November Missional Voice: The Mind Issue

MISSIONAL VOICE Newsletter November 2012 page 1

November 2012 Forge Canada Missional Training Network forgecanada.ca

In this Issue:WHAT’S ON YOUR

MIND?by Cam Roxburgh

SCRIPTURE AND THE RENEWAL OF IMAGINATION

by Scott Hagley

8 IDEASDeveloping the Missional Imagination of

Your Congregation

by Preston Pouteaux

DWELLING IN THE WORD

Meets Congregations Where They Are by Pat Taylor Ellison

BOOK REVIEWSof The Blue Parakeet and Dwelling in

the Word

The Heart Issue

What’s On Your Mind?by Cam Roxburgh, National Director of Forge Canada

Is it true, that what we think about, shapes who we become?

After a year of university, I returned to my family in England for the summer. I worked in a wine-bottling factory with some “interesting blokes” (as they say in England). They were a lot of fun in many ways, but they had a limited and colourful vocabulary. I was so immersed into the environment of the factory that by the end of the summer, I found myself using a few new words as well.

We have a tendency to become like the environment we immerse ourselves in. This can be positive or negative. Paul writes in Romans 12:2, “ Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” I am challenged by his words in Philippians 4:8-9, “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about


such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.”

Sometimes we reduce missional to “what we do out there.” Being missional means that we bear witness to the God we love in all aspects of our lives. We follow Jesus on mission. This includes loving God with our minds. People will see the reality of God’s nature and actions when we learn to imitate him in the way we discipline our mind and will.

God is omniscient and acts by revealing his nature to us. In seeking us, He sends his WORD so that we might know him. We do not become omniscient, but witness to our God through pursuing a knowledge of him. We discipline our minds to know him and to know about his nature and actions. We fill our minds with that which helps us to understand who he is, instead of that which moves us away from him. Of course this includes time in his Word and in other materials that help us to know him. Others see our pursuit, and are attracted to him.

But loving God with our mind is not limited to study of Scripture. We also seek to learn about God’s world so that we might help others come to know God.

A couple of years ago I flew into Toronto for some meetings. My friend Jay Pinney from Montreal was there ahead of me and waiting to pick me up. At the airport in Toronto, cars are not allowed to wait at the curbside. When I landed, I texted Jay and discovered that he was

already waiting at the curb. I knew he could not stay there long.

I rushed through the airport. When I emerged I discovered that Jay had been engrossed in a conversation with the traffic patrol officer for 30 minutes. This man was from Iran and a devout Muslim. As I approached I could tell they were talking about their faith. I listened for another half-hour as Jay not only shared about God from his knowledge of Scripture, but also helped the man to better understand the message of the Koran. I heard Jay reference the Koran multiple times to help the man understand the differences between the Muslim and Christian understandings of God. The man left (to, of course, ticket other cars) with deep gratitude to Jay for what he had learned.

Jay lives in a neighbourhood in Montreal with a large Muslim population. He had disciplined himself to learn the Koran so that he might better communicate with his neighbours. He did this because he loves God with all his mind.

So, what do we think about? It is a deeply missional question.

Cam Roxburgh is the National Director for Forge Canada, the VP of Missional Initiatives for the North American Baptists, and the Team Leader at Southside Community Church in Vancouver, Canada. He lives in Surrey, British Columbia with his wife and four children. [email protected]

Welcoming Rainer KunzWe’re pleased to welcome Rainer Kunz to the Forge Canada National Team. Rainer Kunz (Ed.D. Biola University) is the new Director of Coaching for Forge Canada. Rainer is a pastor in Washington state and has been in ministry for over 30 years. He regularly teaches at a number of universities, seeking to build bridges for Christ on secular campuses. Rainer also lives out his passion for the Great Commission by assessing and coaching church planters throughout the world. He is a CoachNet partner and is involved with coach training and mentoring on a regular basis. Rainer and his wife, Susan, have been married for 31 years and have five children, ages 12-28. In his spare time, Rainer loves to fish and play with his kids.

