The Book

Curious about the world in which we live and informed by the emerging church conversation, Nathan Frambach asks, “What does it mean to be the church as we live - not as we think or remember or long for, but as we live God's mission today?” He speaks directly to the concerns of twenty-first century Christians who wonder about the church's relevance and worry about disconnect in their own lives between Sunday and Monday faith.

Contents

-1. Preface
0. Acknowledgments
1. Living God’s Mission Today: An Emerging Landscape
2. Being Church Today: The Gathered and Gathering Community
3. God-Spotting: Evangelical Listening and Storied Living
4. The Emerging Church: Postmodern Worshiping Communities or Emerging Ecclesiologies?
5. Mobile Leadership: Navigating New Wilderness Roads
6. Notes
7. Additional Resources

Preface

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can…to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. [1]

I live with my fair share of questions, many of which, indeed, go unanswered. As a rule I’m okay with this—I appreciate questions and would rather have a good question go unanswered than be given a pat answer to a complicated question any day of the week. But honestly, I can only live with questions for so long before we need to tussle. The main reason I am writing this book—which I see as a way to join in a conversation with a lot of people, including you—is because of some questions about God’s mission in the world, the ministry of the churches, and Christian leadership that won’t let go of me. They have been percolating, and the time has come to fuss with them.

What I write in the pages that follow is one way of heeding the poet’s advice, living the questions by pondering them and writing about them and inviting others— inviting you—into a conversation that hopefully they will generate. Obviously this will not be a let’s-get-together-over-a-cup-of-coffee-and-talk kind of conversation. That would be nice—those are the kinds of chats that I most enjoy—but it won’t be a kitchen-table or church-basement kind of conversation. Rather, my hope and prayer is that what I write here will instigate a whole bunch of conversations among creative, passionate, missional Christian leaders in all different kinds of neighborhoods and Christian communities. In short, I hope to spark some imagination and prompt conversation among people like you—Christ followers, the people of God—on mission, God-spotting, picking up the trail of the Holy Spirit and helping pave the road to the church that God intends. And perhaps gradually, each in our own places, but all together, without even noticing it, we will live into God’s promised future.

After an introductory chapter on the current landscape in which we seek to live God’s mission today, we’re going to explore what the church is (missional, public, evangelical) as well as what the church is not (private, family) called to be in Chapter 2. After that we will consider how to go about being church today by focusing on story and listening. In Chapter 4,we’ll see what we can learn from emerging church communities about what it means to be the church today as Christian communities. And in the last chapter we will take a look at emerging ministry and leadership as we seek to navigate the new wilderness roads along which God’s Spirit is leading us today.

Sample chapter

Living God’s Mission Today: An Emerging Landscape

An Opening Parable

He came back, this time with his mom. I finally learned his name—Matt—although his mother called him Matty. Just a bit over four years ago, four ruffians sauntered across a rather large expanse of open field parallel to the railroad tracks and parallel to the creek beside the Pulpit Rock apartments at Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa. I first noticed them out of the corner of my eye as they broke out of the woods into the clearing and slowly, methodically wandered our way and into my life. They asked for a drink of water and we ended up sitting on the floor of our Pulpit Rock apartment, drinking soda and looking out the window up toward the Wartburg Seminary castle. We decided that it wouldn't be a good idea to try and climb the tower, and they wondered what exactly a seminary was and what went on in such a place, anyway. I told them in my own feeble way how we sought, as a seminary community, to listen to God and to one another, to love God and one another, to follow God and serve others, and perhaps in the process to learn something of God's ways and God's desire. And if we couldn't do those things too well, then we went to our classes and our meetings, ate our lunch together and drank our coffee, wrote our papers and prayed our prayers and sang our songs in worship and went home at the end of the day hopefully no worse for the wear. We trusted, so often without ever saying it, that somehow, in the midst of this life together, God was altogether present, even if we were not, moving in our midst, touching our lives in surprising and unexpected ways, calling us out, sending us out, calling us out.

