Discussing House Churches

JRD Kirk responded to a post by John Armstrong on the upsides and downsides of house churches. I think this is a very important discussion for the church to have. As I wrote in the comment I see house churches attracting both the young and those disaffected by the institutional church who wish to still practice their faith in the context of a community.

Here is the comment I left on Daniel’s blog:

Good topic. I don’t know if I should comment or write a blog response. The issues that both you and John raise are good and I think our context needs to do more work on house churches and that model.

I could certainly hear the pain of past wounds in your post here. I work with church planters and nearly every good one I know says “sure it can be better than what I’ve seen…” and that’s usually true. It is also the case in nearly every case that whatever solution they sought to address the problems they saw came with their own set of challenges.

There was a time in my ministry when I was very attracted to the model. I had worked with very small churches in the Dominican Republic which were practically house churches. The model address a number of problems inherent in the American church, but some of John Armstrong’s “yeah buts” also resonated with me.

Institutions tend to do one thing well, stabilize and preserve. I tend to find house churches unstable when you start to consider decades, not years. They require a lot of their members, often more than members can sustain over the decades. Many people have periods in their lives when they have a lot to give, and other periods when they tend to coast and rest. There isn’t a lot of room in house churches for both movements.
I also think currently two groups are attracted to house churches: those who have been hurt by the institutional church but aren’t ready to give up on the faith, and those who are idealistic (often the young) about finding the “true” way to do church. When these two groups are happy about how things are going everything is dandy. How will they do when conflict sets in (in a small group there is no place to hide for better or worse) and something ugly happens?

The worst thing about the American system of church is that it is easy to walk away from each other rather than do the hard work of working through conflict. I don’t really see house churches as addressing this even though many say it does. You can leave a house church as easy as a B&M church.

The relationship between the church as organism and the church as institution is always a complex one. The problem of institutions is the problem of wineskins. Institutions both help us travel through time but are always worn down by the age of decay and the accumulation of the residue of our sinful actions.

Perhaps I am thinking of the difference between a snail and a slug. A snail has a shell that it develops. Slugs are just out there in the open.

I think we will probably have house churches with us always, but I also tend to think that what we see out there right now is there for good reasons. The church keeps developing institutions because I think it needs them.

I recall good friends of mine in the cluster when they started their church. They were pursuing a meta-church model which was promoted by Carl George. There is a lot to say for that model. They were developing a network of cell groups which were basically similar to house churches. No matter how much they talked about their little groups being “the church” they continued to be asked by participants, especially those with the least church background, “but when are we really going to start doing church.” They finally broke down, started a worship service. Today the group continues to have a vital small group ministry but it’s pretty much a regular “church”.

I remember reading Ralph Neighbor’s “Where do we go from here” for the first time. It blew me away and I was all geeked about his vision. It made so much sense, seemed so clear, so right. I think it still is, but I haven’t seen it really work out in practice.

House churches in a way run against the current of at least 1700 years of doing church and a lot of stuff in that current isn’t good. At the same time existence at times is its own justification and I so signs of the bulk of the church shedding the encumbrance of institution. pvk

Self-sufficiency in church work and church planting

This is an area that I’ve wrestled with for a long time with populations far poorer (in one sense) than any we find in North America. My definition of “self-sustaining” is rather nuanced for this reason. The difficulty I tend to have is with both words. What is the “self” for a local congregation? What does it mean to “sustain”? These words derive their meaning by understanding the boundaries around the works.

In the DR I worked with illegal Haitian immigrants that when they worked made between $50 and $100 a month. As a mission we refused to pay pastor wages, something that the nationals felt very differently about. Right before I came to the field the pastors when “on strike” against the mission. That moment in the history of the DR field was a curious one but illuminating one. In that moment lots of relationships and assumptions became apparent and in my mind it raise more questions than I can ever answer. The nations quite rightly saw that North Americans could easily afford to provide salaries to national pastors who often lived on the desperate level of survival even for the very basics. Sick pastors would got to the doctor and the doctor would recommend “more food”. It was that basic. At the same time the missionaries understood that creating the expectation of permanent dependent subsidy for the most basic level of church existence is long term poison for the church. This is a learning that the church has had to relearn many many times throughout the centuries. If CRWM offered salaries of $100 a month to pastors it would have destroyed the ICRRD (Iglesia Cristiana Reformada de la Republica Dominicana). One of the learnings I’ve come away from my experience in the DR with was that the money itself isn’t really the issue, it’s how we think about it and the value we invest into it and the kinds of relationships it creates.

