MVM Issue 4 - June 2009

ISSUE 4

ENCOUNTERING JESUS AFRESHAlan Hirsch & Mike FrostMIND RENEWALCam Roxburgh

DOING THEOLOGY IN EXILELen HjalmarsonCHURCH SPOTLIGHTThe Sanctuary

© COPYRIGHT FORGE CANADA

ENCOUNTERING JESUS AFRESHWhen we set out to use this edition of the Missional Voice to discuss worldview and how we love God with all of our hearts, we asked Alan to give us his best thoughts on the subject. He quickly stated that his best had already been written down in his latest book with friend Mike Frost, Re:Jesus. He suggested that in order to get a different slant on the issue that we put an excerpt from this book into the MV. What follows is of course just a section of a book that deals with the call again to be radical in following a radical Jesus. If you are pushed by the concepts in this section from pages 142-147, be sure to get a copy of the whole book.

Much of what gets in the way of a true and life-altering encounter with Jesus can be traced to the problem of worldview. We have already seen how existential monotheism, reinterpreted christologically, radicalizes our understanding of things, but as much as a new application of worldview can change things and unify our world, another can equally distort. This is because worldview is effectively the lens through which we engage and thus interpret the world. The issue of worldview plays itself out rather strangely in the Western spiritual and theological tradition when it comes to the understanding of knowledge, or apprehension of God. The Western church is largely influenced by the more speculative and philosophical worldview ushered in by the Hellenistic world. The problem is that our Scriptures are formed by a significantly different way of seeing things - the Hebraic. We addressed this at length in The Shaping of Things to Come, which surprised some readers. Why introduce Hebraic thinking into a book on the missional church? For us, though, it goes to the heart of why the Western church has moved so far off course. The Church is operating out of a Hellenistic worldview that makes it difficult to appropriate all that the New Testament is saying. If this is the case in the area of ecclesiol-ogy, it is all the more important in the study of Christology.

To try to get to the essential difference between Hellenistic and Hebraic worldview, some writers have called Greek thinking step logic and Hebraic thinking block logic. The Hellenists used a tightly contained step logic whereby one would argue from premise to conclusion; each step in the process is tightly linked to the next in a coherent, rational, linear fashion. “The conclusion, however, was usually limited to one point of view - the human being’s perception of reality.” In contrast Hebraic thinking tended to express concepts in self-contained units, or blocks, of thought. The blocks did not necessarily fit together in an obviously linear or harmonious pattern, particularly when one block represented a human perspective on truth and another the divine. “This way of thinking created a propensity for paradox, antimony, or apparent contradiction, as one block stood in tension - and often illogical relation - to the other. Hence, polarity of thought or dialect often characterized block thinking.” This creates problems for us, trained as we are in Hellenistic approach to thinking, when we try to grasp Scripture. In reading the Bible, in recalibrating, we need to “undergo a kind of intellectual conversion” from the Hellenistic to the Hebraic mind.

It surprised us to learn recently that throughout the Apollo missions to the moon, spacecraft regularly drifted off course. In fact, more than 80 percent of their journey through space was slightly off course. To conserve fuel, the spaceships drift through space, moved by the gravitational pull of the earth. Jet engines are used occasionally only when the ship is getting too far off course to readjust their coordinates and get them back on track. The occasional burst of their massive engines completes the readjustment and keeps them heading toward their destination. We think this is a useful metaphor for the church today. Many people are claiming that the church has been drifting off course and needs a burst of renewed power to get back on track. However, for spacecraft, that surge of propulsion works only if the coordinates are accurate and the flight path is prop-erly conceived. Today, many voices are calling the church back on track, acting like power surges for a drifting church. But our contention is that is that the church needs to go back to the drawing board and work again on its flight plan. If the plan is wrong, all the bursts of renewed energy will only push us further into space.

