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.

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)

Those who are excited about living missionally may think of the purpose driven model as yesterday’s pizza because it focuses so strongly on attracting nonattenders. What’s wrong with that? In itself, nothing, of course, but the missional movement is fueled by the conviction that many people will never be drawn to attend church events where they can hear the gospel. Instead, the church needs to be turned inside out, with far greater emphasis on connecting with those who are not inclined to attend church programs.

Is the purpose driven model fixated on attracting people to attend church services? The five concentric circles Rick Warren uses to describe Christian faith and spiritual maturity could imply that once the believer has reached the innermost circle, the goal is reached and the work is done. Therefore, the purpose of the church is to move people from outside the church (the outer circle) into a place of spiritual growth, trust in Christ and engagement in ministry (the innermost circle). Do that and the process is complete. Right?

Well, the five circles could be used that way, but what if missional thinking were applied to purpose driven concepts? When a missional approach is overlaid with a purpose driven process, the result is (1) a refinement of missional thinking and (2) an energizing of the purpose driven model.

The key is to think carefully about that inner circle, where the believer has been “equipped for ministry.” What sort of ministry? Some form of service within the church? Not necessarily. Years before the word missional began to be used, Rick Warren insisted, “I believe that you measure the health or strength of a church by its sending capacity rather than its seating capacity. Churches are in the sending business.”

Still, it is a safe bet that when Warren wrote, in The Purpose Driven Church, about the church’s sending capacity, both he and his readers assumed God was sending Christians to draw more people to the church, where they could hear the gospel and discover God’s great purpose for their lives. Before the missional movement gained strength, that was all that most churches cared about. Bring ’em in so they can be transformed by Christ.

But what if those who have moved through the circles (Community, Crowd, Congregation, Committed, Core) were to adopt a missional framework and begin to live their faith in the outer circle (Community) among those who are unlikely to come near a Christian church? The missional way of thinking pushes hard on the purpose driven model right at this point. To the extent that the purpose driven approach is based on an attractional assumption, missional thinking reminds us not to miss the adventure of the saving work of God far from the church.

But there is a corrective on the other side as well. Too often missional Christians don’t know what to do once they are on the field, serving and loving and witnessing among people who are disconnected from God. The five concentric circles offer a useful tool for making disciples. It is inevitable that a loosely organized missional community will develop form and structure over time. The five circles provide missional Christians with a process for reshaping lives.

In short, missional and purpose driven concepts are not mutually exclusive. The five circles in the purpose drive model are one place where an integration of concepts can sharpen both models.

If the missional approach were obvious to every Christian and easy to implement, it would have become the standard way of life for churches long ago. But for many Christians it is neither obvious nor easy. Blending yellow spirituality (personal discipleship and congregational caring) with blue spirituality (actions that demonstrate the better world that God has promised us) to create a balanced, holistic green spirituality is hard for many Christians to grasp and difficult for most leaders to apply. Why? Here are five possible reasons for the push back to “going green.”

Inertia

Sunday School curriculum is not written for missional engagement. Neither are small group materials or youth ministry resources. Preachers are not trained to shape their sermons for a “green” spirituality. Board meetings, fellowship events, fund raisers – they’re all yellow. And the occasional helping hand event in the community rounds out the church life with a brief splash of blue. That’s what we’re used to, and it takes a lot of energy to rewrite our entire script for church activity.

Institutional preservation

“If we don’t take care of our own, we won’t have a base from which to carry out the mission.” It is perfectly normal for congregations to care about the preservation of their organization, but excessive concern for “our own” can undermine the healthy integration of yellow and blue spirituality.

Green spirituality puts it differently: Making disciples knows no boundaries. We employ the same components of disciple-making – witnessing, teaching, caring, and redirecting – whether it is with those who have bowed the knee to Jesus or with those have not yet done so.

Furthermore, focusing inward skews the message. Before long, the church that focuses first on its own well-being begins to misrepresent, or at the least to diminish, the Christian hope.

Nevertheless, it takes enormous courage for churches that are eyeing declining numbers to believe that their future depends on reformulating to a green spirituality.

