Ignatius was the founder of the Jesuits, perhaps the most powerful Roman Catholic missionary movement ever. Certainly there were Jesuits at the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which set out to counter Protestant “heresies.” And, equally true, we do know that at least once Loyola personally engaged in debate with Protestants. His legacy in the history of the church, however, is both deeper and wider than that, for Catholics and Protestants alike

The story in brief is this.

Having grown up in Spain, at the age of thirty Ignatius was wounded in battle against the French. While recovering, there being nothing more interesting to read, he read a life of Christ and a book about the saints—and, somewhat like one of his heroes, St Francis, had a mystical conversion experience. His life was never the same again. The year was 1531.

Quite soon, he found that people started coming to him for spiritual advice and direction, and discovered that he had a gift in this area. Over time, his direction evolved into a more or less standard form now known as the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, based on how he had experienced God’s work in his own life. Gradually some to whom he had given the Exercises, and who had been dramatically affected by them, grew into a group of between six and ten friends who lived together and engaged together in a ministry of preaching, catechism and care for the poor. In 1537, this group decided to call themselves the Companions of Jesus and in 1540, the Society of Jesus was given official Papal approval, and Loyola was elected Superior. Not that all was straightforward, however: twice, Loyola was imprisoned and brought before the Inquisition, who were suspicious of his teaching! (Both times he was acquitted.) Loyola died in 1556 and was canonized in 1609, by which time the Jesuits numbered around 15,000 and were at work in countries as widespread as China, Peru and Ethiopia.

saint-ignatius-the-pilgrim
Statue of Saint Ignatius the Pilgrim at Guelph

These days, much of the old suspicion between Roman Catholics and Protestants has evaporated, thank God, and we are at least more understanding of our differences. Wycliffe students often take courses at Regis, TST’s Jesuit College, and Jesuit students have been known to take courses at Wycliffe. One perhaps unexpected fruit of that greater understanding has been increased Protestant interest in the Ignatian Exercises. The best-known way to do this is during a forty-day retreat, paralleling Christ’s forty days in the wilderness. Loyola House (the name is not coincidental) in Guelph is favourite place for people to do the Exercises this way. (Check out www.ignatiusguelph.ca.) Many others, however, do the Exercises in the course of everyday life, simply taking an hour a day for it (the so-called “19th annotation,” since it is in section 19 of his instructions that Ignatius explains this). I did this, following the course of the liturgical year, in 2009-2010.

 

 So what is the attraction of Ignatian spirituality for Protestants, not least for evangelicals?

I suspect there are four areas of resonance.

One is that the Exercises require a close engagement with Scripture. A distinctive of Ignatius’ approach is that the student imagines him or herself in the Bible story, whether it be with the shepherds at the manger, with Jesus as he leaves Nazareth and walks to the Jordan river, or with Mary as she encounters the risen Jesus. Many insights come through this contemplative engagement with scripture that might never come through academic study alone. Even familiar stories take on new dimensions. I confess that, when the Exercises required me to read the Prodigal Son for the third time—yes, the third—I was sceptical: “I saw something new the first two times. Give me a break! Surely there can’t possibly be anything else!” But of course there was. (It became a joke with my spiritual director that every week I would say, “Well, I’d read this story a thousand times, but I saw something new this time.”)

 Secondly, Ignatius could almost have coined the phrase evangelicals are notorious for, “a personal relationship with Jesus.” As Ignatius guides us through the Gospels, always the emphasis is on what you might say to Jesus and what he might say to you. Of course, orthodox Catholic that he is, for Ignatius, that “personal relationship” is never free-wheeling like that of some Protestants, but is always securely in a Trinitarian context (most of Ignatius’ mystical visions were of the Trinity), and in submission to the teaching of the Church. Yet at the heart of the Exercises is a yearning to be a more faithful and dedicated disciple of Jesus, and to learn all that he has to teach.

 Thirdly, the Jesuits are a missionary Order with a clear passion to evangelize the world: this obviously appeals to the missionary heart of evangelicalism. Unlike many Orders, the Jesuits did not (and do not) build or live in monasteries. They needed (and need) to be flexible and nimble for the sake of Christ’s mission. According to biographer Philip Caraman, Loyola insisted that “Jesuits . . . must have one foot on the road, ready to hasten from place to place.” Ignatian spirituality therefore is internal, personal and highly portable—though again, that is not in isolation but is set in the context of communal worship and frequent attendance at Mass.

