Germanglish

I had an interesting encounter yesterday. It transported me back into a world of questions that had accumulated during my time in Germany. I bumped into a visiting German prospective student in the Fuller coffee shop around noonthirty. When I disclosed, my German connections and my Mennonite background, we quickly discovered a mutual German acquaintance.

Upon divulging my Mennonite connections, I sensed a glimmer of recognition cross his face. His look kinda communicated “Oh, one of them.” He then proceeded, in declarative terms, to identify his church plant as not associating itself with any denomination. He expounded upon his organization and gave me his business card with the organization’s name, “Gospel Tribe,” written across the top. Internally, I rolled my eyes.

Perhaps I had misunderstood the look? Perhaps we had mutually judged one another? Perhaps I am just reading too much into the whole thang? All I know is that I was left with familiar questions about the context of the church in Germany.

This encounter tapped into similar experiences I had with German Christian youth. On several occasions I came across the tendency for young adults to express a readiness to discard the old streak of tradition or denominationalism (which I readily understand) and to find new expressions and life in non-denominational/evangelical churches (which I readily support). This distancing from historic or institutional churches in itself is not the problem whatsoever. In fact, I consider myself a proponent of the impulse for new expressions and conceptualizations of church particularly in context steeped in state church corrosion. However, this incident resurfaced a huge irk of mine. I think I just find it hard to swallow the rationale (even though I completely understand it): “We are not identified with any denomination,” but then on the other hand we will call ourselves “Gospel Tribe.”

Gospel and Tribe are not German words. In German, Gospel could be roughly translated as Evangeliumstamm. Granted Evangeliumstamm probably ain’t good German grammar and it sure (knowing the youth culture) don’t have the same ring. It sounds stuffy and old-foggyish. See, English is “in,” especially with the youth. For that reason, I am very skeptical that it will somehow be not just considered a fad in 10-20 years. (“Oh, yeah. That was the phase when we used English, instead of German for slang expressions.”)

This phenomenon is not something limited to the German context. Christians here attempt to make Jesus and the church relevant all the live long day through language, technology, media, etc. I get the sense that many of the cues Germans take are the from American marketing style for Christianity, and like, the name “Gospel Tribe,” results in essentially non-indigenous terms for Christianity. We continually try to be ever savvier to be relevant. Maybe that is my issue. The Gospel and Church, to me, are not somehow exercises in panache.

Don’t get me wrong I am not projecting all my discombobulated vim at “Gospel Tribe.” That business card just got me on this rant. I know actually a little about their ministry and I know many swell people that are with them. I am not critical of the general attitude to make good use of the “new.” I am just left with a helpless sense of not knowing how to explain why I react to this. It makes sense, but it doesn’t feel right. I don’t want Jesus or the church to fall victim to trends… but when I say that it makes me feel like I sound stuffy and old-foggyish. I guess that is what makes me react. This kind of encounter taps into my own perplexity about the relevance and role of Christian traditions (especially mine) in our contemporary context. So there you have it.

New Conspirators

Two weeks ago, Joel Shenk, Matt Krabill and I headed up to Seattle for the New Conspirators conference. It was a great experience and extremely worthwhile!

I attended the conference for several reasons: 1) I have heard the buzzwords, “missional” and “emergent”, bandied about with great frequency. And while I have a slapdash academic understanding of the terms, I sure didn’t have any faces or experiences to associate with the terminology (good elementary books are Missional Church and Emerging Churches). 2) Additionally, I was keen to meet up with fellow Anabaptist types and become better acquainted with the Submergent (emergent-Anabaptist) conversation taking place. 3) Plus, it seemed like a great excuse to hang in Seattle with some friends and do some serious conspiring.

The New Conspirators: What in the World is God Doing was organized around the premise that “God is doing something new through a new generation of emerging, missional, mosaic (multi-cultural) and monastic conspirators,” and philosophically based on the book, The New Conspirators: The Future One Mustard Seed at a Time. The streams, as defined by conference material:

eMerging: The emerging stream had its origins in the UK in the late 80s. Young Christians recognized that many of their postmodern peers had a keen interest in spirituality, but were not interested in what was being offered in traditional churches. Emergent leaders started creating cafés and art centers that engaged specific populations of the un-churched and de-churched. Emerging churches tend to be more relational and experiential.

