Planting the Church of the Brethren in Toledo: A modest proposal

Photo by snowmentality (via Flickr)

This post is part of the NuDunkers conversation on church planting in the Church of the Brethren, on which we'll be hosting a live video chat this Friday, Dec. 6th, at 10am Eastern. Check out the event page on our G+ community page for more info on that.

I've been talking recently about how "seeking the peace of the farm town" has been my mantra for living and ministering in the rural communities of Tama & Toledo, Iowa, since moving here last year.

This phrase is an adaptation of the Lord's commandment in Jeremiah 29, addressed to the exiles in Babylon in the 6th century BCE. The command is to "seek the peace/welfare/shalom of the city to which I've sent you into exile." The exhortation is an echo of the creational mandate found all the way back in Genesis, to "be fruitful and multiply," and that in seeking the welfare of the pagan city (and empire) in which they found themselves, God's people would find their own welfare.

I fell in love with this text in seminary, wrote a paper on it, and posted it here a few years ago. It became a paradigm for me, helping shape my early thoughts about what my church ministry might look like after seminary. In particular, I've found the thematic metaphors of "building" and "planting" throughout both Jeremiah and Isaiah to be particularly, um, productive ones. So church planting and community peace-building have for years now been inseparable concepts in my theological reasoning, and practical mission/ministry planning. My aim has been toward forming worshipping communities with community peacebuilding teachings and practices wired in from the get-go.

Cultivation takes time and patience and risk - among other things - and planting is just one step in the cyclical process of life (and death). So when I discovered the Slow Church blog a year or two back, which takes its cues from agrarian-minded sustainability movements, I found another fruitful metaphor for church planting.

Most recently, I've written and submitted a church-planting proposal for my local community that takes cues from this "slow church" movement. As a bi-vocational minister (i.e. I have a day job that is not professional/paid "church ministry" in a congregation), I've committed to a small, open-ended, slow, patient, and discerning approach to church planting, with explicit nods toward community peacebuilding. It's been approved by the committee overseeing these things in my district and is on its way to the Northern Plains District Board for final approval at their meeting next month. I'll outline a few major points below, and embed the entire document at the end if anyone is interested in seeing how I approached this proposal...

Kaleidoscopic visions of the kingdom

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!’
And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshipped God, singing,
‘Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom
and thanksgiving and honour
and power and might
be to our God for ever and ever! Amen.’

--Revelation 7:9-12

During my four years in seminary I was fortunate to have overlapped with the first seminary cohort as part of the local Mennonite Hispanic Initiative, which is committed to providing church planting resources, leadership development, and theological education to the Hispanic and Latino community here in Harrisonburg. One of the MDiv students is Byron Pellecer, pastor of the Iglesia Discipular Anabaptista (IDA), which currently meets Saturday evenings in the building of Harrisonburg Mennonite Church. Byron and I had a number of classes together and became good friends and brothers in Christ.

This past Sunday at my congregation, Park View Mennonite Church, Byron preached with his good friend, Marvin Lorenzana, who is an EMS MDiv alum and Director of Multicultural Services at EMU. I had been under the impression that Byron was going to be preaching in Spanish with Marvin translating to English. But then something amazing happened: While preaching, Byron would switch back and forth between the two languages, and Marvin would follow along. Here's the sermon...

Byron Pellecer: A miracle in the midst of scarcity from Park View Mennonite Church on Vimeo.

#Occupying Empire: David Fitch eats and tweets at McDonald's

David Fitch,
ready for the mission field

[Note: The preface to this post's title, "#Occupying Empre" is signaling a series of posts I'll likely do this spring. More importantly it's a reference to a conference that I'm putting together with a seminary friend: #Occupy Empire: Anabaptism in God's Mission. Registration isn't open yet and speaker/schedule info is forthcoming. So this is kind of putting the cart before the horse, but stay tuned in the next two weeks for more info on the conference...]

