“I was born into a church where the mission field was on foreign soil. The operative assumption was that everyone within U.S. national boundaries was already Christian, either actively or nominally. Mission was a far-off enterprise to be managed by professional missionaries while mainline members could stay at home comfortable in a culture shared equally by all. Today, we recognize that the mission field is all around us in a complex and diverse culture where religions, philosophies, value systems, and consumer goods compete for attention and claim to bring meaning to a person’s life. The church must compete with other voices.”

“Will changing to drums, improved technology, renovated worship space, or a much more informal clergy who no longer wear preaching robes in the pulpit fix the problems of the mainline church? No. Such simple solutions cannot so easily be found at this time. Difficult conversations among leaders are necessary to determine the appropriate way for a particular congregation in a particular time and a particular place to learn to speak to its particular mission field. A part of the hard-earned learning from our particular exodus is that there are no simple answers in a complex culture that experiences rapid change. Certainly the challenge is all about change. We know more and more about change – the speed of change, the amount of change, the consistency of change, and the immediacy of change.”

“The task for church leaders is not just in keeping up with change, however, but shaping change appropriately for the gospel to have room in people’s lives. We need to learn to speak to this world without conforming to the world. We need to speak freshly to the people of a changed world without losing ancient practices and teachings that shape people in faith. All of this requires that we learn how to change ourselves. Much of the difficulty in the change necessary for the church comes from the depth of learning that is required of us. It is immeasurably more difficult for us to change ourselves than to participate in attempts to change others. Leadership may be more about asking the right questions that can prompt new learning than about installing the next answer.”

This ongoing shift from mission field on foreign soil to mission field on the street where I live has introduced a number of adaptive challenges to the church. Adaptive challenges are different from technical challenges. Technical challenges are about improving what we are already doing. They tend to be problems that we know how to fix or we can find someone who knows how to fix them. They are changes within a paradigm. These are problems that can be fixed by “polishing the apple”, laying down new carpet, putting on a fresh coat of paint, or constructing a new church sign. Technical solutions are changing to drums, adding powerpoint and screens, and not wearing a robe anymore. If a church is facing technical problems, these technical solutions will work. If a church is facing an adaptive challenge, these technical solutions will not work.

I think this is what Jesus was talking about in Matthew 9:17 when He said, “Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the new wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour the new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.” Using the old wineskin is the technical solution. Creating a new wineskin is the adaptive challenge.

Figuring out what to do with our adaptive challenges is absolutely crucial to our future. It involves new learning and acquiring new skills, habits, and practices. Solutions to adaptive challenges are not obvious. They require a great deal of time, conversations, discovery, and experiments. They stimulate resistance, challenge our values, and make us uncomfortable. Often, there is not a win-win solution. It requires a change of culture and addressing underlying issues. And there are no experts.

Leading adaptive change is hard but necessary. Structural changes do not solve adaptive challenges. It requires a change in culture. We follow the missional change model of moving a congregation through awareness, to understanding, to evaluating, to experimenting, and finally to commitment (The Missional Leader, Roxburgh and Romanuk). Structural change follows culture change, it does not precede it. One of our defaults is that we usually start by looking for structural changes and technical changes. We have to learn to begin with culture change and adaptive change, if we are to lead God’s people to address the challenges of the changing culture in which we live.

My hope is that this year, we can spend more time together as a learning community, learning together from one another, how to address the adaptive challenges in front of us. We have tried all kinds of technical solutions. Those can help us begin to take a few steps forward, but the real changes facing us this year are adaptive. I want us to be the sent witnesses for Jesus Christ in the places where we live, work, and play. I want us to move back into our neighborhoods and join what God is already doing there. I want us to be led by the Holy Spirit to the places in our community where the Spirit is already at work. To do this, to be the faithful and fruitful people of God that I believe we are called to be, I believe we will need to address some adaptive challenges this year. None of us are experts at this. We are all learning and growing together.

God is up to something big in our world, and God is inviting us to be a part of this big work. I believe that 2012 is going to be a significant year. I believe some major actions will take place and some major decisions will be made. I hope that you will join us as we discover together how God is calling us to participate in this critically important mission of God. I hope you will let us know how we can come alongside your congregation and discover some new learnings together.

God bless!

