Rhizone

First Blog Review...and New Friends

The first (blog) review of GloboChrist just appeared.   It also is announced on the Baker-related blogsite, where I will be responding to posts about the book in August. 

I find the review  most interesting, and of course it is very favorable.   I realize that calling attention to the intimate interconnection between the global and the postmodern is something supposedly radical and new for a lot of American (and perhaps European) readers.  But it should within a short amount of time become a kind of "duh, now I get it" sort of phenomenon.

I'm really happy that Andrew Jones, whose name is a household word among "new kind of Christian" types of bloggers, is slated for one of the first series of talk-backs on the Baker-related (it's not supposed to be officially an advertising site for the publisher) blog. 

I love Andrew's vision and perspective...and his down-homineness, even if he is a New Zealander (for a long time in my youth, even though geography was my favorite subject,  I thought that was part of Antarctica where the penguins spoke with clipped British accents) living on the Orkney Islands with his kids somewhere in Britland.  Consult Google Earth to find out  where that is.  I'll tell you more about meeting Andrew in a future post.  He's funny and faithful - and he's also deep, something that might sound like a contradiction in terms, if only to an American.

Anyway,  the  reason I really admire Andrew is the same I treasure my newfound friendship with Tangible Kingdom author Hugh Halter, who unlike Andrew I can see regularly since  he lives in Denver.  For some reason Hugh seems to like me, even though he refers to me as the professor with his high-minded philosophy writings he doesn't try to understand.  It's probably because both of us like to drink beer, but neither of us has the kind of sophisticated beer-snobbery that seems de rigeur these days if you want to be more than just a postmodern wannabe. 

I really like Hugh because his TK book and his MCAP movement is about as being real as you can be when it comes to calling oneself a "postmodern Christian".  He's already doing  in reality through his ministries  lwhat I talk about "theoretically" in GloboChrist, at least when it comes to the "radical rhizomatic relational" networks that we are going in the future to mean by the word "church."   I've recommended his book now to far more people than I've recommended his own, and they've all coming away saying "wow" (including my wife Sunny, who's a self-proclaimed blonde and an artist, and says she can't understand my books - like Hugh - though she can understand Hugh's book. BTW Sunny's language is visual; her neo-figurative and abstract art is chocked full of powerful uses of colors and signs, very Deleuzian, that get Christianity across in ways that words can't). 

In Hugh's latest blog post he describes his experiences in bringing The Tangible Kingdom to Beirut, Lebanon.  I resonate with that, particular ly his concluding remarks, because it calls our attention not only to the emergent global Christianity that is postmodern, but not in the sense that you're probably used that word.  It's a call to us to radical obedience to Christ, and it's not just about being hip and playful.  If trying to do "tangible kingdom" stuff  in the same neighborhood as Hezbollah is what he blogs about, I can heartily concur, which is why I call attention in my new book to what I call  "the clash of revelations."  Islamic militancy is challenging all of us to take our Christianity more seriously than we've ever taken it. 

             

A Lot of People Are Wrong About Europe

Recently I returned from about 17 days on the Continent of Europe.  No, I wasn't travelling or bumming around.  I was there on a project. 

The first ten days I spent in Vienna, teaching a university class and hanging out with various representatives of Projekt Geminde.  Project Gemeinde,  which literally means "Project Community" in German, is a unique example of "incarnational" ministry  in the heart of that old imperial city that has always been Central Europe's cultural and artistic showcase outdistanced only by Paris.  Projekt Gemeinde is run by Walter and Andrea Klimt (yes, Walter's actually a descendant of Vienna's most famous cultural icon (next to Mozart of course), turn-of-the-century painter Gustav Klimt.   Walter is executive secretary of the Austrian Baptist Union, and Andrea is finishing her doctoral degree and doing teaching at the University of Vienna.  Projekt Gemeinde is a student house donated years ago to the Austrian Baptist Union by a  "Baptist nun".   Yes, you heard me right.  In Eastern Europe there really are "Baptist nuns".  They're mainly aging widows who dedicate what's left of their lives to Christ and service to him.   

