Mission

Day 1: Foreign Concepts

February 14, 2013 by Bo Sanders 11 Comments

There are two things that I really connected with in this chapter. The first is the description of rolling into Albania with all of its foreignness and intrigue.

I have been privileged to be able to travel a lot over the last 20 years. I went Germany and to Russia soon after the fall of communism. I have been to Thailand, Cambodia, Philippines and Malaysia among other places. But I have never been anywhere like the former Yugoslavia. Bosnia captured a special place in my heart. It is tough to describe exactly what it is about that place and its people that gives it an amazing mix of alien and hospitable.

The second thing was the way that both Cheryl (his friend in Portland) and the women on the phone at the sending agency talked about Albania ‘opening up’.

I grew up in a missionary denomination where both domestic evangelism and foreign missions were heavily emphasized and celebrated. There is a mystique about countries that have not been open to foreign missions before. We even had a big color-coded map on the wall that let us know which countries were ‘open’ and which were ‘closed’. It was a sincere matter of prayer.

Like spice merchants scheming about the Far East or timber barons staring out at a vast virgin-forest … there was something tantalizing about the prospect of being the first wave of folks to ‘take the gospel’ into a country.

It is odd to think about this now. This concept of one-way mission is something that I have lost along the way.

My journey has relieved me of the impression that we go to them … that we take something to them only.

The cold war has been over for a virtual-generation now. The world has changed a little bit.

The internet has changed communications and awareness.
Globalization has changed travel and access.
Our age of pluralism has changed how we conceptualize and relate to the other.

Internet – Globalization – Pluralism are a formidable triad for one-way missions. I now go to an inter-religious university that has me listening to and talking with Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and others on a fairly regular basis. We have much to learn from each other. It doesn’t mean we cease to be sincere Christians. It means that we hold a Christianity a little differently.

This concept is one of the things I really like about Neighbors and Wisemen. It is going to challenge us to listen to stories that we may not be used to hearing and it is going to ask us to reconsider how we treat an-other.

The early days of Lent for me are about loss. I have lost my zeal for one-way missions. What have you lost along your journey?

Filed Under: conversations, latest Tagged With: Albania, book, Bosnia, evangelism, Foreign, gospel, Mission, Tony Kriz

Introduction: Loss and Lent

February 13, 2013 by Bo Sanders 14 Comments

As we begin this journey through Neighbors and Wisemen, I want to do two things by way of introduction. The first is to lay out my many points of contact with this book. The second is talk about why I think this is going to work as a Lenten journey.

I have may layers of overlap with this book. Tony and I are friends. We have eaten lunch together, slept in the same hotel room, sat by the river together and met at the pub on several occasions.

Tony is a big fan of place. So am I. More specifically, Tony’s place is his neighborhood in Portland. Portland holds a special place in my heart. I went to seminary there and am always scheming as to how I can get back there for a visit.

The Balkans play an important role in the stories of Nieghbors and Wisemen. The former Yugoslavia is a terribly messy and heartbreaking story. Tony’s connection to Albania and my connection to Bosnia will show up several times over the coming weeks. This war-torn region is amazing and unlike any other place I have ever been too. There is something special about the people that gets a hook in your heart and once you are snagged … it will pull at you at severely.

The last point of contact I will mention is that Tony and I share several friends. Randy Woodley is the person who first introduced us and several of the times that we have been together it has been with Randy and, of course, Richard Twiss – who passed away last weekend.

In fact, I am very aware as I write this that the last time I hung out with Tony was at Wild Goose West last Summer, it was in Richard’s tipi. Tony and I have been deeply influence by the work of Randy and Richard and brought into a larger community of First Nations and Native American believers. For that, my life and my faith are bigger and richer that I ever knew they could be.

Loss

The intro opens with a story of loss. He had lost his faith.

This story is what originally gave me the idea to go through this for Lent. Lent plays a significant role in the Christian calendar. It can be a time of solemn reflection, of preparation, of repentance and of sacrifice.

But what do you do when you didn’t willingly give up your faith? You didn’t mean to. You didn’t want to.

You lost it.

or it was taken from you.

At least … that is how it feels.

I have heard so many people – pastors and seminarians included – who have lost the kind of faith they once had.

It can be a gut wrenching, heart rending ordeal.

“A cadaver soul impacts everything. It makes faith impossible. It makes prayer impossible. But that is only the beginning.”

As we begin the journey together I want to ask a couple of very simple question.

What have you lost?

Where did you lose it?

The reason that I ask it like that is because I have theory.

What if it isn’t the worst thing to lose one’s faith? I’m not talking about losing it all together – which is what it feels like at the time. I’m talking about circling around in order to revisit, renovate and maybe even reclaim some kind of faith.

What if we are supposed to lose our faith? What if that is just part of the growing pains? Like a butterfly coming out of cocoon or a snake shedding it’s husk skin …

What if what we are losing isn’t our faith – not our true faith – but our ability to hold it that way. What if maturing is coming to hold our faith differently – not so tightly, not so confidently.

It wouldn’t mean losing everything you once held so dear, it would mean having faith in different way than you used to.

I will offer up a personal example in closing: I can’t say “God told me” anymore.

I still pray. I still feel the spirit move. I still get inspirations. But I can’t say that phrase any more. There is just something about the posture one has to be in to say that phrase that I have lost. I have lost the ability to say “God told me”.

When I hear it, it rubs me the wrong way. I know what people are trying to say when they use that phrase. But I have lost the ability to say it like that.
It haunts me, because I used to say it a lot and now – where it used to be on the workbench – sits an empty space that I am all too aware of.

