Fitch on Church Planting

In a seminar on church planting at Northern Seminary, David Fitch outlined three different models of church, and described their characteristics. This is my summary of the talk.

	Franchise Model (denominational)	Update Church (seeker, relevant)	Mission Model (Incarnation focus)
Goal	Caring for denomination members	Being relevant to people who are turned off church.	Reaching non-churched people, seeking injustices and bringing kingdom.
First Step	Get services running as people expect Sunday church service, children’s ministry.	Same things, but updated to be relevant, easy, convenient.	Inhabit a context. Move, work and live there.  Find people of peace
Context	Irrelevant Methodist is same everywhere	Survey the context to be relevant.	Exegete context. Find places of pain? What is causing pain?.  Where do people gather?
Getting started	Establish a church buiding with sign outside.	Do a launch with big publicity.	Landing.  Establish two or three leader people.  Get a job. Get involved in neighbourhood.  Find networks.
Horizon to self sufficiency	Three years	Three years, but getting harder.	Ten to fifteen years
Worship	Traditional	Better music and messages	Incarnational.  Aims to be part of rhythm of life.  Eating together is important
Leadership	Person from denominational school	Charismatic entrepreneur with celebrity to drive preaching	Polycentric group that know their giftings.  Push decisions down and out.
Preaching	Teaching for doctrinal reinforcement for people who already believe.	Relevant communication. Topic driven.  Equipping people to deal with problems of life.	Proclamation of the gospel into and over the context.  Where is God at work?  Explain how to serve Jesus as Lord there
Evangelism	Not a primary focus	Seeker sensitive, evangelistic event.  Assumes people find God by going to a church on Sunday	Training and locating people to be present in places of hurt, pain, brokenness, suffering and injustice to see what God will do.
Justice	Justice is something that government does.  Church might challenge injustice or train people to participate in government’s justice activities.	Find a project.  Use money for justice projects.  Might even have a justice centre/place where people who need justice and those who want to do it can meet.	Develop a presence amongst the poor, the hurt, the broken, the oppressed, the victimised, the lost.  Live with them in their community and see what God will do.

Faithful Presence

I have just completed David Fitch’s latest book called Faithful Presence. He has some great insights, so it is worth reading.

However, I have this nagging doubt that presence is not enough. Jesus was not just present, he made his home here on earth (tabernacled among us). He told his disciples to go and stay in a home in the place where he had sent them.

I believe that people going out to share the gospel must go and live in a place to have real impact. That is the theme of my book Being Church Were We Live.

So I was interested to hear David say in his discussion about the Benedict Option, that when he and some of his friends planted a church in Westmont, Chicago, they decided to live within six blocks. Six blocks is probably four too many, but living close together has contributed to the effectiveness of their community.

I am surprised that David did not push this a bit more in his book, as it seems to be important. As he says,

Faithful presence must be communal reality before it can infect the world.

Too Liberal

David Fitch has interesting article called, We are just Too Liberal. Here is a quote.

Because our Christianity is such an individual thing, we do not have confidence that God is working in the world. Neither do we see how the church is a way of living together that displays His Kingdom in society. We don’t see how the church lives under its political power, the reign of Jesus who is Lord and bringing in His Kingdom.

The article is worth reading.

Fish and Coleslaw (1a) with Chips

One of my favourite meals is fish and coleslaw. A few chips (fries in the US) are needed to make it really tasty.

I have just completed a meal of fitch and holsclaw and it was pretty nourishing too. I am going to round of the meal by chipping in with my comments and thoughts in the next few posts. The book is Prodigal Christianity – Signposts into the Missional Frontier by David Fitch and Geoff Holsclaw.
The first signpost sets the context for the rest of the book, so I will chip a little more in on it.

1. Post-Christendom
The first signpost is Post-Christendom.

People are living as if God doesn’t exist or, at least, as if God does not matter. Society used to have a general place for God. Now sightings are rare, and if they materialize, they are soon forgotten.

