There was an article the other day talking about how some Catholic churches still celebrate the Tridentine Mass, the mass that was used prior to Vatican II in the 1960's. This mass, which is performed mostly in Latin, is really a beautiful dance of the priests and those who tend to the altar moving and praying and focusing every moment and word on God. The priests have their back to the congregation most of the time and the service is mostly silent, except for the soft chanting of the worship leaders.

    It is easy to understand the tensions of the church that led to them removing this service as the primary format for mass. With the lack of interaction, the prayers done in an ancient and unspoken language and the seeming impersonality of the service I too probably would have pushed to make the Gospel and the worship of God more tangible for my congregation. But most styles of worship whether they are contemporary, traditional, seeker sensitive, and even ancient/future blended worship tend to be more congregational focused than God focused in our culture. It is not that these styles do not lead people in worshiping God, or they are by nature dishonoring to God. Instead, our consumerist society has led us to try and create worship that will bring people in, attract larger congregations, and feature better and better performances, preaching, and styles to build our churches. It is obviously difficult to try and draw people in and still have the primary focus of every aspect of worship be glorifying God. So how can we do it? How can we have worship that is dynamic, God-centered, and still makes the Gospel tangible for the world? When we look at a service like the Tridentine Mass, there are elements there that refocus worship on God and we can use them in our services, regardless of what style of music or liturgy or non-liturgy they use.

1) We can stop teaching our people that worship is all about them. No matter the style of worship we can easily give our congregations the wrong message about worship. We mis-educate them when we make decisions about music, messages, order of service or the focus of the service that is driven by practicality and not by our theology and understanding of God.

2) We must bring silence and reflection back into worship. In our fast paced and entertainment driven culture we have leave little space for God. By creating intentional silence and reflection in our services we let God back in. These times will seem awkward and difficult at first, things that make us grow usually do, but in time they will become treasured times of conversation with God.

3) Our creation of services should reflect less of our cultures priorities and more of God's. If slick, entertaining, bite sized nuggets of truth are the value of our culture, but difficult complex and messy realities and mysteries are the ways of God, how should this affect our times of worship? If God is a God of continual creation and redemption how should this inform our creation and use of liturgy and music? If Jesus took time to always seek out the marginalized, the seemingly unimportant, and the weak as he ministered, how should our gatherings as the Body of Christ similarly reflect these values?   

There are certainly more ways for to refocus our worship on God. Do you have any thoughts?

It is an important book and one I would recommend for any evangelical. Unlike some of the Emerging Church, Fitch refuses to trade in his evangelical heritage because of its faults and instead works to try and redeem and refocus the church. It is a courageous book that tackles some immense topics and I fear no review can sufficiently reflect on all of his ideas.

Fitch begins by looking at our Definition of Success in the evangelical church. For many in the church, success has become a game of numbers. Our goals for success are built around growth in the three B's: Buildings, Bucks and Behinds in the seats. The churches that are celebrated as successful in evangelicalism are often the megachurches such as Willow Creek, Saddle Back, North Point, and others.  Fitch asks the questions of how we got to this place and is it a good place to be. He suggests that the church got this way because of the individualism and corporate models that dominate our culture. I would agree and suggest that there is no separating the profound effects of the corporate world or our inherent American individualism from life in the Evangelical church. Just as there was no separating the early church from the philosophies and structures of the Roman Empire. There were efforts to overcome both of these in the early church (see Colossians) but I don't know if they did much better of a job than we do. (After all the church structured itself after the Roman Empire and ended up with an emperor, see The Pope)

So if this is true, that the evangelical church has allowed individualism and corporations to define our success, what cost has it brought? Fitch suggests that the cost is that we only focus on professions of faith, a one time crisis event, as a mark for identifying salvation in a new believer, and we are growing into unhealthy churches by following corporate models. Instead of this emphasis on crisis moment conversions the church should look to baptisms and disciples as signs of proper growth. An improper focus on shallow salvation has lead to bad growth in the church.

Why can growth be a bad sign? As you create a church and set up the organizational systems and goals of that church you create it with an end product in mind and ultimately you find out how well you have done by what you have produced. It is often said that as an organization you are perfectly set up to produce whatever kind of product you are currently producing. You have to change the organization to change the product. So lets look at the product we are producing within evangelicalism to examine the machine. Are we producing mature Christians? Are we raising up a generation of Biblically literate, socially concerned, sanctified stewards of the Gospel? In some cases yes, in many cases no. What we are creating, Fitch points out, is a community of consumers. Our churches offer services to make us attractive to the consumer. And as long as we offer those services and they meet the needs of the consumer they come to our church. When we cease to offer the services they want, or someone else offers them better we lose them as consumers of our goods. Church isn't neat and clean and tidy. It doesn't always meet your needs; at least as you perceive them. It requires more than that. Doing church right is messy, hard, it takes a long time to build up, and it requires dedication and commitment of time and resources. But those are not values built into a church designed to grow rapidly or build big numbers. They can exist in a large church, but being large is no sign that real growth of spiritual depth is going on. It may actually be a sign that it is not. 

