ethans feet

I just read a book called “How Your Church Family Works” by Peter L. Steinke.  And though at times I wished it was written with more, how should i say, strategy (some sections too short, some ideas repeated unnecessarily) overall I am glad i read the book.  The gist (for me) is this:

All churches are complex social networks (like families).  Anxiety can (and will) enter into these relationships form any number of places, external, inter-relational and personal.  The bad news is that often our church communities do not function as a collection of well-differentiated persons.  But rather, we function as a mesh of dependent and co-dependent interrelated and subconsciously triangled relationships. Therefore, when ever any anxiety enters the system it does not stay isolated wherever it enters the system but bounces and rebounds and doubles and triples itself within the web of relationships.

The good news (all though good news that comes with its own baggage it seems to me) is that the leadership of a community is in a unique position to take the power out of the anxiety by simply not entering into it.  i don’t mean by nonchalantly ignoring the problem or pretending it doesn’t exit, that’s actually a way of supporting it’s spread, but by engaging in the anxiety without being defined by it.

Of course all it takes is for the leader to have a perfect sense of who they are, what they want, who they are in relationship to others, and how their emotions are affecting them at any given moment.

In conclusion, I might say that Steink’s main definition of a leader is to be  a grown up.  They didn’t teach me how to do that in seminary.  I guess I’ll have to learn as i go.

So I had a total hand slap to the forehead moment the other day.

You see I have always used the term “missional church” without really realizing what it meant.  I mean I could have probably defined it in an academic way (I mean I’ve actually met the dude that made up the term) but I hadn’t made it concrete for myself in my setting.

And then, the other day I was thinking about my church and about how we always seem to me to be in danger of focusing on the important internal work of community formation and discipleship at the expense of the work of outreach and service.

And I thought (really for the first time) about how outreach and service, though different, both demand a posture of thinking of the person outside the church.  And then I thought that for all the other things we do well as a church, if we don’t have a posture facing toward the other then we have lost our mission.  And then i thought to myself that having a mission for any church really just means having a focus that lies outside the community that already exists in the church.  And then I realized that is what everyone else means when they talk about a “missional church”.

Duh.

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For all our debating about atonement theory, reformed theology and the rest of it we often lose sight of the power and beauty of many of the original writings.  When considered with a proper sense of perspective, they are incredible resources for the church.  Here is a money quote from Martin Luther i cam across in my sermon prep today:

The “incomparable benefit of faith is that it unites the soul with Christ as a bride is united with her bridegroom.  By this mystery, as the Apostle teaches, Christ and the soul become one flesh.  And if they are one flesh and there is between them a true marriage – indeed the most perfect of all marriages, since human marriages are but poor examples of this one true marriage – it follows that everything they have they hold in common, the good as well as the evil.  Accordingly the believing soul can boast of and glory in whatever Christ has as though it were its own, and whatever the soul has Christ claims as his own.  Let us compare these and we shall see inestimable benefits.  Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation.  The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation.  Now let faith come between them and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ’s, while grace, life and salvation will be the soul’s; for if Christ is a bridegroom, he must take upon himself the things which are his bride’s and bestow upon her the things that are his.  If he gives her his body and very self, how shall he not give her all that is his?  And if he takes the body of the bride, how shall he not take all that is hers?

Here we have a most pleasing vision not only of communion but of a blessed struggle and victory and salvation and redemption.  Christ is God and man in one person.  He has neither sinned nor died, and is not condemned, and he cannot sin, die, or be condemned; his righteousness, life, and salvation are unconquerable, eternal, omnipotent.  By the wedding ring of faith he shares in the sins, death, and pains of hell that are his bride’s.  As a matter of fact, he makes them his own acts as if they were his own and as if he himself had sinned; he suffered, died, and descended into hell that he might overcome them all”.

– Martin Luther c. 1520