The Fracking of Spiritual Information

Fracking is form of gas extraction. In the old days, a well was drilled straight down and gas was pumped up. Now to get at less accessible gas, wells are drilled thousands of feet down and then thousands more horizontally. Hydraulic fracturing pumps thousands of pounds of water, sand and chemicals down the well to fracture the rock that holds the gas. This extraction process boosts production, migrating natural gas and petroleum to the well. For all that is gained in Fracking there is a growing chorus of people exposing the environmental impact. No one contests how productive Fracking is for extracting gas, it is exceptionally productive. What is being pointed out is that the process leaves behind damage. Whatever your opinions on Fracking are, they are irrelevant for what I’m poking at. The greater question I want to ask is “What does Extracted Learning do?” Often our celebration in extraction revolves around what is gained, pulled to the surface. Extraction always profits us something yet leaves behind something in the aftermath. 

The Damage on Practice

I contend that the church has submitted to information-delivery techniques that extract. How we learn and teach is stuck in a habit that perpetuates separation. In order to get at, isolate, codify and distribute spiritual information we’re damaging something in the process. The very way we execute the majority of our learning within the Church through the vehicles of sermons, Sunday schools, podcasts, 6 week courses and Bible Studies often does bolster extraction. Like Fracking, our mechanisms for delivering Spiritual Information leaves behind damage in the process; the character of Practice. Practice is left lifeless and inept. As with Fracking, we may efficiently lift information to the surface but do environmental harm on our social existence as the church. Our souls are impoverished because we consume calories of information but are isolated from local, faithful, practicing community. Our current unquestioned approaches to transferring spiritual information are brutal on the virtue of Practice. 

How We Learn

Practice is the inner quality of being formed and informed by the bumps, bruises and baptism of application. Practice is at the soul of being a Jesus-follower but more so it becomes the material for credibility as the People of God.  James 1:22 -- “But be people who live out the truth, not people who merely receive it and fool themselves. When you do this you are like a person who looks in the mirror, walk away, and then forget what they look like.” The future of the Church must re-calibrate how we learn, understanding that we are shaped by the techniques we employ. The methods we implement for maturing as Jesus-followers either lead to increasing integrity in our practice or lead to an increasing in-authenticity in our practice. When it comes to education, theology and personal betterment more and more of our learning processes perpetuate extraction, removal from habitation, in order to acquire the desired information. 

Information and Immersion

Divorcing information from immersion is something I bump into regularly. It is all around us but we’re acculturated to it. A few years back my wife and I went through a 3 month adoption training course to get our adoption qualifications. I was taken aback when I asked our certified instructor his experience about a very specific family challenge that went beyond the written training material. His reply was “I’ve never had a child in my home, not sure I’m cut out for that”. Now I’m cool with his choice about not having children but it was hard for my wife and I not to wince. Why wasn’t this odd to anyone else? How can one be an expert in Family Therapy without ever being tested by the real life challenges? I was sitting under an expert who never touched and grappled with the information in the real world.  It has become normal to separate the spiritual information we store up from actualization locally. This used to be called hypocrisy but now it’s simply the way in which we carry around and sometimes sling around the information we’ve collected in our mental folders. 

Expert Delusion

We can be proclaimed experts without immersion. It seems like never before we are more inflamed or convinced about some theology, new idea or cause that is less sourced from what is happening on the ground in our local places and more from what provocative story we read on-line, what blog we recently devoured, what book we just inhaled or what podcast we just downloaded. We are fascinated with what we can discover that will boost our enlightenment or boil our blood. Only in an information-based society can Christian author's write from a place of ideation rather than a place of practice. At times I’m lured into the lie that I can be an expert on something because I’ve had information-intake on a specific matter. Peter Senge in his book the Fifth Discipline unpacks our fixation on becoming experts -- “Being an expert gives us power and prosperity over our peers.” We secure our strength in our societal cosmos when we have more accumulated intelligence in our head than anyone else. This knowledge offers an expert-delusion that we are not vulnerable to making the unenlightened errors others will. We fear ignorance, ignorance is our enemy. In no previous time has there been such a fire-hose, keg-like binging on information. We are rabid about acquiring information but at what cost? A great divorce has been filed between information and immersion. This separation propels the opinionated milieu we find ourselves in and presumes we are transformed because we’re informed. 