What I look for in terms of “self-sufficiency” in a work is that their leadership (which hopefully in time goes from the missionary to a local leadership group) has the initiative and responsibility to acquire for itself the funding it needs for sustainability and future growth. To me that means that while not all of the dollars needs to come from the pockets of the people who are benefiting directly from the local ministry (although some of that very much has to happen) but that the sphere of those who benefit is broader than the local ministry. There can be external funding partners or donors who can sustain a ministry long term but in a sense that local ministry also finds a way to minister to the donors through their partnership. I think that this kind of understanding helps develop healthy ministries and helps reduce unhealthy dependency as well as resource sharing between communities and individuals of different financial resources.

Culturally we are very comfortable with market metaphors. I think that markets can be very helpful and powerful but that they aren’t God. Markets and ministries in fact don’t always produce the best results. Classis and other ecclesiastical structures can provide a helpful, added layer here. Some leaders are natural fund raises either by giftedness or by virtue of more affluent networks they were simply born into. That’s a wonderful things, but unless we have other structures that invest financial resources outside of natural networks we will tend to perpetuate the “haves and have-nots” situations and not make progress in seeking the Jerusalem-Acts standard of “no poor among them”.

What I am looking for is a layered approach that uses natural networks and also intentional leadership networks (which is what a classis is) to do a better job of supporting diverse ministries in a diversity of economic communities. We want to do this in a way where we see churches among the affluent and churches among the poor and where in a sense all are “equal” in that they are self-sustaining even if money is flowing between them in a healthy way. The broader body of Christ is blessed when the financially wealthy and financially poor can make contributions of whatever it is they have been blessed with for the benefit of the whole body of Christ.

Archiving my Twitter Feed in Buzz

Twitter doesn’t promise to backup and keep accessible or searchable your tweets. You should know that about twitter. The library of congress is doing it, but not twitter. That limits the value of twitter for an archivist which is my basic use for the service.

Since I moved from a self-hosted wordpress.org account to the wordpress.com account I haven’t had a reliable way of archiving my twitter feed. I used to use the nice widget available for the wordpress.org software which gave a daily record of my tweets on my blog. That gave nice searchable, storage for all my tweets which I use as a personal library for links I find on the web so that I can go back and easily search and find articles that I thought I might like to use at some point for something. When I switched to wordpress.com I knew I had lost that way of archiving my tweets but since I have my google reader account also following my tweets I figured I could use that. Unfortunately trying some searches in my google reader revealed that it wasn’t a very reliable way of permanently archiving my tweets in a searchable fashion. I tried searching for keywords that I knew I had in my archive and Google Reader search didn’t find them.

Buzz came out under Gmail in a dramatically inconsiderate way a while ago and played with it for a while but decided that Twitter seemed to continue to meet my needs better than Buzz so I pretty much abandoned it. I did figure out, however, the Google does archive those “Buzzes” (guess that’s what you call them) and they were searchable so now I’m going to send my tweets into Buzz and that will be a way to archive them and be able to search them. Google also has their “data liberation front” initiative that is designed to make all your Google data portable. That’s a very comforting commitment so that if for some reason Buzz fails to work out in the future I can at least take my archive out of it and keep it in some other way.

Tweets no longer appear on the blog which is a mixed blessing. On one hand they don’t clutter up the stream, on the other hand I have my stuff now in multiple places so unless I figure out some funky command line for Google doing a quick search for a past thought or article will take two searches. For now, however, buzz seems the way to go. pvk

Life of the age to come

Just some more work on my gospel vocabulary.

