Last week, I posted a simple job description for myself based on a description of Paul’s work. I’ve finished the job description I’m going to turn in to the IRS. I could have thrown something together, or even just copied someone else’s for the purpose of the IRS. But, I decided this would be a good opportunity to work through my primary functions for this season of Austin Mustard Seed.

The results are below. I’d welcome any feedback, especially on the roles described and the language used. Overall, I like it. It still feels a little formal to me, but this is the IRS afterall!

Local Theologian - The pastor serves as a local theologian by connecting an understanding God’s ongoing work in creation with the unique contemporary context of Austin. Functions of this responsibility include:

• Deep listening to the Scriptural narrative, the Christian tradition, and the cultural influences of Austin as a means of engaging the three with one another.
• Form the church community around the core values of Story, Wholeness, and Presence through teaching and interaction.
• Invite the church community into local and global mission and justice as an expression of a theology shaped not only around ideas, but action.

Community Development - Shape the community around the movement of God’s Kingdom into the world through spiritual formation and multiplication. Functions of this responsibility include:

• Form relationships with others with the purpose of mutual growth in the Way of Jesus.
• Engage difference and brokenness in the Austin culture to help repair broken relationships with God, each other, creation, and self.
• Facilitate the start up of new house church communities and larger gatherings throughout Austin as needs or opportunities arise.
• Cultivate the gifts and passions of others in the church community as new expressions of the Kingdom of God in the world.
• Develop others as leaders in our community who can share the responsibilities of community guidance, mentoring, and decision making.

Administration - The pastor will manage the general operation of the church community to provide structure for mission. Functions of this responsibility include:

• Work with the treasurer and the rest of the board to budget and manage the operating expenses of the church community as a means for inward and outward mission.
• Form relationships with other churches and organizations for the purpose of partnering in mission.
• Provide responsible oversight for the physical resources that belong to the church such as equipment, promotional and training materials, etc.
• Be responsible for miscellaneous operating requirements such as government paperwork, scheduling board meetings, etc.

The picture to the right is Lesslie Newbigin. It’s not exactly the kind of picture that will score an author a big book deal these days. Glance at the back cover of the best sellers rack, and you’ll see lots of hip, yet pensive, looking people. Or perhaps pensive, but hip.

Lesslie doesn’t really look like either. That’s why you should read his books.

With a growing list of books that I want to read, I’m accepting the reality that I’m not going to read them all. In fact, I’m finding freedom in saying no to many so I can say yes to the best. New books about how a church should, could, or might engage with it’s culture come out every week. Some are good. Some are fluff. But so many owe the origin of their thinking, at least some of it, to Lesslie Newbigin.

Newbigin’s bio will tell you all you need to know about why you should read him. You can find a good summary on WIkipedia, but for the sake of summarizing said summary… Newbigin was raised in the UK but spent 33 years in India in the middle of the 20th century. When he returned to the UK in 1974, he saw how much it had changed. In his time away, the UK, like much of Europe, had moved the Christian faith from the center of culture to the edge.

His experiences in India helped him to see the UK in a way that others could not. It was Newbigin who helped shift Christianity to see that it must rethink how it must engage with culture from the margins instead of the center. It is a message that the church, including me, is still trying to learn.

So where should you start? Thanks for asking. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society is considered his most important work, with Foolishness to the Greeks getting mentioned a lot too. Those are the two I’ve read so far. My buddy Todd has a series of posts interacting with The Open Secret and mi amigo Dean loved Proper Confidence. And if you’re on a tight budget (and have an aversion to libraries), you can always dip into the hundreds of article available for free on Newbigin.net.

Get your Lesslie on.

As we’ve been getting settled in Austin, I’m trying to learn about the city through its history. While I’ve yet to find a thorough book with the history of the city, I’ve been able to pick up bits and pieces here and there.

Inherent to the culture of Austin is a long rivalry with Houston. It hasn’t been evident in contemporary culture, but it was present in history as the cities vied to be the capitol of Texas. While Houston was emerging as an oil city, Austin decided to emphasize a different product: ideas. This led to the prominence of the university in the city, and the emphasis on ideas still shapes the culture of the city.

