Day One of my return to Faith Church felt sort of like starting a new job, except that I already knew the people. There was so much to absorb. I even had to learn how to use the telephone; a new system had been installed while I was away.

I discovered that the church was not sitting idle while I was gone. There were incredible stories of spiritual growth and mission adventures. The elders made some changes. And a major building renovation was launched and is halfway complete.

Most importantly, the word missional is on people’s tongues. Members are trying to figure out how to connect with their neighbors and how to make a difference in the community. Bottom line: there is a growing awareness among members that matches my growing conviction that we are in a new day, requiring a vastly new approach.

I said to one member last night, “Fifteen years ago young families literally poured into Faith Church. Today there are just as many young families in Medford as before, but they’re not coming. Even when we invite them, they politely decline. We have to find a way to connect with these people on their terms and on their turf, and that will require learning a new way, not of doing church, but of being church. We will have to learn how to crawl before we can walk, and walk before we can run.”

Her response to me? “That’s a pretty good place for us to be.” I couldn’t have been happier with her reply. We have only the sketchiest idea of what we need to do or how to do it, but we’re ready to get going on the adventure of following Christ into the world.

It’s the final day before I go back to Faith Church after my sabbatical. I’m ready to return, refreshed, stimulated, and eager to strike out in new directions.

My friend Steve Hayner was advised, when he was planning his sabbatical, “Describe your perfect day. Then string together enough of those perfect days to fill the time you’re away.” As a gift from God’s hand, I received three months’ worth of perfect days.

In spite of a year’s advance notice, there was a lot that could not have been planned. Each day when I was out of town, I was dependent on God to help me make contacts with people that would be beneficial. One contact would lead to another, and in God’s providence every day was meaningful and valuable, but God’s leading was “just-in-time.” My days were filled with thanksgiving that my heavenly Father was providing such a rich array of experiences, and I could never have known how to set them up in advance.

One thing I learned is that for me, a perfect day includes a certain amount of work. I think we were created with the capacity to take enjoyment from productive endeavor. With the right balance, work can be energizing and satisfying. And I did a lot of work on my sabbatical. I read, I studied, I wrote, and I often fell into bed weary from a day crammed full of new ideas and experiences, stimulating interactions and travel. But it was a “good tired,” and I drifted to sleep with deep gratitude in my soul.

On three occasions, well into my sabbatical, someone remarked, “Rick, you sound different. There’s a lightness in your voice.” What a revealing comment!  I may have pushed hard in order to maximize the time available, but in ways not fully understandable, God was replenishing me.

I will always be grateful to my church for making this transformative experience possible. This undoubtedly will be one of the high points of my life.

The word dispersion is growing on me. My previous web posting, “No More Congregations,” in which I proposed substituting the word dispersion for congregation, led to an interesting give-and-take in the comments. My friend Doug Resler thought the word deployed might be more fitting. Rather than continue the discussion in the comments section, I am opening up a new posting – and let the comments continue.

First of all, why not use the word deployed to describe Christians who see themselves as sharing in God’s mission to the world and who have accepted their part in that redemptive work? Lloyd Ogilvie used the word often when he was pastor at First Pres., Hollywood. The goal of the church, he argued, was to deploy enthusiastic believers into the world to further the work of Christ. It was an early stab at emphasizing the church as a missional entity.

I used to love that idea, but now I am a little nervous about it. If the pastor and elders are Command Central for the deployment of church members, the church’s mission can only reach as far as the imagination and faith of the leaders.

I favor the word dispersion because it implies less control, less certainty, and greater reach. And best of all, it is biblical. Dispersion is the Latin version of diaspora, the New Testament expression for Christians who ran for their lives after the first persecution of Messianic believers. These believers were scattered like seed, and soon there were witnesses to the risen Christ in many parts of the Roman empire.

Now, was every dispersed believer a valiant partner in the Christian mission? I imagine not. Some were courageous, joyful witnesses. Others, out of fear, probably kept their mouths shut.

God has dispersed his church in myriad places. Some of these Christians are fully equipped and alert to every opportunity, and they bear great fruit. Others are distracted, or uninformed, or intimidated, or they struggle with doubt, or they lack imagination. The list is pretty long of ways in which God’s people end up sidelined and of little use in the kingdom. But my pastoral sensibility will not allow that these many, many Christians are not to be counted in God’s dispersion.

