Month: August 2020

What will it take for Americans to come to know God for who God really is? In the face of the epidemic distractions presented by American culture, this question invites a more pointed question: What way of life centered in God has the capacity to capture and hold the attention of people in our time? With focused attention such a rare commodity, much discussion of mission, discipleship, and love as a lifestyle remains hypothetical. The concrete acts of love that undergird the way of Jesus can happen only sporadically at best. We are simply too busy and distracted to be available for the attention and discernment love requires. This paper reviews the nature of our contemporary distractions, then explores an ancient understanding of church as a way to reclaim our attention and re-engage the mission of God more deeply. A concluding section offers specific research-based guidance for joining God in mission in our context.

Stolen Attention: Naming the Challenge

What will it take for North Americans to come to know God for who God really is? The way we answer this question has profound implications for how we think about and engage the mission of God in our place and time.

I begin with four observations and a question. I assume we can agree on the first two observations, and I present evidence in support of the next two. They are:

1. God is love.
2. We are made in the image of God to be lovers.1
3. Love requires attention.
4. Our attention has been stolen—but if we really want to, we can get it back.

Love Requires Attention

In the English language, to love includes both the desire to share and the actual act of giving. Love enacted is the sharing of some gift by one person for the joy of another. The Greek language offers intriguing insight on this relationship between love, giving, joy and gratitude. Three words with the Greek root for joy—char—are instructive:

Chara—joy

Charis—a gift or grace (that which brings joy)

Eucharistia—gratitude (joy returned)

Lovers want to bless their beloved by sharing good gifts with them. When the lover takes action and gives a gift, this brings joy to the receiver. The gift also brings joy to the giver, as the comment attributed to Jesus suggests, “it is better to give than to receive.” The beloved then extends the process by expressing gratitude—literally returning joy to the giver.

This simple process, giving a gift to bless another, is therefore self-reinforcing. Love is regenerative.

This may sound simple, but in reality such enacted love requires careful attention. We cannot truly love what we do not know. Only the attentive lover knows the need of the beloved clearly enough to offer a gift that brings blessing and joy. Without paying attention, I may offer you water when what you needed was information, or I may not notice you at all. Furthermore, only the carefully attentive know themselves well enough to know what they actually have to offer.

Our Attention Has Been Stolen

The essential role of attention in love underscores the depth of our current challenge: our attention has been stolen. While it is also true that we give our attention away, my emphasis here is that from infancy our attention has been taken from us. The culture we have inherited virtually ensures we will have little room for love in our lives.

Our attention has been stolen.

In the presence of epidemic distraction, with focused attention such a rare commodity, most discussion of mission, discipleship, and love as a lifestyle remains hypothetical. The concrete acts of love that undergird the way of Jesus can happen only sporadically at best. We are simply too busy and distracted to be available for the attention and discernment love requires.

Consider these five areas that illustrate this epidemic of distraction:

1. The average American now spends nearly eleven hours per day in screen time, with five hours of that dedicated to television.2 Without even getting into the pros and cons of what we are seeing and experiencing, what do we lose in our capacity to love when the vast majority of our attention is habitually directed toward screens? How might other use of our time and attention impact our capacity to live and love well?
2. In 1985, researchers learned that one person in ten did not know anyone with whom they felt safe to be themselves—a true friend. By 2004 that number had risen to one person in four. Since then, one of the greatest attention magnets of all time, Facebook, has come to claim over 1.5 billion user “friends,” and during these years research shows that average measures of human empathy have plummeted.3 What if there were ways to develop true community in our time, where deep friendship and compassionate shared life were not the exception?
3. The average American family spends thirty-five percent of its lifetime earnings on interest. Given the uneven earnings typical in most households, that thirty-five percent represents nearly the full-time attention of one adult.4 What this means is that almost half of each family’s adult working hours go to enrich banks and other financial institutions. What do we lose in our capacity to love with this loss of adult-parental-neighborly attention? What plausible alternatives exist?
4. Sixty-five years ago the average American family spent thirty percent of its income on food and five percent on health care.5 With the rise of industrial agriculture came cheaper food. Now Americans enjoy some of the least expensive food in the world. At the same time the annual cost of health care for a typical American family of 4 has now risen above $25,000.6 The result is that we are spending at least as much on food and health care, but in significant ways we are losing our health—and undermining the health of our planet in the process.7 How is our attention being compromised over a lifetime by these changes? What saner ways exist to meet the nutritional needs of present and future generations?
5. In his book Church Refugees, social scientist Josh Packard reports extensive research documenting a group he calls the “Dones,” sixty-five million American adults, nearly a third of the total population, who have left their churches behind. In subsequent research he has learned that another seven million present church-goers are “almost done.”8 Church, as Americans have been practicing it, seems to have a dwindling capacity to capture and hold the attention of people—even those who have spent a lifetime attending church. And contrary to what we might expect, according to Packard, the people leaving church are often people who have been holding primary leadership roles and continue to have a deep commitment to their faith.

Examples of our massive distraction are abundant. These five areas alone suggest that Americans have had much of their attention stolen: a serious challenge for people committed to a life of love. If true, we can now ask our initial question with more precision: How will ordinary Americans be able to reclaim their attention to the extent that their life is caught up in the life of God—the life of love? We might be inclined to dismiss this vision as a utopian dream, were it not for the confident statement of Jesus, “You must love each other as I have loved you. All people will know you are my disciples if you love each other” (John 13:34-35).9

A Vision for Shared Love in the Ancient Church: Ecosystems of Grace

The disciples who heard Jesus state that love would distinguish them proceeded to embody a way of life that, despite enormous opposition over the next three centuries, came to permeate the known world. That way of life, long known to scholars of ancient Mediterranean history, is largely invisible to contemporary readers because it represents a reality with which we rarely have experience.

The ancient Mediterranean world was a world of households. Everyone—rich or poor, Roman or Jew—was part of an extended family. Those without a household were in deep trouble, because that community was the basis for economic and social well-being. This household, or oikos, provided the livelihood wherein people found work in the family business—fishing, farming, or ruling a region. This was the community with whom daily meals and life were shared, that provided social standing in life and security in senior years.10

Jesus called the first disciples into a new family—a new household—partly because he knew that many who followed him would lose their natural families. When people made it known to their biological household, whether Jewish or Gentile, that they had decided to follow Jesus, the reaction was often the same: You have denied the true religion, you have dishonored our family, you have endangered our business—you are no longer a part of this family.

Knowing this, Jesus said, “And all who have left houses, brothers, sisters, father, mother, children or farms to follow me will get much more than they left, and they will have life forever” (Matt 19:29). These new, vibrant families of Jesus were tangible, local good news in the Mediterranean neighborhoods of the first three centuries. And ultimately they permeated every corner of the Roman Empire. As New Testament scholar J. H. Elliott observes, “Households thus constituted the focus, locus and nucleus of the ministry and mission of the Christian movement.”11

These new, vibrant families of Jesus were tangible, local good news.

This might all appear to us an interesting historical footnote, largely irrelevant in the radically different context of twenty-first century Western culture. However, in what follows I want to consider a reading of early Christian thought that seems to suggest just the opposite.

Ecosystems

The earliest Christians understood this new household—the oikos family of which Jesus spoke—to be the means by which God’s ultimate purposes would be fulfilled. This understanding runs right through early Christian writings, but it is given special expression in the letter to the Ephesians. Here, the writer elevates the household system to cosmic significance.

Though the common transliteration of oikonomia is economy, the English word economy normally carries the connotation of financial systems.12 A more accurate translation of oikonomia in our time may be the word ecosystem, which carries the idea of an interdependent community of shared resources. For the household-dominated ancient Mediterranean culture, this translation comes much closer to conveying the fullness of shared life borne by the word oikonomia.13

In Ephesians this oikonomia of God is the pre-ordained system for the summing up of all things into God by way of Christ. This theme is introduced in chapter one: “making known to us the mystery of his will, in accordance with his good pleasure that he purposed in himself, leading to the ecosystem of the fullness of times, to head up all things in Christ—the things in heaven and the things on the earth” (Eph 1:9–10).14

This ecosystem is the object of God’s self-purposed pleasure, something revealed in the fullness of times, what has been a mystery but has now been made known. These ideas are taken up and developed more in chapter three:

To me, less than the least of all saints, was this grace given: to announce to the non-Jewish peoples the boundless riches of Christ and to enlighten all that they may see what the ecosystem of the mystery is, which throughout the ages has been hidden in God, who created all things, so that now, to the rulers and authorities in the heavenlies the multifaceted wisdom of God might be made known through the ekklesia. This aligns with the eternal purpose which God made in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Eph 3:8–11)

Here it is as the ekklesia—the gathered people of God—that God reveals this finally-disclosed “ecosystem of the fullness of time.” The ekklesia is the divinely appointed means of displaying God’s multifaceted wisdom to the heavenly powers.

The ekklesia is an ecosystem of grace that reveals God’s multifaceted wisdom.

An Ecosystem of Grace

What makes this an ecosystem of grace that reveals God’s multifaceted wisdom is that each person in this community is a gift, a grace of God freely offered in love on behalf of the household. The case is summarized in the next chapter of Ephesians:

To each one of us a grace has been distributed as a gift of Christ (4:7).

From Christ the whole body is joined and held together . . . by means of the distributed divine energy of every single growing part of the body working to build up his body in love (4:16).

God’s divine energy is distributed to each growing part of the body according to the distinct grace each one bears. The exercise of that grace by each one under the headship of Christ builds up the body of Christ, the ekklesia. And that completed person—the Bride of Christ—fully reveals God’s multifaceted wisdom.15

Ecosystems of Grace for the 21st Century

How could this understanding of an ecosystem of grace—an extended family wherein each person has a vital role in giving, receiving, and displaying God’s love and wisdom—take form now? How might a more richly shared life be possible?

In 2013, two ACU colleagues and I conducted research on eleven intentional communities across North America.16 Over the course of three months we conducted dozens of interviews exploring the dynamics of communities that share resources to an uncommon degree. We began with a working definition of intentional Christian community:

A group that practices an uncommon sharing of assets in order to follow Jesus together.

“An uncommon sharing of assets,” or resources, was a key in our analysis. It became clear that the love that characterizes these communities is a tangible love. It involves sharing—and this sharing is across a whole range of gifts or assets that individuals and communities possess. In these communities it was often obvious that the time and attention necessary for loving God and neighbor was present to an uncommon degree.

As the study continued it also became clear that across this spectrum of assets all Christian communities make decisions, either intentionally or unintentionally, about the degree to which they share each asset. By paying attention to this reality, every Christian community can map where it currently is with respect to the depth or “thickness” of its sharing.17 For those who so choose, with this insight they can also make intentional decisions to change the ways they share their gifts.

Together the eight assets we identified form a typology by which communities can take inventory along a spectrum of sharing from thin to thick.18 A question about each asset provides a starting point from which to explore that asset:

THIN

THICK

Purpose – How would you describe your community’s purpose? In communities with a strong, thickly shared purpose, people across the community could describe why they were where they were, doing what they were doing. They might say, “We are living in this neighborhood of San Francisco to be the family of Jesus among and for our neighbors.”

People – How do you identify and engage community members’ unique gifts? Whether a person is 9 or 89, male or female, regardless of ethnicity or wealth, healthy intentional communities act to understand and call out each member’s gifts. In an ecosystem of grace, every gift is honored and every voice is carefully heard.

Place – How does the community’s social/cultural/physical location influence the community? Extended families that are attending carefully to the gift of their place reflect the distinctives of that setting in ways that are profoundly unique and effective. Should we expect suburban and urban or African and Asian churches to be the same in practice and culture?

Production – What is the community’s approach to shared and individual work? In every healthy family there is work to be done. Healthy intentional communities are proactive in seeing that each member has meaningful work that contributes to their shared life and purpose.

Process – How are community decisions made and implemented? Families that honor Jesus as Lord discover ways to discern a path forward together. Beyond authoritarianism or majority rule, healthy intentional communities work out a means to discern and govern that takes seriously God’s present guidance among God’s people.

Preparation – How do newcomers become community members? Research and personal experience make it clear that unless communities are intentional in the ways they include new people into their ongoing practices, people are unlikely to stay.19 This is true of people who grow up in the community, as well as newcomers.

Possessions – How are material goods shared? What was true in the first century remains true today—people who love one another as family find ways to share what they have with each other “so that there are no needy among them.” This is true whether the asset in question is money, cars, homes, or fields. Sharing of these assets, in particular, impacts not only the quality of our attention, but also the quantity available. People who can live well on half the financial resources through simplicity and sharing may have twice the time for loving.20

Play – How does this community renew its life in joyful re-creation? A key marker of the love of God embodied in a community is that community members find joy in playful sharing together. While this may take many forms, play together seems to be a steady characteristic of healthy families.

Each of these eight community assets presents an arena to explore a more richly shared life, to take decisive steps to love more deeply.21 Every community can find in these shared resources opportunity for growth in love.

If We Really Want To, We Can Get Our Attention Back

We struggle to live according to our design as lovers in large measure because our attention has been stolen. Our distraction results in lack of attention to the beautiful, glorious God of love. Our distraction also results in failure to give attention to the grace we bear in and for an ecosystem of grace. The outcome for many is that we find ourselves weary, wasting our lives in lonely, trivial pursuits.

Our distraction results in lack of attention to the beautiful, glorious God of love.

But it is not inevitable that we should live distracted, debt-driven, lonely lives—even though we have inherited the isolating cultural structures of our society.22 In noticing and naming what steals our attention, we are empowered to make other choices. We are freed to re-envision our own lives in an ecosystem of grace. Over time, such communities have the capacity to address the kinds of crippling distractions that hold our attention captive: debt, poor health, addictions, and loneliness.

For many of us, the pathway to reclaiming our stolen attention will require a deep reconsideration of the way of life embodied by Jesus and his earliest followers. This invites concrete decisions to share life at a level uncommon in America today, a willingness to face the fears this evokes for people acculturated to radical independence and distraction, and a choice to acknowledge that we are in fact designed for life in an ecosystem of grace.

No simple formula can be constructed for the formation of such communities. Attention to the God who gathers people into new families is all that can ensure the distinctive expression of God’s life in each place.23

Wherever such communities show up in our neighborhoods, not only will they hold our attention, but they will also capture the attention of the people around us who long for life as it was meant to be lived. The lifestyle of love in God is the one reality strong enough, beautiful enough to capture and hold the attention of people in our time. What it takes for people to know God for who God really is has not changed: ecosystems of grace that display the compelling love and multifaceted wisdom of God.

Dr. Kent Smith is CHARIS Professor at Abilene Christian University and has taught there in the Graduate School of Theology since 1991. His teaching and research focus has been in the area of spiritual nurture systems, especially as they relate to new expressions of church. He directs ACU’s graduate internship in missional leadership and has been a trainer for international mission teams over twenty-five years with ACU’s Halbert Institute for Missions. Kent and his wife Karen are founding members of the Eden Community. He can be contacted at smithpk@acu.edu.

