If at any point we need to get some chairs
here, I just have no idea how this will play
over the next little bit.
I mean, there's some scattered throughout here.
A lot of you are edging as close to the door as
possible in case Keyford is not as good
as you heard that he might be.
And so if people are leaving after an hour or
so, Pat, it's you, it's not me, as the
outsider to the group.
So, but if, oh yeah, that's right, Dr. Durington.
You mean there's something else in the world
besides us, how terrible.
Lectureship is your whole world for three days,
Colleen, yeah.
Let's explain the logistics first of what we're
going to do this afternoon and then
we'll make some introduction.
This is the first year that we have tried what
Mark is calling extended classes.
These are almost three hour classes, hi Mark,
do you want to explain extended classes?
Yeah, it's one of the worst ideas in the
history of lectureship.
This gives us an opportunity to discuss in
depth over extended period of time some issues
that you can only kind of pick the surface of
if you only have an hour together one day
a week.
And so there are a handful of these extended
classes going on these three days.
And during this slot, all three days we'll be
dealing with issues related to the missional church.
You all come in and if it makes people feel
comfortable to go in and get those chairs out.
Can I wear this? Sure.
It's pretty sticky.
Maybe not.
Maybe I'll.
Go right, I bet you.
Oh no, no, but don't forget that.
It's a little too big for your head.
Well, that goes without saying, Pat.
It's good to know.
We will not just sit here, however, and talk
for two hours and 45 minutes.
There will be breaks.
We'll conduct this something like a graduate
seminar and as the spirit moves us or as you
begin to be restless.
This little three-some whispering right up
here, I had them as graduate students and
the same thing happened in my classes then, Pat.
This is what happens when they're.
It's like confirmation sitting in the back of
the room.
And the guy right behind them is going to be a
problem as well.
So prove to me you're no fool while I cross my
swimming pool, Sir.
So some of you I know have other
responsibilities and you may not be able to say
the whole time.
Dr. Durrington, anytime you need to leave,
wherever you need to go.
You wanted to slip in quietly, didn't you?
You really wanted to come and kind of sit on
the back row and not disturb anything.
What were the odds of that?
The plan is for Pat Kieffert and I to talk some
about the project that we're in the midst
of that involves not just ACU but a number of
congregations that are associated with
ACU and a congregational project that's been
going on now for several years.
And to kind of get his take on where we are in
Churches of Christ.
And then we're going to bring two additional
conversation partners into this.
And so let me introduce those conversation
partners first and then I want to introduce
our special guest, Pat Kieffert.
We're going to bring in after a while Charles
Mattis, Dr. Mattis, Charles is the dean of
the first year program at ACU.
He is by trade a dentist.
He was a faculty member of the Earth University
as a biology faculty and is just an extremely
competent dean and loves students and is loved
by students and will give us some insights
from the perspective of our incoming students
here but also as an elder, one of 44 elders
of the Highland Church of Christ here in town
which is attempting to implement missional
ideals in relation to its neighborhood and
community and just to kind of talk a bit about
what's going on in the world that he inhabits.
And then Wade Hodges will join us after a while.
Wade is the preaching minister at the Garnet
Road Church of Christ in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Many of you know Wade and know the impact that
he has by his ministry of Proclamation
and the kinds of ministry he has in a
significant city in the south or the southwest
and so
he'll be joining us in conversation just
reflecting a bit about the issues that we
place on the table.
This is Pat Kieffert.
I've had a chance the last two days to say some
very nice things about Pat and I want
to say some of those things publicly to you all.
There are very few people over the last several
years who have come to mean as much to me
and to many of us at ACU, certainly to Mark, to
Charles Seibert, David Ray and others who
were involved in this missional church project
as has Pat Kieffert.
Pat is a professor of theology and philosophy
at Luther Seminary.
He is Lutheran.
He will come to us as something of an outsider
able to look at us with I think a helpful
angle as someone who cares greatly about many
of the things that we care about but because
he's not immersed in our world he's able to see
us somewhat objectively and see some
of our strengths and maybe point to some of our
weaknesses but he also serves as a consultant
for us in an official capacity.
He is, what is your title, Director of
President and Director of Research at Church Innovations
which is also based in the St. Paul Minneapolis area.
He travels all over the world, just got back
from South Africa where he is trying to help
there a cluster of churches, come to grips with
what it means to be missional in this
age and he has just been an enormously helpful
conversation partner to us and so thank you.
Thanks for being here.
I'm delighted to be here, truly.
I told you going in that we didn't know how
many would come, there might be six or eight
of us.
I was hoping on that, yeah.
But we end up being a bit larger.
These are missionaries, former missionaries,
preachers, former preachers, elders, just
a variety of people as I look around the room
and at some point I hope that we'll be able
to draw them into the conversation.
Maybe the best place to start, my role by the
way is not merely to be moderator, I want
to kind of keep us going, kind of keep us moving.
Oh, it fell.
Thank you, Mark.
But to participate in the conversation because
of our involvement at ACU in the Missional
Church Project, what do you mean by the word missional?
This word is thrown out a lot and in some of
the interviews that were done by some of
our folks, everyone said that's a good word, we
like that word, but a lot of folks basically
meant by that that we need to be more
evangelistic and that's not exactly what's meant.
So put it on the table, kind of a functional definition.
Missional, I mean in part, let me be really
frank, it's a word designed to irritate.
