ISSUE 1

CHRISTOLOGY IS CRUCIALAlan HirschWHICH ORDER SHOULD IT BE?Cam Roxburgh

CHURCH SPOTLIGHTGrandview Calvary Baptist

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CHRISTOLOGY IS CRUCIALAL

AN H

IRSH

Alan Hirsch began Forge in Australia a number of years ago. His leadership along with a number of others, has been influential in that country and has helped to bring great renewal to the church in Australia.More recently he has moved to the States, where he now spends much of his time speaking and writing. His first few books have been a major impact on the way many are looking at the future of the church in North America. Soon, his latest book with Mike Frost, ReJesus, will be released. It too will become a favorite among those who are seeking to follow Jesus with everything they have and to see a Fresh Expression of the Church emerge in a changing world. We are encouraged to have Alan as founder of Forge, now developing in Canada as well as in Australia, and are pleased to present a short excerpt from the Introduction of ReJesus here.

“We open this book with these three vastly different stories-the 1964 massacre in Neshoba County, and our visits to the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox cathedral-to illustrate our concern with what has been promulgated in Jesus’ name throughout history. In Mississippi, Rome, and Moscow, the name of Jesus has been invoked as central to movements that do not seem to be in accord with the Jesus we find in the pages of the Gospels. In the descriptions of the KKK’s Bible-thumping reign of terror in Mississippi we are aghast that men could attempt to sanctify their actions with prayers to Jesus. In the Vatican, one of the archetypal buildings dedicated to the religion that was founded on Jesus Christ, we cannot locate the simple, hardy, revolutionary carpenter who is compellingly portrayed in the Gospels. At the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the Jesus of the Gospels competes with stars and generals for the affections of the devoted. All of these are unsettling insights that speak directly to the purpose of this book because they raise disturbing questions about the continuity between Jesus and the subsequent religion established in his name.”

Hirsch and Frost continue to push us all with the following questions;

“These examples suggest questions that can be, indeed, should be, asked of all believers, churches, and denominations in any time and place:

* What ongoing role does Jesus the Messiah play in shaping the ethos and self-understanding of the movement that originated in him?* How is the Christian religion, if we could legitimately call it that, informed and shaped by the Jesus that we meet in the Gospels?* How do we assess the continuity required between the life and example of Jesus and the subsequent religion called Christianity?* In how many ways do we domesticate the radical Revolutionary in order to sustain our religion and religiosity?* And perhaps most important of all, how can a rediscovery of Jesus renew our discipleship, the Christian community, and the ongoing mission of the church?These are not insignificant questions because they take us to the core of what the church is all about. They take us to the defining center of the movement that takes its cue from Jesus. Rather than call this reformation, we will call this task refounding the church because it raises the issue of the church’s true founder or foundation. And in our opinion, nothing is more important for the church in our day than the question of refounding Christianity. It has a distinct poignancy at the dawn of the twenty-first century as we collectively attempt to address Christianity’s endemic and long-trended decline in the West. We seem a little lost, if truth be told, and no quick-fix church-growth solution can be found that can stop the hemorrhage. There is no doubt that we face a spiritual, theological, mis-sional, and existential crisis in the West.” Later in the introduction, they push us as the church even harder.

“Surely the challenge for the church today is to be taken captive by the agenda of Jesus, rather than seeking to mold him to fit our agendas, no matter how noble they might be. We acknowledge that we can never truly claim to know him completely. We all bring our biases to the task. But we believe it is inherent in the faith to keep trying and to never give up on this holy quest. The challenge before us is to let Jesus be Jesus and to allow ourselves to be caught up in his extraordinary mission for the world.

Whether it is the grand ecclesiastical project of the institutional churches, epitomized by the ostentatious excess of the Vatican, or the tawdry grab for the hearts and minds of the aspirational middle class by prosperity style Pentecostalism, the Christian movement has been subverted. Like a forgotten nativity scene in a shopping mall dominated by Santa Claus, reindeer, elves, Disney characters, tinsel, baubles, and fake snow, the biblical Jesus is hard to find. But Jesus is still calling us to come and join him in a far more reckless and exciting adventure than that of mere church attendance. When allowed to be as he appears in the pages of Scripture, Jesus will not lead us to hatred, violence, greed, excess, earthly power, or material wealth. Instead, he will call us to a genuinely biblical and existential faith that believes in him, not simply believing in belief, as in many expressions of evangelicalism. It requires an ongoing encounter with Jesus. This will raise issues in the ways of knowing that bring about true spiritual transformation, which we will explore later in this book.