One of those areas that need to be re-examined is that of worldview. Without an appreciation of the Hebraic worldview from which the New Testa-ment was written, we can keep surging the church’s engines and keep getting more and more lost, even though it looks like we’re doing the right thing. By thinking in Hellenistic terms, we construct a highly philosophical approach to our world and indeed the Scriptures. Jacques Ellul notes

ALAN HIRSCH & MIKE FROST


that our fundamental problems in perception can be traced back to a change in the basic understanding of revelation, namely the transition from history to philosophy:

I believe that all the errors in Christian thought go back to this [italics mine]. I might say that all the theologians I have named had correct thoughts, that their theology was true, that there was not heresy in the one and orthodoxy in the other, but that all of them are caught in the philo-sophical circle and pose metaphysical problems. All seek an answer by way of ontological thinking. All regard the biblical text or known revelation, as points of departure for philosophy, whether by translation into philosophical terms or as references of thought. They had intellectual, metaphysi-cal, and epistemological questions, etc., and adduced the biblical text with a view to providing a system of answers to their questions. They used the biblical text to meet their own needs instead of listening to what really it was [saying].

In other words, as Ellul goes onto explain, the shift away from the existential and historical revelation of God toward philosophical formulations diluted the nature of the truth the church proclaimed. Even though the theologians Ellul refers to expressed a profound and authentic faith marked by a concern for truth, “all this was undermined and even falsified by the initial transition of the idea of revelation” in the first place. The die was cast. Very soon the developments in philosophical thinking became stronger than the biblical truth they sought to retain. The theologians had forgotten the essential point that God does not reveal himself by means of a philosophical system or a moral code or a metaphorical construction but rather enters human history and accompanies his people. Ellul concludes:

The Hebrew Bible (even in the wisdom books) is not a philosophical construction or a system of knowledge. It is a series of stories that are not myths intended to veil or unveil abstract truths. These stories are one history, the history of the people of God, the history of God’s agreements and disagreements with this people, the history of loyalty and disobedience. There is nothing else but history...a history that tells us that God is with and for us, but that does not speak about God himself, or provide any theory about God.

This history-anchored worldview values the action and word of God over a philosophical construct of his character. It also requires obedience in order to truly comprehend what is being revealed. In this worldview, the Bible is read as the history of God’s self-revelation. It proves that God reveals himself in real life, in observable and distinct ways that defy neat explanation or simple formulation. Under the new Hellenistic worldview, the Bible is approached differently. God’s revelation was interpreted as the climax of the teaching of Socrates, and the Bible was interpreted by the intellectual tools of Greek philosophy. The Torah, or example, is seen merely as a moral code, not unlike the Twelve Tablets, a Greco-Roman legal code. What resulted was of decisive importance. Instead of listening to the text as it was, theologians tried to draw from it a coherent philosophi-cal system, whether modelled after Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus or Epicurus. It all came to the same thing. The biblical stories were treated as myths from which one had to draw some abstract, universal thought. And so the Christian theological tradition embraced a philosophical approach alien to Jewish epistemology (ways of knowing). The Hebraic framework for the true comprehension of revelation was thus discarded in favour of the Hellenistic. Ellul continued:

Some will tell me that we have no option but to use our available tools of knowledge even to understand a history. This is true. But I reply that Hebrew thought had its own tools of knowledge that are fully set forth in the language. We should bow and submit and convert to these instead of forcing God’s revelation into the straight jacket of Greco-Roman thinking, instead of putting it in this cage of tigers...To convert! This great word has been diluted. The people of the third century and later have been converted to Christianity in morality and religion, but they have kept intact their mode of thinking. Conversion is needed in the mode of thinking, too...Now metaphysics, ethics, and law have radically transformed the meaning of revelation even though formally what is advanced seems to be right, the exposition is faithful, and the interpreters are serious and devout. The problem does not lie with their faith or piety or intelligence but with an integral falsity of meaning.

If we hear Ellul correctly, this is part of the process by which Christianity was essentially subverted into something significantly less, if not entirely different from the originally way Jesus set down for us. Ellul therefore calls us to a new conversion if we are to ReJesus, a conversion back to Hebraic thinking in order to rediscover Jesus afresh.