What needs to change in our churches and spiritual living to close the gap between information and immersion?

Community Patterns for the Church (7 C's)

When my wife and I got married 16 years ago we'd already been dating for 5 years prior. We had a winding dating relationship that was stretched by time zones, career u-turns and simple immaturity (mostly mine) but we continued to hold onto each other despite these challenges. Naively I thought our sheer romantic-will-power would be enough to cultivate a vibrant marriage. I was an idealist that needed to experience the school of hard knocks. The first year was filled with beautiful memories but the assaulting arrows of: demanding jobs, fluctuating finances, existential crisis (mostly mine), complicated outside friendships, the intensity of school, and learning to grow up, was an onslaught to our bondedness. Our emotional love for each other was still strong but a significant shift needed to take place if we were going to build an abundant life for the future. We needed new patterns. 

Organized-Organic

All of life is built upon patterns. In the natural world bees form their honeycombs methodically, robins put together their nests piece by piece and planets loop around the sun in a strict cycle. All of these are wild expressions in nature, yet none of them is spontaneous and random. They are exuberant but they are organized around a pattern. These prescribed patterns form the platform for robust displays of brilliant beauty. Patterns on the surface can seem constricting, stiffly organic expression. Funny thing, organic farming is hip but organic farming is anything but haphazard. Ask any organic farmer how intentional, premeditated and rhythmic their toiling is in order to produce a bountiful, colorful, natural crop. 

Shaping Together

Patterning is part of the biblical narrative. The Genesis one account reflects creation patterns, instructions given to Moses for building a tabernacle reflects patterning – “See that you make this according to the pattern shown to you on the mountain” (Exodus 25) and the Apostle Paul urged people to model their lives on the pattern of other Jesus-followers – “Take note of others and live according to the pattern we gave you.” (Phil 3). My own marriage lacked healthy patterns that would produce fruitful character in our oneness. We lived by anti-patterns. I love mystery but we both learned our relationship needed to move out of the abstract and into some particular patterns we could commit to and apply together. We fashioned daily, weekly, monthly and yearly patterns. The goal was not to reach some level of self-congratulation but rather partnership towards growing something beautiful in our midst. Some of those early practices were as simple as a daily cup of coffee to download the happenings of the day, or going over finances weekly so no one bore the stress alone, or having a full date day monthly to indulge in each other. Some of our patterns have changed over the years but we've committed to them, rallied around them and trusted they would shape our life together in the typhoon nature of the world.

Shared-Patterns

This post is not about my marriage but it is about patterns and the church. I share my waking-up to patterns because what I felt in my early years of marriage, I feel deeply about the church now. The church needs to re-evaluate its patterns of togetherness in the places they dwell. Lesslie Newbigin has said "We are shaped by what we attend to". We must refresh what will conform us into a love-filled, grounded people, for the good of the world and the glory of God. I’m a minimalist, believing that the power is in the essentials not the luxuries. From that perspective I ask "what are those essential patterns we must cultivate that foster a vibrant life together in the world?". I find the question "how can we be a relevant church" distracting from what will nourish ecclesia for the future. What is really relevant is when the church is the church, not when it’s an impressive production. We need a full recovery of simplified, sacred, shared-patterns that mold a new but old way of being Kingdom-Come in the neighborhoods we inhabit. We are human so our joy, energy and emotional maturity towards living as the church ebbs and flows, which makes it paramount to covenant to foundational patterns. I use 7 C's to explain the patterns I attempt to live into with others. 