And so it is all about Jesus for us, with some direct implications for our lives as followers of Jesus.” You will not be able to read even the introduction without knowing the steep challenge we all face as disciples of Christ, and as the church he founded.

For a copy of the whole of the introduction, please go to www.theforgottenways.com © COPYRIGHT FORGE CANADA

WHICH ORDER SHOULD IT BE?CAM ROXBURGH

In the past, we have given greater emphasis to the practice of doing church, than to the issue of mission. It seems as if our Christology led to our Ecclesiology, which may have led to Missiology. At times, our Ecclesiology has even been elevated above Christology.

But this has been changing in the thinking of some who align themselves with the missional church. Too much has been put on the institution of the church and not enough God’s call to mission. Many are now supporting the idea that our Christology must lead to our Missiology, which then leads to our Ecclesiology. This idea continues to help us to deemphasize the institution of the church and to engage with the mission of God in our neighbourhoods.

But I am not satisfied with even this new understanding. We need to go even further. I would suggest that the view that our Christology - Missiol-ogy - Ecclesiology falls short of true missional thinking. It undervalues the place of the people of God in mission, and if adopted would present a diminished gospel that did not portray the good news of being the people of God. It would shortchange the renewal of the church in Canada.

Instead, we need to understand that our Theology (including the nature of the people of God) leads to Missiology (the Good News in context) leads to Ecclesiology (the practices of being God’s people in that context). We need a two-part understanding of the church - the nature of God’s people and the practices of God’s people.

First, I agree with the many who are emphasizing the person of Christ and the place of radical discipleship. Christology is of the utmost importance. But we are a people of the Trinity, and therefore need to reflect the image of God in who we are as His people. The gospel includes the fact that God is calling a people to Himself who will reflect His nature to a broken world around them. This is crucial to becoming truly missional. Far too of-ten, I hear a rejection of the importance of the church (nature of the people of God) in our so-called missional thinking. But being missional means that we are to not just participate in what God is doing, but demonstrate what He is like in the way we live together.

Second, coming out of our theology (who God is and who we are as His people) we need to understand His purpose and His invitation for us to be involved in Mission. It is crucial that we learn to exegete our neighbourhoods in such a way that we discern what God is doing in those places and join Him in the work of the Kingdom. It has been stated that if we do not understand the nature of God we cannot fully understand the mission in that place. But if we do not know the nature of the people of God (image-bearers), and who He intends us to be, we will not learn to be missional either.Finally, we do need to look at our ecclesiology, but here I would state that it is the practices of the church with which we need to be concerned. If we have understood God’s intent for who we are, and learned to therefore join with Him in what He is doing in our neighbourhoods, we will then move towards a number of practices with which the community of God’s people in that place will engage. These practices may have a common theme from one neighbourhood to another, but because of mission, will look very different. They must look very different if we have rightly under-stood the first two points.

As a reaction to the institutional nature of the church in generations gone by, we must be careful not to forget the fact that it was God’s plan to build His church and to further His kingdom through His people. It is crucial for us to reflect both on the nature of the church and on its practices if we are going to be truly missional.

Questions...

1. How do you see the relationship between Christology, Missiology and Ecclesiology?2. Respond to the idea of the importance of the Nature of the people of God in the development of a missional church.3. What are the common practices in your community of faith?

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CHURCH SPOTLIGHTGRANDVIEW CALVARY BAPTISTEvery month we will spotlight a church that is reaching its neighbourhood with the good news of the Kingdom of God. Canada is a unique country and instead of always looking to the south for our stories and our voices, we need to be telling the stories about what God is doing in our land. This month we begin by telling the story of Tim Dickau and the community of Jesus followers called Grandview Calvary Baptist Church in East Vancouver.

MV: Tim, thanks for taking the time to tell us your story and about what God is doing at Grandview Calvary. Tell us how long you have been at GC and why you decided to go there?

TD: I have been at GC for 19 1⁄2 years now. I went there when I graduated from Regent College. Our denomination (Canadian Baptists of Western Canada) had five or so churches that were in that general vicinity. It seemed as if many of them were struggling to come to grips with how to reach people in a more urban setting. There was a great sense of the need for renewal and the people who were at Grandview at the time seemed desperate. That was important to me. As I did the research on the churches and what was needed to make changes, this attitude in the people really appealed to me. I discovered that 15 churches had died in that neighbourhood and a big reason for this was the fact that many people have left the neighbourhood. So, I knew that for a church to make a differ-ence, there was a need to move in... and stay.

MV: How did you come up with the vision for GC?

