It’s pretty strange to adopt a motto for ministry from an atheist existentialist, but that is what Eugene Peterson did as he opened his book, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. On the first page he quotes Friedrich Nietzsche:

The essential thing “in heaven and earth” is. . . that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.

I love it. I am sure Nietzsche meant something very different from what Peterson meant, but the way Peterson developed the quote to describe a life of perseverance in faith gripped me in 1980 and has sustained me ever since.

By the time I read Peterson’s book I was four years into my first pastorate. My vision for renewing the faith of that congregation was nearly squelched by ongoing indifference and resistance.

Using the life of Jeremiah as the model, Peterson reframed what it means to be faithful to God’s call. Here was a prophet who gave his entire life to a vision that was not to be realized in his lifetime.

For me, the message was both bracing and sobering. God’s work of spiritual renewal will occur, but not in every place and not by a human timetable. The vision is valid whether it occurs in my setting or not. What I need is to adhere to the vision and pursue a long obedience in the same direction.

I’ve learned a lot through the years about how renewal takes hold, and one of the earliest and most difficult lessons has been how to counteract discouragement when it seems “nothing is happening.” Commitment to God’s work of transformation is a faith journey that requires every bit of perseverance I can muster. The marvelous thing is to observe how my faith has been shaped through the disappointments as much as by the successes.

Next blog: how my idea of what renewal looks like has evolved.

I met recently with a group of pastors to explore what it takes to transform a congregation from spiritual lethargy to vitality and effectiveness. When it was my turn to say a few things, I began by stating that I have been thinking about this my entire adult life. Spiritual transformation is my passion and my calling. I am a lifelong learner and practitioner.

I joined the movement in college. By then my faith was coming alive and I was drawn to a church where lots of others were coming alive too. It was the perfect setting for observing how God’s work of personal spiritual renewal can recharge and redirect an entire congregation. I caught the vision for a nationwide movement of the Holy Spirit, in which churches who had lost their enthusiasm for the gospel could be re-energized when a sufficient number of members regained a personal faith.

A wide-ranging enterprise of renewal organizations, publications, conferences, and networks of committed pastors and church leaders sprang up in a shared conviction that God was ready to reclaim thousands of churches who had somehow become bored with their own message. I wanted in. When I sensed God calling me to pastoral ministry, I believed that God wanted me to devote my effort toward church renewal.

Forty years later, the church renewal movement has evolved. Many would probably say its day has passed. That recent meeting with pastors I described above was focused on church “transformation.” I was the only one who spoke about renewal, and I did so in order to remind everyone that attending to organizational matters will not be sufficient if the goal is spiritual health.

I firmly believe in developing leadership skills and organizational savvy, but the church draws its life from the risen Lord. “Apart from me,” Jesus asserted, “you can do nothing.” And on the other hand, Jesus promised, “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.” That is why I remain committed to fostering the renewal of personal faith as the key component of revitalizing a church.

Next blog: how I learned to face disappointments in the pursuit of church renewal.

A few days ago BBC’s program, “Witness,” played a history clip on the student unrest in 1969 at the prestigious London School of Economics. Chanting revolutionary slogans, the students were joining a movement spread across the US and Europe to insist on radical changes in politics, economics and social mores.

My first thought in listening to the program was, “History?!” How can it be history when I was there? That is to say, I was coming of age when revolutionary fever was in the blood stream of every young person.

That was when I became a change agent. While I was certainly interested in the political and social issues that were hotly debated at the time, for me the prime focus of change was spiritual. As my Christian faith grew exponentially during my college years, I winced at the contrast between the staid, bland form of Christian life found in most churches and the winsome, exuberant faith experience of the more radical followers of Jesus.

My life was rooted in institutional Christianity. My faith was formed by the routine of Sunday School, worship, and youth fellowship. It was the only game in town, and it was almost good enough to bring me to the point of vibrant faith. Almost. . . but not. I knew the words and concepts and I was comfortable with the program, but in the revolutionary mood of the sixties I couldn’t help but experience discontent with the customary faith expression that moved from platitudes to passivity.

There were lots of voices within the church calling for change, but they weren’t inspired by a common vision. Some of the champions for change were driven by political ideology. I didn’t see how political activism would address the spiritual superficiality of nominal Christians. Instead I found myself joining the church renewal movement, whose vision was a renewed passion for Christ enlivening moribund churches.