I came across David Fitch's blog - Reclaiming the Mission - last year and began casually following his posts and his tweets. Partly by his own admissions, but also by my own assessment, Fitch seems like a postmodern evangelical whose been bit by the "new traditionalism" bug (which means he's taken folks like MacIntyre, Hauerwas, and Yoder seriously). "Neo-Anabaptist evangelical" might be another way to describe Fitch. He is a bi-vocational professor and pastor in the Chicago area. He's also not afraid to talk about Marx and Zizek, and has a provocatively-titled book, The End of Evangelicalism?, which I haven't read yet but appears in my favorite Wipf & Stock series, Theopolitical Visions. Taken together, all this makes Fitch quite an interesting person to me. Lucky for me, he's visting EMU later this month!

But one thing in particular strikes me about Fitch: He's at McDonald's a lot. I know this from his tweets. Just this morning he reported, "Gathering early at McD' s w/ triad in the back to read, pray, check in and ask the questions - ahhh discipleship :-) #fb." What's the deal?

AMP post: The Sacrement of Mission

"I worship and love, therefore I am."
Photo by Petra via Flickr.

For the past four or five days I've been reading James K.A. Smith's Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. It's about time, too, since I've been reading his blog, watching/listening to his lectures for almost two years now. In some ways I feel like I've already read a lot of it, but I'm still very happy I finally got around to reading it.

It was also my turn on the schedule to contribute to the Anabaptist Missional Project (AMP) blog, so I synthesized as much of Smith's key points into a post about...

The Sacrament of Mission

“I think, therefore I am.” This short dictum from René Descartes may be the best shorthand summary of the entire Enlightenment project. It is a statement about human nature – our “am-ness” – namely that we are primarily rationalanimals. So successful has this view of human nature become – entrenched as it is in our thought and practice patterns of cultural, political, economic, and (yes) religious institutions in the West – it’s nearly impossible to detect, much less argue with. 

But Christian philosopher, James K.A. Smith, has a bone to pick with that view of human nature. In his recent book, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Smith has set about to change our minds about this mind-centric view of human beings. Drawing on contemporary philosophy and other disciplines, Smith wants us to shift the understanding of our being from that of homo sapiens to “homo liturgicus,” that is the human being as worshipper and lover. So the dictum here would go, “I worship (and love), therefore I am.”
(Read the rest of the post...)

Beasts for the Kingdom: A prayer

Beasts of burden, Debre Zeit, Ethiopia

This morning for a final-year seminary class, my fellow seminarians and I were led through a time of guided retreat. In the seminary chapel there were set up four stations, each asking a different question. One about how we conduct our closest relationships, another about our public ministry, and yet another about how we take care of ourselves personally. The final question was this: Who am I and what do I do in my relationship with God?


On the page facing these questions in the handout was printed two Bible verses: Matthew 11:28-30 and Philippians 1:9-11. Here's some quick exegesis and a prayer which arose from my journaling this morning...

Better together: Hauerwas and Taylor on American Secularity

The statesman and the raconteur;
Charles Taylor & Stanley Hauerwas

Two pieces that popped up for me in the past day seem to be good companions for each other and stimulated my thinking along the topics of nationalism and secularity. That they come from two men who've dramatically influenced my thinking in the past year was a plus.

• The Death of America's God - by Stanley Hauerwas
• Western Secularity - by Charles Taylor (the philosopher, not the dictator)

The spiritual disciplines of being troubled and peaceable

It’s been a troubling year. The Arab Spring protest movements that went (relatively) nonviolently in Egypt have devolved into bloody and protracted conflicts in numerous other countries across the Middle East. Then in early May, the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, was killed by the US military and buried at sea, only to return as a 500 foot monster wreaking havoc on the United States. (Okay so that last bit is obviously not true, but the Onion article offers golden social commentary.) As I watched fellow Americans dancing in the streets in early May, I became troubled and began offering theopolitical and pacifist Christian commentary. This commentary was lost on many of my non-Anabaptist friends, both Christian and non. One piece of criticism that I welcomed was that my arguments didn’t allude to or reference Scripture, so I promised my friends to follow up my pacifist grumblings with biblical-theological reflections to help non-Anabaptist, non-pacifist Christians see the world in ways which trouble us as we should be troubled.