Missional: The missional stream began with the publication of The Missional Church in 1998. While the emerging stream began with practitioners, this movement began in the academy with scholars like Darrell Guder. Many churches use the missional language, but what seems to distinguish young church planters in this stream is that they are creating outwardly-focused models that address the needs to those outside the church instead of those inside the building.

Mosiac: The mosaic stream seems to have its origins with young people from ethnic churches who want to be a part of richly multicultural congregations that reflect God’s Kingdom. Typically, like missional church plants, they tend to invest more of their resources outward in mission, but they experience much more of the richness of God’s new order by sharing cultural practices in their lives, congregations and communities.

Monastic: The monastic stream began twenty years ago with new monastic orders that moved into tough urban communities to work with the poor and practice spiritual disciplines together. Early groups included InnerChange, Servants Partners, Servants to Asia’s Urban Poor, Word Made Flesh and Urban Neighbors of Hope (UNOH). New Monasticism, a movement within the monastic stream, began at a gathering in Raleigh-Durham, NC, in 2005. Unlike the other three streams, most monastic have no interest in church planting, and they offer a much more robust critique of the dominant culture.

While there are differences between these four streams, they flow together. These new conspirators all share a strong common passion to create new forms of more authentic faith in their lives, families and communities, and to creat congregations that are more outwardly focused in local and global mission.

The “festival” was organized to be an opportunity to communicate, connect and create. The highlights for me were the people. We had some amazing speakers like Shane Claiborne and Efrem Smith and I got into some great conversations with folks like Mark Van Steenwyk (Jesus Manifesto) and Elician Rosario-Cruz (Kingdom Praxis). With all of its good intentions to include times of question-answer, collaboration, and creativity the conference took on a familiar conferencey disposition. In the end I felt, besides all good intentions, that it was a fairly conventional conference about unconventional church. In regards to the four streams, I was most vague about the mosaic stream as a self-aware movement. The monastics impressed me the most with their sense of covenant in community, counter cultural perspective, and mission. Two issues continued to tickle my brain after conference.

Social Location: One lingering question that remains for me is about the role of social location in these emerging expressions of church. It felt like many of these ideas and innovations were borne from folks with a significant degree of social mobility. They could choose where to live, what traditions to draw from, and what social contexts/neighborhoods/communities to enter. That is not the case for every social class and ethnic group. (For example, the majority of Christians around the world do not live in this state of choice and occupy this degree of social location.)

I spent a lot of time thinking about how much the issue of social location will play in these expressions and their influence on the contemporary context of the global church. Most people in the world live lives perhaps "confined" by their limited social mobility, culture, religious contexts. It is not simply a matter of choice. One cannot always choose which community to belong to, which neighborhood to live in, which social customs to adopt, or how to shape their own identity. I, like many of the people at the conference, represent people with a high degree of choice and social mobility. This is an age old question in mission and still is tangible, even in these new discussions about church. I hope that Christians in our day, in our participation in the mission of God, can find ways to transcend our social location and social mobility as we explore new ways of doing church.

Tradition and Streams: Over the weekend I kept trying to wrap my head around the question of how does my tradition interact and connect with these new expressions? I didn't come to any good place and hope to explore that further. It will be interesting to see how these fluid streams will interact with the rigidity or institutional concerns present in denominations. How will ideas from the perspective of choice interact with the context of confinement of established tradition? Coming from a denomination, the Mennonite Church, I don’t always feel like I have the same choice. I am rooted in a history, identity, culture and a tradition. To me having community and culture, is not something that one can just always pick and choose from. That encompasses my greatest tensions on the one hand and also gives me rootedness and sense of belonging on the other. Part of being church is living in that tension of experiencing confinement as a reality in where we are located and who we do community with. However, the Church also includes discovering and nurturing a new rootedness, new identity and a new people in Christ. I do believe that is exactly what these streams are exploring and discovering. Hopefully, traditions, like mine, can find points of renewal through the new expressions of church.