In the early Christian era, there was considerable disagreement amongst Christians regarding the nature of Christ’s Incarnation. While all Christians believed that Jesus was indeed the Son of God, the exact nature of his Sonship was contested, together with the precise relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit referred to in the New Testament. Though Jesus was clearly the Son, what exactly did this mean? Debate on this subject raged most especially during the first four centuries of Christianity, involving Jewish Christians, Gnostics, followers of Arius, and followers of Athanasisus, among others.

Eventually, the Christian Church accepted the teaching of Athanasius and his allies, that Christ was the incarnation of the eternal second person of the Trinity, who was truly God and truly human simultaneously. All divergent beliefs were defined as heresies.  This included Docetism, which said that Jesus was a divine being that took on human appearance but not flesh; Arianism, which held that Christ was a created being; and Nestorianism, which maintained that the Son of God and the man, Jesus, shared the same body but retained two separate natures. 

Our Presbyterian Book of Order, in F-2.03, says that “The confessions express the faith of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in recognition of canonical Scriptures and the formulation and adoption of the ecumenical creeds, notably the Nicene and the Apostle’s Creeds with their definitions of the mystery of the triune God and of the incarnation of the eternal Word of God in Jesus Christ.” 

In The Message, Eugene Petersen translates John 1:14 as “The Word became flesh and moved into the neighborhood.”  In The Missional Leader, Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk write that “Missional leaders take the Incarnation of Jesus with the utmost seriousness.  More than just a doctrine to be confessed, it is the key to understanding all God’s activities with, through, in, and among us.  It points toward an answer to the question of where God is to be found.  In the Incarnation, we discern that God is always found in what appears to be the most godforsaken of places – the most inauspicious of locations, people, and situations.  God seems to be present where there is little or no expectation.”

“An old man, past hope, keeps the light of the temple in Jerusalem.  His wife is an embarrassment because she is far past the age of childbearing and there is no son.  Yet God comes to these two elderly faithful people, and their world is transformed.  A young girl, just a teenager, in an obscure village, becomes pregnant with the life of God.  Over and over again, God meets God’s people with the bright light of the Kingdom in what appears to be the most hopeless and forsaken places.”

“In these biblical narratives, God is constantly present in places where no one would logically expect God’s future to emerge, and yet it does, over and over.  There is nothing in these stories about getting the wrong people off the bus and getting the right ones on to accomplish great ends and become the best organization in the world.  This God who pursues us is always calling the wrong people onto a bus that isn’t expected to arrive.  The reason for all of this is that God chooses to unfold the future of the kingdom among people and places of this kind.”

“In the Jewish Scriptures, the prophet Ezekiel asks, ‘Can these bones live?’  In reality the question isn’t answered until Jesus appears as the one who is God’s enfleshed presence among people.  God’s answer to the question is God himself:  Jesus the Incarnate Lord, who comes among us in the most unexpected and inauspicious times and places.  The Biblical stories that lead to the Incarnation keep telling us these are the very places where God’s future emerges.  This is what God does and how God acts, most clearly in Jesus.”

Throughout our Christian history, the Incarnation has been, and continues to be, central to our celebration of Christmas.  In Jesus, God took on flesh, moved into our neighborhood, and lived among us.  As followers of Christ, we are invited to be the presence of Christ with the neighbors God has put around us.  What does this practically mean to live incarnationally in neighborhoods where people are poor, hungry, and hurting?  What is God up to and how are we being invited to participate in God’s work during this Advent/Christmas season?  Where will Jesus show up this year?  It may be in a place where you have no hope or in a place that you do not expect.  That would be just like God.

MISSIONAL IS NOT a label to describe churches that emphasize cross-cultural missions.
MISSIONAL IS NOT a label used to describe churches that are using outreach programs to be externally focused.
MISSIONAL IS NOT a label for church growth and church effectiveness.
MISSIONAL IS NOT a label for churches that are effective at evangelism.
MISSIONAL IS NOT a label to describe churches that have developed a clear mission statement with a vision and purpose for their existence.
MISSIONAL IS NOT a way of turning around ineffective and outdated church forms so that they can display relevance to the wider culture.
MISSIONAL IS NOT a label that points to a primitive or ancient way of being the church.
MISSIONAL IS NOT a label describing new formats of church that reach people who have no interest in traditional churches.

MISSIONAL IS about God, Who is about a big purpose, in and for the whole of creation. The church has been called into life to be both the means of this mission and a foretaste of where God is inviting all creation to go. Just as its Lord is a mission-shaped God, so the community of God’s people exists, not for themselves, but for the sake of the work. Therefore,

MISSIONAL IS NOT about a program or project some people in the church do from time to time (as in “mission trip”, “mission budget”, and so on).
MISSIONAL IS NOT even about sending missionaries.
MISSIONAL IS a community of God’s people who live into the imagination that they are, by their very nature, God’s missionary people, living as a demonstration of what God plans to do in and for all of creation in Jesus Christ.
MISSIONAL IS about Imagination, Incarnation, and Context. .