Next blog: my early experiences in the church renewal movement

Last August, Harper’s magazine published this statement: “Estimated percentage of all existing blogs that have not been updated in four months: 94.” The sentence stood alone, without supporting evidence, so for all I know this is one person’s wild guess. But my own hunch is that this estimate is credible.

Harper’s published that sentence just as I was taking a break from my blogging. I wrote before vacation last summer and then. . . well, six month passed. I always intended to resume, but this blogging business requires perseverance, coupled with the belief that expending the time is worthwhile.

For me the value is chiefly that I always learn something as I write. Putting thoughts in writing helps me to crystallize and often to discover. I also believe that my reflections may be useful to others, so I put it out in cyberspace, hoping not only for readers but responders.

So, I’m back. Yesterday I updated the page (“about“) that describes who I am and why I am writing. I describe my life as consisting of several journeys: as a follower of Jesus, as a husband and as a pastor. Even when I am not writing, these journeys continue, with incidents and encounters that are fascinating or perplexing, enriching or disheartening. I’m trying to make sense of the whole thing as I go, and this blog is one of the places where I hope some clarity emerges.

With churches struggling to maintain attendance and to attract members, it may be startling to learn that American culture is in the middle of a spiritual renaissance. Yet that’s exactly what Reggie McNeal finds as he looks at the signs of spiritual interest and activity across the land. The spiritual awakening is taking different forms than Christians who cluster inside their buildings might be looking for, which is why Christians are perhaps the last to learn that the spiritual landscape is shifting.

In Missional Renaissance, McNeal describes three trends that Christians ought to be aware of in order to participate in the present chapter of God’s redemptive work.

* The emergence of the altruism economy, in which people are looking for ways to invest their resources in making a difference in their world

* The search for personal growth, whereby people have become lifelong learners, eager to develop new skills, gain new insights, and discover new worlds

* The hunger for spiritual vitality, entailing an openness to God, or at least to a spiritual dimension to life that will add depth and meaning to their existence.

“This outpouring of good and hope in the face of so many daunting challenges,” McNeal concludes, “together with people’s desire to grow and to experience genuine spiritual vitality, represents the spiritual awakening of our time.”

The task for Christians is to “see” what is right in front of us. Why is it so hard to see? Some Christians are still looking for people to show up on their own to a church event. Yet even “seeker services” are amassing fewer seekers these days.

Other Christians cannot imagine there is a spiritual awakening amid signs of deteriorating morality and the crumbling of core social institutions such as marriage and family.

Then too, a bona fide spiritual awakening ought to be centered in Jesus, while the evidence abounds that people expressing interest in spirituality may not be using Christian language at all.

These are weighty objections. What they add up to, I think, is that McNeal’s observations are more likely pointing to the beginning of a spiritual awakening, one which has great potential but has not flowered yet.

But if it is not flowering, it may be nevertheless budding, and that spells a huge opportunity. That is McNeal’s point. Something is happening; the cultural shifts he describes certainly are significant. Will we recognize these signs and take advantage of them? Here is his conclusion:

“Those who miss [the spiritual awakening] will find themselves on the other side of a divide that renders them irrelevant to the movement of God in the world. Those who engage it will find themselves at the intersection of God’s redemptive mission and the world he loves so much he was willing to die for it.”

“There is no such thing as an individual,” psychology professor Dennis Guernsey used to insist, “only members.” It is a provocative way of emphasizing that God created humans for relationship and that our identity as individuals cannot be described except in relation to the people with whom we are connected.

Why, then, has salvation been presented so often in the modern era as the liberation and deliverance of individuals? Every evangelistic crusade in recent decades focused on decisions, as though salvation was complete once the individual had experienced a change of heart and mind.

Among many missional and emerging church Christians who are rethinking this is Steve Taylor, who maintains that the beginning point for salvation is the nature of God as being-in-community. In The Out of Bounds Church Taylor writes,

And so the task of being disciples is to form communities that embody redemptive trinitarian love.

This planting of embodied communities is essential to the mission of God. This is a shift beyond individual salvation and individual discipleship. It is a shift to the priority of community planting, within which salvation and discipleship occur.

It is not I, followed by we. It is not the individual absorbing the lone preacher and the lone preacher’s words. Instead it is the we that validates the I. It is within the community that faith is found.

In short, for several generations the western church has delivered the wrong message in the wrong way. The legacy of this approach includes the multitudes who privatize their faith and consider the church an optional feature in their spiritual journey.

The loud protests from those who are reading the Bible afresh is, as Steve Taylor says, that Christians must “shift to the priority of community planting.” Our foremost objective is not the saving of souls but the formation of a people who reflect the triune God who saves.

