Where's the Spirit in Missional Communities?

If you’re familiar with the lively soundscape of a modern worship set or a historic setting with breath-taking liturgy or the delivery of an inspiring sermon then a Missional Community can be a bit of a, well… let down. Some entering into a Missional Community go through a transition. When your senses are atuned to these channels it’s natural to expect to feel a certain way in church.  Our eyes and ears are accustomed to the obvious most blatant signs that “something spiritually dynamic is happening”. Without these channels it can be difficult to decipher the whereabouts of the Holy Spirits activity. 

Emotional Expectations

On the surface there’s nothing spectacular about 20, 30 or 40 people doing ho-hum activities together; eating, conversing, singing (without bells and whistles), serving (without much fanfare), dialogical teaching (with interruptions and questions). I’m being a bit sarcastic but I’m attempting to poke at a real emotional occurance for people when they enter into this simplified, raw, relational way of being the church.  In a Missional Community many of the dynamics that sparked an expressive return may not be there for orientation. Many aren’t aware of their emotional expectations until they begin to feel unmoved by the challenge of being the church. I've noticed that when faced with paring back the complexities of church life, some discover they were more dependent on the packaging than the contents.  

Church-going

So where’s the Spirit? Good question.  The re-discovery of the Holy Spirit begins with a renewed perspective; new eyes to see.  The perspective is directly tied to “church-going” vs “church-being”. Church-going relates with spirituality through what is offered. In this perspective, an individual anticipates encountering God through the template of what is provided: worship, preaching, liturgies, discipleship programs, church wide events etc. There's nothing inherently wrong with any of these offerings. Still I think there is an underlying psychological precedence that gains footing; participation is qualified through consuming.  An unsaid value is fostered in our minds “if there’s nothing spiritually interesting to consume, I don’t feel God at church.”  We're accustomed to this way of encountering a worship gathering. We naturally prop up the visible, the magnetic or the most visibly inspiring. As leaders we know we can tinker with the elements, add certain factors and manufacture a meaningful experience. Both the contemporary church and the liturgical church have the strong tendency to communicate methodologically that "the Holy Spirit is moving" because of what we view on stage and take into our senses. I'm convinced this has had a catastrophic impact on our attention spans for beholding the Holy Spirit in the ordinariness of being the people of God.

Church-being

Church-being develops eyes for the movement of the Holy Spirit in the seemingly mundane, shared work of growing up in Christ together. When I saturate in the New Testament letters, beyond the initial inaugural event of Pentecost, “church-being” is bare-bones but extremely nourishing. In Philippians 2 the Apostle Paul goes under the hood to show us the guts of the Spirit’s activity:

“If you have the community of the Spirit, if you desire tenderness and compassion between each other, then learn to love well, do the persevering work to find commonality with each other, build deep-spirited bonds. Let the Holy Spirit teach you how to cut-away selfish ambition and self-centered obsession as you share life together.  Let this lead to humility that sacrifices for the needs of others, stop looking to your own demands to be met… therefore, continue working out your salvation with fear and trembling. It is God who is moving amongst you to act in this way, to fulfill his divine purposes in the world.” (The Message)

Essential Material

Can God really be this earthy, gritty and ordinary? Could this be the most essential material of the Holy Spirit’s company? I believe so. In the scope of the early church there's nothing more supernatural than these elements in Phil 2: vital connections, intimate partnerships, permanency, inconvenient responsibility and mutual care. In Matthew 18:19, Jesus points directly at the unimpressive exercise of finding each other relationally and declares "that's where I'm at." Working out our salvation, in loving dialogue, is inherently a spirit-filled sacrament.  

The Primary Space

I've traveled the world to find the treasure of where the Holy Spirit dwells. I've scoured the scriptures to find the secret.  Honestly, it was slightly anti-climatic to discover the Holy Spirit's primary dwelling is in the temple of one-anothering. When we delight in each other, in our frailty, in an attitude of gentleness and humility we touch God. Pneumatology begins and ends with inhabiting with each other.  This is the furnace that burns away my privatized spirituality, my tolerance for self-loathing, my envy, my hatred, my idols, my demand for attention, my backbiting and my stubborn negotiating with God’s purposes for my life. This is the signal flare for the Kingdom of God.  Again, identifying the Holy Spirit's home is difficult when wearing the blinders of institutional attachments, idiosyncratic worship needs and individualistic appetites. We need a centered theology that identifies community-building as the primary witness of the Holy Spirit. Is there room for diverse expressions of the Holy Spirit, YES; but I contend covenantal-interaction is the blazing nucleus, everything else is an accessory according to 1 Corinthians 13. We must re-imagine God’s Spirit meeting us in our relational calisthenics.

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?