1. Commitment (A Pattern of Fidelity) – We need a foundation of mutual commitment to each other. If you're gathering a cluster of people to live as the People of God do not be afraid to ask for a long term commitment to a neighborhood together. We're not in a promise-keeping culture so commitment sounds alien and potentially cultic. Covenanted-community is a core sacrament of the church. This is not an issue of control but of mutual love for one another. Love is not sentimentality it is fidelity. Love is a rugged commitment to be with and for someone. Many live their lives with a strong dose of individualistic-ADHD, transitioning to the next shiny, exciting opportunity that benefits them. We cannot be fueled by inspiration as inspiration comes and goes; we are fueled by covenant-love, patterned after God’s relentless faithfulness to us. Discover rootedness, converse about it, come together, fashion some vows together, don't take them lightly and press into a long faithfulness.

2. Communion (A Pattern of Remembering) – The Lord’s Table (Eucharist) is our banner reminder of who we are to God, who we are to each other and who we are in the world. We rally around this living feast because of how forgetful we are. We need to tell each other with symbol and sacrament that we are loved, we belong to God and we are sent on a cruciform mission. This Table marks us, humbles us and fills our souls back up. This becomes a blazing signpost for our existence as the People of God submitting to the reign of King Jesus.

3. Common-Table (A Pattern of Welcoming) – From the Lord’s Table flows a secondary table into our lives; a common table. This common table is a coming together to feast, to share our food, linger and laugh, share our high’s and low’s and make space for strangers in our life. Kids play among us, tears flow when it's been a hard day and warm hugs are offered liberally. This pattern shapes our social muscles together, one that is generous, hospitable and constant. The schedule of our lives will resist this table-pattern but we must practice a counter-resistance.

4. Confession (A Pattern of Truth-Telling) - Galatians 6:4 says "Let everyone examine together the work they've accomplished, for then you can delight in the work of your hands without pride. Do not compare yourselves with each other; rather seek God’s help in making the inner secrets of your hearts plain.” This verse inspired the Jesuit practice of The Examen of Consciousness founded Five-hundred years ago. It was an Examine practiced in community to explore motivations, hopes, failures and sneaky sins. Examine is essential for maturing together. This pattern of examine is our place to confess who we are. We need safe spaces that encourage discourse and disclosure. What does it mean to be confessional about who we are? We must learn to tell the truth. Truth-telling is first about speaking the truth about ourselves before pointing the speck out in someone else’s eye. Yet we must seek understanding when we observe relating that is untruthful, perpetuating the nursing of wounds, angry inner tirades, passive aggressive postures and festering sins. Confessing who we are in safety is a cord that holds us together in a viral culture of dishonest relating

5. Conflict (A Pattern of Dialoguing) – We will offend one another, we will hurt each other because we are human and flawed. What will we do when we intentionally or unintentionally jab each other? Will we bail? Will we revert to gossip, detached attitudes, ruminating in paranoid interpretations, hiding behind words in emails and collecting weapons to unleash on each other? When we sense our rights have been stepped on, or voice has gone unheard, or our input has not been valued: we must vow to new patterns of conflict. We must name these new patterns, hold each other to them and invite each other to refresh our 
application when they are not practiced.

6. Complexity (A Pattern of Diversity) – Community does not obliterate our individuality. We must make space for our uniqueness, our hobbies, our distinct cultures, our political leanings, our varying education levels. We must not force conformity, graciously learning how to make room for each other beyond affinities. This means listening to each others differences, celebrating each 
other’s milestones, partaking in each other’s cultures and genuinely listening and learning from each others opposite experiences.

7. Crisis (A Pattern of Supporting) – Crisis precipitates a change in our lives and we must be there for each other when this occurs. A loss of job, a significant failure, a death, a marital fight, a loss of faith, are all matters for community to press into urgently and appropriately. We must take crisis seriously and feel the full burden to carry our brothers and sisters when it arises. No superhero person can do this, this is covenant-commitment to each other.