I love the idea (pun intended) of a city whose main export is ideas. Of course, I do love ideas…after all this blog is called some strange ideas. Just like Paul brought strange ideas to Athens, I am experiencing this openness to ideas in Austin. (Six ‘ideas’ in one paragraph…get the idea?)

Shortly after we moved here, Bob Carlton told me that it is still okay to talk about what church you are a part of here. I thought he was nuts. General church attendance in Austin is low, and I had seen some of the sentiment against Christianity that existed in the culture.

But in one on one conversations, I’m discovering that Bob is right. The openness to ideas seems to win out over the subtle anti-Christian tone of the city. Even people who have discarded prior experiences with Christianity seem curious, sometimes even intrigued, as I share with them about Austin Mustard Seed.

Perhaps they are being polite; after all, one thing that Austin does share with the rest of Texas is a welcoming spirit. But I think the reality is that a willingness to learn from others on our part, and a general openness to ideas in Austin, has made for some great conversations. I look forward to the next one.

Some links that are worth a few moments of your valuable time:

• My friend Zach put his iSight to good use and recorded an iChat interview with Rob Bell. There’s a lot of good banter about creativity and teaching. For your viewing convenience, Zach broke it down into part 1, part 2, and part 3. (For the record, I introduced Zach to Rob’s teaching, so I’m trying to claim some kind of Executive Producer credit.)
• My friend Blaine (and fellow 2008 graduate of Mars Hill Grad School) helped create this promotional short about MHGS. It makes me want to load the family up and return to Seattle.
• My friends Justin and JJ do fantastic work in Africa with Life in Abundance, Intl. This video highlights some of LIA’s work. Find a way to partner with them.
• My friend (and church planting coach) JR put together this Primer on the Missional Church — primer is an understatement. This is a gift.
• My friends at Pixar — I’ve never actually met anyone connected to Pixar, but I’m sure we’d be friends — are making another movie. Go enjoy the trailer for Up. Pixar is the only studio that makes movies that consistently live up to and even exceed the anticipation created by the trailer.

Cool friends, eh?

We’re in the process of getting our 501c3 status with the IRS, and one of my tasks at hand it write my job description. With that in mind, I read the quote below from Richard Hays’ The Moral Vision of the New Testament. If you replace Paul with John and Mediterranean with Austin, I think it pretty much nails how I would like my job description to read:

Paul* was first of all a missionary, an organizer of far-flung little communities around the Mediterranean* that united clusters of disparate people in the startling confession that God had raised a crucified man, Jesus, from the dead and thus initiated a new age in which the whole world was to be transformed.

What do you think? Will the IRS accept it?

I read this today, and it seemed rather timely…

There is no room for a political fanaticism that supposes that my political achievements will establish God’s kingdom, or declares a holy war against opponents, or tramples on individual human beings in the pursuit of a political millennium. The public political act has its real meaning simply as a kind of acted prayer for the coming of God’s reign.” — Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks

Each of us possesses amazing resources of knowledge, wisdom, and creativity. Our organizations need to learn to respect, nurture, and accomodate this wealth of human capital. We need to learn how to liberate the power of peers to create extraordinary organizations. Unfortunately, the way most companies are managed today, they fail to make use of their most valuable resource — their people.” — Jeffrey Nielsen, The Myth of Leadership

The idea that one can or could at any time separate out by some process of distillation a pure gospel unadulterated by any cultural accretions is an illusion. It is, in fact, an abandonment of the gospel, for the gospel is about the word made flesh. Every statement of the gospel in words is conditioned by the culture of which those words are a part, and every style of life that claims to embody the truth of the gospel is a culturally conditioned style of life. There can never be a culture-free gospel. Yet the gospel, which is from the beginning to the end embodied in culturally conditioned forms, calls into question all cultures, including the ones in which it was originally embodied.”

I started reading Foolishness to the Greeks, by Lesslie Newbigin this week. This quote is on the first few pages, and methinks you might be reading a lot of Newbigin’s words on this blog in the coming weeks.