 The last point of resonance came home to me in a comment by Caraman, that Loyola’s “contemporaries . . . saw in him, first and foremost, not a champion of Roman Catholicism, still less a hammer of heretics, but a passionate believer in holiness, reaching out with his whole being towards God.” A characteristic of evangelicalism is to recognize and be drawn to that passion for God, even across traditional barriers. Counter-intuitive though it may seem, and despite differences of culture and theology, evangelicals recognise in Ignatius something of a kindred spirit. Within that mysterious and wonderful thing called the Body of Christ, there is much to learn from him. Maybe you would like to try doing the Exercises some time—either during a forty-day retreat or following the 19th Annotation—and discover it for yourself.

Roots and Wings: The Evolution of a Conference

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You never how things are going to develop. A few years ago, Stephen Andrews, the Anglican Bishop of Algoma, asked me to speak to each of his four deaneries about mission. So, over the course over eight months or so, I visited Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, North Bay and Huntsville, and gave the same two talks in each place. The first was on the Gospel, the second about ways we might live it out in and through our churches. And, as happens when one has to give the same talks more than once, I tried to refine and improve them each time.

So, by the time I received an invitation to speak to the annual conference of the Presbyterian Renewal Fellowship in 2013, the two talks had evolved into three. That way, they felt less rushed and seemed to me to unfold more coherently. And they had acquired a new title: Roots and Wings: Being Church in the 21st Century. This is how the three flow:

  1. Roots: Recovering Our Passion

This really deals with the basic question of: What is the Gospel? Someone once defined evangelism as “overflow.” Overflow of what? Of enthusiasm for the good news of Jesus. So unless we grasp the Gospel—or unless we are grasped by the Gospel—all our attempts at mission and evangelism are no more than a desperate strategy for survival.

Then, using Rowan Williams’ image of the mixed economy, with two complementary mission strategies for the contemporary world, we look at two “wings” (as some have suggested, perhaps the left and the right!):

  1. Wings Part 1: Learning to Fly Again

In this talk, we look at twelve different things existing (or “inherited”) churches can do to become “evangelizing communities”—that is, place where “spiritual seekers” can find help to grow into disciples of Jesus.

  1. Wings Part 2: Daring to Leave the Nest

Finally, we consider fresh expressions of church. Some can be helped to experience the Gospel by existing churches, but others will only know it when church enters their context and culture. How do such things begin and who can do it?

The biggest challenge of Roots and Wings, of course, as for any conference, is what happens next. I am old enough to have been to many conferences which were interesting at the time, but which were forgotten within a week or two. One group which sponsored a Roots and Wings day covenanted at the end to stay in touch with one another once the conference was over, to see how they were doing, and offer encouragement, prayer and challenge. Another group will be getting together again three months after the initial Roots and Wings day to report and strategize. These seem to me wise and stewardly moves.

I have now given these talks to ten different groups—Anglican (including the four in Algoma), Presbyterian and ecumenical—and I am booked for three more. If you would be interested in hosting a Roots and Wings day for churches in your area, or in knowing more about it, feel free to email me at john.bowen@wycliffe.utoronto.ca.

Having Second Thoughts about Evangelism

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John Bowen’s book, Evangelism for ‘Normal’ People, was published in 2002. Since then it has sold 10,000bowen book copies, and been used as a textbook in several seminaries. But 2002 is a long time ago. What does the author think now?

