02.23.08

missional orders

Posted in community, ekklesia, formation, missional order, pilgrimage at 6:00 am by len

Geoff Hsu writes,

“I didn’t really have a good mental map of what a missional Kingdom movement would look like. But last November, after Chris Brewster and Jason Evans began using the language of being like an “order,” the conversation just took off. I left the meeting with a couple of very clear thoughts. First, this was clearly something that just about everyone in the room felt some resonance with. Second, I knew nothing about orders. I still don’t.

“But the more I think and read about it, I’m intrigued. I like the idea of gathering missional leaders that have a burden for the whole city to choose to covenant together. While not leaving their primary faith communities, there would be a deliberate second order choice to join with others to be the city church. It would value the unique callings that individual brings to the community/order such as church planting, marketplace ministry, arts/media, or educators, etc. At the same time, we covenant to learn from each other who are gifted and called to be involved in justice and sustainability issues, racial reconciliation and homelessness issues (to name only a few.)”

I have a feeling this represents the thoughts of many as they hear about a rule of life and missional orders. It seems a season of rediscovery, and sometimes the new direction is the renewal of something ancient. It’s intriguing to me also.. and I speak as a person in the same process.. that covenant language and practice seems strange to we who are benefits of a covenant. All that we are and do is defined within the terms of a gracious covenant; a covenant shapes who we are as God’s people.

On Thursday morning four of us gathered to talk about the shape of a missional order locally, around the formation of a leadership training center. Three pillars – theory, practice, and formation – will form the training, and these three clustered around a missional order that defines a set of shared commitments and shared practices. Our intention is to shape a faithful journey that is both inward and outward.

It is striking to me how intentional we are about so much of our lives, particularly our work as leaders, yet unreflective and unintentional about the most critical pieces. We are used to certain rhythms, but inward rhythms are less familiar. I wonder if it isn’t simply our activist nature as leaders. But perhaps it’s also difficult to justify time for explicitly spiritual practices when we are valued for.. and paid for .. results. And of course, there is a certain fear factor on the inward journey, particularly if we haven’t been to those places for a while. Franciscan Richard Rohr years ago formed “The Center for Action and Contemplation.” He says the important word in the title is “and.”

I am only beginning to learn how radical that conjunction is. Ours is not a choice between action and contemplation. These are part of a rhythm, an organic outflow of interior life. We shouldn’t have to choose, and ideally shouldn’t even have to worry about such categories. Formation is about being united in Christ and renewed in His image. The end goal is not activism or contemplation: the end goal of Spirituality is Jesus. And note that there is no NT conception of the ekklesia that represents isolated units making choices: there is no cartesian individual, there is only the Body.

More fundamentally than any of these things, we need to be found in God. If we are deeply rooted there, His life will move us. Too much action in the name of God is really a compulsive need for movement, a codependent cycle, another need to be in control of my world, a subtle return to the old idolatry under a religious banner.

The monastics understood this better than I do. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote more than a hundred sermons on the song of songs, the great love story of the Old Testament. In sermon 18 he writes on 1:2, “Your name is oil poured out..”

“The man who is wise will see his life more as a reservoir than a canal. The canal simultaneously pours out what it receives; the reservoir retains the water til it is filled, then discharges the overflow without loss to itself…. Today there are many in the church who act like canals, the reservoirs are far too rare…”
“You too must learn to await this fullness before pouring out your gifts, do not try to be more generous than God.”

Our initial agreement is to pray the office daily, to dwell together in John 6 for the next month, to practice hospitality, and to reflect on the further shape of a missional order. We will likely form triads and quads as an accountability practice.

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