I had the rare opportunity this past week to sit in on a special, intensive one-day conference in Dallas titled "Voices of the Missional Movement" sponsored by Leadership Network. If you're a megachurch pastor, I probably don't have to tell you what Leadership Network is. It's like telling a computer geek why Redmond, Washington is a significant place. But if you're not an "MP," it might need a little explanation. Actually, what probably needs a bit more explaining is why it's so significant that Leadership Network sponsored such a conference to begin with.
Leadership network - we'll use shorthand here on and dub it LN - is without doubt the trend-spotter, trend-setter, and trend-supporter when it comes to everything that is new, powerful, and effective (even if it's not always pomo and "cool") in American evangelical Christianity. LN, for example, launched the emergent church movement as an identifiable future force with an identifiable leadership at the beginning of the decade , even though the movement had a different name then and it did not end up what its sponsors had hoped it would do. But if it weren't for LN, "emergent" probably would have never emerged.
Within the candles-and-sandals crowd LN has a somewhat ambivalent reputation. They know it's got clout, let alone savvy, but there is also the feeling, which is probably not wholly justified, that when LN has hold of you you've somehow "sold out." That's of course a paradox - in Derrideanese we'd call it an "aporia", or undecidable - of America's media-obsessed, reputation-driven, commercial-success-seeking culture, even among the wholly hip - notice I didn't say "holy hip." Having a "press agent" and getting visibility and influence is what everyone strives for, and no one knocks it necessarily if they really get there, only perhaps if someone else does. LN has a publishing arrangement with Jossey-Bass, and if you're part of their publication operation, you're sure to become well-known and well-regarded fast.
At any rate, by doing a conference with three well-known "missional" authors in the flesh to hear and talk with (with others who have just recently made their debut in attendance), I was really, really impressed. Moreover, I was thinking, okay, next time I hear the smarmy muttering that LN only favors big churches with big money, I'll smile and say, "wrrrrong."
I rarely go away (or as we are asked to do, "take away") from a conference with such a sense of can-do-ness and encouragement about the American church changing as I did this week. I've got all the books of LN's major missional players now - Reggie McNeal, Neal Cole, Milfred Minatrea, and Hugh Halter/Matt Smay. (the newcomer who in my estimation has the most powerful and relevant, if not the slickest, message of them all). I'm really encouraged when LN, undetected even by this trend-sniffing hound dog here, decides to "go missional" with such a shock-and-awe display of confidence.
The one thing I did miss in all of them was a real consciousness that American missionality crucially depends on network linkups with global missionality (although Minatrea kept mentioning it without elaboration and my good buddy Hugh has had his own scales-falling-from-eyes experience, subsequent to writing his book with Matt Smay, in England, the Netherlands, and Lebanon this past summer). But that step is not as hard to take as Frost and Hirsch's now well-honed characterization of passage from "attractional" to "incarnational." In reading some of the earlier published books, I get the feeling at times that "incarnational" is still in the minds of the targeted audience, if not the authors, a way of saving your attractional church from becoming too self-absorbed or too-irrelevant. Missionality and incarnationality is not like going to the gym regularly when you turn 40 in order to ensure that you don't get too fat, too fast. It's more like deciding to go back to school and become a coach and physical trainer. You have to "go all the way" in the good sense of the word, although I grant that use here of the old 1950s euphemism about what some people end up doing in the back seat of a car, after they've both convinced themselves they will get married in two years while remaining virgins and "only" necking, can be quite misleading, and perhaps not so appropriate. However, I'm not condoning in any way, let alone winking at, setting up the temptation to pre-marital sex, but I do think some church planners - and perhaps even planters - ought to sit in the back seat of their own churches, where the people who come in late to avoid the greeters and having to fill out a guest card sit, might actually benefit from the experience. That's where the first aha moment of missional Christianity in an attractional church environment can really occur.
Going all the way could mean that church as we know it is on the way out. At the conference two well-known speakers did say without mincing words that becoming missional can really mean making pastors as we know them "expendable." They themselves were pastors, or pastor-trainers, who are at the same time major stakeholders in what one actually termed "the church industry." Even Jeff Bezos, founder and tutelary genius of Amazon.com, would never talk about making bookstores "expendable."
At LN you could say that. Wow! The church really must be changing. But after all, when Jesus was asked by his disciples in Matthew 24 what would happen to the Jerusalem Temple, which they were awed by, he replied without batting an eye: "Every stone will be thrown down."
As I looked out the window at the downtown skyline of Dallas from my vantage point in the LN conference room on the ninth floor of a building right down the street from the beginning of Turtle Creek, where the wealthiest of the wealthy and the most powerful of the most powerful dwell, I could only say to myself: "Well, if they can say something in this place like 'we're here to make ourselves expendable', they've got to be serious.
We'll see.
But I am encouraged.
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