What Newbigin expresses above fits with what we are trying to capture here in Austin. The process of church planting is not about replicating one’s church experiences from somewhere else, but about engaging as a missionary in the culture where you live. In fact, I’m using the term church planting as little as possible. The language that I have used much of the last year is that we are coming to Austin as missionaries — as foreigners with a need to listen to, and learn from, the culture.

But, Newbigin sheds new insight for me above. Not only am I beginning to learn more about this culture — and, of course, about the Gospel — it is also a process of learning about self. I am seeing how my understanding of Gospel is limited to the culture(s) that I have been a part of.

What lies ahead for me, and for Austin Mustard Seed is a delicate process of learning what is true about Austin and myself, and how the Gospel shapes both. Or perhaps better said, how the Gospel is Good News for both.

For those looking to rotate some new content onto your play list, I give you some of my favorites of late. And if you’ve had your coffee, you might notice a theme here…

• For my Explosions in the Sky or Sigur Ros loving friends I’d suggest you give a listen to Joy Wants Eternity. They are new to me too, but so far, I think I like Must You Smash Your Ears Before You Learn To Listen With Your Eyes best. I find I’m listening mostly to instrumental tunes these days…it’s like a musical score to the story of my life.
• A few months ago, one of my Twitter peeps mentioned The Moth Podcast. (Was it you, Jake Bouma?) It is stories, stories, and more stories. Some are humorous. Some are poignant. Some are both. All of them are engaging.
• Rob Bell was at his best this weekend in his message called Beware the Dogs. He did what he often does so well — placed a small text into the larger story of Scripture to reveal how it mattered then…and now.
• While you are on that Mars Hill Teaching Page, or on their podcast, listen to Brian McLaren’s guest teaching called Which Story Do We Live In. It a great summary of some of his ideas from Everything Must Change.

Did you catch it? The theme? What can I say…it’s my year of the story.

And this means, as is well known, that his theology has the character of inaugurated eschatology, that is, of a sense that God’s ultimate future has come forwards into the middle of history, so that the church is living within — indeed, is constituted precisely by simultaneously within! — God’s new world and the present one.” — NT Wright, Paul: In Fresh Perspective

(This is the final post in a series reflecting on David Bosch’s six distinctives for a missiology of Western culture. See the introductory post for a little background.)

in the context of the secularized, post-Chrsitian West our witness will be credible only if it flows from a local, worshiping community.

Of all of Bosch’s six distinctives, none resonates with me more than this one. It seems that there is a great deal of opinion (and tension) over what it means to be the church. The discussions are full of rhetoric as people make their cases for house churches, local parishes, regional megachurches, or no organized form of church at all.

But I think the question is not what structure of church is best, but over how a church community can best engage with its own context. Bosch goes on in this section to quote Lesslie Newbigin: “the only hermeneutic of the gospel is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.” We must perpetually ask ourselves how we can form, and reform, our community so that we can be a living and visible gospel to our local culture.

Bosch emphasizes this:

the question about the feasability of a missionary enterprise to Western people hinges on the question of the nature and life of our local worshiping communities and the extent to which they facilitate a discourse in which the engagement of people with their culture in encouraged. Local church “happens” where believers are involved in what is critical for people and society.

There is a unique challenge we face in our North American metropolitan areas, and I think this is true for both urban areas and suburbia. We are a transient culture. We have few relationships that happen due to our geographic proximity, where we tend to bump into the same people simply because they live, shop and work closeby.

I was challenged a few weeks ago in a conversation with a respected retired pastor who knows the heart of Austin well. I asked him what he would do if he were planting a church today. His response was that he would focus on an elementary school, and do all he could to bless it. In his view, and I can’t disagree, elementary schools are our last remaining gathering points for any neighborhood, where we can interact with people who share our proximity.

If the church is to be a local, worshiping community, then we have to seriously engage with the idea of what exactly it means to be local. Who are the people we can connect with regularly because of our daily life patterns? What does it mean to minister to, and alongside, those that our lives happens amongst?