I am glad I went to this conference. I made some new friends. I learned more about the potential interaction between Anabaptism and the new expressions of church. The conference definitely gave me some new vocabulary and new food for thought. I am very excited about the developments and hope to continue exploring what these ideas can mean in my own context. I look forward to more conversations and insight.

Shift Happens

A MAGL student just showed us this presentation in class today. Very interesting. It gives a good portrayal of our changing world and poses a challenge for educators to ask new questions in how to think about the needs of students.

When I watch these videos, I am always impressed and left with a sense of awe at the increasingly complex and interconnected nature of our world. It is overwhelming to think about. Sometimes, I wonder if this rapid change of our world is a long term phenomena? Will it run out of gas at some point and level out? Or are we facing a new future that is hard to fathom with only unfathomable change to count on?

Part of the reason I love being in seminary is that I get to think about and learn about the church in this changing world. Working for the MAGL program and studying in the Intercultural Studies degree has been a fulfilling and enriching experience. The one introduces me to online education and the other teaches me to see the world through missiological eyes. This is what I try to remember when my brain starts to hurt after watching these kind of presentations.

Early Church History Rant: Part Deux

My friend, Matt Krabill, and I spent about an hour last night rehashing our Early Church History course. We became fairly immersed in the subject, that we about missed out on the fondue meal with a group of friends. As we stood in the kitchen, people kept beckoning us to come and partake of the gooey, cheesy goodness before it disappeared.

This engrossment has become common nature recently. Early Church History has held me in a trance now for the past few weeks. I tend to go off about it whenever I get the chance, which many of my friends can attest to. Since I am running out of people who will humor my fixation, I need to resort to blogging. In continuance of my previous post, here goes rant two on Early Church History...

The main critique I have is not of my professor or of my class that I took. Like I mentioned Yesterday, I felt like I have learned heaps. Part of that learning involves being taught a historical perspective that is fairly normative in its approach. This is the story of how church and Christianity developed in the West and how the West tends to remember that story. That normative approach offers me a conversation partner as I sift out my thoughts on the historical narrative of Christianity.

The main critique I have is that this history is taught with the same absence of consciousness of the culture question that was lacking in what developed into the Christendom understanding of Christianity. Christendom was a cheery place where the Christian faith became equated with society and culture. Of course it is more complex than this, but the fundamental issues remain. The engagement of the gospel in culture ceased to cause tension and a society, with a healthy homogeneity of absolute Christianity, tended to view the need for engagement, or mission, as moot.

Christendom rendered the cultural interaction with Christianity as a neutral encounter, which lead to the perception that truth is also neutrally intelligible apart from culture and contains universal application. This was evident, especially, as Christianity expanded from the West to other parts of the world. As Christianity became firmly grounded in a territorial conceptualization, expansion of the church piggybacked the whim of empire. Christianity became to be understood as universally normative according to the Western experience and perspective, much to the eternal joy of the world’s “unreached” peoples.

A good example of the culture question being being overlooked is the American context. American Christians tend to neglect the way our culture informs our understanding of Christianity. Coupled with the Christendom legacy of Christianity being somehow culturally neutral, American Christians often face a double whammy, in that we assume our cultural narrative is neutral as well. Part of the way we understand that neutrality is that our values are espoused to be universally normative. Think of our civil religion of liberty, freedom and democracy. We see those issues as either disembodied from our culture as universal truths or the other way around, as universal truths embodied in our culture.

Another example of the culture informing the context of church history is the impact of German nationality as the catalyst for the Reformation. I would argue that the Reformation was not absent of political or cultural influence. Of course the theological confrontation was the heart of the issue, but German nationality became a major rallying point behind the emergence of a major change in the church. Rome was exercising dominion, politically and religiously, over the German people. The translation of the Bible into German, Luther's theological challenge to the religious status quo of Rome, the German princes chaffing under foreign rule, all led to the convergence of political, religious, cultural, and social factors uniting against papal authority. The Reformation did not take place in a theological vacuum.

