This is the experience of our first Life On Fire Unconference, held in Oak Ridge, TN in September. We hope this story encourages you to continue to live *your* life according to your deepest faith, values, or inspirations, and challenge others to do so.
Links
Resilience and the Spirituality of Change
A defining characteristic of a church with a mission is that it adopts change as a spiritual practice. Congregations on a mission, that develop the communitas I discussed in my last post, understand themselves to be on a journey of faith together that by its nature implies risk and uncertainty. Instead of fearing this risk and uncertainty, missional congregations see it as the natural terrain for serving the needs of the world. Because missional communities adopt change as a spiritual practice, another benefit of the missional shift is the creation of a community with give, flexibility, and the ability to bounce back. Communitas is resilient. A spiritual practice is something done with depth, regularity and intentionality. When we understand that constant change, at least gradual constant change, is the spiritual playing field, we approach the challenges of change – such as dealing with loss and the sense of insecurity as well as new opportunities for growth and learning – as a deep, intentional, regular practice of what life in a faith community is all about. Developing change as a spiritual practice helps us bounce back when conflict or difficulties arise. Change as spiritual practice makes us resilient.
“Come back to church.”
One of my favorite stories of radical missional church incarnation is from Michael Frost’s book Exiles, about the young adult who had attention deficit disorder and had always found it difficult to sit still in the pews with his family during worship, and so when he became an adult it dawned on him that he really didn’t have to go to worship anymore as he had in the past in the congregational setting, so he went with friends to the lake on Sundays. But he felt a little guilty and he wanted to be spiritually nourished so while he was partying at the lake he asked his friends, most who had not had his church background, if he could take a moment to pray and he asked them if they had anything he could include in his own prayers, and he went on partying. The next Sunday he brought his Bible and took a few minutes to do the same, adding in a brief reading, and then he went on partying. Not taking more than a few minutes at first. But then he and his friends started adding more prayers, and they started doing small acts of service at the lake, cleaning up, towing boats, and then they sat at picnic tables and had bread and juice for communion alongside the burgers and the beer, and wove spiritual issues into their conversations. Still, it was a party; still, his family pestered him to “come back to church.” Imagine such an organic expression of church being seeded intentionally?
from “ReShaping the World: Church in Likeness to a Different God” by Rev. Ron Robinson
ReShaping the World: Church in Likeness to a Different God
by the Rev. Ron Robinson
The prevailing church model today does much good in the world, and will continue to do so. But what I want to leave you with today is that no matter how good the congregation and its people are, and no matter how much it grows in number as well as in vitality, that fewer and fewer percentages of people in the world around the congregation are likely to be attracted to it—though still hungry for spiritual depth and connection and service. The pool, or mission field, of people who seek to be nourished by a congregation, any congregation, will shrink, and the competition by congregations for them will be fierce, cutting across denominational and religious lines as we are already seeing, with the already haves having the upper hand in landing the potential new members.
…
I believe the mission of the church is at heart about serving, saving, the most vulnerable of our neighbors; and if your neighbors aren’t vulnerable (though I bet they are in many ways; as my wife Bonnie says, the people in the wealthy suburbs have power but don’t know they have needs; the people in our area know they have needs but not that they have power; it is harder work in many ways to get the powerful to know they are in need) and you can’t figure out a way to give yourself away to them then you should move to a different neighborhood. I believe the church should not be growing more vital and healthy when the world around it is dying. I don’t believe the mission of the church is to attract more people to think like us, and lord knows its not the mission of the church to make more people who call themselves Unitarian Universalists, or call themselves Christian either, for example; if that happens as a byproduct of fulfilling our mission, then well and good; but it isn’t why we exist and the more we make it our focus, the more we worry about church even, as an institution and organization, the more we lose sight of our calling to love and shape the world bent out of shape, and the more we will just end up paralyzing the church anyway with anxiety.
(excerpted)
Moving Beyond the Box, a Missional Postflection
Liberal theology does not come from liberals thinking about religion, it emerges out of the disciplined process of how we tell these stories and engage those images. This means dealing with not just the stories, images and ideas that we like, but engaging the ones we don’t as well.
One of James Luther Adam’s (20th century liberal theologian) guiding principals for a free faith is a belief in continuing historical revelation. That means approaching the revelation of truth and meaning with both an openness to the future, which most liberals do well, and it also means a continuity with the past. This is what Adams referred to as a sense of length. In my former church we used to say it this way – in our faith the Bible is the beginning but not the end.
Peacebang: The Missional Church and Unitarian Universalism
The missional church cannot generate its energy from the sighs of relief exhaled by its members who are welcomed into it as a place of refuge from “icky ole religion.” Nor can it be a place where people slide “safe” into home base and stay there for the rest of their church life, with grass stains on their pants and a sense of elation for having made the run. The church’s responsibility is to help such individuals get up off the dirt, brush themselves off, have any injuries tended to, and sent back out on the field, and then eventually out of the ballpark altogether.
AT THE INTERSECTION OF MISSIONAL AND UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST THEOLOGIES
The core elements of the modern missional theology movement strongly align with the theological house of Unitarian Universalism that Rebecca Ann Parker explained at Collegium 2003. These elements propel us toward new understandings about how we should work in, and engage with, the world. They urge us toward the life of a modern missionary, in which we both work with the culture, yet still understand ourselves as radical prophets in a land that often reflects values vastly different from our own.
Written two years ago. Over-reliance on quotes. But I said I’d post it, so here it is. – Joanna
AT THE INTERSECTION OF MISSIONAL AND UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST THEOLOGIES
Worship Wagging the Dog?
Spiritual Direction, Discernment, Mission and the Liberal Church
You’re here because you know something is wrong. What you know you can’t
explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire ministerial life, perhaps all your life – that
there’s something wrong with the church. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a
splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to this
paper. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Even after all the trainings and workshops, even after the switch to adaptive
leadership and all-ages worship and a bit of multi-media, something’s still wrong.
Church still isn’t what it could be, what it needs to be for the coming century.
Out of my stillness, I can help with this confusion. I can’t give you any answers,
but I can offer a conceptual framework, some guidelines, some suggestions, one
ancient sacred spiritual practice, and promise my fellowship as you see how deep the
rabbit hole goes. It’s a sacred journey. Choose well, Alices. Take one pill and
everything you know about church is wrong, take the other and you can ignore
everything else I have to say and go back to your congregation as if I never existed and
as if this paper never existed. You will never know the difference.
Spiritual Direction, Discernment, Mission and the Liberal Church
Red Pill Brethren 