For Blog Action Day, my friend Bob Carlton (let’s be honest…he’s everybody’s friend) invited me to join a parade of Austinites to blog about the issues of poverty here in Austin.

I have to admit I have regretted it a bit. Like Julie, we’ve only been here for a few months. And what I’m really aware of is how easy (and dare I say chic) it is to be aware of global issues of poverty, and not really aware of what is happening locally. But I can share a few random observations from my experiences in Austin:

• It is easy for me to go about my day seeing people who are mostly like me, at least in terms of economic levels. They live on my street, generally go to the same coffee shops and stores, and do similar recreational activities. But living in a new place means I have had been to state or county services three different times to register cars, get a driver’s license, and set up a non-profit. I admit I am evaluating based on appearances, but each time I’ve been reminded that not everyone shares a background similar to mine.
• Near our home, there is a greenbelt with some trails meandering through it. Someone has set up “camp” right in the midst of it. This isn’t camping of the recreational kind, but someone making a temporary home until they told they can’t anymore. I can only assume they will then find another.
• A few weeks ago, I joined my daughter for lunch at school. I think that she was more excited about getting to invite a friend to join her for a meal on the cafetorium stage — a privelege reserved for kids who have a visiting parent. Her friend shared that she has no bedroom, but sleeps on the couch in their family room every night.
• Yesterday, my friend Sam gave me a tour of Space12, a new community center where he works in East Austin. As we talked afterward, he shared the complexities that are happening all around Austin (and many other urban areas). Middle and upper class families are moving in and the poor are moving further out. The poor are no longer found in what previously might have been considered the “inner city”.

Perhaps none of these situations is as extreme as what is happening in other parts of the world. But that doesn’t mean they should be overlooked. In our age of globalism, where we can be in touch with what is happening in any country through wifi and web browsers, I hope we don’t lose touch with those we can actually touch. Stories like what I have glimpsed above are all around Austin. The truth is, it feels like there is more potential cost, more potential risk, for me to engage locally then globally. I hope I — I hope we — can rise to such a challenge.

(This post is part of a series reflecting on David Bosch’s six distinctives for a missiology of Western culture. See the introductory post for a little background.)

A missionary encounter with the West will have to be, primarily, a ministry of the laity.

I suppose one might argue that the laity are being given more opportunities for responsibility in churches now than they have in decades. (Laity would refer to volunteers, or anyone in a church that is not professional clergy.) The emphasis in a lot of my experiences with Evangelicalism is for pastors to be those who raise up lay people for the purpose of leading and running the ministries of the church.

This isn’t a bad thing in itself, but I hope we can see the need for more. The laity are equipped to do far more than offer energy and ideas for the ministries of a church. I think Bosch was envisioning much more as well. He emphasizes the importance of the laity for two reasons:

first, the church’s witness will be much more credible if it comes from those who do not belong to the guild of pastors;

From my observations, I’m finding this to be true sometimes, but not always. Some I know avoid stating that they are in professional ministry as much as possible, expecting that such a revelation will immediately shut down conversations. Others I know embrace the role of clergy, and function well with the title of pastor outside of the church building’s walls. (I really appreciate how Kester seems to have developed a persona as a pastor at large for Austin.) I’m finding a happy middle ground by making 2/3 of my income as a professional pastor, and 1/3 doing web design. When I meet someone, mentioning that I do both offers to different routes from which the conversation might proceed, and two different means to gain (or perhaps lose!) credibility with others.

Bosch continues:

and second, only in this way will we begin to bring together what our culture has divided, the private and the public, for the lay members of the church clearly belong to the public and secular world, whereas the pastors belong to a separate, “religious” world.

Dualism in Christianity is a buzz topic for me — I tend to see it playing out everywhere, so I can’t help but see how Bosch addresses it with this idea. An empowered laity is a statement against the spiritual vs. unspiritual dualism that distorts Christianity today. The lay people of a church must be seen not just as resources to enhance programs and ministries within our churches. They are the body of Christ, with opportunities to engage in the every day as sacred agents of the Kingdom of God.