I call it the salvation of I, because “I” desperately needs the relationships of God’s people in order to experience full restoration in Christ.

There’s a sizeable segment of our population who seem to be self-absorbed, living from experience to experience and seeking pleasure as their highest goal. These people don’t come to church, though some of them used to.

John Drane describes his conversations with people in this group in The McDonaldization of the Church. “They all brought the same message, which was not only simple and stark, but alarming anc challenging.” Drane calls them hedonists, but that may be a misleading name. The point is not so much their pursuit of pleasure as it is the covering up of pain. These are people who “find that the realities of life are just too painful to deal with head on. Others are disillusioned with the breakdown of a prior belief system. . . They can cope only by escaping from it all, and are likely to spend every spare moment in activities that will anesthetize them from the pain.”

We can hardly minimize the gulf between this sub-group and almost any American church. Hedonists are likely to be “wasted” all weekend and completely incapable of rousing themselves for a Sunday morning event. Further, church programs represent a social order and set of values that is stultifying to these party-goers. Church-goers, for their part, are disinclined to associate with those whose contempt for godly values, and whose self-destructive behavior, violate everything that Christians stand for. It’s a stalemate.

What would have to change in the church, and what would have to change within these perpetual party-ers, for them to become followers of Jesus? My first observation is that the church would have to take a closer look at Jesus’ outreach to those on the margins. How could Jesus remain true to who he was while befriending people whose attitudes and lifestyle were antithetical to everything Jesus taught? If we can figure that out, then the follow-up question is whether the followers of Jesus are willing to follow Jesus to those whose outrageous behavior pushes every button.

Secondly, Drane thinks that Christians might reach some of these disaffected souls with an “embodied spirituality, which can understand play as worship, and see God’s kingdom as a party.” This would require a huge transformation from the way most western Christians experience and express their faith, and likely it will be those who have themselves come from the margins who will lead the way in exploring what this might look like. Here is the challenge to the church: if it is true that “everybody loves a party,” then Christians of all stripes ought to be at home with a joyful, embodied integration of life and faith.

And how might God open the way for the perpetual party-goers to move toward the gospel? Drane found that after a period of time, some of these people grow weary of living a series of disconnected experiences. He quotes a character in Douglas Copeland’s Generation X: “Either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.” The search for a thread of meaning just might be used by God to open some of these people to the Story that is the heart of our faith. May we be ready, with that Story in our minds and hearts, when we encounter those who desperately need to hear it.

What kind of person is more open to the gospel? To ask this question is not to imply that gospel is only for certain types of people, but to affirm what everyone observes, that some people seem to be more receptive to following Jesus than others.

Is it just a matter of timing? Certainly timing plays its part. Far more people become Christians in childhood and adolescence than in adulthood. And adults are more open to a new perspective when their lives are in transition or in crisis.

Apart from these factors, another variable often overlooked is cultural diversity. John Drane, in The McDonaldization of the Church, describes seven cultural identities, some of whom are ripe for engagement with Christians in finding true life in Christ, while others will remain hard to reach. The full list is worth careful study, but I want to highlight the group that Drane thinks is the most promising for the church’s evangelism, spiritual seekers.

“We live in a time when the overt search for spiritual meaning has never been more intense than it is now,” Drane observes. If that is the case, it may seem odd that the church is not flourishing. Instead, these spiritual seekers look everywhere except in the church for an enlarged experience of life that includes spirituality.

Why the avoidance of church? Some of these seekers have prior experience in church and they found it wanting. Drane’s conversations with non-Christians who are “into” spirituality flatly insist that the church is unspiritual, an incredible indictment and worthy of soul-searching among Christians.

What do they mean? To the extent that Christian faith is presented as a set of doctrines and ideas, those who are hoping for an experience with God find the church’s message distracting. Drane quotes Leith Anderson, in A Church for the Twenty-First Century: “The old paradigm taught that if you have the right teaching, you will experience God. The new paradigm says that if you experience God, you will have the right teaching.”

Second, spiritual seekers find too many in the church who seem content to limit their experience with God to a formal worship service, when what the seekers want is a holistic integration of all their weekly activities into a seamless reality. Well, that is a trenchant critique, since Christians admit that at its best, the Christian life should touch every aspect of our being.

John Drane thinks that of all the cultural types, the spiritual seekers are the most easily reached population, even though this will require the church to make significant shifts. After all, we already affirm that the essence of our faith is life with God, not just correct beliefs, and we agree that this should evidence itself in a daily abiding in Christ. If we can get our act together, we will have much to offer a cultural group that is eager for what Christ provides.

