The Ubiquitous City

I’m constantly impressed with the trajectory of our cities. As more people flock to them and as technology multiplies exponentially it has the potential to create new urban environments that a mere 10-20 years ago seemed like a far off concept like found in a sci-fi movie. Some of these advancements are found and seen here in the U.S. but sometimes it takes leaping over the pond to see how cities are progressively and aggressively advancing.

Like I’ve said in past blogs, to me the built environment of each city is just as important to know and understand as much as who lives where, breakdown of ethnicity, and so on. We can learn so much about a city simply by the way it was laid out, why certain things are in certain places, etc. Take for example, yesterday I drove through downtown St. Louis. A few weeks ago I spent considerable time reading and discussing city rivalries from ancient Athens and Sparta to recent examples like St. Louis vs. Chicago. Obviously STL lost and Chicago won the day as well as the future as the “great Midwest city.” But during the height of the Industrial period STL was a tragic example of deplorable conditions that wouldn’t be good even for animals.  You see, built environments are important for health and sustainability.

Korea is pioneering the concept of a U-City … “ubiquitous city.” Another term you could insert for ubiquitous that is more common in our Christian verbage would be “ominpresent” and it’s in reference to information technology.  These new cities are all wired (or wireless) and held together via information technology.  Everything is virtually linked. I know, you’re probably starting to have flash backs to movies like Terminator or iRobot.

What’s cool is that cities like these are being BUILT FROM SCRATCH.  Imagine that, whole cities … built from nothing.  Everything is new … buildings, parks (and lots of them), infrastructure, everything.  One such city is Songdo (or New Songdo City) outside of Seoul. If you want your mind blown click on Songdo to check out the website.

Again, like in everything I discuss in regards to the city … how does this affect church planting?  What will the future of church planting looks like in urban environments like this?  I’d really love to hear your feedback …

New Urbanism in Small City, USA

It’s funny, I post on New Urbanism last night and as I sit here this morning at the Coffee Hound in Normal, IL I’m looking out the window at the reality of this concept unfolding before me. Home to Illinois State University downtown (or actually called Uptown) Normal is going through a revitalization process of its own as they apply principles of New Urbanism.  Wider sidewalks, beautified streetscape, new incoming trendy apartment lofts, right next to the university, shops and restaurants galore … and my first question always is, “Where’s the church?”

I know the inherent dangers of chasing after such things as New Urbanism because these types of areas attract young urban singles and DINKS (double-income no kids) who tend to be white collar, have discretionary income, and so on.  Often times areas being revitalized are older, thus have great character, and have fallen on hard times.  Usually lower income working class people live in the area. But when a place becomes a hotbed and building and retrofitting sets in the cost of living sky rockets which forces working class families out (maybe not so much in Normal, IL). A church could be planted in these areas and be just as homogeneous as the suburbs and the poor/lower class will only continued to be marginalized and forgotten.

My dream would be to plant churches in these hotbeds with a church having a distinct missional ecclesiology.  The trajectory is outward and all people are loved and cared for whether that be mainstream or marginalized.  It could be akin to some of the apostle Paul’s writings where he talks about how when we’re in Christ there’s neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female … poor nor wealthy, white collar nor blue collar nor no-collar, Black nor White nor Yellow, etc.  In Christ we’re all family loving and serving one another as well as our cities.

I’m humbled to live in such a time as this where cities are truly the new frontier in mission whether that be Normal, New Songdo City in South Korea, Dubai (UAE), or wherever.

New Urbanism and Church Planting

One of the things I love about cities is that all throughout there is the ongoing process of birth and “rebirth” in its built environment.  I’m just as curious about such things as revitalization, gentrification, migration, the local economy, infrastructure, transportation, and so on as I am about the demographics.  When we look at cities in the context of church planting we need to think well beyond simply who lives in what part and what radio stations they listen to.

New urbanism is a growing trend in our cities. It can be defined as a re-invention of the old urbanism as seen in our cities before the advent of the automobile. In other words … cities were laid out in such a way before everyone had cars.  Basically each neighborhood had a town center (within a 5 minute walk) where you went to get groceries, your hair cut, to see the doctor, the banker, or the plumber. Think about it for a moment.  What if all of our cars were gone?  How would we create communities/neighborhoods?  Would everything be so stinkin’ spread out?

I’ve mentioned this numerous times in past blogs but as New Urbanism continues to spread think about the implications for church planting. No longer would we need ginormous buildings, parking lots larger than football fields (or larger!), and you’d “go to church” with those who you’d see day to day at the grocery store or the bank.  Guess what … you might actual “do community” as a church.  Why is community so hard to accomplish?  We’ve grown our churches based on the commuter concept.  We drive to a location, look at the back of people’s heads, sing songs, listen to someone talk at you, then go home. (I know, that’s an over-generalization but you get the point).  What would church look like if we didn’t drive there?