I struggle with how to enlist them, or to reclaim them, but I’m not ready to write them off. If they claim to follow Christ, however limited their view of that may be, I’m counting them as among the dispersion.

Let’s stop talking about congregations. The very word assumes that the people of God have their primary identity as people who congregate. No wonder the church has been fixated on attracting people to their meeting. The word congregation reinforces the idea of gathering.

To help seal the change, we should stop counting those who congregate and instead count those who go out as sent-ones. Our reporting mechanism needs to change. When someone asks, “How many are in your congregation?” a good reply might be, “I have no idea; it seems to vary based on the reason for which we have come together.”

And before the shock value of the response is allowed to fade, the respondent should add, “But I can tell you how many there are in our dispersion.”

There you have it: substituting the word dispersion for congregation. I would suspect there is not a single church in America that has counted its dispersion.

The adage is profoundly true: What gets counted is what is valued. Let’s impose a thirty year moratorium on the word congregation. And in its place? Well, the word dispersion isn’t perfect, and I am open to suggestions, but it conveys the missional essence of the church.

If what we value is for people to show up, then counting the congregation makes perfect sense. But mere attendance isn’t producing transformed lives and it isn’t furthering the mission. Think about it: congregating doesn’t work.

It is easy to see why counting congregants took hold. Of the three core functions of the church –  community, worship and mission  – community requires congregating, and worship works better with others. Even mission is carried out better as a team activity than as a solo act.

But the point of the church is not just being together. The point of the church is our participation in Christ, who unites us in the eternal community of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, joins us with a host of earthly and heavenly beings united in praise to God, and enlists us in God’s mission to the world.

Christ’s mission was exemplified in his incarnational presence: serving, proclaiming, modeling, healing, suffering, and restoring, and his followers are dispersed throughout the world to share in Christ’s redemptive activity. For now, that’s what counts, and therefore that is what we should count.

Imagine being invited as the guest of honor to a dinner in which the other guests want to hear everything about what you believe and why. They promise to be polite (and they also promise not to talk with their mouths full). However, they will likely also ask you probing questions, to see if you have really thought everything through. It’s an opportunity to convince others of your worldview, your values, and the truths upon which you are staking your life. Would you accept the invitation?

Ikon, the experimental “faith collective” in Belfast, sponsors such events, calling them The Last Supper. “The Last Supper is a monthly gathering in which twelve people gather informally over food and wine to question an invited guest about what they believe and why they believe it. If the guest does not prove convincing, it may turn out to be their last supper.”     http://wiki.ikon.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Last_Supper

The Last Supper seems to be a variation on the Socrates café, a philosophy discussion forum developed by Christopher Phillips. The Socrates café, as popularized by Phillips in a book by the same name, is modeled after the question and answer format Socrates used with his students to lead them in the pursuit of truth.

The Last Supper is not merely a knock-off on a trendy intellectual exercise. It illustrates one way post-modern Christians are interacting with non-Christians. Eddie Gibbs, in Church Next, says that in the postmodern environment, “For Christians to engage people who are earnestly seeking alternative explanations that are more convincing and comprehensive requires a commitment to listen patiently and discerningly. It necessitates an unconditional acceptance of those who are content to live with ambiguity, and it requires the humility to communicate in open dialogue with those who hold a pluralistic worldview.”

Note the three points in Gibbs’ description: listening, acceptance, open dialogue. Those are three characteristics often mentioned in regard to postmodern evangelism, and they are all part of The Last Supper.

Once a newly planted church gets running for few months, the question of a permanent place to meet inevitably arises. Sometimes the new church will intentionally delay investing in real estate for a very long time, even up to ten years, if the church cannot afford to construct a building as large as the current rented facilities. But the goal for most churches, sooner or later, is to have their own place.

However, emergent churches are rethinking the matter of real estate. It is easier to remain missional when there is no place to conduct church programs. Without a central location there is no temptation to rely on inviting people to come to the building. Missional churches look for ways to connect with non-Christians on their own turf.

Veritas, an emerging church just outside Atlanta, meets for worship in the basement of a Baptist church in a high class neighborhood. That’s okay for now, but the folks in Veritas eventually want to be located in a neighborhood that is a better fit with the people they are seeking to reach. They have their eyes on a working class neighborhood closer to the city.