So what does success look like in the church? It certainly isn't about budgets or the number of people coming. It is about the lives that are being transformed and shaped into the image of Christ. That is a process that is slow, intentional, and requires full engagement. It requires each of us to examine our own faith and determine how committed to working out our salvation we are as well.

Going beyond ideas of success, which is really only the first section of the book, Fitch lays out a return to more ancient and proven church practices in the Evangelical church. This includes sacramental living and worship, using the lectionary, balancing between teaching centered and experiential worship, living each year in rhythms of the church calendar, and recapturing the prophetic imagination of narrative in our preaching. For each of these subjects Fitch, fairly comprehensively, examines the historical roots, modern realities, and hopeful future of the evangelical church.

What is most striking about Fitch’s book, especially for those well versed in the Emerging Church and its writers is that actually offers answers to the problems he sees in evangelicalism. He isn’t abandoning his heritage, his denomination, or his backing down from the challenges he sees. Instead, he works to recapture a holistic missional vision for evangelicalism that doesn’t abandon its strengths or history. For those of us in the Emerging Church this book serves as a brilliant beacon of hope shimmering forth in the darkness of the postmodern soup. Maybe there are actual answers to these struggles we have with the church. Maybe in the search for the church of the 21^st Century we will discover that it doesn’t require us to reinvent the church so much as rediscovering the church.

The Great Giveaway is a fantastic book and well worth picking up. I have already given copies to a number of friends and recommended it to many others. Pick it up, chew on the ecclesial meat it provides and begin to reexamine your own church and your vision for the church through Fitch’s lens. If you do, you will rejoice over the church you find. 

The whole night was almost ruined for me, however, by a very strange conversation with someone at the show. I was cleaning up afterwards and someone approached me with a conversation about the baptismal font in our church. They seemed interested in our approach and methodology for baptism. It was a weird question but I started talking to him about it. He wasn't interested in a conversation, however, he was interested in debating the theology of how you baptize someone. An obvious proponent of immersing people during baptism, he started arguing with me, or attempting to, about our practices. I was dumbfounded, certainly not by his arguments or theology, it was standard baptist theology, but by his purpose. He had just driven 3 hours for a 3 hour concert at my church, which was provided for free, and now he wanted to argue with me, in a condescending and belligerent tone, about baptism!?!? I don't get people. Christian hang ups on specific moral issues, theologies, or social concerns often over shadow the good the Gospel is doing in this world. The church has a bad name because we can't love each other. If we can't love each other inside of the church how will we ever share the love of Christ with the world. So whoever you were, debating baptism with some guy you don't know guy, I offer grace and forgiveness to you and refuse to be irreconciled to you or to trash you. I am glad that you came to our concert, hope you were blessed, and wish you well in your immersion of new believers. May you find the grace to accept us for who we are.

First, do movies about this event honor the victims or do they dishonor them by taking tragedy and making it enterntainment, no matter how well they are made? There is obviously a line somewhere in the making of a film between recreating history in visual media to honor the history and keep it in our conscious (A film like Schindler's List for example) and a film that sensationalizes history for profit and entertainment (Pearl Harbor for example). What factors go into determining where a film falls on that line? 

Second, what am I to make of companies whose only purpose in production and distribution of such a movie is profit? I refuse to believe that any of these studios are acting for the comon good. You don't become a studio executive by working for the common good. So, does the reality of consumerism and profit making preclude these films from existing for the common good? Certainly films can have a powerful voice and impact on individuals and communities, but, I doubt that most film companies have that in mind. It makes me distrust films that try to accomplish something for society and are released by major production companies. 

Third, with the reality that movie making is an art, and all art carries with it interpretations and stylistic elements, how true to the details of the story do we expect these films to be? Certainly we must expect all the major aspects to be in the right order, but the reality of that day was chaos, miscommunication, and mayhem. Trying to make a movie about Flight 93 or about what was going on in the Twin Towers between the crashes of the planes, or about the terrorists as they planned and implemented the events, includes a lot of guess work. How do we balance that artistic license with the reality of the pain and suffering people brought? How do we balance that with the reality that whatever images and ideas are produced by these films will alter history for the audience in some way. No one who has watched historic films such as JFK, Malcom X, Braveheart or even the Passion of the Christ, can completely remove those images from their conscious as they reconsider the events of the past. In many ways that is a helpful tool of media. In other ways that is the downside of living in an image driven world.  

