Name:Earl Country:United States State:Missouri Metro:Springfield Gender:Male
Interests:Church planting, really good coffee in the french press tradition, technology, photography, travel, missional anything, culture, preaching, pentecostalism, the web Expertise:Learning, remaining an amateur, listening, eliptical machines, finding other people who can teach me Occupation:Berkeley Church Planting Proje Industry:Church Planting
On a recent trip to Berkeley Jan and I had a chance to meet some members of an anti-war group called Code Pink as two of them protested outside the US Marine Corps office. We talked with them for a while and watched them protest by singing what I would call anti-military parody songs karaoke-style as one of them swung a large hoola hoop around her waist.
Jon Stewart of The Daily Show recently featured this video report on the Code Pink initiative in Berkeley.
We found the Code Pink women to be sincere and personable, but alone. Their exercise of free speech was protected by two Berkeley police officers (one for each protester, I guess) but with no other participants or audience, except Janet and me. I'm sure there are more people there at other times, but not on that day.
In our dialogue with them, we felt an echo of the Berkeley of old, the bastion of alternative lifestyles, social ferment and radical politics.
While a lot of that DNA is still present in the community, it seems remarkably inconspicuous on an average day walking the streets. My sense is that the student population, while very diverse, seems more conservative in some ways than the older residents of the city who have roots in the 60s and 70s.
Of course, all of our conclusions about Berkeley are still very preliminary. The campus and community are complex entities with many faces. At least part of our learning process is the reversal of expectations. I suppose a lot of that is necessary before real understanding begins to grow.
Sitting in a coffee house in the northwest I was commiserating with
a pastor friend about how neither of us had the sort of “big
personality” so often identified with leadership.
He
described himself as “leading from the middle,” that is, bringing
people together around the congregation’s mission in a way that
produced results but not heroes.
Talking about this issue
brought up the criticism that both of us have taken over the years for
not being more dominant, criticism that has always come from believers
and virtually never from those who make no claim to follow Jesus.
We
began to speculate about whether church folks and unchurched folks have
different followership styles. Do they respond to completely different
approaches to leadership, at least in the northwest Anglo context in
which the observations were made?
This hypothesis (and
that’s all it is) draws a distinction between two primary followership
styles. I am deliberately exaggerating the difference for the purposes
of clarity and discussion:
1. The churchly followership style:
Serving for many years as an audience for platform-driven ministry,
lots of church folks seem to equate leadership with a dynamic
individual standing at the front of a large room casting vision the way
a major league pitcher hurls fastballs. The ability of this lone
entrepreneur to sway a large group of people with the quality of
his/her strategy and the force of his/her personality is considered the
very definition of leadership. This kind of attender is not shy about
pressuring less dominant leaders to fit into this mold. And the
temptation for leaders is to spin the ministry’s ethos in a direction
that will appeal to this follower type because they likely control most
of the financial assets in the house.
This is not to say
that the less forceful leader loses his/her integrity, but that
important nuances of the group’s culture are gradually shaped to please
the churchly. If you don’t think this is possible, ask yourself what
your ministry would look like if the majority of your financial support
came from people under 25, or an ethnic group other than your own? If
you don’t feel these pressures, we speculated that the reason may be
that this battle was lost so long ago that it’s no longer a fight.
Followership for the churchly, then, is a response to greatness—the
kind of leadership I deserve.
2. The unchurchly followership
style: My friend has noticed that the people coming to faith in Jesus
in his congregation have an unswerving distaste for “big personality”
leaders. These new Christians are likely to regard the celebrity model
as an exercise in narcissism that is more about control and ego than
servanthood. Their resistance takes many forms, but mainly is expressed
by their relative absence from churches directed by the leaders of a
more heroic stature. That way of leading feels to them like working for
“the man” in the corporate world. They reason that, if Sunday morning
demonstrates essentially authoritarian values, then the rest of this
religion is probably not worth checking out. However, this person is
more likely to be receptive to the “small personality” leader who, like
my friend, brings people together in a faith community that responds in
love to the mission of Jesus for the world.
Imagine what
would happen if this leader began to spin the ethos of the ministry in
this direction so that more and more unchurchly folk began to show up?
Perhaps this explains research by Barna and others finding that
effective evangelistic churches, in all their diversity, have the
common feature of a missional culture. Followership for the unchurchly,
then, is a response to humility—the kind of leadership that could
change me.
Our embryonic idea concludes with the suggestion
that these followership dynamics become cyclical, moving the ministry
in either a less or more missional direction over time.
A famous historian once said the most dangerous form of ignorance is
the illusion of knowledge. This maxim has become very real to us as we
prepare for our campus church project in Berkeley. On our journey, Janet and I have stumbled over
three kinds of "knowledge" (so far) that have all proven to be illusion
in their own way.