If you want to get the conversation about
something important, one way you can do that
without creating violence usually is to invent
a word, now this isn't an invented word, it's
been in the Oxford Dictionary since the late
19th century and there's a logical conversation
out of which what we're doing is a part of, but
it is to irritate.
So someone has to dwell a little longer on
something that they otherwise would take for granted.
So first of all, the word missional is
determined to trip you up a bit, like a bump, a speed
You have to stop, you have to think.
You have to stop and think.
Because if you don't, you're going to make a
number of fairly typical errors.
One is this is about doing missions, well no,
it's not really about doing missions.
Or this is about evangelism or new outreach or
new church development, it's not really
about those, although we've learned a lot from that.
It's about really the being of the church in a
circumstance that's radically changed.
Changed from what?
From essentially a Constantinian Christendom in
which you could assume the immediate environment
of a local church put social pressure on
individuals to be a part of the church and two, provided
the primary resources for making Christians.
Because there was a sense 50 years ago that we
kind of lived in a Christian nation and
that the basic resources for being Christian
were just kind of in the air.
That may or may not have been true, but we kind
of had that sense.
So that schools and the city could kind of
serve as props for us.
They were part of the backdrop and we were all
kind of generally Christian and that's
no longer the case.
There seems to be a lot of evidence that that's
not the case.
And furthermore, there's a price then to be
paid, local churches that continue to assume
that immediate environment are dying, some
slower, some faster.
And with that, either this incredible need for
quick fixes, I mean we could name them,
you all know them probably better than I do, as
if there is a quick fix to take on this
kind of cultural change.
It's been hundreds of years in the coming and
it isn't going to disappear with quick fixes.
So what's the difference between a church in
Dallas and a church in Cape Town or a church
in Bombay?
Aren't they really still different?
American churches can think one way and a
church in Bombay can change another?
Are you suggesting that the church in Dallas
and Bombay now have the same set of issues
in front of them?
Well, what was surprising to me is I've been
educated in philosophy and theology.
Hermeneutics is my specialty, theories of interpretation.
In that journey, being educated in that area, I
had learned to do a critique of the assumptions
of modernity, philosophically and culturally.
I was busy teaching that stuff, for example, I
had to teach an intro to philosophy course
for students who couldn't pass our introduction
to philosophy, which, you know, as years went
on there seemed to be more and more of them and
now I realize for churches of Christ it
may even seem offensive to have a requirement
to be able to pass philosophy before you can
start teaching theology, but in the Lutheran
tradition, philosophy is a lower discipline
of which theology is somewhat the queen. Yeah.
Well, we just want to pass the Bible.
That's pretty much all we want to pass.
Well, we have problems there, too.
I mean, we discovered when we went to take a
look at our new curriculum that our biggest
crisis was our students were biblically illiterate.
And here we were teaching all these models of
high criticism and teaching them sophisticated
critical methods, but I didn't even know the story.
I mean, I'll never forget when I first arrived
at Luther, I gave this lecture at the beginning
of my first course in theology on, it was on, I
wanted to introduce the issue of pluralism
and the church and doing theology in a
pluralistic culture.
So I gave this lecture in which the primary
metaphor out of which I developed the lecture
was Jonah's gourd plant.
Well, let me tell you, it was a great lecture.
But you could not tell it with my students, you know?
I mean, it was how's looking at a new gate time.
I teach at Lake Wobegon, Senator, and I looked
at these students and, you know, I've been
preaching, I've been a pastor in a black
congregation on the south side of Chicago and
then called
to serve a congregation on the north side
because I could preach in German and it was
in the midst of 115,000 Spanish speakers, the ever-forward-looking.
And so, I mean, I was used to knowing whether
or not I communicated.
So even though these were mostly Scandinavian
Americans in which a raised eyebrows a major
emotional commitment, I was not getting raised eyebrows.
I was getting nothing, I mean, cows looking at
a new gate.
And I thought, well, maybe this concept of
pluralism was too much, Et cetera.
But you know, I just fortified my examples and
decided I'd make more noise, you know,
and maybe a joke or two, and I went into the
second time to give the lecture and I still
got the cows looking at a new gate.
And I came out and this young woman walked up
to me and she said, it's a gourd plant.
What's it got to do with this?
And I realized no one in that class had ever
heard the story of Jonah, except there was
this controversy, was he really, you know, in
the belly of a big fish?
They all knew about that.
But they had no idea what the story was about, right?
It was about the gourd plant, you remember?
I mean, it was not about the big fish.
The big fish was the way of getting into the
gourd plant, folks.
And I had a whole room, right, of seminarians,
people who felt called.
Who obviously had never read or had anyone tell
them the story of Jonah.
And I said, oh, I've got a big problem on my
hands, right?
I was teaching to students who in no way
reflected the culture I assumed, namely a Biblical
literate culture, even in the church, right?
That's the level of crisis we're talking about, right?
We don't have, shall we say, as many or hardly
any parents who teach the scriptures in the
way in which they understand the world.
I mean, I had an advantage.
My grandmother only graduated from eighth
grade, but when she talked about the world,
she did it through analogies to stories in scripture.
She was very Biblically literate and
sophisticated in that way, do you understand
what she means?
Not stupid by any stretch of the imagination,
though, not with a lot of education.
My students were clueless of the main text they
would have to use.
And anyway, so anyway, let me go back to the
philosophy course now, okay?
All right, and then we'll make it all the way
back to Bombay before all is said and
done, right?
Well, actually, this is going to Bombay.
That's what I thought.