Here’s another way to think about it belief, consequence, judgment and the life of the age to come.

What Jesus does when he proclaims that the kingdom-of-heaven/earth/eternal-life/being-in-Christ is at hand, is that he declares it is close and available to all of his hearers. We include ourselves in that having heard him. He does not limit it to the future, he declares its advent in the present and if it was present 2000 years ago it is certainly present and available and close at hand right here and now.

What is this thing he is speaking of? He describes what it is like, he makes demonstration of it in signs and healings. It is the undoing of all that we suffer from in our present situation, I like to call that situation “the age of decay”.

Jesus announces “release” (see Luke 4) from the age of decay and he doesn’t announce it as an exclusively future reality, he announces it as a present reality. The wealthy ruler of Luke 18 makes the time mistake too. We inherit (not earn, not appropriate, children inherit) eternal life. It is received, like a child receives an egg from his father (not a scorpion).

The two opposing realities: the age of decay and the age to come have a relational characteristic about them. God, the way he relates, see Luke 5:43-48, his perfection in fact is tied up in how he relates to others. I call this relational polarity. The relational polarity of God is “your wellbeing at my expense” and God does this all over the place. The relational polarity of the age of decay is reversed: “my wellbeing at your expense” and we are all very familiar with this dynamic. It is the dynamic of kings as described in 1 Samuel 8. It is the dynamic of the whore of Babylon. It is the way of the world.

When Jesus talks to the wealthy ruler in Luke 18 it seems clear the ruler is operating under an assumption of a qualification for future reward mentality. Jesus dealt with that pretty straightforwardly a few verses prior with the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector and what Jesus invites the wealthy ruler into is the life of the age to come at a deeper level today.

CS Lewis likes to make the point that if in fact we really are everlasting beings and that if death isn’t really the kind of hard reset on our consciousness, story and character then what are small flaws today can over the timespan of everlastingness become the horrors of hell. What believing in Jesus really is of course involves assent to a group of ideas about how the world is combined with actions consistent with those ideas.

If we believe that the life of God is available to us, and if we now believe on this side of the resurrection that we are in fact everlasting creatures and will be given a new imperishable body to live in an imperishable world this re-orients how we deal with people around us and the world around us. If we also believe that this world is not merely disposable but in fact decisions made in history as we experience it have consequences on the other side of the resurrection AND that good things we do by God’s grace today bear rewarding fruit after that transition, store up in heaven not for use in heaven but safe outside of the age of decay (where moth and rust don’t consume) to be enjoyed in the world made imperishable then we are freed to do all kinds of generous things.

If however, we are gripped by the assumptions of the age of decay we operate under its rules (Paul talks this way about the Spirit) then we do things under its rules. We live in the age of decay and we perpetuate it by our behavior.

Obedience then has its own reward even though often living as in the age to come in the context of the age of decay predictably leads to exactly what Jesus received, the cross. What we also learn from Jesus is that such cruciform living also results in resurrection.

Homosexuals who profess Christ

I thought JR Kirk had a good piece on his blog. I entitled it “final thoughts” but I doubt this will be the last time he writes on it. I like his blog and find it helpful.

Here is the comment I left on his blog:

Thanks for your piece here. I think it is a helpful contribution. I had hoped you would move forward into the area of action or regard. How this gets played out is not in the abstract but in ecclesiastical bodies and assemblies.

I like your point that what we are faced with today are believers who profess homosexual orientation as well as the conviction that they see homosexual practice as not antithetical to a life pursuant to the age to come. Given our context on western democracies a particular church has no power to impede their pursuit of this form of witness, the most it could do would be to excommunicate them and not allow them a particular status (member, office bearer, etc.) within that ecclesiastical group. There are also other ecclesiastical bodies that would permit them full participation in the life of their fellowship. What this affords any particular believer and the trans-denominational body of Christ itself is an opportunity for watchful waiting over this subject. How will the change of this particular element of Christian teaching impact the rest of fabric of Christian understanding? Probably only experience and time will inform us. This means that the conversation may continue for a very long time, as it has for many issues within the church.