This paper discusses the fact that the notions of missio Dei and missionality have for decades been intimately connected to the Trinity and to Trinitarian theology, but Churches of Christ have been little impacted by this connection. This is due to the relatively distanced position of Churches of Christ from both missionality and Trinitarian theology. In response, the specifics concerning a void with respect to Trinitarian theology in Churches of Christ need identification and attention so that this theological lacuna may be filled, leading to missional possibilities for Churches of Christ. Then, given their history and ethos, what are the ways in which the connection between missionality and Trinitarian theology could and should specifically manifest itself in Stone-Campbell churches overtly expressing a Trinitarian theology?

Although missio Dei has been understood and applied for over sixty years, the turn of the millennium has witnessed a widespread popularizing and proliferation of missionality among not only mainline denominations but also among those typically counted as evangelicals. In fact, in the same way that both the post-World War I era and the second half of the twentieth-century each became known for their respective key theological paradigms, one of the theological moves for which the earliest part of the twenty-first century will be known is the widespread popularization of missio Dei and missionality. Several theological perspectives—those oriented toward social justice, N.T. Wright’s this-worldly eschatological perspective and his contribution to what has become known as the New Perspective on Paul, postconservativism, the acquiescence of a Western, industrialized bias to a global perspective concerning church and theology, the resiliency of Barthian theology—have received attention at the beginning of the current century. Along with these noteworthy concentrations, missio Dei and the missional church are greatly contributing to contemporary theology and the ministry of the contemporary church.1

The identification of missio Dei as a significantly relevant advancement within Christianity and the embracing of missionality by denominated Christian fellowships and their individual churches, ministries, and theological and ecclesiastical instructional centers has come at different rates. Mainline denominations in North America and the state churches of Europe began applying missio Dei decades ago;2 some evangelicals in North America are yet to make its acquaintance.3 Indeed, it makes sense that where there is essential correspondence between, on one hand, the basic theology of any segment of Christians interested in expanding the influence of Christ and his kingdom and, on the other hand, the theological roots of missio Dei, there would be a readier acceptance of missionality. And, of course, when the theological ethos of any grouping of Christians stands removed from those elements that comprise the theological identity of missio Dei, missionality is likely to be received more slowly and with less enthusiasm.

After a brief glance at the presence of theologically centered ministry and missio Dei among a cappella Churches of Christ,4 the following will focus on one central theological foundation for missio Dei—the doctrine of the Trinity—and the potential impact of the Trinitarianism (or lack thereof) of the Churches of Christ on the embracing of missionality by this fellowship of Christians. If the doctrine of the Trinity is central to missio Dei, then ​reception and application of Trinitarian doctrine among Churches of Christ ​should decisively shape ​their ​missionality.

Trinitarian doctrine ​should decisively shape ​the ​missionality of Churches of Christ.

Theologically Centered Ministry and Missio Dei in Churches of Christ

There is a sense in which the ministry and mission of Churches of Christ have always been theologically motivated. In typical Restorationist thought, the mission of the contemporary church should center on emulating the mission of the primitive church, which in turn emulated Christ. The Christ-directed mission derived from scriptures like Matt 4:19, 23; 28:18–20; Luke 4:18–21; Acts 1:8, or from a host of other biblical passages has compelled the church to go into all the world with the good news of Christ. To minister to the unfortunate ones and preach the good news about what God has done in Christ is to participate in the Father-originated ministry and mission of the Son through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. And of course the biblical example of Jesus has significantly figured in the mission of the church, which exists “to seek out and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10) as Christ did.5 The church is called to wash one another’s feet in response to the example set by Christ (John 13:14) and to love one another just as they have been loved by him (John 13:34). God sent the Son into the world not to condemn the world but to save the world (John 3:17), so the church responds by attempting to achieve the same.

Where Churches of Christ have emulated the ministry of Christ, their efforts amount to being a theologically motivated ministry. The concept of missio Dei may be only recently known among some in Churches of Christ, but it is not as if there has never been a connection between ministry conducted in Churches of Christ and the mission of God through Christ and Spirit in the world—even including the existence of some ministries, operating now for decades, that possess a decidedly social-justice orientation.6

Additionally, that there has been within Churches of Christ during the last four decades, or so, significant theological and ecclesiological change in areas that have been linked by missiologists and missional theologians with missio Dei partially explains why there has been some acceptance and application of missio Dei and missionality by Churches of Christ. This major theological refocusing and renewal has included a move from ecclesiocentricity to theocentricity (actually, to a specifically more Christocentric focus).7 It has formulated a greatly altered conception of the gospel (attendant with the newly Christocentric focus) that accentuates God’s role in saving us and the transformation of all creation through Jesus, rather than on the steps of salvation that are the biblically required believer’s response to what God has done.8 There has been a recognition of the universally effective, dynamic character of the kingdom (as opposed to viewing as identical the kingdom of God and the visible church), combined with an acceptance of an “N. T. Wright-like” concern for the renewal of all creation, and positive affirmations of the role of the Holy Spirit in the mission of the church.9 There has been an ever broadening conception of where the church’s efforts should impact the world for the gospel, so that domestically and internationally Churches of Christ find themselves going out not just to evangelize but to bring God’s healing presence.10

Further, although there has always been a great interest among Churches of Christ in the advancement of the gospel and Christianity among the unchurched, there has occurred in the last few decades a much needed relaxation among Churches of Christ of interest in converting those who are part of another Christian fellowship to the “Church of Christ” way of looking at the gospel and church. This has been an attitude that unfortunately dominated much of the domestic evangelism and international missions efforts of Churches of Christ for much of the previous 75 years. A number of Churches of Christ, then, have completely altered the basic orientation of their ministerial focus. They more frequently than in the past possess the revised goal of reaching with the impact of God’s in-breaking kingdom those hurting ones who both remain apart from Christ and those who endure the suffering of being in a broken world far from God. Ministerial priorities include the creation of new ministries oriented toward social justice and a reorientation of the evangelistic efforts of Churches of Christ toward those who really do stand apart from the influence of Christ and God’s reign in the world.11

All this to say that the concepts of theologically driven ministry or of missionality have not fallen on deaf ears among Churches of Christ. In fact, to cite one place of recent, specific influence, the connection of Mark Love (now Dean of Theology and Ministry at Rochester College in Rochester Hills, Michigan) with the Gospel and Our Culture Network and his efforts at promoting missionality within Churches of Christ have been effective and are expanding. It is significant for Love’s work (and for several others) that since the 1980s, or so, many in Churches of Christ are no longer convinced of their exclusive status as the singular body of Christ. As a result, ministerial practitioners and theorists have felt a new freedom to collaborate with those from other theological and ecclesiastical traditions. This is especially significant in the case of discussions regarding missio Dei and missionality in light of the fact that these central concerns for mission and ministry, present in missiological discussions among theologians and missiologists of mainline denominations and those linked to the World Council of Churches for over half a century were, until the 1990s, unknown to or largely ignored by missiologists and practitioners in Churches of Christ. Expanding openness in Churches of Christ to the missional theorizing of others has fortuitously coincided with the revivification and popularizing of missio Dei and the rise of missional church thinking among missiologists in North America, meaning that collaboration regarding missionality between those in Churches of Christ and those at the center of the missional church revival has in some quarters easily occurred.

Trinity, Missionality, and Churches of Christ

The modern day theological and historical roots of missio Dei and the missional church have been carefully researched and discussed. The origins of missio Dei applied in the contemporary context go back first to the work of Karl Hartenstein and the crisis of German missiology occurring in the first half of the twentieth-century.12 In a series of articles beginning in 1928, Hartenstein argued for the missionary existence of the Christian community by grounding mission in the sending of the Son into the world by the Father and the eschatological expectation of his return following his ascension. He used the expression missio Dei in a 1934 article to describe the proper impetus for the nature of the missional church.13 For Hartenstein, the church and its commission from God, rather than God’s immanent nature as Triune being, is the primary locus of missionary agency. Thus, although John Flett dissociates from Hartenstein’s work a specifically overt grounding of missio Dei in the Trinity, missionality is no accident or sidebar in Hartenstein’s theology.14

Nonetheless, the exact roots of a connection in our era between Trinitarian doctrine and missio Dei are disputed. For example, David Bosch implies that the roots are Barthian, saying that

indeed, Barth may be called the first clear exponent of a new theological paradigm which broke radically with an Enlightenment approach to theology…. His influence on missionary thinking reached a peak at the Willingen Conference of the IMC (1952). It was here that the idea (not the exact term) missio Dei first surfaced clearly. Mission was understood as being derived from the very nature of God. It was thus put in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity, not of ecclesiology or soteriology. The classical doctrine on the missio Dei as God the Father sending the Son, and God the Father and the Son sending the Spirit was expanded to include yet another “movement”: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sending the church into the world. As far as missionary thinking was concerned, this linking with the doctrine of the Trinity constituted an important innovation.15

In response to Bosch and others, John Flett argues persuasively that it was not Barth but Paul Lehmann, H. Richard Niebuhr, and F. W. Dillistone—with help from Lesslie Newbigin—who were responsible for lending to Willingen a link between missio Dei and the Trinity. Lehmann, Niebuhr, and Dillistone were part of the North American commission who between 1950 and 1952 prepared what is commonly known as the American Report, a preliminary document prepared in advance of the Willingen conference. Although the commission did not meet with the express intention of drawing a connection between Trinity and mission, this constituted one of its major premises. It directly influenced the final report for Willingen, drawn up by Newbigin.16

While the exact origins of the link between Trinity and missio Dei are important, what is most important is that this connection was indeed made. When Trinity is the impetus for the church’s mission, mission is not primarily something for which the church is responsible, as if mission is a church-centered, church-originated concept. Rather, mission is what God is and does in inviting and empowering the church to join in with what he himself is and is doing. The church is not first a sending institution but is a people sent by God to fulfill his mission, which coincides with his own nature as Trinitarian sender and Triune sent ones. In this it is God’s Trinitarian character and activity that is most decisive, casting the shadow of his immanent nature over all that the church does for the kingdom of God.

Apart from the reality that there are issues concerning the specific impact Trinity has and should have on missionality, our concern here is the very limited way in which Trinitarian doctrine impacts missionality within Churches of Christ.17 The problems/needs are at least threefold. First, there is a need for increased theological depth and reflection by those in Churches of Christ with reference to the theological underpinnings of their ministerial efforts, including consideration of the bases on which they have been impacted by missio Dei. Second, there is the struggle Churches of Christ face with respect to their Trinitarian orientation. They need to become explicitly Trinitarian. Third, there is a void within Churches of Christ regarding the structures needed for effectively fostering theological and ministerial change, including helping Churches of Christ be both explicitly Trinitarian and Trinitarianly missional. I will address each of these in turn.

Churches of Christ need to become explicitly Trinitarian.

The Need for Theological Reflection Regarding Ministry

Historically, the ministries of Churches of Christ have been shaped by their restorative stance, whereby they have attempted to replicate the ministerial forms of the earliest Christians. In some respects this has been advantageous in that the primitive church was essentially theologically driven with respect to its ministering efforts and focus on mission. The consistent witness of the New Testament is that the apostles and other early Christians were driven by God’s history with Israel and their connection to Israel, by their Christology, by their acknowledgement of the Spirit’s presence, by how they conceived the kingdom of God, by agape, by their vision of the church as the chosen people of God, by their notion of koinonia, and by the renewal of all creation. To the extent that Churches of Christ have replicated the primitive church’s theologically driven ministry, their cooperation with God as he works for kingdom transformation has been noteworthy.18

However, the biblical primitivism that has been so much a part of the ethos of Churches of Christ has not always served them well. Too often the forms of the primitive church have been viewed as the end goal. Replication of external forms was thought a crucial and decisive element in making for biblical ecclesiology, without those in Churches of Christ seeing the need to connect ecclesiastical forms (e.g., ecclesiastical polity, ecclesiastical mission, ecclesiastical service to the world, ecclesiastical relationship to political and social structures) to core theological foundations.19 This is changing, and it would not be wrong to say that this is rapidly changing, especially in larger churches in urban locations and in places where church leadership has made a point of exploring the relationship between their ministerial effectiveness and the extent to which their ministries are driven by the dominant theological themes of the Bible.20 But there remains a need for a much broader application of theology to the church’s ministry, including the need to see the very nature of God and his key Trinitarian activities directly related to the church’s practice.

It was noted above that there has been in Churches of Christ some acceptance of missio Dei and the concept of missionality, and, as noted, this has much to do with the progress made in recent decades as many in Churches of Christ have exercised their autonomous theological and ecclesiastical freedoms and made much-needed theological changes that run parallel to missio Dei. However, I wonder if at this point the theological parallels have been often serendipitous rather than intentional. Churches of Christ have become more theocentric, less ecclesiocentric, more Christocentric, more kingdom oriented, and so forth, but my impression is that this was not explicitly done in order to reflect missio Dei, even if these moves have been made with a view to becoming more theologically centered. This raises a question: if missio Dei were intentionally given a greater priority among factors affecting ministry in Churches of Christ, would it not enhance the extent to which our churches would be both theologically and biblically centered? Is there not room then for deeper and more pointed reflection regarding the specific theological factors that would raise the profile of missio Dei in Churches of Christ? This would especially be the case if a Trinitarian turn was included as part of reflection upon missio Dei in Churches of Christ. As seen below, because of the disparagement of overtly Trinitarian doctrine within the Churches of Christ, there has been little opportunity for the Triune God qua Triune to directly and overtly influence mission within Churches of Christ. I suggest that this reality be changed and that Churches of Christ give due attention to the Trinity as the primary foundation on which their efforts at being missional should be grounded.