I remember how one of them rolled his eyes really big and sighed really deep, and when I called him on it, he said that his dad told him that when someone started talking about God in a conversation it was time to go (with the thumb saying “outta here”). Then the ringleader—Matty—called his friend on his eye-rolling, deep-sighing attitude and said that as far as he knew he didn't have a dad and he wanted to hear what I had to say about God. And because they sort of voted (three to one, I abstained), I hauled out a bunch of Bibles and we sat there on the floor and looked at Bible stories and talked about God for a bit. There was nothing more dramatic about it. Pretty soon it was obviously time to be done, and as they left, Matty noticed a picture my oldest son Garrett and me. In the picture Garrett, two-years-old, is sitting on my lap. He is leaning up to tell me something and I am tilting my head down to listen to him. It appears as though our cheeks are touching.

Matty looked at me and asked. “So, are you a dad?”

“Yeah,” I responded, “I’m a dad.”

“I bet you’re a pretty good one,” he remarked, somewhat matter-of-factly, and then he left. Whether or not I’m a good dad will be up to God and history and my children. I certainly figured I would never see Matty again.

But I did. He and his mother showed up on our doorstep out in Asbury, Iowa, on a Saturday morning early in the summer, nearly a year after he had first wandered into my life. He had taken one of my Bibles with him that first day we met, and I guess it had my name in it. She apologized profusely and said that Matty would not rest until they had found me, and truth be told, she wanted to see the picture, the one that, in her words, had turned their lives upside down in a good sort of way. After that first meeting, Matty had returned home bent on two things: connecting with God and finding his father. They’d re-connected with their Roman Catholic roots and were happily a part of a faith community. But after almost a year of trying, she could not find the father of her son. They had been seeing a counselor, who suggested that perhaps it was time to stop trying so hard and find another way to bring about some closure. This was fine with Matty—but he needed to find me.

And so it was that almost a year later they ended up on my doorstep out in Asbury, on a clear, early summer Saturday morning. Matty wanted to see the picture again. I brought it out, along with Garrett in person. Matty smiled when he saw it. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a camera. His mother was taken aback, “I didn't know he brought that camera,” she said.

“You touched my life,” Matty said to me, “but I never got to touch you.” I held out my hand. Remembering the earlier picture, Matty proffered his cheek. I knelt down and we had our picture made, sticky, Saturday-morning cheek to sticky, unshaven, Saturday-morning cheek. For Matty, it seemed, it was a simple, safe touch that closed the deal.

This experience has become a parable for me as I think about ministry today, particularly with people in the emerging cultures all around us. It has become parable in the way that John Dominic Crossan understands parable:

Parables—give God room. They are stories, which shatter the deep structures of our accepted world and thereby render clear and evident to us the relativity of story itself. They remove our defenses and make us vulnerable to God. It is only in such experiences that God can touch us, and only in such moments does the Kingdom of God arrive.[1]

The church today needs both parabolic speech and parabolic action that shatters our complacency and conventionality, rendering clear and bringing near the power of God’s story and the promise of God’s reign.

Frontier Living Old and New

Wilhelm Loehe, founder of the institution at which I am called to teach, was oft to say, “Mission is nothing but the one church of God in motion,”[2] a phrase that in capsule reflected a missional ecclesiology (an understanding of what it means to be the church that is rooted in God’s mission in the world and focused on the reign of God) that served Loehe and his missionally-minded cohorts well in their particular frontier context (the United States in the mid-1800s). Now, in this new, emerging frontier context in which the churches of North America find themselves, a missional ecclesiology must emerge in practice that is more deeply Trinitarian and eschatological, more organic and fluid as it lives. In short, a way of being church must emerge that orients the whole life of a Christian community around God’s mission. The question that will drive such an emergence is, “What does it mean to be the church as we live?”—not as we think or remember or long for, but as we live as the people of God. Mission in this new frontier context is the way a people sent by a sending God live everyday, on mission, as they risk living for the reign of God and bear witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ “24/7” as many are apt to say. What God has done in Jesus Christ for the sake of creation and all of its peoples cannot be undone; it is pro nobis, for you, for me, for all. It is this central proclamation of the Christian faith to which the Holy Spirit continually points us, and in turn, to which we are called continually to point others. What matters first and perhaps most is who we are: a people created, chosen, cleansed, claimed, and called by God in Christ. And we are who we are, for better or for worse, all the time, not just on Sunday mornings or Wednesday evenings. On the new wilderness roads emerging everywhere all around us, being “on mission” looks, I believe, strikingly similar to what happened on that much older wilderness road in the Acts of the Apostles (8:26ff). Someone is sent, and goes, to an unexpected place along the Way, and is encountered in a deeply mutual and relational way by another in whose midst the Spirit works mutual transformation.