He's a philosophy teacher, it takes a long time
to make it all the way around, okay.
Anyway, so I'm sitting there teaching these
students who had with malice of forethought
avoided philosophy their entire lives.
And I had an obligation to teach them enough to
understand Christian theology, enough philosophy
to understand Christian theology, which on the
one hand is a fairly modest goal, especially
for a four week course in the summer, you know,
if this is Tuesday, it's Aristotle.
And I was doing, I thought a pretty good job of
especially getting at the crisis of what
modern philosophy had meant for modern culture,
which is huge.
Now, of course, your movement is a creation of modernity.
And for those of us who represent traditions
that are previous, it's especially devastating
to see the divide that modernity creates even
in our own tradition.
And so I was trying to help my students with that.
And I ran across a book called Foolishness to
the Greeks by a missionary by the name
of Leslie Newbingen.
How many of you have read Foolishness to the Greeks?
And I said, this guy does it at least a
thousand times better than I do.
And with a whole lot less sweat, and my
students don't have to go through near as much German
and French misery.
And this book named in very helpful ways why
the church in Western culture is dying.
Because what Leslie could see was he could
after 50 years in the South of India, Bombay
and quite to the south of India, and having
done the analysis that missiologists understand
how to do, they got to do that to live, right?
None of this is rocket science in terms of what
the people who've done mission in the
two-thirds world have seen.
He came back to Birmingham, his home, and he
said, my goodness, this is a mission field.
And furthermore, if I'm going to use the same
sort of cultural analysis that I would in
Bombay, we've got a crisis in Birmingham and in
Western culture, and the church is not
addressing it.
It's really selling out to it.
And he and a South African, this is where the
Cape Town thing comes in, David Bosch,
who taught at UNISA, the University of South
Africa, which is really a distance learning
organization, kind of came to the same set of
conclusions from a different route.
And they named the crisis in Western culture
better than my philosophy teachers who were
- I studied, my dissertation advisor was Paul
Recur, and I'd spent time at Heidelberg
with Hans-Geord Gottemer, so fairly well-known
at least in continental philosophy, philosophers,
had helped me to come understand that these
missionaries coming home and looking at Western
culture were able to name in deep ways this crisis.
And what does it mean about the being of the
church, not just what the church does, but
about the very nature and identity of the
church if this is the crisis we're addressing?
We're not looking for another revival, okay?
We're not looking for another spiritual great
awakening like 1740s or the 1820s or the 1870s.
If you do that, you're going to fall prey
straight back into the hole of playing religion
as if we're in the modern - as if modernity reigns.
So even the things we hunger after, they were
saying, will lead us deeper into this dead end.
And so we have to reconceive of the
relationship between church and culture, gospel
and culture.
This culture is in some very, very deep ways
far more toxic to the gospel than we have realized.
And only when we are in conversation with
Christians around the world is it so obvious.
That's been my experience as well as I've spent
more and more time in different places
in the world watching, working with actual
congregations and local churches and seeing
what's going on.
It becomes clearer and clearer to me how deep
our doo-doo is here.
Just how up -
He's toning this down for us, y'all.
I'm just trying to give you a sense.
They speak differently in Lutheran circles, I
think, so thank you for the sensibility here.
Thank you.
If you read Martin Luther, you'd swear he was
anally retentive, but he probably was,
you know, if he had to eat what he did.
Very different, very different diets.
So that while there are differences between
starting a local church in Bombay or starting
a local church in Cape Town, although actually
I'm doing, working with New Church Starts
in Cape Town.
They're not as different as you might think.
The fact of the matter is the crisis with the
encounter with modernity is the same.
It's really interesting, the similarities and
the perversity that we have imposed upon
the world and upon ourselves without, I think,
knowing it, at least I didn't intend it.
And I don't think the people, my predecessors
in the church in Europe and America intended that.
I don't think so.
No matter what this has meant for many of us,
Pat, and I think that churches that you
know in a variety of denominations have kind of
been on the same track.
We went through a long period of time where,
and large measures still are there, in which
we thought of ourselves as sending, you sent
missionaries out.
Now, you know, we've done a lot of that.
It's been a pretty good century for us in
Churches of Christ.
We've sent a lot of missionaries out with
pretty good success, looking at numbers and
whatever, a variety of places and most of the continents.
So we've done a lot of that sending.
But on local soil in North America, it's been
more of an attractional model.
If we are a good church, we get our act together.
If we are, you know, have good programs, good
preaching, whatever, then they will come to us.
Obviously, some of the things I was talking
about last night, you know, reflect that concern.
But what you're describing is something
different than either just sending people out there
to do stuff over there while we take care of
the local church and being really a good
church in our neighborhood, in North Dallas or
Abilene or San Diego or wherever, and assuming
that the outsiders will kind of make their way
into us.
Something else is at stake in terms of how we
go at the culture, in terms of our seeing
ourselves as sent and not just as senders.
We ourselves have opportunities, responsibility
to diagnose the culture, to be cross-culturally
literate in our own neighborhood, that we are
ourselves in a missions context in North
America, which we probably were 50 years ago
just didn't recognize, but it's pretty clear
now we have to do something different.
Is that a fair assessment?
Now, you've had some fat that you've now burned
off, wouldn't that be nice, in the way you
did business, but now you can't.
Now it's life and death for most of your congregations.
And so you don't have that luxury that you had.
Now, the real huge change, if you think about
this theologically, that people like Neumann
and Bosch kind of represent, is that the move
from conceiving of mission as the church's
mission to recognizing that the mission is
God's mission.