One response is to preach the old message harder (neo-reformed). The other response is to actively embrace the post-modern mind-set and make Christianity relevant (emerging). Fitch and Holsclaw want a more radical response that breaks with the Christendom paradigm completely.

They suggest the cultural shift is characterised by three posts-. I will comment on the first post- in this post.

A) Post-Attractional
People in the post-Christendom no longer think about going to church when they wake up on Sunday mornings.

I agree that the attractional church does not work, but the world is still easily attracted. People are attracted to football games, rock concerts, peace marches. Many of these events are not relational, yet people are attracted.

The problem is that the people of the world are not attracted to church any more. Part of the reason is that there is now much more competition. When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, there was not much else to do on Sunday morning. Now there are a huge variety of alternatives. You can run a marathon, go to a farmers market, or visit and art gallery.

When I was young, going to church was what people were expected to do, especially if you were in the middle classes. You did not have to go every week, but if you stopped going altogether, you would come under suspicion. So people went, even though they did not always enjoy it. The lower classes were different. They were not expected to go to church, and many did not.

The real problem is not that the world is post attractional, but that our church meetings are boring. Who wants to listen to a pastor droning on for nearly an hour? Congregational singing is a turn off, no matter how enthusiastic are our wannabe rocks the worship leaders. These days, people listen to their music of choice all the time, they do not sing together. Even seeker friendly services do not cut it for modern people. People close their eyes, and try to look solemn during the Eucharist, but many feel nothing. Our church services are not attractional, because they are boring.

Fitch and Holsclaw claim that Jesus did not use an attractional approach, but went to where people are. I like the way they quote of the Message version of John 1:14:

The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood.

Yet that is only part of the story. Jesus operated in a hugely attractional way. Whenever he entered a village, everyone gathered. When he went in the mountains, enormous crowds followed. So we need to ask, why people were attracted to Jesus, but turned off by our church meeting. People were attracted to Jesus, because he healed the sick, cast out demons, thumbed his nose at the Roman rulers, and got stuck into the religious authorities. I guess the Holy Spirit helped, but people were drawn to Jesus because they like what he was. The apostles were attractional too, in a similar way. The church could still be attractional, but only if it heals the sick, casts out demons and challenges the religious and political leaders of the age.

Jesus challenged his disciples to announce the good news to all nations, but warned them that they should wait unit they were clothed power from on high (Luke 24:45-49). Until the Holy Spirit is doing what Jesus did in our meetings, people will not be attracted, whether we are in a church or in a neighbourhood.

If Jesus has risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, and poured out the Spirit of God to live within us, the that should not be hard. If we cannot heal the sick and cast out demons, or change the world without relying on human politics, the world is entitled to ignore us, because they think our claims are false.

I would characterise post-attactional in these words,

People will not come to us.
We will have to go to them.
That means that most of what we are doing now does not work very well now, and will not work in the future.

End of Evangelicalism (5) Epilogue

The final chapter of the book examines some of David Fitch’s concerns about the direction being taken by the emerging church. When correcting problems, we must be careful that we do not lurch to far the other way.

1. We must approach all revelation with humility and openness, but there is a danger. We could end up always postponing judgement as to what God is saying such that we never allow it to shape our lives together as a people.

2. While evangelicalism has over personalised salvation and is preoccupied with the afterlife and escaping hell, there is a danger in advocating that we put out trust in the message of kingdom, rather than submitting to Jesus who is the reigning Lord and is actually bringing in the kingdom. Jesus becomes a guide, rather than a saviour.

3. While it is right to resist the institutionalism of the church, we must be careful not to leave the church without a role in God’s mission and Christians doing things on their own in the world.

This book is quite demanding, but is really worth reading.

The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission

End of Evangelicalism (4) Christian Nation

The third big issue for David Fitch is the Christian Nation, commonly symbolised by the Stars and Stripes draped on one side of the pulpit in many churches. I agree with him. This is a blindspot and contradiction for American evangelicalism.

Evangelicalism took on an agenda to turn America back into a Christian nation. This became the dominant theme for how evangelicals would engage with society. We do not see the church as having a social reality of its own. The church gathers to encourage and edify, but Christians go into the world as individuals to work for a Christian version of morality.