These are the patterns that I've been attempting to live into over the years. They have become my foundation for being the church as the expression of the Kingdom of God. All of these Patterns stirred together create a crock-pot for God’s Spirit to brew and create a new Kingdom flavor of body-life. 

What patterns would you add to the list?

Community Is Not Self-Actualization

This video was so true I could not resist posting it. As a church planter this has been one of the hidden hurdles to forming genuine, tethered communities. Culturally we seem more concerned with "how we want to be recognized by others" rather than "how do we meaningfully relate with others".  I've recently been recognizing how vintage my own church plant appears in a viral culture.

Check it> 

Substitute Community

I was fascinated by the elements of the Manti Te'o drama. In January 2013 this young football player was hoaxed as his online girlfriend faked her death. An acquaintance of Te'o confessed to orchestrating a hoax that lured Te'o into an online relationship with a nonexistent woman. How did a young man build a strong emotional attachment with someone that was not physically in his life? How did he develop a perceived relationship with someone who was not actively present? Something about this story symbolizes a cultural shift in how we've begun to quantify relationships. The psychological issues around this story had me buzzing as it relates to the formation of community.

Modern Symbolism

We face complications around the symbolism of community. What is it? What does our popular imagination say it is? What ideals do we harbor? What expectations do we import? Personally, my laser focus on community is directly tied to my take-away from the narrative of the New Testament church. If the temple is no longer the space that contains God, what is? 

The landscape of the New Testament letters exposes that community is the container for carrying the message of Jesus. Biblically informed community and American popular ideas of community are not the same. Time and time again I see the Kingdom framework for community collide headlong into this concept I call "Substitute Community."  

The Challenge

Substitute community is a deluded version of a common-life. Substitute communities do offer us an emotional return, a sense of belonging and a feeling of affirmation but my observation is that they are primarily delivered on “my own terms”.  The Manti Te’o experience is indicative of the story we find ourselves in. He was able to assemble some of the contents of a relationship without having an actual tethered relationship. To him the relationship was real, which is the point. To Manti Te’o the relationship was meeting his emotional needs. The challenge of building mutually serving, faithful, mission-sent, spiritual households is starting to become clearer; we must arrest back this idea of community from the grip of felt-needs based connections. Our learned behaviors from consumerism are spilling over into our symbolic definitions of community.

Commodified Versions

On the ground many believe they already have community because they have: Facebook friends that comfort them on a crummy day, blogs they follow that cluster them with like-minded people, books that instruct them without being in relationship, runners clubs, book clubs or any type of club they attend. None of these are inherently bad but having furniture does not mean we have a house. Community has become a commodity and we approach it the way we assemble our own custom meal from a buffet of options. The center for belonging and becoming has eroded and is being parceled out. It is possible to put together the semblance of community “a little of this and a little of that” and end up with a self-selected substitute community. 

What occurs gradually is that we find our ideological tribe online but we don’t have to live with them or persevere with them as we together submit to Jesus. Relationships operating this way inevitably turns people into pieces that can be swapped out and replaced. This is a hyper individualistic approach that is sadly not the exception but has become the norm. In this substitute community paradigm, my self-image is being shored up with very little, if anything required of me. We must ask a rhetorical question; can we really experience connection without the pain of compromise?

Subversive Approach

Kingdom-community binds me to a particular people, in a particular place, with particular rhythms, with a particular responsibility. As a Missional practioner I’m convinced recovering community should be a major point of rebellion for us. We are not on a mission to convert the cultural (Evangelical or Popular) slide from ex-carnate brands of community. We must embody new practices rather than hate on the cultural milieu. 