In order to reJesus our lives and communities, it is essential that we engage God through the revelation that he has given us in Jesus. And this

ENCOUNTERING JESUS AFRESH cont...


will mean that we must take the Bible with utmost seriousness and must read it on its own terms if we are to truly comprehend its teachings. But the Bible should not in this process replace Jesus as the focus of our faith. In a way we are not really the “people of the book,” as we are so often called - as far as we can ascertain, it was the Muslims gave us this tag. In a far more fundamental way we can claim rather that we are truly Jesus’ people before we are anything else. Our focal point remains the Messiah and we must be guided by the Bible toward a true experience and understanding of Messiah. The Bible functions something like the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series - it is a gateway to another world; one goes through it in order to get into the knowledge, the love, and the wonder of God. With this in mind, let us look at ways in which we can perhaps renew our love and understanding of Jesus with the Bible in hand.

Part of this journey will mean that we need to learn to value what philosophers call subjectivity in relation to truth. And here we find Søren Kierkegaard to be most useful. Kierkegaard stressed how important it was to move beyond mere objective understandings of truth to the subjec-tive appropriation of that truth. He argued the case in one of his books that all truth means subjective change. And he meant by this that if you believe something is really and objectively true (in this case statements about Jesus and the gospel), then it must somehow affect your life. It must become personal. It must become your truth, or it is by definition not true. Your values and your association with truth indicate what you really believe is true.

When we look at Jesus, we find that his approach to communicating kingdom truth squares with this very biblical idea of subjectivity in relation to truth. Jesus’ method of communication is unbalancing. It destabilizes the smug complacency that stands between the individual and truth. Kierkegaard says:

Jesus’ method is essentially his goal. What Jesus “teaches” cannot be taught in some more objective manner. The listener is forced to confront the full paradoxical power of ‘the lesson’ and in doing so, is forced to confront himself or herself.”

With the previous discussion of the Hellenistic worldview in mind, we feel that so much of the way we approach the Scriptures are overly ratio-nalistic. Perhaps some of our frustration with rationalist and overly modernist approaches to reading Scripture can be highlighted by taking a look at many of our standard commentaries. In writing a book like this, one has to refer to commentaries to glean more insight on a text. But trips to the commentary shelf often prove frustrating and useless when it came to integrating Jesus and his teachings into our lives. Biblical scholars who focus on the grammar, structure, and etymology of a passage and then carefully compare what other scholars have said couch their writings in a language laced with assumptions of objectivity: the attempt becomes an exercise in investigating God rather than God investigating us. But follow-ing a purely rational, linear, historicist approach, we cannot hope to get at the true meaning of a text.

The problem is that the method dictates the outcomes! By not engaging the Jesus referred to in the text, scholars end up objectifying the Bible, making it into knowledge alone. In Martin Buber’s terms, they move from an I-and-Thou stance toward and I-and-It in relation to the Scriptures. And herein lies many of our problems when it comes to engaging the God in and through Scripture; we lack the spiritual mechanisms to get beyond the written word to God’s own self, and so we get stuck in the wardrobe. We have so attached ourselves to a Cartesian approach to knowledge (the viewpoint of the autonomous, objective, knower) that we have lost the art of participation in the text, of somehow finding ourselves in the text. James calls Scripture a mirror in which we see our true selves (Jas 1:22-25). To use it in an attempt to mine objective knowledge about God is to

ENCOUNTERING JESUS AFRESH cont...


MIND RENEWALCA

M R

OXBU

RGH

In our effort to escape the results of the enlightenment on our faith, and what many have negatively termed Christendom, is it possible that we have allowed the pendulum to swing too far the other way and ignored the invitation of Jesus to love God with all of our minds? Has the effort to recognize the validity of the emotional aspects of our faith allowed us to become complacent when it comes to being transformed by the renewing of our minds?