The Christian nation ideology functions as a fantasy for evangelicalism that enables us to see ourselves as accomplishing something in terms of changing our society for Christ, while in effect nothing ever happens. David says that the Bush II presidency was the big moment, but it produced huge disappointment.

This elaboration of the Christian Nation enables us to go on acting as if we believe “the gospel makes a difference” all the while having to change nothing about our lives. It allows us to work vigorously for justice, while being complicit with existing systems of injustice.

We are suburban congregations sending aid to urban centres, while we sit as individuals next to each other in the comforts of a church pew. We avoid knowing the poor among us and around us. We can give enormous sums of money from behind the protection of our secure bank accounts and gated communities.

We are hampered from embodying the reign of God in a living community that engages the world. We are shaped for dispossession.
We are becoming a society of individuals bound together by a form of spectating.

David Fitch proposes a different approach. The church is a new way of being together in the world. It is social manifestation of the “sent one” by the Spirit the facilitator of the kingdom, which inhabits the world for mission.

The church is the social body of his Lordship incarnating Christ in the world for God’s mission. It is the extension of the incarnate Christ sent by the Father to join what he already doing by the Spirit.

David really hits the nail on the head with one, and drives it home. If you live in America, your should read it.

My Response
here is brief because I have written about this elsewhere.

Nations have no place in God’s plan. Our loyalty is to the Kingdom of God, not to any nation state.

The Kingdom of God will come as Christians get together to re-build society form the ground up, one village and neighbourhood at a time.

The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission

End of Evangelicalism (3) Big Decision

The second big issue that David Fitch deals with is “The Decision”, especially through the sinners prayer. It leads to a narrow focus on penal substitutionary atonement, whereas the gospel is much bigger than that. It also leads to an emphasis on escape from hell and getting a ticket to heaven.

The recidivism rate of these who make decision for Christ is famously high (at least seventy-five percent never go on). David says that making a decision leads to a dissonance. I am saved but I am content to live in the same way that I always lived. The decision allows us to feel good about our belief without having to change anything. It shapes us for duplicity. People can say, “We are saved”, but it does not affect how they live. This makes the church appear hypocritical and is one reason why the world hates the church so much.

The decision leads to pride. We can look at others who have not made the decision and say, “at least I am not like them”. We feel better and morally superior.

David says that the solution is “more about entering into membership of the covenantal people of God in whom he is at work in to fulfil his promises to set the world right.”

We are invited to enter a salvation that God is working in the world. We are joining the Kingdom of God under Christ lordship.

Evangelism has over-personified salvation, making it into a transaction and has generally been preoccupied with the afterlife and escaping hell. It has ignored the message of the kingdom and has preached a personalised, middle-class gospel accommodated to the comforts of American prosperity.

The call for conversion is no longer, “Have you made a decision or receive Jesus as your personal saviour". It is “Have you entered into the salvation begun in Jesus Christ that God is working for the sake of the world?”.
This is good stuff.

My Response
This is my gospel. The world has been stuffed up by sin and evil. Jesus incarnation, ministry, death, revelation, ascension, giving of the Holy Spirit have set off a process to roll back the big stuff ups, beginning with me and rolling out to places that I and the others who join up have influence.

The initiation process should be based on Acts 3:38 with a bit of Romans 10:9.

Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Conversion has several elements.

• Repentance
• Belief in Jesus
• Receive the Spirit
• Declare Jesus is Lord

Baptism is a declaration of repentance, faith and allegiance to Jesus, and is the process by which we receive the Spirit. David Pawson wrote a good book on this called the Normal Christian Birth.

I dislike the expression “receive Jesus into your heart”. It turns Jesus into an add-on that we control. Receiving Jesus is not scriptural. Jesus still has a human body and he has ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father. Although he now has a spiritual body, he cannot be in two places at the same time. He cannot be in with the Father and in my heart. The scriptures teach that if we believe in Jesus, we will receive the Spirit. This should be our gospel.