MISSIONAL IS about IMAGINATION – a way to see and experience life in the church and the world. Missional imagination is fundamentally about seeing the church and the world in light of the Triune God’s presence and activity. Jesus repeatedly stresses new ways of seeing in his encounters with various people in the Gospels. Discerning the presence and possibility of the reign of God in our midst involves a fresh perspective illuminated by the Spirit. From the perspective of missional theology, imagination is not the property of autonomous individuals. Rather, it is one of the ways in which the Holy Spirit moves within and among us to lead us into God’s missional activity in the world.

MISSIONAL IS about INCARNATION. Just as “the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14 in The Message), we are called to live Christ-like lives among our neighbors within our own context. We are called “to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight for the blind, let the oppressed go free, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19). We are called to share stories and parables as Jesus did, come alongside people as Jesus did, and demonstrate the Kingdom of God to the world. This is more about living the faith than creating a program. It is about discerning what God is up to in our community, and discovering how God wants us to listen, live, and learn in a particular place.

MISSIONAL IS about CONTEXT. The church increasingly finds itself within a dramatically changed context. A variety of terms are used to discuss this shift, such as “postmodernity”, “post-Christendom”, “globalized world”, “information age”, and “network society”.

The MISSIONAL conversation has unleashed a great deal of energy and hopefulness among churches stuck in patterns of church life that have become disconnected from a changing world. Leaders weary of trying the latest strategy or technique, burdened by the impossible expectations of entertaining and satisfying fickle spiritual consumers, and staggering under the weight of collapsing church institutions are waking up to a new sense of possibility, as they explore what it means to rediscover their identities within God’s larger mission.

Discipleship is following Christ into participation in God’s mission in the world in the power of the Spirit. This means that it lies at the heart of the missional turn. Since missional church is fundamentally about identity – about being the church – developing and deepening the Christian identity of every disciple must be at the forefront of the church’s focus. The church cannot witness credibly to or participate effectively in God’s mission without faithful discipleship. Christian identity in Christendom was assumed to be transmitted primarily through the broader culture. One learned how to be a good Christian by being a good citizen as well as a faithful family member. Today the culture can no longer be assumed to contribute constructively to Christian formation, and few families are equipped to do so. Thus Christian identity must be cultivated intentionally, patiently, and comprehensively by congregations and other Christian communities. Practices of discipleship are primarily a communal reality, given the Trinitarian understanding of the image dei. Unfortunately, late-modern culture has tended to de-emphasize the communal dimension of discipleship in favor of focusing on the individual.

One of the more fruitful developments in contemporary theology is the renewed attention to practices that shape Christian life, imagination, and discipleship. Most of the literature that is focused on practices, however, has not assumed a specific missional theological perspective. The impulse reflected in these writings is nevertheless a helpful one to holistically engage Christian formation and mission. This impulse recognizes that the Christian faith is expressed not only in doctrinal formulations but also in concrete acts. It understands that our beliefs and imaginations are shaped through patterns of behavior over time and that these patterns are grounded in and passed down by communities into which we are apprenticed. Practices of peacemaking, worship, healing, hospitality, and discernment are integral to the church’s participation in God’s mission.

It is important to resist the common tendency to reduce missional church to a set of rules to follow, discrete characteristics, or summary principles. There is no model for what a missional church looks like. Rather, missional church needs to be defined by the church’s dynamic participation in the Triune God’s movement in the world. There is thus no how-to list or set of defining characteristics for the missional church, an approach often pursued in some of the current literature. It takes on different expressions at different times and places. Missional church is a habit of mind and heart, a posture of openness and discernment and a faithful attentiveness both to the Spirit’s presence and to the world that God so loves. Recognizing and seeking the leadership of the Spirit in the church’s communal life and practice is the key.