Churches of Christ and the Trinity

While many Churches of Christ have been quite open to the progress of missionality and missio Dei, there is at least one place at which their own theological infirmities will continue to hinder both their theoretical contributions to the missional church discussion and their applications of missio Dei to the praxis of missionality. This is in reference to the merely implicit nature of the commitment of Churches of Christ to Trinitarian theology.21

The history of thought within Churches of Christ demonstrates that they, along with their sister fellowships in the Stone-Campbell Movement, have generally been orthodox Trinitarian in their theological orientation. Although there have been exceptions, Restorationists have generally implicitly believed in the Trinity in a way that corresponds with historic, orthodox Christianity.22 However, there is a long history in Churches of Christ of a hesitancy to use traditional Trinitarian language in expressing their beliefs about the Triune God. In Churches of Christ, Trinitarian theology has been largely understated (or not stated, at all!), and it certainly has not been overtly influential in individual churches, having little impact on either theology or ministry in Churches of Christ. Although in recent decades, as mentioned above, a Christocentric influence has significantly impacted the thinking, preaching, teaching, and practice of many in Churches of Christ, historically Trinitarian doctrine has not been a shaping force with respect to either doctrine or practice.23

The lack of impact of Trinitarian theology on ministry within Churches of Christ stems from the approach taken to the Trinity by those who initiated the Stone-Campbell Movement. Although essentially Trinitarian, Thomas and Alexander Campbell (especially Alexander) were hesitant to speak or write about anything they perceived to require “speculative language.” In addition, relatively insignificant disagreement between the positions of the Campbells and that of classical Nicean-Constantinoplean Trinitarianism occurred when Thomas Campbell accepted a mild subordination of the Son and when Alexander Campbell raised questions concerning the eternality of the Son and the incorrectness of referring to the logos by using Father-Son terminology. Clearly one does not find in the Campbells’ strong advocacy for classical Trinitarian doctrine, even if this for the most part represents their view.24

Barton Stone, for his part, refused to accept what he thought of as the irrational, illogical, unbiblical explanations of theologians who resolved the unexplainable relationship between the so-called persons of the so-called Trinity by positing theological mysteries and by using philosophical language that was neither found in the Bible nor helpful for rationally delineating the relationship between Father and Son. With Stone there is a definite move in the direction of Arianism, whereby the Son finds his origin in the Father at a specific time prior to natural history, meaning that the Son cannot be identical with the one and only true God, who alone is eternal.25

The outcome of these early beginnings is that there has never been a strong affirmation of the Trinity within Churches of Christ, even if there has never been a pervasive rejection of classical Trinitarian doctrine. The generations that followed after the Campbells and Stone were often simply silent with respect to Trinitarian doctrine, refusing, like Campbell, to use speculative language and rejecting the creeds as authoritative—or even as valuable statements of faith—so that the Trinitarian doctrine so often at the center of these creeds was for the most part ignored.26

At the same time, the rise and then the influence of evangelicalism in North America—which coincided to a great degree with the historical timeline of the Churches of Christ—has meant that the pervasiveness of classical Trinitarian doctrine among evangelicals, not to mention the Trinitarian doctrine that has characterized so much of the remainder of Christianity, has influenced Churches of Christ, becoming the basic position for Churches of Christ with respect to the Father, Son, and Spirit. That Churches of Christ are in fact for the most part classically Trinitarian, even though this belief is implicit, often goes unrecognized, and is given little place as a foundation for the fellowship’s ministerial praxis.27

With this in view, it would seem that an overt, intentional renewal of focus upon Trinitarian theology would be quite fitting and in order for Churches of Christ, and there is little reason why it should not be welcomed. In fact, whether in conjunction with a call for Churches of Christ to accentuate missio Dei or not, the recommendation here is that Churches of Christ make explicit their already implicit commitment to a doctrine of the Trinity that is essentially in line with that found in the classic ecumenical creeds of Nicea and Constantinople. But what course should be followed in actually developing a vibrant Trinitarianism that could serve as solid foundation for missionality among Churches of Christ? How will they actually become explicitly Trinitarian? Although much more could be said, a primary attitudinal change must take place within Churches of Christ that will allow them to develop a perspective different from that of their theological ancestors, who, as seen above, were hesitant to focus on explicit Trinitarian doctrine.

Alexander Campbell and those who followed after him refused to take a stronger position on the Trinity largely because Campbell himself capitulated before contemporary events and understandings, not because he perceived that biblical justification for the Trinity was entirely absent. There was so much controversy and ecclesiastical disunity over the Trinity that Campbell concluded through his empirically considered, propositionally oriented evaluation of the biblical witness that the Bible’s language about the Trinity was insufficiently clear to develop a highly nuanced Trinitarian position.28

Part of what today makes possible a different approach to Trinitarian doctrine is that the entire climate of Western epistemology has changed, not only from what it was two hundred years ago, but also from what it was sixty years ago, bringing with it changes in the theological/ecclesiastical milieu of Christianity. There is now a freedom and a need to reach new conclusions regarding the biblical foundations of Trinitarian doctrine, and there is no longer the worry among many adherents of Churches of Christ that rampant disunity will be propagated if an overt Trinitarian stance is espoused. Postmodern acceptance of differences of opinion and the loss of confidence in foundational truth claims mean alternative perspectives can more easily coexist. In such a context, overtly expressed belief in a particular Trinitarian perspective is less threatening and less polemical, allowing for new conclusions freely to be entertained without pressure. The hope expressed here is that this will take place.

The Way Forward For Trinity-Based Missionality

What, then, should be the way forward for Churches of Christ as they attempt to apply in their contexts the ferment of missio Dei, the missional church discussion, and the assertion of a Trinitarian foundation for missionality?

Unfortunately, this is not a question as easily answered among Churches of Christ as it might be among some other Christian fellowships. Inculcating doctrinal transformation in Churches of Christ is not an easy task. They possess no denominational headquarters and no authoritative statement of faith that is bound on their churches. Nor is there a unifying, universally effective means of communicating to all churches the ferment of a discussion like one about missio Dei and its theological foundations (even if such a discussion were to take place in some context)—all in a fellowship that prides itself on the autonomy of its individual churches. The structures, then, that might allow for uniform, efficient transformation in doctrinal views are not in place. Typically, the independent, autonomous, often disconnected nature of ecclesiology in Churches of Christ means that new paradigms are communicated and inculcated within our churches with difficulty. Widely distributed publications, travelling teachers, the training that occurs in educational institutions, blogs, university sponsored lectureships, and scholarly conferences are some of the ways in which new ideas are shared, sometimes with effectiveness, but the fact is that this pattern of discussing and being influenced by new ideas is often sporadic and incomplete. As part of communicating effectively and persuasively something as dramatic a change as a new emphasis on Trinitarian doctrine, along with a coinciding focus on the impact the Trinity should have on the missional nature of ministry in Churches of Christ, Churches of Christ need to continue proceeding down a path of transformation they have already begun, exercising all of the above options for communication, and more, with the specific intention of being more overtly Trinitarian.29

In the course of such efforts Stone-Campbell churches should continue moving in the direction of replacing what has primarily, or at least often, been a concern for their ecclesiological mimicry of the primitive church forms with an interest in being theologically driven regarding ecclesiological function. For many this has now been happening for several decades. For others this will require that they ask a new set of questions regarding the identity of their churches, whereby, key loci and elements of biblical theology will receive pointed attention. This means that even before they begin thinking in terms of the influence of the Trinity on their nature as missional church, there is a need to broaden the impact on them of a more holistic view of the biblical theology. They should take their clues for how to be the church from God’s attitudes and great acts in creating and restoring his entire creation, from his interaction with Israel, and, most centrally, from a set of identifiable core theological principles, ideas, and driving concepts that comprise the ethos present in God’s saving interactions with his creation. What is God’s fundamental attitude toward all that he has created? What are God’s fundamental attitudes toward His children? What are God’s goals for humankind? What are the basic forms of relationality God exemplifies in interacting with his people and with those who for the time being do not acknowledge his Lordship? What is God’s attitude toward human sin, toward sin as an influence within all of creation, and what is it that God does in response to sin?

Further, if biblical theology is to drive the identity and mission of the church, the foundational, fundamental Christocentric turn signaled by the earlier efforts of Thomas Olbricht, Rubel Shelly, Randy Harris, Leonard Allen, Monroe Hawley, and many others needs to find continued expression and further expansion among those currently thinking and working on behalf of Churches of Christ.30 What are the core features of the personhood, mission, and teaching of Jesus? How should the central teachings of Jesus impact the efforts of the church in a culture that is rapidly becoming less Christian? How should the uniqueness of Christ and the faith he founded help Christians to respond to religious and cultural pluralism, to a world driven by social media, to issues of social justice, and to what seems to be an escalated and spiralling devaluation of what were previously identified as moral norms?

Additionally, there is a need for a deepening of the sense that the church’s mission is not to be viewed as activity that has merely originated in God but as the ongoing mission of unity and cooperation with and in the Triune God. Although Churches of Christ have followed the example of God and Christ, there has been little direct expression of the church participating in a cooperative mission with God. The church has been sent out by God as Christ was but without the mutual working with God in the mission that is part of the Son’s existence in the Father’s mission. The Son is sent, but the sending occurs in mutual participation with the Father, rather than as an isolated monarchical action. Further, the sending of the Son includes incarnational participation with those to whom the mission is directed, so that the church following after Christ will find itself participating both with God and with the world, even as it is sent into the world.

The church following after Christ will find itself participating both with God and with the world.

Finally, Churches of Christ have largely missed cooperating with and being driven by the Spirit in the mission of the kingdom of God, including missing the realization that the Holy Spirit is at the center of the ministry of the Word of God in the world. Reciprocal relations between Father, Son, and Spirit constitute the fullness of the communal, cooperative mission they share in redeeming humanity, but discussion of this kind of Trinitarian reciprocity is simply missing in a fellowship unfamiliar with allowing Trinitarian theology to directly and influence its praxis. This must change, and help in doing so can be readily found. Jürgen Moltmann’s The Church in the Power of the Spirit and The Spirit of Life together provide a vision for the impact that the Holy Spirit should play both in ecclesiology and the church’s redeeming ministry, and in both the concepts of Trinity and kingdom are never far away.31 Michael Velker’s God the Spirit advocates Spirit-fostered change, where justice, mercy, and our understanding of the nature of God conjoin to create a community where self-giving on behalf of other creatures becomes the rule.32 Craig Van Gelder’s The Ministry of the Missional Church: A Community Led by the Spirit may be the most accessible of recent works that join missionality with pneumatology, and his overview and comparison of ecclesiological models, his look at open-systems theory and organizational structures, and his theologically skillful look at the Spirit’s role in the church’s ministry would likely be instructive, even for those familiar with missional church.33

Rather than bringing to an end this look at missio Dei, missionality, Trinity, and Churches of Christ merely by drawing together a summary and conclusions, at this early stage of Trinitarian missional thinking for Churches of Christ two series of questions are in order, along with some provisional answers to these questions. First, how explicitly Trinitarian should Churches of Christ become? Hopefully, quite explicitly. Will overt, clear formulations of Trinitarian doctrine be formulated and adopted by individual congregations in a fellowship in which congregational doctrinal autonomy is still defensibly the norm? Hopefully; prayerfully. Will an explicit Trinitarianism within Churches of Christ closely follow the classically stated orthodox Trinitarianism of the ecumenical creeds? There seems to be no reason why this should not happen; whether it does or not, explicit Trinitarian doctrinal formulation is in order for Churches of Christ. Can Trinitarian doctrine be explicitly formulated, stated, and accepted in non-exclusionary ways, so that specific forms of Trinitarianism do not become the basis on which lines of fellowship are drawn? It will be the responsibility of church leaders to avoid the mistakes of the past, the mistakes which moved progenitors of the Stone-Campbell Movement to avoid shaping for themselves and those who came after them an explicit Trinitarianism. The current ecclesiastical and theological climate of graciousness, openness, acceptance, and non-judgemental cooperation in Churches of Christ should make it possible to celebrate the Trinity without denigrating the specific Trinitarian doctrinal formulations of others. Disunity within the community called forth by the being and acts of the Trinity does not have to be the excessively ironic outcome of thinking deeply about the being and unity of the Father, Son, and Spirit.

Further, it would seem that merely stating an overt belief in an orthodox view of the Trinity, although a crucial first step, will not take our churches far enough in the direction of allowing Trinitarian doctrine missionally to shape the ministries of our churches. What aspects of Trinitarian doctrine should be most decisive for shaping missio Dei as it comes to fruition among Churches of Christ? Should those interested in allowing the Trinity and Trinitarian doctrine impact their ministries focus primarily on the proclamation and revelation of the immanent Trinity, as Barth did, or on the interaction with creation of the economic Trinity34 in line with Catherine LaCugna35 and Jürgen Moltmann?36 What Trinitarian theologians should most influence the manner in which Trinitarian doctrine impacts our perceptions of the church as a ministering community created by and emulating the community that is the Trinity: Alan Torrance?37 John Zizioulas?38 Miroslav Volf?39

Whatever may be the answers to such questions, Churches of Christ need to accept and apply an overt, robust view of the Trinity and Trinitarian theology, even while they allow the real divine Trinity, the Trinitarian God, directly to impact and advance their work in the world and for the kingdom of God.

Kelly Carter has, since 2006, been the Lead Minister at the Calgary Church of Christ in Calgary, Alberta, where he also serves as an Adjunct Professor of Theology and Bible at Alberta Bible College and Ambrose University. After ministry with the Shelbourne St. Church of Christ in Victoria, British Columbia, from 1986 to 2001, Kelly attended Southern Methodist University, completing there a PhD in Systematic Theology. He also holds a BS and MA from Abilene Christian University and an MDiv from Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia.

This response was read at the 2016 Christian Scholars Conference at Lipscomb University, following the presentation of the papers by Gailyn Van Rheenen, Kent Smith, and Fred Liggin published in this issue of Missio Dei.

Many consider the context of the Unites Sates to be postmodern, anti-institutional, and even post-Christian. Traditional ecclesiologies are undoubtedly faltering, whatever the case. What does such a context mean for mission? Perhaps planting new churches is the future—but what sorts of churches? Perhaps the missional renewal of existing congregations or traditions is the best way forward, but this too is a contested idea. Due to these urgent questions, the theology and practice of church planting and mission in the Western context are rapidly evolving, and scholarship in these fields continues to grow apace. This session features Stone-Campbell scholars and practitioners engaging with the wider discourse about the contours of mission in the US.

Framing a Response

Often in settings like this the aim of respondents is to challenge or critique the arguments of those presenting. While this might be a coveted exercise for some (you know who you are!), it’s not what I want to do. Rather, as someone listening in and then speaking as mainly an “outsider” to the conversations and perspectives of those who inhabit the Restorationist tradition, what I want to do is (1) trace a few themes that I see in all these papers, (2) comment briefly on where I believe these themes intersect with what I am observing across the landscape of American Christianity, and then (3) try to add something to the conversation from my own perspective that might advance the conversations each of these papers are looking to engender, as well as the the unity of Christ’s church in our day—something I trust that my Restorationist brothers and sisters can easily get behind!

Theme 1 – The Cultural Captivity of American Ecclesiology: The Ecclesial Challenge

The first major theme that shows up in all these papers has to do with how contemporary forms and practices of the church seem to suffer from a profound enculturation to American culture. For Gailyn this shows up in the church mirroring the social fragmentation and vendor/consumer paradigm of our culture. For Fred this shows up in a capitulation to the “authorizing narratives” and “plausibility structures” of modernity or perhaps postmodernity. And for Kent this shows up in forms of church that take for granted lifestyles of hyper-busyness and distraction. In each case, the common denominator is a particular expression of some way in which the forms and practices of our church communities are held captive by the shape and sensibilities of our host culture as opposed to existing, primarily, as a countercultural witness. Or, to say it another way, when it comes to addressing the contours of mission in the US, our attention is drawn first to ecclesiology.