TD: I was fortunate to have the opportunity to walk the streets of the neighbourhood for a number of months and allow the ethos of the place and people to sink into my gut. I got to know the people. I then spent 4-5 years focused on helping us to become a welcoming community, while helping us to learn to love the neighbourhood. I was trying to help our people to seek the well-being of the neighbourhood, and of course to do that we needed to move in.

MV: Tim, how old is GC and what were some of the founding principles or values?

TD: Social justice and evangelism were key values of the church when the church was planted 100 years ago. It is our 100th birthday this year. Especially into the depression years, GC worked hard at being a voice for those who needed justice. As time moved on, the neighbourhood changed and there was a greater multi-cultural presence, and so we began to see this reflected in the make-up of our church community. However, as is the case so often, the church began to see drift and people began to commute from further away. We have really worked hard to become a neighbourhood church again. It is hard today because of the considerable cost of living in that neighbourhood. Our people have to be creative.

MV: How would you describe the vision now?

TD: The short sentence is “Radical Welcome for Radical Transformation.” The longer vision is “Grandview Calvary Baptist Church is a community of people who receive and extend the radical welcome of God in Christ for the transformation of our neighbourhood.”

MV: Tell us about some of the creative and formative ways you are living incarnationally and impacting the neighbourhood.

TD: There are a number of things we are doing. We have something called the Crossroads Community Project. In this we serve food to the homeless and offer them a place to sleep, in from the cold. We help with health and hygiene issues both in the church and on the street. We connect with other social service agencies in the neighbourhood. We have a ministry to single mom’s in the neighbourhood called The Open Door. We have started a ministry called Salsbury Community Society where we lease homes to help provide affordable living to diverse people. We have started initiatives called JustWork, JustGarden and the Pottery Studio.

MV: Why? What drives you in this pursuit of transforming the neighbourhood?

TD: It is a highly theological issue for us. It is all about the gospel. Our theological position is that we are to become incarnate (living in the neighbourhood) because this is the way that God sought to bring transformation. We have intentionally made efforts to teach our people that we face powers in our culture (individualism, materialism, secularism) and that these powers are opposed to the kingdom of God, or the good news. Therefore we are constantly wrestling with how we live in this culture. If we can learn to live in the patterns of the kingdom of God instead of some of the powers of the world that we face, we believe transformation can take place. We see this kind of thing in the book of Colossians which we use to help us to learn how this is done. It cannot be done as individuals. No, that is just going along with the pull of culture. But it must come in the vision of a community of people who are themselves being transformed.

MV: Tell us a story of something you have seen God doing recently.

TD: We had a homeless man come to the pottery club that is held in the basement of the church. For a while he would just come and hang out. Then he began to get involved a little and make a number of relationships. Then through relationships, he found a place to live and was given a little dignity. After this he began to work at the pottery club and so became employed giving even more dignity. From there, his relationships grew and he eventually started coming to our wor-ship services and now has become a follower of Christ. It was through the multiple connections with people that this all took place.

MV: That is a wonderful example of what Kreider and others have said... sometimes now people need to belong before they believe. What difference do you think you have made in your neighbourhood?

TD: The best has been that even people who are normally very opposed to the church have seen us at GC as partners in trying to see transformation in the neighbourhood. This is tremendously satisfying.

MV: Okay, incarnational living takes a lot of energy. How do you keep going?

TD: We have had to really stress the theology of rest. Burnout indicates that there is something wrong, an inbalance between what is going out of the person and what is coming in. Along with this rest, must be the practice of confession and repentance.

MV: What are the values of GC?

TD: They are all articulated fully on the website, but we value things like hospitality and making room for the “other.” We also value the need for space and time for healing for the broken, finding our own story embedded in God’s story, intercultural ministry, unity and community. These are some examples.

MV: Would you consider yourself to be a “missional church?”

TD: We have always been considered about the mission of God. We teach on that all of the time. But we were engaged in neighbourhood transformation long be-fore the term “missional” became popular. The term doesn’t really affect us, but rather we just want to stay focused on demonstrating the reality of the kingdom of God as His people. This is about the way we are living and not just about us adding a bunch of stuff to our lives.

MV: Have there been any changes in the philosophy of ministry over the last ten years?

TD: As the church has grown and the reputation has grown, we have had a wider ministry and are now involved in a number of city-wide efforts.

MV: Tim, I have always been so deeply impacted by you and GC. May God continue to bless you and that wonderful community of God’s people, and may He use you to bring a renewed theological vision of the church to God’s people across the country.

* For more information on Grandview Calvary and the tremendous work they are doing to see neighbourhood transformation, please check out their website at www.gcbchurch.ca.

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