Ok, I just read yet another article on how we need to take the church outside the doors to serve the world, implying that our lack of doing such is the reason for mainline church decline.  It’s a good and well meaning sentiment– truly we aren’t fully the Church if we don’t go out in service.  I even had one professor in seminary who thought the “sending” at the end of a worship service should be elevated to the level of sacrament like baptism and communion.

Here’s my thought, though.  I know many, MANY people who have wonderful ministries which they do clearly in the name of God (and in partnership with God) that happen outside the walls of the church.  They probably wouldn’t use the word “mission” for what they do, but there is no question that’s what it is. What’s more, most of them look like their ministry is a natural response to their faith and ecclesial life.  BUT, their ministries aren’t part of an organized program at the church, and so their ministries aren’t a quantified part of our churches’ systems.

Are we asking the wrong question here?  Just because we can’t put our fingers on the ministry that’s flowing out of our faith communities, why do we just assume there isn’t any?  Perhaps instead of moaning about why we’re losing members, we should instead help people to see the connections between their ministries and their church life.

The church needs to have organized missions to lead by example if nothing else, but let’s not assume that if our logo isn’t stamped on it God isn’t working.

Wow.  I’m a bit jaded today.

Vending Machine Jesus

Originally uploaded by jslater316

Check this out… (sorry for the blurry phone picture)

So I’m walking through Hastings, a video/games/music/book store, yesterday, I walk by the kid’s vending machines (you know, the type where stuff comes out in plastic eggs?), and I saw one that immediately demanded two of my quarters. For the low, low price of only 50 cents, I could have a small likeness of my favorite saint!

So I put in my money, turn the crank, hear the satisfying “clunk” of the egg falling, and– lo and behold– I got Jesus! Jackpot!

This is SO going to be a sermon in the very near future…

(This actually sounds like a semi-decent way to communicate the faith to kids– don’t think I’m totally dissing it here… Still, this is just crying out to be a sermon. I can’t wait.)

As the Associate Pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in Hutchinson, KS, I write a weekly article for the newsletter article. I invite both members of the church and other visitors to my blog to share their thoughts!

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Happy Easter– again! This is about the time we start to “move on” in our minds, allowing Easter to become only a day to us. The truth is that Easter is not a day—it’s a lifestyle. As Christians we are called to be God’s “Easter people,” bringing God’s kingdom into the world and living our lives empowered God’s amazing love. How can we sit still and watch suffering, for instance, when we know God has already overcome it? It moves us to do something about it! How can we stand around while we see people whose lives are so very disconnected from God? Easter empowers us to do something about it!

There is a hymn which says it very well. Here are a few lines from it, find #304 in our hymnal if you’d like to read the entire thing (the words are by William M. James in 1979).

Easter people, raise your voices,
sounds of heaven in earth should ring…

Fear of death can no more stop us
from our pressing here below.
For our Lord empowered us
to triumph over every foe…

Every day to us Easter,
with its resurrection song…
Alleluia! Alleluia!
See the power of heavenly throngs.

I welcome your comments on http://ministrygeek.net.

Since my visit to Mozambique about a year and a half ago, I have become interested in the effects of colonialization and the role missionaries played in it, intentionally or unintentionally. I was amazed at how many Mozambiquans leave their culture at the door and become perfect western Christians, not unlike so many of our churches trapped in generations mostly past when they go into church. I’m not judging, by the way… It may be that such cultural oppression was necessary to prevent humanitarian issues like ceremonial rape, etc. (though even that was an imposition of our culture, wasn’t it? Woah… I’m not going there…) Still, I was overjoyed every time a little bit of their own culture peeked through. While the West learns to emerge out of Modernity, they are learning to emerge out of colonialization.

Andrew Jones wrote a post today with a provocative idea about this (I especially like the part about missionaries bringing pipe organs to Africa so that the natives could “worship God properly.”) The case he makes (I hope I’m summarizing well) is that one of the reasons colonialization happened through missionaries was that they were unaware of how much their own Christianity was impacted by their own culture. Now THERE is an idea the resonates with the current Postmodern shift– one of the main tasks of emergence as I see it is to figure out how Modernity has impacted our faith and decide what to do with that. Is this a glaring example of our culture blindly impacting faith from our not-so-distant past?