Any thoughts on the film? Will you go see it? Any reviews to share? I would love your thoughts…… 

For a long time, however, I have realized that many of the ideas I held about evangelism were rooted in a poor understanding of the Gospel. Evangelism,after all , is sharing the good news or the Gospel with the world. It is being a messenger of the gospel. If you have a poor understanding of the gospel, you will certainly have a poor understanding of the how to share it. You will also have poor understanding of how to live out the gospel. So what is the gospel and how did I misunderstand it?

The good news of Jesus, the message that he went around proclaiming, centered itself on the Kingdom of God (or as the Gospel of Matthew usually refers to it the Kingdom of Heaven). The good news is that the Kingdom of God is here, and it is open to all people. Those who are in the kingdom of God are called children of God and they are heirs to his blessings. That is good news! The good news is that the separation of humanity from its creator has been removed. No longer do we need toirreconciled to our creator. Jesus, through his life and death and resurrection and ultimately his return, has opened the gate to the kingdom for all people.

What many of us, seemingly especially in Evangelical and Fundamentalist circles, have misunderstood about this gospel is that this salvation, that comes from being made a child of God, is a salvation centered on eternity. For much of my life the only part of the gospel that seemed particularly important was going to heaven. All those who believe in Jesus will go to heaven. I got my heaven ticket punched and now I am all good. I viewed evangelism as simply trying to get people to pray a prayer and "accept Jesus as their savior" so they too could go to heaven. That was the most important part. To do anything else, such as concentrate on discipleship or social concerns, seemed secondary to just getting people into heaven.

You know what, that isn't the gospel. Jesus didn't become incarnate and serve as our atonement just so we could go to heaven. If you read the gospels Jesus seems much more interested in how we live now, here, on earth, as part of the kingdom of God, than he was about our eternal destiny. Certainly heaven and eternal life are a significant part of Jesus' message, but Jesus seemed to think that your eternal life began now and so you better start living it. The Gospel is not just about some prayer or heaven, it is about heaven here and now, lived and experienced by those in the Kingdom of God. That means that growing in our faith, serving God and others in this world, and living a life of worship are our salvation. They aren't something we do in addition to our salvation. They are salvation itself. We have been saved to live as a kingdom people in this world. We have been saved to be disciples of Jesus. We have been saved to make a difference in our world. We have been saved that we too may proclaim the good news of the kingdom. To live our lives this way is to work out our salvation and grow in the holiness and sanctification God calls us to.

But, when we misunderstand this purpose of our salvation, we misunderstand how to share the good news with others. A life lived working out our salvation as kingdom people is a life of evangelism. It is not just about making Christians. Jesus told his disciples, "Therefore go and make DISCIPLES of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." Our charge of bearing the good news to the world is a charge to make disciples, to instruct, lead, live along side of others and be examples of the life Christ lived among us. You can't do this through a tract. You can't do this with a bullhorn on a corner. You can't do this merely arguing with someone. You can't do this quickly. You can't do it halfhazardly . You can't pretend to do it. You can't leave it to someone else. All who have heard and believed the good news carry the inherent responsibility of living it out and in doing so sharing it with the rest of the world. The good news is here. The Kingdom of God is all around us. And we, the church, the body of Christ, have been called and equipped to bring it to the world.

I don't know what happened to this woman, it seems as if she has little motivation to make up these allegations, but the courts will decide on any wrong doing that might have taken place. What has really made me think, however, is the responsibility that Duke had for preventing this incident from ever happening. 

There has been a culture of privilege and looking the other that has been created around this team. There had been numerous signs that there was excessive partying and out of control behavior with this group. These charges have brought light to a bevy of earlier charges for publicdrunkenness, public urination and altercations that already existed. This incident was the inevitable result of a group of you men who live with a sense of indestructibility. I can remember being 20, athletically gifted (although certainly not to any extent like these guys), intelligent and carrying an arrogance that said I could do anything. It is one of the things that makes great athletes great, this sense of arrogance. But when the coach and the university failed to address this culture of excess and allowed it to continueunabeited , these charges were inevitable. It is every institution's responsibility to be aware of and to control the behavior of those who are part of their institution. 