I’ve been reading Alister McGrath’s book “Heresy” recently and have found it very helpful in understanding why the church eventual cordons off areas of thought or practices as “heresy” in time because it finds these things to unravel the foundations of Christian understanding.

Ultimately in terms of personal ethic homosexuals who profess Christ are the ones who will have to work out these issues for themselves in a more consequential way than those of us who are heteros do. Our situation of multi-denominational churches allows for a sort of freedom of experiment that makes us all responsible for ourselves and brings the consequences of our decisions and behaviors back upon ourselves.
If what we see throughout the rest of human experience is any indication I think we should expect a long and vigorous conversation with lots of surprises. One deep element of this conversation I think will be the highlighting of the broader way in which our culture view sexuality and marriage in an idolatrous light. I also expect us to realize that options and choices themselves do not equal access to the kind of meaning and fulfillment our culture associates with them.

In our context (unlike many Islamic cultures) homosexuals will be free to make their choices and congregate in the Christian assemblies of their choosing. If and how this one element impacts all the rest of the fabric of the Christian life will in fact be seen over time. It may in fact take a lot of time to see it, or perhaps not.

Douthat and response on gay marriage debate

Some interesting discussion prompted by Ross Douthat on the gay marriage debate followed by the Patrol blog.

Here’s a comment I made there
I like to talk about “universal” marriage being a custom held in diverse cultures and times that while maintaining an incredible variety of rituals, customs and norms yet had a single idea at its core. Marriage is about the creation of legitimate heirs. Universal marriage therefore is a subset of property law. Christian marriage is a rather different thing. The irony of this debate is that SSM makes little sense in the context of universal marriage (apart from the contemporary American trend of creating a traditional facsimile using reproductive technology or adoption) while at the same time attempting to leverage some of the “value added” properties of Christian marriage, a meaning-witness-creation device.

I think Douthat is correct that we are seeing the culture fruit of the page having turned away from the Western/Christian ideal he lays out. The argument as to whether this “should” happen in the context of the US as secular nation vs. Christian nation (which is what the new-fundamentalism is about according to this article http://bit.ly/bpNN2f) is of course the subject for discussion.

Lots of questions and ironies remain. Is this in fact forcing Christians to adopt more of an “old Fundamentalism” approach to culture, meaning escaping it? Will the continual receding of Christian notions from the culture lead the gay community to abandon traditional Christian notions of marriage to which they are ascribing and we eventually see more of a classical approach which separates marriage (creation of legitimate heirs) from sex (lower classes not participating in marriage because of the diminished incentive for property issues, sex for recreation/need, etc.)?

“greater-than”, “less-than” and “equal-to” in doctrinal ascent

When it came to predestination Calvin was dogged and got the support of his city Council after they read his institutes. He broke longstanding relationships because the others no longer held to the view exactly as Calvin did.

In mathematics comparisons are often evaluated according to three measures: greater-than, less-than or equal to. When it comes to the huge world of human relations and where we stand with respect to who God is and what he does, “equal to” is sometimes hard to come by. Find two different people, poke around enough in enough theology and you’ll wander away from “equal to” pretty quickly. That’s no surprise to most of us.

What the church often settles for, however, is “greater than” or “less than”. There’s some wisdom in that because if we only had “equal to” we’d wind up spending all of our time evaluating each other and or cutting ourselves off from each other.

It strikes me that our sensitivities about a lot of things are also connected to these approximate, relational evaluators. We might prefer going to a church that is more theologically conservative than we are, not because we share in all their beliefs, but we are generally comfortable with that bias. Others might prefer a more liberal church for the same reasons. They might not be as liberal as the church or the pastor, but they like the bias, it fits for them in terms of where they feel themselves to be or want to go.

We also, often demand consistency from others that we don’t require of ourselves. This too factors into these mathematical evaluations. I might feel more comfortable with someone whose more consistent on X or Y than I am because I see the value in X or Y, even if I’m not really “equal to” where they are at. All of this is the make up of how we group together and I think it’s helpful just to recognize some of this when see and hear each other.