 

It all began with an email. I had known Andy when he was a doctoral student at Duke, and now he was a professor at another seminary. He had been using Evangelism for ‘Normal’ People as a textbook, and now he wanted to know if I would be willing to skype with the class at the end of the term to discuss the book. I said yes (how could I refuse?) but then began to wonder: What did I actually say in the book? (Authors don’t often re-read their books once they’re published.) Do I still think those things? It was a good exercise for me to reflect. Here are some of my conclusions:

  1. The Gospel is always bigger

I think my appreciation for the sheer bigness of the Gospel has increased. I would go further, and say that the Gospel should actually be the starting point for all of our theology. Some think the starting point for theology should be the mission of God (the “missio dei”) but surely the only way we know that God has a mission to redeem the world is because of Jesus’ announcement of the Gospel! The Gospel is the key to understanding what a Christian is (an apprentice of Jesus in the mission of God), what church is (the community of apprentices where the Gospel is spoken and lived out), what worship is (our hearts’ response to the Gospel), and (of course) what evangelism is (inviting others to respond to the Gospel). The Gospel is absolutely key.

These days, I am reluctant to say anything about evangelism until we have talked about the Gospel. Until there is passion for the Gospel—the evangel—there will be no healthy evangelism.

  1. Evangelism and discipleship are on the same spectrum

I don’t know why I didn’t say more about discipleship in the book. Now it seems obvious to me that evangelism and discipleship are not separate things. Thus, when people ask why Christians are not living as disciples, my question is: “What Gospel had they heard? What on earth did they think they were getting into? Why does the challenge of discipleship come as a surprise to them?”

The Good News is that God is at work to restore all things (the kingdom), and the invitation of the Gospel is to commit to that message—firstly, so that the work of restoration can be carried out in us (aka “sanctification”), but also so that we can be co-workers with God, and play our part in the restoration project (aka “vocation”). “Repent” means giving up the leadership of your own life; “believe” means giving your life to being a disciple of Jesus. So, if you are not a disciple, what exactly is the message you heard?

One practical outworking of this is that as people explore the Gospel, they need to be encouraged to try it. Not long ago, I was studying the Gospel of Luke in a local coffee shop with a young man who was trying to understand Christian faith. When the server asked what we were discussing, I let my friend do the answering. Why? Because if he becomes a disciple, he will have to learn to be upfront about his allegiance to Jesus. On another occasion, because I help out at a local reception centre for refugees, I encouraged my friend to come and help out too. Why? Because, as I explained to him, that’s the kind of thing that Christians do, and I wanted him to get a taste of it. In a sense, he was already beginning to “repent and believe.” In this kind of way, our evangelism needs to contain the seeds of discipleship. I don’t think I had seen that so clearly before.

  1. The significance of baptism

In my Christian upbringing, the important thing in evangelism was to help people get to the point where they would pray “a prayer of commitment.” The form of the prayer hardly mattered. Indeed, as Michael Green says, such a prayer can be just one word: “Yes!” They would then begin a life of involvement in the church and discipleship. And baptism? Well, yes, that was important too, as a public profession of new faith. But it was a “recommended extra.” There wasn’t much about it in Evangelism for ‘Normal’ People.

Now I would reverse those two and make baptism primary and the “personal prayer” secondary. (I can’t actually think of an example of a “personal prayer of commitment” in the New Testament accounts of evangelism! Baptism, however . . . It’s everywhere.)

So, for example, if I’m teaching a Christianity 101 course, I devote a session to explaining what it means to become a disciple—and spend some time unpacking the terms “repent and believe.” But do I invite people to say a “prayer of commitment” at the end? Well, yes, I do.

The way I explain it is to compare it to marriage (a biblical analogy, after all). “Praying a prayer,” I say, is like engagement. Engagement is usually a private commitment, very intimate, very personal, and there is no set form of words. Engagement is important and beautiful, but of course it’s only the first half of a much bigger commitment. Baptism, on the other hand, is like the marriage: it’s public, it’s formal, it’s a community celebration, and the form it takes is (more or less) standard.

Thus at the end of that C101 session, I often offer people a “personal prayer” to pray in the quiet of their hearts. But then I add, “If you prayed that prayer, do give your name to the minister before you leave tonight, because she is arranging a date for the next baptisms, and would love to include you.”

  1. Church planting and evangelism

Something that was hardly on my radar in 2002 was the importance of church planting for evangelism. But the evidence is now quite clear. The Southern Baptists in the US, for example, who have tracked where conversions are happening, are seeing more than three times the number of people coming to faith in new churches than in their older churches—and this in a denomination that majors on evangelism! Because of this development, I taught my first course on church planting as one of Wycliffe College’s evangelism offerings in the fall of 2002.

