One of the real treats of my first week in UK was sharing the experience with classmates from around the world. All are enrolled in Fuller Seminary’s D.Min. course, “Encountering New Ways of Being Church,” either for credit or, like me, as a graduate auditing the course. Here is a brief profile of some of the participants:

Silas – Chinese pastor living in Vancouver, BC. The church he planted eleven years ago is now planting three other churches.

David – Presbyterian missionary to Tibet

Richard – pastor of the state Reformed church near Bern, Switzerland

Dan – pastor of a multiracial, Pentecostal church in Los Angeles in a community where 80 languages are spoken

Lyn – a Salvation Army officer in Australia, teaching missiology in the SA training school, and pastor of an inner city church which has a ministry to those with mental illness

James – associate pastor in a Baptist church in Manhattan. In addition he and his wife lead a vibrant ministry for young artists, called The Haven.

Daniel – an American serving as associate pastor in Glasgow with the Church of Scotland. Before coming to Scotland served in ministry for seven years in Israel.

Bjorn – national leader for the Seventh Day Adventist churches in Denmark

And of course, the course leaders, John and Olive Drane. John is a minister in the Church of Scotland and former professor at the seminary in Aberdeen. A prolific author, he has written 72 books to date. John left his seminary teaching in frustration over the inadequate way students were being prepared for ministry – with the educational assumption that graduates were being sent to churches that could continue to thrive without adjusting to the new challenges of a post-Christian culture. As he explored what God was doing through “emerging” churches, he began to write about his findings. Soon Fuller Seminary picked him up as a guide for pastors wanting to discover new directions. His wife Olive has spent her adult years searching for creative, artistic and participative ways to worship.

Monday, May 4, was a holiday in Great Britain, an ideal day for the Earlsdon Methodist Church to sponsor a Soul Clinic for the community. Also called a Spirit-Mind-Body Fair, the soul clinic is designed to appeal to the growing number of people who consider themselves spiritual, but not religious.

The church building is transformed for the day, with booths set up throughout the room for the various spiritual activities to be offered. Some examples, with quotes from the brochure:

* healing prayer is offered for any who ask

* dream interpretation

* halo prayer. “Through the Holy Spirit, [Methodist minister Colin Telfer] is led to areas of prayer revealed in the colors that form a halo around a person.”

* Prayer – prophetic pictures. “These are pictures seen in the mind’s eye, as a pictorial message from God to the recipient. They can be used to direct prayer and ministry, or to speak out God’s encouragement.

*Well-being through touch. “Holistic massage is about sensitive communication through the medium of touch. . . Christ centered attitude, care and love enhances this treatment and body felt emotions are released, often shared and if possible brought into the presence of Christ, allowing His touch and love to heal.”

American churches are accustomed to hosting blood drives and rummage sales, but as far as I know, no church has held a soul clinic. So, what is going on here? Well, it is strange and new for British churches too, and the sponsoring churches have to search far and wide to find trusted Christian practitioners of these unusual activities.

The soul clinic appeals to people who resist the cerebral approach to life. In contrast, they desire to experience life through emotions, through bodily awareness, and to integrate these ways of knowing with their intellect. The post-modern approach holds Christianity at arm’s length in part because it seems to many people today that it focuses only on ideas and doctrines. The soul clinic invites people off the street to connect with God in ways more appealing to many post-moderns because these approaches are less rational and more wholistic.

Monday afternoon at 5:00 we climbed to the second floor of the Methodist community center in Coventry to attend Goth Church. About twenty kids, age 12 to 22, were already hanging out. Here were youth from Coventry’s disadvantaged neighborhoods. One sixteen year old had brought her two month old son with her. Another youth, we were later told, already at age fifteen was an alcoholic. Throughout the gathering there was a steady stream of youth stepping outside for a cigarette break. Not all of the kids were dressed in Goth style, but most had chosen some distinctive form of self-expression.

The topic for the day was for the youth to design together the ideal church. Keith, their leader, flashed on the screen several scriptures referring to church and then invited the youth to work in small groups, including the adult visitors, to describe their own ideas of what church should be like. The answers were fairly predictable: a gathering where every person’s ideas were accepted, with no rules, where people could just have fun with each other. Then Keith turned the topic upside down as he declared, “Just remember, you’re not talking about some other group. You are church, so if you want a certain kind of church, you’re going to have to make it that way.” Keith then closed the more structured part of the gathering with prayer, and the visitors left, while the kids continued to hang out for a couple more hours.