Becoming a missional movement of God’s people in Canada is not about a new evangelism program or a new model for church growth. As Charles Ringma stated it is a “renewed theological vision of the church in mission, as a sign, servant and foretaste of the kingdom.” This renewed missional approach must include a fresh call again to loving God with our minds. Without it, the depth needed to engage the culture in meaningful dialogue is severely lacking. Without it, our actions will not be shaped by correct theological reflection, but by the hijacking of a very powerful secular culture.

I recently read an article in a Christian publication where the illustration was told of a man entering the grocery store to buy strawberries. The writer proceeded to state that they watched the man begin to open a number of plastic containers and pick out all of the good strawberries from each of these containers. He then emptied one container and filled it with the best strawberries from each of the other 4-5 containers. He placed the bad strawberries in the others and then went to buy this new “super strawberry” container that he had created.

The writer of the article eventually applauded the man for his desire to get the best for his buck, and proceeded to try and support this view from a biblical story. It missed badly, and was a classic example of how we have allowed our faith to be hijacked by the culture. I am quite sure there have been and perhaps even are examples of this in my own life as well. The strawberries story saddens me, but it must also awaken me, and us, as followers of Jesus in Canada, to a renewed commitment to loving God with our minds (as well as in other ways). Many authors have written about this issue in recent years, and we would do well to pay attention before we see incredible sinkholes developing all over the Christian landscape.

I have been preaching through Ephesians again. It is crucial for churches across Canada to be in that letter often in an effort to strengthen our ecclesiology. The first half of the letter deals with our theology and how that must lead towards our missiology, while the second half deals with how we as the body of Christ need to live this out.

We know chapter 4 for its clarion call to unity and the emphasis on what many term the 5 fold ministry or more recently APEST. But if we read a little further into verses 17-24, we see Paul making sure that we are thinking correctly. He states in this context that we need to think our way into acting. (The opposite is also true at times - there are times when we act our way into thinking as well). In verses 17-19, he states clearly what happens when we do not think properly.

First we begin to harden our hearts. “My mind is made up! Don’t confuse me with the facts.” We see evidence of this all around us. I heard a commercial the other day that was geared to raising support for a worthy children’s cause. The commercial was grieving the loss of a young boy to disease and with quiet music in the background had a female voice saying that they were convinced that after the boy died, butterflies came down from the sky and carried the boy to heaven. The word Paul uses here is ‘petrified,’ almost as if he was saying that we exchange our brains for rocks.


Then when we have hardened our hearts (stopped being engaged in thinking), we begin to walk away from the light. We begin to live as if we were groping around in the dark looking for an elusive light switch to see clearly. And when we have walked far enough away from the light, we end up in death - or complete absence of light. By this Paul means that we are completely separated from God (light) and are spiritually dead. When this happens, we begin to engage in reckless living of all sorts and are given over to addictions which come in many shapes and sizes. All this, because we have failed to pursue right thinking.

Right thinking takes more discipline and more work than just going with whatever we feel or want.

By verse 20, Paul reminds the Ephesian church that they as followers of Christ are to live in the completely opposite way. They are to focus on cor-rect thinking. When they came to faith in Christ, they came through this kind of thinking. Paul states 3 things that were important.

First, Christ was the curriculum. In verse 20 he states that they did not come to know, or learn of Christ in that way. By this he means that as followers of Jesus, the very life of Christ is the curriculum for our school of discipleship. We look at who Christ is and how He lived as the very foundation of how we are to live. We need to apply ourselves to the study and understanding of this curriculum in order to learn to wlak in the right direction - toward the light instead of away.

Secondly Paul states that not only do we know Him, but that we heard Him. The “of” in verse 21 is misleading. Paul tells us that Jesus is our teacher, as well as our curriculum. Christ, now through the Spirit, instructs those us. We know that in order to grow, we need to apply ourselves to listening to the teacher and putting into practice what they lead us to do.

Finally in verse 21, Paul says we are taught in him. Not only is Jesus the curriculum and the teacher, but He is also the environment in which we learn. He is the classroom. By His Spirit, He dwells within us, and it is the Christ in us that actually leads us into deeper expressions of the fruit of the Spirit. If I am serious about studying and thinking my way through something, I need to place myself in an environment where I will not be distracted. Likewise, we need to be in the classroom of Christ to be able to think clearly and not harden our hearts.