This brings us back to the church. The church, even more so than a university, has the responsibility to be aware of the behavior of their people, and to hold them accountable for that behavior. This has to be one of the hardest tasks of the church. It is also one of the least desirable. When someone signs on at a church, when they join and become part of that community, they pledge to honor Christ with their life and uphold the mission of that church. Unquestionably each one of us in the church, at times, fails to uphold the call to holiness, Christ centered love for the world, and service of God and the world. So how should we, as the Church, work to hold one another accountable to this mission? How do we prevent a culture where sin is not only tolerated but ignored along with its inevitable consequences for the individuals and the church involved?

This accountability has to start with authenticity and awareness. Too many of us come to church, worship, and leave. We don't try and connect with others or expose people to the realities of our lives. We put on a our best clothes and best behavior and then go before God and try to appear holy. We have to start by being real with one another. This requires a lot of time together, outside of church, in the real world. It also requires the courage to be honest about our struggles and failures as well as our successes. This must be modeled by leaders who live in accountability. It is hard for a leader to be completely vulnerable with the people they lead, but they can't be fake either. To be an effective community leader you need people around you who you can be completely honest with and share your struggles with.

Accountability in the church must also entail a clear understanding of the Gospel and what it means to be a disciple. In our politically correct and tolerance driven culture, the nature of the Gospel, sin, and holiness are often lost. In our desire to be tolerant of anyone and everything we often overlook accountability for fear of being labeled a bigot, hypocrite, or even worse, intolerant. We have to have the courage to call sin what it is and the love of Christ so we are still connected and unified as we do so. My greatest fear, as a leader of the church is destroying the name of Christ because of my own sin, whether it was my sin or the sin of my community that did so. We mustacknowledge that when we are part of a a community, the sins of the community are our sins. When we are part of a system, the sins of the system are our own. And so we must never stand pat and let communal or systemic sin ruin the name of Christ.   

The actual time at the Kairos gathering was fun as well. There were about 40-50 Pastors, church planters, and lay people. We were a wide variety of church folk from Jay my favorite Episcopalian ever, to a bunch of non-denominational Emergent types, to a couple of church planting Methodists, some Fuller guys, and various hodgepodge of lay people. The topics included the nature of Evangelism, Atonement theory, the tension of postmodern and modern ministries in the same church, team leadership, and being made into the fullness of Christ, which I guess you would call Discipleship or Sanctification. So what did I gather or think about from this eclectic ecclesial gathering?

1) The Emerging Conversation is life giving – For most of the people there, their background was free church (Baptist or Non-Denominational), evangelical, and fundamentalist. For them, the emergent conversation breathed life into their faith. It has allowed them a connection to the rest of the church. It has helped them discover sacramental, communal, ecclesial living. It has helped them become more narrative in their approach to scripture and preaching. It has made them more experiential in their worship and more cooperative in their pastoring. I saw people there who without Emergent would probably no longer be in the church.

2) Brian McLaren is the right voice for recovering Fundamentalists – This was the 3rd or 4th time I have been with Brian McLaren and I am always very impressed by his thoughtfulness, graciousness, and faithfulness to the gospel. I can’t imagine there being a better voice for those who are trying to recapture the fullness of the gospel and reexamine the nature of who we are as the church.

3) The Emergent Conversation seems to be making Free Church Christians more Wesleyan – I laughed as I heard conversation after conversation where people talked about a discovery of sacramental living, the connection nature of the church, small groups, and the role of prevenient grace in the Kingdom of God. Wesleyans have been trying to live into these ideas for hundreds of years. If this is what it took for them to discover them, well how about that. I am not saying the Wesleyan denominations have always lived into these ideas well, because we all have our issues, but they certainly aren’t new.

4) Mainliners need a different conversation – Much of the angst that many of those I have encountered in the Emergent Conversation have is not the angst of the mainline church. Their struggles are very different than many mainline churches. So I am interested to see what an emergent conversation for The Methodist or Episcopal or Presbyterian church will look like. Many mainliners have joined in the Emergent Conversation, but mainly, in my view, because they are pleased to be in dialogue about these issues with Evangelicals. It has allowed them the opportunity to be united in issues that for them they thought through a while ago. But, that doesn’t mean that mainliner’s don’t need an emergent conversation of their own. Mainliner’s need a reexamination of ideas such as evangelism, sanctification and holiness, the ability to deal with heresy in the church, and I think even a recapturing of a love and sense of awe for the Word of God. I hope that there will be those who God calls out in these denominations to lead their conversations.

Those are my quick reflections from the gathering. In the next couple of days I will post more in-depth reflections on the doctrine of holiness, the nature of the gospel, and community evangelism.