And what are they planning to build first? A playground for the community. They’ll spend their Saturdays this summer providing a gift for the children, and in the process meet lots of people in the neighborhood.

Looks like Veritas is following its missional instinct quite well.

“Most of the people who come here are church drop-outs,” explained Doug Logan, pastor of Liberti Church in Roxborough. Liberti is the third congregation in a multi-site church in Philadelphia.

“These are present or former college students, mostly from somewhere other than Philadelphia. Their entry into the church is not the worship service but the home meetings. We may never have a really impressive worship service, but that’s not the heart of this church. It’s the home meetings.” To reinforce that point, everyone who joins Liberti must first belong to a home group.

That requirement may turn out to be the key to keeping the people of Liberti together. I asked  a young father what makes Liberti distinctive from other churches. Struggling to find an answer, he acknowledged he hasn’t found any church to be all that acceptable. “Then why do you keep coming to Liberti?” I pressed. “Well, it’s better than the others.” Not a ringing endorsement, but those who insist they are Christians but who have dropped out of church are bound to be a difficult population to satisfy.

In addition to reaching out to the de-churched, Liberti is focusing on a large apartment building near their worship site. A fair number of the apartment residents are young adults, and so folks from Liberti make a point of hanging out in the apartment club, making acquaintances. When the church decided to send a group to Sudan to install a well, they invited residents of the apartment building to accompany them and to share the expense.

It’s a good missional strategy, on two counts. First, apartment dwellers are notoriously hard to connect with, so beginning with entertainment and relaxation is one of the few options. All the writers on missional themes emphasize the need for Christians to allocate far more time to forming relationships with those outside the church. Frost and Hirsch, in The Shaping of Things to Come, urge, “The missional-incarnational church should be living, eating, and working closely with its surrounding community, developing strong links between Christians and not-yet-Christians.”

Second, inviting the apartment residents to participate in the Sudan project illustrates a common feature of missional churches. Frost and Hirsch maintain that “Shared projects allow the Christians to partner with unbelievers in useful, intrinsically valuable activities within the community. In the context of that partnership, significant connections can be established.”

Everything that Ikon, the experimental community in Belfast, does, has an ironic twist to it. While insisting that they are not a church – Pete Rollins calls it a faith collective – they have a full assortment of commitments, values and programs to provide expression to their alternative vision.

For instance, if Ikon is not a church, and not even an organization, how does one identify him/herself as associated with it? At the monthly gathering in May, for instance, about half of the attenders were new. A fair number of these are pilgrims passing through, who come once or twice and move on. Yet some of the regulars, for whom Ikon is their primary faith expression, insist that they would never want to be considered members. Pete has decided to make up Nonmember Cards to distribute so that such people can be officially recognized as nonmembers(!).

Can an anti-institution have programs? Evidently so. There is a Nonmember Class, a course called What Would Jesus Deconstruct, and last spring they offered Atheism for Lent.

One of the more popular offerings is the Omega Course – a tongue in cheek alternative to the widely known course, Alpha. The Omega Course “is designed to invite participants to move beyond their current understanding of Christianity through a lively yet serious interrogation of faith. What we leave behind in the aftermath of this course is anyone’s guess and it may well turn out to be more than we expect or even desire, so please consider carefully whether this course is right for you.”

While there is no structure within this faith collective, the very lack of organization is designed to draw something out of everyone who participates. Pete Rollins challenges those who associate with Ikon to pay (1) a relational tithe – to give a tenth of their time to forming and maintaining friendships, and (2) a financial tithe, not to Ikon, but to others in need.

And even a non-church can foster caring relationships. Rollins explains, “If there is no ‘group’ who cares about the person sitting beside me, then there is more need for me to care about that person. If there is no pastoral support team in place, then I need to be the pastoral support. The refusal to offer pastoral support thus generates a potential place where pastoral care is distributed among everyone. As Dostoevsky once said, ‘We are all responsible for each other, but I am more responsible than all others.’”

We were going around the room introducing ourselves at the monthly meeting of Emerging Phoenix, the emergent cohort in Atlanta. A twenty-something still in business casual dress from a day at work, said, “I’m Dave, and I’m a heretic.” No one batted an eye or registered surprise at his introduction. As a devotee of Pete Rollins, founder of Ikon, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, everyone in the room was familiar with the expression and knew what Dave meant.