Of course, it is equally clear that church planting will not usually take the same form today that it did in a Christendom era. Hence all the talk of “fresh expressions of church”—new churches which begin at the grassroots, grow out of a particular local culture, and develop into mature churches over a period of years. The Mission Shaped Church report, which catalysed a lot of the fresh expressions movement in the UK, was not published till 2004, two years after Evangelism for ‘Normal’ People. That’s meant a whole lot of learning for me.

  1. The significance of friendship

I notice that in Evangelism for ‘Normal’ People, I often refer to “inviting your friends to Christian events.” Now, I would say the problem with that approach is two-fold. One, that fewer people these days are interested in attending church events. (One friend, Karen Wilk, has actually written a book called Don’t Invite them to Church!) The other problem is that many Christians are too busy with activities in the Christian fellowship to build meaningful friendships, ones where faith can be shared, outside the church. And not much evangelism will happen until we are prepared to equip people to go out with confidence, and release them to do so. We need to complement our emphasis on “the church gathered for worship” with one on “the church scattered for witness and mission.”

Hmm. Maybe all this means there’s enough to justify writing another book. We’ll see.

Why the Church is like Dr Who

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Christianity—like the religion of ancient Israel—has undergone metamorphoses over the centuries. Maybe it is time for another one.

I have a friend, a recent immigrant, who is puzzled at much of what he sees in the Canadian church. In particular, he does not understand our reluctance to talk openly about the decline of churches across the country.

Are there good models of growth?

In the past year, I have been on several panels—ostensibly to discuss that very issue—only to find the moderator gently steering the discussion away from decline, and toward examples of churches that are successfully bucking the trend.

The only problem is that most of the churches held up as examples of healthy growth are growing with people who are previously churched. The good news, of course, is that these churches are catching people who might be lost to church and faith if these centres of excellence were not there to catch them.

The better news is that immigrant churches are filled and multiplying. But as a model of growth for other churches, it is limited—and masks the change that has already overtaken much of the western church and world.

If denial, despair, and celebration of non-missional growth were the only options on the menu, I would be truly depressed, but Willow Creek Community Church has pioneered another way: facing the problem. When their leadership team published the REVEAL report in 2008[i], it was a public confession that 63% of their core people were considering leaving the church, and only 7% said that the church was helping them to stay on track with their spiritual life. That kind of honesty takes courage.

The way forward

If we assume that the Gospel is not faulty, and that God has not left the building, andthat most church leaders are faithful, hardworking souls doing all that the Spirit has empowered them to do, then what is going on? Let’s start with some history.

The church almost died in infancy. Rome’s destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70 should have been catastrophic to the early church. In Acts 2, we see the apostles teaching in the Temple—a sensible strategic location of spiritual authority for Jesus’ followers and the Jewish diaspora who had also put their faith in Christ.

Some scholars see the horror of those days reflected in St. John’s Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation. It was an Apocalypse. Despite the loss of physical location and the martyrdom of almost the entire first generation of apostles, we see the regeneration of an entirely different Church, inwardly carrying the same identity and memories, but outwardly almost unrecognizable.

The shift was so complete that those who continued untransformed became known as Judaisers, simply because they wanted to retain early practices of the apostles such as circumcision, dietary restrictions, and festival days. The rest of the Church had moved on to become a multi-centred Gentile/Jewish phenomenon—while inwardly reflecting God’s original mission with fresh clarity and fruitful effect.

Apocalypse is a wonderful New Testament word, not to be confused with the modern secular meaning of doom and destruction, as in “Zombie Apocalypse”—but almost as dramatic. Apocalypse simply means revealing what is hidden in plain sight: God’s plans and purposes through cataclysmic events.

In times of discontinuous change, the formulas don’t work any more. Fortunately, we have stellar examples of how God moves faith communities through something more than change: it looks more like death followed by resurrection.

