Take Nothing For The Journey

‘I have always been fascinated by these wagon wheels with their wide rims, strong wooden spokes, and big hubs. These wheels help me understand the importance of a life lived from the centre. When I move along the rim, I can reach one spoke after the other,
but when I stay at the hub, I am in touch with all the spokes at once.’

Len Hjalmarson and his family live in the dry, but fruitful, Okanagan region of BC. Len is a part time journalist, recovering selfaholic, and software developer and wishes he were a vintner. Occasionally he ponders the mysteries of life and the ambiguities of leadership, but mostly he reads hangs around the Bean Scene, designs add-ons for combat simulations and wonders what he will be when he grows up.

Len and his wife lead a house church in Kelowna, British Columbia and are talking with friends about a retreat center/learning community. In quiet moments Len enjoys coffee with friends, listening to music, or canoeing. Len's wife is an RN who zips around the town doing home care. He has two teen daughters who are incredible people. The family includes a siamese called cat called "Kiara," and a Golden Retriever named "Rory." The cat doesn't dig up the yard. Len prefers the cat. PS. Len hates writing bios.

Christopher Alexander is an architect who advocates building in process and not from a plan. He argues that this is the ancient way, and that the modern and mechanistic approach demonstrates our lack of spirituality. Alexander is not a believer.

Alexander relates that one of the fundamental problems in architecture arises when the building is going up and the designer must make simple choices. For example, should this column be 5" or 6" in diameter? He talked about how the designer's own ego could get in the way of constructing the right building. The question he would finally ask is: "which choice is a greater gift to God?" He continued,

"You can build a building that everyone says is wonderful.. a success.. but does that make it wonderful or a success? No... You can build a building that no one says is wonderful or a success.. but can it be wonderful and a success...? Yes..” [1]

When we reduce truth to formulas or success to size, we are far along the road of idolatry and the worship of technique.[2] We have sold out to the evil Empire, and forgotten that we are strangers and aliens here. Leonard Cohen opines,

In this article I am not going to spell out a taxonomy of health. I believe that health is not the sum of a set of measures, but rather is a quality of relatedness to God and His people, both a state and a process. Neither is it primarily an individual quality, but rather the quality of a Jesus community. Instead of a taxonomy, I offer five essential movements. Each of these movements must be engaged in order for a community to find their place in God’s kingdom purpose, because “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

Essential Mission: both ascent and descent, engaging the powers, on a kingdom mission

Essential Character: the ability to sacrifice temporal goals in view of citizenship in heaven, embracing the Cross

Essential Listening: to our inward life, to the culture, to the broader community of the Spirit (local, extra-local and historical), and to the word.

My intention is not to spell out these movements systematically, but rather to paint a picture and tell a story. The reader is asked to do their own work of reflection to find the suggested movements.

The organized church in North America is facing a crisis. David Bodine cites statistics from the World Evangelization Research Center: “Christians spend more on the annual audits of their churches and agencies ($810 million) than on all their workers in the non-Christian world. The total cost of Christian outreach averages $330,000 for each and every newly baptized person.” [4]

The church has adopted worldly and temporal means to achieve eternal ends. We seem to believe that we can spend our way to a revitalized church, but we cannot. The crisis is taking shape as giving and attendance drop. George Barna sees a leadership crisis.[5] Barna reports that his ten year campaign to revitalize the church has failed. More recently he suggests that a revolution is underway outside inherited churches within “micro-movements.” [6]

The deeper crisis may be a crisis of spirituality. John O’Keefe at the popular postmodern magazine Ginkworld opines,

"Over the past 15 years we have spent over $500 billion (that’s “billion” with a “b”), and for the most part the church in the USAmerica has not grown at all; it has not even kept up with the population growth. In fact, the average attendance in church has declined over a ten-year period.”[7]

The influx of cash hasn’t resulted in transformation. We may point to large buildings and large congregations with wonderful programs, but these aren’t indicators of health.

How do we quantify health? Toward what goal do we move people? Is “health” a useful category, and what worldview informs our answer? Are numbers important? Is permanence important? Is it enough to be purpose-driven?[8] Is it possible that the typical measures of health actually cause us to attend to the wrong things?