Last week I wrapped up a class at Eastern Mennonite Seminary called “Biblical Foundations for Justice and Peace,” taught by Mark Thiessen Nation, one of the leading scholars of influential late 20th century theologian, John Howard Yoder. Mark began the class with something surprising: He showed us a music video by Tom Jones (yes, of “What’s New Pussycat?” fame). As he introduced this video, my Gen-X sensibilities were offended (Tom Jones?!), but I must now say this song is profound...

This song speaks to the ways in which the Lord troubles us and the ways in which humans often resist that movement of God’s Spirit. The church has certainly closed its eyes, “slept too long and...too deep” and not allowed “the tears of (our) brother” to move our hearts. We “let things stand that should not be.” Into this sin-induced coma, God sends dreams, visions, and inspires songs which are “ringing (like) a bell in the back of our mind(s).” Our souls are stirred, we are troubled. And the purpose for this divine disturbance from our slumber? “To make (us) human, to make (us) whole.” In Christian biblical anthropology, Jesus is the true, whole human. Jesus is our vision for fullness of life to which his disciples gravitate toward and invite others into Christ’s “gravitational pull” toward fullness, shalom, life abundant. Which brings us to biblical-theological pacifism...

Earthy discipleship and peacebuilding in Jeremiah

Photo by snowmentality (via Flickr)

Today ended a three-week intensive class at seminary, studying the book of Jeremiah in the Old Testament. It's great to have those classes where the primary textbook is the Bible, which doesn't happen as often as some might think at a seminary. For one of my papers, I chose the topic of "to pluck up and to pull down, to build and to plant," which is a theme that is established in the very first chapter and runs throughout Jeremiah, giving it somewhat of an organizing principle.

In the paper, I do a literary and narrative-theological analysis of that theme with special attention paid to historical and sociopolitical events that drive the narrative forward in Jeremiah. In an academic paper, you have to do all the hard and boring work first before you get to say the interesting and relevant stuff at the end. Since this is a blog, I'll skip most of the boring stuff and say up front why I think this theme and Jeremiah in general is an excellent source of inspiration for faithful Christian peacebuilding. If you really want to see the academic treatment, the paper will be embedded at the end. If you read both, you will see me repeating myself, because I'm lifting material from the paper for the post...

The secret of mission: Humility

Lesslie Newbigin's The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission  says so many things well it's hard to know where to start. While this is a book about theology of mission, it is just a flat-out excellent book of theology in general. But not just theology, because Newbigin is simultaneously doing some startlingly lucid reading of Western societies and cultures. It perhaps shows my tacit Western belief in progress, but I was consistently amazed throughout the book that it was first published in the late 70s. All of his descriptions are still relevant, and in fact a few are downright prescient and/or prophetic. This book is a masterful blend of orthodox Christian theology and rigorously postmodern thought, adding a splash of critical engagement with Marxist theories and liberation theology. For that engagement, Newbigin affirms and applies what's helpful to his project while also clearly drawing the lines where those frameworks become unusable to his theology of mission. He is articulate and nuanced in ways that many of us can simply hope for, and elucidates an unapologetically Christian theology for mission that short-circuits what many people - including many Christians - associate with Christian mission (namely its legacy with the imperialistic colonial impulses of Europe).

In terms of the broad arc of the book, Newbigin front-loads a general theological exploration of standard Christian doctrines, but does so in such a way as to make mission inevitable “by the logic of (the church's) own gospel” (121), before then going on to discuss more practical yet still theologically-rich implications for mission work. At the outset, Newbigin locates the beginning of Christian mission as the "vast explosion of love, joy, and hope released into the world by the resurrection from the tomb of the crucified and rejected Jesus" (3). He then charges through this history of mission to its most recent expressions in the West this side of the Enlightenment, quickly naming some of the challenges associated with that positioning. One of these challenges is the dichotomous nature of mission work as it's presently understood and practiced. Some see mission as primarily a soul-saving endeavor while others see it as taking “action for God's justice” (11), manifest in liberation theologies but also in what Anabaptists might call peacebuilding. The nature of this split means that mission as development or peacebuilding gets carried out in large organizations mostly divorced from congregational life. Newbigin laments this split (and I with him), as both need each other to sustain a robust and faithful Christian mission.