Missional theology, understood through the framework of the church’s participation in the Triune God’s creative, redemptive, and reconciling movement in the world, invites us to recognize the missionary character of Christian practices. Practices must be understood not simply as things we do to grow spiritually but rather as concrete ways in which our participation in God’s mission is embodied in relation to our neighbor. For instance, the Christian practice of prayer – a central one, as most would agree – can take on a powerful missionary dimension when done with attentiveness to the world. Reggie McNeal offers an example of how one congregation attempted this:
“Each member of the staff at one church was instructed to go to a coffee shop, sit on a park bench, or stand in a mall parking lot and pray a simple prayer: ‘Lord, help me to see what you see.’ They were to listen for an hour to the voice of God and then reconvene to share what they had heard. This simple outing radically changed their outlook as they realized that what was in the heart of God was much bigger than typical church concerns. They began to see broken families, homeless people, at-risk children, stressed teenagers – all people they were not engaging with their church ministry.”

When this attentiveness is grounded in an imagination for God’s presence and movement in the world, our eyes are opened with compassion. We connect with God’s passionate care for all creation.

The missionary dimension of practices such as service and hospitality might seem more obvious, but a robust Trinitarian missional theology opens up their reciprocal, mutually transformative potential. When we enter into participation in the ministry of Christ with our neighbor, we expect to meet Christ in the stranger and to experience the Spirit’s movement between us and those whom we serve or welcome. We are sharing in a bigger movement that may lead us into surprising and unexpected places. Mother Teresa of Calcutta would sometimes ask those serving alongside her as she cared for the poor and dying, “Do you see Christ in them yet?” This was not a pious platitude but rather a profound spiritual insight into what happens when we follow Christ into identification with the poor. God is there, the passionate God Who suffers with the lost and downtrodden, whose Spirit breaks down walls of division and creates new community where one might least expect it.

For this reason, spiritual formation or Christian discipleship, from a missional view, cannot be merely an in-house affair. We must engage the curriculum of the world as we expect to encounter God’s presence in the neighbor or stranger. Congregations must make space for deep engagement with the biblical narrative in direct relationship to an engagement with the world. We are formed spiritually as faithful disciples through immersion not only in a vibrant practicing community where we learn from mature mentors in the faith, but also through coming to recognize the signs of the Triune God’s movement in the lives of our neighbors and our w

Three events for pastors were held this past spring. One was held in Arcadia (near Pasadena), one in Sacramento, and one in Portland. About 90-100 pastors attended the spring events on Leadership in Times of Discontinuous Change. They were invited to be a part of a ten month pastor cohort process. Over the summer, the pastors filled out the Pastor 360 survey and asked at least 20 church members to fill out the survey on them as well. The Executive Presbyters who had volunteered to coach the pastor cohort groups also filled out the Executive 360 survey and had about 20 people fill out the surveys on them, as well.

On September 29, 2011, a gathering of pastors and coaches was held with leaders from The Missional Network (Alan Roxburgh, Mark and Nina Lau Branson, and John McLaverty) to give them the results of their 360 surveys and to kick off the ten month cohort process. Three groups met the same day in Pasadena, Sacramento, and Portland, and were connected by a video conferencing system.

The missional leadership process has been influenced by Everett Rogers’ work on the Diffusion of Innovation, which asks how do you do culture change within an organization? What are the skills and capacities that leaders need in order to be able to lead their people through adaptive change? We are facing challenges we have not seen before. We were trained for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, and we are discovering our way into the new world. We are going on a journey together where we are learning as we go. Our context is different than it was just ten years ago. This is a process in just-in-time learning.

We used the image that the church is like a sailboat. The church, like the sailboat, is not something that you can “drive”, but is something that is driven by the winds of the Holy Spirit. We can’t predict or control what happens. We are tacking and weaving our way across the water, trying to stay in the path of where the wind of the Spirit is blowing.

Why are we going on this journey? There is A Great Unraveling going on in both the church and the culture. We have been inside a wonderful tradition that has been woven together for centuries. It has been a good tradition and we don’t want to throw it away. But, it is coming apart. There is something deeply important being lost. We want to figure out how to lead in this time of unraveling, when the Spirit is pushing us places we have not been before.

Leadership cultivates environments that release the missional imagination of God’s people in a particular locale. These environments are where we go to learn again to listen to and discern the Spirit of God. We need this new imagination, because we know that our management strategies and techniques aren’t working so well anymore.

Our metaphor is that pastors are teaching elders. That is still important an important role, but it is no longer sufficient. We need to be cultivators who form a people in the likeness of Jesus Christ, asking what God is up to in our neighborhoods and how do we join that work? This is about change. We are invited into a journey of change. This leadership process is not about how to change the church, though. The focus is on what kind of change we need to make as leaders. We know that this kind of change does not happen in a straight line like going from point A to point B. It is like the tacking and weaving of the sailboat as it goes from the left to the right to the left to the right as it crosses the water.