“You are church.” I wasn’t completely surprised by the statement, since I had been reading about “youth church” as one of the forms of the emerging church in England. Still, it was a bit jarring, since this youth gathering had so few characteristics commonly held to be essential to a church.

Later I asked Keith about his assertion that these kids he works with every week constitute a church. “Jesus said where two or three are gathered in his name, he is there among them,” he replied. “That is the primary factor.”

We’re spending this week in England in a course titled, “Encountering New Ways of Being Church.” Goth Church in Coventry certainly qualifies as a new way of being church, though it pushes every button for most Christians. Tomorrow we will spend the morning in the seminar, “Church or Not a Church: That Is the Question. What Must We Have, and What Can We Do Without?” There should be a lively discussion.

Coventry Cathedral, with its thousand year history, is a fascinating setting for the first three days of my course in England on new forms of church. To visit the cathedral today is to see stark reminders of the horrors of World War II and inspiring illustrations of the power of the gospel. The historic cathedral was firebombed by the Germans in 1940, leaving only the outer walls intact. As mourning church members viewed the smoldering remains, they saw that two charred roof beams had fallen near the altar in such a way as to form a cross. The message was unavoidable. Soon after, church leaders hit upon a statement that would both guide the church in their response to the crisis and lead eventually to a worldwide ministry: “Father, forgive.” Not – “Father, forgive them” – but rather, “Father, forgive,” for the church wanted to emphasize that all need God’s forgiveness.

The spirit of reconciliation in Christ, which drove the church’s decision not to nurture hate for the destruction of their building, is now represented by the peacemaking organization, Community of the Cross of Nails, www.crossofnails.org. Coventry’s bishop, sifting through the ruins, had found three medieval nails, which he bound with string to form a cross. The cross of three nails quickly became an enduring symbol of Coventry Cathedral’s witness to God’s work of reconciliation in Christ in every sphere of life.

The church’s extraordinary response to their great loss during the war was evidence of the Holy Spirit’s profound blessing upon the church. God brought about a resurgence of faith and joy in Christ. In the 1960s many American churches met in small groups to read Fire in Coventry, the story of God relighting the fire of faith in the Coventry congregation. The story of God at work in Coventry ignited a longing for the renewal of the Holy Spirit in many of these American churches.

Today the Church of England is struggling with losses far greater than destruction of buildings. Only nine percent of the population attends church even periodically. In response the Church of England has begun a creative venture, Fresh Expressions, to plant hundreds of experimental types of churches. Coventry Cathedral www.coventrycathedral.org.uk has backed that initiative in a highly unusual move, by creating an ordained position, Canon for Mission, staffed by Yvonne Richmond, a visionary leader in the missional church movement and board member of Fresh Expressions. As the church searches for new forms of ministry to connect with a disinterested British population, the Holy Spirit’s fire still burns at Coventry.

 

The signs say “ReaLife Café.” There is no indication a church meets inside. But if you open the door on a Sunday at 11:00 a.m., you will find a room buzzing with young adults and children, fresh coffee at the café counter, and the rest of the room set up for worship.

ReaLife Church is designed around the café, which serves as a drop-in center for the community on weekdays. The café is a symbol of the church’s determination to (1) be part of the community and (2) provide a nonthreatening setting for faith-oriented conversation. You might call it, “Friends” Finds Jesus and Moves to Bridesburg. The Bridesburg neighborhood of northeast Philadelphia is a tightly knit community with many long-term residents. If you want to gain a hearing for the gospel, you need to show that you are settling down and committing yourself to the community. The café sounds like a good strategy.

ReaLife Church, www.realifephilly.org, was launched a little over a year ago, though the pastor, Rob Burns, and others have conducted informal ministry in the area since 2000. They’re off to a good start, with a dedicated core group.

This new church is part of a church planting network called Acts 29, based in Seattle. Go ahead; look it up. There is no Acts 29, which is the point. The next “chapter” of God’s mission to the world is the continued expansion of the church as it takes the gospel to the world.

This is a winsome, faith filled, savvy cluster of believers on fire for God’s mission. May their tribe increase.

Michael Moynagh turns some contemporary assumptions on their heads in his book, emergingchurch.intro. Everyone recognizes, for instance, how deadening to the soul consumerism can be, so it is quite a remarkable turn in which he states, “Consumer desires should not be things for the church to battle against, but entry points for the gospel.” Say what? Well, let him explain.