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]


Scripture and the Renewal of Imaginationby Scott HagleyA few years ago, I went for a hike in the Lake District of England with a good friend. The night before our hike, we bought a topographical map of the region and planned a route that began not far from the hostel where we were staying. Although the map had good information on hiking trails, it did not label many of the side-roads and villages that dotted and crossed the region. No problem. We did our best to orient the topographical map according to our limited knowledge of the region and set off early one morning for the trailhead.

A couple minutes into our hike, we began to sense that something was wrong. Although we could orient ourselves by several features in the landscape, the map did not wholly correspond to our surroundings. For the first hour, we would walk for awhile and then stop to pull out the map and find some way of making sense of our surroundings from the map. But the process only confused us. No amount of imaginative work could connect our map and current location. We began to

wonder if we had the wrong map, or whether we were not on the map at all.

Then a sudden realization gripped us. The problem was not our map or our location. The problem was our imagined place on the map. We realized that we had been tracing our route from the wrong unmarked village. Once we oriented ourselves from a different village, our place, route, and surroundings appeared before us in a whole new way. All along, we had been reading the right map and paying attention to the right landmarks, but we failed to put it all together and so we could not see where we were or where we were going. Our failure was one of imagination. We were unable to see the relationship between the map and our context, and so all our detailed attention and our readings of the compass led us in the wrong direction.

When it comes to the use and role of Scripture in our churches, a similar failure takes place. We tend to care about the right things - neighbors in need, practices of spiritual formation, authentic worship - and we try to be guided in our speech and action by the right authoritative text - Scripture. But too much of the time we end up lost. We fail to see both the Scriptural text and our context in right relationship, and so our leadership runs aground because we are unable to interpret where we are and how God is leading us. Our


problem is that we have not adequately attended to the vigorous practices that shape a missional theological imagination.

“Imagination” can be a troublesome term. Its popular use suggests an emphasis on what is ‘unreal’ or ‘not-yet.’ We tend to say things like “my daughter has a great imagination” to communicate my daughter’s capacity for inventing stories, events, or images. As such, we have an ambiguous relationship with imagination. We value its inventiveness while being suspicious of its utility. Imaginative people can sometimes help us find a new way forward, but they often have trouble finding solid ground. Because of this popular use of the term, the mod ifier “ theo log i c a l ” c an be confusing. Is theological imagination the capacity for making things up? Don’t the Scriptures caution us against that as a potential act of idolatry?

However, our popu l a r u se o f imagination offers an impoverished vision of how we live in and image our world. In philosophy and the human sciences, imagination has come to refer to the ways in which our ‘image’ of reality shapes our encounter with it. Similar to the concept of ‘paradigm’ or of ‘gestalt’ in perception, imagination clarifies the way in which we always see the parts in terms of the whole. Like the famous drawing that could be an old woman with a crooked nose or a young woman looking over her shoulder, the way we see ‘the whole’ determines which parts we identify. The parts simply reinforce our initial ‘seeing’ of the young or old woman. This feature of human seeing and knowing is pretty consequential for all of life. Before Copernicus and Kepler, it was self-evident that the earth was a stable and fixed entity around which

the heavenly bodies moved. Certain abnormalities in the details persisted - in the same way that the surroundings on my ill-fated hike failed to conform to the map - but the reigning paradigm for the universe subordinated all contrarian data points. The dominant ‘image’ of reality kept others from seeing the fact that the earth revolved around the sun. Thus, imagination names the way in which we see the world through our existing ‘image’ of the world. Garrett Green, in the book Imagining God, calls this the “paradigmatic imagination.”

When describing the paradigmatic imagination, we must resist the tendency to picture this faculty as

existing within individuals, as though everybody sees through their own self-constructed paradigm. Imagination - if it names this broad idea of the way in which we image reality - must be understood as a social and historical entity. In this way, the paradigmatic imagination functions a bit like language. It is public and social. This means that our ways of seeing are best thought of as a type of world that is shaped by our prac t i ces , the

communities within which we live, our language, and our histories. We share and shape our paradigmatic imagination together. Anyone who has come back from a retreat with a series of jokes or perspectives that just don’t ‘translate’ to those who did not attend has experienced this social feature of the imagination.