The morphing of Judaism

change One example was the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in the sixth century BC, and the exile of God’s people in Babylon for seventy years. Imagine a faith whose entire practice had revolved for centuries around burnt offerings by a clergy trained only for Temple service. Then, for more than seventy years in exile, those priests had no vocation and no location. Ordinary people of faith raised children and grandchildren who no longer spoke the language, kept the festivals, or made the necessary sacrifices. As a result, when the exiles returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, their faith in God had regenerated in a radically different form.

The Temple was rebuilt eventually—but not before the portable Torah had supplanted fixed altar sacrifice as the centre of faith, and priests had given way to teachers of the law. Sabbath was practiced at the family table, led by mothers; and communities of faith sprang into being wherever ten men could make a quorum. Judaism had become portable, and less dependent on inherited priests and places.

As a result, when the Temple was destroyed a second time in 70 AD, God’s people were entirely equipped to continue without it. Fast forward 400 years to a Church that has completely adapted to the new realities of the Roman Empire. The faith has travelled Roman roads using the Roman language, building churches in Roman towns with patterns of government compatible with Roman culture. Brilliant! That is, until the Roman Empire fell, and Roman churches languished and sank into disrepair and disuse. This might have been the end, except that un-Romanized “barbarians” on the fringes of the former Empire began to build monastic communities that sent out missionaries to build new communities, and re-evangelize the world.

The Reformation was another such Apocalyptic event. Respect for the institutional church had plummeted, and faith in God was shaken by catastrophic events—climate change, plague and famine. The rediscovery of God in scripture as Christians drifted from corrupt institutions was a Godsend in every sense of the word.

Uncertainty and expectation

Like Doctor Who and his Tardis, the Church hasregenerated in another body each time—almost unrecognizable in appearance to those used to the older forms, but identical in heart and memory.

Most Canadian church leaders acknowledge that something very dramatic has happened to much of the church in Canada, but we hardly know how to talk about it, let alone undo it on a large scale—even if “undoing” were the right (or even a possible) response.

We are seeing pieces of this new regeneration, I think, in such areas as fresh expressions of church, transplanting the nucleus of a new congregation from vibrant churches into old buildings, emerging church planting movements, house churches, new monastic communities, and other places that are still in the process of morphing from one body to another.

Oswald Chambers was prescient when he said:

 Naturally, we are inclined to be so mathematical and calculating that we look upon uncertainty as a bad thing. . . . [But] to be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness; it should rather be an expression of breathless expectation.[ii]

 Only the perspective of time will illuminate the reasons behind our era of change, but a few clear lines are already emerging from the mist. In my denominational tradition, the precipitous declines were underwritten with denial for decades. It seemed the better alternative to despair. It wasn’t. It isn’t.

Apocalypse is a bad-news word if the undead walk among us. It is a good news word for the Church of Jesus Christ risen from the dead. It is good news for a church that believes that it was founded on a rock against which the gates of hell cannot prevail. It is excellent news if we believe that the answers are hidden in plain sight.

[i] Greg L. Hawkins and Cally Parkinson, REVEAL: Where are you? (Willow Creek Association, 2008)
[ii] Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1935), 120.

Confessions of a Confused Church Planter

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Where do we find significance in a life of ordained ministry? One church-planter made an important discovery.

There is a heroic sense of purpose and urgency that comes with the idea of inaugurating a new church.

At least that’s how I felt in 2005—but by 2013 the feeling had painfully worn off. The mission of a new start in a new territory had been taken hostage by a new inability to see the future. Afflicted by a deep sense of loss, I found it unbearable to think of myself apart from what I had helped start.

Even after our bags were packed for the next ministry appointment, I had doubts about the legitimacy of pastoral work in a traditional setting. I was certain that I had sold my soul to the many grade givers, as Henri Nouwen once said,[1] and in turn disappointed the people that I loved most.

 Future Shock

There was a time when I knew where we had to go. With great precision and great people, we confidently navigated the first steps of a new church. It was not easy, but we felt invincible. Each move felt more obvious than the last as all the pieces wonderfully fell into place.

The proof, in our minds, was in the stories that we were collecting along the way. Like the time where the majority of keys to our building belonged to people who were not part of our worshipping community, but part of our neighbourhood. Or the time that it took six years for a woman to trust us enough to allow us into her life. The list only grew from there. There’s the story about Baby Basket, the one about the Booty Call, the one about the Art Festival, and the one about The Business. For the outsider, these words and stories mean nothing, but for us they were code for “God is at work,” and by them I felt as though I could see the future.