Projekt Gemeinde is more than a "church." It's also a community center for students in the house and at the world-famous University of Music and the Performing Arts, which is right next door.  The facility is also shared by a community of Middle Eastern Christians who had to flee their home countries because of persecution by Islamist governments.  Projekt Gemeinde is also involved in what in German they call Herzwerk (literally, "heart work").  It's as much the hands as the heart, because one of their central initiatives involves working with street prostitutes who have streamed into Vienna from Eastern European countries, particularly those as far as the Ukraine which are not yet part of the EU.  The prostitutes have been victims of human trafficking and are virtual slaves to their handlers.  Many from the female leadership of Projekt Gemeinde spend once a week on the street with the ladies of the night. They do not "witness" in the sense most American evangelicals are used to.  They get to know the prostitutes, cultivate relationships with them, then seek to entice them out of the street life into meaningful lines of work. 

Andrea, however, had a powerful point about such Herzwerk for those in the US who mainly give lip-service to incarnational or relational ministry.  Unless you are both humbled and changed by the relationship itself to someone, who is "in need" or on the "other side" of what would be considered a morally respectable Christian life, through sharing their world and their pain (in other words, if you look at the prostitute simply as the "poor dear" who needs to be "saved" in some formulaic sense), you are not prepared to do his work.  In other words, God transforms both the "saved" and the one who is involved in the "saving."  We can of course think of Jesus' example in the case of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11).  That mutual transformation is ultimately the "good news" of salvation.   

One of the  big myths among American evangelicals about Europe in general, and Austria in particular, is that it is "spiritually dead" and that they "just don't respond" to evangelism.   Only a very small percentage of Europeans actually go to church, at least in terms of what we would understand by the expression, but that well-known factoid, when you unpack it, may tell us more about ourselves than about the Europeans.  Austria, for example, where Christianity is as old as the Roman empire, has acquired the undeserved reputation as "the missionary's graveyard."   

Austria may be a cemetery for traditional "missionary" projects, but that's mainly because most American missionaries treat their efforts over there with a completely wrong mindset.  Can you really expect highly cultured and cerebral people to buy into the Joel Osteen sort of approach, which is what the American evangelical establishment usually forks out the dollars for?  It's like calling Silicon Valley a tech-salesman's "graveyard," especially if somebody's  trying to get venture capitalistists to put up significant money for a company that would specialize in dial-up connections.

Right now, I am told, the prophets of "church growth" are peddling the following type of sales pitch in Central and Eastern Europe.  "You're a small and beleagured group of Christians who don't know how to reach out to the big audiences.  You just need money, marketing expertise, and more showbiz savvy.  We can help you."  It kind of reminds me of the siren song that the human traffickers give to poor farm girls from Rumania or Bulgaria.  "Come with me to Vienna and I'll make you a supermodel."  Yea, right.  Unfortunately, like the poor farm girls, many small churches fall for it.    

Central and Eastern Europe, however, does seem to be a fertile field for the new kind of missional Christanity.  What do I say that?  I say that because in the final analysis becoming "missional" is the opposite of undertaking some sort of "packaged" or preconceived program of "telling people about Jesus."  Missionality is about imparting the message through the relationship.  As Marshall McLuchan famously said, "the medium is the message."  The Christ-relationship is the Christ-message.  At the same time, missionality is not simply "hanging out" with somebody until you're ready to pop the question, "okay, you really need Him, don't you."  A Christ-relationship involves discerning powerfully and acting intentionally to enable Christ to work through the relationship so that a true transformation takes place, not just the transformation of one's self but the transformation of the world.   As Paul says, we must be "confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus." (Philippians 1:6).   To become missional we have to assume the Christ-posture, which is openness, humility, and confidence of the power of God to work in us and in the situation in which we find ourselves.   To be Christians we must be "as Christs," Luther memoraby put it, to each other.  The emphasis is on "each other."

Now all that is a roundabout way of pointing out that to be missional means we have to "assume the posture" in every set of circumstances into which we stumble, or into which we are led.  If we don't live a life of relationality, we can't be Christ-followers and Christ-sharers.  In Europe relationality is not something you have to work at.  It's already there.  People live in relationality, even if it's not a Christ-infused relationality, wherever you go.  Consider the prevalence of pubs, or the beer-halls in Germany and the wine-cellars of Austria.  Did you know that most Protestant hymns were originally drinking songs from pubs for which the lyrics were changed to words of praise and celebration of God's might and grace? 