A loss for words

It’s hard to describe God’s mission to the world in language that includes both personal redemption and the reshaping of the physical and social components of the world. Personal salvation is the heart language for most American Christians.

Philosophers claim we can’t believe something until we can find words for it. Describing a more comprehensive (green) spirituality can be done, but we haven’t had much practice, so our early efforts are a bit awkward. No wonder people keep defaulting to expressing the faith in the way that is familiar.

Overwhelmed

Most of us have come to accept Scott Peck’s assertion, Life is hard. Narrowing down to essential tasks is a natural recourse. It’s hard enough just discipling our own children and caring for those already in the Christian community. Green spirituality compels us to widen our concern to include politics, economics, public morality, justice and environmental stewardship. It’s not that Christians don’t care about these things; they do. But developing a Christian theology that integrates the social and material realms into God’s grand plan requires a lot of mental work. . .  too much work for people with no margin in their lives.

Disbelieve the evidence

“Why should I have to make disciples of my neighbors’ children? It’s full time work raising my own kids. If everyone does his part, the world will turn out okay.” In the Christendom era, discipling our own was sufficient. There were always unbelievers and slackers in every neighborhood, but a widely held Christian consensus in America resulted in the successful transmission of values and beliefs from one generation to the next.

Many people have sensed that the cultural landscape has changed, yet they haven’t really accepted the idea that Christendom has collapsed. Green spirituality is based on the assumption that personal discipleship alone is not going to give us the winsome, just and honorable society we all want.

Five points of resistance

There you have it: five possible explanations for the difficulty in making the transition to a balanced, green spirituality. None of these is insurmountable, but together they present a lot of drag to the missional movement.

The ReIMAGINE community in San Francisco focuses on creating “green space.” It’s not an environmental goal, though they also are passionate about stewardship of the earth.

Rather, it’s based on the elementary fact that green is the blending of yellow and blue. ReIMAGINE wants to blend yellow and blue spirituality.

Yellow spirituality includes Bible study, spiritual disciplines and every aspect of personal discipleship. Blue spirituality centers on actions that demonstrate the better world that God has promised us upon Christ’s return.

Too often yellow and blue never meet. The Christian world has at one extreme those who spend their lives engaged in personal spiritual endeavor with no impact on others. “Too much existing Bible teaching happens to passive groups of Christians, many of whom are not involved in any kind of risky missional activity,” claim Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, in The Shaping of Things to Come.

At the other extreme are those who exhaust themselves on the front lines of service to others while never replenishing the well. They too often end up embittered, having forgotten that in the end it is God who ushers in the Kingdom, not humans.

Recognizing these two extremes, seven radical Christians in San Francisco began a group experiment four years ago to bring the inner and outer aspects of the Christian life together. They formed the missional community ReIMAGINE, with this purpose:

“We fuel initiatives integrating spiritual formation, community building, the arts and social action. As a collective of artists, activists, educators, tech professionals and social entrepreneurs we invite people into conversations, projects and community experiences that explore the question: ‘How can we cultivate a way of life together that leads to greater wholeness for ourselves and our world?’”

I think we need more green space in Faith Church, where I serve. I returned from my sabbatical fired with the conviction that too much of our yellow spiritual activity – Sunday School, worship, small groups – is disconnected from what we are being sent by God to do.

Jesus modeled a way that avoided both extremes. His disciples were immersed in the ministry of Jesus: observing, interacting and demonstrating. On regular occasions they were sent out to practice what they were learning. Gradually they began to grasp not only how Jesus is central to God’s mission to the world, but how they could participate in Jesus’ mission as well.

Years ago my home church in Cincinnati came up with a design for mission to the community that was ahead of its time. They created mission base communities, which were small fellowship groups with a missional purpose.

When a group of people decided to tackle a local problem, they would form a mission base community. Half their time together was devoted to Bible study, prayer, interpersonal support, and developing strategy for addressing the community issue. The other half of their time together was engaged in shared activity to meet the community need or solve the problem.