The fact that we all experience and interpret through a particular paradigm or socially-formed imagination should not come as a surprise to us, nor should it resign us to the fatalism of bad maps and lost hikers. Just like we (long ago) learned to image the world as moving and spinning through space, so also our

The problem was not our map or our location. The problem was our imagined place on the map.


paradigmatic imagination is a flexible and formidable feature of our lives. Understanding it helps us to think differently about the task of leadership in our churches. Besides asking questions about practice and mission, we must also consider the shape of our theological imagination: how do we imagine the world and God’s engagement with it? This is not a pure exercise, but one that forces us to attend to the influencing factors of our time in history and our cultural context. Certainly, features of our theological imagination come from dominant practices of our society. For example, the precedence of economic and transactional soteriological metaphors in North American evangelicalism reflects our daily catechism in the ways of a market economy and runaway consumerism (i.e. salvation as “free”). Or, our occasional use of the Bible as a personal self-help manual reflects an ‘image’ we’ve adopted in a Dr. Phil world.

But an awareness of these obviously negative strands in our theological imagination also discloses an opportunity for congregational leadership. The Bible does not come to us as an object for us to interpret from our culturally-framed point of reference. It is not a passive text from which we pluck occasional moral instruction or data about the origins of the universe. Rather, the shape of the Scriptures as a set of stories with a particular narrative arc stretching from primordial to new creation helps us to see the Bible as a particular kind of world that redescribes or remakes our world through forming our imagination. A missional Christian theological imagination is one that is continually shaped, described, and redescribed by the Scriptural narrative.

The consequence of this realization is now clear. We get lost in our leading, discerning, and acting as

Christians because our social imagination becomes static and resistant to the redescription of the biblical story. Like the disciples on the Emmaus road, our eyes are simply incapable of seeing the unexpected presence of Jesus in our midst. Of course, it is Jesus himself who opens the Scriptures, who redescribes the world for these disciples. It is Jesus himself who speaks in and through the Scriptural story, and who shapes their theological imagination so that they can see a crucified and resurrected messiah. Is our contemporary situation any different?

So how can we structure our life as the church so that we might inhabit the biblical story more truthfully? Where should we place ourselves so that the voice of Jesus might renew our theological imagination? These questions invite a whole new essay, but a couple comments can be made here. Since a theological imagination must be formed by inhabiting the Scriptural story, it is vitally important that we create practices of discernment, discussion, and dwelling in the Scriptural text. The articles in this newsletter on “Dwelling in the Word” offer some suggestions in this direction. Second, since our imagination is public and social, we must create space for ongoing conversation centered on the biblical story and yet rooted in our particular context. It is, afterall, conversation that helped two lost hikers find their way - on an ancient road to Emmaus and (less dramatically) a not-so-ancient one in England.

Scott Hagley (Ph.D. Luther Seminary) is a teaching pastor at Southside Community Church and the Director of Education for Forge Canada.


8 Ideas: Developing the Missional Imagination of Your Congregation

by Preston Pouteaux

Those who flunked poetry essays or managed to create little more than blotchy sketches in art class will no doubt feel a little cool at the mention of the word. But imagination is a profound concept that can shape the way a congregation sees itself, God, and the world around them. The imagination is a central, even vital, source of life because it is through the imagination that we can see those places where God is at work in shaping our communities of faith. It is in our imaginations where the Spirit of God births vision, hope, and new prayers for our neighbourhoods.

David Morgan eloquently describes the importance of the imagination in shaping the life of a community when he says, “To belong to a community is to participate, to take part, to perform a role, to find a place within the imagined whole... Moreover, belonging is nurtured by the aesthetic practices that are designed to generate and refine feeling on the crossed axes of human relationships and human-divine interaction” (Morgan, The Embodied Eye, 147). The imagination is a kind of “sensuous cognition,” according to

Morgan. We long for our communities to experience more than just a conversion of belief. We desire, as God does, that our communities participate in the mission of God with the their very being: heart, soul, mind, and strength. To shape the missional imagination of a community is to help them fully embrace, delight in, and feel the the missional heart of the Father. This starts with creative and surprising experiences that dislodge the imagination to ‘see’ anew what God is up to in the midst of the world around them.