Here’s more: Is this true, or is the idea so provocative to my emerging soul because I am projecting our own shifting cultural problems on another generation of missionaries?

Interesting thoughts for a sleep deprived Tuesday. I’m telling you, the motivation to write papers for classes REALLY goes out the window once “senioritus” sets in.

Not sure how many rural-types read my blog, but considering I’m a Kansas pastor going to a seminary bordering Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri, I’m guessing there are a few. I just found out about a brand new blog that shows some serious promise and is filling a huge, gaping hole in the conversation: emergent in rural contexts. Check it out:

http://emergingrural.com/blog/

Someone just asked me what I thought of preaching in postmodernity, and it was a good opportunity to get a few abstract thoughts “floating around in there” into words. I thought I would put them here, too, with a few edits for clarity’s sake in this context. Thoughts?

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Preaching in postmodernity… That’s a topic that seems to be all over the charts as far as differing opinions go. Some say that the very concept of one person standing and talking while others face forward and listen is bad– but I disagree rather strongly with that.

One common theme is letting the people shape the sermon through dialog, etc. My gut tells me there is a way to make sermons more interactive and dialogical, but I have yet to see it done well. Jacob’s Well here in KC is one of the first and perhaps one of the “most emergent” congregations in the nation. Tim Keel, the pastor, usually throws out a question at one point in the sermon (often, “What is your impression of the scripture?”), but it’s done in a way that invites only the outgoing folks to speak, and they usually only give trite answers. Plus, it has no influence on the content of the sermon itself, which to me makes it less dialogical, thus defeating the purpose. (I say that with great respect, by the way… Tim is one of the best preachers I know– if only I could preach like he does!)

Doug Paggitt at Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis is said to have good dialogical sermons, but since they don’t put them online I have never heard one. I have heard their seating is in a circle and there are microphones hanging above the congregation so everyone can be heard. He has a book on preaching out that is spoken well of, though I haven’t read it yet…

If you ask me, the true difference between preaching in modernity vs. postmodernity is the same as in the rest of ministry: the theology and the philosophy with which you approach it. If you have all this wonderful dialog, but in the end cling to modern-resonating stuff, then it’s a modern sermon. But if one person talks to a bunch of other people all facing forward, but bravely explores something that theologically resonates with postmodernity, like say using John 1 to explore Jesus as Creator (just read that one today in Tony Jones’ new book, The New Christians), then that sounds like emergence to me. One of my sermons which I consider the “most emergent” I’ve preached was, at its heart, an attempt to develop a theology of human creativity.

I also think good use of story can be very postmodern– Fred Craddock resonates with this for me (story is/was also key in modernity, of course, but I think of “illustration” for modernity and more along the lines of “shared experience” for postmodernity). Another good preaching moment I’ve had was my first week back in the pulpit after my hip stuff. I told a story of when I was in the ER, with the intention of people either experiencing it along with me or being taken back to when they were in a similar situation. It was even more experiential than I had planned– you could hear a pin drop in that sanctuary before I brought it around to rebirth. The comments I got afterwards were about the peoples’ own experiences, not the one I actually talked about– experiential success!

Check this out:

http://cometothewaters.wordpress.com/2008/03/30/it-appears-they-nevered-liked-his-church/

I’ve always suspected young adults have always been a weak demographic in the church, and researching numbers for that has been on my to-do list for years. The above blog post is short and contains no real hard numbers, but it is provocative.

It’s not that the church should give up trying to reach young adults, but it probably should get real about how it understands that stage of life.  By the way, I do NOT think this has anything to do with postmodernism.  In fact, it makes its emergence in the church all the more important for me.  When young adults do age and re-discover the church as in the past, THIS generation is not going to be happy with a church set in its Modern ways.

Anyway, interesting thoughts for a Monday morning.