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Thoughts on Accessibility | part one

Halfway into our flight. I'm sitting across the aisle from Katie and she is fast asleep. Our plane is full of two very different groups of people: a high school physics class, supposedly measuring every thing the plane does with "stop watches and flexostatic-spectrostatic-girder-chro-mometers" (or whatever the captain said over the intercom), and a sizable group of people in cheap suits that are clearly headed to a multi-level-marketing convention of some sort. THE golden child prodigy is sitting directly in front of Katie-- I heard the team leader tell several people that Erick is only 22, and he has already achieved Platinum Status with three eagle legs and a 4500 something...I can't take my eyes off of him Trinity...I believe he is the one...

The team leader is sitting behind me and before we took off he was leaving a mass group voicemail. He said the words "growing", "success", "intentional, "exciting" and a myriad of other buzzwords so many times I could not count them (not to mention each of those buzzwords preceded by "You're part of something..."). Man, I need to develop some exciting buzzwords. I either want to be a team leader sending mass voicemails, or at least be on a team where a leader is sending confident, type-a voicemails. Maybe Katie and I will sign up with these guys in the luggage claim area. Maybe I will be one of legs under The One.

I have been staring at the phone that is so nicely anchored in the seat back in front of me for the last hour and thinking about the phone in terms of accessibility. The phone is right in front of virtually everyone on the plane (everyone in the middle seat at least, and no further reach than changing the track on your car stereo for every other passenger). It is well lit, comes complete with clear instructions for use, and is so well integrated that you can access the phone by using a variety of payment options. Yet, not one person on this plane is using them (thank God!!). In fact, I can only recall one time in my life that I have ever seen anybody use the "airplane phone".

Why?

The fact is, the phone is completely inaccessible. The prices are so astronomical that the phone is either outside everyone's reach, or past the boundaries of asinine for those that can afford it. Perhaps it is because I only got 1.5 hr of sleep last night combined with the fact that I worked at 4.30 this morning, but this concept of the inaccessibility of those things which are, on the surface, completely accessible, has gotten me thinking about many of the things that we are called to embody as a church.

McManus, Zimeckis, & The Future | part one

I have spent a good deal of time lately thinking about the "Future"-- partly because  I have been forced to think about the future of my family.  What is God calling us to do?  Where are we headed?  What is the next step for Katie and I?

But this has lead me to reflect on the future in general: what it is, how we set our sights on it, how we get there, and when does it begin?  The scope of this is obviously quite broad.  That is, thoughts on the future are in many ways as vast as the future itself.  Additionally, as someone who hopes to be vocationally involved within the faith community "in the future", in areas of teaching, discipling, pastoring, church planting and leadership development, "the future" is something I have a personal stake in.  Thus, how I conceive of the future and how I intend to lead people toward it is of critical importance. 

Furthermore, our thinking about the future becomes more difficult when we realize that we have to conduct our evaluation in two spheres: thinking about the church in terms of the future; and thinking about the future in terms of the church.  Actually, my contention is that we have to choose which way we are going to think about the future, and that our chosen path has a myriad of implications for how we live our lives in the present.

I have been laughing throughout all of this, as my mind has constantly been drawn to thoughts of Dr. Emmit Brown, the flux capacitor, and the space-time continuum which he was so deliberate not to tinker with.  For those of you that

don't remember Robert Zemeckis' 1985 film, Back to the Future, you can read a brief synopsis here.  Not that I remember a whole bunch from the film, or could clearly articulate the philosophical presuppositions that under-girded it-- but I do remember that the multiple plot lines were driven not by looking at how we move toward the future; but that the future was already what it was as a result of miniscule events from the past and present.  That is, we are creating the future now.  We have been creating the future for a long time.  Therefore, the best way for us to build the future for the church is not to evaluate the church in terms of the future.  Rather, we determine the future through our actions and interactions in the present.

I must confess at this point that my thinking as of late has been profoundly impacted by Erwin McManus' book, An Unstoppable Force.
McManus' contention throughout the whole book is that the way we move toward the future is by "unwrapping the present".  For example, he says,

The paralyzing fear  for many who are clinging to the past is moving into an unknown future.  There's an irony in this.  While we think we're moving into an elusive future, all we're actually doing is moving into the already existent present.  The great leap of faith isn't from the present to the future but from the past to the present!  All we have to do to discover the future is unwrap the present (McManus, 91).

and

The future is full of hope.  God has placed it there for those who will follow him into it.  Yet the only way we'll ever receive so great a gift as the future is by unwrapping the present (McManus, 93).