Here are eight practical ideas for engaging the missional imagination of your congregation that come largely out of the experiences of my own church community in Calgary, Alberta:

Embrace the word, “Experiment.” Unchecked imagination can be our worst enemy. Church communities can build up fearful expectations that shape scary outcomes in their minds. Not only does Jesus call us not to live in fear, but he offers us his guidance and peace as we venture in new directions. Building a vocabulary that allows for experimental forays into the unknown will build confidence and trust in the Father. Taking on a missional “experiment” offers the imagination a release valve to let out fear. As you empower others to try creative or risky projects, you may even come to expect unforeseen results.

Travel together. There’s nothing like staying in your basement to cut off your imagination for the


neighbourhood. Likewise, there is nothing like staying in the church building to shape and reinforce a congregation’s imagination for self-protectionism. In recent years our church has learned to travel together: Israel, Brazil, Mexico, and Kenya have each opened our eyes. Each experience has broadened our missional imagination to see the ways that God is working around the world and right here in our own neighbourhood.

Create an art show. A few years ago we dedicated a small space in our church for art. We hosted professional artists from a local Christian art society to showcase their work, and then did a couple community art shows ourselves. Artists came from unexpected placed and we were compelled to reflect upon the broad giftedness in our community. Simple experiments like this can instill a sense of communal participatory awe that can infuse new life in the the imagination of a community.

Pose good questions to your community. People walk by our church building every day and we wanted to know what our neighbours dream about. Taking a cue from artist Candy Chang and her work in New Orleans, we created the “Before I Die” wall that allowed people, chalk in hand, to share their dreams about what they hope to do with their lives. A simple, but well placed question may spark broader conversations and a few surprises. http://beforeidie.cc

Tell the old stories. The imagination is shaped by looking back as well as forward. It is shaped by the stories we tell and retell. Sometimes that’s where we need to start. For a recent 50th anniversary celebration we created a wall dedicated to the five centuries of God’s work in our midst and neighbourhood. Not only did it generate plenty of stories and nostalgia, but it allowed people to imagine what God might shape in us for the next 50 years.

God Sightings. Open mics are risky. But try setting aside time on Sunday mornings for people to share God Sightings, or places in their lives where they’ve seen God at work. Not only is it a healthy missional practice to

identify and thank God for his work in our lives, but it opens our imaginations and invites further observation and participation.

Cry together. Theologically we believe that church is a place where we can mourn together. However in practice we may live as though Sunday mornings are all smiles. When a congregation goes through hard times hand in hand, and takes time to embrace those who suffer, the community begins to live into the hope that church is for the broken-hearted. Recognizing sorrow and pain lays bare in our imagination the deep need for God and may serve to bring new life rooted in the hope of Christ. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Matthew 5:4.

Model the missional life. Living missionally can be a stretch for the imagination used to seeing church as a program and place rather than a body of believers living attentively with Jesus in their contexts. As leaders live out the missional life and share their stories and struggles, a previously closed imagination may begin to embrace the possibility that they, too, can live missionally. A woman in my neighbourhood was nervous about having strangers over for supper. After months of watching others model hospitality she started to change. One day she burst into our gathering and declared, to much celebration, that she had shared supper with a neighbour and had a remarkable experience.

Skye Jethani wrote that, “Like Jesus, we must find ways of getting past defensive walls and enter the chamber where peoples’ imaginations are sleeping and stir them from hibernation” (Jethani, The Divine Commodity, 27). How might you slip past the well fortified defenses of your community’s imagination? May we develop a Spirit shaped imagination to see and participate in the profound work that God is doing today.

Preston Pouteaux (DMin. Tyndale Seminary) is a National Team member with Forge Canada and is the Director of Discipleship Ministry at Lutheran Church of Our Saviour in Calgary, Alberta. [email protected]

http://beforeidie.cc

http://beforeidie.cc


Dwelling in the Word Meets Congregations Where They Are

by Pat Taylor Ellison

Dwelling in the Word is a spiritual practice of deep listening to a scriptural passage over a period of time. It is developed as a habit in groups throughout the congregation. And the fruit it bears is many-fold.

1. It is a way to build relationships over time around the Word of God. It increases people’s comfort level in speaking about God’s Word with one another; they also share the experience of God’s Word speaking to them and shaping them together into community.

2. It is a habit lay groups practice, mostly without the benefit of a pastor/Bible scholar in the room, a practice of extended prayer, Bible reading, and deep listening to one another. When a Bible scholar shows up, people have harvested many questions for him/her.

