Blacksoil

Even though it has become a jargon word, I still use it a lot. I like it because it gets at a cluster of ideas that are import to me when I think about what a church community should be.

1. A value for going because we understand ourselves as sent. That is, we don’t expect to draw people to a building, but rather we look at the people that are already in our life and our neighborhood and our community and ask, “How can I initiate a connection with others? How can I engage in loving others? How can I bring them good news?”

I think this involves a process of each community discerning the ways in which God is calling it to go. The Gospel and Our Culture Network’s “Patterns of Missional Faithfulness” first pattern is that “the community is discovering together the missional vocation of the community…It is seeking to discern God’s specific missional vocation (‘charisms’) for the entire community and for all of its members.”

2. The inseperable connection between being and telling the good news of Jesus Christ. God’s mission is not merely to save souls, but to redeem of all things. A missional community will point toward the kingdom of God with their actions/life (social justice, artistic creativity, community involvement, racial reconciliation) and their words (proclaiming that Christ is king and faith in him is the entrance into the kingdom).

As Jason Zaharlades puts it, “They are learning how to easily, naturally, and routinely embody, demonstrate and announce God’s life and reign for the sake of the world around them.” For me, “missional” is a word that gets at the embodying piece as well as the announcing piece. Like a medical mission or a disaster relief mission or a community development mission in a developing country, we need serve the greatest needs of the place we’re in AND share the good news about Jesus.

3. The willingness to find God in the culture, embrace what’s already good and sacred in it, and thus, allow the church to take an indigenous shape. This means a posture of openness and grace to the community around us and a willingness to re-examine the forms and patterns of church that we have inherited (and, if necessary, to toss them if they create unnecessary obstacles to faith).

This does not mean that the church doesn’t stand for truth or reject what is evil or take a prophetic role where it sees injustice or idolatry. The GOCN’s third pattern is “Taking Risks as a Contrast Community,” and the risk taking has to go both ways. The missional community will risk being ostracized or persecuted by the culture when it must take a prophetic stand against, but it will also risk by asking hard questions about its own “cultural captivity” and risk by embracing new cultural forms and letting go of old ones.

4. The recognition that many parts of America, especially urban centers in the North and West, are post-Christian cultures, and so we must take #1 seriously if we are to be fruitful, and we must take #2 seriously if we are to speak the gospel with credibility, and we must drop the culture war approach for a posture like #3 if we are to be Christ-like in those contexts.

Posted by Jeremy

I was reviewing some notes I took while listening to a presentation given by Joe Myers, author of the book Search to Belong.  At one point he said that we measure what is important to us.  If you want to know what an organization values, look at what they measure.  It doesn’t matter what we say is important; what will be important is what we are measuring.  He then went on to suggest that we should measure our lives by core relationships and not just core competencies.

First, is this valid (or can we label it as modern and old fashioned since a big part of modernism was categorizing and measuring and so let’s toss it out)?

And secondly, if it is true that what we measure will become what is important to us, what are we measuring at Blacksoil?  And how are we measuring it?
Posted by Dave

Without getting into all the fuss about whether ‘emerging’ and ‘emergent’ mean two different things, I want to answer the question Is Blacksoil an emergent church?

Yes and no. I am certainly excited about “the conversation” and think that it is a positive, Spirit-led catalyst for necessary changes in the North American church.

At the theological level, I think that the discussion about epistemology and worldview and how they relate to evangelism and apologetics (and everything else) is an important one. I think that Stanley Grenz and others who argue for a postfoundationalist epistemology are simply giving a more accurate description of how we know. I also think the criticism that modernist epistemology has snuck in the backdoor of evangelical thought and infected its systematic theologies and apologetics is true. Josh McDowell-style apologetics based on getting semi-biblically literate people to take the bible seriously are useless in a post-Christian culture. As are strategies to “prove” Christianity is true. The emergent emphasis on belonging preceding believing is dead on.

So far as I know, no one in emergent circles has proposed comprehensive theology of Scripture, but people are asking good questions. I agree that evangelical categories like ‘inerrancy’ and ‘infallibility’ have run their course as useful ways of talking about how God works through Scripture. Folks like NT Wright and Gabriel Fackre, who advocate a more narrative understanding of how Scripture is God’s word, are much more compelling to me that folks who try to ‘harmonize’ the gospels in order to prove ‘verbal plenary inspiriation.’

I think that Nancey Murphy’s work about how modernism is at the root of both liberal and conservative post-Enlightenment Protestant theology is very accurate. And I agree with those who would like to move beyond the liberal/conservative categories as they are largely unhelpful. (Though I do think that conservative theology maintained more of the heart of the good news, and that evangelicalism is more orthodox than liberal Protestanism).

At the practical level, I came to many of the same conclusions as Dan Kimball about what indigenous worship would look like for postmoderns (when I was also a youth minister). Blacksoil’s worship gatherings look like many emergent gatherings with candles and creative expression, and I believe this is faithful indigenous worship for our culture. I think that folks like Karen Ward at Church of the Apostles and my friend Rob Wondergem at Lighthouse Village are great examples of ‘missional’ communities in their contexts. And I really appreciate the preaching of Tim Keel and Rob Bell. I also appreciate the blogging of my friend Mark van Steenwyk (who like me is only critically-emergent).

Brian McLaren…oh, Brian McLaren. Brian says a lot of heretical things and a lot of silly things. But he has done much more good than harm, and I try to remember that he sees intentionally going “too far” as a strategy for getting people to where they need to be (though I don’t agree with this strategy). A New Kind of Christian is a very helpful book for people who are struggling with not fitting into evangelical church because they are philosophically or intuitively postmodern. I don’t agree with everything he says there, but again, I think that book does more good than harm.

I am more excited about emergent’s cousin: missional. The Gospel and Our Culture Network, which has carried on the work of ecumenical missiologist Leslie Newbiggin, has not gotten anything like the attention Emergent (Village) has, but it has been just as important in the discussion about doing church after Christendom. Darrel Guder’s books on The Continuing Conversion of the Church and The Missional Church are wonderful. The GOCN is the main reason I chose Western Theological Seminary, since both George Hunsberger and Jim Brownson teach there. There’s certainly a lot of overlap between people who identify as ‘missional’ and people who identify as ‘emergent,’ like Andrew Jones (aka Tall Skinny Kiwi), who prefers to use the term ‘missional-emergent.’

I would tend to agree with those who say that the emergent conversation is a bunch of white, middle-class, (post)evangelicals who are better at criticism and blogging than they are at being the church. Very few emergents are walking the talk. And many of the healthy, sustainable emergent churches are not nearly as different as their talk. Most them are still personality-driven and worship-service-focused.

Finally, most of emergent culture that I’ve been exposed to is not critical enough of consumerism and not thoughtful enough of the impact of technology on discipleship and on worship. [Insert joke about ipods and Apple laptops]. There are some neo-monastic communities (which may or may not count as emergent) such as Missio Dei, the Psalters, and The Simple Way, which have taken up this resistance. I have an affinity for those communities.

My hope for Blacksoil is that it will be catholic, orthodox, and missional in the best senses of those words. In my context, postmodern Lansing and East Lansing MI, I believe that means Blacksoil will look an awful lot like an ‘emerging’ church.