And God needs a church for God's mission, but
God also needs a world because it's the
world that is the object of God's mission.
And God is already very active in that world.
And therefore, the issue isn't being sent into
the world, the issue is figuring out
what is God up to here and how can we be a part
of that.
And that's a radical shift on the whole for
modern Christians who have basically conceived
of the church as a family, as private space.
It's our accommodation to modernity, right?
Public space belongs to the government, private
space belongs to the church.
And if we've got Jesus in our heart and we've
got our faith, that's enough.
And that's a huge accommodation to...
I call it a deal made with the devil, frankly,
but you see, I have devils in my world and
you don't.
The devil's filled the world is the second line
from a mighty fortress.
And Luther really believed there were devils
and so do I.
We may disagree on the evidence and the
empirical way of describing that.
But we have kind of quietly agreed to that
modern rule and therefore, in effect, conceived
of public space as empty of Christian value and
of God's action.
Now the same people who made that deal now, you
know, are trying to take it back, but
they're having a tough time because their only
means of engaging in it is still family values.
It's a problem.
And only a couple of issues related to the
so-called family values. Right.
Rather than public values.
Yeah, right.
And how do we engage in the life of the public
in a way that the church belongs, which doesn't
mean establishing a state church, please.
Don't even think of it.
I also teach law and I really do believe in the
First Amendment to the Constitution and
I think it's actually a gift of God to humanity.
So in these days especially, being able to
distinguish public values from the government
being the church is really important.
But that the church would retreat from this
sense that God is up to good things in the
world and we need to be a part of that.
Because God's mission does need a church, but
God's mission has a world and the world
is the opt for God so loved the world, not God
so loved the church or God so loved those
who would believe.
No, no, God so loved the world.
That's the big shift I think.
When I see congregations, I'm going to put this
fairly bluntly after 20 some years of
doing this with congregations.
So often when I go into a congregation,
especially if they're in a high social stress circumstance,
which is where I tend to work with congregations.
When we do interviews in those congregations,
what people tend to say is when they look
at their immediate environment, they say, what
in the hell is going on here?
They may not say hell all the time, but usually
they do.
When they gain mission lies, they start asking,
what in Heaven's name is God up to here?
And let me tell you, you make that shift and
everything changes.
You're just not the same.
And you don't need to have, well, we find if
you can get 2% of the people in your leadership
looking at their community and going, what has
God up to here?
And how can we be a part of that?
They will irritate enough of the others.
No, no, I mean irritation deliberately.
Conflict is an inherent part of missional change.
Thus, this is a massive difference in how you
lead, right?
You now lead in which conflict is a part of the
way you lead, not that thing which you
avoid at all costs.
You are peacemakers, not peacekeepers.
This massively shifts the attitude.
And conflict will resolve enough to where you
can get over a three to five year period
of time, we found, about 20% of the active
membership now imagining their world this
way and acting out of that imagination.
And you get 20% of your active membership and
you've changed your church, you know that.
I mean, about 11% of the congregation pays 90%
of the budget and about 20% does 85% of
the work.
So, you get 20% moving in that direction.
And it really is a matter of the imagination of
what God's up to.
So, I mean, that's really critical, both at the
local level, but it's also true now what
is leadership if you're going to work with that reality?
That's a rhetorical question, I hope.
I hope. Yeah.
But it is a different view of leadership, right?
All right, let me push us in a more specific
direction and move toward the project that
we have been involved with.
When we talk about the reaction to the changes
in culture that have taken place, when we
talk about Newbingen and the missional
principles that have been kind of in the air
for a couple
of decades, when we talk about the gospel in
our culture network and George Hunsberger
and all that, we're really talking mostly about
the mainline churches, right?
Because in churches of Christ, we never felt
all that propped up by civic government.
We were always the outsiders.
You Lutherans were kind of running the city and
the Church of Christ folks, we were on
the poor side of the tracks.
Yeah, well, you know, all these are obvious
generalizations, but you understand, we have
never identified ourselves with the establishment.
We're a countercultural movement.
We grew out of the rural south.
It's only been in the last 20 or 30 years that
there's been a kind of civic prominence
in some places, but not in most places.
Is this also a problem for us?
And I want to begin to focus on what you as an
outsider see as both the challenges and
the opportunities for churches of Christ.
Well, you have both challenges and
opportunities there.
One, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the
congregations that seem to be able to make the
shift to
missional church are those who have not
depended upon their external environment to provide
the primary resources for making disciples of Jesus.
Do you understand?
They are an advantage here.
The congregations that have always depended
upon some sort of cultural pressure of one
form or another are the ones that are in the
deepest trouble.
So especially where you are genuinely marginal,
right, which is certainly not Abilene.
Not Abilene.
I mean, you are a form of Christendom in
Abilene, and no one would build Abilene
Christian University
who felt marginalized or could possibly even be
vaguely confused at, right?
Abilene did not build this place.
But some of the people who work here are humble.
I have no...
You have to understand, I work for Scandinavian
Lutherans, they can out-humble you in faith.
It's all an act, though.
You know, as Italian Germans, we can't even
fake humility.
We can recognize the real thing.
I pray for it, but the Lord doesn't have it,
you know.
Maybe I prayed hard enough, I know, but on my
list of sins, it's the trivial one.
On the one hand, you have huge strengths here.
When we interviewed in your congregations, on
the one hand, you have a sense of not having
to be in charge in order to be who you are.