The 360 survey looks at characteristics and skills in four areas: personal foundation attributes, creating a shared future, forming a congregational culture/environment, and engaging our context. If we are going to go through real change, then we must begin with listening to what is going on. We begin moving through the Missional Change model, which moves from Awareness to Understanding to Evaluation to Experimentation and then to Commitment. The 360 survey begins this process by getting leaders going with Awareness and Understanding. This is about culture change and culture change is always adaptive change.

This process looks at forming new habits, values, attitudes, and practices. It looks at a new way of leading. As we learn to be different people, and as we learn to become different leaders, we are also looking at how we change the culture of our congregations, our presbyteries, and our synods. How do we cultivate a new imagination of what a presbytery and a synod could be? Can we begin to create a culture where we are asking different kinds of questions? Can we as leaders become open enough to say, look, we are facing problems we don’t know how to solve. How do we do this? How do we do this together? Can we make this the emerging culture of the synod?

I think this is part of our connectional ministry. Bringing people together in learning communities is important to the cultivation of a positive, viable, hope-filled future. Regardless of the unraveling that is going on around us, this is one way that we continue to build strength into our leaders, our congregations, and our presbyteries, so that we will be a part of what God is doing in our world. Please pray for us as we move through this process this year. It will be interesting see where Christ will lead us and what will come out of this!

One of the major changes that has taken place over the summer in our denomination has been the passage of the new Form of Government (nFOG). This change to part of our constitution could have some very positive benefits for our presbytery.

The previous Form of Government had shifted away from being a constitution with general principles and values to more of a manual of operations that added specific rules for what could and could not be done. If one church or presbytery had a bad experience with one situation, they would take an overture to the next General Assembly to get the rules changed so that this could never happen again. As a result, we ended up with a lot of individual answers that were applied to the entire denomination, when the entire denomination didn’t need those individual answers. That answer was really needed in that congregation or that presbytery, but the rest of us had to live with their new prohibitions. What is needed in the northeast or the south is often not the same thing that is needed out here on the west coast. In terms of policies and procedures (not theology), one size does not fit all. But, the Book of Order began to prohibit all of us from doing things, when the prohibition may have only been needed for some of us.

The good news is that much of the regulatory nature of our constitution has now been removed. Many of the obstacles that were getting in the way and making ministry more difficult have now been eliminated from our constitution. Presbyteries and congregations are still free to maintain these rules in their own manuals of operation, if it makes sense for them to do so. But, now the rest of us do not have to be hamstrung by someone else’s rules.

This moves us from a “manual of operations” style of constitution to more of an “enabling” style of constitution. It moves us away from a lot of specifics for day to day operations and more into general principles that we need to abide by. This could push us back more into our Reformed roots for conversations about what our covenant is. What are we willing to covenant about with one another? What kind of covenant would we agree to? How do we achieve accountability and maintain proper ethical standards and behaviors without being micro-managers?

What will this change mean for us?
Changing to the new Form of Government means that we have moved from a permission–withholding document to a permission–giving document. Instead of the first, initial, knee jerk answer to every question being, “No, we can’t do that” or “No, the Book of Order won’t let us do that”, the first response now becomes “Let’s talk about it. Maybe that would be a good idea.” It moves us from governance as a “leash” that is holding us back to governance as a catalyst, encouraging us to venture out into new forms of ministry. It moves us from unity as top-down uniformity to a more collegial unity that must be centered in Jesus Christ.

Under the new Form of Government, the key questions change. The old question was usually “Does the Book of Order allow us to do this?”, and the answer was often “no”. However, since the Form of Government is now silent on many day-to-day issues, the question changes to “Is this a good idea? Does this make sense? Is God leading us to consider this? Will this help us participate more fully in the mission of God in our community?”
In some congregations and presbyteries, the old Form of Government was used as an excuse to say no to new, creative, and innovative ideas. But, by returning to a constitution with general principles and values, the new Form of Government might actually open the door for some new imagination. It supports the emphasis in our presbytery to encourage missional experimentation. It encourages us to pray together, to read scripture together, to ask questions and have conversations together to discern how God might be leading us forward into the future. This is a good thing.