Until I couldn’t anymore.

By 2012, dark clouds began to roll into my soul, causing a fog so thick that I could no longer see what was ahead. This would later lead to a sabbatical that began with a sense of pride (Yes! They can do this without me!) that quickly turned into a panic (Oh no! They can do this without me!). As I spent those three months stumbling in the dark, I kept asking God to renew my sense of passion for the church plant, but it never came.

I hassled the Holy Spirit for a new sense of direction, but that too never materialized. There were plenty of voices prescribing what I should do, but they only contributed to the poor visibility. And as I toyed with the possibilities and options before me, I kept coming back to what I would later recognize as my greatest fear: that I was about to run out of good stories. Whether I persisted in the dark, or sought sunnier pastures, I feared that my courage had expired and, because of that, I could no longer see the future.

Illegitimate Work

Months would pass, during which I transitioned from being a bi-vocational pastor to being a volunteer pastor, to being once again a full time pastor—only this time at a different church, in a different province.

This new position had everything I had felt missing including stability, opportunity, and the challenge to help fix something that was broken. On paper, this was a perfect match, and there was a strong sense from my peers and mentors that this would be a healthy move for our family.

But even before we were fully unpacked, it started all over again.moon-sun-and-clouds_57553

Despite the fact that I felt very good, that work felt meaningful again, and that I was meeting new people I believed I could grow to love, there was this aching sense that my transition into an established, traditional setting was an illegitimate one. It was too easy and too good. Church planting was virtuous and self-sacrificing work, but this steady gig was a sign that I had truly given up on doing anything significant with my life. It may sound over-dramatic, but it really felt that way.

More old stories then came back to haunt me. Like the time we couldn’t afford to keep the heat on in the church building during the week, so we had to wear coats and hats while we worked. Or the year our combined household income was $26,000—that is, one thousand dollars less then I made alone at my first full-time job. Or the time the church emptied its bank account to pay for dentures for a man who had lost his teeth and his job. This was important work! This was front line ministry! This is where I needed to be.

Clearly Beloved

Weeks later, by way of a trusted friend, I finally heard what I had known to be true all along: this isn’t about my performance. I don’t need to prove my worth or justify my work. I don’t need to manufacture reasons or re-phrase excuses as to why things have changed. There is something of greater importance than what I can produce. Author and Episcopal priest Robert Capon puts it best by saying:

The will of God now becomes not the orders of a superior directing what a subordinate must do, but the longing of a lover for what the beloved is. It is a desire, not for a performance, but for a person; a wish not that the beloved will be obedient, but that she will be herself—the self that is already loved to distraction. The will of God, seen this way, is not in order to something, but because of Someone.[2]

Today things are a little less foggy. I recognize that I am an accomplice in my own demise, dulling my awareness with distractions of every kind while feeding my appetite for good with the junk food of accomplishment. Yet all the while the Lover reminds me that I am his Beloved not for any other reason than the fact that he has willed it.

 

Joe Manafo is an ordained minister with the Free Methodist Church of Canada, Teaching Pastor at Lakeview Church in Saskatoon, and author of . . . And We Will Become a Happy Ending.

Joe was one of the two plenary speakers at the Vital Church Planting conference this year.

[1] Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life (Ave Maria Press, 1974), 18.

[2] Robert Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox: Images and Mystery in the Christian Faith (Seabury Press, 1974), 38.

 

Vacuum Cleaner Church

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We sometimes forget that the church exists from Monday to Saturday, and not only on Sunday. So why do we spend so much time thinking vacuum cleaner editedabout our gathering on Sunday—and so little about being the church during the week?

 Have you heard the term “vacuum cleaner church”? Whether you’ve heard it or not, you’ve probably experienced it. “Oh, can you help out with this committee? Can you do a reading this Sunday? Why don’t you join this small group?” It goes on and on. I remember a friend joking that there was only one night a week when she was at home, and her husband was worried that she’d give that one up to being “at the church” too. It wasn’t a particularly funny joke.