3. Our research in hundreds of congregations over the past 20 years shows that Dwelling in the Word creates a shift in the culture because of people’s enhanced capacity to listen to God in the scriptures and to listen to one another across many boundaries. The shift is a mild shift, but it can impact the entire congregation’s shared life, vision, and work. The tone of church meetings is more open, people begin to speak who rarely spoke before, and the focus of congregational life is more on God’s mission than it is on the church’s (or some individuals’) desired ends.

4. Dwelling in the Word, practiced regularly by some key groups in the congregation, makes it easier for people to both think and speak in God terms, to name and claim God’s activity in their lives and test those claims with one another.

At a recent Dwelling in the Word training, people used to the usual practice of Bible study (where an expert comes to help a group unpack a book of the Bible and bring translation and historical resources to bear) at first balked at Dwelling’s insistence on crossing the room to hear from a stranger about where her imagination had been caught by the text. “My stranger was no more well-versed in scripture than I was, and I wondered what good this was going to do for me,” one man said. “But what she had noticed really resonated with me. It was something I hadn’t even heard. We began a conversation between strangers that went quite deep – very surprising.” Later that afternoon, after twice more dwelling in the same passage, the same man told me, “I couldn’t believe how many different reflections I myself experienced and then how many I heard from my stranger-partners. How is it possible for one passage to sound so different three times in a row?”

This man and I talked several times, and as I was leaving the next day he told me, “Now I see that the Bible is still a book to study with the very best experts we can find. But it is also the viva vox – the Living Voice of God which we heard in the person of a stranger.” Glory to God!

Dr. Pat Taylor Ellison is the Managing Director of Research and Development at the Church Innovations Institute. To learn more, visit www.blog.dwelling-in-the-word.org

http://www.blog.dwelling-in-the-word.org

http://www.blog.dwelling-in-the-word.org


The Blue Parakeet

Scot McKnight

Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 2008

Reviewed by Anthony Brown

Should Christians participate in war? Are there apostles in the Church today? Should churches be taught and lead by women?How are Christians to keep the Sabbath? Should Christians support capital punishment? Why do we never do as Jesus commanded and wash one another’s feet?

When any of these issues are raised the first impulse of Bible-believing Christians is to turn to the Scriptures. Yet any survey of the shelves in the local Christian bookstore is enough to demonstrate that even those who hold the Bible in the highest regard still come to different conclusions about these and many other matters.

Biblical hermeneutics may not be everyone’s idea of light reading, but if Scot McKnight, Professor of Religious Studies at North Park College in Chicago and author of The King Jesus Gospel, is right in saying that how we read the Bible determines how we live our lives, then Biblical hermenutics is a pressing issue for us all. With this in mind, McKnight, who usually writes on New Testament issues, has authored The Blue Parakeet, which aims to introduce a wide audience to the vital topic of how we read and understand the Bible.

The result is a book that is at times frustrating, occasionally overstated, but always thought-provoking

and often deeply challenging. If we want to model a consistent use of the Bible ourselves, and understand how and why others in the church come to different conclusions, McKnight’s book helps us ask all of the right questions. Rather than reading the Bible to retrieve instructions from a distant past, or reading the Bible through the lens of the Church’s tradition, McKnight argues that for our Bible interpretation to have internal coherence and consistency we need to read the Bible with tradition.

A good part of the book is given over to a case study on the role of women in the Church. McKnight does not insist that we agree with his conclusions, but shows us that the conclusions we draw will be entirely dependent on the view we take of Scripture. Sadly the book is poorer in this last third. McKnight doesn’t always stick to his positive criteria (‘reading the Bible with tradition leads to…’), but takes a few negative swings at the opposing views, and in the end doesn’t make the most persuasive case for his view.

Nevertheless, these faults are minor in comparison to the great achievement of making Biblical hermeneutics, this most important of topics, accessible and interesting to all.