The currency in use for measuring church growth has been the ABCs.. attendance, buildings, and cash. If a church has these in measure and expanding, it has been considered fruitful. But these are entirely secular values, imported from the business world in a capitalist and consumer culture. A biblical set of ABCs would look different: perhaps authenticity, belonging, and cultivating Christ.[9] If God’s end goal is Jesus, if his purpose is to form people into the image of His Son, then transformation, formation resulting in new identity and new practices, must be at the core of ekklesial health.

In the past fifty years we have witnessed a number of movements directed toward production of healthy and growing churches. These movements have now been soundly critiqued (Craig van Gelder, Howard Snyder and others). Broadly speaking, church growth movements have been anthropocentric, while missional movements have been focused on God. Church growth movements tended to focus on what humans do. Missional movements tend to focus on what God is doing.

Naturally, where one begins makes a difference. Gailyn Van Rheenen argues that the seeds of syncretism were sown “in the very principles of cultural analysis and strategy formulation” within the church growth movement.[10] Methods are not value neutral, but form an imaginative architecture which act back on the thinker and then shape practice.

There are other problems with church health. Health connotes a bunch of shining faces, clean and well-clothed, happily chatting around a coffee table in a well furnished living room with mugs of coffee from Starbucks. We need to consider the etymology of the word “health.”

Metaphors are rooted in story, and story assists us in developing an imaginative architecture that remains flexible and open. Metaphors invoke imagination, and what begins in the Holy imagination can be born of the Spirit. The dream can become reality, the Word can become flesh. Brueggemann writes, "concrete change - attitude, action, behaviour, policy--of any serious, lasting kind arises only through an alternatively imagined world..." [11]

Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination 2^nd Ed. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2001

Cole, Neil. “Organic Church.” Interview in Next-Wave Magazine. Online http://www.next-wave.org Nov. 2005, #83

Frost, Michael and Hirsch, Alan. The Shaping of Things to Come. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003

Guder, Darrel. Ed. Missional Church. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998

Kirk, Andrew. The Mission of Theology and Theology as Mission. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997

Nelson, Alan E. Spirituality and Leadership. Colorado Springs, CO: Navpress, 2002

Peterson, Eugene. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005.

Wheatley, Margaret. A Simpler Way. San Francisco, CA: Barrett-Koehler Press, 1996.

James V. Brownson. “The God Who Sent Jesus”. From “Gospel in Our Culture Network.” Online www.gocn.org

David Hopkins, “Rebooting the Purpose-Driven Church,” Next Wave Magazine, August, 2001. Online http://www.next-wave.org

Gailyn van Rheenen, “Contrasting Missional and Church Growth Perspectives,” Dec.16, 2004. Online http://www.missiology.org

Tim Stafford, “The Third Coming of George Barna,” Christianity Today Magazine, September, 2002.

[1] Christopher Alexander, Interview on CBC Radio. IDEAS. Fall, 2002. Online http://www.cbc.ca/ideas

[2] Jacques Ellul. The Technological System. (France: Calman-Levy, 1977). viii.

[3] Leonard Cohen, “Anthem,” 1992.

[4] David Bodine, “Crisis in the Church.” May, 2004. Online http://www.tribalchurch.org

[5] Tim Stafford, “The Third Coming of George Barna,” Christianity Today Magazine, September, 2002.

[6] George Barna, Revolution (Carol Stream, Ill: Tyndale House, 2005). For an explanation of the taxonomy of “inherited” versus “emergent” see Stuart Murray, Church After Christendom (London: Paternoster Press, 2005)

[7] John O’Keefe, “Church XP: The Upgrade.” October, 2003. Online http://www.ginkworld.net

[8] See David Hopkins, “Rebooting the Purpose-Driven Church,” Next Wave Magazine, August, 2001. Online http://www.next-wave.org

[9] An interesting discussion of belonging occurs in Stuart Murray, Church After Christendom (London: Paternoster Press:, 2004) 9

[10] Gailyn van Rheenen, “Contrasting Missional and Church Growth Perspectives,” Dec.16, 2004. Online http://www.missiology.org

[11] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 2^nd Ed. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2001) 42