My Eyes

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Someone saw me and reminded me that I have big eyes.

Then, I remembered that today I had forgotten to dress them.

Mascara and eyeliner slept in vanity’s drawer,

As spines, pages and words awakened curiosity.

I wonder.  Did I forget to dress my eyes?

Don’t bother me, I’m reading.

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Open Source – Following Friends and Finding Family

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When considering which church to go to, we often consider where our friends go.  It is not uncommon in a town, suburb or city, that there are certain churches that are hotspots of activity where folks attend because it is the popular thing to do (social proofing in Whitsitt’s chapter).  We trust our friends because they have listened to and understood us.   They have seen us at our best and our worst.  They have been patient with us as we have struggled to explain and discover who we are.   In my experience, friendship is a very effective gateway for people to examine various churches in which they might begin or restart a faith journey.  However most do not end up committed to a church because it is where their friends go.  Once a person actually commits to a church it is because they experience the church as a trusted friend where discovery of self and purpose is an ultimate value.

From an organizational perspective Whitsitt, in  chapter four of his book Open Source Church, addresses  decision-making from its outer recesses to its inner recesses within the organizational church.  He begins by imagining a risk-avoidant approach to the church as people begin to explore the organized church as hot spots or places of associations.  Then he takes us to the inner sanctum.   As if he were in any one of our board rooms, Whitsitt imagines exceedingly rational participation (cascades of decisions) that bore the most committed participants.  In the end, he suggests forfeiting both reliant and sequential decision-making.  Instead, he encourages an organic and rich decision-making process that allows individuals to discern a robust direction for community.    This decision-making process or method is well-known as the mutual invitation method.

1. The subject is introduced in a way that everyone in the room has the ability to address it or discuss it.
2. After the presentation another group member is invited to speak.
3. That group member invites another….who invites another….who invites another until all have spoken.

The mutual invitation method is known for its ability to build trust in organizations and families.  And a need to trust was the reason we approached the church in the first place.   It is a great example of the  way that the organized church both does its business and allows friends to become family.  The mutual invitation method will ask a lot of leaders because it is not result driven.  Rather it produces clues or  road map for traveling through the great adventure of Christian faith.   I think people STAY committed to church because it remains and adventure and discovery of a living God who knows all about mutual invitation.

Thanks Landon for the reminder,  sometimes forgetting what we know can impede an open source church.

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One-On-One – challenges to the Open source church

The second chapter of Open Source Church is WIKI-WONDERFUL.    Just a brilliant chapter on the way that Wikipedia is set up to receive editors with very broad parameters and we as a church should be so structured.  Whitsitt rightly warns that people are not arriving to church to be plugged into a preexisting mechanism.

However, I have found in Osawatomie that even if that is not what people want it is what they expect.  It seems that what exists just before the open source church is a sort of Gordian Knot.   Somehow for one to even entertain visiting a church they are anticipating a structure and wanting a road map to determine if this church is the right place or not.   In this way even a church that is open source “ready” for visitors (like an untied rope)  can get tempted to over structure and provide…..the beginning of the knot.   What The Open Source Church requires is really a dual track of attention.  Open source must be a concept understood by church members AND by approaching people themselves.

In order to imagine how open source might be imagined by those who are approaching us I would appeal to the work of J. Rufus Fears and his Teaching Company  lectures on “the Wisdom of History”.   In those lectures he  makes the argument freedom is not something that most people want for themselves.  One cannot simply cut through what has the church in a knot and expect greater interest.  This is because, Fears says, freedom requires a tremendous amount of  commitment if one is to live well with it.   He argues that what the majority of our world population might prefer is to put themselves under the care of a powerful person with whom they can imagine the greatest possibility.  We see that in this country as people align themselves with political parties and vote a straight party ticket.    The open source church is founded on freedom.  And yet, if Whitsitt’s concept will receive the caution of Fears, it will have to address the question, “Do people really want more freedom?”  If they might, the next question belongs to the existing congregation.  “How much one-on-one time is the church willing to give to each visitor?”