Maybe that should become a mandatory deal-breaker for new church planters.  We’d tell them they can only plant a church if they focus solely on those people who live within a 10 minute (walking) radius.  Maybe we wouldn’t solely focus on one demographic (Next Gens, young families, etc). Maybe this way our churches would be multi-generational and multi-ethnic without having to do any marketing?  Maybe we wouldn’t need such large domineering buildings and we’d integrate into our community more easily?

Maybe, just maybe this idea of New Urbanism is the best thing going on in our cities that will over time transform the way do and be the church?

Good Theology in Church Planting

I think in the past I had underestimated the value of good theology in church planting.  Partly because I had simply assumed that maybe people believed the way I did (I know, that’s silly) and also I’ve been constantly sifting through issues in my own thought process in regards to ecclesiology, the process of evangelism, how we go about sharing the Good News of the Kingdom, and so on.

Recently I picked up a book written from the EmerGENT side of the emerging church movement/trend. As I read the first few chapters this morning what struck me was how your theology affects the way you plant a church and even deeper … your motivation behind it. Just a quick example, one side makes the case the the highest goal in evangelism is simply becoming authentic friends with “non-Christians.” The goal isn’t to persuade or point them to the cross or share your best attempt at explaining the Gospel, but to simply be a good friend.  Everything takes a back seat to maintaining this friendship even if that means not sharing how they’re innately broken and in need of God’s healing / saving touch.  On the more EmerGING side of this conversation it’s about sharing the good news that Jesus was and is God, died a bloody death on the cross, paid for our sins, and longs to purchase us off the slave block of sin.  While friendships are highly valued as well there’s a recognition that the cross is offensive.

This then leads down to the subterranean motivators to plant churches.  Why are you planting a church?  Is it because your heart breaks for your city? Are you, like Jesus when he looked out over Jerusalem, broken and weeping over your city because it is broken and in need of God? Do you plant churches because you know the Gospel not only transform lives, but families, neighborhoods, cities, and nations? Do you plant because you think that Jesus offers a better way to live in the mainstream of God’s Kingdom for both now and eternity? Do you plant because you realize that Jesus died for all of us and we’re in need of reconciliation with God?

We can plant because it’s sexy and trendy.  We can plant because you can make a name for yourself.  We can plant because we can create uber hip spiritual communities that live together and grow organic food. We can plant so we can be our own bosses. Etc, etc, etc …..

Why are you planting?  If it’s not tied to spreading the Good News that Jesus died to restore broken man and a broken world then maybe we have no business planting.  Obviously the outflow of the Good News is investing in our cities, our environment, spiritual formation practices, befriending the least, the last, and the lost, and so on but we need a bedrock for planting.  What’s yours?

Slaying the Dragon

You know, it’s funny how as an adult so much of your life is consciously and mostly unconsciously shaped by your past. For me every now and then it rears its ugly head head like a vicious dragon and I wonder where in the world “that” came from … but I know. I’m 35 years old and still deal with the effects of growing up in an alcoholic home.  It’s nothing I’m proud of, it has brought a lot of shame and pain but I also know it was not my choice nor fault.  What’s frustrating is how it still affects me whether I was planting a church, dealing with conflict, my outlook on life, how I deal with expectations, how I live with tension, and so on.

Welcome to the under-world of church planting (and life). How many of us in planting churches, while striving to honor God, are still slaying dragons from our past and just maybe if we’re “successful” then what was broken might be fixed. Maybe that love and affection we so craved as a child would finally be unleashed and we can feel pride rather than shame?  When we’re all alone in our room at night how much do our dragons of the past yell at us in comparison to God’s voice?  How do we distinguish?  What do we do if we confuse those opposite voices?  What if we inadvertently place upon God those dragon-like voices which makes us run harder and faster trying to “make God happy?”

Grace. Whether we fail or are a ripping success in church planting nothing changes God’s love for us.  Maybe that’s what we need to hear. If our church plant bombs God is not some irrate tyrant yelling and throwing things at us because he’s so ticked.  Grace.  God loves us for who we are regardless if we succeed or fail and in reality how can we ever fail?

I know we can’t pop the lid into every church planter’s psyche to see what competing voices are going on, but I guess my hope that as we run hard and live missionally that we do so because of the grace we’ve felt and experienced.  Maybe that’s just what we need to free us up?  I know most church planters fear failure in planting.  Who are they failing?  What is failure?  If we’re responding to God’s loving call on our lives to plant and then we step out in obedience we’ve already succeeded regardless of the results.