Theme 2 – Issues with Models and Patterns of Leadership: The Equipping Challenge

The second theme that stands out to me in these papers has to do with the arena of leadership, or what we might call the equipping challenge. Gailyn calls out the top-down, management orientation of leaders; Fred laments a lack of cruciformity; and Kent, maybe more implicitly than explicitly, points out a lack in the number of leaders with the inclination or competency to create and mature thick communities that function as ecosystems of grace. So, again, we have topics as wide ranging as the “missional conversation” at large, the practice of hospitality, and the place of intentional communities in refocusing and reordering our call to love, but in each case there is a central identification of leadership—and more specifically the call upon Christian leaders to function as equippers of God’s people—that rises to the surface in these discussion with respect to the landscape of mission in the US.

Theme 3 – Issues with the Formation of People and Communities: The Ethical Challenge

The last theme to call attention to is what I’ll call the ethical challenge. It has specifically to do with what kinds of people and what kinds of communities must be formed if we are to faithfully and fruitfully navigate the challenges of mission in the US today. To follow the same pattern, Gailyn’s focus here is on the formation of disciples and communities who exhibit faithful presence and gracious hospitality, Fred’s is on communities and leaders who embody hospitality, and Kent’s is on believers whose attention and love are compelling forms of life before a watching world. I found this to be an especially interesting theme to emerge from a panel of papers on the topic of mission in the US. One would be quite justified in assuming that, when given the opportunity to say something on the subject of mission, the primary emphasis would be on what we need to do, but here we see a primary emphasis on what, or more properly, who, we need to be. There’s a lot there we could—and should—mine.

Points of Intersection

To summarize then, as I listen in on these conversations among members of the Restorationist family under the heading of “The Contours of Mission in the USA,” I note strong connections around challenges in the areas of ecclesiology (the life and practice of churches), equipping (the instincts and skillsets of our leaders), and ethics (the formation of people and communities in the likeness of Christ). Though I wouldn’t have expected it, these are the same sort of themes that I am observing as central to the conversations that many other tribes and traditions are focusing on in our day. And here’s my best stab as to why that is: the common denominator for so many of us, especially those of European heritage, is the new reality we are commonly facing as Christendom ends. To the extent that Christendom can be defined as a cultural condition in which Christianity occupies a place of societal privilege and power, we are all in the same boat, and as it begins to sink, we’re asking many of the same questions. Questions like, “What really is the church in a time and place when more and more people have no history with it, vocabulary for it, or interest in it?” (the ecclesial challenge), “What actually does it mean to be a Christian leader when fewer and fewer people care what you have to say simply because you occupy a place of positional authority?” (the equipping challenge), or, “What does it look like to embody the values of the kingdom of God in our day?” (the ethical challenge). Many, many people are asking those same questions today, so I’m encouraged to see these themes expressed in these papers and suspect they provide good evidence for the possibility of greater amounts of trans-tribal discourse and fellowship.

We’re all in the same boat, and as it begins to sink, we’re asking many of the same questions.

A Reflection on the Captivity and Corruption of Western Soteriology within Christendom

I’d like to conclude with a proposal of my own that I think can add to each of these important lines of dialogue and provide additional potential for fruitfulness in terms of our participation in God’s mission.

The proposal is that behind all of these themes and the questions that give rise to them lies a deficiency in one of our most fundamental theological categories, soteriology, our understanding of salvation. In short, I want to suggest that to the degree Christendom eclipsed our view of the missionary nature of both God and the church, it has likewise kept us from appreciating the fundamentally missional nature of salvation itself.

For a great long while our understanding of salvation has been essentially static. It has been something that we conceptualized mainly as a possession—something one either has or doesn’t have, which would then translate into one’s eternal destiny. Instead, I submit that a proper understanding of salvation, one rooted in the missio Dei, would be a communal participation in the re-creational life and mission of God as disciples of Jesus.

Obviously the purpose here in not to jump headlong into a discussion along these lines. I simply want to offer this thought as a means of expanding on what we’ve already heard. Such an understanding of salvation, I suspect, would be a significant key in helping to address the ecclesial, equipping, and ethical challenges that have been put before us today. More than this, I think it would provide a substantive opportunity for conversation between Restorationists and fellow kingdom sojourners endeavoring to live faithfully into the emerging mission context of the US.

After 15 years of serving in pastoral ministry and theological education, JR Rozko currently serves as Co-Director of Missio Alliance (http://missioalliance.org). Helping to create new networks, partnerships, conversations, and resources that embody and advance the good news of God’s mission of reconciliation is at the center of JR’s calling. JR has a DMiss from Fuller Theological Seminary and teaches there as Adjunct Professor of Church & Contemporary Culture. He, his wife Amy, and their two daughters, Aubrey and Junia, live in Elgin, IL and are part of Life on the Vine Christian Community where he serves as an Elder.

In American Christianity, hospitality has not only lost its moral dimensions, it no longer plays an integral role in informing a church’s missiology or ecclesiology. Hospitality has been reduced to cozy dinners with friends or associates who closely resemble the socio-economic status and socio-political worldviews of their hosts. Perhaps more detrimental, hospitality has been relegated as one of many Christian practices from which Christians can choose, a practice most generally situated around various forms of table fellowship. In this paper, I hope to offer a more robust theological framework, one that extends back to the creation narrative, through the Israelite narrative, and is both epitomized in and central to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Hospitality understood in this way necessarily becomes the primal posture of Christian witness in a post-Christian culture and promotes a missiological impulse powerful enough to reorient a congregation to engage holistically and embrace those suffering social displacement due to homelessness, mental illness, and intellectual disability.

Today when our society speaks of hospitality, we do not normally think of a love for strangers, which is the meaning of philoxenia, the biblical Greek word usually translated hospitality. Instead, hospitality arouses images of what Henri Nouwen described as “tea parties, bland conversations and an atmosphere of coziness.”1 A culture of xenophobia pushes back against the impulse to make room for strangers with a welcoming embrace. In a post 9/11 world, fear has cast out love (1 John 4:18), thus relegating Christian hospitality to a romanticized ideal consigned to one of many possible Christian practices rather than an alternative way of being in society. Christine Pohl argues that hospitality has become an industry of business and a practice of relational networking in our upward-mobility-driven system. Yet, this was not the view of hospitality in the early church. The early mothers and fathers of the Christian faith practiced a way of being that welcomed others with relational embrace, including strangers and those incapable of reciprocity.2

They believed that transcending socio-economic and ethnic boundaries by sharing meals, homes, and worship with people of different backgrounds was a significant identity-marker of the Christian faith.3 They extended hospitality to strangers and those incapable of reciprocity by welcoming them into their homes and sharing their resources as a covering of friendship. Early Christian hospitality bore witness to the legitimacy of the Christian faith powerful enough to capture the attention of onlookers.4 This is evident in the comments of the fourth century Roman emperor Julian when he instructed the high priest of the Hellenistic faith to emulate Christianity’s practice of hospitality, and asked, “Why do we not observe that it is their benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done most to increase atheism?” He commanded that a new government sponsored program be established to distribute food to the poor and that hostels be established in every city for strangers. He wrote: “For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galileans [Christians] support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us. Teach those of the Hellenic faith to contribute to public service of this sort.”5

Hospitality was, more than just a practice, a way of being for the early Church. It encompassed the whole person as it addressed the social, emotional, cognitive, physical and spiritual dimensions of personhood. To early Christian writers hospitality was a moral obligation brought forth by the inbreaking of God’s kingdom and was a fundamental expression of the gospel and vital for faithful Christian witness.6

For the people of ancient Israel, understanding themselves as strangers and sojourners, with responsibility to care for the vulnerable strangers in their midst, was a significant part of what it meant to be the people of God. Jesus, who was dependent on the hospitality of others during much of his earthly sojourn, also served as the gracious host in his words and in his actions. Those who turned to him found welcome and rest and the promise of reception into the Kingdom. Jesus urged his human hosts to open their banquets and dinner tables to more than family and friends who could return the favor, to give generous welcome to the poor and sick who had little to offer in return. Jesus promised that welcoming the stranger, feeding the hungry person, and visiting the sick were acts of personal kindness to the Son of man Himself.7

When the early church extended gracious hospitality to others they were affirming a common humanity brought forth in the reign of grace. We see this taught in Paul’s letters as he urges the Christian community to welcome one another as Christ had welcomed them (Romans 12:13; 15:7). This is the hospitality modeled by his incarnation and is central to the gospel. Therefore, it is essential in our understanding of witness, leadership, and power.

A critical aspect of missional renewal in a post-Christian culture is the recovery of hospitality as an essential ecclesial posture. Taking the incarnation as a theological paradigm, I argue that hospitality is a holistic congregational engagement in witness, homemaking, and leadership. After discussing each dimension of hospitality, I consider barriers to embracing this robust practice of hospitality. Finally, I provide one example of overcoming those barriers.

A critical aspect of missional renewal…is the recovery of hospitality as an essential ecclesial posture.

A Theology of Hospitality

Hospitality begins in creation. In the Genesis narrative we see God making room in his infinite and omnipresent life for a finite and limited creation, including us.8 He did so, not stoically or out of obligation, but in love and out of desire. He embraced us from the moment he first thought of us. As a “homemaking God who creates a world for inhabitation,” he welcomes us into his life to share in all that he is and all that he has, including his good creation.9 Our God is a homemaking, hospitable God, and hospitality is central to his triune being.

Our God is a homemaking, hospitable God, and hospitality is central to his triune being.

Later in the Genesis narrative, the Lord comes to Abraham and Sarah as “three strangers,” and they welcome them to dinner (Gen 18:1–8). In a simple reading of this text one might conclude that Abraham and Sarah extended hospitality. But read in light of the creation narrative, God extends hospitality. All of creation is his, yet he chooses to come and dine with them. The welcome and embrace of God is concrete and particular, as particular as his incarnation, revealed to the world through a Jewish man named Jesus, born in a small town called Bethlehem of a woman named Mary. In the incarnation we see what humanity-affirming, dignity-restoring, homemaking hospitality looks like; we see the hospitality of God.

Matthew wants to be sure we know God’s intention with Jesus from the beginning: he is Immanuel, God with us (Matt 1:23). John tells us that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was both with God and was God. This Word, the divine logic of God, became flesh and took up residence among us. In Jesus the living Word, God, “came to His own,” yet they did not respond as Abraham and Sarah. Jesus was not welcomed. Despite God’s hospitality and willingness to make room for humanity in his life, there was a stubborn refusal to make room for him. Humanity was inhospitable to its hospitable Creator (John 1:1–14).

After pronouncing that God’s kingdom will welcome all who repent and believe, he gathers blue-collar workers as his first apprentices. He invites them to learn the way of God’s welcome alongside him as he teaches the worshippers in synagogues, heals unclean tormented people, journeys through Galilean neighborhoods, touches lepers with his own hand, shows compassion to the vulnerable, and shares a table with sinners (Mark 1:14–20, 23, 27, 29–41; 2:15–17). Jesus challenges the narrow definitions of hospitality and inclusion as he presses his hearers to move outward to the margins of society and welcome those with whom they least desire to have connections, especially those incapable of reciprocity (Luke 14:7–23, Matt 25:31–46). He teaches us not to view people marginalized and displaced by socio-cultural or socio-economic realities as a projects to fix or problems to be solved. Rather, they are to be joined with and welcomed into the presence of a friend, because friendships and places of welcome are where human flourishing takes place. As a friend of sinners Jesus is found in the presence of liars, thieves, prostitutes, and those who do not believe; the rich, the poor, the powerless, and the divorced; the widow, the child, the religious elite, and those left out; the murderer, the immigrant, the racist, and unrepentant. By welcoming and embracing sinners Jesus reveals that contrary to the prevalent religious narratives of exclusion and hospitality, God is willing to make room in his life to welcome all. Home, that is, human flourishing, is found in the welcoming presence of God along with all others who welcome Jesus as Lord. The early Christian writers bear witness to this and summon all others who have received the gospel to do the same. This should affect how we understand and implement the gospel.

Hospitality As Witness

Today we must rediscover the formative nature of Christian witness and move beyond an understanding of witness as mere observation. Witnesses are actively involved in making someone or something known to everyone around them. It is a participatory role, one that presupposes an experience, which in turn necessitates a proclamation or demonstration of that experience for the benefit of others. As we experience God’s welcoming embrace despite our brokenness and ungratefulness, we are compelled to bear witness to this experience by extending his welcome to others where together we make our home with God. As the apostle Paul has said, we welcome one another as Christ welcomed us to the glory of God so that our way of being in the world will overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit working within, between, and among us (Rom 15:7, 13).

Self-serving agendas and strategies to get them “coming to” church are relinquished because the church has formed a different imagination and understanding of witness. A theology of hospitality offers a different way of seeing, which when embraced by a congregation, adequately upholds the prophetic witness of Christ’s church. A witness formed by hospitality subverts the narrativized systems of anxiety, coercion, scarcity and exclusivism. It disrupts the status quo as it tears down walls of division, closes the gaps between between proximity and neighborliness, and makes reconciliation between all people possible.

A witness formed by hospitality…closes the gaps between between proximity and neighborliness.

The church whose posture is formed by hospitality reorganizes her life for the practice of presence with others, trusting that the Spirit of Jesus is mysteriously at work within, between, and among them. As the congregation catches a glimpse of the Spirit’s work it will humbly, boldly, and lovingly bear witness to his work and invite others to see and hear what God is doing and saying. When gathered as a people, the church serves both as gracious host to God and the other while simultaneously receiving the hospitality of God; they make room in their communal life for the other with a welcoming embrace.

Hospitality as witness helps a congregation contextualize the gospel. In listening and being present with others, the church gives up settling for abstract propositions that are disembodied from real life but labeled as gospel. Rather, it will hear where the bad news is felt and known—where the reign of sin and death is clearly having its way in the lives of the socially displaced and marginalized—and bear witness to good news in a way that offers a new vision of life and love where all can be welcomed and at home with God through Jesus Christ as Lord.

Hospitality as Homemaking among the Socially Displaced

Over and again in the biblical corpus God is seen as a gracious and generous homemaker whose hospitality is connected to his sovereign presence and provision.10 From the wilderness of the Exodus to Galilee, God provides sustenance to the hungry and often ungrateful. Like Israel our identity with God includes being displaced foreigners and strangers who are wholly dependent upon his welcome and provision. No longer estranged he has adopted us and called us his children (Gal 4:4–6; Eph 1:4–6). No longer displaced, he has naturalized us as citizens of his kingdom (Eph 2:12–19). If we are like Israel, then our displacement and estrangement also makes us accountable for our treatment of the displaced and estranged. As a people who find ourselves at home with God we are called as a community of hospitality to become homemakers.