When Faith Church was considering adopting the purpose driven model, my struggle was not with what was contained in the five purposes, all of which are thoroughly biblical. I was concerned with what was missing.

Presbyterians already have a purpose structure that defines the core functions of the church, and our structure is more comprehensive than the plan Rick Warren developed. The Great Ends of the Church are laid out in the first page of our constitution:

* The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind
* The shelter, nurture and spiritual fellowship of the children of God
* The maintenance of divine worship
* The preservation of the truth
* The promotion of social righteousness
* The exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world

With some squeezing, you could lump Warren’s five purposes (Worship, Fellowship, Discipleship, Ministry and Mission) into the first three of the Presbyterian Great Ends. That leaves three other Great Ends that Presbyterians consider essential to the church’s work and that do not fit in the Purpose Driven model.

I think the last three of the Great Ends are statements of genius. They capture the activities of a well-rounded church that are usually missing from evangelical churches. Further, these are the outward thrusts of the church that the missional movement has been trying to recover.

Faith Church has settled on the five-fold structure of the Purpose Driven model, but we have used our own words for the five components, and one of those five words has to carry a lot of freight in order to accommodate the principles in the Great Ends.

Beginning with Worshiping as the center of the famous Purpose Driven baseball diamond, Faith Church organizes its life around Belonging, Growing, Serving, and Proclaiming. It’s not really balanced, because for us Proclaiming includes four of the six Great Ends: proclaiming the gospel (of course), plus preserving the truth, promoting social righteousness, and modeling what God’s kingdom looks like.

In practice this has meant that the final three Great Ends don’t get much air time except to the extent that I preach on those themes. Further, since our purpose driven plan hides the last three Great Ends in the word Proclaiming, Faith Church doesn’t notice if we are neglecting them in the missional activities we organize.

What to do? Add more purposes to our structure? No, five is enough to keep track of. Switch to the Great Ends? No, they are well stated but a little wordy: too much to remember.

For now, I’ll let that word Proclaiming bear as much theological weight as I can load onto it. And as Faith Church continues down the missional path, the word will matter less than the substance.

A simple question can sometimes explode hidden assumptions. So here is a question regarding the five concentric circles in the purpose driven model: Where is God on that chart?

Rick Warren’s five Circles of Commitment describe degrees of commitment to Christ and to the mission of Christ, all in relationship to the church. The outer ring is the Community of unchurched people; next is the Crowd of church attenders who have not yet become Christians. The Congregation is the next smaller ring, comprised of people who have confessed Christ and joined the church. The Committed are the members who have begun the journey of discipleship, and the Core are those members who are trained and ready to minister to others.

To ask where God is, on the chart of five circles, is to identify a common assumption among Christians: since non-Christians are out of contact with God, then the process of becoming a Christian and growing in faith brings the believer more and more into the sphere where God is most present and active.

On the other hand, the missional perspective emphasizes that God’s concern for the world is more comprehensive than the sphere of the church. When Christians join Christ’s mission, we often find God was at work before we were there. It is mistaken to assume that God is more profoundly present among “core” Christians at the center of the purpose driven chart.

But in what ways? First of all, when we joyfully declare, “Jesus is Lord,” we affirm that God is sovereign over all creation, even those aspects that are in rebellion from God’s rule. The Westminster Confession of Faith boldly states, “God the great Creator of all things doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by his most wise and holy providence.” In that sense we should expect that God is somehow present, though perhaps unacknowledged, to those who are in the outer circle of faith commitment.

Following this first assertion of God’s sovereign rule over all is the observation that God must begin to open the way for faith to develop before anyone can respond to Christ. Echoing Romans 8:30, the Westminster Confession describes God’s work of calling people to faith: “enlightening their minds spiritually and savingly to understand the things of God.” When we find to our delight that some people seem to be prepared to respond to the gospel, we believe God has been at work, laying the groundwork for saving faith.

In sum, the missional movement provides an important corrective to the purpose driven model by widening the focus of interest beyond the church. Craig Van Gelder, in The Ministry of the Missional Church, highlights the difference. “When one starts by focusing on the purpose of the church, the church tends to become the primary location of God, which makes the church itself responsible to carry out activities in the world on behalf of God. A trinitarian understanding shifts the focus such that the Spirit-led, missional church participates in God’s mission in the world.” (p. 19)