Grace.

How Far is Too Far?

All churches are contextualized to culture … PERIOD.  There is no such thing as a cultureless expression of church.  Even traditional churches who accuse younger churches of “whoring after culture” (trust me, I was told that in my first church plant) they themselves are a church steeped in culture as well.  For some churches their culture is like a throw-back basketball jersey from the 1960’s while new churches try their best to be at least in the 21st century.  These kinds of culture wars rage on in the church and believe me, everyone has not only an opinion, but a STRONG opinion.

In these types of discussions maybe you can pose two questions that form bookends in your thinking:

1. How far is too far?
2. How far is not far enough?

More than likely your church/church plant would fall somewhere within that continuum.  For fun, let’s push the envelope on the first question and see where we go and what our comfort level is.  How far is too far?  Some advocate a wholesale change in theology and in the case of the U.S. it’d be a synchronization with postmodernism. Is that true?  Yes, to some degree because realize this … we had no problem synchronizing with modernism as we shifted away from a more mystical view of God / Scripture to a view more influenced by scientific reasoning and compartmentalization.  The big question is how far is too far?  How much do we sync up with culture in our theology? It’s easy for us to see this more clearly in contexts that are not our own whether that be Christianity mingling with ancient animism. I can only imagine how embedded my view of the church/God/Scripture/Christianity has been synced with American capitalism, consumerism, and materialism.  Ouch.

What about “church expression?” Let’s say you’re in a predominantly Catholic area/culture does that mean your church ought then to adopt numerous aspects of this culture and expression of church/worship gatherings?  Would your gatherings look highly liturgical/formal? Isn’t that part of becoming indigenous?  I see, you’re starting to push back. Good. You can feel the tension. I think since the reality that most of us plant churches among peoples and parts of the city who’re most like us we don’t really have to deal with this.  We just assume that all we need for “church” is some Chris Tomlinesque music and John Piper kind of teaching.  How myopic.

Welcome to struggle.  Welcome to messy church planting.  The more we plant in diversified parts of the city the more we’re confronted with questions like, “how far is too far?”

Lowering the Bar on Church Planting

In light of where my thinking has been the past few days in reflecting on the social justice issues and the trend that church planting by and large attracts the young hip crowd who reaches people like themselves maybe one of the key realities is at hand is that we need to lower the bar on church planting …

Two days ago I looked through several “prospecti” (church planting proposals) and while super impressive they more resembled what you’d hand a group of financial investers if you were to start a business from scratch.  Wait, that’s what we are doing except we call them “partners.”  Maybe this is the reason why church planting attracts a certain type of profile of dude … you know, 30ish dude, still dresses like an Abercrombie catalog model (or for the crunchier crowd he mixes in some goods from the thrift store), usually he dons the Rob Bell glasses, likes listening to Indie bands (and insists he tells you all about this new band from Britain he found through a friend via Skype), and of course he wouldn’t be complete without the ever cool and ever creative Macbook laptop computer. If you were to go to a church planting conference you see the majority of the planters are clones from one another. (maybe the question is who’s the original that everyone is being cloned from?)

Ok, jesting aside … but guess what? You don’t need a propectus, nor money, nor Rob Bell glasses, nor a Mac, nor a trendy wardrobe, nor a slick $3,000 website to plant a church.  You just need to (a) love Jesus, (b) love those who Jesus misses the most, (c) and a willingness to invest in them relationally.  PERIOD. You don’t need to fine-tune your expository preaching.  Guess what, the only people who care about that are Christians because non-Christians don’t care what brand/style of teaching/preaching you do. Non-Christians arent impressed with your websites, or even you swank worship band with Cold Playesque music. If you love them and they genuinely know that then a lot of these issues are mere 2nd or 3rd tier issues at best.  The only people who make a fuss about teaching style, worship styles, websites, programs, etc are Christians.

Let’s look again at those 3 things needed to start a church

1. Love Jesus
2. Love those who Jesus misses most
3. Invest in them relationally

My question is … can you do that? Can you do that regardless of your job? Regardless of your education? Regardless of your socio-economic background? Regardlessof race?

Maybe it’s time we lower the bar on church planting and let more people “play our game” with us.

Justice in the Burbs

A while back I picked up a book at an outlet Christian bookstore called Justice in the Burbs written by Will and Lisa Samson. For 3 bucks I couldn’t pass that up since it dealt with the city as a whole. Just this past week I finally decided to start reading it and incorporated it into my schooling since we’re dealing with the topic of social justice in the city.  After the first few pages of the first chapter I was hooked.  Right now I’m half way through it and I have to take it in stride to let it soak in otherwise I’d want to read it all in one setting.