And boy, that's huge in a missional church situation.
If you feel like you have to be in control,
you're the ones doing the hosting, and you're
not dependent upon those to whom you're sent.
You really have no chance to be a missional
church, it's just a lost cause.
So you have a great heritage to draw upon, and
you really need to do that more because
our research also showed you're really
ambivalent towards your heritage.
You do not know what to do with it.
I mean, there are parts of you that want to,
and these are the same individuals sometimes.
I am ambivalent, I don't mean you're kind of gray.
I mean, one sentence will say, I'm so glad that
I have this heritage, and this is what
we're about, and we want to be that.
And then the next sentence out of the same
human being is, man, it's a lost cause.
I mean, we've been so long sectarians, and we
don't make sense to anybody, hardly ourselves anymore.
But the same human being, you understand, your
ambivalence is deep, and you need to
talk about that because it's like that Missouri
mule between two equally distant piles of
fodder who starves to death rather than make
the choice.
There are a lot of you who are sitting there
and not able to move, you understand?
You're kind of caught in this ambivalence
towards your heritage.
I think while I can make a long list of things
that I might disagree with you on, your heritage
is the work of the Holy Spirit and is
desperately needed in this culture and within
the great
economy of God, of the church.
And I can name those positives, and you need to
claim them as, in fact, gifts of the Holy
Spirit and be creative out of them.
One of the things we always try to do when we
work with a congregation, we try to help
them find a usable future in their past.
Tradition is not the enemy.
I come out of a tradition, as one of my
teachers put it, tradition is the living faith of
the dead.
Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.
You have a tradition.
You need to be able to name it.
You need to bring it forward into a missional church.
And to do that, you're going to have to have
some honest conversation, and you're not having
it now.
You're just avoiding these neuralgic issues
that has created such ambivalence towards,
on the one hand, that you are classically,
sociologically speaking, a sectarian movement.
It's not a bad thing, if you'll pardon me,
especially in a missional church setting.
The whole church is in a sectarian
circumstance, right?
None of us represent the establishment.
We ought to forsake that as a purpose, I mean,
if it ever was.
And so in this way, you can help those of us
who are mainline churches, who many of
us who still hanker after a kind of establishment.
But on the other hand, I'm just astounded at
how ambivalent you are towards God's world.
All right, pause there, I'm going to fill in
some gaps here, I'm going to make sure
that everyone's together.
Don't lose the point that you're headed on,
because this is an important one.
Let me describe just a little bit where Pat is
getting his information.
This is not just, he's just kind of, you know,
has been a couple of lectureships and hears
us talk about ourselves in negative ways.
There have been extensive interviews that have
gone on now for over three years at Pepperdine
Lectureship, at ACU's lectureship, and then in
New Hampshire and in the greater Northwest
and Portland and Abilene and Dallas and a
variety of places.
There have been a number of interviews that
have gone on as a part of a congregational,
an evaluation of four congregational systems,
four denominations in language that generally
we don't use.
One is a Presbyterian synod in the East, one is
a Mennonite denomination, a merger of two
Mennonite denominations into one around
missional ideals.
One is the Lutheran group that's associated
with Lutheran Seminary in Minnesota, and one
are churches that are kind of a part of and a
dialogue with ACU.
And so these four groups going on, Mennonites,
Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Churches of
Christ, and there's a lot of interviews going on.
And this is done through a process of
appreciative inquiry, which is to say that
they're asking
questions and whatever that gets, what they get.
They're not trying to lead us in a direction.
They're not trying to find, they want to hear
what we have to say.
And one of the things that was said over and
over and over by the folks that were interviewed
in Churches of Christ was, we're so glad to be
in the Church of Christ, but we're so embarrassed
to be in the Church of Christ.
It was just said over and over again, we love
our heritage, but this sectarian spirit, this
exclusivism, this sense that we're the only
ones that are right and everyone else is going
to hell, we don't want to be there anymore and
are embarrassed by it.
And yet, there's this fear that if you lose
that, if you lose this sense that you know
exactly who's in the kingdom and who's not in
the kingdom and who's going to Heaven and
who's not going to Heaven, if you lose that,
that the whole game is lost.
We don't know what our identity is anymore
because that was our identity for so long
that we don't know what our identity is.
And that's the ambivalence that Pat and Al
Roxborough, who comes out of a Baptist heritage,
George Hunsberger comes out of a Presbyterian
heritage, Lois Barrett, who grew up in Sweetwater,
Texas as the disciples of Christ who was
persecuted by my grandfather and his group
there and
now is Mennonite.
He became a Mennonite.
Yeah, he became a Mennonite as a result.
That these folks kind of looking at us and
doing all these interviews with us, Pat Taylor
Ellison, also Lutheran seminary, who is also
Lutheran, looking at us and they're saying,
this is what you're saying about yourselves.
It's not what we're saying about you.
It's what you're saying about yourselves, that
you've got this love-hate relationship
with your past.
You love your heritage.
You hate your heritage.
And you're embarrassed by your sectarianism,
but you don't know what to do with it.
You don't know now where to go if the
boundaries are more porous than what you
thought they
were 30 or 40 years ago.
So I want to feed into that.
These are not just impressions.
These are just reflecting what hundreds of
folks in Church of the Christ over the last
three or four years have said.
That's what we've said.
It's one of the dominant impulses that we have seen.
Does that ring true for you all?
But you also then are beginning to describe our
posthumous relation to the world.