“[Church leaders] give the impression that Christianity is against what individuals enjoy in their everyday lives. Many people conclude that the church has little to contribute to their deepest longings – to their search for identity, acceptance and ways of achieving their aspirations. They don’t see church as being on their side. In its attempt to be prophetic, the church undermines its mission.”

An interesting feature of Moynagh’s book is that he invites a couple of friends to dialogue with him throughout the book, and his friends’ responses are interspersed in the text. One of his friends responds to Moynagh’s bold idea of engaging consumerism for the sake of the gospel with this comment: “I hope Mike will develop this. How to be counter-cultural from within consumerist culture is our biggest challenge, not least because its values have eaten so deeply into the existing church.”

Moynagh sees enormous opportunities for churches to co-opt the powerful consumer tendencies that are shriveling the souls of contemporary society. What Moynagh is not championing is the way large, wealthy churches, both traditional and seeker-oriented, draw crowds with spiritual entertainment. They are joining consumerism, not subverting it, and they are not transforming lives.

Instead, Moynagh urges the church to recognize the spiritual hunger that is driving consumer impulses and to offer Christian faith and community as a better choice. And choice is the key word. “Only by taking seriously the culture of choice will the church have a future. When people think ‘it’s up to you,’ the church won’t get away with being dogmatic or hierarchical: it needs to be more like a partner, working with individuals as they explore belief for themselves – ‘this is how the passage has often been understood, but how do you read it?’ (Time to farewell the traditional sermon?)” [Moynagh’s parenthesis, not mine.]

“After a certain age most people are uncomfortable with new ideas. That certain age varies by person, but if you’re over fifty-five (mentally) you probably won’t enjoy this thought experiment. If you’re eighty going on thirty-five, you might like it. If you’re twenty-three, your odds of liking it are very good.”

This excerpt from God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment by Scott Adams, is pasted on the web site of one of the emergent churches in Pittsburgh, www.churchreincarnated.com. Standing alone at the top of the web page, the quote projects an edgy image and warns the viewer that this church is going to push the buttons of nearly everyone, and if you’re no longer mentally malleable, you might as well avoid the church altogether.

And what about the statement in its context? Adams, well known for his comic strip Dilbert, writes a fictional account of a young deliveryman drawn into a metaphysical journey by an old man he encountered while delivering a package. The dialogue that ensues is intended to lure the reader into a complex “thought experiment” about ultimate reality.

The quote above, in which the author introduces what the reader is about to encounter, exposes Scott Adams’ hubris, in imagining that he can toy with the deepest enigmas of life in such as way as to explode the shoddy thinking of the great philosophers and theologians who have preceded him. In a later book Adams pokes fun at himself with the title, Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!: Cartoonist Ignores Helpful Advice. Did he know he was overreaching with his “thought experiment?”

Adams knows his market, however. In soliciting twenty-somethings, he is pretty sure he can get away with a postmodern presentation of reality that, while slippery with the truth, is appealing in its ambiguity. I’m finding a lot of that in the emergent churches: slipperiness and ambiguity. Nobody is going to disagree with what is presented because it is generic and generous (I hear the word generous a lot), and besides, no one who attends is in the mood for precision of thought, anyway.

So, they’re right: I’m over fifty-five and I don’t really care to wander around the universe aimlessly. But here’s my dilemma: I have been commissioned to bring the gospel to those who do.

I pushed Scott over the top yesterday. I didn’t know it at the time, and I didn’t mean to, but there we were, having a good conversation, and the next day he sends me this six page rant. (He wasn’t angry at me, thank heavens.)

Scott has invested two weeks helping me think through the wholesale transformation of the church in order to make it more missionally aligned. It’s a tall order, and Scott has been very supportive of my pursuit. Meanwhile, Scott is on a quest of his own, to be an agent for the transformation of the seminary where he teaches.

Scott wants his seminary to change NOW, because the kind of training the students are receiving is based on an outmoded model of church. Watching me, after years of pastoral work trying to retool, and realizing that today’s graduates are going to be ill-equipped from the start, he wrote a manifesto for the reformation of the seminary.

I think his most herculean problem is that he wants the faculty to produce a different product. But these highly trained, conscientious scholars have spent a lifetime becoming good at what they do, and they would be very clumsy at doing anything different.

Scott, welcome to my world. I have a really fantastic congregation. They’re good at what they do. Asking them to become missional means asking them to acquire a new set of skills, to adopt a new idea of why they exist and to employ new measurements to evaluate how they’re doing.