Conversion takes time. I remember reading about revival meetings in the nineteenth centuries, where people sat on the sinner’s bench and cried out to God for several days, before coming gloriously through. I do not want to go back to that style of evangelism, but it reminds us that conversion takes time. As soon as we get a whiff of repentance, or faith, we rush the person straight into the sinners prayer and tell them they are saved. This truncates the work that the Holy Spirit is doing. We must get better at letting the Holy Spirit do a full work of repentance in a person’s life, even if it takes several weeks.

The conversion experience will depend on where a person is coming from. We must be careful not to get into applying a formula. For some people, getting forgiveness from God will be important. For others, the guidance of the lordship of Jesus might be what they are seeking. We must allow the Holy Spirit to do what each person needs, rather than following a standard pattern. For example, a few may need deliverance from evil spirits, before they can believe. Most will be set free once they believe.

The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission

End of Evangelicalism (2) Inerrant Bible

The concept of an Inerrant Bible has become one of the core badges of modern evangelism. David Fitch notes that stand appeals to modernist criteria of true and false. Appealing to the world’s standards undermines the authority of the scriptures. Our articulation of the authority ends up being in terms defined by modern science, histiography and the modern academy. We have sought a secure position in the wider world by aligning ourselves with the forces in power. If we hitch our horse to the wagon of their ideology, we will find ourselves going somewhere we do not want to go. Here are some of the implications.

• We sound arrogant; because we claim to have the truth and that others do not.
• Every word in the scriptures is expected to communicate propositional truth.
• It makes us unwilling to listen to the people their world. We miss their questions, so they do not hear us.
• The church is too certain about what we know about God.
• Making a stand for the inerrant bible allows us to believe that we have the truth while not being changed by it.

Fitch is correct to highlight these. He suggests the following response.
Instead of attempting to define the scriptures externally to scripture, we should only hope to know the scripture’s authority in our lives as it is revealed within our inhabitation of God’s mission in the world.

My Response
I have never been that comfortable with the concept of inerrancy.  The following thoughts describe my approach.

• The scriptures were written by people. They used their own vocabulary and style, and they did not realise that they were writing scriptures. They put stuff in that is irrelevant. “Bring the cloak I left at Troas” does not much anything to us.

• According to 2 Tim 3:16, the scriptures are God-breathed (theopneustos). We do not fully know what that means, but I believe that the Holy Spirit got everything into the scriptures that he wanted in. The scriptures contain everything that he wanted to about God and the world.

• When interpreting the scriptures, I am not so worried about understanding the author’s intent. I always want to know what the Holy Spirit intended. I try to read the scriptures listening to him. Reading and listening at the same time are important. (We sometimes need to be in a group to hear clearly).

• The Psalms teach that loving the law leads to wisdom. I find that loving the scriptures leads to insight (we must not worship them). Heavy doubt seems to leads to dister.

• Spurgeon said that you should defend the scriptures the same way that you defend a caged lion. You let it loose.

• All people and all cultures have blind spots. My culture has blinds spots, but I do not know what they are, because I am part of my culture. I have some blind spots that cause me to miss part of what God is saying, or to get some things wrong, but I do not know what they are. It is really hard to escape from our culture and see it as God sees it. They best we can dois to read humbly and be as open as possible to the challenges of the Holy Spirit.

• Reading the scriptures frequently is important. The more we read, the more we will see and hear.

• The Holy Spirit chose to use verbal revelation. He could have given us twenty pictures, but he did not. He could have waited until the modern age, and given us a movie or an audio-visual, but he did not. The Holy Spirit chose to use words, so words are important. This means that we need to listen to the words carefully, but in the context of the whole message.

• The scriptures should be read as they are written. The epistles are more propositional than other parts of the scriptures. The gospels describe events, and record statements. Much of the Old Testament describes events, although the law is much more propositional.

• Propositional writing is a clear precise way to communicate. Communicating in this way is fine, as long as we understand the limitations.