Cultivating a culture of hospitality in the congregational context is particularly important in a post-Christian culture of social displacement. A community which embodies hospitality contradicts contemporary messages and systems of coercion and exclusion that tell us who is valuable and invaluable, significant and insignificant, worthy and unworthy. Such a community becomes a sign of hope that proves self-giving love is possible. The church becomes a community where all are included, where the world is not irreversibly categorized between classes, races, genders, sexual preferences, or other identity markers.11 This kind of relentless hope found in communities organized around hospitality as witness allows all people, guests and hosts, to flourish in challenging and transformative ways. The homeless can find a home with a community of hospitality. The mentally ill and intellectually disabled can find importance in a community of hospitality. In such communities, the power center of society has been redetermined, and all are welcomed into a life of cruciform power, because all that we have can be leveraged for the good another as together we make our home with God. If, however, hospitality is to become a fundamental expression of congregational witness, it must become the fundamental expression of congregational leadership.

The homeless can find a home with a community of hospitality.

Hospitality As Leadership

As Jesus came to the end of his earthly ministry he entrusted his work to twelve apprentices. In his practice of hospitality, he taught them that if they were to lead others in and to the kingdom, they must receive hospitality as a way of being. Perhaps this lesson in leadership is most evident when Jesus washes their feet in John 13. I believe the message of this text is much deeper than mere servitude. I suggest it is a text on hospitality as leadership. For the sake of space, I will highlight what I believe is a pivotal phrase that turns us toward considering hospitality as leadership: “And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself” (John 13:3–4).12 Jesus was fully aware of his place, authority, influence, and power. “So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet you also ought to wash one another’s feet” (John 13:14). Instead of leveraging his power to be served, to receive embrace, he leveraged it for the good of everyone else. In this practice of hospitality reserved for a house slave, Jesus made himself vulnerable as their slave by washing their feet. As the incarnation of God, Jesus’s posture was one of hospitality, so it makes sense that his leadership would be grounded in the same. To make sure his apprentices understood what happened, Jesus told them to go and do likewise. Later they would learn that power is cruciformity.

In today’s Christian leadership culture, influence, authority, or power is often referred to as servant leadership. At first this sounds noble, even biblical. We lead by serving. So why doesn’t this work? Why do our notions of servant leadership fail to play out in such a way that it reflects what we see in Jesus? Is it solely based upon hierarchical structures prevalent in the North American Church, or is there more to it? I suggest that, among other implications, this kind of leadership can subtly abrade our innocence and original intentions to serve others, especially in hierarchical leadership structures. The preoccupation to influence others toward a predetermined goal results in a disordered love that gives birth to disordered hospitality. In essence servant leadership easily comes to be about receiving hospitality (by being followed) and less about extending it (by being present to mutually discern the Spirit’s work).

Hospitality as leadership moves beyond serving others. It is less about self-preoccupation and more about self-giving love. It is about making room for others to flourish based upon giftedness. Hospitality as leadership shifts from leading and facilitating projects to facilitating presence. It is leadership as cruciform power. As Jesus washed the disciples feet, death was working in him so that life could work in them. He demonstrates that when leaders view their interaction with others through the cross they seek to place themselves in postures of vulnerability rather than in positions of power. Therefore hospitality as leadership understands things this way: presence first, participation second, proclamation or bearing witness third. Practically speaking, hospitality as leadership is about listening, learning, loving, and only then leading.

Hospitality as leadership shifts from leading and facilitating projects to facilitating presence.

Congregational Barriers to Hospitality and Home-making

Churches both have cultures and are cultures.13 If a congregation is to embrace hospitality as witness as a homemaking community for the socially displaced, it must confront significant barriers to hospitality and homemaking, including authorizing narratives and plausibility structures at work in the culture of the congregation. Authorizing narratives are the shared experiences or stories that possess authority in the life of the congregation.14 On another level, plausibility structures are culturally shared realities, or systems of meaning, that determine what a given society will accept as plausible—whether or not it is believable or makes any sense—in terms of beliefs and behaviors.15 Each play a role in creating the practices and values that form the church’s common life and missional orientation. In some cases these practices and values result in structures (i.e., programs and institutional commitments) that obstruct hospitality from becoming an ecclesial posture.

Like people, most congregations are unaware of their culture until it is challenged, until they experience a new one, or until it is made explicit. In my experience, nothing challenges congregational cultures more than the socially displaced and marginalized. Listening is a key practice for leaders who wish to open themselves to this challenge. Listening allows the congregation’s leadership to learn the unobservable and observable elements of culture. Listening also helps the leadership learn how to lovingly navigate the consequences of extending the welcoming embrace to the socially displaced and marginalized. This requires the congregation’s leadership to constantly push back against the default impulse of vision casting and persuasion from a top-down approach. Then the hard work of facilitating a culture of listening—whereby the Spirit can be discerned through the voices, concerns, fears, and excitement of his people—can begin. There are several listening practices a congregation’s leadership can employ, such as ethnography and Appreciative Inquiry, but it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss them.

Nothing challenges congregational cultures more than the socially displaced and marginalized.

Ultimately, if the socially displaced and marginalized are to be welcomed and embraced by the church, a reorganization of priorities will be necessary as the congregation shifts from program-centered practices to the practice of faithful presence. When hospitality becomes the posture of the church and forms the congregation into a homemaking community, a new kind of Spirit-birthed power will overflow from within. Just as the gospel was born on the margins of the Galilean society, so too the church is reborn at the margins of its own society. Hospitality as witness and leadership leads the church to shine the light of Christ throughout its city as a prophetic witness of the inbreaking kingdom of God, and the dominant categories and systems within a culture of displacement will be subverted.

Williamsburg Christian Church and 3e Restoration Incorporated

The journey toward hospitality and homemaking began for Williamsburg Christian Church (Williamsburg, VA) six years ago, one year after my arrival to serve as a pastor. At the time, it was a program-centered church in steady decline, deep in financial debt, but unwaveringly committed to loving one another. They were what some might call a “country church.” The church was in need of new life—of missional renewal.

After I asked the congregation to join me and my wife in walking from homelessness to holistic sufficiency with a set of grandparents, a daughter, and her infant son, we began experiencing missional renewal as a church. Men and women within the congregation began exploring how their vocation could be leveraged to equip this family toward holistic sufficiency. Others were simply seeking to be present with the family over lunches and dinners, while others offered transportation to various places or to help them take the necessary steps in the transition from homeless to housed. Challenges and conflict from within the church developed as underlying assumptions, taken-for-granted values, and stereotypes were uncovered. The culture of our church was becoming observable we began shifting away from facilitating programs to facilitating presence. A shared leadership approach was formed as we learned new listening practices to navigate the change in mutually submissive ways. Old authorizing narratives and plausibility structures resistant to change were confronted as new narratives created new movements that allowed us to establish new plausibility structures. Missional renewal was taking place, and it was happening from the margins. Consequently, men and women living through homelessness heard they could find a home with us, and so they have. This includes two group homes of mentally ill and intellectually disabled adults that were recently asked to leave two different local churches, making them socially displaced in a unique way. Now they have a home with us.

Word of what God was doing in Williamsburg Christian Church went out into the city, not only in the wooded areas, hotels, and under bridges where the socially displaced dwell, but into the business community and other faith communities. As Williamsburg Christian Church continued soliciting local businesses to provide various professional services and resources at free or discounted rates for our friends living through homelessness, a network of professional coaches developed. Christians and non-Christians alike began asking how they could leverage their vocational expertise to alleviate homelessness. Financial advisors, dentists, therapists, attorneys, job-training specialists, and other professional services necessary for the socially displaced to find healing on all human dimensions joined us in this Spirit-led work of hospitality and homemaking. A Restoration Process was eventually formed to guide our socially displaced friends living through this particular journey toward holistic sufficiency.

After walking with a few families out of homelessness and bearing witness to God’s restorative work among us, a twenty-church interfaith collaborative approached Williamsburg Christian Church to learn about our approach. They wanted us to equip each member church to walk with people living through homelessness to holistic sufficiency. So we did. Our collaboration led to the formation of a nonprofit organization called 3e Restoration Incorporated, which equips, empowers, and encourages local churches to walk in relationship with friends and families in need as they transition from homelessness to holistic sufficiency. Our work facilitates presence as a people of hospitality and homemaking rather than a program-driven approach. Hospitality in the name of Jesus is a dignity-restoring, homemaking practice that can begin healing the whole person—socially, emotionally, cognitively, physically, and spiritually.

Hospitality in the name of Jesus is a dignity-restoring, homemaking practice.

Only three years old, 3e Restoration is staffed by two full-time employees working to actively equip seven local churches spanning four denominations in Williamsburg, Virginia, to become communities of hospitality and homemaking for the socially displaced. 3e Restoration’s work now extends to Dallas, Texas, and Fredericksburg, Virginia, where three local churches spanning two denominations are learning to become communities of hospitality and homemaking.

Our little congregation called Williamsburg Christian Church is still learning and growing. We are the mentally ill, the intellectually disabled, the homeless, the formerly homeless, the addicted, the recovering, the wealthy, the poor, the widows, the married, the never-been-married, and the divorced; we are the working, the unemployed, the young, and the old; we are private citizens, public servants, the “from-here’s” and the “come-here’s”; we are the wandering, the confused, the certain, the abused, the abandoned, and the hopeful; we are the struggling, the privileged, the prideful, the humble, the entitled, and the forgotten. But above all we are learning how to be loved by the Lord of heaven and earth and are discovering that our identity is in something greater than these labels most often ascribed to us. We know that we have been broken and bruised by sin, but we also know that in Jesus we have been given new life by the holy Breath of God. So we’ve decided to live as a committed family of witnesses to God’s gracious hospitality, and together we find our home with him as we proclaim with our lips and lives that Jesus is Lord.

Fred Liggin is a multi-vocational pastor at Williamsburg Christian Church, founder and president of 3e Restoration Inc., and a mission specialist for church renewal with Mission Alive. He is currently pursuing a DMin in Contextual Theology at Northern Seminary.

Is renewal possible? Is there hope? Are there ready ears to hear the message of God’s prophets? What patterns of renewal are being proposed? Anthony Wallace’s classic theory of revitalization movements provides a framework for examining the potential renewal of Churches of Christ. In the contemporary context of cultural disintegration, three paradigms of renewal compete. Among them, faithful presence and gracious hospitality is the counter-cultural model of missional renewal that reflects the life of Jesus.

The simplest definition of a missional church is an UP – IN – OUT diagram that illustrates the life of Jesus. He lived UP—in relationship with his Father; he lived IN—in relationship with his chosen followers; and he lived OUT—in relationship with the hurting world around him. Jesus modeled this three-dimensional living when he prayed all night before selecting his twelve apostles (UP), brought them into community (IN), and then went out to minister with them (OUT) (Luke 6:12–19). Likewise, God desires that his people live in these relationships.1 The paradox is that living the rhythm of UP, IN, and OUT is not easy, especially in the United States, a nation characterized by fragmentation and individualism.

The Cultural Context of Euro-American Missions

Understanding this rhythm of life is immensely important in the United States of America, because social fragmentation and contemporary management models have displaced this spiritually formative mode of living as God’s chosen people.

Fragmentation

Bowling Alone describes North America’s loss of “social capital” beginning around 1960. The book, whose subtitle is The Collapse and Revival of American Community, warns that unless Americans find ways to reconnect with one another, they will experience a deepening impoverishment in their lives and communities.2 In Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg observes that in suburban USA “a man works in one place, sleeps in another, shops somewhere else, finds pleasure and companionship where he can, and cares about none of these places.”3 Christians within our churches are also experiencing this fragmentation of social capital! Their communities of faith frequently have little connection to their neighborhoods, their work places, and the schools where their children learn.

Management

The American church also suffers from a crisis of leadership. “Our culture, and as part of it the church, has developed into a management-oriented society. We want to manage growth, manage productivity, and manage human resources.”4 Our leaders have inadvertently become organizers of ministry rather than makers of disciples in the context of imitative ministry. Dan Kimball suggests changing our focus on leadership: “Leadership in the emerging church is no longer about focusing on strategies, core values, and mission statements, or church-growth principles. It is about leaders first becoming disciples of Jesus with prayerful, missional hearts that are broken for the emerging culture. All the rest will follow from this, not the other way around.”5 Breen and Cockram prophetically say: “We need leaders who will step out of ‘managing church’ and make discipling others their primary objective. The time has come to humbly acknowledge before God that we have failed to train men and women to lead in the style of Jesus. Whether through ignorance or fear, we have taken the safe option, training pastors to be theologically sound and effective managers of institutions rather than equipping them with the tools they need to disciple others.”6

Our leaders have become organizers of ministry rather than makers of disciples.

I am often in meetings with leaders who have planted or are leading large churches but prayerfully confess that their churches are not sustainable in this fragmented American cultural climate and that many of their members have not developed the rhythms of living as disciples of Jesus.

Reflection on Disintegration and Revitalization

Anthony Wallace’s classic essay on “revitalization movements” helps us evaluate what has been occurring in different streams of Churches of Christ. Revitalization movements are “deliberate, conscious, organized efforts by members of a society to create a more satisfying culture.”7 A society’s leaders deliberately and consciously seek some type of revitalization as tension increases when older paradigms no longer seem tenable. A more plausible, even more satisfying, culture is created out of this organized effort to revitalize a disintegrating culture. These revitalization movements occur during times of widespread stress and disillusionment with existing cultural beliefs.

Despite cultural variations, Wallace perceives that movements follow a remarkably uniform pattern of disintegration and renewal throughout the world.8 He outlines five stages of a revitalization cycle: (1) the steady stage, (2) the period of increased individual stress, (3) the period of cultural distortion, (4) the period of revitalization, and (5) the new steady stage. Some movements fragment and disintegrate during times of cultural distortion because appropriate revitalization does not occur. In this paper I apply Wallace’s stages to different streams of Churches of Christ, explaining what has occurred and is occurring during each stage, and then describe three contemporary models of revitalization.

Some movements disintegrate in times of cultural distortion because revitalization does not occur.

The Steady Stage

I distinctly remember the steady stage as a child living in Iowa. My parents left our Dutch Reform heritage in south-central Iowa and became members of the Churches of Christ. They felt that the Church of Christ was the original church founded on the Day of Pentecost soon after the resurrection of Jesus. Churches of Christ, they believed, followed the Bible while the denominations followed human creeds and customs. They “came to Christ” by following the “five steps of salvation”: hearing the Word of God, believing what it says, repenting of their sins, confessing that Jesus was Savior, and being baptized for remission of sins. They believed they were part of the one true church and fervently evangelized out of this assumption. They studied the Bible topically through a hermeneutic of “command, example, or necessary inference.” I grew up within this environment and, as an undergraduate, led campaigns for Christ from Harding University that reflected these ideologies. I believed what F. W. Mattox once wrote: “The church of Jesus Christ is neither Jewish, Catholic, nor Protestant. It is non-denominational in its origin, worship and organization. It is the body of Christ, functioning according to the New Testament directions, organized according to New Testament patterns and worshipping according to New Testament instructions, extensive enough to embrace in its fellowship all who comply with God’s requirements and who thus become a part of that body.”9

The Period of Increased Individual Stress

Tension rises during the period of increased individual stress. Members have difficulty coping with their traditional perceptions of reality in the midst of changing times. Thus, prophetic personalities propose new, more plausible options.