Whether the task is transforming seminaries or congregations, it’s a God-size challenge, and getting there is going to be a faith-stretching adventure for all of us.

I’ve been digging around for a few days in an area of research that is all new to me. I’m studying the life and writings of Gregory the Great. He was pope during the years 590-604. It was the twilight of the Roman Empire, a time of great social dislocation and political upheaval. Constant war, and decimating plagues, famine and floods added to the misery of his era.

Gregory is called “great” because of his leadership of the church in a time of high anxiety and uncertainty. He brought spiritual depth to his oversight of the church, and his guidance to pastors is still being read today.

Of note to me is Gregory’s effort to reconcile the desire for spiritual reflection and prayer with the demands of daily duties. Gregory had been called into service as pope from the monastery. His preferred way of life was the quiet of contemplation, and he was very reluctant to give it up for the administrative rigors of the papacy.

Gregory wrote extensively of the tension between the active life and the contemplative. In his biography of Gregory, R. A Markus writes, “Service and contemplation [Gregory believed] complement each other in the pastoral life. The preacher always needs to return to the ‘fire of contemplation’ to renew his ardor, if his work of love is not to cool. The life of a faithful minister is a constant returning from action to contemplation and from contemplation to action.” (p. 24)

Surveys of today’s pastors show how much they struggle to find time for contemplation. Gregory offers a word of realism as he reflects on the story of Mary and Martha.

“If those of us who serve our brothers cannot sit quietly at our Redeemer’s feet, we should nevertheless stand by Him for a little while. We do this well if we glimpse Him as we pass to and fro while serving. And what does it mean to glimpse the Lord in passing, but to direct to Him the intention of our hearts in all our good works? For we pass to and fro as we run around serving Him, ministering to His members. And passing we glimpse the Lord if in all we do, we contemplate Him who is present to us when we try to please Him.”

Maybe that’s the best we can hope for, as we “pass to and fro while serving:” to “glimpse the Lord in passing.” And I think what Gregory means by “directing to Him the intention of our hearts in all our good works,” is something like the prayer, “Lord, as I hurry from task to task, this is my service to you, my offering, my prayer; please receive it in love.”

It still seems unbalanced, and Gregory would probably agree. But if in our ministry the Lord should grant us a glimpse of himself, not only would that give us extraordinary encouragement; it would undoubtedly draw us toward more frequently to prayer.

Scott Sunquist, mission professor at Pittsburgh Seminary, invited me to the monthly gathering of a group of emergent church pastors. We met at The People’s Restaurant, a storefront serving great Indian food in Pittsburgh. The discussion was thoughtful and intense from the beginning. Here were four young pastors trying to think missionally as they lead their churches in creative interaction with the unchurched.

I represented what they were running from: conventional, suburban churches. Two of the pastors could hardly contain their impatience with the traditional church. Even the sexy, hip, postmodern versions of institutional church were more than they could stomach; they are still all about programs, buildings and self-promotion. The other two pastors have their feet in both worlds: the emergent church, which they love, and the conventional church, to which they still have some allegiance.

I dove right in, dropping a name they all would immediately respect (Point scored). I referred to Alan Roxburgh’s The Sky Is Falling, in which this missional guru maintains that emergent leaders (like them) and “liminal” leaders (pastors like myself) need each other. They hadn’t read the book. (Two points.)

We do need each other, and that is why I was so delighted to engage these pastors in dialogue about the nature of the church and its mission. Roxburgh observes that emergent leaders have developed fresh, effective ways to connect with populations the church seldom can reach. They tend to be reactionary, however. In their zeal to do church differently they throw out the wisdom of 2,000 years of church ministry. Liminal leaders are the carriers of hard-won theological insight and “been there” practical wisdom but their way of conveying the faith, and their idea of what the church should look like, do not compute in a postmodern culture. “It’s my conviction,” writes Roxburgh, “that without dialogue and cooperation between these two tribes – the Liminals and the Emergents – we will never be able to discern the shape of the communities God truly wants to call forth.”

We had a great conversation at The People’s Restaurant, which led to plans for further dialogue this week. Maybe it was the location. The name of the restaurant seems to this Baby Boomer like a throwback to the Sixties, so I felt at home. And as we talked, the Indian music in the background couldn’t help but put these multicultural, postmodern pastors at ease. Whatever it takes to get us together.