March 20th Saint Cuthbert Feast Day

Forgive a brief digression from my blog series on Alan Hirsch's wonderful book The Forgotten Ways. March 20th is Saint Cuthbert's Feast Day. Saint Cuthbert is one of my heroes. Cuthbert was a monk and bishop in Northumbria during the 7th century. He combined a deep personal holiness and spiritual walk with Christ with a ardent commitment to justice and a vibrant passion for evangelistically sharing the love and lordship of Christ. The three -- deep spirituality, justice and evangelism -- went together naturally in ways most of us only vaguely speak about. David Adam in Fire of the North: The Life of Saint Cuthbert writes: “Cuthbert penetrated deep into the mountain areas, going where others had been afraid to go, into areas where poverty and ignorance made the people unattractive; Cuthbert saw them as children of God awaiting their redemption. Such ordinary people heard him gladly. He, in turn, attended carefully to instructing them. This meant he was often away from Melrose for two or three weeks at a time, and sometimes even a month. His own example, as well as his teaching, won over the hill people.” A prayer of Cuthbert's is offered for our sharing. “WE DWELL IN HIM “Dear Lord our God, Help us to see Christ In others, Help us to receive Christ From others, Help us to share Christ With others, Help us to be Christ To others, Help us to bring Christ To others. Help us to see that In him we live and move And have our being, That we dwell in him, And he dwells in us.”

The Forgotten Ways IV

Recently my son Nathan sent me an email link to the blog of Walter Russell Mead. Mead wrote in a March 14 blog “Sometimes mainline church leaders remind me of the Pope who showed St. Francis around the Vatican to see the many treasures of the church. “Peter can no longer say ’silver and gold have I none’,” chuckled the pontiff. “Neither can he say ‘rise up and walk’,” snapped St. Francis. I can only imagine [continues Mead] what Francis Asbury would say to a Methodist convention today. The mainline churches do a lot of good, but the long inexorable decline both in numbers and in the influence of Christian ideas in modern American life show very plainly that something critical has gone wrong. In attempting to reconcile classic Christian ideas and standards with modernity, the mainline has somehow lost American Christianity’s characteristic and most vital strength: the ability to electrify generation after generation with the call to begin a transformational encounter with the person of Christ. This ability can’t be regained by committee. There is no diocesan or denominational planning process that can knit the dry bones together. But the mainline churches will dwindle and diminish if they don’t somehow reconnect with the enthusiasm and charisma that once made them great.” (http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/03/14/wanted-a-mainlinegelical-church/) At the heart of recovering a vibrant Christianity is the rediscovery and radical reapplication of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Our disputes (theological, missional and otherwise) have to be submitted to His Lordship. Our actions and ministry have to be guided by a sold out conviction that Christ rules our lives and our ministry. Hirsh writes in The Forgotten Ways "I have become absolutely convinced that it is Christology, and in particular the primitive, unencumbered Christology of the NT church, that lies at the heart of the renewal of the church atl all times and in every age." (p. 99) So am I!

Rediscovering Forgottetn Ways III

I find that every page I read in Alan Hirsch's The Forgotten Ways deeply stimulates my thinking. One of Hirsch's concepts is the notion of what he calls "Apostolic Genius." By this he means "the total phenomenon resulting from a complex of multiform and real experiences of God, types of expression, organizational structures, leadership ethos, spiritual power, mode of belief, etc." (p. 78) Apostolic Genius is what cased the early church explode upon the Roman Empire as a new way of thinking, believing and acting. Apostolic Geniuis is what led the Chinese church to grow from 2 million to 60 million while undergoing persecution. A review by B. Brisco shares the following summary. "So what are the key elements of Apostolic Genius? The six distinctives identified by Hirsch are: 1. Jesus is Lord 2. Disciple Making 3. Missional-incarnational Impulse 4. Apostolic Environment 5. Organic Systems 6. Communitas, Not Community" It is both fascinating and inspiring to understand that Apostolic Genius springs out of a core theological conviction. Jesus is Lord! Hirsch writes: "This is cleray the situatino of the gospel in the early church as well as the Chinese revoltuon. The desperate, prayer soaked human clinging to Jesus, the reliance on his Spirit, and the distilliation of the gospel message into the simple, uncluttered message of Jesus as Lord and Savior is what catalyzes the missional potencies inherent in the people of God." This is deep and heady stuff! It is also, I think, a reminder gift from a God who dares to love us. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, it is the return to a focused center!

Forgotten Ways II

In the first part of Alan Hirsch's book Forgotten Ways he tries to set the context for the missional church in today's culture. He notes that the Christendom model of cultural engagement (what he calls "evangelistic-attractional") is simply not up to the challenge of cross cultural evangelistic and missional engagement. With good intent many churches spend their time trying to reach the same narrow demographic slice of people. "What is becoming increasingly clear is that if we are going to meaninglfully reach this majority of people," writes Hirsch, "we are not going to be able to do it by simply doing more of the same." Attractional evangelism has limited appeal in a culture that increasingly rejects the current mode of being church. A host of different writers have addressed this issue. (One of the best in my opinion is Reggie McNeal's Six Tough Questions.) We are now in a new missionary age which demands not only cross cultural evangelism but a mode of being (& doing) church which reaches across the cultural divide. Our consumer model of doing church, however successful it may look today, will not finally carry the day. The attractional consumer driven church is not the future. As Hirsch puts it, "We plainly cannot consume our way into discipleship." The answer is not to become less open or more indifferent to the culture around us (as many mainline churches have done). Hirsch's insights are not cause for stubborn celebration of organ music as somehow more holy or cllinging to an out of touch building driven understanding of church. It is a challenge to rediscover what it really means to be missional. For his part Hisch suggests what he calls the TEMPT model. It looks somethign like this: Core Practice Spiritual Discipline (T)together we follow Community Togetherness (E)engagement with Scripture Integrating Scripture into our lives (M)mission Missiion (the central discipline) (P)passion for Jesus Worhsip and Prayer (T)transformation Character development & accountability He is challenging us to radically rethink what we are about in doing and being church. I'll continue the reporting in my next blog.

Rediscovering Forgotten Ways I.

In an arresting article found in the October 2002 Atlantic Monthly Philip Jenkins (Penn State, author of The Next Christiendom: The Coming of Global Christianity and Lost Christianities) wrote: "As the media have striven in recent years to present Islam in a more sympathetic light, they have tended to suggest that Islam, not Christianity, is the rising faith of Africa and Asia, the authentic or default religion of the world's huddled masses. But Christianity is not only surviving in the global South, it is enjoying a radical revival, a return to scriptural roots. We are living in revolutionary times. But we aren't participating in them. By any reasonable assessment of numbers, the most significant transformation of Christianity in the world today is not the liberal Reformation that is so much desired in the North. It is the Counter-Reformation coming from the global South. And it's very likely that in a decade or two neither component of global Christianity will recognize its counterpart as fully or authentically Christian." At the United Methodist Convocation of Cabinets in the fall 2007, one of the African bishops spoke eloquently on what they were doing with the resultant transformative social witness and expansive evangelistic growth. A variety of other speakers commented on how much we had to learn from the so call 3rd world. Our best thinkers and practioners call this "missions to the first world approach." It involves translating best practices in missin developed over the last century in the two-thirds world in the first world." (Alan Hirsch) I hope to write a series of blogs Alan Hirsch's insightful book Rediscovering Forgotten Ways. More later.