My graduate professors at Abilene Christian University in 1968–69 were such prophetic personalities. I learned how to read Scripture to discern the author’s intent by exegeting the discourse within its historical and cultural context. I remember a brief, pre-class statement by Dr. Abraham Malherbe when he picked up a Bible by the teacher’s podium and used it to illustrate a typical “Church of Christ” Bible: The wear on the pages illustrated that the book of Acts and General Epistles had been thoroughly used but the Gospels were relatively untouched. I remember thinking, “How am I reading the Bible? What is my hermeneutic?” I recall a similar incident when reading a comment on one of my research papers about a theology of animistic beliefs in Dr. Thomas Olbricht’s class on Philosophy of Religion. He scribbled, “I perceive that you have a deeper understanding of animism than Christianity.” Dr. George Gurganus, the first professor of missions in Churches of Christ, challenged me to plant “indigenous churches” and contextualize the message of the Good News of the kingdom of God. I realized that I had selectively read the Bible rather than allowing it, as a narrative of the work of God, to form my life. How was I to read the Word of God? How was I to reflect the character and mission of my God?

During this time, prophetic voices, like those of Carl Ketcherside and Leroy Garrett, challenged us to rethink our heritage in terms of the original intentions of Stone and the Campbells and called for greater grace and unity. An example is Carl Ketcherside’s sudden and heartfelt conversion on a trip to Ireland.10 Ketcherside had been a major voice within the anti-institutional segment of Churches of Christ. As editor of the Mission Messenger, he argued against the development of Christian colleges and the use of full-time preachers and debated these issues with leaders like G. C. Brewer and G. K. Wallace. However, he experienced a sudden transformation during a preaching trip to Ireland, where he visited the Presbyterian Church where Thomas Campbell preached before his journey to America.

After entering the church Ketcherside noted an old bronze likeness of Thomas with a plaque that read “Prophet of Union.” He planned to speak that evening on Ephesians 2:14: “For He is our peace who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us.” Throughout that day the words “For He is our peace” reverberated in his mind. As he spoke that evening, he realized that he was speaking more to himself than to his audience. He returned to Belfast that evening and walked two miles through a strong snow storm to reach the house where he was staying. His thoughts kept returning to Thomas and Alexander Campbell and their goal of restoring the unity of all believers. Convicted both by the words of the plaque and by his own sermon, he acknowledged what he would call his own “sectarian spirit.” As he read Revelation 3 the following morning, Ketcherside was deeply touched by the Lord’s message to the church at Laodicea: “For you said, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked” (v. 17). As this forty-three-year-old preacher read the words of Jesus, “Behold. I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him and eat with him and him with me” (v. 20), he did something that he had never done. He asked Jesus into his heart! From that moment he had a completely different approach to life, to worship, to Christianity, and to ministry.

He became part of what some called the “progressive movement” that emerged in the 1960s and preached and spoke to Churches of Christ, Christian Churches, and Disciples of Christ.11

During this period of disequilibrium, my hermeneutics and theological convictions were nuanced and shaped through the experience of learning a new culture and language as a church-planting missionary first in Uganda and then among the Kipsigis people of Kenya. Over a 14-year period my wife Becky and I learned in community with not only our American co-workers, Fielden and Janet Allison and Richard and Cyndi Chowning, but also with a maturing national Kipsigis leadership. When the first six people were baptized in a village called Chebongi, across the valley from our home, we realized that something special had happened: We had planted our first church among the Kipsigis! This realization led us to ask some core biblical questions: What is the meaning of church? How does a church live as God’s distinct missionary community in this culture as explained in their language? In response, we spent the next three months studying the book of Ephesians, allowing this missionary letter to shape our model of ministry formation. Over the years we were driven by cultural realities to ask questions that we would never have asked in North America, specifically: How do we communicate the kingdom of God in this largely animistic culture? How do we read Scripture with an ear toward the relationship between God and the gods in the Old Testament, Christ and demons in the Gospels, and Christ and the principalities and powers in Pauline literature so that we teach and minister effectively to those in bondage not only to their own cultural beliefs but also to the power of Satan? Ministry in Africa thus served to de-secularize my Christo-secular heritage!

How does a church live as God’s distinct missionary community in this culture?

When we returned to the United States in 1986, the Churches of Christ were entering a stage that Wallace would call “cultural distortion.”

The Period of Cultural Distortion

During cultural distortion, new options confront old ways as people seek resolutions to the tensions of society. Culture is in a state of flux. Old conceptions are seen as increasingly incomprehensible and continually called into question. Prophets then challenge the assumptions that, in their understanding, fail to reflect the kingdom of God.

Our family returned to the United States in 1986, and I began my teaching ministry at Abilene Christian University during what I would describe as a crucial time in the history of Churches of Christ. A series of books challenging Church of Christ sectarianism were coming off the press. These books called for a new biblical hermeneutic and described an implicitly secular way of living embedded in our forms of religion. The year 1988 was a water-shed year with the publication of Illusions of Innocence by Richard Hughes and Leonard Allen, The American Quest for the Primitive Church edited by Richard Hughes, Discovering Our Roots: The Ancestry of Churches of Christ by Leonard Allen and Richard Hughes, and The Worldly Church by Leonard Allen, Richard Hughes, and Michael Weed.12 Reflecting on these writings, Mark Noll said: “The project they unfold is nothing less than a full-scale, rigorous, and critically informed investigation of the notion of ‘restoration,’ the controlling principles of the Churches of Christ since their inception . . . , that is, attempts to cut back through the corruption built up over centuries in order to recover the pristine purity of Christian faith and practices on the model of the church’s early period.”13

The most prophetic of these publications is The Worldly Church: A Call for Biblical Renewal. The authors assert that the “scandal of the cross” has been replaced by salvation by human obedience, which has secularized the life and activities of what should be God’s covenant community. They write, “The things that matter most to the world often set the agenda for the church. In virtually every age, those who call themselves the church gradually take on the shape and color of the culture, enshrining its idols, sanctifying its values, and blunting the scandal of the cross.”14 The outward forms are adored but the inward essence humanized.

While writing this article for Missio Dei, I was struck by the influence of Leonard Allen’s The Cruciform Church: Becoming a Cross-Shaped People in a Secular World. No other book of a Restoration heritage has so formed who I am! The sections of the book critique (1) the way we read Scripture; (2) the way we view God, (3) the place we give to the cross of Christ, (4) our stance in the “world”, and (5) our portrayal of Christ-like character. Throughout the book Allen asks two significant questions: “ ‘What have we been?’ and ‘What does God through Scripture call us to become?’ Both questions are essential. In the interplay between them we will find new direction and identity.”15 I took Allen’s class framed around this content in 1986 immediately after returning from 14 years as a church planting missionary in East Africa. The class and later the book helped refine the re-theologizing that occurred during my years in Africa and guided me to find my place in God’s mission in North America!

These renewal messages have eroded old paradigms, contributing to the development of a “cultural distortion” during which Churches of Christ are declining. No longer is salvation understood as merely a “five-finger exercise” of hearing, believing, repenting, confessing, and being baptized. Communicating the gospel in searchers’ homes using the Jule Miller Filmstrips, organized around the Patriarchal Age, the Mosaic Age, the Christian Age, God’s Plan for Redeeming Man, and History of the Lord’s Church, seems both inadequate and inappropriate—far too sectarian. Jeff Childers, Doug Foster, and Jack Reese, in The Crux of the Matter: Crisis, Tradition, and the Future of Churches of Christ, define the disequilibrium: “The sense of stability and certainty from the early and middle years of the twentieth century is largely gone. Our papers have polarized, lectureships attract increasingly narrow audiences, and preachers who are influential in one segment of the churches are often unknown or demonized in others. While there is still an amazing consensus on many teachings and practices, you can never be sure about what you’re going to get when you visit a congregation in another place.”16 Thus Churches of Christ, who were the fastest growing religious group in the US during my teenage years, have ceased to grow, have lost their cohesion, and are rapidly declining. Many have began attending more vibrant community and Bible churches that share their developing sentiments. Others have became disillusioned with Christianity and either overtly or covertly have fallen into the secular or even pantheistic ways of living and believing.17

Churches of Christ are declining during a period of cultural distortion.

Wallace writes that if revitalization does not take place, feelings of disorientation will increase with resulting instability leading to gradual cultural disintegration. The populations of disintegrating societies can die off, splinter into autonomous groups, or be absorbed into larger, better integrated societies.18 With this in mind, we ask: Is renewal possible? Is there hope? Are there ready ears to hear the message of God’s prophets? What patterns of renewal are being proposed?

The Period of Revitalization

During this contemporary period, I discern three paradigms for renewal, each having its own theological assumptions and practices. These different, yet sometimes similar, movements are (1) “Return to the ‘Old Paths,’ ” (2) “Organize and Manage,” and (3) “Faithful Presence and Gracious Hospitality.”

“Return to the ‘Old Paths’”

To some the first impulse when facing disintegration and demise is a return to the “Old Paths.” A contemporary proponent is Michael Shank with his book Muscle and a Shovel.19 The book is a testimony of Shank’s conversion from a nominal Baptist heritage to become a member of the Churches of Christ. The journey began when a coworker, based upon the reading of 2 Thess 1:6–10, asked, “Have you obeyed the gospel of our Lord?” Searching for this “gospel” and how to “obey” raised questions about the Sinner’s Prayer, instrumental music, the development of denominations, and the organizational structure of the early Christian church. Shank responded to challenges to the hermeneutics and sectarian orientation of his book by saying: “There should be no arrogance in our brotherhood. Some have claimed that this humble work is trying to bring people back to the 1950s doctrine. Dear friends, I am so sorry for I have missed the mark. I was not trying to bring us back to the 1950s. I was trying to bring us back to 33 AD. Our Lord purchased his one church with his own precious blood.”

“Organize and Manage”

A second, more prevalent, response to disequilibrium is to default to the management impulses of culture and to organize the church for “success.” This model is instinctive, not because of biblical precedent, but because it fits the organizational impulse of North America. The goal is frequently to become a growing megachurch with vast resources and high influence.

Church is envisioned as an organization to be managed rather than a community on mission with God. The focus is on managing projects and events, not personally walking with searchers within neighborhoods and networks and guiding them to become disciples of Jesus. The projects and events are coordinated by a paid staff rather than equipping lay leaders for these ministries. Strategic planning sets the course for the church rather than prayer and fasting and the discernment of God’s leading through the Holy Spirit. A hierarchy, whether formal or informal, is deemed necessary to implement the plans of the church rather than an understanding of the giftedness of all believers. Ministry leaders focus on giving information rather than modeling mission and inviting new Christians to imitate what they are doing. Within this structure the preaching minister becomes the most important leader of the church—the person people come to hear.

On a practical level this “manage and control” approach tends to negate the work of the Holy Spirit. The church plays the role of a vender of religious goods and services and invites people into the organization to receive these blessings. Church success is measured by attendance, bricks, and cash (the ABC’s of successful church growth) rather than the more difficult metric of “being transformed into the likeness of Christ” by reflecting “the Lord’s glory” (2 Cor 3:18). As David Fitch says, “There are Empire builders and then there are planters of the Kingdom and between the two is a huge difference.”

There are seeds of renewal, however, in some of these movements. One example is the Willow Creek Community Church, which published an introspective analysis of the relationship between church involvement and spiritual growth, called Reveal: Where Are We? They discerned four successive stages of spiritual development: (1) exploring Christ, (2) growing in Christ, (3) close to Christ, and (4) Christ-centered. Their findings were surprising: While Willow Creek was effectively helping people come to Christ and take initial steps as Christians (stages 1 and 2), they were not adequately equipping these disciples to grow into mature Christians (stages 3 and 4). Some of the most mature Christians could not find a place for ministry within the church and were looking for alternative communities which emphasized deeper spirituality.20

These shocking realizations led Willow Creek to determine which activities and programs would lead to greater spiritual growth. In the book Move: What 1,000 Churches Reveal about Spiritual Growth they discerned that participation in church projects or events does not predict or drive long-term spiritual growth. While these activities have some influence during the earlier two stages, personal spiritual practices, including prayer and Bible reading, have far more influence on long-term spiritual growth.21

This study suggested four “best practices” for spiritual growth: (1) Rather than providing multiple opportunities for personal involvement, newcomers are provided a “pathway . . . designed specifically to jumpstart a spiritual experience that gets people moving toward a Christ-centered life.” (2) “They embed the Bible in everything. . . . These churches breathe Scripture. Every encounter and experience within the church begins with the question, ‘What does the Bible have to say about that?’” Church leaders model a life based on the answers to that question. (3) “They embrace . . . discipleship values as part of their identity” and hold “people accountable for changing their behavior—for becoming more Christ-like in their everyday lives as a reflection of their faith.” (4) “Best-practice churches don’t simply serve their community. They act as its shepherd, becoming deeply involved in community issues and frequently have members serving in influential positions with local civic organizations. They often partner with nonprofits and other churches to secure whatever resources are necessary to address the most pressing local concerns.” They desire to move from consumer churches seeking to satisfy the felt needs of members to equipping churches “consumed with making disciples.”22

The movement from “organize and manage” to making disciples on mission with God is very difficult. This renewal is possible only when God grasps the hearts of discerning leaders who develop discipling practices that lead to spiritual renewal.

“Faithful Presence and Gracious Hospitality”

The third response to disequilibrium and demise is “faithful presence” and “gracious hospitality”—a missional response focused on growing as disciples of Christ within Spirit-formed communities with God’s mission flowing through us to the world. Stated simply, disciples are nurtured to live UP in relationship to God; IN in community under God; and OUT on mission with God in both worship gatherings and missional communities. While “organize and manage” reflects the impulses of our culture, “faithful presence and gracious hospitality” are counter-cultural perspectives reflecting the nature of Christ, who “became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). In describing this response, I define “faithful presence” and then relate these understandings to “gracious hospitality.”

Faithful presence is walking with God, basking in his love and holiness and living by the power of the Holy Spirit. Faithful presence is like marriage in which the husband and wife faithfully care for each other (Eph 5:25) or a family in which parents lovingly care for and nurture their children who then faithfully care for their parents at a later stage of life.

Faithful presence is incarnational: God comes to us in multiple forms and dwells among us. We, in turn, grow to dwell with him.

This presence is illustrated by God’s walking in the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve sinned, calling out, “Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9).This question is a metaphor of God’s faithfulness: Because he formed us in his nature, he loves us unconditionally, is always coming to us, sacrificed his Son for us, and indwells us through the Holy Spirit.

Faithful presence is illustrated by Moses’ face radiating God’s glory after he dwelled with God 40 days on Mt. Horeb (Exod 34:29-34; cf. 2 Cor 3:7-18) and Moses’ pleading statement to God, “If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here” (Exod 33:15), when the Israelites waiting for him at the foot of the mountain returned to the pagan customs of their Egyptian heritage.