Though Belfast could hardly be further removed, culturally, from Atlanta, the influence of the experimental community, Ikon, is palpable. Ikon uses five words to distinguish itself from conventional churches, and many emergent communities are fully on board. These five descriptors, below, are followed in each case with an explanatory sentence from the Ikon web site, http://wiki.ikon.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Iconic

“To treat something as an icon is to see it as that which draws us into a deep contemplation of that which cannot be reduced to words, images or experience.”

Apocalyptic

“The word ‘apocalyptic’ simply refers to the incoming of a singular, unrepeatable event that is absolutely inconceivable, an event that could not have been predicted in advance of its coming and which defies all expectations. At Ikon we wish to reclaim and celebrate the apocalyptic nature of God. . . .”

Heretical

“Each revelation of God requires interpretation and these interpretations are inevitably limited by such things as language, intelligence, cultural context, tradition and psychological makeup. By recognising this we endeavour to hold our current understanding of God lightly, allowing both the Spirit and other people to challenge what we believe.

“In addition to this we acknowledge our heretical stance in relation to the larger Christian community. . . By doing this we also endeavour to be a place of refuge for those on the edges, or outside, the traditional church system, yet who desire God.”

Emerging

“. . . We would prefer to call ourselves a community becoming Christian rather than a community of Christians. . . We embrace the idea that re-reading, critiquing, constructing and deconstructing are all processes which remain vital for our spiritual development.”

Failing

“Finally Ikon acknowledges that it constantly fails in its desire to be an icon of the invisible. . . Our attempts at forming a community of individuals who radiate divine love are, at best, the forging of a poor icon through which people can dimly perceive God and, at worst, an off-putting mirror that simply reflects our own limitations.”

No marketing consultant would ever recommend that a church describe itself to the public as heretical, or failing, and the other three words would only seem abstruse to the outsider. But for the worldwide emergent community, these are attractive and engaging concepts around which to shape the community of Jesus in the post-Christendom era.

In the center of tradition-bound Belfast is a small spiritual community that pushes every boundary and questions every assumption. Calling themselves Ikon, they are a network of young adults drawn together by the engaging, nonconformist leader, Pete Rollins. Their mission is to reach those who can’t fit into the mold of traditional Catholic or Protestant churches and who want a place to explore faith or non-faith without anyone jumping on them. The friends at Ikon love to question everything, to press people to think beyond ordinary categories in search of what is real – something you can build your life on.

Having grown up in the evangelical church in Belfast, Pete Rollins became restless for a different way of being church. What if churches met in public view instead of sequestered in their own buildings? Deciding to give it a try, Rollins went up to a barkeep and asked if he could have a church meet in his bar, during bar hours, with other patrons present. After a long pause, the barkeep said, “Okay.” That led to the monthly gatherings of Ikon at Menagerie Bar.

They don’t go to the back room of the pub. When it is time for Ikon to begin, those who have gathered for the event are scattered among other patrons at tables. Regular customers can ignore the presentations, music and drama if they want, but because the interactions are so interesting, many are drawn into the event. And these are “events,” not worship services. Each month there is a theme and a carefully planned series of activities and presentations using art, music, movement and personal expression. Here is how Ikon describes what they do:

“Inhabiting a space on the outer edges of religious life, we are a Belfast-based collective who offer anarchic experiments in transformance art. Challenging the distinction between theist and atheist, faith and no faith, our main gathering employs a cocktail of live music, visual imagery, soundscapes, theatre, ritual and reflection in an attempt to open up the possibility of a theodramatic event.”

Don’t miss that last phrase, “theodramatic event.” Pete Rollins is convinced that churches have so badly botched their message that it is hard for anyone actually to meet God in worship. But by guiding people through a sensory, interactive experience, Rollins hopes those who have given up on finding meaning through faith might encounter God in unexpected ways.

There are thousands of emerging churches in the Western world, almost all of them born out of the same restlessness that drove Pete Rollins to seek an alternative to the churches’ standard fare. Most emerging churches, however, have ended up not that different from the traditional churches that were left behind. Ikon is one of the few exceptions.