I’m a bit of a movie nerd. At the end of each year I make a list of my top ten movies of the year. Since my son came along, I don’t exactly get out to the theaters very often (I think I’ve seen three movies in the theater this year). My list for 2006 will have to wait a while. Here are my lists from the past three years, for anyone looking for something to fill out your netflix queue.

IN Arts and Culture

After twenty-one years of formal education, I am still learning to read. I have learned that my ability to retain information (unless it is about baseball or set to music) is pretty pathetic. Because of this, when I read a book I have to go through it very slowly, and make lots of notes if I want to remember anything. The more I write when I read, the more I will remember. I have decided one of the ways I want to use this blog is as a place for me to write about what I am reading as a way of creating a catalog of my note taking and commentary on what I am reading that I can refer to in the future.

I will be breaking down the books I read by chapter, and providing a basic summary followed by some of my own thoughts. For my tens of readers out there, my goal is to write my comments in a way that will allow for discussion, even if you have not read the book.

Tyler Watson and I have agreed to do a little back and forth about what it means to belong to a church. My first post is here, Tyler’s full response is here. Here is a chunk of his post:

I am on board with the idea of a high commitment church membership. I live in the tension between really wanting to be a part of something larger than myself, something I can commit my life to, and being a born and bred consumer. I grew up in the generation of the silo church ministries. We in the church have played to peoples’ selfish desires rather than engendering relationship and responsibility. I wonder if the discussion of creating structures is jumping the gun, or at the least incomplete without the discussion of how the majority culture shapes us. My question is how do we create a desire for high commitment in our churches when our culture places little to no value on commitment? Brand loyalty, sports team affiliation, and political parties may be the exceptions, but even then these commitments happen almost exclusively at the individual level.

I think Tyler is right to point out how allergic our culture is to the idea of commitment. I feel like that is especially true of my generation. I’m sure that has something to do with how many of us grew up with divorced parents. If we have not ever seen the benefits of committing to a marriage, a friendship, or a church, then the idea of commitment probably sounds something like self-imposed imprisonment, with the possibility of severe emotional damage. Sign me up, baby.

So I guess my best response to the question "how do we create a desire for high commitment in our churches?", is that we model how life-giving commitment can be. If this dosen’t make sense with an entire congregation, how about starting with a small group of folks who commit to each other and to some intentional means of striving to be faithful. This smaller group can invite the rest of the church, and neighboring community, to watch and see what happens when you make such a commitment (for those of you who have read Missional Church, this is the bounded set/centered set idea).

Making a commitment may require hard work, but it doesn’t have to be scary. Most of us are already sold on the reasons for making lifelong commitments to love, respect, and be faithful in a marriage. In a marriage, such commitment provides stability so a relationship can grow without fear of the other person leaving, and accountability so those friends who support a marriage can remind the couple of their mutual obligations to each other.

Now I’m not advocating church membership should entail lifelong commitments like a marriage (just when you thought I was going to start into white robes and mass suicides…). But I do believe in some kind of a structure of membership that encourages being in relationships over the long haul. I think deep, meaningful relationships need lots of time to develop, over different seasons of life. This often happens naturally, but more often we simply buy into the assumptions of our culture, where career advancement and financial security are a priority over friendship and community.

And besides committing to be together, it is helpful to define how you hope to be together. I don’t think we escape the selfish nature of our consumer culture without naming its destructiveness and intentionally creating an alternative. We can create an alternative culture by defining the specific values of the church community, and encouraging members to actively embrace those values, namely worshipping together, serving together, and growing together.

I see the biggest danger to this as legalism, or "Phariseeism" as one of the visitors to Tyler’s blog put it. What I am trying to describe will only be life giving if it is based in grace, driven by love, not by rules.

IN Church, Community Formation, Practical Theology

Earlier this week our staff at the church had a birthday celebration for one of the true saints of our church, known to most simply as "Thomps". Thomps turned 85 this week, and has been at our church since 1953. Over lunch, Thomps was the center of attention as he shared stories from his service in WWII (he was among the second wave of troops at Normandy), and fought back tears as he recalled his conversion to faith over sixty years ago. He has been a great friend to me during my five years at the church. Every single time I see Thomps, even for a brief moment, he makes a point to stop and ask how things are going with the youth group. Each time we speak I feel very grateful, that my life is richer just from being around him.

My time with Thomps this week got me thinking about, of all things, the emerging church. Since I started writing this blog a few weeks ago, I have enjoyed reading a lot of other blogs, as well. Many of the people around my age who I have been reading describe themselves as "emergent". If that is a new term for you, the best introductions I know of are at Wikipedia and Emergent Village. I like a lot of the fruit that is coming from the emergent conversation, especially the books I’ve read by Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, and Stan Grenz. I am especially excited to hear so many of the emergent folks talk so much about a missional approach to church. But when telling my own story, I have yet to adopt the term "emergent" as a way to describe myself. The biggest reason for that, I suppose, is Thomps.