I love this idea, but I must admit it is still threatening to me as well. What does it mean for me to pastor a community of people that are so engaged outside of the church that it can’t be measured? How can we shape a community the celebrates well the stories of what is happening outside of our structured times together?

The fundamental truth, as I see it, is this — the laity are a great asset to a church community not because what they can do “inside” the church, but for what they can do “outside”. The church is the sent people of God, so how can we better honor the sacred vocation of those who are “sent” Monday through Saturday?

Next post: a local, worshiping community

It has been nine months since I received my Amazon Kindle. It has been a great device, and I blogged some initial thoughts here, as well a post on Creativityist about how it has been helpful for research.

While the Kindle has been a convenient way to read literature, both classics and contemporary, it’s main appeal to me has been as a research device. Having a searchable index of some favored theologians and practitioners makes me a little giddy. One of my original concerns was the limited selection of books available, but that is changing. In addition to a growing library of contemporary writers like Alan Hirsch, Tim Keller, and Rob Bell, there are now books available from the likes of Lesslie Newbigin and Jurgen Moltmann, whose works I’ve been eager to dive into more.

I still have far too many unread books on my shelves that I am working through. But once I do, it is conceivable that I could be in the midst of 3-4 books at a time all on the Kindle. My shoulders will be so thankful.

Note: I had started writing this post earlier this week, hoping to finish it up today. This morning, an email came through from Amazon with coupon codes for Kindle owners to share with friends. It is good for a discount of 5% off a Kindle, bringing the price down to around $340. I am posting them here for anyone who wants to use them at checkout. Each one is only good one time, so if you use one, please let me know in the comments so that I can remove it from the list.

RJGX-PW4N2Q-T2EAU3 (used)
RJ2S-29U8R8-3SZT83 (used)
RJ9V-5Q4L7F-YE9DAL
RJWP-TVH9F6-E9PCCP
RJFA-FM2ECJ-N2FPUY

Last week, I wrapped up three books that I had been working through. It has been a rich couple of weeks reading these books, and I wouldn’t be surprised if all three of these make it on my list of favorite reads of 2008. By the way, none of these were books I was sent for review…just good reads that I think are worth a mention…

Jesus Wants to Save Christians - by Rob Bell and Don Golden
Rob Bell continues to be a voice that helps shape a lot of my thinking. This was my favorite of his books, and I think it gives a helpful framework for reading the Bible as a whole. It should only be seen as a summary of the Biblical narrative, and not a comprehensive one at that. But, it provides an important understanding for how one should see the context of Jesus’ ministry in the first century and the ministry of the church in the 21st. Scot McKnight’s response to this book matched up with many of my own thoughts, or perhaps I should say my thoughts matched up with his.

Signs of Emergence - by Kester Brewin
This book was first recommended to me a few years ago when it was published in Britain under the title The Complex Christ. I wish I wouldn’t have waited so long to read it. If there an “emerging church genre” of books, than this one is at or near the top of the list for me. It is a thoughtful book, and not just a “here’s some cool stuff we’ve done to be emerging in our church” kind of book. Lost in much of the emerging church discussion at a popular level is how the term came about in the first place — the idea that “the principle of emergence is all about bottom-up change.” (pg. 35) The emerging church must be seen as more than a response to the prior church, or as a popular church culture phenomenon, and Brewin helps us understand its origins in the developing science of emergence.

What is the What? - by Dave Eggers
I have to be honest here, when this book released a few years ago, I shied away from reading it. I assumed it wouldn’t be as ‘fun’ to read as Eggers’ previous books. It isn’t. It is the story of one of the Sudanese Lost Boys. It is published as fiction, though it is based on the life and memories of Valentino Achak Deng, who worked closely with Eggers. The fiction label, along with the description of events that seem to awful to be true, created a bit of denial for me as I read the first half of the book. I knew that stores such as this happen daily, but when you don’t see them firsthand, it is so much more convenient to write them off, isn’t it? But I need to be reminded, I need to see what happens in our broken world, even if I don’t see it firsthand every day. Now may God give me the will and courage to repond to that which I don’t want to see.