Thoughts on the Missional Movement ~ Part Nine

The Fragmentation of Evangelicalism
and the Precipitation of the Missional Movement

Part Nine: How These Frameworks Play Out in Our Overall Attitudes, Styles of Interaction, and Community Connections

Review and Preview

In Parts Seven and Eight, we looked at two key issues in how the organizations we create either enhance or hinder discipleship.

• Access to Discipleship Systems – Is our entry/intake system radically inclusive, temporarily tolerant, or radically exclusive?
• Discipleship Activities – Is our discipleship system grounded in license, liberty, or legalism?

Another way to consider these concerns is how they work (or don’t) to keep people in the game, so to speak. Have we established an open system, a “centered set” that enhances cooperation around what the Holy Spirit is doing in someone’s life, to keep people engaged and cooperating with God’s principles and His providence? Or have we created a closed system, a “bound set” that creates a competitive environment to shut out and shun those who don’t measure up to “God’s standards” (a term we often use to hide our own idolatrous ideals)?

In Part Nine, we’ll look at some details of how these open or closed systems affect individuals, relationships for peers or partner organizations, and community dynamics – again, using images to illustrate the concepts.

Thoughts on the Missional Movement ~ Part Eight

The Fragmentation of Evangelicalism
and the Precipitation of the Missional Movement

Part Eight: The Big Picture of Features and Frameworks in Our Discipleship Systems – Approaches to Discipleship Activities

Review/Preview

In Part Seven, we considered what it looks like to be a congregation that either welcomes, conditionally accepts, or rejects specific kinds of individuals or groups who do (or might) want to follow Jesus Christ as His disciple. That was about access to discipleship. In Part Eight, we’ll look at these approaches’ potential companion parts in discipleship activities and their focuses.

Thoughts on the Missional Movement ~ Part Seven

The Fragmentation of Evangelicalism
and the Precipitation of the Missional Movement

Part Seven: The Big Picture of Features and Frameworks in Our Discipleship Systems – Approaches to Discipleship Access

Review …

So far in this series, we’ve looked at how cultural fragmentation and re-formation plays out in the “missional” movement:

• Underlying information processing modes (i.e.,epistemology) hide at the deepest DNA level of a paradigm system – but affect everything else in the system, both the seen and unseen.
• That paradigm system is all inclusive of values (axiology), theology, strategies and structures for organizing ourselves, culture, behaviors/lifestyles, and modes of collaboration.
• Based on some key paradigm differences, the generic “emerging” movement separated into six distinct streams.
• Some of these streams are more likely to resonate with the missional paradigm and find a sort of magnetic attraction to it, and some not so much because they’ll find missional features more or less repulsive to their paradigm. Still, individuals within those streams might gravitate toward being missional.
• Significant differences in paradigms often make it difficult for people or partner organizations to function together – constant culture clash on goals and means are indicators of potentially irreconcilable differences.
• The systems of legalism versus license versus liberty are irreconcilable. Only liberty brings true freedom and healing; legalism and license bring bondage and wounds.

• Three central features of being missional are: (1) Contextual – making truth accessible in the current culture’s language, without compromising the truthful nature of the content. (2), Incarnational – living out our faith so people can see what Christianity and Christ-like character looks like. (3) Sojourning – seeing ourselves as guests in our host culture, not controllers of it, because the Church is not a theocratic nation like Israel.

These aren’t just tasty little theoretical hors d’oeuvres for some nice theological snackathon. All of these elements have weighty implications. They affect how we go about our everyday lives as individual disciples, ministry teams, and communities of Christians. And to some of those key impacts we now turn.

Thoughts on the Missional Movement ~ Part Six

The Fragmentation of Evangelicalism
and the Precipitation of the Missional Movement

Part Six: When Collaboration Just Won’t Work Well: Operating Systems of Legalism or License Instead of Liberty

Overview of Part Six

In Part Five we looked at five different ways of processing information – all of which have a unique realm of application to imperatives and principles and paradoxes in Scripture. I gave some initial analysis to show how those five epistemologies hold values that can keep us on track with liberty and freedom in Christ, or veer us off toward legalism (being rule-bound where Scripture isn’t) or license (being without bounds where Scripture is). In Part Six, we’ll conclude that exploration of legalism, license, and liberty.

