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“There is a way to be meaningful Jesus communities on God’s earth that our ‘success’ is not awaking (10).” Contemporary church culture has focused more on what “works” than on what humanizes. Immersed in a culture that values size, information, and speed, the local church in the West often substitutes stage presence for community presence, spiritual knowledge for spiritual practices, and results for patience. This not only reflects our culture; it feeds our egos – if we succeed by the culture’s metrics. But ask just about any pastor and you’ll discover that we pay for this success with our exhaustion and anxiety. White suggests that instead of an industrial church complex driven by market metrics, the future of the church is “rooted,” focused on fidelity, locality, and community. The future of the church is organic, not mechanic. It is simple, not complex.
The Church that Jesus started with his disciples had a relational infrastructure that ministered the gospel to the relational brokenness of their worlds. It’s soil rather than spreadsheets that are needed to grow deep roots. Shifting means we must “confront our contemporary assumptions of what it means to be a significant church (12).” Ironically, in order to produce Kingdom fruit we may have to let go of our need to be significant and make an impact. We have to shed the need for applause both individually and corporately. Can we do that? What do we lose if we don’t? Are we willing to give up the power that comes with attention?
My takeaways from White’s book are that
1. Church begins with the neighborhood, not the church service.
2. Kingdom growth is slow and requires patience. That’s ok.
3. This takes a different kind of leader than what we’ve been producing.
(In David Fitch’s Afterword he also mentions these 3 things.)
Let me go a bit deeper.
Like Jesus, our discipleship is meant to happen in the places where life happens. Yet our method of training is to “remove people in order to teach and train” them (37), and in the process we divorce information from immersion. When we look to Jesus as an example, it’s clear that his message was communicated not only in the content of his teaching, but in his way of teaching. His methods illustrated his message (46). It’s worth asking what our modern methods communicate about what we believe concerning Jesus and his Kingdom. What does our excessive focus on size, stage and speed teach others? “We are shaped by the techniques we employ (36).”
A starting point is to think of the local church in terms of fidelity, locality, and community. Each of these traits requires intentionality, and each can produce fruit and kingdom multiplication, and yet a ministry centered on fidelity, locality, and community will stand in stark contrast with the contemporary church industrial complex.
Fidelity refers to allegiance to Jesus and one another. The enemy of fidelity is a “personal relationship with God,” where “faith becomes transactional, not covenantal (78).” Fidelity to Jesus creates a community in contrast with the kingdoms and empires of the world. To see that such fidelity bears fruit, one only needs to look at churches that grow under persecution and rejection. It’s their faithfulness to Jesus that produces fruit, not their programs or events. Perhaps we undervalue the power of fidelity in western culture.
By locality, White means that we focus on what God’s doing in the neighborhood more than on what he’s doing in the church building. God is always local, and we begin by listening and asking, “What is here? Who is here? (94)” “Early Christian communities were identified by their location, clearly noticeable as Paul greets church’s meeting in a particular home grated to a particular place (93).” The difficulty is that the neighborhood is messier than the church meeting. For one thing, what’s happening in the neighborhood is more difficult to measure than what’s happening in the building. And yet in Luke 17:20, Jesus says that the Kingdom of God doesn’t come with things that can be observed. In other words, our traditional church metrics (attendance, budgets) do little to reveal what is actually happening in the Kingdom. Second, the neighborhood will challenge and develop our leadership skills in ways that are different from conventional church leadership. Third, focusing on the neighborhood limits our ministry to being with people. If ministry in the western church largely takes its cues from corporate business and/or the entertainment industry, ministry in the neighborhood is more like gardening. Listening, patience, and hospitality are key virtues to cultivate ministry in the neighborhood. “The renewal of our churches will not start on stages, it will start around our tables (143).”
“A church with faithful qualities of fruits of the Spirit simply does not go viral, and I’m not sure these virtues lead to rapid expansion.” (50) “Are we OK with God moving slowly? (52)” “Does God have to move fast for God to be moving? (53)” Too often our growth outpaces our maturity. The result is always damage to the mission. “Patience makes space for people as organisms, not machines, and makes space for God as mysterious, not predictable.” “The cultivation of community is head-poundingly slow (55).”
The industrial church complex has largely replaced community with events. “The New Testament is not a record of big explosive event after big explosive event (122).” Rather, “the explosive quality of the gospel of Jesus was that Jews and Gentiles, women and men, slaves and free were being knit together to declare something with profound social implications. Former enemies were now sharing a meal, orbiting around the bread and wine of Jesus the Messiah (122-23).” There was very little “machinery” to hold this in place (123). The more complex our organizational structures and the more prolific our programs, the more difficult it will be to cultivate authentic community. Developing communities will require us to become organizational minimalists, yet this is difficult when we’ve discipled our congregations to be consumers of religious goods and services.
White finishes his section on community by describing what it looks like to partner with one another for the Kingdom. Partnership isn’t about control, but about availability. We partner by being available for one another, by recognizing the abundance that each of us brings to the table, about taking one another’s humanity seriously, and about “linger[ing] with people for who they are and where they are (145).” The biblical word for partnering is “fellowship.” Partnering is about belonging. “In any discipleship relationship, the content of what is learned is a bit less important than the relationship itself. It is prolonged presence that communicates what is essential (151).”