There is this other interesting tension, and I
don't see this as failure, but it's a very
important, I call it a polarity, to be managed.
There's a deep desire among most of you who we
interviewed to be able to cross the boundaries
that have once historically been around you, to
be able to reach out and be a part of and
engaged in ministry with people that in the
past you haven't been able to be.
And at the same time, you're scared to death of
it, and you feel as if you don't have what
it takes to do it.
And so you're avoiding, so that we get a huge divide.
One of the things we worked on, we asked
everybody about what are the attitudes and
beliefs that
you have in place to be missional, however you
define it.
What ones do you need to work on?
What are the skills you already have in place
to be missional?
Which ones do you think you need to work on?
What's the minimum knowledge base you have in place?
Which ones do you want to work on?
And what are the past honorable habits that you
have in place, and which ones do you want
to work on?
And overwhelmingly you said, well, we got some
great attitudes and beliefs, and we know
a bunch of stuff.
You are people who know a lot.
That's not a put-down.
You have a strong minimum knowledge base.
But at the same time, you said to us, oh, we
really don't know what to do with this,
and we don't have practices in place, and some
basic skills, frankly, we don't think
we've got.
This creates an ambivalence towards actually
doing what you really feel you're called to do.
So there's a very large number of you who would
like to be missional.
You have the attitude and the belief to do so,
but you, in fact, aren't doing it because
you have a sense that you don't have the
habits, the practices, and the skills to do it.
Does that ring true?
In fact, one of the things that many of you
have said is, but I don't think this is unique
to Churches of Christ.
We wish that there were some models out there
of churches that are doing this well, and
there are some.
Of course, part of what the whole missional
conversation leads to is there is no program.
This is not a formula.
It doesn't look like a certain thing.
This is not first base and second base and
third base.
This is not one neighborhood in Dallas that
looks one way and a neighborhood two miles
away in Dallas that looks like something
completely different.
It's not about a program.
It's not about some method that's being used.
It's a different understanding of who we are in
relation both to God and to culture.
And so looking for models is a part of what is
needed, and I think that's a conversation
I want us to push us toward before the day is over.
What's really painful about that one, Jack, is
the congregations that make this shift
tend to feel alienated and start associating
with other people who have made this shift
outside of their usual fellowships.
So odds are they're there.
There are Churches of Christ who have made
these sorts of shifts, but they feel alienated
from the rest for various reasons, and they're
so darn busy working at these things, they
go to places and they're with people who are
working on that more than they return to their
usual places.
So they may not be here at lectureship, you see.
That might be one of the problems.
And the churches we've studied, they tend not
to show up at the continuing education
events sponsored by the official structures,
which I take lectureship to in an odd sort
of way to be, kind of, I mean, since you don't
have a denomination structure.
Right, right.
But some will show up at Emergent Church events.
It's amazing.
I'll go to Emergent Church since we've started
a long-term research project with the Emergent
Church, and I'll see these people there, you
know, and I'll go, I'm glad they're there
because they need that kind of fellowship, but
I wish they'd also be back helping their
own traditions make this journey, but that's a
lot harder to do, and they feel quite alone.
So that intensifies this problem of models, right?
Yes, yeah, it does, because a lot of folks in
Churches of Christ would like to find another
Church of Christ doing it, and there are some
out there, but that's part of what we need
to talk about.
All right, I want to, maybe for the next 10 or
15 minutes, let me push one direction
and we're going to take a break and we're going
to reconvene.
I want to come back to that ambivalence towards
the world, but we'll come back to that.
Do you want to do that first?
No, no.
One of the things that happens, Pat, at most of
the lectureships that I go to or speak
at, and this is not about what other people are
doing, it's what I'm doing, it is real
easy for us to be self-critical, and there are
very few groups that beat themselves up
quite as much as Churches of Christ do.
That's true.
We really, you know, far more than Lutherans,
you know, who, as we all know, are very humble,
but we really beat ourselves up, and so part of
what happens at lectureship is to say,
you know, aren't we awful?
We've done this.
Look at our past.
We've done that.
We don't want to be there.
We're Armenians, you surely beat the crap out
of us.
I know, but nevertheless, I think it's
generally true, and I think that we're just
kind of
at a point where we're tired of bashing
ourselves and hearing ourselves bashed by one another,
and so over the last several years, as we have
been more involved in public sort of
ways in conversations with a broad gospel
culture network and certainly with you all
at Church Innovations with Al and you and some
others, there has been a genuine surprise
on the part of non-Church of Christ people
concerning what you have found among us.
Now, when Hunsberger was on our campus several
years ago, he was kind of whispering quietly
to some of us, but he had, you know, dated a
Church of Christ girl in Alabama and lived
most of his life in the deep south and had
these impressions of us, and he said, but
the conversations I'm hearing seem different
than that one, and I don't know who you guys
are anymore.
And Al, when he first met Mark Love at a GOCN
conference, kind of pulled him aside, and
he said, I'm just really intrigued by this conversation.
You guys have some things going on that some of
the rest of us really would like to hear.
I've heard from you over and over and over
again, stop beating yourselves up.
You guys have something fairly significant to
offer if you would wake up to the strengths
that you have.
And so I don't want this to be
self-congratulatory on one hand, but we've gone
through 25 or
30 years of self-beratement.
What do you see after having spent these last
several years investigating us that you think
are real strengths that we have to bring to the table?
And only in 10 minutes.
Well, we can start in 10 and come back after a break.