It was a brilliant idea for avoiding passivity on the one hand and burnout on the other. It was “green” long before the ReIMAGINE community developed the same concept.

Now it is time for Faith Church to go green. We believe in yellow and we are committed to blue. Can we merge the two? It won’t be easy.

Next blog entry: Going Green – 2: The Push Back

Here is an idea that works. For pastors who are wanting to encourage the members to find their places in God’s mission field, and for members who are trying to envision what that might be like, this worship activity fulfills both concerns. The idea is simplicity itself.

Just before I lead the worshipers in the “prayers of the congregation,” I walk into the center of the worship area and invite people to give their “reports from the field.” I prompt them with two or three questions, so they know what I am looking for.

“Did you have a conversation with someone this last week that seemed to be “pre-arranged” by God? Did an opportunity for serving someone open to you this week, and you knew this was God’s doing? Do you find yourself thinking about a problem, or a person in need, and you’re pretty sure this is the Lord nudging you to pursue this?”

Then I wait. Before long someone will raise a hand and then tell a brief story. One teenager said, “I saw someone drop his entire lunch tray. Then he went to a table and sat by himself. I sat down with him and shared my lunch with him.” Another worshiper told of going to a next door neighbor who was struggling with a health problem in order to pray in person with the neighbor.

I do my best to keep these accounts brief, and I draw it to a close at three reports, so that there is time for our congregational prayer.

The cumulative effect of asking for “reports from the field” about three times per month is powerful. People hear these stories and think, “Well, I could do that.” More effective than reading five books on missional “whatever” is the inspiration and practicality of everyday illustrations that are local, current and doable.

Could a large church do this? They would probably have to organize it in advance, by recruiting members to tell their stories up front, behind the mic. They would have to work hard to keep the stories down to earth and simple. And in doing it that way, they would lose one of the chief values of these reports: that these spontaneous expressions help to prevent passivity in the pew.

Well, for now, Faith Church doesn’t have to worry about having too many people in worship to engage in this kind of activity, and neither do most American churches. We’ve hit upon a worship practice that is showing ordinary Christians how to be missional.

Last week, I didn’t ask for reports from the field. Two people told me after worship they were disappointed, because they were eager to tell their story.

Music to my ears.

I’m back. I have wanted to resume this web log for a long time, but this blogging activity is hard to work into an already full life.

I’m going to try again to write fairly regularly because I want to record my journey in leading Faith Church through an incredibly difficult transformation. I hope many folks from Faith Church will resume reading. They did a great job of keeping up with me in my sabbatical. And I hope I can regain a larger readership, because the insights of others outside my viewpoint will be invaluable. So here goes.

God is in the business of remaking Faith Church (and most of the other American churches as well). The first phase feels like loss; the second phase feels like confusion; and the third phase feels like possibility. Faith Church is not at phase three yet.

The losses take us by surprise because they are so easily masked. Just as economists are unwilling to declare a recession until long after the country has experienced subtle signs of downturns, churches can miss the early signs that conditions have changed. Once the evidence is unavoidable that conditions for ministry have altered considerably, we can look back and say, “Well, this trend started six years ago.” Or, “We had an uncomfortable feeling but didn’t know what exactly was going on.”

I think the reason I could hardly stand to blog these last four months is because it is so uncomfortable being in this unknown territory. Today I shared my malaise with a group of local pastors. I described my spiritual struggle against anxiety and my resolve to try to live for now in the present, and leave the uncertainty of how to lead the church into new forms of ministry in God’s hands. “Please pray for me to abide in Christ and to be content in that relationship.” To a person, as we went around the room, every other pastor said, “Ditto. I need the same prayer, because I am just as anxious and uncertain as Rick.” It is consoling to know I am not alone.

Although I resume this web log in the dark, I am totally confident how things will turn out in the End. It’s the next couple of decades that are so perplexing. I think it will be a wild ride, and, once we get beyond the discomfort of loss (phase one), maybe even exhilarating, as we experiment under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. I am writing in order to record what will likely be a fascinating journey, for me and for the church.