We also of course have to recognize that all of our spectrums are three dimensional, not two. Someone may be very conservative on abortion or the Bible but think that its unfair for churches not to embrace gay marriage. Others may never want to darken the door of a church that won’t allow women in office but if you change their liturgy from the one they grew up with they’ll call you a liberal. People are madly inconsistent according to the imaginary spectrums that we wish to position them upon.

When we hear theological opinions that we disagree with and find clumps and groups of people congregating around them, its helpful to recognize that probably most of those people will have “greater-than” or “less-than” relationships with those positions while others will have wild inconsistencies with whole ranges of associate positions that usually go together with a particular position. This makes things messy, and it might make you frustrated, but it seems to be just the way it is. pvk

Words and Consequence

Now that the vacations are done it’s back to the Tuesday night Men’s group and I’ve got a biography of John Calvin to finish reading. I’m up to Bolsec’s attacking Calvin on the subject of the doctrine of predestination. Bolsec was a medical doctor who was also learned in theology and attended the Genevan “company of pastors” meetings. At one meeting Bolsec got worked up about and went after Calvin’s doctrine without Calvin present. Calvin enters mid-rant and Calvin being Calvin (impulse control over theological argumentation was a bit of a growing edge for old John) the battle was joined in a big way. The meeting ends with Bolsec being taken into custody.

When we read this today our eyes roll and we think “that’s what was wrong with them in those days, they took things too far” and maybe they did. The idea that we ought to be given the right to speak what we think without consequence is deeply ingrained in us and probably for some good reasons. I doubt, however, that we are so completely sold on the idea that we really think that there should be no consequences for anyone saying anything anywhere. Our little experiment with “freedom of speech” has of course yielded a variety of notable exceptions, like yelling “fire” in a crowded theater.

When it comes to employment issues we also know that there is no such thing as completely “free” speech. Almost all of us know that you can be fired for saying certain things, or even for not saying certain things at certain times. This is true of a CEO and equally true of a lowly customer rep on an 800 number somewhere. In fact, one might argue, the more responsibility one has, like the POTUS in fact has the least free speech. When he says one thing about a planned mosque in lower Manhattan one group is mad, when he says something else someone else is mad. Saying certain things in fact CAN threaten not only your job but also your freedom.
So why is the world like this and why do we want it so?

We want it so because we as persons, actors, agents in this world are given agency and agency requires consequence. To know each other, not just what we do, but also what we think is important for building community and for knowing how that community will travel into the future together. We also have things called agreements where when we come to a conclusion together in mutual or joint agency we expect that others will stick to the words (which embody expectations) that were expressed. This sub-creation in reality that we develop in this way in fact is enormously consequential. All of the mechanism that in fact billions of people depend upon not just for living but also for peace and wellbeing depend upon this network of consequential words. We quite frankly can’t live without it. Ever since two people became a family, this situation has prevailed.

Do you really want to assert that words should always be consequence free? Go ahead, try it. I bet you can’t do it with words and if you do you are undermining your assertion itself.

How this all works is in fact the stuff of culture, the stuff of community, and the stuff of life together itself. This is why we speak.

So go ahead and test the limits. Limits have a way of finding us. If you imagine that you really want a world without consequential words I suppose you should try doing it yourself. My only advice is to not be surprised if an unwelcome consequence finds you quickly.

A wise book says “be quick to listen and slow to speak”.

Words are important.