Well, of course, you understand that you're
berating yourself, of course, as a result
of inadequate doctrine of grace.
But God is really up to much more in you than
you realize, but you don't expect that, I think.
That's all right.
A little Lutheran dig.
Yeah, that's a big Lutheran dig.
I'm not reflecting on your weight at all.
It was a big Lutheran dig, but we're not going
to go down that path.
First of all, we do live in a biblically
illiterate culture, and that is as true of
Baptist as
it is of United Church of Christ.
Do you understand?
As true.
I mean, it was so bad when Kurt Hataway, who's
one of our researchers, Ph.D. in sociology,
grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, lives
in Birmingham, not England, had the unmitigated
gall in a national study that showed the
average Southern Baptist knew as little scripture
as the United Church of Christ person did.
He got fired because they just didn't want to
hear it.
So the United Church of Christ hired him
because it was the best news they'd heard in a long
We know as much as the Baptist. Yeah.
Well, about the Bible, they were just kind of
stunned, actually, I think.
It was an achievement they had not aspired to.
As one of my staff in the UCC pastors says, she
says, that's Unitarians considering Christ.
I'm just quoting her.
She sometimes is quite discouraged.
So then Kurt went to work for them and did a
study on what happens when a congregation
puts as their highest purpose being inclusive.
What happens is they become, or they either are
or they become, white, female, middle-aged,
and middle class, which was not what the United
Church of Christ wanted to hear, right?
I mean, here you put, if you find a
congregation where the attitudes and beliefs
are we must
become inclusive, what that congregation is is
middle-aged, white, middle class, and female.
He wanted to study, well, what if you're, you
know, made up mostly males or, well, there
wasn't enough of a database of congregations in
the UCC left where there was a critical
mass of males for the study to be.
Well, I was there when he delivered that message.
He lasted 18 months, and now he's at the
Episcopal Church.
He's getting paid a whole lot more.
I don't know if he'll tell them the truth, too,
but I bet he will.
And maybe he'll come to work with you.
My point on this is you have the enviable
position of not having a crisis of biblical
literacy as bad as most churches.
Do you understand?
So for example, as your people tell their story
about themselves, they, we don't ask,
you know, we don't go up and do a Bible test,
you know, how many children did
Leia and Jacob have, you know, etc., or can you
name the books of the Bible in order, etc.
No, no, what we do is we ask them to talk about
whatever, and then we see if they draw
upon the scriptures to make their argument, you
understand, because that's where it really
makes a difference.
Is the Bible really authority in the way in
which you understand your world?
Well, you are remarkably so, do you understand?
In a missional church, that is the first key characteristic.
You're not going to have a sense of God's
mission if you don't imagine the world the
way the scriptures do, and if your imagination
isn't shaped by the scriptures, then it's
a lost cause.
I mean, you could know a lot of things about
the Bible and not have your imagination shaped
by the scriptures.
So we found abundant evidence that you have that.
Is that a gift?
In this situation, it's a massive gift.
You want to ask yourself, how did you achieve that?
Because this is really important.
How did you achieve that?
Now, there's a catch in that one, there's a
challenge, in that you tend to move to doctrine
or to propositions, really, out of the
scriptures rather than help people learn how to make
an argument out of the biblical narrative to
one another.
So that's going to be really important.
How do you share the faith with another person
or even amongst yourselves when you have disagreements
without using the Bible as bullets?
Not propositions to be shot at one another, but
as God's word within which you dwell.
But you have tremendous resources to do that.
Two, as I noted, you are comfortable with not
being at one with the power base of the culture.
And in this time to be missional church, that
is a critical ability, because the temptation
in America today is to easily identify being
Christian with one part of the culture of
the other.
I come from that part of the church that seems
to think the Democratic Party and being Christian
is happily identical.
There are other parts of the church that seem
to find this happy identity between what it
means to be Christian and being Republican.
And you have the happy circumstance that you
have within your DNA a suspicion of all sets
easy connections.
And in a missional church, especially in the
time of empire, that's a huge gift you bring
for the rest of us.
We need to learn, and it's in your DNA, it's a
beautiful thing.
You have such ambivalence about this power
thing and establishment, and Christians ought to.
The Scriptures always conceive of the church as
having a hierarchy of interest, and that
is those who are the weakest are of our
greatest concern.
Third, you still remember what it's like to be
working class and have really messy, broken
up family lives, more than any of the other
groups we've studied.
If I could have a dime for every interview that
talks about alcoholism in the family
and what it's like to have Jesus make a
difference in your leadership.
That's just one example.
And to talk about what it is not to have
financial security.
And you're very ambivalent about your financial success.
You're having made your way up in the middle
class status, you're very ambivalent.
And that's the kind of ambivalence I think all
Christians ought to have.
The Scriptures are filled with it, right?
And this is a strength as we come into being a
missional church, Jack's sermon last night.
What would it be like if our normal behavior
were to always wonder, okay, what's the blind
man telling us here?
We're going to imagine the public scene there
at Siloam, all the public spaces of our life,
we're going to first imagine what's the blind
man teaching us.
Why is it that God, why is it that Jesus, in
order to show forth the glory of the only
begotten of the Father, needs a blind man?
That's something that's within the people in
the congregations.
And that's a huge gift for being a missional church.
And I think a lot of that is because you,
pardon me, you were poor working class folk
who didn't get it easy and who have struggled
very hard.
Now I come from the same sort of people, but
the Lutheran church in this country has left
behind those that brought them to the party.