I want to suggest that we have at least two fundamental foci in our DNA as Lutheran Christians in this country, a people sent to and always living in particular places that are historically conditioned. First, there is this strong missionary impulse to bear witness to the Christian gospel “Lutheranly,” remaining faithful to the primary accents of our Lutheran heritage: the doctrine of justification by grace through faith, a deep commitment to the efficacy of the Word of God as both law and promise, an understanding of the human as simul justus et peccatur (at the same time justified and sinful), a profound sensibility about the priesthood of all believers, and a clear understanding of vocatio (calling) as the primary means of the ministry of the baptized. This missional impulse is coupled with a built-in sensibility about learning to navigate the realities of frontier living. It’s one of the mantras we recite (and believe) at Wartburg Seminary: attending to context. Many of our Lutheran forebears knew well how to migrate their faith into a new place. They became bilingual, both literally and figuratively, learning a new language as well as the customs and mores of new people. They learned not only how to survive in but how to adapt to a new environment; yet they held onto those threads indispensable to their beliefs and way of life. Perhaps many of our forebears were culturally savvy before adapting to a new place was considered savvy. Regardless, we must affirm, celebrate, and build on these dual commitments: the strong missional impulse and the knack for navigating new frontiers. However, we must also fess up to another reality: the landscape has changed.

An Emerging Landscape

The phrase, paradigm shift, although overused, seems an accurate description for the acute changes experienced by Christian churches attempting to navigate the twentieth century. Underlying these changes was a massive shifting of the tectonic plates, culturally speaking, what theologian Graham Ward calls a “cultural sea change.”[3] This should come as no surprise; the Church had a place, had its place in Christendom, and then lost this place. For a period of time ranging roughly from the mid-fourth century to mid-twentieth century, often referred to as the age of Christendom, Christianity and the Christian church as an institution had a culturally supported, central place in the public life of many western societies. In the United States there existed an accommodating, intimate relationship between the church and the predominant culture of the larger society. As a result, this relationship led to an environment in which these two entities, church and culture, were functionally one and the same. Today, however, we simply cannot talk about culture without using the plural, “cultures.” We live within what some have called a “pluriverse” of cultures determined by geography, race, ethnicity, class, worldview and the like. All of us inhabit and are shaped by a variety of cultures at the same time. Given the impact of some large, powerful realities—secularization, cultural and religious pluralism, the massive advances in technology that created the digitally-enhanced world we now experience in this “Infomedia” age—the church (and here I refer to the Christian churches) has been de-centered. Under increasing pressure from these aforementioned powerful realities, the cultural underpinnings that once supported it swept away, the church practiced some ecclesiastical free agency and swapped its central place in public life for a prominent place in the private domain of life.

More broadly, there was another phenomenon defining an emerging missiological landscape. As early as 1942, William Temple, then Archbishop of Canterbury, pointed to the emergence of worldwide Christianity and named it the “great new fact of our time.” [4] The “fact” to which he was referring was but an incipient reality at the time: Christianity had been transformed. No longer confined to the Northern Atlantic context, it had become a global mélange of churches, existing in virtually every major cultural reality on earth. Every year David Barrett generates a statistical review for the International Bulletin of Missionary Research. How’s this for an eye-opener: In 1900, Christians in Europe/Northern America comprised 77% of the world Christian population. By sometime in 1998, Christians in Europe/Northern America comprised 38% of the world Christian population. By the year 2025, it is projected that Christians in Europe/Northern America will comprise 27% of the world Christian population.[5]

More recently Philip Jenkins has narrated this transformation that is taking place in world Christianity.[6] Notice that churches in non-Atlantic regions (Africa, India, South America, etc.) are growing, often exponentially in some cases, while many or even most established Christian traditions are losing numbers, especially in recent decades. At the same time these established Christian traditions are coming to terms with the awareness that Christendom—the dominance of Christian religion and institutional churches in the West—is finally over. To this end, Douglas John Hall’s trilogy, Thinking/Professing/Confessing the Faith, documents this with painstaking detail.