Our work of community should be rooted in the recovery of actual eye-contact, locality, regular availability, mutual vulnerability, shared mission and rootedness beyond our offenses. It is worth contending for. Kingdom-community is the space we create for humans to become more fully human. The life of God is intended to be tangible in the life of a Kingdom community; it is the new temple, the new home of God. Be prepared as you invite and challenge others to live into community alongside you, there is an awkward and frustrating transitional process from "Substitute Community" to "Kingdom Community".  

Becoming a Community Diagnostician

A formative book for me has been "Life Together" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  It painted a breathtaking vision of community that has been lodged in my mind for the last decade.   As a church planter though, I quickly realized how un-sexy the process of shaping and sustaining Missional-Community is in contrast to the surreal vision swirling around in my head. Here's a promise: the romanticism around this burgeoning approach to church planting will soon fade under the real hands-on work of cultivating routine community. I've journeyed through a "crashing-to-earth-process" after detoxing from years of devouring leadership books combined with reading stories of modern monastic communities, realizing people are not pieces to be used for my preferred utopian dreams.  Our pictures of perfection need to be grounded and humbled.  Idealism can be the un-verbalized fuel for disappointment surrounding the concept of community. 

The Fragility of Community
It’s tempting to talk about community in abstract terms but when practiced those abstract ideals have very little traction.  The disarming reality around fostering community is the ever present vulnerability and fragility of it.  My observance is that maintaining vibrant community is even harder than active missionality.  Christine D. Pohl said in a recent lecture "this truth may be the ingrown effects of our culture's emphasis on personal freedom, self-fulfillment, easy exits, and lots of choices with minimal responsibilities."  In the ordinariness of community, we are exposed in our subtle resistance to form genuine bonds of love with people who: like Romney when you like Obama or have an outgoing personality when you’re introverted or work a white collar job when you work at a coffee shop or are married with kids when you’re still single or like liturgy when you like contemporary or are artsy-fartsy when you’re pragmatic... and the list goes on.  You will acutely discover that the chemistry of community is always under assault from our easily offended and narcissistic human nature that would rather hide from people or coalesce with people just like us.

Nurturing a Family
A core challenge in sustaining community is the effort of nurturing a healthy spiritual family.  Buildings, budgets, programs and worship services must take a back seat to the ethos of community.  I believe the church of the future will be in some shape or form a Missional-Community that is working from the margins in our society.  I look forward to this new horizon.  I believe our church expressions need to be stripped of their noise and clutter in order to construct a "togetherness" that testifies to the Kingdom way of life.  Embodied relational transformation in a Jesus Community will be the new apologetic in our civilization. The credibility of the Gospel of Jesus is explicitly tethered to the quality of our practical and emotional collective life. (1 Cor 12,13, Matt 5-7)

Gardening the Soil 
It becomes essential in this new territory to develop into "Community Diagnosticians".  This has been by far what has morphed the most in my pastoral approach. There needs to be an intentional leadership re-framing from "Platform Preacher" to "Community Cultivator" or "Program Builder" to "Community Developer."  Tim Gombis a professor at Grand Rapids Seminary has an appropriate blog post on viewing the Apostle Paul as a "Community Organizer"   I’ve discovered that one of my foremost responsibilities is to assess, identify, stimulate and disciple healthy emotional habits amongst extended spiritual families.  I cannot sweep-under-the-carpet the messy, methodical work of gardening the soil of mutual submission to each other under the Lordship of Jesus.  If we abdicate this it will perpetually sabotage our community's maturity.  Belonging may start with these practices but forging an alternative community goes beyond hosting parties, having BBQ’s, hanging out and chatting about recent books we've read.  Much of the best selling Spiritual Formation literature I've come across takes a very individualistic angle on personal betterment and intimacy with God, but the living laboratory of community should be the primary space for the careful surgery on our self-oriented hearts.

A community diagnostician becomes a student of the scaffolding of community, gradually stirring very specific emotional and practical habits into the fabric of shared life. I am in awe of the epic prophetic nature of being together. Every time our community gathers we model the future we want to create.  We bear witness to the coming Kingdom of Jesus.