There's nothing inherently "Christian" or "non-Christian" about going into a pub.  Because of America's own early social legacy of rampant alcholism on the frontier and in the working class slums, along with the temperance movement, many denominational movements began to identify alcohol as "demon rum" and the number one source of spiritual oppression, which they then codified into a theological position.  That position, however, has no basis in Scripture, and like so many American obsessions is a cultural or "values" issue, not a spiritual or a Biblical one.  If you're "sharing Christ," you always go where the people are.  Europeans also tend to be more open to conversations at all levels, and that is where missionality can really begin.  Missionality is not prepping the "mark" in order to deliver the punchline.  It involves opening up a space of true authenticity between people so that God can work, sometimes amazingly and sometimes even miraculously.

To make a long story short, I experienced a lot of unexpected "Christ moments" in various situations among all those "pagan Europeans" supposedly wandering in spritual darkness.  At Projekt Gemeinde I experienced "Christ community" in ways that one rarely experiences it in the United States.  Maybe that is because if you're a marginalized minority in terms of the culture at large, you don't need to work at it.   You're either the real deal or you're not.  And if you're not, it's hard to pretend.  While in Austria I had an unexpected personal sorrow take place with someone in the US I was once close to.  Nobody tried to play the game of "saying the right Christian things to me" when they learned about my grief, or in one case seemed to know without me even saying anything.  They were there for me in a soft-spoken but overwhelming fashion.  That's all you can really expect from an "incarnational" situation.  The words don't really matter; it's the unscripted mediation of God through that kind of fellowship.

The next post will discuss the last ten days of my trip in Amsterdam.  Different people, different circumstances, different outcomes, but confirming of everything I've mentioned above.         

 

So what's the "rhizone"?

The rhizone is the planet, the all-encompassing zone of "rhizomes".   

Okay,  so what's a rhizome?  Technically, it's a term from botany.  Wikipedia defines it  as "a horizontal stem of a plant that is usually found underground, often sending out  roots and  shoots from its nodes."  Orchids, ginger, and irises are examples of rhizomes.  So are a lots of weeds, the kind that seem to grow everywhere and you can't ever get out of your lawn or garden.  Rhizomes are unique because their vitality is not dependent solely on the soil or moisture in which they are planted.   Rhizomes store their  own nourishment and support multiple kinds of growth in all different directions.  A rhizome goes where it grows, and grows where it goes.   

If it were not for the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the concept of the "rhizome" would have remained obscure and confined to botany textbooks.  But Deleuze along with his co-author Félix Guattari developed it as a metaphor for a new understanding of both organizational dynamics and the nature of change itself.  Rhizomes are "anti-hierarchical" structures.  Any point on a rhizome can be connected to any other point.  The global internet has many "rhizomic" characteristics, though it is not perfectly analogous to its living counterpart.  Deleuze foresaw rhizomic growth and movement as the key to the evolution of "postmodern" cultures and communication systems.  Much of Deleuze's philosophy, particularly his masterwork A Thousand Plateaus, can be taken as a general template for current theories of globalization and the broad tranformations that are currently underway on the planet.   

If one studies the Book of Acts carefully, one deduces that rhizomic growth also characterized early Christianity.  The travels of Paul and his counterparts in spreading the gospel around the Mediterranean followed rhizomic trajectories.  Paul did not "plant churches" so much as he turned local congregations of Jews and communities of pagan devotees into "nodes" from which new roots and shoots of Christianity could grow.  The early churches were all intricately interlinked in different ways, as Paul's journeys and writings attest.   It was this rhizomic "connectivity" that made the rapid early growth of Christianity as the outworking of the Great Commisson possible in the first place. 

Today things are similar to Paul's time.  The Mediterranean is now the entire world.  Especially in the developing countries, but also strangely once again in Europe, Christians are multiplying, connecting, and sharing each other's joys and burdens.  The American church is undergoing its own crisis of identity,  but it also is realizing that there is a bigger faith-universe out there than it ever realized.