I hear people saying “we should stop arguing with each other and just love each other.” Well, I suppose we don’t need to argue with each other, but I also think we can’t as human beings really love each other without words, and we’re not going to honestly relate to one another or be able to respect each other without talking about the words we disagree about. It hasn’t been done because it can’t be done and it won’t be done. Like it or not we’ve been given these powerful things called “words” upon which all human culture is built. Like it or not loving each other will always involve them even its hard. pvk

On God’s Freedom and Ours

A key element of the arminian/reformed conflict revolves around the idea of freedom. One of the things I think we are seeing today is our beginning to understand the complexity of freedom, in particular the limitations of our own freedom. The modern discipline of psychology has created a science of predicting human behaviors the authors of which can’t help but assume to be simply “free”. Sociology has done the same thing. Demographics likewise and now we add to it evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology and discoveries in studying the brain. The 20th and 21st centuries have brought forward a vast body of evidence to indicate that we are no where as free as we have imagined ourselves to be.

I think it is also fairly easy to say that our freedom is a diminutive shadow of the larger source freedom we inherit from our creator. God is FREE in a way our own freedom aspires to become. This, like many comparable human limitations is difficult for us to come to emotional terms with, the outcome of which is usually our rebellion and resentment towards God.

I think that Calvinism also is very right in wanting to emphasize that whatever our participation “salvation is of the LORD”. Arminians of course say this too. I remember being in Seminary going through the Canons of Dort on Soteriology with Plantinga and thinking that all five points are like fingers connected to the palm of the hand which is basically this point. Salvation is ultimately something God does FOR us and TO us in a way that probably mirrors a blog post I wrote years ago thinking about prayer while pushing a Costco cart while my then small son Ben thought he was doing all the work. (http://paulvanderklay.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/prayer-pushing-the-costco-cart-with-ben/)

The issues of our participation in our rescue (which I think Paul and Jesus clearly assume) very quickly get complicated by our inability to both understand what freedom means for us and how in fact God works through history and through his Spirit in our minds and hearts. CS Lewis in Mere Christianity gets into this (really must know that book better!) when he notes that we don’t work with God like two guys making a brick wall. The interplay is much more intimate and complex than that. It’s really tough to say “I did this, God did that” not because God’s work is confusing or mixed, but because of our limitations in knowing our own freedom. The tougher part is really saying “I did this”. Did you really or were your actions easily accountable to heredity, upbringing, your training (sociology, psychology, evolutionary biology, brain chemistry, etc.)

None of this limits human agency and we understand this. We ARE real agents and we ARE responsible for our words and actions, but our agency is always qualified by the world of things that we are subject to in ways that God can never be.

CS Lewis also in “The Great Divorce” and “Mere Christianity” if I’m not mistaken has a terrific section on freedom. I think it is in the Great Divorce when the dragon on the shoulder of the pilgrim gets dealt with by the angel. That decision was most free and every free moment was bound up in it.

One of the things I love about Calvinism is how little sense it makes of this because I think we are correct in our limitations in making sense of this. We are terribly confused creatures and the more we learn, even with science today, the more we begin to see how confused and limited we are, even while we grow in understanding and power. God’s freedom is therefore so much more great, and our freedom dependent upon his own. He makes us free because he is free. Rebellion itself, however, confuses us because in it we imagine ourselves to be stepping towards freedom when in fact we are walking away from it. pvk

The American Political Left’s ambiguous relationship with Pacifism

http://www.cpjustice.org/files/lovingourenemies.pdf

From the Center for Public Justice. When I read this I thought of this group (Calvinincommon.org). When I listen to the American political left I hear a deep ambiguity about the use of violence. On one hand I hear some aspirational pacifism, but on the other hand there is a militant energy that believes in the power of threats of retribution (often political, social (shame, regret) or economic) to achieve its goals. I think this inconsistency undercuts the legitimacy of the left because they can’t seem to make up their minds if they really want to be pacifist when threat clearly seems to be their tool of choice.

Pacifism can be enormously powerful but only when those who flirt with it are willing to go all the way. Apart from that it looks more like the kind of scrawny, whining victim power that feeds on a self-indulgent self-pity.

All pacifism leverage a “greater good” in order to seek the energy for sacrifice. Christian pacifism I believe ultimately leverages a judging God and the received resurrected body of Jesus as the source of its capacity to endure loss in the hope of a cruciform redemption of one’s adversary since ultimately our enemy is not of flesh and bone. pvk