1. The Google Illusion: During the
very anxious season when we were considering becoming planters, we
comforted ourselves by doing research about the campus and community at
Berkeley. Along with millions of others, we turned to Google to discern
the answers to life's questions. What we found was a huge quantity of
information about our potential plant site. We learned, for example,
that the median adult age is 31, that this adult is likely a single
professional, and that Cal is one of the top- ranked universities in the
world. Armed with more demographics than the Census Bureau, we headed to the Bay area for our first visit feeling that we understood some things.
2. The Sidewalk Illusion: About ten minutes after we arrived on campus,
the statistics that had given us confidence in our own understanding
suddenly seemed like pale abstractions. To be honest, we had expected
to see a 21st century version of Woodstock reenacted on the campus.
What we actually saw were extremely serious students walking by in
silence on their way to the next class. Our Google illusions
experienced something like a hard drive crash, only to be overwritten
by the kind of shallow assumptions that are developed in a first visit.
So, maybe the numbers didn't tell the whole story, but now we had
actual field experience,
meaning that we had walked around for a few hours, eaten Indian food,
and sipped Peet's Coffee. Certainly experience couldn't mislead us?
3. The Relationship Illusion: Talking with people about the
planting project after a couple of visits was a lot more fun than just
reciting the statistics. Now we could tell stories about the "look and
feel" of the campus and city, including the homeless guy smashing
bottles against a wall and life on the street after dark on homecoming
weekend. We also collected sound bites about Berkeley that helped us
tell the story of our emerging mission. For example, I will quote William Gibson's
comment that, "The future is already here, it's just unevenly
distributed" to make the point that Cal is one of the recipients of
that uneven dispersal. All of that was fine, until I realized that
telling stories about coffee houses and repeating clever quotes was not
the same as actually knowing anyone in the community.
There is no "Berkeley Barbara," a perfectly representative 31-year old
single professional, or "Berkeley Ben," a prototypical 20 year old
engineering student. Our new community is the home of cultural
creatives (some in training and some at work) who highly value the
atypical.
While numbers and experiences help, only relationship is going to
crush the last of our illusions so we can actually discern what God is
already up to our community. Berkeley is not the "site" for a "project," it is a community that is home to individuals whom God loves
more than I ever will.
Leaving the conference room at the end of our last church plant
screening interview, I felt like a parachutist taking that first big
stride out the airplane door. Up until that moment, my resignation from
our Seminary and the sale of our house had still seemed sort of
hypothetical.
But this committee's affirmative vote completed a long
approval process that finally made our transition into church planting
concrete. In our system, we raise personal and project budgets for as
long as it takes before the plant actually begins. In other words, we
are self employed with a capital "S," a radical departure from the
institutional cocoon of higher education.
It feels like free fall. One step
and you're hurtling downward through empty space with nothing tangible
to grasp for support. But there are some things that happen during the
free fall of risk-taking that weren't as likely when we were just
passengers on the plane:
1. When I look down, the view is great: Now I understand why
skydivers do what they do. After that long first step it takes a moment
to gain the courage to open your eyes. But once you do, the world looks
completely new, taking on a perspective that is just not available from
the plane. Could this be something like the God's eye view? For me,
free fall has made it possible to see Berkeley (the location of our
plant) as part of a network of smaller post-Christian cities dominated
by "cultural creatives" who invent the future the rest of us will live.
An effective ministry in Berkeley might help us learn how to reach
these enclaves and even produce some of the people to do it.
2. When I look around, the company is grand: At first free fall
felt very lonely, as if we were flying straight down by ourselves.
However, looking downward eventually yields to looking around and the
realization that we are actually doing something like formation
skydiving. Our planting journey has connected us to some of the most
amazing people, including other planters like Trinity Jordanin Layton, Utah, Curt and Kelly Harlow of West Coast Chi Alpha, and Craig and Dana Mathison,
global missionaries with the AoG. We knew most of these folks before,
but nothing bonds like skydiving together. They are our mentors, our
friends, and our family.
3. When I look up, I see God's face in a new way: It's not like
the movies; there are limits to what the other skydivers can do for
you. In the silence, as the air rips past your face, you can hear
things that were drowned out by background noise when riding as a
passenger. Our Church Planting Director, Steve Pike,
told me once that God may have sent him to plant just to teach him to
pray. I thought I knew what he meant, but now I am learning it in a new
way. The heart of
Christian ministry is a person in love with God in a way others would
notice and want to emulate.
With one big step transition becomes a lifestyle and a state of
mind, rather than an event. There are seasons for riding in the plane
(that's good for in its own way) and seasons for jumping out.
If we gave more attention to the benefits of free fall, would more of us would jump?