In Subterranean: Why the Future of the Church is Rootedness, White presents us with a different way to be the church, a new social order, a new way of being human that is centered on Jesus Christ and cultivates deep roots in the neighborhood. I believe that what White describes grows strong trees. The alternatives are just tumbleweeds.
The Church that Jesus started with his disciples had a relational infrastructure that ministered the gospel to the relational brokenness of their worlds. It’s soil rather than spreadsheets that are needed to grow deep roots. Shifting means we must “confront our contemporary assumptions of what it means to be a significant church (12).” Ironically, in order to produce Kingdom fruit we may have to let go of our need to be significant and make an impact. We have to shed the need for applause both individually and corporately. Can we do that? What do we lose if we don’t? Are we willing to give up the power that comes with attention?
My takeaways from White’s book are that
1. Church begins with the neighborhood, not the church service.
2. Kingdom growth is slow and requires patience. That’s ok.
3. This takes a different kind of leader than what we’ve been producing.
(In David Fitch’s Afterword he also mentions these 3 things.)
Let me go a bit deeper.
Like Jesus, our discipleship is meant to happen in the places where life happens. Yet our method of training is to “remove people in order to teach and train” them (37), and in the process we divorce information from immersion. When we look to Jesus as an example, it’s clear that his message was communicated not only in the content of his teaching, but in his way of teaching. His methods illustrated his message (46). It’s worth asking what our modern methods communicate about what we believe concerning Jesus and his Kingdom. What does our excessive focus on size, stage and speed teach others? “We are shaped by the techniques we employ (36).”
A starting point is to think of the local church in terms of fidelity, locality, and community. Each of these traits requires intentionality, and each can produce fruit and kingdom multiplication, and yet a ministry centered on fidelity, locality, and community will stand in stark contrast with the contemporary church industrial complex.
Fidelity refers to allegiance to Jesus and one another. The enemy of fidelity is a “personal relationship with God,” where “faith becomes transactional, not covenantal (78).” Fidelity to Jesus creates a community in contrast with the kingdoms and empires of the world. To see that such fidelity bears fruit, one only needs to look at churches that grow under persecution and rejection. It’s their faithfulness to Jesus that produces fruit, not their programs or events. Perhaps we undervalue the power of fidelity in western culture.
By locality, White means that we focus on what God’s doing in the neighborhood more than on what he’s doing in the church building. God is always local, and we begin by listening and asking, “What is here? Who is here? (94)” “Early Christian communities were identified by their location, clearly noticeable as Paul greets church’s meeting in a particular home grated to a particular place (93).” The difficulty is that the neighborhood is messier than the church meeting. For one thing, what’s happening in the neighborhood is more difficult to measure than what’s happening in the building. And yet in Luke 17:20, Jesus says that the Kingdom of God doesn’t come with things that can be observed. In other words, our traditional church metrics (attendance, budgets) do little to reveal what is actually happening in the Kingdom. Second, the neighborhood will challenge and develop our leadership skills in ways that are different from conventional church leadership. Third, focusing on the neighborhood limits our ministry to being with people. If ministry in the western church largely takes its cues from corporate business and/or the entertainment industry, ministry in the neighborhood is more like gardening. Listening, patience, and hospitality are key virtues to cultivate ministry in the neighborhood. “The renewal of our churches will not start on stages, it will start around our tables (143).”
“A church with faithful qualities of fruits of the Spirit simply does not go viral, and I’m not sure these virtues lead to rapid expansion.” (50) “Are we OK with God moving slowly? (52)” “Does God have to move fast for God to be moving? (53)” Too often our growth outpaces our maturity. The result is always damage to the mission. “Patience makes space for people as organisms, not machines, and makes space for God as mysterious, not predictable.” “The cultivation of community is head-poundingly slow (55).”
The industrial church complex has largely replaced community with events. “The New Testament is not a record of big explosive event after big explosive event (122).” Rather, “the explosive quality of the gospel of Jesus was that Jews and Gentiles, women and men, slaves and free were being knit together to declare something with profound social implications. Former enemies were now sharing a meal, orbiting around the bread and wine of Jesus the Messiah (122-23).” There was very little “machinery” to hold this in place (123). The more complex our organizational structures and the more prolific our programs, the more difficult it will be to cultivate authentic community. Developing communities will require us to become organizational minimalists, yet this is difficult when we’ve discipled our congregations to be consumers of religious goods and services.
White finishes his section on community by describing what it looks like to partner with one another for the Kingdom. Partnership isn’t about control, but about availability. We partner by being available for one another, by recognizing the abundance that each of us brings to the table, about taking one another’s humanity seriously, and about “linger[ing] with people for who they are and where they are (145).” The biblical word for partnering is “fellowship.” Partnering is about belonging. “In any discipleship relationship, the content of what is learned is a bit less important than the relationship itself. It is prolonged presence that communicates what is essential (151).”
In Subterranean: Why the Future of the Church is Rootedness, White presents us with a different way to be the church, a new social order, a new way of being human that is centered on Jesus Christ and cultivates deep roots in the neighborhood. I believe that what White describes grows strong trees. The alternatives are just tumbleweeds.