Granted, we all approach history from where we stand. My professor comes out of the reform tradition. For him, the reform becomes the definitive event in the trajectory of Christian history. Therefore, the doctrinal development of the Early Church becomes paramount to the theological clash of the Reformation. For me as an Anabaptist, it is easy to see the course of Christian history resulting in the need for a restoration. This of course informs my historical understanding. However, when we approach history without asking the culture question, I believe it can result in the blindsides of Christendom.

The world is changing and the gospel is becoming couched in cultures all over the world. Today it is absolutely impossible to avoid the cultural question. As the church expands, the integration and re-translation of the gospel is automatically present. There is no ambiguity about culture shaping and informing Christianity today. In fact, in a post-Christian west we are becoming more keenly aware of the non-Western Christian influence on the global church. In a post-Christendom West, we are finally asking the culture question of how the gospel can engage our contexts missionally.

This is my beef. It is apparent to me that no time in Christian history is it somehow removed from the culture question. Church does not take place in a vacuum. There is always the variable of culture.

See, what started with a simple discourse on Early Christian History, turned into a seriously long rant on what is wrong with the world... People like me shouldn't be allowed to blog.

Early Church History Rant

Now that the quarter has come to a close and life has taken on less of a shrill tone, I can finally take the time to rant about my class, Early Church History.

First of all, the class should really be called Early Church History of Theology, NOT Early Church History. An abundance of time was dedicated to learning about hermits, monks, ascetics, bishops, theologians, and councils. The church history material on the 1^st – 5^th Century world felt as removed from the social, political, cultural, historical contexts as the monasteries of the early church were from the life outside of their abbey walls! Granted, we learned about the development of doctrine, the trajectory of Christian thought, the debate around the trinitarian controversy and initial ventures in methods of biblical interpretation. Ok! Christian historical material was covered. I admit that. However, it is a history that is taught disembodied from its context. For example, we spent maybe 5 minutes on the rift between East and West in the church. On the other hand, we spent over 2 hours on the Blessed Virgin Mary and way too much time in purgatory (pun intended).

In regards to my nervousness about the final exam, a friend of mine said “what's there to know about church history other than you had Jesus and the Apostles, than the fall of Constantine happened, and later the restoration of the Anabaptists came along? Seem pretty simple to me.” (He is Mennonite and not being sarcastic.) I had to remind my friend that there exists a vast array of unimportant stuff that happened in between those points on his time line. Apparently they are significant enough that my professor has made a livelihood out of teaching that stuff. In fact, he did cover Constantine for almost 10 whole minutes. Come to think of it, my friend’s comments are the completely opposite to what was covered in our class material. The apostles were briefly mentioned. Constantine was a "major transitional historical figure" where after "nominalism became an issue in the church" and nothing apparently needed to be "restored," only reformed. Basically, my professor comes out of the reform tradition and is keeping the major theological encounter of the reformation in mind as he develops the trajectory of Christian history.

In my mind we could have spent less time on monks who buried themselves up to their necks in sand at night, theologians who cut off their junk to remove the temptation of lust and bishops who endlessly bickered about the substance/essence/humanity/divinity/spirit of Jesus. I would have appreciated more time on the persecuted church in tension with the empire and Greco-Roman culture, the way communities of Christians formed and practiced their faith, the story of how the gospel movement spread throughout the Mediterranean and Europe, how conversion was understood, the impact of imperial patronage of the church after Constantine and the rise of institutionalization of religion in the church.

Am I being a typical Anabaptist?

To end, I want to make sure that I note the quality of the course and the professor. He was a great lecturer and knew his material inside out. The course, even if it had a typical Western perspective on the advancement of the church, was extremely helpful in understanding the way Christianity developed in the West.

And on a serious note, Monks did learn how to brew some good beer.