They say that for children to become participating and discerning adult, they need a great deal of one on one time with a parent in the first years of life.  We have found this to be true of people who are in their infancy in the church.   This personal time getting to know individuals must be done appropriately and with integrity and if it is done well, it allows people to feel known and supported enough to begin making suggestions and editing the church.   In Osawatomie we would say that one-on-one time inspires people to love freedom and editing ownership of the church.  Open congregation + interested visitor ≠open source church.  Open congregation + deep discovery of interested visitor = open source church of editors.

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Obama’s agony of evolution

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http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2011-08/liberal-agony

Christian Century has a wonderful political summary of our current administration’s plight.  This is a wonderful and well written article.  As I read it, I thought of Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky’s Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading.In the book they detail the art of the holding environment in order to keep the temperature not too hot or too cold for change.  It seems to me that President Obama may be working to sustain a holding environment in a more complex or entrenched political environment than the one FDR operated in.  So not just a pragmatist but a diligent, non-anxious strategist (which the article also suggests).

However the real insight in the article for me should not have been an insight at all.  The difference between Obama and FDR is that in Obama’s election there was a revolutionary sort of change, i.e., the first African-American elected to office.  Such revolutionary moments of change (overdue or not) withdraw a large amount of change-ability from the bank account so to speak.  If all things had been equal (and I understand in the article that they were not), FDR represented no such revolution upon his election and may have had greater power to do  revolutionary change while in office. As organizational development theorists would tell us, revolutionary change might be necessary or we might just want it.  However, evolutionary change has a greater staying power if the ego of the leader can be held in check for it’s more subtle but powerful efforts.   Whether he likes it or not, it seems Obama has symbolized one revolution and is now into the agony of evolution.

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Open Source….”Knitters Needed”

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At First Presbyterian of Osawatomie we have begun a small group program.  I am a part of one small group that is learning to knit.  Knitting is not easy because it involves just one strand of yarn and a complex series of wraps, tugs and dips to move that yarn into a weave that is plush and warm.   Knitting is not only a discipline of crafters, it is the discipline of theology itself.  For if a certain theological suggestion is to be valid, it must ultimately be practical and a tool for God’s people.

Whitsitt’s last chapter of The Open Source Church,  knits in the concept of the open source church back into the practical tasks of  congregational leadership.  I appreciated the chapters specificity suggesting that leaders should at least and essentially be proclaimers, facilitators and mentors for the congregations they serve.  While it is not my privilege to add a category or even a chapter to the book, I do believe any open source church will also need to be  a place where leaders model a multi-disciplinary approach to scripture and theology.   In a way,  modeling the multi-disciplinary could be easily subsumed into any of Landon’s three fundamental leadership tasks.   But in other ways, it needs to be considered a more fundamental knitting exercise for the leader that will affect proclamation, mentoring and facilitating.

By multi-disciplinary I mean a consistent integration (in pulpit,  classroom and idle conversation) of all the major disciplines of hard and soft sciences, local and global politics, literature and the arts into conversation with scripture.  If our people are really to arrive at church and appropriately use the church to realize God‘s call upon their lives, then that surely begins by allowing the world from which they come to be fully present in the classrooms and sanctuaries of our churches.   There has been, for too long, a battle in our sanctuaries and Sunday School rooms.  It is  a battle that we seemingly wage alone, arguing that the church is the ultimate authority.  Though the world is full of discoveries that rival focused attention to our authority, we pretend that we just need to talk louder about our ancient authority and that will be sufficient.

I think about it a bit differently.   Using the knitting metaphor, all the various disciplines of the world are like the individual fibers within the strand of yarn itself.  And it is the job of congregational leaders to allow the god-given yarn its full integrity.  We must refrain from pretending that our fiber is the only important one.   Folks we are not being invited to a battle as much as we are being invited to knit a bundle of fibers into a warmth that can move our people fully into their present moment.  This means that our task is to be constant learners outside of our own field of discipline in order to pay homage to our God that is fully in the present and is the source of all that is creative and novel. So we don’t try to discount or strip the fibers or disciplines of psychology, sociology, algebra, physics, astronomy, literature etc. from the congregational conversation.   Such integrated attention assures our people at the deepest level that God is present here and now and not lingering in just the past or future.