Thoughts?

How Do I Live Into A Missional Community When I Don’t Like People?

I mean come on, have you really been around people lately? They talk too much, they get excited about stuff they never follow through on, they talk smack about other people without trying to look like they’re talking smack, they are narcissistic so they subtly manipulate conversations back to themselves, they spend their money on dumb stuff then grumble about having no money, the raise their kids in wacky ways, they vote for the wrong politicians, they try to talk intelligently about things they’ve barely studied, they are poor listeners, they are undisciplined with their time and then they complain they have no time, they are all about “doing justice” but then can’t unplug from their computer to actually do it, they are too conservative, they are way too liberal, they are easily offended and then avoid conflict by avoiding you.   Seriously, I could go on for days but I probably shouldn’t.   

People are hard to like and if you're honest we all have bouts where we don’t like people much. 

This is a daily and weekly reality of forming a missional community, but very few like to be honest about it.  It’s hard to like each other.  Often in Christian cultures we attempt to pretend, smile and pose about our relationships which end up creating some form of twisted Christian-love.  Posing eventually causes us to unconsciously distance from certain people and subsequently dilute the quality of our community. Learning to love people we wouldn’t naturally like is an essential point of discipleship in creating an emotionally mature community with missional traction. 

I happen to believe this was a constant grind in the forming of the early church in the First and Second Century.  When you read many of the Pastoral Epistles you see that there are more than doctrinal issues at play.  When people who previously had very little in common (Jew & Gentile, slave & free) are now forging a common mission and community there will be emotional/personal dynamics that threaten the ongoing life, unity and movement of the Kingdom.  This challenge causes Paul to plead in Ephesians 4 “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with each other in love.  Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit with a bond of peace.”  The participants in an emerging Kingdom-Community must go through the dynamic pressure of loving and liking one another, if they don't, they slowly become irrelevant.

Addressing this community chemistry is mission imperative.  

Here are a few elementary spiritual minimums to be applied and remembered when we don’t like people:

1. There's no option of a community with people just like you.   The sad separating of the church into "like" groups and programs doesn’t create New Testament community.  When we parcel out into moms with toddlers, hipsters with tattoos, men who like to hunt, or middle age types with good jobs we don’t look like the “People of God” we're only mimicking our consumeristic/indivualistic counter parts.  It takes intentional effort to form a quality of life together.  

2. Holiness doesn’t magically happen in an incubator.  Evangelical Christianity has sold us a false formula for holiness and transformation prescribing; private Bible reading, worship music or taking in good preaching.  The catalyst for genuine heart transformation happens as you work through the “fleshiness” that arises from the rub of being tethered to others.  Our real selves are given the privilege to percolate to the surface so the grace of God can do its surgical work on our character.

3. Jesus bears with you.  Remember you are slow to conviction, slow to action, slow to selfless love, slow to pray, slow to compassion and quick to judge.  Jesus Christ has a lot of patience with you and I.  His kindness, graciousness and faithfulness to us while we hold on white-knuckled to our own buffoonery is part of the glimmering beauty of the Gospel.  I should learn to love and like others because Jesus loves and likes me and I can be very unlovable and unlikable.

4. Choose to incarnate.  Instead of hiding, avoiding or moaning about people who grate you in your community choose the movement of love.  The Gospels are full of accounts where God in Jesus enters into the emotional space of others -- Matthew, Nathaniel, a prostitute, Nicodemus, a blind man and a Samaritan woman.  Incarnation is a cute hip word but when practiced it requires us to pick up our cross.  Jesus said, “Students are not above their teacher, nor servants above their master” (Matt. 10:24).  You and I will probably never die literally on a cross but we will have to die in other ways when we incarnate with actual people.  Incarnation costs time, patience, forgiveness and emotional energy.  Incarnation calls us to disrupt the lazy gravitation towards only relating with people we like and filtering out those we don’t.

Thoughts?