The most explicit expression of God’s presence is Jesus Christ, who came into the world not only to die for our sins but also to show us how to live. This theology of incarnation is encapsulated in the name Immanuel. This Hebrew name עִמָּנוּאֵל (⁽immānû ⁾ēl), meaning “with us [is] God,” consists of two Hebrew words: אֵל ( ⁾ēl, meaning “God”) and עִמָּנוּ (⁽immānû, meaning “with us”). Who then is Jesus? The answer revealed by the incarnation is: Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man in one person. In other words, He is God incarnate. The incarnation of God in Christ shows just how far God is willing to go to identify with those he desires to serve and to save.

Before Christ ascended, he left a promise. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). The book of Acts describes the story of the church faithfully operating under the power of the Holy Spirit. The first Gentle church, during a time of prayer and fasting, was commissioned by the Holy Spirit to send out Barnabas and Saul “for the work to which I have called them” (Acts 13:1–4).

Thus “faithful presence” is distinctively Trinitarian. The church lives in relationship with the Father, models the life of the Son, and is being empowered by the Holy Spirit.

James Hunter says that this incarnation

is the only adequate reply to the challenges of dissolution; the erosion of trust between the word and world and the problems that attend it. . . . For the Christian, if there is a possibility for human flourishing in a world such as ours, it begins when God’s word of love becomes flesh in us, is embodied in us, is enacted through us and in so doing, a trust is forged between the word spoken and the reality to which it speaks; to the words we speak and realities to which we, the church, point. In all, presence and place matter decisively.23

As we nurture our souls, we are called to dwell in God’s presence—in our homes, our work contexts, and places of recreation; in our community of faith worshipping in the Spirit and encouraging one another to faithfulness; and in missional communities (or small groups) in specific neighborhoods and networks, inviting searchers to participate with us to experience living in God’s presence. Living in God’s presence is breathing in the Spirit to live cruciform lives as witnesses to the gospel (Rom 1:16–17), distinctively Spirit-filled in our secular, increasingly pantheistic culture!

“Gracious hospitality” forms the character of our communities—both in our worship gathering and in our missional communities. Gracious hospitality leads us to invite people into our lives, to “come and see” the presence of God. John’s Gospel records the enthralling story of two of John’s disciples following Jesus when they heard that he was the “Lamb of God.” Jesus turns and asks, “What do you want?” Not knowing what to say, these disciples respond, “Teacher, where are you staying?” Jesus says, “Come and . . . see,” and they spent the day with him (John 1:35–39). Andrew, one of the two, then called his brother Simon to “come and see” the one that he now knew to be the Messiah. The next day Jesus invited Philip, “Follow me.” Realizing that he had just met the Messiah, Philip told Nathanael that he had “found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Nathanael asks. Philip simply says, “Come and see.” As Nathanael heard Jesus describe his character and how he had seen him under a fig tree before Philip had called him, he declared, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the king of Israel” (John 1:35–51). With power Jesus invited people into his presence to know and follow him.

“Come and see” is the essence of hospitality. It is inviting people to walk with us—to see if this Christ Way is the right way. “Come and see” means “Come and think, . . . come and examine the evidence, . . . come and follow and change your life.”24 Hospitality is inviting people into our lives to see Jesus. What would happen if the church was known as a community walking in the presence of God?

Four practical changes are needed to support this renewal. First, God is worshiped as sovereign Lord who renews his church through the interceding of his Son and his indwelling Holy Spirit. Second, leaders understand their purpose as ministers who equip God’s people for works of ministry rather than organizers of projects and events. They grow beyond seeking volunteers for church projects to equipping disciples “so that the body of Christ may be built up” (Eph 4:12). Thus the church focused on the mission of God equips and releases her members into God’s mission as illustrated by the Antioch church (Acts 13:1-4). Third, what God has done through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ must flow through the veins of the church leading to vibrant gospel fluency. Our formerly secular vocabularies must reflect appropriate “words from God.” Fourth, the organization of the church must be simplified. When planting a new church, I suggest three primary structures—a worship gathering for teaching the Word of God, inspiration, and testimony about God’s mission; missional communities in neighborhoods and relational networks who live UP – IN – OUT so that the kingdom of God is locally visible; and missionary youth ministries focused on local middle and high schools. Teaching and nurturing, then, take place through equipped lay ministers within the missional communities of the local church. Thus the church will be equipped to minister personally, heart-to-heart, where members work, play, and live. Note, for example, new churches like the Redland Hills Church, Storyline Christian Community, Gentle Road Church of Christ, and Ethos Church.

The New Steady Stage

The final stage of the revitalization process, according to Wallace, is ideally a new steady stage in which the cultural transformation has been accomplished and the new system has proven itself viable.

It is hard to discern at this time what the new steady stage will be. Since Churches of Christ are locally organized, diversity and fragmentation are the tendency. I doubt that the “Old Paths” movement is sustainable because of its idealistic cultural roots as the “one and only” representation of the early Christian church. The “Organize and Manage” movement seems to be the most prevalent. Often, however, members of Churches of Christ tend to flow through these churches to more “successful” Bible churches, resulting not in a “new steady stage” but a stepping stone to a new heritage.

There is, however, real hope for innovative “organize and manage churches” who are called to intentionally mature disciples to become God’s missionary people. As mentioned earlier, the Willow Creek Community Church has intentionally sought such renewal. Also, Elaine Heath and Larry Duggins in Missional. Monastic. Mainline: A Guide to Starting Missional Micro-Communities in Historically Mainline Traditions envision missional communities that intentionally form at the edges of traditional congregations to prototype the new way of living UP, IN, and OUT within their neighborhoods and relational networks.25 The vital question, thus, is “How many ‘organize and manage churches’ have the spiritual imagination and courage to facilitate renewal?”

“Faithful Presence and Gracious Hospitality” is the most difficult movement of the three paradigms. Like the early Christian church, it relies on the power of the Holy Spirit to take root and flourish. However, like a mustard seed it can morph into “the largest of the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches” (Matt 13:31–32).

Thus, answering the question, Is missional a fad?, requires both a personal and communal calling. We must personally, prayerfully nurture our souls to live UP—in relationship with God; IN—in community with other Christians and searchers; and OUT—in mission equipping disciples through imitative practices of prayer, discernment, and mission. Communally, we must live in God’s faithful presence while extending gracious hospitality to those around us.

We must live in God’s faithful presence while extending gracious hospitality.

These practices are easier described than implemented. I confess that during certain periods of my life I advocated for missional living without adequately living as God’s emissary. Accordingly, we must encourage and equip those in our community of faith to practice such faithful presence and gracious hospitality. Finally, this nurturing for missional must occur in our Christian universities and training ministries. Leonard Allen, now the Dean of the College of Biblical Studies at Lipscomb, writes, “I am trying hard at Lipscomb to rethink and refocus the way we train men and women for ministry—particularly with a turn toward making praxis an integral (rather than mostly peripheral) part” of theological education.26

I pray that this article will provide a model to both help us understand ourselves and renew our lives around walking in God’s faithful presence as his missionary people.

Remember this wisdom from T.S. Elliot:

The Church must be forever building, and always

decaying, and always being restored . . . .

But here upon earth you have the reward of the good and

ill that was done by those who have gone before you.

And all that was ill you may repair if you walk together in

humble repentance . . . .;

And all that was good you must fight to keep with hearts

as devoted as those of your fathers who fought to gain it.

The Church must be forever building, for it is forever

decaying from within and attacked from without.27

Dr. Gailyn Van Rheenen served as a church-planting missionary to East Africa for fourteen years, taught Missions and Evangelism at Abilene Christian University for seventeen and a half years, and is the founder of and facilitator of church planting with Mission Alive (http://missionalive.org). His books Missions: Biblical Foundations and Contemporary Perspectives, Communicating Christ in Animistic Contexts, and The Changing Face of World Missions (authored with Michael Pocock and Doug McConnell) are widely used by both students and practitioners of missions. He edited Contextualization and Syncretism, a compilation of presentations of the Evangelical Missiological Society. His website (http://missiology.org) provides resources for missions education for local church leaders, field missionaries, and teachers of missions.

A better understanding of how practices are related to participation in the life of God is crucial for helping congregations discover their missional vocation in the world. To that end, this article surveys the recent literature devoted to Christian practices and, in turn, proposes more eschatological understanding of participation. After briefly considering christological and pneumatological perspectives on Christian practices in light of eschatology, hospitality is taken as an example of the practices that bear the conditions of possibility for participation in the life of God.

In the consulting work I do with congregations who are interested in missional innovation,1 we often talk about participation in the life of God as a way to invite them into the missio Dei. However, we never stop to define what this means, partly because we are never asked. I’m not sure what people hear when we say “participation in the life of God,” and I’m not even sure what we mean. What are we saying when we invite congregations to participate in the life of God, and how is that participation related to practices? A better understanding of how practices are related to participation in the life of God is crucial for helping congregations discover their missional vocation in the world. Though many have written on Christian practices and participation in the life of God, few have made it clear how these things are related. In what follows, I propose a way of thinking about this relationship that would help congregations identify practices that possess the conditions of possibility for participation in the life of God.

As a way of getting at the relationship of practices and participation in the life of God, I want to begin with a survey of the recent literature devoted to Christian practices. Christian practices have received a lot of attention the past few years, due in large part to the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre’s notions of practice seem to be the starting place for all who dip their toe into this conversation, even if their ecclesiologies are very different. He defines a practice as “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.”2

This definition is useful for theologians. It recognizes, for instance, that practice is rooted in social systems of meaning, which are in turn valued because of a particular account of the world shared by those who “cooperate” in a particular practice or set of practices. This socially embodied understanding conforms well to an understanding of the church or congregation as more than an aggregation of individual, religious consumers. The faith is primarily a socially embodied experience made both concrete and coherent through practices.

The faith is primarily a socially embodied experience made both concrete and coherent through practices.

Moreover, MacIntyre’s notion of “internal goods” releases the church from the need to ground its own practice in some prior, or general, account of reality. The shared practice of the church emerges from its unique account of the good. Still, while internally coherent, practices extend beyond the boundaries of a given tradition as the realities of changing times and circumstances are engaged and notions of the good are enlarged.3 Additionally, practices assume bodies.4 Any account of the church in which practices are constitutive is simultaneously rooted in creation and the incarnation. Through the church’s practice, the body of Christ becomes visible in the world in a material way. The church visible through practices avoids ideal or essentialist accounts that stand above or behind the actual existence of Christian communities. This shift from the ideal to the actual can also be applied to what it means to be Christian. To be Christian is not simply to hold certain ideas or to believe certain notions. Faith is not simply belief in this sense, but faith works itself out in love—in material practices with others for the sake of the world.

Through the church’s practice, the body of Christ becomes visible in the world in a material way.

Prominent Proposals about the Place of Practices

As I mentioned above, MacIntyre has been conscripted in the service of diverse theological viewpoints. An impressive literature on practices has been produced by a group led by Dorothy Bass and Craig Dykstra, including writers like Miroslav Volf, Diana Butler Bass, and Christine Pohl.5 Following MacIntyre, they define Christian practice as “things Christian people do together over time to address fundamental human needs in response to and in the light of God’s active presence for the world.”6 They are vague, however, on how these practices relate to the life of God. After all, these practices contribute to the thriving of all human life—“good for oneself, for other people, and for all creation”—but are done by Christians “somehow differently because of their knowledge of God in Christ.”7 As Roger Owens suggests, for the Bass/Dykstra project, practices are a response to what God has done. While Dykstra and Bass hope for an account of practices that also provides an adequate account of participation, these practices are a response to what God has done. As Owen summarizes, “This way of talking about practices—“in light of and in response to”—suggests that the activity of God for the life of the world is happening somewhere other than in the practices of the church, so that through the church’s practices the church must find where God is working, and join with God, cooperating, so to speak, in meeting human needs.”8

A quite different perspective on practices, also relying on MacIntyre, is represented by theologians like Stanley Hauerwas and James McClendon. For instance, McClendon finds in MacIntyre helpful correspondences to an account of the world revolving around notions of principalities and powers. As Owen summarizes McClendon,

MacIntyre’s concept of a social practice is useful not only for understanding the undeniable social constitution of human life; it is helpful for understanding the Bible’s suggestion that the social constitution of human life is corrupted and redeemed, rebellious against God’s reign and yet conquered by the victory of Christ. The social constitution of human life, embodied within a web of social practices, finds its place in the theological narrative of God’s creating and redeeming the world as those biblical ‘principalities and powers’ with which Christ conflicts and over which he conquers.9

Additionally, McClendon imagines how practices constitutive of Christian community create a distinctly Christian engagement with the larger society, a note that resonates with the work of Hauerwas. In fact, this is the advantage of MacIntyre’s definition for “baptist” theologians like McClendon and Hauerwas: it refuses a general account of morality, leaving us instead to particular accounts, rooted in particular narratives, that result in concrete, embodied, and contrast communities.10

I find the approach taken by McClendon more helpful than that of the Bass/Dykstra group in providing the conditions of possibility for practices to be an actual participation in the life of God. However, I want to make my own proposal in light of the helpful, albeit incomplete, work of Roger Owens. Owens is very specific in laying out a detailed proposal that would allow some practices to be an actual participation in the life of God. Owens’s proposal is considered and expansive, moving through a variety of influences, including Maximus the Confessor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Herbert McCabe, to name only a few. His account of participation insists that “the church’s participation in God is Christ’s practicing himself as the embodied practices of the church, in the Spirit, for the world.”11 As such, the following descriptions apply:

1. An account of participation must faithfully maintain the distinction between Creator and creation. . . .

2. An account of participation must be given in terms of the particular and embodied nature of the church. . . .

3. An account of participation must begin with the particularity of Christ and the church and not in a general account of creation’s participation in God qua creation. . . .

4. An account of participation should show how participation in God is not an invisible essence or interiority, but is socially visible and has the shape of the life of Jesus’s peacefulness. . . .

5. An account of participation will need to be given in particular terms of the activity of the triune God.12

What is missing in Owens’s account is a truly eschatological understanding of participation. His understanding of participation would be strengthened, perhaps even significantly altered, with a sixth criterion: An account of participation will define the relations of God, church, and world in light of the coming kingdom of God. While Owens gives lip service to participation as eschatological, his notions of it are not strong enough to warrant a listing in his criteria.

Owens’s “eschatology” is better labeled a “teleology,” or an end in which theosis, or deification in the life of an individual, is the result. There is little talk of participation in the life of God for the sake of a new heaven and a new earth. As teleology, the life of the church may be seen as continuous with the life of God.13 Eschatology, however, is not necessarily simply the state of things at the end, or the telos of existence. In particular, an apocalyptic eschatology works from the future into the present. The church experiences its life, not only in continuity with God, but also in discontinuity with the larger realities of the coming kingdom of God.