Lest you think that I am demoting the fiber of religion let me say that what I am suggesting is intended to be most respectful of Jesus’ life and ministry as well. Jesus, after all, made significant responses to the various disciplines of his day.  Politics, family structure, morality, laws of tradition, economics, ethics, religion etc.   I worry that our Christian community is becoming increasingly rigid and focusing more on the record of Jesus in scripture rather than the knitting method of Jesus’ living and loving, part of which is recorded for us and, thus, we hold sacred.  In order to cultivate an open source church leaders must model how it is that one takes the various disciplines of thought as examples of a living and revelatory God.    Examples of a living God then allow us to live non-anxiously into the method of Jesus in new and creative ways in the world.

It is surely a rich part of our Christian tradition that much of how we move forward comes from overt and focused instruction.  Whitsitt recommends just that encouraging open source leaders to be intentional  proclaimers, facilitators and mentors.   However, overt instruction can be exhausting.  I want to suggest that for the sake of the system, the instruction can continue in some gentler ways as well.  Fred Craddock,  in his timeless work as one without authority, reminds us that because communication has grown increasingly complex, overt instruction (like preaching)  must be co-mingled with method in order to communicate fully.  There must be subtle but no less intentional opportunities to “observe” or “overhear” what it means to be an open source congregation. In my experience, an open source church must partly exemplify its values by being open to the world as a source.  

By taking in the current events, trends and discoveries of its world as conversation partners with the gospel,   the open source church practices  relevant meaning from various professional disciplines.  We allow the world to observe us doing this.  This communicates subtly, but powerfully,  the truth, that each individual Christian per their personal relationship with God is also an expert knitter who has a contribution to make to the Kingdom.   The stakes are high!  After yarn that does not get knit….begins to unravel.

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Why I Need Your Own Personal Jesus

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I have a confession.  When I am feeling my best….Norman Greenbaum’s one hit wonder, Spirit in the Sky  and Depeche Mode’s song Personal Jesus  really do it for me.   It’s not that I don’t love the hymns on Sunday morning, it’s just that I am the product of a certain time and place and these rhythms and words make sense for me as I spend my life striving to understand the personality and ministry of Jesus.   But I might not want you to know this….because I won’t know what you think.  Perhaps the lyrics or beat are not respectful enough….perhaps I don’t know enough about where these songs have been or what they have inspired and my love of them is thus uninformed.    I care about what you think….partly because there are so many thoughts about Jesus.

We live in a highly competitive Christian environment.  This is ironic because by any town’s count, there are more than enough good folks for any church.  However, increasingly in the Christian community, we spend time trying to determine who has the accurate, most biblically based understanding of Jesus and thus the church.  Jesus is morphed from an open armed saint to a suspicious vice grip.

In his book, Open Source Church, Landon Whitsitt makes a strong case that Jesus’ fundamental agenda was one of freedom for each human being.  The way that I understand Whitsitt’s suggestion is that Jesus’ call upon individual lives moves each of us forward to our greatest potential and possibility.  It follows that if individuals are called to their best selves….society is emboldened with love, compassion and courage for the individuals within it.  Individuals of all sorts.  So, society becomes a refined place, practiced at living beyond itself into the will of the Creator.

In the current competitive environment, we are all tempted to keep our own personal Jesus to ourselves, lest someone put that personal meaning down.   We read our bible, pray and sometimes talk about God only in the boundaries of our home or safest company.  Sometimes the situation is even more private.  That means we only ever think about and imagine God for ourselves….God never makes it into conversation.

The open source church is a place where your own personal Jesus is not a competitor with mine.  Rather your own personal jesus informs my own personal jesus.   They live alongside each other and work together.  In the open source church, you are not afraid to talk about and ask questions of and to your jesus.  You are not afraid to inquire and challenge mine.  In fact, you come to an open source church because you can’t wait to come and talk out loud.  There is a freedom and an interest in doing so. My personal jesus grows as does yours.  They grow like our children in the care of a community.  They grow toward the Jesus of scripture.

First Presbyterian of Osawatomie respects the original source code of scripture from which the story of Jesus emerges.  But it also respects the unique way that Jesus’ rhythm has hit your life and perhaps even rocks your life out!    I have heard that Personal Jesus  was inspired by Priscilla Presley.  It was recorded a number of different ways by Depeche Mode themselves.   Then it was picked up by at least a few others…. Johnny Cash, Marilyn Manson, Jamelia, Hillary Duff.   Quite a variety!   ……But then the Personal Jesus has been picked up by so many more!    The open source church is not afraid of the way individuals receive God’s source code and make it their own with an intent to share it.