In recent years, we have become lazy. Whenever an entrepreneurial idea was raised, people would often respond by saying, “The Book of Order doesn’t allow that”, without much prayer and conversation about whether this might the leading of God’s Holy Spirit. The new Form of Government eliminates our excuse to be lazy. Instead of using the Book of Order as an excuse not to try new forms of ministry, we will actually have to have conversations about the merits of the new proposals and pray together to discern if God is wanting us to launch a new pilot project.

Now, some people think that the new Form of Government will make us more missional. This is not true. A document, a new polity, will not force us to move back into our neighborhoods or require us to join with what the Spirit is doing there. Only actively engaging with our communities will make us more missional.

Not every presbytery will experience the benefits of the nFOG. A presbytery that has a regulatory, permission-withholding culture, will continue to read that attitude into it, and may not see any positive change. Our deepest needs are not polity change or structure change but culture change.

The new Form of Government was written to provide us with more flexibility in our methods of ministry. This could result in the pursuit of new possibilities that begin to emerge. We need to be ready to act on the opportunities that are surfacing. We need to be ready to move with the Spirit of God, whom our Reformed theology teaches us, never acts in contradiction to the written Word of God.

I don’t know if the nFOG will be good for every presbytery. But, I believe it will be good for ours. Allowing people to dream and imagine and experiment with new ministry methods is a good thing. Who knows? Maybe God will use this to remove some barriers to joining in the work of Christ’s Holy Spirit in our neighborhoods.

“At its core, missoinal church is how we cultivate a congregational environment where God is the center of conversation and God shapes the focus and work of the people. We believe this is a shift in imagination for most congregations; it is a change in the culture of congregational life. Missional leadership is about shaping cultural imagination within a congregation wherein people discern what God might be about among them and in their community.”

Branson goes on to say that “the missional church needs a different vision of leadership…The work of church leaders is to shape an envrionment in which God’s missional imagination, which is available to the members, can be discerned and entered into.”

So, leadership is about creating an environment. Leadership is about asking questions, not giving answers. Leadership is about character and authenticity. Leaders must build relationships and trust. Leadership is more about framing than vision. Leaders create meaning in the midst of the chaos.

Ron Heifetz has said that “the prevailing notion that leadership consists of having a vision and aligning people with that vision is bankrupt because it continues to treat adaptive situations as if they were technical: The authority figure is supposed to divine where the group is going, and people are supposed to follow. Leadership is reduced to a combination of grand knowing and salesmanship. Such a perspective reveals a basic misconception about the way systems succeed in addressing adaptive challenges. Adaptive solutions require members of the system to take responsibility for the problematic situations that face them.”

If this is true, then one of the skills that missional leaders need is learning how to cultivate an environment, how to stimulate imagination, and how to help people discover what God is up to in their neighborhoods. It is not an “expert” model of leadership, but an “explorer” and a “trail guide” model of leadership, that realizes God is already at work among the community of believers and the communities where we live. We have to work with our people to discover where the Trinity is already at work and join in the reconciling and redeeming work that is already taking place around us.

Gil describes his personal experience in the church as being defined by this exodus. He says it has been a pilgrimage through a changed North American landscape and a changed global landscape. To describe the radical change in our lives, we look back to the story of the Exodus in the Old Testament, about how God’s people had to wander for a generation in the wilderness, before they were ready to enter the new reality that God had waiting for them. We are a people who have been taken out of a way of life that was well known and deeply established. The North American mainline denominational church used to be strong, confident, growing, and a dominant voice in shaping the norms of North American life. That is not true anymore. Now, the church is in a period of questioning, doubt, and searching.

But, this is not a reason for despair. The surprise is that hope grows in the wilderness. The surprise is that the wilderness is a great place to learn. The surprise is that the wilderness turns out to be a good place where the old supports are gone, the old assumptions are no longer true, and the old practices either fail or are no longer possible. Because of this, people have to learn new ways of doing the most basic things.

Gil says that there is little doubt that our mainline denominations will be changed in size and shape by the rest of the journey. There is little doubt that a good percentage of our local congregations, perhaps as many as 25 to 30 percent, will not live through the journey and they will close. There is little doubt that our denominational structures, staffing, and use of resources will continue to undergo deep change. Nonetheless, we are being helped and shaped by what we are learning and by how our trust in God is deepening. The metaphor of the exodus is meant to help us recognize ourselves as a displaced people who need to trust God for our future and who need to be willing to learn new ways and reshape our lives as we travel.

