Category: md-7

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.

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.

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.

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).