The growing Forge network, want to underline that we are not just a “think-tank” group, but rather we want to be a movement across Canada that lives out the call to be a missional people. And this includes learning to love God with all of our minds. In past generations, many followers of Christ spent hours studying the scriptures. We still see evidence of some denominations where “their people” are known for their biblical knowledge. In many ways we need to applaud this and we need to use them as a model for us all to be studying scripture. We need to memorize, meditate and recite scripture to much greater degrees. But loving God with our minds is of course much more than that. It is about a change of the will. We are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. This includes, knowledge, action and reflection. It means that not only do we study scripture, but scripture studies us. It means that we also need to be reading and learning about other faiths represented in our lands so that when the oppor-tunity to develop relationships with our Buddhist, or Muslim, or Hindu friends arises, we can converse with them about matters of life and faith intelligently. I was never taught that reading a book like the Koran may actually be an action I take which demonstrates my love for God.

Perhaps super strawberry containers are not the biggest worries of our day. But maybe they are an indicator of something far more important.

MIND RENEWAL cont...


DOING THEOLOGY IN EXILELE

N HJ

ALM

ARSO

N

When everything that can be shaken is shaking, our traditional questions and traditional answers no longer seem adequate. When the maps we are using no longer describe the territory, we are pushed back to the text in a posture of listening. Who will do the theological work we need now - experts, or all of us? And is new theological work needed? What is the Spirit saying to the church “today?”

We must involve entire communities in theological work. Our first inclination might be, “Oh, no.. we can’t have EVERYONE doing theology!”

But what then of Moses rebuke to those who wanted to limit prophetic gifts: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets!” (Nu. 11). And what of the promise and fulfillment of Pentecost?

And it shall be in the last days, God says,That I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh;And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,And your young men shall see visions,And your old men will dream dreams... Acts 2:17ff (quoting Joel 2)

This priesthood is radical and universal, a heritage largely unrealized even post-Reformation.

Hearing from God, we know too well, does not guarantee freedom from error. We “see in part and prophesy in part.” Moreover, we are variously gifted. One of the differences between apostles, prophets and shepherds is in the way we see. The plurality of gifts Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 12-14 and Eph 4 is in part a call to communities of discernment or interpretive community. When we listen to the Word and the Spirit together we become an interpretive community.

One dynamic view of theological reflection (TR) views TR as conversation. In “Method in Ministry” Whitehead and Whitehead consider the authority of experience. They recall that Scripture itself is the record of a people’s experience of God’s presence. They make this statement:

Revelation - God’s self disclosure which surprises us, overturns our certitudes and transcends our best imaginings - is registered in experience... The religious authority of experience is rooted in a recognition of God’s continuing, disturbing presence among us. When our experience of sin and forgiveness; of dying and rising; of Christ recognized in the stranger confirms the testimony of Scripture and the wisdom of our religious heritage, it authorizes the Christian tradition again. By saying “yes!” to this sacred story, affirmed again in our own experience, the faith community regener-ates the Christian heritage in its own time. This incarnational optimism allows Christians to listen confidently to the three different sources of this model: it is the same God who acts in all three contexts...

There are multiple hooks for me in this paragraph. First, the three partners in the conversation each appear here: scripture, the community, and our context in history and culture. Second, the attitude and motivation for TR are implied: we respond to God’s self disclosure in all three sources, and we respond from our personal and corporate experience while rooted in the real world. Third, we cannot effectively do TR apart from the founda-tional awareness of our contingency and particularity. I’ll return to the first point a bit further along.

We need to do theology and we need to do it today. God is alive and is teaching and leading us as we seek him today. When Jesus promised another Counsellor, a Teacher who would lead us into all truth, the promise was for more than the first disciples. Jacques Ellul wrote, “Our God is a God of beginnings. There is in him no redundancy or circularity. Thus, if his church wants to be faithful to his revelation, it will be completely


mobile, fluid, renascent, bubbling, creative, inventive, adventurous, and imaginative.”