He suggests that our bias toward orderliness means that we expect too much from an exodus. We expect that the trip can be scheduled on a clear time line, that leaders will know the right directions to walk every day, that faithfulness will not be challenged, and that everyone will willingly take the trip together without argument. Were such an orderly trip even possible, the fact remains that neat, tidy trips produce little learning and perhaps, in the end, no change. But, moving through the wilderness increases our anxiety level. It sometimes causes us to be overcontrolling, overworried, and overreactive. These reactions do not allow room for the hand of God or the movement of the Spirit to work and lead us in new directions.

The longer we are involved in an exodus, the harder the work becomes, the more difficult the questions, the richer the results, and the deeper the hope. Because of our time in the wilderness, we are finally moving beyond the technical questions of the surface to the adaptive questions beneath. We are finally facing the more difficult questions of identity. Who are we as the people of God in this time and space? What is our purpose? Why are we here?

Gil writes that many mainline denominations in North America today are theologically, politically, regionally, racially, and ethnically diverse. Where once in an earlier age, we had a much clearer shared practice that held us in community, our breadth of differences now often makes the people within our denominations uncomfortable with themselves and one another. We are left wondering what we now hold in common. What holds us together? Without a clear sense of identity, it is hard to stay in community with one another in order to address our reason for being. Clear identity and reasons for being often give birth to new groups, movements, and denominations. The need to recapture and reclaim a central and functional identity is the unique challenge of a long-established denomination. Long-established denominations risk carrying forward an older identity that once served well, but is no longer accurate or effective. Recalling, reclaiming, and risking to live into a newer, fresher identity as a people of God are essential tasks of our particular wilderness experience.

One idea that helps us move through this time of transition today is to remember that we have been here before. We are the people of the original Exodus and the Exile. We have been displaced before. We have learned to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land before. And through it all, we have received an inheritance from those earlier people who faced the wilderness and responded with deeper spiritual, missional, and relational connections. It has been messy, but we have done it before.

One church historian has identified seven lessons the church has learned from past experiences:
1. Things move slowly in the church.
2. Because things move slowly, we need to be a people of great patience (part of the fruit of the Spirit – Galatians 5:16-17).
3. The church has a long tradition of making decisions collaboratively through councils. Top-down authority is not always the best.
4. The church responds best when it recognizes what is essential and what is primary.
5. The church needs to constantly discern and stay in touch with people. What makes this difficult is that the people the church needs to connect with are not the people already in the church, but the people the church is called to in our neighborhoods and communities.
6. Our God is a God of surprises. We are not in control. God is in control. We cannot always accurately predict what God will do. The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:25). God can surprise us.
7. We live in constant hope. History teaches us that we have seen worse, we have survived, and we have been renewed.

However one chooses to tell the story, we are clearly in a wilderness moment. Some call it a paradigm shift or postmodernism or an emergent moment. Whatever the description, we need to remember that the church has been here before, the church has managed change before, and the church has survived circumstances that it didn’t think it would before.

This consultation is designed for congregational leadership teams (pastors, staff, elders, other key leaders).  We will learn, discover, and plan together how to identify practical ways that your church members can make gospel connections with their communities.  Hands on resources will be provided for pastors and lay leaders to create experiments in missional life, which will be tailored to your context and to your people.

The consultation will be led by Alan Roxburgh and Mark Lau Branson.  Alan is the president of The Missional Network, and the author of the recent book Missional:  Joining God in the Neighborhood.  You can learn more about the ministry of The Missional Network at http://www.roxburghmissionalnet.com/.  Mark Lau Branson is the Associate Professor of the Ministry of the Laity at Fuller Seminary, and the co-author of the recent book Churches, Cultures, and Leadership:  A Practical Theology of Congregations and Ethnicities.

There will be a pre-conference seminar for pastors on Friday, August 19, from 8:30 am – 3:30 pm on “Pastors as Missional Leaders”.  The cost for the pre-conference seminar is $25.  The consultation begins on Friday, August 19, from 5:00-8:00 pm, and continues on Saturday, April 20, from 9:00 am – 3:00 pm.  The cost for the consultation is $75 per person, but the fifth person from each congregation comes for free.  You can register now at the Presbyterian Global Fellowship website at http://sendingout.com/events/.  Space is limited to the first 300 who register.  We hope to see you there!     

As you may have been hearing lately, the Presbyterian Church (USA) is currently voting on amendments to our Book of Order. One amendment is a proposal to remove our ordination standard that church officers live in fidelity in the covenant of marriage and chastity in singleness, and replace it with a standard that officers joyfully submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The proposal would shift the full responsibility of ordination decisions from the national level of the denomination to the presbytery and session level. It represents a de-centralization of the denomination. It looks like this new proposal will probably get enough votes to pass.