These changes are difficult to grasp, and maybe even harder to digest for many of us—particularly members and leaders of the so-called mainline churches in North America. Tribes like the Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopalians specifically enjoyed the benefits of establishment and protection under the cover of Christendom. For these churches the paradigm shift we have been discussing is extremely challenging. Navigating this emerging missiological landscape will involve discerning and experimenting with approaches to ministry that will radically challenge many present understandings of what it means to be the church today. Navigating this landscape will mean:

Learning how to do theology in unaccustomed ways. This will expose different sources for theological reflection, including creative sources that focus on the search for God in popular culture. Graham Ward suggests that this will involve both a return to and a new emphasis on re-enchantment with filmmakers, novelists, poets, philosophers, political theorists, and cultural analysts—not theologians—leading the way.

Discovering how to relate to a context genuinely and deeply, such as we see in Acts 17 (Paul at the Areopagus). We relate to this context—previously Christian and then secularized western cultures—as marginalized outsiders (e.g., church de-centered), which means we begin with a primary leadership posture characterized by humility, patience, and servanthood.

Learning and practicing new forms of communication, beginning with deep listening and mutual dialog as the first move toward genuine understanding This exposes the need for the communication of the Christian message to be intelligible, at the heart of which very well might be the recovery of gospel as story or narrative into which the hearer is invited to dwell.

Discerning and asking hard, honest questions about the purpose of the church from the perspective of particular traditions and then thinking and acting differently in terms of how to go about fulfilling said purpose, once discerned.

The fact of the matter is, if we are to be true to our historical legacy as Lutheran Christians in this country—a people possessing a strong missional impulse coupled with a knack for navigating new frontiers—then we must wrestle with this missional paradigm shift. Why? Because it defines the North American religious context in which we are called to live God’s mission today. The challenge before us is, at its core, a missiological challenge. There has emerged around us a substantial, global conversation about the mission of the church, at the heart of which is a shift from a primary focus on the church and its expansion to a focus on God as a missionary God.

Such a shift in focus to God as a missionary God has tremendous implications for the life and ministry of Christian communities and their leadership. If God is a missionary God, then the church is called to be a missionary church and Christian leaders are called to exercise missionary leadership. This way of thinking about and imagining Christian life and practice has come to be called the theology of the missio Dei, or the sending of God. In its infancy, this theology was significantly influenced by Karl Barth in the west. More recently, the work of David Bosch has been the most influential, with his 1991 book, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, already a classic.

Mission was understood as being derived from the very nature of God. It was thus put in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity, not of ecclesiology or soteriology. The classical doctrine of the missio Dei as God the Father sending the Son, and God the Son sending the Spirit was expanded to include yet another “movement”: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sending the church into the world.[7]

In short, no Trinity, no mission; no Trinity, no church. The movement to mission is rooted in the very life of the triune God. God knows relationship within God’s self, that is, “immanently.” Yet this deeply relational God is one who lives by sharing. As Justo Gonzalez so nicely puts it, for too long “…Christians have made the basic mistake of approaching the Trinity as a puzzle to be solved rather than as an example to be imitated…If the Trinity is the doctrine of a God whose very life is a life of sharing, its clear consequence is that those who claim belief in such a God must live a similar life.”[8]

God, in creating, seeks relationship beyond God’s self, that is, “economically.” Out of God flows love, into the creation and all of its peoples.[9] In particular, the people of God are called in love to share this love. Can you see where this gets us? The purpose of mission and evangelical living is not merely for the sake of the church. Rather, it is to express God’s faithfulness to God’s saving intention for the entire creation.

The landscape has changed, due in no small part to those powerful realties about which we spoke earlier. In so many ways it’s a big world getting smaller and coming closer all of the time. We now have at least one generation in this country, if not two, that has been bathed in bytes since birth. A new frontier context has emerged, and we are once again immigrants, in a way, in a world that we do not always understand. And we live in the midst of so many people who are, literally, immigrants, just like our ancestors once were.