Thoughts on the Missional Movement ~ Part Five

The Fragmentation of Evangelicalism
and the Precipitation of the Missional Movement

Part Five: When Collaboration Just Won’t Work Well: “Irreconcilable Differences” on Operating Systems for Discipleship

Overview of Parts Five and Six

In Part Four, we looked at elements that potentially set us up for “irreconcilable differences,” when it comes to being part or partners in some kind of movement or ministry collaboration. I introduced epistemology (information processing styles) and axiology (values) as the core of the ministry systems and cultures we create. The key idea it led to was this: If we’re missing some biblical values, or our values are anti-biblical, we can easily end up with beliefs and behaviors, and lifestyles and cultures that go against Scripture

In Parts Five and Six, we will look at the “operational framework” – the sets of maco-level principles that guide our everyday beliefs and behaviors, interests and interactions. If we’re off center biblically in our epistemology and axiology, we’ll be even farther off in our operational framework, either in the direction of legalism or license instead of true biblical liberty and the freedom for which Christ set us free.

Thoughts on the Missional Movement ~ Part Four

The Fragmentation of Evangelicalism
and the Precipitation of the Missional Movement

Part Four: When Collaboration Just Won’t Work Well: The Way We Process Information and What We Value Create “Irreconcilable Differences”

Overview of Parts 4, 5, and 6

This series has looked at aspects of the uncontrollable process we find ourselves in as a result of a global shift in paradigms and cultures. Some forces in the process work to fragment the old, others to reformulate the new. To my thinking, this has resulted in six streams in the post-Evangelical vein. Other forces, like the power of paradox, help us consider why the missional stream has more potential for drawing in a wider range of elements from other sources to create a more comprehensive structure and a more dynamic trajectory.

In the next installments (yes, it’s grown past four parts), we’ll look at some powerful principles that seem to have the opposite effect from paradox. In brief, they don’t provide a safe place for people to land while they sift through the complexity to figure out if they fit. Instead, some variations in these sets of frameworks set up conditions and pressure people to decide if they fit before they enter. Some don’t go anywhere once people have entered.

So, as to potential collaborations, they represent “irreconcilable differences” in terms of entry and trying to merge into the missional movement, or trajectory and trying to collaborate and journey toward a common goal, or destiny and what goals they would value. Even if they all apply the label of “missional” to themselves, it doesn’t mean they’d survive as a long-term part or partner in a coherent missional movement.

Thoughts on the Missional Movement ~ Part Three

The Fragmentation of Evangelicalism
and the Precipitation of the Missional Movement

Part Three: Principles of Paradox, and Magnetic Attractions
and Repulsions in the Making of a “Missional Movement”

Part One looked at how different people have been viewing the fragmentation and re-formation of the “missional” movement. Part Two expanded on how there are six streams in what seems to be the next generation after “evangelical” – Emergents, Progressives, Evangelicals, Emergings, Neo-Reformeds, and Missionals – and how they seem to be identify with the “missional movement.”

As I mentioned in an earlier part of this series, I have been in all six streams (or their earlier prototypes) during my Christian experience. By that, I don’t mean just an occasional visit now and again, but extended periods with years of participation. As I’ve experienced a stream by immersing in it, I’ve come to see the pluses and minuses of it, and made adjustments. I think missional will end that series. It seems to integrate more of the pluses of all the other streams and fewer of the minuses. It’s complex, but it makes sense to me. Actually, I’ve been more missional than I realized for nearly 40 years … so, no wonder I didn’t fit in so well in so very many ministry situations before!

And since missional is my home base for “faith and practice,” I’m curious about how elements within these streams might connect or disconnect in a larger missional movement. So, my new questions arise (as always) more from reflections on concrete experiences I’ve had as an insider in them – not from reading books on abstract theory about how movements work or how things should be in the “ideal” church. And right now, I’m wrestling mostly with questions about where various streams will find their entry points into marrying with the missional movement, and what points or perspectives will prove barriers.