We have created a church that on Sunday morning
is really only comfortable for upper middle
class white people.
And we've called it progress, right?
I go home to my family picnic, my maternal
grandmother's family picnic.
There'll be 300 of us there easily.
And I'm the only male, except for one other
cousin that's in seminary, over the age of
14, who's going to church.
And almost all of them are, you know, I'm the
first person in five generations to graduate
from high school, much less go on to college,
blah, blah.
And America still is made up mostly of those
people, right?
When the church, by having rightly created
places like ACU, and I want to praise you
for that, I do, this is a wonderful place, I
was teasing you, you know, but it wasn't
humility that built it, but it's a beautiful place.
But when the church forgets who brought us to
the party and the values of those people,
it also forgets what it is to be church.
It's not just, this isn't, you know, some class
issue, it's a much deeper issue about
who gets privilege in the kingdom of God.
And universities can really make those sorts of
church, let me tell one little story and
then we'll take a break, but this is a real
interesting lesson for me.
About 10 years ago, on the front page of the
Minneapolis paper, there was a story on where
do our minority teachers come from, and which
of our colleges and universities are producing
the most Native American graduates?
Because Minnesota has a lot of Native
Americans, it has as many Native Americans in
the state
as there are Swedes, people of Swedish descent,
so it's a lot of Native people.
And the two schools that were on the top, the
school that had produced more than 50%
of the African American teachers in schools in
the state of Minnesota was Little Concordia
College, Missouri Senate, 800 students.
And I kind of went, you've got to be kidding
me, I mean, there's got to be something weird
going on here.
And it just so happened that the kraut, the old
kraut who was their dean, who I knew well,
Walter's son, was sitting in my class, he was
on sabbatical and he was sitting in my
Lutheran Confessions class to kind of brush up
on his, what he probably never learned
in the first place, you know, but anyway, he
was there and I said, whoa, when did that happen?
Well, I know, and so he went back to kind of
figure out, oh yeah, about 10 years ago,
we set aside $1 million to do only one thing,
to recruit African Americans to become teachers,
to provide daycare, tutoring, whatever it took,
to form them with the Christian vocation
of teaching, which if you know anything about
Missouri Senate teaching is, you know, big
deal, it's a very important vocation, as
important as a pastor in that heritage.
And that's all we did.
Now the University of Minnesota has 60,000
students on its main campus, and way more
blacks, right, but they don't graduate them and
they don't put in them a vocation to be
a teacher.
So are we surprised that they're not?
The other school was Little Augsburg College,
about 1,200 students had graduated the largest
number of Native Americans.
Right in the middle of the University of
Minnesota campus, it's from the old Lutheran
Free Church
tradition, so a lot in some ways historically
coming at the same time period that your church
was founded.
And I went over to talk to their staff, how did
this happen, and they had simply dedicated
a part of their faculty and finances to doing
nothing but creating a culture within which
Native Americans could flourish and gain a
Christian vocation.
And they, at these two schools, you see when
they ask themselves, what is God calling us
to do, outshone all the rest of the great
universities and colleges, of which we have
several top ten colleges in the liberal arts
category in the state of Minnesota, where
a state of higher education than all those
schools had done, because they asked themselves,
God, what are we being called to do in mission?
And they didn't ask the question, how does the
world define excellence?
We want to know, God, how are you defining excellence?
And they said, well, Excellence means, in our
little case, producing African American
teachers, or Native American teachers, given
their circumstance.
You have great schools, I mean, hands down,
your commitment for working class people to
education is one of the most extraordinary
miracles in American culture.
Places like ACU represent the hopes of multiple
generations of hard working, hard life people, right?
You know that.
Let's not forget who brought us to the party.
When we live in a nation where greatness and
Excellence may be defined by certain kinds
of scales in the academy, we have to ask
ourselves, which piece of God's action in this world
is this school going to bet the family farm?
Because you are betting the family farm, right?
You literally have been the inheritors of a lot
of family farms and trailer houses.
You know, giving a trailer house is a heck of a
lot bigger deal than giving $50,000 you
wouldn't use that year anyway, right?
I thought that was nice this morning that Bob
Woodward said of his mother that the only
difference between his mom and the widow who
put the two coppers in the Gospel of Mark
is the amount.
They both gave everything.
That's a set of resources you have in your
heritage you really should play to the hilt.
And I can't imagine God wouldn't be pleased,
but I could be wrong because the mind of God
is as far away from me as it is from you.
I could go on in this theme, but I think you
need to ask yourself these sorts of deep questions
because you have huge wealth here in this heritage.
Let me set the hook for what we'll do after a
brief break.
And I want to get Charles and Wade up here to
engage more broadly in this conversation.
I want to put on the table in a moment the
three main findings from this three-year congregational
systems analysis that was done of Churches of Christ.
Now we've already hinted at a couple of them,
but I want to make sure that we put these
on the table because this is a part of the
result of this study.
I want to talk a bit, and I think maybe Charles
and Wade can help us some here, in reflecting
on the last things that Pat has talked about.
But are we at a point at which we have begun to
forget what it was like for us to be a
movement primarily of working-class folks?
What happens when you forget what it was like
to live on the wrong side of the track, so
just where most of us came from but where our
kids don't live any longer?
And does that have any implications for how we
function as a missional movement?
And then we are going to get to your view of
how Churches of Christ relate to the world.
And so those are the three hooks that we want
to place, but we're going to take a strict
ten-minute break.