But there is something particular about these times we live in that demands theological work. Much of the work done in the last century was done in reaction to secularism, and much of it was done on foundations that no longer exist. Moreover, it was done as a privileged elite within the edifice of Christendom. Theology from a place of privilege and power was theology that often made compromises for the sake of maintaining a place of privilege. Now that the edifice is falling down, we have an opportunity to do theological work that is not self-protective: not primarily concerned with privilege, pensions or power.

The invitation of the Spirit in this location in time and space is to enter a clearing together, and together to become faithful listeners. Walter Brueggemann in Cadences of Home observed that it was as the people of God went into exile that their imaginations were renewed. They were forced to rethink much that they thought was clear; they went back to the text and listened anew to the Spirit. They did not see the extent of their own compromise until they were removed from a secure place - it seems we learn little until we are forced into liminality. The answers to yesterday’s questions were no help in Babylon.

“Take nothing for the journey” (Luke 9:3). The beauty of insecurity is the invitation to relearn dependence on God. But more - the invitation to re-learn dependence on one another. We really are forced to become better listeners: to God, the wider community, and to our culture. We enter what Alan Roxburgh has called a “creative commons.” “If we dream alone, it remains merely a dream. If many dream together, then it is the beginning of a new reality...” (Elisabeth Fiorenza)

Participative technology and the wisdom of crowds (Surowiecki) may hold more promise than we once thought. Reformation always demands theological work: the church must always be reforming. John Franke penned his paper, “Reforming Theology: Toward a Postmodern Reformed Dogmatics,” and wrote,

“Reformed theology is always reforming according to the Word of God in order to bear witness to the eternal truth of the gospel in the context of an everchanging world characterized by a variety of cultural settings... In the words of Jürgen Moltmann, reformation is not “a one time act to which a confessionalist could appeal and upon whose events a traditionalist could rest.”

In 2005 Robert Webber reflected on the changing culture and our need to adapt in his book, “The Younger Evangelicals.” In the final chapter Bob reflected on the nature of the leadership we need in the coming generation. He reflected that, “the leadership of the younger evangelical is not shaped by being right, nor is it driven by meeting needs.. Instead, it arises out of (1) a missiological understanding of the church, (2) theological reflection, (3) spiritual formation, and (4) cultural awareness” (240).

DOING THEOLOGY IN EXILE cont...


All these theologians affirm the need to do theological work here and now.Reaching further back, Karl Barth affirmed the need for the ongoing work of theology. First, because theology is always human and limited. He writes that, “Theology is neither prophecy nor apostolate. Its relationship to God’s Word cannot be compared to the biblical witnesses, because it can know the Word of God only at secondhand, only in the mirror and echo of the biblical witness.” (Evangelical Theology, 31) If all theology is thus limited, it behooves us as a community of God’s people to continue doing theological work. It may be that more light can be found today; that in light of a new situation we will see some issues with greater clarity.

In his primer in theology Barth tells a story about a series of lectures given in the postwar ruins of the Kurfursten castle in Bonn, Germany. In the summer of 1946 Barth began his lectures. Every morning at seven they met to “sing a psalm or a hymn to cheer us up.” By eight o’clock “the rebuilding of the quadrangle began to advertise itself in the rattle of an engine” as the engineers went to work to restore the ruins. (Dogmatics in Outline, 1959, 7) This is where vigorous theological work is always done, in the ruins of an old world with hope for a new.