Every church I know of that I have heard described as "emergent" consists almost exclusively of people between the ages of 18-40. I believe the assembled body of Christ should represent, as much as possible, the many diverse parts of the body: in gender, in ethnicity, and in age. I think we lose a lot when we intentionally create a church without the wisdom of seniors, or the wonder of children. I know there are some emergent churches who recognize this as a weakness, and are working to change it, but when you have established a homogeneous community I am sure that reaching out to others outside of that demographic is really tough to do. Just ask the folks who are at churches who are trying to become multi-ethnic. Of course as long as the emergent folks keep having babies, the problem will fix itself in a generation or so.

This is my lingering question: Is there a way to be a part of the new life that we see in the emergent movement, and also invite Thomps along for the ride?

IN Church

The most recent edition of The Christian Century contains an article about the rise in popularity of large churches. I would have thought that the emerging generation was moving away from megachurches, causing a bit of a decline, but the research in this article (from a professor of Sociology at the Univ. of Arizona) proves otherwise. It seems the biggest churches are in fact getting bigger, and there are more of them, in all twelve of the major American Protestant denominations in the study. Is this good news?

There are at least three things that concern me about this trend:

1) One of my seminary professors used to talk about how megachurches often depend on the "feeder system" of smaller churches for their growth. He would say that wherever you found a large congregation growing rapidly, you would find a dozen other churches in that city who were hemorrhaging members. When one church grows primarily because of people jumping ship from other congregations, rather than from new converts, is that something to celebrate?

2) Another concern I have is my belief that it is much harder to foster meaningful community in a large congregation. Surely knowing and being known by one another is right at the heart of what the church is called to be. The congregations depicted in the New Testament were small gatherings, what we would call "house churches" today. Biblical scholar Robert Banks argues that the most important and consistent metaphor in the writings of Paul is the church as a family. He points out that Paul’s letters are saturated with "family" language, as in Ephesians 2.18-19. We are called to "bear each other’s burdens" (Gal. 6.2), to "live in harmony with one another" (Rom. 15.5), and to "bear with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit" (Eph. 4.2). These mandates point to a close community of believers that is intimately involved in each other’s lives. Even the basic titles used in Christian community of "brother" and "sister" point to close relationships.

I think this kind of intimacy is virtually impossible to find in a community of several hundred (or thousand) people. When I have worshiped in very large churches, I have felt anonymous. I have had the feeling that nobody knew me, and that I could come to worship each week for the next twenty years and still not be known. Now, certainly most large churches have many programs geared towards helping members get "plugged in" and find community in smaller clusters, but I think most also simultaneously create an environment where it is normal and natural to be disconnected and isolated from other Christians. My question is this: can a megachurch describe itself as a "family"? Can you be a brother or sister to people you have never met?

3) My third concern is that it is more difficult to encourage personal discipleship in a large church, or at least in a church that is most concerned with becoming large. When the first goal is to grow the attendance of the church, it is common to create ministries based on what people want, in order to get them in the door. What if the Gospel contains something that doesn’t make people comfortable? Do we avoid it, or conveniently leave it out? For example, in an effort to attract as many people as possible, Willow Creek Church in suburban Chicago does not have any crosses on display, because "we try to be seeker-sensitive, and the cross is not". In our capitalist, consumer-driven culture, "good" is defined by what meets our felt needs. Rather than pushing against this dangerous mindset, many churches have bought into it, and adapted our understanding of church around principles of marketing. The church (and God) becomes evaluated by how it can meet our needs. Worship is for me, not for God, as we gather as consumers to have our individually defined desires filled. Churches are then led into competition with other churches for "customers." This becomes a habit-forming, as observed by Eddie Gibbs: "If converts are converted on the basis of satisfying self-interest, it will be difficult to change this into the daily cross-carrying that is a characteristic of authentic discipleship. People are likely to continue on the basis on which they first came."

Of course, to be fair, there are also many advantages to larger churches. The pooling of resources in a megachurch allows it to have social and political clout that smaller churches don’t have. Large churches can create big, expensive ministries that smaller churches simply can’t do. Large churches may also be better stewards of some things, like facilities, because they are being used by more people, more of the time. The people who I know from our neighborhood megachurch are very devoted, mature Christians. God is doing a lot of good through these institutions, but I wanted to write a bit about the costs that exist, as well, that I don’t hear people talk about very often.

IN Church, Community Formation, Spiritual Formation