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Newbies hold the key – Open Source Churchwear

I have heard it more than once!  “Why don’t people dress up to come to church anymore?”  “Where are the suits, dresses….”….some even ask where the hats have gone!    I have said it more than once, “The dressing for church is not so much in clothes as it is in the way a person dresses their mind with an  interest and need for the church.”  The church is morphing from an institution of proper respect to an institution of curiosity and adventure.

Landon Whitsitt asserts in Open Source Church that people “don’t just want to be part of a machine”. Rather people, when they come to church, they want an open source experience.  An open source church experience draws upon the foundation of the  open source software industry.  This industry is committed that the instructions for software are open for anyone to see and edit.   There are licensing regulations for what makes a software open source (Whitsitt, with wit,  sites 10 and calls them the 10 commandments of open source).  But after the 10 point criterion is met, the source code really is received, changed and enhanced by individuals who are using the initial source code for more specific purposes.

Like software consumers, good church folks want do be able to use the foundations of a church home to do the things that  “…they need to do in order to make the church work for them”.   In First Presbyterian Church of Osawatomie Kansas, we know what that means.  There has been an important shift in mindset of leaders and congregants in Osawatomie over the years.  Gently but surely the people and leadership of Osawatomie have come to understand that First Presbyterian church does not belong to them.    While we have responsibility for the church, fundamentally the church belongs to God.  What this means is that we listen very carefully to what our congregants (not just our formal members say).     As we attune our listening, we are intent to pick up their clues.  The understanding is this…. that their clues tell us something about how God might be calling us forward as individuals and then as a community.    The purpose of visitors is not to fill our pews or pay our bills but to propel us a little further than we can imagine in our adventurous pursuit of God and the gospel.

Our visitors and newbies are our informants and in that way they become essential to us long before they decide to formally join the church.    You don’t have to prove yourself to participate or lead at First Presbyterian Osawatomie….you just have to be ready to be a part of a church that is ready to be available to anyone.  There is no inside group of privilege or power.  There are no unnecessary hoops that are not related to how we will share space.   Those of us that might be imagined to hold power are scrambling all the time to pull clues together like stepping-stones into the future.

Our prayer is that not that we would be right or proper.  Our prayer is that we would be interesting enough for a Hovering Holy Spirit who might allow us the opportunity to feel like we are God’s open source code and church to the world.   The recognition that people are dressed with an interest in the gospel, a hope to be decision makers in activity, and the providers of clues for the kingdom is the perfect outfit for church!

 

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Looking for Meaning? Is Your Church Open Source?

What many of us want is a greater sense that our life is on track and meaningful.  We want more than to just go through the motions and get to the end of our day (or days).  So we focus heavy on our children, the keeping of our homes, attention to our pets, working out or cooking heart healthy.  And even though all of that is important and part of living well, the meaning of life was never meant to be located in any one of those things.  It is counter-intuitive really.   Meaning arrives not in over-focusing on our individual lives.  Rather meaning arrives through participation  in a community that is focused beyond itself.

In a six part review of Landon Whitsitt’s book The Open Source Church.  I will argue that an open source church allows for us to experiment toward a meaningful life that is more comprehensive than its components.  Further, an open source church is a place where individuals can  that brings the essential pieces of their lives together and then take essential practices back into the very important compartments that make up their lives.

The Open Source Church puts our faith into conversation with the dynamic world of information that otherwise hypnotizes us today.  Emerging from our hypnosis, we can realize that the flow of information that we have come to love today has more to do with Jesus than we ever imagined.  So that an open source church might be a more faithful way to make meaning than through the methods of the increasingly competitive and rigid Christian environment which characterizes these last decades.    We start tomorrow!

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A Customized Faith

The Barna Group‘s latest research reveal indicates that most Americans want a customized religious experience. http://www.usatoday.com/NEWS/usaedition/2011-09-13-If-World-War-IIera-warbler-Kate_ST_U.htm   The research, as summarized in the USA Today article,  suggests that Americans shop for their religious believes like accessories to the self.  That is, Leslie’s religion reflects her preferences and is absent of the convictions or statements that make her uncomfortable.  For example, the article cites that there is an increased belief among individuals in Jesus as their personal savior as well as the conviction that they are going to heaven however none have attended church in the last 6 months other than for a special event such as wedding or funeral.