Elsewhere Barth comments on our proclivity for experts. In essence, he argues for the “minority report.” He had the wisdom to see that theological work is too important to be left for ivory towers. He writes,

“How disastrously the Church must misunderstand itself if it can imagine that theology is the business of a few theoreticians who are specially ap-pointed for the task... Again, how disastrously the Church must misunderstand itself if it can imagine that theological reflection is a matter for quiet situations and periods that suit and invite contemplation, a kind of peace-time luxury... As though the venture of proclamation did not mean that the Church permanently finds itself in an emergency! ..... The whole Church must seriously want a serious theology if it is to have a serious theology.” (Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth, 1979. 81)

The theological foundations we work with were mostly built in modernity, filtered through Enlightenment lenses and limited by that context. The Enlightenment was the ultimate ivory tower. It presumed that we could stand objectively apart from the world and see through the pristine lens of Reason. As a result, theological work was often overconfident and lacked a hermeneutic of finitude.

And we created an expert class of people to do the work for us. We forgot that experts are subject to their own distortions, isolating themselves into narrow conversations divorced from life as lived, and with the need to justify their own existence and privilege.

Finally, I return to the Whitehead’s reflection on theology as conversation. It’s critical to recognize the dialogical.. or trialogical.. nature of the conversation between Scripture, the community, and culture and experience. Theology is always tethered: the freedom to do theological work is not freedom from tradition, but freedom within it, and not freedom from Scripture or the community, but the freedom to live within it. If this seems too limiting, or if we doubt the collective wisdom of the Spirit in the Body, then we merely remember Paul:

But God chose what is foolish in the world,even things that are not,to bring to nothing things that are.. 1 Cor. 1: 27-28

DOING THEOLOGY IN EXILE cont...


CHURCH SPOTLIGHTTHE SANCTUARYEvery 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’re in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and will tell the story of Jeff Christopherson and the community of Christ followers called “The Sanctuary.”

MV: Jeff, thanks for taking the time to tell us your story and about what God is doing at The Sanctuary. Tell us how long you have been at The Sanctuary and why you decided to go there.

JC: We moved to Oakville (just west of Toronto) in 2000 to begin the ‘prenatal work’ and officially launched in September 2001. We moved here because we sensed a need for our country to have a spiritual awakening and we wanted to move to an area where we could have the greatest impact on the Canadian scene.

MV: What were some of the key factors in shaping your vision for the church?

JC: When we were starting The Sanctuary, the largest church in Canada was at about 4,000 people. We knew that even if we planted a church twice that size that it would be “spit” compared to the needs of the GTA (with a population of about 5 million). So, from the beginning, we were trying to resist some of the impulses of the church growth movement and move more into things that looked like multiplication than addition. Instead of keeping ourselves and gathering in one place we were really fascinated with the principle of giving ourselves away and seeing things multiply. Mark 8:35 shows the attitude Jesus asks his follow-ers to assume. “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.”

MV: What events or circumstances have shaped the church over the years?

JC: Organizationally, we’ve seen some changes. We started with a mother/daughter church model that saw us releasing church plants quite quickly to be au-tonomous. This was not always healthy for the new church plants so we moved to a multi-site model where we maintained a higher degree of control. However, we began to notice that this allowed less possibility for quick, local decisions because of bureaucracy. So, we struck a halfway balance. Now we see us as an incubator. There is a high degree of hands-on in early stages of the plant, but we aim to set them free within two years so they are autonomous, financially and in other ways.

Our goal was to plant 25 churches in GTA by 2020. We are well on the way to far outstrip that, so now are aiming for 250 by 2020. We are building systems to work backwards from that goal to see it a reality. For example, I now work as Network Pastor. In that role I am looking for apostolic leaders from many different ethnic backgrounds represented in the GTA; and we are finding them all over the place. These leaders do not just want to plant individual churches, they want to reach their people groups. We are serving as a catalyzing agent, drawing these leaders into the Sanctuary network and finding resources and coaching for them.

MV: Part of being a missional church is learning to live incarnationally. What is The Sanctuary doing in the neighbourhoods in which it is a part?

JC: This is an area in which we are growing. Traditionally, I saw the endgame as planting churches. As a result we saw success as having an “outpost” with our name on it. But recently, the Holy Spirit has been teaching us and others that the Church is not the end goal. Rather, the Church is a tool to build the Kingdom of God. We now see the church as a tool for community transformation. And so when we work with a leader in planting a church, we look for agreement and accountability on two key factors: 1) Reproduction - that this will be a church that seeks to give itself away and multiply and 2) Community transformation - which is what you are asking about here.