The trouble is that it is all too easy to measure people’s spiritual maturity by the amount of time they spend in the four walls of the church building, or in “church”-related activities. They’re the people we value most, the people we trust with yet more responsibilities, and the people we reward.

What is the church?

What is wrong with this picture? It assumes a very distorted understanding of “the church.” What is church? Church consists of those who have responded to God’s call to “repent and believe” through faith and baptism. And what does “repent and believe” mean? Jesus connects it with his announcement of “the kingdom” (Mark 1:15). So we could paraphrase Jesus’ words about the arrival of the kingdom this way: “Now I’m here, God’s plan to restore and renew the world is reaching its climax: drop whatever you’re doing and come join me. Stop wasting your lives and get with God’s program!”

If this is the heart of church, then how does it operate? Some have suggested that church exists in two modes, the “gathered mode” (when we come together for worship and teaching) and the “scattered mode” (the rest of the week, when we live our lives in the places God has called us—home, work, or leisure). Church is an apprenticeship in the ways of the kingdom, a co-op program with a (relatively small) classroom component, and an on-the-job component (most of the time).

The trouble is that church leaders usually value the gathered mode more than the scattered mode. It’s natural enough, since—traditionally anyway—the focus of seminary training has been how to lead the church in gathered mode with excellence. But Lesslie Newbigin warned, over a quarter of a century ago, that this is not enough: “it seems clear that ministerial training as currently conceived is still far too much training for pastoral care of the existing congregation, and far too little oriented towards the missionary calling to claim the whole of public life for Christ and his kingdom.”[1] Did you notice the word “still” in there? He was looking back—and in 1977!—and seeing that even then this was a long-standing problem. So has it changed since then?

The need for missional leadership

In recent years, seminaries like Wycliffe and Tyndale have increasingly reoriented their teaching and training to take on a missional dimension: that is, like the church in general, we have realised that the purpose of the church is to work with God in God’s mission to renew and restore the cosmos. The church is not there to supply services to religious consumers, or to meet people’s “spiritual needs,” or to provide a “spiritual dimension” to society’s life. We are a community of Jesus Christ’s apprentices in the transformation of the world for the glory of God. This is the key to understanding Scripture. This helps us know who we are meant to be in a post-Christendom world.

But I’m not sure this awareness has percolated through into the life of the average local church. Our instinct is still to suck people in to innumerable activities—all of them worthwhile, of course—within the church community (and all too often in the church building), instead of seeing church events as equipping Christians for their missionary work in “the world.”

John Stott warned us of this danger almost forty years ago:

A convert to Jesus Christ lives in the world as well as in the church, and has responsibilities to the world as well as to the church. I think it is the tendency of churches to “ecclesiasticize” their members which has made so many modern Christians understandably wary . . . Conversion must not take the convert out of the world but rather send him back into it, the same person in the same world, and yet a new person with new convictions and new standards. If Jesus’ first command was “Come,” his second was “Go”—that is, we are to go back into the world out of which we have come, and go back as Christ’s ambassadors.[2]

Rather than honouring those who spend all their time “in church,” perhaps we should worry about them. How will they ever mature as apprentices of Jesus that way? How will they have time to fulfil their mission in the world? Of course, some people are required—and gifted—to maintain existing church structures. After all, we do need those structures to equip and sustain us for mission. But my hunch is not as many people, and not as often.

Maybe some of those who are in “gathered mode” too much of the time need to be pushed out of the nest so they can learn to fly—for their own good and the good of the mission. The opposite is also worth considering. We sometimes worry whether those who only show up on Sundays, and resist serving on church committees. We even question their commitment: are they really growing in their discipleship? But it may be that if we scratched the surface of those people’s lives, we would find that they are too involved with loving their neighbours to serve on yet another church committee.

Sending out, not sucking in

I had a friend once who started literally dozens of Bible study groups in workplaces across his city. Over the years, they saw about a hundred people come to Christian faith through their witness. My friend’s church—a Baptist church—said, “Look we would love to have you as one of our elders, but this work you are doing across the city is your mission, and putting you on a church committee would just be a waste of your gifts. So we will pray for you and support you in any way we can.” A truly missional response. After some years, my friend moved to a job on the other side of the country. So the man who had acted as Vice-President of the group was asked to take over the leadership. His response? “I would love to do that, but I’m much too busy in my church. Thanks, but no thanks.” Not surprisingly, the ministry declined in size and effectiveness.

