The Forgotten Ways
Over the next few months I'm going to dia-blog on the book "The Forgotten Ways," by Alan Hirsch. Your comments are welcomed.
Today I want to talk about the introduction to the book.
My first day of ministry began with a cry and a prayer, "I was never prepared for this!" While unloading our furniture into the church rented home a member of the church took a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. I learned the ministry of tears that day.
About a dozen years later I stood in the house that resembled a garbage dump. Among the rubble was the candle I used for the baptism of a drug addicted prostitute. She was the mother of six children. Mom and dad left the state quickly because I was going to have their children removed from their home. The children had seen more abuse and pain in their short years that I could have ever imagined. My tears were filled with rage that day.
I was not prepared for this and what made matters worse were my feelings of inadequacy and ineffectiveness. I was not seeing people coming into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ. I saw poor people and hurting people in the streets around the congregation. We had church meetings and church disagreements within the congregation. There were good days and there were bad days. I was learning that ministry was more like management.
Beyond that the world as I once knew it was no longer there. I never imagined I would have monthly bills for satellite TV, cell phones and Internet. What happened to the gas station I saw outside my grandma's window that sold gas for $.19 a gallon. Couples would come into my office preparing for marriage with $20,000 of credit card debt. Their lives and priorities were so out of whack. Quite frankly, I wonder when the whole economy is going to come crashing down. How can so many people have so much debt?
That gets us to the introduction of the book. Alan writes, "The truth is that the 21st-century is turning out to be a highly complex phenomenon where terrorism, paradigmatic technology innovation, an unsustainable environment, rampant consumerism, discontinuous change, and perilous ideologies confront us at every point."
Would it be safe to say that we are all struggling and have spoken the words either softly or quite loudly, "I was never prepared for this!" It was out of Alan Hirsch's struggle and journey that he asked a significant question when presented with these significant facts, "how did they do that?"
This question was asked because of this:
In 100 AD there were as few as 25,000 Christians
In 310 AD there were up to 20 million Christians
In China 1950 AD there were 2 million Christians
In China 2004 AD there were up to 80 million Christians
How did they do this?
Alan will lead us in a discussion around what he discovered to be a missional DNA. The times described above were times of great movement. The components of this mDNA are:
Jesus is Lord
Disciple Making
Missional Incarnational Impulse
Apostolic Environment
Organic Systems
“Communitas” not Community
What are some of your concerns or frustrations in ministry today? How do we begin to help so many sisters and brothers in ministry who are crying out to God, "I was not prepared for this?"
I Was Not Prepared For This!
I think you are exactly right, Dave. I don’t feel prepared for the future! I got a great biblical and theological education at seminary that will help to guide me in the future. However, I don’t think that I can even imagine what questions and problems and issues that the church I am a part of will face in the years and decades to come. Later in this book, Hirsch says that strategic planning only works if change in our culture is constant and slow. I don’t feel that this is the pace of change at all anymore!
I think a tool like this blog is EXACTLY a step in the right direction. We need to have a lightning fast way to keep abreast of new questions and ideas. We also need to have an equally quick way to share ideas and evaluate the answers we are discovering in our own contexts.
Technology is allowing us to do this. In the past 2 months, I’ve been able to Skype (a free internet video conference tool) with a pastor friend of mine across the country, email back and forth with a missionary in China, and share almost real-time information with a connection in the Philippines through Facebook. Now, I’m excited to share a discussion on this important book with peers from around North America. I hope that this blog idea will be just the beginning of opportunities our English District can help to provide for us to communicate quickly and thoughtfully with each other in the face of a rapidly changing culture.
Keep up the good work, Dave.