Owens’s lack of a robust eschatology, in which the future of God is breaking into the present in material ways, betrays the fact that his account of participation does not escape the gravitational pull of a substantialist ontology, which defines participation principally in terms of “natures.”14 This becomes evident, for instance, in Owens’s use of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.15 In explaining Bonhoeffer’s understanding of preaching as an actual participation with Christ, Owens gives attention to Bonhoeffer’s Christus totus ecclesiology. “‘The Church is the body of Christ,’ writes Bonhoeffer. ‘It does not signify the body of Christ. When applied to the Church, the concept of body is not only a concept of function, which refers only to the members of his body. It is a comprehensive and central concept of the mode of existence of the one who is present in his exaltation and humiliation.’”16

Bonhoeffer is aware of the difficulties of identifying the all-too-human church with Christ. He is clear that while the church is the body of Christ, Christ must also be distinguishable from the church. According to Owens, Bonhoeffer can, by way of Chalcedon, hold that “in the church itself is Christ’s adoption of humanity, without any confusion between the divinity and the humanity.”17 Bonhoeffer, according to Owens, both totally identifies and distinguishes Christ and church through an appeal to “natures.”18

Instead of conceiving of the space between Christ and the church through an understanding of “natures,” I propose an understanding of participation that honors the daylight between church and kingdom around notions of “identity” seated in a temporal or dynamic ontology. Here I am following Robert Jenson (and others19), who move to make discussion of God’s identity prior to a discussion of his nature. Jenson would shift the discussion of God from “a perduring something” or “continuing subject” toward more personal, temporal, and dramatic meanings.20 The way the identity of God is known is through the narrative construals of the biblical testimonies. “To the question ‘Who is God?’ the New Testament has one descriptively identifying answer: ‘Whoever raised Jesus from the dead.’”21

Jenson’s discussion of God’s “being” moves away from a list of God’s attributes and toward a series of relational qualities of the God rendered through the narrative testimonies of Scripture. God is an event, a person, a decision, a conversation.22 These render not so much God’s nature but rather his identity. This is not to deny the category of natures, of God’s nature or human nature, but to suggest the priority of identity in participating in the life of God, and subsequently, its methodological/theological priority. This is the case simply because identity is a step closer than nature to rendering an actual person. Identity refers to a concrete person who can be “identified” as distinct from others. The first question of participation is not, “In what do we participate?” (substance, power, causation, knowledge, etc.) but “With whom do we participate?” (The One who raised Israel’s Messiah from the dead).

The first question of participation is not “In what do we participate?” but “With whom do we participate?”

Participating in the Life of God: Trinitarian Eschatology and the Practice of Hospitality

This move from nature to identity bears fruit precisely around the question of the relation of practices to participation in the life of God. Imagining participation in relation to natures leads Owens to describe only those practices that deliver a mystical sacramentalism as a real participation in the life of God: preaching, eucharist, and baptism. So, on the one side, we have the Bass/Dykstra school of thought that speaks only vaguely of Christian practices as participation in the life of God, if at all. Practices are, after all, things other people do as well, but that Christians do “somehow differently because of their knowledge of God in Christ.”23 Nowhere in the Bass/Dykstra literature are the eucharist or baptism even discussed as practices. On the other side, we have Owens, who because of his onto-theological commitments can only talk about the sacraments as practices that provide a real participation in the life of God. The shift I have described, a narrative approach rooted in God’s eschatological identity, would offer a third way that would include both the sacraments and the longer list of practices by Bass/Dykstra, all as a real participation the life of God.

While evoking eschatology as a factor in an account of practices as participation is already a step forward, in my opinion, the gains are amplified when considering eschatology from a Trinitarian perspective. For the sake of space, I want to consider briefly christological and pneumatological perspectives in light of eschatology.

Cruciform Christology

For Paul, the death and resurrection marks a dramatic turn of the ages, wherein the future realities of the new creation have broken into the present. The resurrection, anticipating the resurrection at the end of the age, is the sure sign that the new age has broken into the present. More than that, the self-giving death of Jesus displays the very power of God, a power other than that of the principalities and powers of this present age. The death of Jesus, in this view, is more than a transactional event whereby sins are forgiven. Rather, it is a reality in which we participate. This is notable in Paul’s autobiographical texts, which feature the language of participation. “I am crucified with Christ” (Gal 2:20). “I want to know Christ, and the power of his rising, share in his sufferings and conform to his death” (Phil 3:10). “For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So, death is at work in us, so that life may be at work in you” (2 Cor 4:11–12).24 Statements like these are what Paul indicates by the phrase, “in Christ.” He is participating in his cruciform identity.

No one has written more persuasively about the cruciform shape of Pauline faith than Michael Gorman. Gorman views cruciformity as more than just an imitation of Christ but as an actual participation in the life of God. For this to be an actual account of participation would require that the shape of God’s life be cruciform, which Gorman finds in various places, particularly in the Christ hymn of Philippians 2. Kenosis is not simply something Jesus did but is an expression of who God is, possessing a self-emptying life for the sake of others.25 Gorman, in fact, claims for Paul an understanding of salvation as theosis, defining theosis as “transformative participation in the kenotic, cruciform character of God through Spirit-enabled conformity to the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected/glorified Christ.”26 For biblical authors, like Paul, participation in the arc and movement of the dramatis personae Dei,27 is an actual participation in the life of God precisely because God inhabits the space created by this movement.

So, we participate in the cruciform life of God through practices that are kenotic or self-giving. Narrative practices conforming to the identity of God established eschatologically in the power of the crucified one, therefore, constitute a participation in the very life of God. Jesus, as the second Adam—the firstborn from the dead and progenitor of a new humanity fit for the realities of the coming age—makes available to us God’s life in human form, or practice. The Spirit of God—the Spirit of the risen one and agent of the future glory of God—empowers the eschatological people of God to share in Christ’s life in anticipation of the coming new creation.

We participate in the cruciform life of God through practices that are kenotic or self-giving.

Advent Pneumatology

This brings us to a consideration of the Spirit from an eschatological perspective. Since Moltmann’s epochal The Crucified God,28 the Spirit has frequently been identified as the agent of God’s coming future. The Spirit, for Moltmann, does not bring about the consummation of history (futurum) but rather a deliverance from history as the Spirit works as the agency for the coming future of God (adventus).29 Jenson refers to the Spirit as “the End of all God’s ways . . . because he is the Power of the divine future.”30 The pouring out of the Spirit in Acts 2, therefore, is a sign that the future Day of the Lord has become effectively present.

Michael Welker provocatively refers to the Spirit’s effective, eschatological presence as a “force field,” through which we participate is the Spirit’s life, in “valid, liberating, and liberated life.”31 Welker’s notion of the Spirit as force field rescues the Spirit from overly individualistic conceptions—the Spirit working only for the benefit of the individual. The Spirit of God, more characteristically, creates spaces in which the cruciform power of God works for redemption, justice, and liberation, working not just within people but among and between people—even in and through creation.

Hopefully, I have given enough description to establish both a cruciform christology and an advent pneumatology as eschatological and participatory, creating the possibility that Christian practices participate in the life of God. I would like to end the paper with an exploration of hospitality as a preeminent missional practice, largely determinative of missional vocation and identity, that bears the possibility of participation in the life of God.

Hospitality

When coaching congregations to practice hospitality, we certainly mean they should provide room for others when they venture into “our space.” You should treat visitors well. We emphasize more, however, the capacity to participate in God’s hospitality in other people’s space. Part of this is due to the missional critique of Christendom that claims the “if you build it, they will come” days are largely over. Congregations in a new missional era will have to increase their capacity to form relationships apart from their own privilege—a kenotic move. This commitment is embodied in year one (of a three year process) in the practice of Dwelling in the Word, in which Luke 10 is used and participants are invited to share with a “reasonably friendly looking stranger” (a member of the congregation they may not know as well) and “listen them into free speech.”32 The act of attending to the other as stranger is hospitable. Luke 10 is chosen precisely because it depicts God’s hospitality occurring on other people’s terms. It depends on finding “people of peace.” God’s hospitality often takes place away from home in Luke-Acts: for example, Zacchaeus, Cornelius, Lydia, the jailer. Often, these encounters are arranged by the Holy Spirit.

Congregations…will have to increase their capacity to form relationships apart from their own privilege.

In the second year of our process, we invite congregations to “plunge” into their communities to find “people of peace.” We encourage them to shed paternalistic notions of mission attached to the prepositions “to” and “for,” and instead to go expecting God’s hospitality under the preposition “with.” This shift in prepositions is itself a foregoing of privilege in anticipation of the Spirit’s ability to create liberated and liberating space between and among people. It embodies both a cruciform christology and advent pneumatology.

Hospitality is an example of the practices that bear the conditions of possibility for participation in the life of God. Others have helpfully pointed to the centrality of hospitality to being Christian,33 but few if any discuss it as participation in the life of God. I believe that moving the possibility of participation from a substantialist to a narrative ontology, with the attending move from “nature” to “identity,” frees the necessary space to explore hospitality and other practices more explicitly as real participation in the life of God. The integration of belief and practice in this way, moreover, would highlight missional theology’s own unique contribution to broader theological conversations. If theology is not simply thinking the faith within certain categories (e.g., Trinity, christology, eschatology, etc.) but instead is concerned first with naming the missio Dei contextually, then theology must necessarily be done within practices that promise participation in the life of God. Seen this way, theology itself is a practice, and the congregation is its primary location and agent. Apart from wedding practices and participation in this way, missional theology loses both its unique place in the larger theological enterprise and its ability to help congregations reimagine their lives.

Dr. Mark Love is Director of the Resource Center for Missional Leadership, Dean of the School of Theology and Ministry, and Associate Professor of Theology at Rochester College. Mark served congregations in Texas and Oregon full-time for 17 years before finding his place in the academy. In addition to teaching courses in evangelism, missional ecclesiology, and congregational transformation, Mark works extensively with congregations pursuing missional innovation.

Charles Kiser is Director of Training for Mission Alive, a North American church planting and renewal ministry, and a missionary with Storyline Christian Community in Dallas, Texas. He is currently pursuing a DMin in Contextual Theology at Northern Seminary.

This issue of Missio Dei, for which I am honored to serve as a guest editor, seeks to explore the contours of mission in the United States. Our vision for such exploration was to invite leaders of mission ministries in the US associated with Churches of Christ and Christian Churches to share their perspectives on the growing edge of their reflection and practice on mission. This issue includes contributions from representatives of ministries such as Global City Mission Initiative, Nexus, Kairos Church Planting, Missionary Residence for North America, and Mission Alive. Each of these ministries is deeply committed to mission through the local church, either through forming new ecclesial expressions or by working with existing churches for renewal in mission. Each of them are, in truth, ministries of the local church—they exist because churches and church members support them with prayer, service, and finances. This local church criterion for exploring developments in mission might seem odd to some: Why such a narrow focus on mission via the local church? What about forms of mission outside the church?

These questions are pressing because of the changing focus of ministry in the US. A few years ago I was invited to participate in an evaluation group for a seminary associated with Churches of Christ. I learned about the overall decline of theological education institutions in the United States and that the number of people being trained for ministry was decreasing. But I was particularly fascinated to discover that the shrinking number of trained ministers were choosing diverse settings in which to work. The seminary had once trained individuals to work almost exclusively in congregational settings. More recently, however, students were choosing paths other than congregational ministry: for instance, chaplaincy, social justice ministry, and “emerging” or startup ministry. These new trajectories were affecting the makeup of the student population so much that the seminary was beginning to reshape its curriculum.

On the surface, it was no wonder why students were turning away from congregational ministry in favor of other forms of ministry. A significant number of congregations within Churches of Christ are, or at least are perceived by the new generation of ministers to be, unhealthy and dysfunctional. Perhaps students grew up in a congregation and found it lacking in its spirituality and discipleship. Others may have heard stories from fellow students who had entered into congregational ministry only to be chewed up and spit out by conflicted elderships. Some might be suspicious of the institutionalization of congregations that created an inward focus and organizational bureaucracy that stifled meaningful ministry and mission. One student shared with the evaluation group his experiences of preaching for a rural church nearby. He observed: “I feel like I’ve been trained to serve a church that doesn’t exist.” Whatever the reasons, students are finding something unappealing about congregational ministry and passing over it in favor of alternative forms of service. Given this changing context of ministry, it may appear out of touch to publish an issue on US mission with such an exclusive focus on the local church. But there are deeper issues at stake.

It seems that, in addition to these experiential motivations, there are also theological reasons for exploring alternative forms of ministry. Over the course of my own theological education in Church of Christ schools, Bible professors sought rightly to deconstruct two theological commitments that were once commonly held in Churches of Christ. The first belief is that the kingdom is the church.1 On the contrary, the kingdom is the reign or rule of God. “The church is the community of the Kingdom but never the Kingdom itself.”2 It follows, then, that God and his kingdom are at work outside of the church in the world. The second belief is that “mission” is the church’s mission to make disciples of all nations. The theology of missio Dei challenges this notion: “It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfill to the world; it is the the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the church, creating a church as it goes on its way.”3 Rather than having ownership of and responsibility for the mission, the church joins God in what he is doing in the world by his Spirit. God is at work in the world before the church ever gets there.

These theological reflections about the church in relation to kingdom and mission have positive implications. They provide a path beyond sectarianism, which determines who is in or out of the kingdom. They also alleviate the anxiety of having to perform or generate the mission, because God is the primary missionary who leads his people into mission. The church is repositioned to a greater place of humility within God’s story in creation. In light of both these positive implications and the changing shape of US ministry, why then are we engaging in a discussion of mission so focused on the local church? Because, if pushed too far, these shifts could displace the role of the church in God’s mission and create imagination for “kingdom work” or “mission work” that no longer requires the community of faith.4 The kingdom is not the church, but the kingdom of God always creates the church—a community of people who live by the Spirit under the reign of God in Christ in the world. God’s mission to renew all things is not the property of the church, but God’s mission always has a church. Therefore, it’s impossible to speak rightly about the mission of God or the kingdom of God without also speaking of the social reality being formed in their wake.

The kingdom is not the church, but the kingdom of God always creates the church.

This is not to deny a place for social justice or other such initiatives in the mission of God—only that the church ought to be the primary arena in which such initiatives take root and grow. Neither is it to deny that experiences of the church’s shortcomings and brokenness motivate alternative forms of ministry. Rather, I want to argue, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, that “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly”5 (in hopes that by God’s grace we will eventually get better at it!). We are most faithful to God’s mission when we tend both to the renewal of existing church expressions and especially to the cultivation of new expressions. The church, after all, is the vehicle through which “the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Eph 3:10–11).

The articles in this issue have been developed by gifted missional thinkers and practitioners within the church. They offer fresh imagination for the church’s participation in the missio Dei and faithful responses to the changing landscape of ministry. I commend these articles to you, readers, so that the United States church in mission “may become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4:13).