Dwelling in the Word: A Pocket Handbook

By Pat Taylor Ellison and Patrick Keifert

St. Paul, MN: Church Innovations, 2011

ISBN: 978-0982931318

96 Pages, Paperback

Reviewed by Scott Hagley

Good and powerful practices are almost always disarmingly simple, contagious, and portable. When a shared practice embodies these adjectives, it becomes natural and habitual for a community such that it works its way into the tapestry of the group and begins to shape the community’s expectations, language, and culture. But these practices are hard to find.

In Dwelling in the Word, Pat Taylor Ellison and Patrick Keifert have done a great service for the church. A handbook for congregations and congregational leaders, Dwelling in the Word provides stories and guidelines for practicing Church Innovations’ best-known congregational resource. Dwelling contains all the elements of a subversive and transformative practice. It is simple, involving a public reading of Scripture, silence, and then conversation in dyads around the place in the text that caught one’s attention. It is an exercise in listening and speaking in relationship to the Scripture, for dwelling ends with a time for persons to share with the larger group what they heard in their dyad.

It is also contagious. Taylor Ellison and Keifert structure the book around stories where initial hesitation or frustration with the practice gives way to shared understanding, learning, and transformation. This is often due to the fact that Dwelling encourages groups to remain in a single text over a long period of time while

also cultivating an environment for deep listening and shared conversation. As conversation builds in relationship to the text, participants begin to experience the Bible in a new way. It is no longer a site for contested academic dialogue or a manual on the Christian life, but rather the viva vox, the living Word alive in and through their conversation.

And finally, it is portable. It can be practiced in a wide variety of settings. Throughout Dwelling in the Word, the authors demonstrate the wide array of places and groups where this practice can take root: seminary

classes, congregational leadership teams, church-wide gatherings, and research teams have

all practiced and experienced transformation in relationship to dwelling.

Decades of practice in settings around the globe give Dwelling in the Word a particular kind of credibility. It is a meaningful practice for many. But perhaps the most significant detail for this handbook lies in the practice of the authors themselves: it is a practice at the center of Taylor Ellison’s and Keifert’s work together at Church Innovations. A practice that Dwelling in the Word now makes accessible to many others.


Coming in the Spring: Everyday Church Study

By Cam Roxburgh

As a pastor, I am constantly looking for ways to equip the people of Southside Community Church. I want our people to fall more in love with Jesus by coming to understand his will and being sent into our neighbourhoods for the sake of his mission.

As a denominational executive, I want to equip all our pastors and leaders to resource their people in similar ways. For the sake of my congregation and pastors and leaders across North America, we are creating a Study Series on 1 Peter using the book Everyday Church by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis. We have discovered that Everyday Church is an excellent resource for helping our people make sense of 1 Peter in a way that helps them to join God on mission in their neighbourhood.

We are hoping that you will make use of some or all of the resources that will come with this series. Here is what you will be able to use…

1. Sermon outlines, and sample sermons off of the website

2. Personal Study Guides for those in the church who want to dive deeper into the text

3. Mission Group Engagements – these will allow your group to both discover the text and to discover how God is working in your neighbourhood

4. Video stories of churches engaged in reaching their neighbourhoods

5. Web dialogues around the topics of the text.

These and other resources will be available as we gear up for this series. We are hoping that many churches will make use of this series. We are praying that through many using this resource as a means to understanding our context, that many neighbours and neighbourhoods will be transformed by the power and presence of Jesus.


Join the Conversation

on twitter @forgecanada

Search Forge Canada on Linkedin or visit http://is.gd/X9sNh4

facebook.com/ForgeCanada

[email protected]

forgecanada.ca

Missional VoiceNovember 2012

Forge Canada National TeamCam Roxburgh

Anthony BrownHoward Lawrence

Scott HagleyKaren Wilk

Preston PouteauxRainer Kunz

National BoardGlenn SmithJay Brecknell

Merv BuddDon Goertz

Cam Roxburgh

aXiom - Simcoe, Ontario at The CommJanuary 25 and 26, 2013Visit: www.forgecanada.ca/events/axiom-simcoe

Asset Based Community Development SeminarCalgary, Alberta at Millrise Covenant ChurchFebruary 5 and 6, 2012Visit: www.forgecanada.ca/events/asset-based-community-development

First Calgary Hub Meeting December 13, 2012Contact Preston Pouteaux at [email protected] for more details.

Documents

November Missional Voice: The Mind Issue