We’re asking the leaders to figure out their communities; what the needs are, and then to just go after meeting those needs. Our three most recent plants have been very effective in this area. In Pickering, east of Toronto, our leaders went to the toughest place in town and offered a free 10-week summer camp for kids who can’t afford camp. They have also found persons with AIDS who needed help; they have cleaned and painted their houses. In our Mississauga plant, the leaders went to the mayor and asked, “Where is the most difficult part of the city?” and planted their church there. Again, they have rolled up their sleeves and have got into the lives of the people in that neighbourhood. A third example is in Oakland. This plant is only a few kilometres from our original plant, but a world away as far as the people who live there; those people would never go to Sanctuary Oakville. So we have gone to them. We use a bar as a base of operation. It’s a very relational plant. The leaders, a couple, cook a lot of meals and build relationships that way.


MV: What drives you as a community to be involved in this way?

JC: When we were involved in church planting through sending out flyers and marketing we’d see some results; that is, we’d see some come to Christ. But it’s a whole new level when we walk with somebody from the beginning - when they’ve not just shown up on our doorstep, but we went and found them. We walk with them through whatever they are going through and we see their lives turning around to Christ; then we watch them being baptized and we hear their testimony - that’s a whole new level of excitement. That’s what drives us into the community.

MV: Is there a story where you see God at work presently in the neighbourhoods in which you are involved?

JC: In our Brampton plant we are working with a wonderful Pakistani couple that are missionaries just naturally. The man is from a well-respected clan in Paki-stan and when people hear his name they want to invite them into their home. So he has open doors into this community. He probably does four to five meals a week in people’s homes, by invitation. He doesn’t tell anyone he is a Christian. But he always asks if he can pray at the beginning of the meal, and he prays in the name of Christ. Of course, this leads to lots of discussion. Out of these friendships formed over meals has developed gatherings of 50 to 80 people coming together - Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs - to explore Christ.

MV: What are the values of the church?

JC: To answer that I’ll start with our mission statement: “A growing group of friends giving ourselves away, building the Kingdom of God.” Each one of those statements has values attached to them. Lately, we’ve become a little more explicit in terms of stating two additional values that I mentioned above: 1) Repro-duction - that this will be a church that seeks to give itself away and multiply and 2) Community transformation. I would also add to that “Celebration” - helping all the parts of The Sanctuary be aware of and contribute to the work that is going on in all our campuses.

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

JC: Our missional strategy asks two questions: First, “What are the needs in our community that Christ wants us to meet?” Second, “Who are the people in our community who are outside of relationship with Christ, but who would like to join us in meeting those needs?”

We find that there are secular people, who are “Kingdom seekers,” who want to “do good.” But they don’t have “gas in their tanks” to do it because they don’t have the Holy Spirit living in their lives. But they are really impressed with churches that consistently go after the needs in a community. They begin to ask us, “tell us the reason for the hope you have.” And you tell them and they come to Christ. And they are relationally connected to others who don’t know Christ. And you watch thing moving again and again.

MV: Have there been any changes in your philosophy over the past 8 years or so?

JC: I once saw church planting as the end; now I see it as the means to the end of building the Kingdom of God. I still think church planting is the best tool for missional engagement. Often, however, church planters think that they can only meet the needs of the community after the church is established with its sala-ries and programs, etc. How much better would it be if from “day one” we made it our priority to serve the community? Then, the people you bring with you on that journey - who aren’t even Christ followers yet - will learn the true meaning of mission. They would already have the right DNA because they have watched you engage in mission from the start.

MV: Thank you Jeff. May God continue to bless you and The Sanctuary as you live missionally in your communities.

*For more information on The Sanctuary and the great work they are doing to see neighbourhood transformation, please check out their website at www.thesanctuary.ca.


MVM Issue 4 - June 2009

Documents

Transcript of MVM Issue 4 - June 2009