At the end of each chapter there are meditations/thoughts written by various authors and leaders. Here’s what’s frustrating. Because there are meditations in there written from different people like Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, and Tony Jones that automatically means many won’t even read the book because of fear of being placed in that camp.  You know that camp … emergENT, shhh … the “l” camp, you know l-i-b-e-r-a-l.

Maybe this is an age old question that I know has its roots in the early 20th century with the “Great Reversal” but why is one camp more inclined (as a whole) than the other when it comes to social justice issues?  When in doubt one side defaults to a high emphasis on the preaching and proclamation of God’s Word while the other side is more activism-oriented.  Why does it have to be either/or?  Why can’t it be both/and?

I know a lot of this stems from ones eschatological framework.  You see, if one believes that God is going to come and destroy the plant and create a new one from scratch then it doesn’t make sense to invest in it, right?  Why invest in cities and the people within if it’ll “all burn?” Why care about stewardship issues if the whole planet will be decimated?  So does that mean we keep “preaching the Word,” screwing our eco-systems, neglecting our cities, forgetting social justice issues whether that be domestic violence to incest … because we’ve got our Bibles, we’re saved from this wicked place, so let’s keep singing our songs, listening to long messages, and sit in more Bible studies because that will change the world?

Am I missing something?

We’ve Sold Out to Sexy

Ok, I’ve never blogged 2 times in one day so this is a first. But the fact that I’m hot under the collar (frustrated, ticked …) is reason enough so start compiling my thoughts. Here’s the deal.  I just spent the past hour looking over dozens of church and church plant websites. I got the bulk of them from a LifeWay page link of model churches for a networking / coaching website they’re hosting.

Here’s the frustration.  After looking at all of them (plus many others) if I was a outsider to Evangelicalism here’s what I would conclude … God only tells his followers to start churches among affluent / semi-affluent good looking people. Seriously, look at each of their websites and everyone was good looking and well-dressed.  To this outside visitor maybe their conclusion is that God really only loves the middle class? (and mostly white)  Is this true?  Again, my theory still stands that the majority of our evangelical church planting efforts resides in the suburbs among mostly white Middle-class Americans who have a disposition to family values.  Am I wrong?

Have we sold out to sexy? Are we really only interested in planting among good looking young families?  Again, if you were to look at the cross-sampling of websites I just perused you’d probably come to the same conclusion (if unbiased, but we have all biases, myself included).  Why is it not sexy to start a church for Somali refugees?  Oh wait, I know, because they don’t have money.  I forgot, how could I be so forgetful? Why is it not sexy to start churches for Mexicans in South Tucson? Why is it not sexy to start churches in the gay community? Why is it not sexy to start churches among Indians (South Asians) in Chicagoland? Maybe our websites wouldn’t be as cool and trendy if we didn’t have good looking white families on them?  Maybe the deeper issue is that we have prejudice issues that we’re not dealing with?  Until then, we’ve simply sold out to sexy.

Myopic Visions

In the church planting arena one of the first points of clarity is to figure out your vision.  Not only that but we’re to come up with succinct and catchy vision statements that roll off your tongue like a t.v. commercial jingle. While I know the root of the influence came primarily from the business world it has helped a lot of churches and organization really hone in on what they want to do … but maybe they’ve missed the whole point.

When does God ever call us to create our own visions?  I realize that our motives are indeed good and godly but again, does God call us to create our own visions?  The funny thing is that most of our visions revolve around what we want to see happen in our church.  Did Paul have a vision or vision statement?  Well, kinda yes in some ways … “to reach the Gentiles.” Did he hammer that out with his leadership team on a desert retreat?  No, God told him what his vision was and the rest is history.  (You and I are here as a result).  Paul was heading in one direction, God grabbed him by the shirt collar (or robe or something). and pulled Him along HIS purposes.

Maybe the best thing your church plant could do is NOT to have a vision but instead figure out what God is wanting to do in your city and get on board. I know this sounds strikingly familiar to Experiencing God and you’re right.  In each of our cities God is at work and what’s humbling is often times it’s not found within the walls of our churches … it could be through a revitalization project, a new healthcare policy, a university initiative, a new non-profit being birthed, a change in immigration that’s bringing the nations to your city, and so on.  What’s frustrating is most of our visions revolve around what we want to see in our churches … x number of people in worship, x number of baptisms, etc.  What if instead our vision was more than our church?

What if our vision had to do with seeing our cities transformed?  Not just spiritually but in every level of society from the poor to the elite and where our vision statements deal equally with issues of salvation and poverty in the same sentences, or discipleship and better city schools in another, or evangelism and better public transportation. Have you ever asked what God is trying to do in your city?  Maybe it’s time to start and join HIS vision.