This blog is designed to facilitate an understanding  that to be a Christian - or "Christ follower" - means that were are all connected to each other in a global, relational, rhizomic, and transformational network that is the postmodern "body of Christ."  That network is the rhizone.  Through this blog we will begin to get to know each other as "global Christians" and to share our passions and stories.

About Rhizone - It's About the Great Commission, Stupid

Rhizone is about the spread of Christianity worldwide and the growth of its emergent, global frontier.   

The tag "Dispatches from the Next Christendom"  captures the sense of what is happening on a planetary scale and derives from the title of a book by historian Philip Jenkins.   Jenkins' The Next Christendom  , published by Oxford University Press in 2002, projects the accelerating, future growth of Christianity, which is no longer really a Western phenomenon, but a global one.  Christians in the West still have little clue.  According to the book blurb, "the explosive southward expansion of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin American has barely registered on Western consciousness. Nor has the globalization of Christianity--and the enormous religious, political, and social consequences it portends--been properly understood."

While Christianity is spreading rapidly in Asia and Africa, it is also undergoing some radical and long-term shifts in the West itself.  The sudden decline of the evangelical establishment in America with its almost single-minded focus on "family values" and "social issues" such as abortion and gay marriage has been offset by the growing influence of socially conservative Christians in the global south, as the recent fracturing of the Anglican church's worldwide communion suggests.    At the same time, American evangelicals are becoming more socially "progressive," or at least not so lockstep when it comes  to the traditional issues that their leaders have espoused.

The so-called "emergent church" - which is now a catch-all label for new, experimental, and youth-based forms of Christianity in the West  - may have seeded the current trend in Western evangelicalism.   But in many ways all the different varieties of emergentism for the most part tend to be the mirror image of the old guard against which they are reacting.  What they have in common is a preoccupation with social and political issues, the gist of what was once called the "culture wars," and a kind of choleric take on how the other half represents itself.  In many ways the emergent movement, broadly conceived, has defined itself as simply the "alternative" to the now senescent evangelical empire of the 1980s and 1990s.  Traditional evangelicalism  favored mega-churches and "church growth."  Emergents have concentrated on small gatherings, even "house churches."  The "religious right", as embodied in the influence and agenda of Jerry Falwell, was  for years on its high horse about the takeover, which happened in the Sixties, of mainline Protestantism by liberals and social activists.  The new evangelical "religious left," personified in Jim Wallis and his Sojourners movementa presidency and the all-out push for an Obama, seems to want to turn the hands of the clock one more time again.   

By and large American Christianity  across the political, cultural, and theological spectrum remains focused on what faith "can do for me and my lifestyles," an outgrowth of consumer capitalism which Americans pioneered and perfected over the last half century.  It is what I have called "Burger King Christianity,"  which coined the marketing slogan "have it your way."  But consumer capitalism is currently going through a crisis that it has never  in the past experienced.  Oil shocks, credit crunches,   offshored jobs, and generalized economic Angst without any immediate prospect of a turnaround are the bitter harvest of decades of consumerist self-absorption.  The idols everywhere are now falling. 

If Christianity during the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century was forced to disentangle itself  from  the Constantianian heritage of Christ as Caesar (what historians call "Caesoropapism"), Christianity in the new millenium will find itself forced to separate from the legacy of consumerism.  Consumerism is about "me" and "what I want."  Christianity is about "God" and "what God wants."  God and self cannot be served any more than God and Mammon can. 

When Christ rose from the dead, he bid his followers to "make disciples of all nations."  He did not say "start churches that will appeal to people and grow because of that appeal."  Nor did he say "figure out what you want in life and go for it."  He said "make disciples of all nations."  That bidding has come to be known as The Great Commisson.  Scripturally, the Great Commission is the practical imperative corresponding to The Great Commandment - "love the Lord your God with all thy heart and your neighbor as yourself." 

The new Christians of the global south are likely to lead the old Christians of the super-indulged west into what is truly the next Christendom.  The next Christendom will be the realization of the Great Commission. 

In our next post we will begin to explore more fully what that means, and what the word "rhizone"  means for the next Christendom.

NOTE: many of these ideas are explored in Carl Raschke's new book GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn, set for release by Baker Academic Books on August 1, 2008.