Jesus said we are the salt of the earth. Good Christian leaders will ensure that the salt gets sprinkled liberally where it is most needed, and beware the piles that accumulate on the side of the plate. Or, to change the image: Christians are rather like manure: spread thinly, they do a great job. But gather too many of them together for too long, and they begin to smell pretty bad.

[1] Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1989), 230-231.

[2] John R.W.Stott, Christian Mission in the Modern World (IVP, 1975), 121.

Christmas Symbols and their Meaning

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Do our traditions help or hinder the communication of the Gospel?

It was about this time last year that I happened upon two students in the lobby of Wycliffe College. They were Chinese students who were part of an English as a Second Language (ESL) group who had rented space at the college and who were enjoying a break from class. They were gathered around the centre table in the lobby, and were taking pictures of a Latin-American pastoral scene depicting a man and a woman surrounded by a variety of animals. As I moved closer, I was surprised to notice something conspicuously missing. Someone had stolen Baby Jesus!

Only later did I learn that no one had stolen Jesus, but that this was actually intentional. The idea is that leaving Jesus out of the nativity scene during Advent helps increase a believer’s anticipation of what is to come. It is one of those many symbols and traditions that intensify the Christmas season for the believer. Well, I’m not an Anglican, and learning the ins and outs of the liturgical calendar has been a steep (but highly edifying) learning curve. Back to the case of the missing Jesus.

Despite this enlightenment, there was part of me that still felt uneasy with the encounter. I wondered what the students thought of this scene. In all likelihood, they had no Christian background to draw from. Did they think that the figurines were nicely painted? How were they going to explain the pictures to their friends and family back home? Will they say, “See how Canadians have nice figurines” or “It was strange that they had this in the lobby of their university”? I wondered if it would have made any difference if Baby Jesus had been there. I wondered if they would ask the deep questions I hoped this scene would provoke.

I began to wonder too about the relationship between liturgy and proclamation, or symbol and evangelism. Ideally, there is no tension: they are meant to augment each other. But in some contexts, either one may simply serve to obscure the other. Some of our liturgical practices, while they can heighten the meaning for believers, are often incomprehensible to those outside the church, or from outside North American culture. Is it possible that our traditions actually veil Jesus for outsiders?

Just a week ago, as I was thinking about this, I happened upon the exact same scene, although this time there were three international students Advent creche2standing at the table. This year Wycliffe has opted for a more traditional Middle-Eastern scene, complete with camel and magi. There is also a manger for a baby—and, once again, no baby (yet). Was this scene just as strange to them as the year before—or was it even stranger because of the Canadian student (me!) who blurted out, “You know that there is supposed to be a baby there?” I quickly realized that they were early in their ESL course, and did not understand what I meant. So on this occasion a verbal explanation did not help, and I was left with the image on the table, pondering whether it could still communicate something that my words could not.

I am grateful for what I have learned about liturgy in recent years. There is a deep void in my own tradition, and my spiritual life has been greatly enriched by my time and exposure to Anglicanism. My concern is pragmatic. What are we communicating to those outside the church? Is our message clear and accessible?

I have also come to realize that it does not have to be an either/or situation. After I had ranted for a week to anyone who would listen, in front of the table at Wycliffe, the chair of our student council placed a nice explanatory note in front of the nativity scene explaining the tradition and the symbolism. It was nice to see another visiting student reading it the other day.

It is through small steps of this kind that we can translate the richness of our liturgy and traditions for the benefit of people whose background does not include the story of Christmas.

The Christmas season is one of the few windows we have where our culture invites us to reveal the deep truths of the Christian message and the true hope we have in Jesus Christ. What are we communicating—and how?

 

Steve Hewko is a doctoral student at Wycliffe College studying interdisciplinary Islamic and Christian theology. He has spent time working in campus ministry in Canada and as a missionary in West Africa. Steve is married with three children.

 

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