Here in Part Three, we’ll explore how “missional” often equates to a “third way” of paradox – those situations where polar opposites co-exist, and on the surface of things that doesn’t seem to make sense, but underneath it actually does. (I need to tell you up front why it’s paradox is crucial to understand, and that’s, because the ongoing worldwide paradigm shift is moving us toward paradox as the dominant way of processing life. If we don’t “get it” soon about paradox, we’re sunk. We won’t be able to navigate the present or the future.) We’ll also look at how paradoxes create “missional magnetic impulses” of attraction and repulsion that affect whether these streams can form a movement in the long run or not. In Part Four, we’ll look at how various discipleship systems and stances toward culture typical within the six streams compare and contrast, and provide either bridges or barriers for collaboration. So … take it slow, here we go!

Thoughts on the Missional Movement ~ Part Two

The Fragmentation of Evangelicalism
and the Precipitation of the Missional Movement

Part Two: Six Streams in the “Missional Movement”

Missionary ~ Missional

A lot of individuals and groups use the term missional these days, but mean some vastly different things by it. For some, it’s about The Latest Program or add-on feature – a buzzword designed to attract people who are into what’s new and happening. For others, they seem to use it as a “big tent” concept for any group that holds to being something akin now that mirrors what evangelicalism was before.

For others (like myself), it’s the inverse of being a cross-cultural missionary where we’d go overseas, learn the language and culture, find the “people of peace,” and disciple them and others. Similarly but turned inside out, the missional-minded disciple moves in his/her own country where the Spirit leads, roots into a local neighborhood, listens and learns from the people right there, becomes a “person of peace” who welcomes all with respect and justice, and disciples others.

So, what sounds like group compatibility when we hear “missional” may actually turn out to be irreconcilable differences between underlying paradigms … It’s confusing, as the ways we perceive the world just aren’t the same, even if we’re using the same word to describe our approach.

Thoughts on the Missional Movement ~ Part One

SERIES INTRODUCTION. This week, I will be launching into the final edit of the first in a series of five curriculum books that I’ve been working on for a very long time. The main topics in this doorway book are culture, creativity, and compositing teams of people with different strengths to forge better collaborations. I see teamwork as one way to navigate the choppy waters of the world as it now is, a way to expand the surface area of the raft we float on together in that ocean of uncertainty.

Problem is, collaboration doesn’t work well when there are deeply-rooted, irreconcilable differences between potential ministry partners. It’s not that we can’t find a level of appropriate tolerance in letting people be where they are, not where we wish they were. It’s about what to do when conflict occurs not in the content of our perceptions but in the deepest processes we use to make those perceptions. These are what keep us from linking together effectively … and maybe that disconnection is something that we cannot or even should not try to overcome.

This three-part series explores some key aspects of how the Church in the US has fragmented during the modern-to-postmodern paradigm shift, what the field looks like in its missional re-formation, and what this may mean in very practical terms for our discipleship systems and collaborations.

UPDATE: This turned out to be a nine-part series.

Thoughts on the Missional Movement – Series Links:

• Part 1 – Making Taxonomies in the Midst of Transformation
• Part 2 – Six Streams in the “Missional Movement”
• Part 3 – Principles of Paradox, and Magnetic Attractions and Repulsions in the Making of a “Missional Movement”
• Part 4 – When Collaboration Just Won’t Work Well: The Way We Process Information and What We Value Create “Irreconcilable Differences”
• Part 5 – When Collaboration Just Won’t Work Well: “Irreconcilable Differences” on Operating Systems for Discipleship
• Part 6 – When Collaboration Just Won’t Work Well: Operating Systems of Legalism or License Instead of Liberty
• Part 7 – The Big Picture of Features and Frameworks in Our Discipleship Systems – Approaches to Discipleship Access
• Part 8 – The Big Picture of Features and Frameworks in Our Discipleship Systems – Approaches to Discipleship Activities
• Part 9 – How These Frameworks Play Out in Our Overall Attitudes, Styles of Interaction, and Community Connections

Redemption and Restoration Part 2-The Restoration of the Powerful