While their contribution to the conversation is helpful, it may be true that the Barna research is playing a tired chord within an over-played song.  That chord is that people are mindless without the church; clergy have lost their persuasive abilities and that the church is fractured because of both the previous points.    What if the chord was transposed just a note or two higher?   It might sound like this, people are still striving to be found faithful in an increasingly complex world;  Clergy have never been persuasive apart from their care to people by which their study of the gospel is fully informed; and the church has never been of one mind or expression about anything.  Such a higher note might allow us to honor gospel fundamentals without grasping at trendy straws in order to solve what is uncomfortable about the church’s life.  After all being the church means being fundamentally uncomfortable.

Quite contrary to Barna’s concerns, religious experience is fundamentally customized (that is the essence of believing in a personal God).   Customization is not something that people do artificially because clergy and the church have lost control.

In the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) we believe in the aggregate of experience that informs the entire Body of Christ.  So, my customized religious experience is put alongside others who have a distinct customized experience.  If there is the right spirit between us, I am interested not only in my experience but in the experience of my fellow worshiper and church-goer.  The shared life, then is a creative mix of the customized.

Research like Barna’s is the most recent arrival  in a long line of laments that mainline Christianity is on the way down and out.  This anxious cry is becoming increasingly impotent.  This is the cry that would have us all trying harder to keep up with insatiable expectations for the church.  Some of our expectations for Christianity in the United Stated of American cannot be satisfied.  We expect more and more.   Increasing demands include more attendance, more income, more members, more successful programs.    Perhaps these insatiable demands are what drive people from organized religion to find some relief.  It seems to me that there is a natural ebb and flow in the organized life of the church.   If we are truly in an ebb, perhaps it is a good time to dig down and serve those gathered with greater personal attention to their customized experience so that it can inform our shared life in creative ways that contribute to the next flow from an abundant God.

After all the fundamental expectation for Christ‘s church is not just rapid appeal and growth.  There is also the relational work that serves as scaffolding to the Body of Christ.  In this relational work, we taken on tough questions as we figure out the customized experience of “the other” person….specifically the person who seems miles from our own experience.    This work is not for those who believe they are going to heaven because they prefer to….this is the work of those who are wondering, hoping and working ….doubting that their customized faith is all there is.     This has always been the work of an inner circle of customized individuals who prepare to interact intensely with God’s wider world.

Related articles

• USA Today: More Americans Tailoring Religion to Fit their Needs (frozenclocks.wordpress.com)
• Barna: What Self-Described Christians Must Overcome (5ptsalt.com)

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Sharing Vineyard Prayers for Sunday’s Lectionary Reading

The Book of Common Worship is an excellent and even critical resource for pastors, but I find writing my own prayers an even more essential discipline in the homiletic process.  Writing my own prayers is a weekly discipline.  Here are prayers inspired by Exodus 16:2-15 and Matthew 20:1-16.  BTW prayer of praise can be easily written to the negative to function as a prayer of confession.

CALL TO WORSHIP

Leader: The Kingdom of God has been imagined as a future promise or a present invitation.

People:   The Kingdom of God is mysterious.

Leader: Jesus’ teaching tugged at the mysterious veil in order to explicate God’s Kingdom.

People: His parables, age-old, remain unsettling and surprising.

Leader:  Perhaps we will recognize The Kingdom as a tireless seek and find.

All: Let us worship the God who allows us a robust reward through exertion and purpose.  Amen.

PRAYER OF PRAISE

God of a divine economy, in our dollar and cents society, we struggle to express what we value.  It is a great mystery that some valueless things are priceless.  It is another mystery that some valuable things are a burden.  From some place deeper than our pockets or wallets we have come to know value.  At times, we have been undervalued and almost talked into our worthlessness.  In other moments we have walked into a profound purpose and felt great humility and privilege.  Let the evidence of our praise be in our ability to call one another to purpose within this place.  For this church does not belong to those of us who have been here the longest.  Your house and ministry belongs equally to the next one who walks into your ready space.  Hear each prayer in whatever hour it finds itself, through Christ.    Amen.

 

 

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