In this new frontier context there are new wilderness roads along which we are sent to bear witness to the reign of God that broke into the world in and through the person of Jesus Christ. It is this reality, the inbreaking of the reign of God, that the gospel announces, and we are called and sent to proclaim this good news, the same message Jesus carried with him: “The kingdom of God has come near.” (cf. Matthew 4:17; Mark 1:14-15; Luke 10:1-12) Sinners are forgiven, and enemies too for that matter; the last are first; the least are greatest. There are people to be loved, and words of healing and hope to be spoken. What does the reign of God look like? It looks like the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), and perhaps specifically the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12), as well as the vivid picture captured in Revelation 21:1-7.

But the landscape is not the only thing that has changed. A profound shift has taken place in how one understands mission. The modern missionary movement that spawned our being as Lutherans in this country today, focused primarily on the church and its expansion. In our emerging missiological landscape we are compelled to focus on God as a missionary God and the church as that community sent by God the sending One to embody a more fluid witness in new frontier contexts—on mission wherever, whenever. In other words, the church does not do mission, it is mission; by its very nature and calling it lives as God’s sent people. Worship centered in Word and sacrament, life as a distinctive community, the concrete demonstration of God’s love in acts of service—all bear witness to the good news of God in Jesus Christ. The church is sign and foretaste of this good news, at the heart of which is the inbreaking of the reign of God. The church is called to witness to, participate in, even celebrate God’s mission, all the while knowing that the “mission” does not belong to the church, but to God.

God intends Christianity to be more than a system of belief or even a way of life. Rather, Christian beliefs and practices are intended to foster a way of being human that sends us into the world to imitate the deep relationality of God—a God who is for the world and for other people. It is the already-but-not-yet reign of God to which we point and to which we are called to bear witness. This missional focus on the reign of God suggests that the church is never to be the withdrawn or isolated end-user of the Christian gospel. Rather, we hear and receive by faith the good news of the gospel so that we may be equipped and sent into the world to love our neighbors, serve the other, and care for the whole creation. The church doesn’t have a mission; the church is mission, and thus both object and agent of God’s mission.

Missionary Living in a New Frontier Context

Back to a question I posed at the beginning of this chapter: What does it mean to be the church as we live? Where are the new wilderness roads that are emerging around us? Where are the new wilderness roads to which you are being called, along which perhaps you are already walking? They are everywhere and all around us. Generating a response to these and so many other questions means not thinking more, but thinking and acting differently. In this new frontier context the people of God must be much more fluid, more nimble, more agile than we have heretofore. We must reach back, farther back than our immigrant or even Reformation past, to find cues and clues for navigating the new wilderness roads in this emerging frontier context. The book of Acts is a good place to start. I mean here the book of Acts not as a road map to help us with our navigating, and certainly not as a prescription for being church today. Rather, it seems to me that we will discover, or re-discover in the biblical narrative some cues and clues for missionary living in this new frontier context emerging a thousand different ways all around us. As a kind of case study in miniature, I point to Acts 8:26-40—the story of Phillip and the Ethiopian Eunuch.

Questions for Reflection & Discussion

1. The story of Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch (Acts 8:26-40) is a key text when it comes to figuring out what it means to live God’s mission today, and a text to which we shall return at the end of this book. Take some time to read the text carefully, and then discuss it. What cues and clues do you see and hear for living God’s mission today?
2. What is the “mission history” of your church community? Discuss the manner in which your congregation came into being—when, where, who, how, and why?
3. When was the last time you had an experience or an encounter like the one described in the opening parable (see pp. 00-00)? How have you come to interpret or understand what happened?
4. What does it mean to be the church as we live? Where are the new wilderness roads that are emerging around us? Where are the new wilderness roads to which you are being called, along which perhaps you are already walking?

About the author

NATHAN C.P. FRAMBACH is Associate Professor of Youth, Culture and Mission at Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa. He is a contributor to The Ministry of Children’s Education (2004) and Across the Generations (2001), both from Augsburg Fortress.