All this has done for me essentially is to remind me that the future is for God alone to determine.  This is not to say that shouldn't talk about the future, or speak with (humble)authority on where we want to be in the future.  But this is merely a trajectory.  God is the architect of the future.  What he has called us to do is, in faithfulness and obedience, architect the present.  This reminds me of the words of my college professor Carla Waterman, "You will be what you are becoming."  Not that these words originated with her, but they did serve as the infrastructure of her view of spiritual formation.  The future starts right now.  The way Katie and I can confidently plan for the future and the way the church can confidently move toward the future is through faithfulness in the present. 

We live in a dysfunctional, non-communicative place...

Cell-Phone Shushing Gets Creative:
Bottom line.  I do not wait on you at Starbucks if you're on a freaking cell phone.

Let Me Clarify My Gripes With Terms

(this will interest Brian especially)

I just found this link and this is not what I'm saying AT ALL.  Whoever wrote this piece contends that "missional" is just another word for "emergent".  I couldn't disagree more intensely.  What I'm suggesting is that neither term is very helpful.  Perhaps both were for a time; or never were.

I'm still using the term 'missional' with positive connotations in my own life and thinking.  But, I do think that I'm looking for an alternative.  Now,  I very well may abandon this search altogether and continue to use the word missional indefinitely (as I have found it a quite helpful descriptive for the past several years).

I'm just trying to ask the question, "has the word lost its punch"?  And, if so, are we willing to do the hard work to find new terms that better describe the life of the church as we see it?

Reclaiming? Renewing? or Searching? For an evangelical ecclesiology

I have been re-reading Stan Grenz's book, Renewing the Center as I have been working through Taylor, et al; Reclaiming the Center (sometimes it gets confusing as to what I'm supposed to be doing to the center).  It has been an eye-opening endeavor for me.  From what I've read thus far, Erickson & Taylor's army have been quite charitable (though excessively footnoted, in my opinion), and Grenz is absolutely fantastic, and absolutely terrifying. 

I don't really care about anything Emergent, and, as I have told many of you, have become increasingly disinterested in their movement the more I read.  Instead, the primary thing I have been working with as I have read these books is the concept of evangelical ecclesiology.  I have rambled on several occasions (and have heard Grenz and others assert quite lucidly) that one of the crippling elements of the evangelical church throughout history is that they don't have an ecclesiology (or a well-defined one at that).  We have seen the growth of the evangelical movement through innumerable para-church ministries, and I doubt any of us have lived very long as evangelicals and not been involved in a para-church ministry of some stripe.  I don't wish to comment at this point on the perils or promise of para-church ministries.  Rather, I have become fascinated with Carson's response to this line of thinking

It is not that evangelicals have no ecclesiology, but that we have several of them, to some extent mutually contradictory.  And one of the reasons for this state of affairs is that one of the characteristics of evangelicalism is that soteriology is elevated above ecclesiology-- or, to put the matter differently, soteriology is more determinative of the shape of ecclesiology than the reverse.  Traditionally, it is Roman Catholicism that elevates ecclesiology above soteriology.  I cannot detect that Grenz is even aware of the danger (Reclaiming, 52).

One of the extreme dangers I see the younger generation of evangelicals (read "me" if it helps) dancing with is that we have not done the work to even understand the danger that Carson refers to.  Furthermore, because the bulk of our developing ecclesiology is reactionary, we haven't taken the time describe theologically (let alone historically) how we are understanding the church.  As a result of this, we have a new generation of church planters reading a new school of missiology (thank God for all of it), but not necessarily asking questions of history, or theologically informed questions about the nature of the church. 

So, we are attempting to live missionally, but don't have a clearly articulated direction of the mission (I'm sure many will object here-- but the number of people that are using the word missional these days is overwhelming-- most of whom I don't think I would agree with on the nature and the scope of the mission-- all of which would be flushed out, I think, if we talked about trajectory), and have left our missional church virtually uprooted historically.  I am 100% in support of what we have termed "missional ecclesiology" (though, as I have said before, I'm trying to come up with a new term), but as we strive to think about the church in light of the mission of God, we have to actually think about the church.

Once I finish reading Bauckham, I'm moving on to Evangelical Ecclesiology, and hope to be able to better come to terms with my frustration-- thereby being able to better articulate the alternative.  I set this out here in hopes that Daling, Tiny, & Eutychus at least could box my brains around and help me line up the issues I want to think about.