The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission

End of Evangelicalism (1) Fitch and Ideology

Back when I was employed as a pastor, I was the minister in a rural parish, where most to the people were sheep farmers. One farmer supplemented his income with fitch farming. He bred these ferret-like animals for their fir skins. A fitch is a ferret that has been domesticated. I thought of this recently when I was reading a new book, “The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission” by David E. Fitch. The subtitle is “Towards an Evangelical Political Theology”. I wonder if David realises that a fitch is a domesticated ferret. He certainly has an amazing ability to ferret out the truth.

David Fitch teaches at Northern Seminary. In this book, he examines the presence of evangelicalism in North America. He asks why evangelicals are perceived as arrogant, exclusivist, duplicitous, and dispassionate by the wider culture. He uses the ideological theory of the European philosopher Slavoj Zizek to diagnose the problems faced by evangelicalism in America. He ends his study by examining the possibilities for a new faithfulness emerging and missional church movements springing forth in the current day.

I found this book very challenging and thought provoking. In the next few posts, I will summarise his main points and outline my response.

When I found that David had used the philosophy of Zizek to provide a framework for analysing the problems of evangelicalism, I was puzzled. I was not familiar with this European philosopher, so I was wondered why he wanted to go there. The funny thing is that it works. He explains Zizek’s philosophy very clearly, in a way that it can be understood by someone who is not familiar with it. He uses Zizek’s approach to expose the antagonisms and contradictions in American evangelicalism very effectively.

I suppose that he could have gotten to the same place by waiting in the council of the Lord like Jeremiah, but I have heard the Spirit speak through donkeys, street signs and atheists, so I am not going to complain. If he can hear the Holy Spirit speak through an obscure European philosopher, all power to him.

David Fitch provides a better summary of the nature of ideology and why it is important in a blog post.

My position (if I can say it that way now) is that before one can engage cultural issues both inside and outside the church, you must step back long enough to discern ideology at work. Because, once you take a position on the terms offered from within an ideology you have in essence already assented to that ideology. There is now no way to escape it. The ideology now determines how you will live out this issue in your life on the terms it puts down… This goes for any number of social/cultural issues including justice and economy.

I have argued for several years now that the church in the West must accept that it finds itself in the minority position in an increasingly post-Christendom culture. I have drawn from Anabaptist and Neo-Anabaptist theologians (and their philosophical friends) to teach evangelicals how to be alright with that and indeed come to a new self-understanding as the church in Mission in the West.

…..But more and more, over the past five years I have seen the need to discern the ways ideology works and how it thwarts our engagement with culture. To me, a good Anabaptist theologian needs to understand the critique of ideology (here is where people accuse me of being a Marxist which is hard to do if you’re an Anabaptist rejecting church-state alignments). My book End of Evangelicalism? carries out this argument extensively using Slavoj Zizek.

A good critique of ideology should teach you:

• How to recognize the signs of an ideology at work. And so often, when you dare to reveal contradictions at work within an ideology, or use a code word differently, you will see an explosion of excess emotion, fear and anger. If you threaten an ideology that people are most comfortable in, it cuts to the core of our deepest fears and angers. Be of with that. Recognize it at work in yourself. Be ready to repent.

• That you cannot directly criticize ideologies. You have to kindly provoke, push the ideology’s absurdities to their extreme to reveal the powers at work. Let people come to their own revealing. Only then can they “traverse” it and be “saved.”

• That ideologies run on lacks, and antagonisms and fears, the opposite of what should be the body of Christ’s fullness in the Triune God. So whenever we see fear and anger and security driving a discussion in the church, we know that the church itself has succumbed to ideology.

When discerning ideology, the local indigenous community must be present. Instead of conceptually entering into an ideology and taking positions to win some “street cred,” instead we must discern individual issues one at a time together with real people in relationship. The first church did not have a “position” on pro-life/pro choice. They simply went about rescuing babies as they were confronted with infanticide in their streets. That was their position. And in that witness, the world was changed. Today, we must do likewise

In his book, Fitch addresses three main issues for evangelicalism that feed out of its struggle with a modernist ideology. I will discuss these in the next few posts.