What does this mean for us here in the Presbytery of San Diego? Here are four things I would like to share with you.

First, this language gives us permission to remain who we are and to act as we always have. The DNA of the Presbytery of San Diego has been shaped by spiritual, missional, and relational strands. Our identity is rooted in Jesus Christ. He is the vine and we are the branches. If we abide in Christ, we can bear much fruit, but apart from Him, we can do nothing (John 15:5). This will not change.

In 2003, we approved the Essential Tenets and Reformed Distinctives as guidelines for preparing and evaluating candidates through the Committee on Preparation for Ministry, for directing incoming ministers through the Committee on Ministry, and for educating and training our officers and members. They have helped to shape the spiritual strand of our identity. These tenets continue to articulate what we believe.

In 2006, our presbytery discussed a resolution that expressed a concern that the Presbyterian Church (USA) was moving away from the essential convictions that formed the covenant that we received and entered. In order to answer the questions raised in the resolution that was adopted, the Task Force on the Way Forward was formed. This report recommended a Year of Preparation to devote time to corporate worship, communal discernment, and interactive prayer. It expressed a desire to create a new paradigm for the presbytery. It listed ten areas of concern.

In 2007, the Way Forward Work Group was formed to follow up on these areas of focus. The final report that was approved in 2008, stated that our presbytery is no longer primarily a governing body, but that we are primarily a relational community, and we hope to someday become primarily a mission agency. This helped develop the missional and relational strands of our DNA. This document outlined the beginnings of our missional vision, and some exploratory missional pilot projects, which have continued to grow in the years since. We voted to affiliate with the Presbyterian Global Fellowship, and organized our first Moving Back into the Neighborhood event. We reaffirmed our theological identity, strengthened our local ordination standards, adopted a property covenant, and sought to expand our networks and partnerships. We also stated that we might need to develop responses to future scenarios such as actions to set aside ordination standards. We said we wanted to lead, not leave. We continue to pursue this missional vision.

In 2010, we re-affirmed the Standards of Ethical Conduct. We continue to abide by them. All of these actions have helped shape the spiritual, missional, and relational strands of the DNA of our presbytery. The coming change in our denomination’s ordination standards does not mean that we will all of a sudden change who we are. We will be true to ourselves. We will act out of our identity, and discern people for ministry in the same prayerful, spiritual way we always have.

This language gives more permission to the local level, but we would not be required or forced to change. We will continue to examine pastors and candidates for ministry in the same, diligent, prayerful way we always have. We will continue to take seriously the responsible to discern God’s will as we always have.

Secondly, I believe there are a small number of people who are active in same sex relationships who will try to become ordained under the new ruling. This will not be automatic. A presbytery may try, it will probably be challenged, and rulings would be needed by the Permanent Judicial Commissions of the church before we will know for sure what the actual impact of the new language will be.

Third, this represents a de-centralization of the denomination. The PC(USA) is becoming more like the NCAA, which has 32 different conferences for major college athletics. The Pac 10 has different rules than the Mountain West Conference. The Western Athletic Conference is different from the Big 10. What other churches and other presbyteries do around the country, will be more like what other conferences do in college athletics. We are not responsible for what others do. We are only accountable for what we do.

Fourth, I have been involved in numerous conversations with many people across the denomination over the last two months to understand what the impact of this decision will be, what options are available to us, and how to help us best move forward. I hope that we can all respond together. I believe the denomination gets weaker when individual churches pull out. In addition, a couple of churches have contacted us about transferring into our presbytery. We will be praying and talking about what actions we believe God wants us to take. I would ask that you be patient, pray, and wait upon the Lord as we seek His face and ask for His direction.

As Reformed Christians, we believe strongly in the sovereignty of God. Thus, we do not need to act out of fear, but we believe that God has everything under control. There are some very exciting ministries that are developing across the PC(USA). However, our denomination is definitely changing. We need to monitor these changes, anticipate where they are going, and not be afraid to take the actions we believe are necessary. I continue to be impressed by the people in our presbytery, and I have every confidence that we will continue to make good decisions in the future. Our hope is in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who said, “Upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18) If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me, and I will be glad to talk to you face to face, by phone, text, email, or Facebook. Hang in there. God is on the move!

God bless you,

Clark Cowden