I haven’t lost my faith. I have lost the ability to hold my faith like that anymore.

What about you?

Filed Under: conversations, latest, living Tagged With: Albania, Balkans, Bible, book, books, Bosnia, faith, God, jesus, Lent, loss, Mission, Spirit, Tony Kriz

Concern about the Collapse of the Mainline Liberal

July 12, 2012 by Bo Sanders 24 Comments

There is a fascinating conversation these days about what exactly is going to happen to the the ‘Old’line (what used to be the Mainline) denominations and why exactly it has happened. Both John Cobb (a while ago) and Diana Butler Bass (more recently) have had amazingly insightful takes about it on our podcast.

I find myself in an interesting position as one employed at a healthy and growing Mainline church that is about to begin an emergent expression this Fall with the addition of a second gathering. It has been said by numerous folks that I bring an evangelical zeal to being progressive. But when I read stuff about the bigger picture I feel like I showed up at the prom around 11.

Today I want have a little conversation with David Ray Griffin. His article ‘Postmodern Theology for the Church’ begins with possibly the best opening paragraph I have read. I will post it, break the sentences up and attempt to dialogue. I won’t get beyond the first paragraph in round 1. My comments will be in italics

___

Many believe that the modern liberal church is dying. Whether or not this is true, it is obvious that modern liberal churches have been in decline in both numbers and influence for some time.

It’s funny to judge life and health by numbers and influence. Maybe it is not the worst thing in the world to lose a little weight! Maybe downsizing and streamlining are not all that bad for the 21st century. I mean, this is not post-WWII America anymore. These mammoth cathedrals and lumbering bureaucratic structures are from a bygone era.

This fact has recently received terminological recognition in the change from “mainline” to “oldline” to refer to these churches. Various analyses have been offered to explain this decline.

I’m always nervous when reductive thinking tries to explain a complicated situation with a primary label. I mean, if its true – and obvious – that is one thing. My tendency is to look to a web of interpretation (anchored at many points) or to use a chemistry analogy about a concoction or mix.

Conservative theologians offer a theological analysis, saying that the liberal churches are in decline because their theology is vacuous. I believe that this analysis is essentially correct.

This is the point that John Cobb makes in that interview. They basically figured out that no matter what degree or shade someone’s belief had, we all basically did the same things. The system was set up to serve here, give to this, and show up there. The technical fine tuning of belief didn’t make that big of a difference so … it must not really matter that much.

Religion is based upon the perennial human desire to be in harmony with the supreme power of the universe, but modern liberal theology has had trouble speaking of the world as God’s creation and of God as providentially active in the world in any significant sense.

This is why I am so inventive and try to be so creative to articulate a faith that has God not just in world but inter-acting with the world. I have put great creativity into conceptions of emergent creation (instead of ex nihilo or evolutionary explanations only), dealing with demons, making sense of miracles and explaining evil (among other things).

It has generally redefined God—indeed, if it speaks of God at all—so that God is not portrayed as the supreme power of the universe, if it attributes any power at all to what it calls God.

While we do certainly contend that omni-potent is not the Biblical picture of God (but a Ceasar-esque one imported from Greek philosophy and Roman politics) we can not abandon a God who acts all together if we are to have an Christ at all. I have no interest is being generically religious (a God-ian) or spiritual (a Spirit-ist). I want Jesus. If not, I would just walk away – to be honest. I have better things to do (like Sociology). Maybe that is exactly what people have done… walked away from it.

Religion is based upon hope for salvation, but modern liberal theology has not provided a realistic basis for hope, either for individuals or the world as a whole. Vital religion usually involves not only hope for the future but also present religious experience that is salvific in itself, and yet modern liberal theology has little if any room for such experience.

Two interesting things here: A) I am all for hope. Once the social gospel collapse (or the government took over many of its functions) I get why folks were less likely to really sacrifice and pour themselves out for the cause. The post-millenial expectation that was predominate 100 years ago was a bust. It was too optimistic about human progress and social change … and not strong enough on anthropology (human nature).
B) Religious experience is a doozy of a topic. It was eye opening for me to move from an environment where we raised our hands, closed our eyes and sang as loud as we could (over even danced) in delight at experiencing God’s presence in corporate musical worship. I love the idea of liturgy, ceremony, and ritual. But you have to admit that epistemology and the expectation are night and day. People want to argue with my on this point but I’m telling you that evangelical-charismatic worship is more individualist and more faithful to Schleiermacher’s liberal expectation than anything I have found in the Mainline.

The Christian Church when it has been on the move has had a clear sense of its mission as God’s agent to bring from the power of the demonic, but modern liberal has been able to articulate no such sense of mission.

There may be no better point in the whole article than this. I think that greater than the massive sanctuaries, the dogged loyalty to old forms in worship, and anything else you can point to … this may be the most important element of the demise.

A religious movement thrives when it offers a message that seems both true and important, but modern liberal theology has not been able convincingly to portray its message as either true or important.

My goodness this one stings. It actually hurts so much (even as newcomer) that I pour many hours and invest tons of energy into addressing this one.

Conservative theologians say that modern liberal theology provides little more than a religious gloss on an essentially nonreligious worldview; that criticism, I am saying, is largely correct.

Totally unacceptable! We have good news to offer the words – and it is not that everything makes sense. Making sense is good (most of the time) but it is certainly not enough. Our commission is not just to help folks be the nicest, best, most generous versions of themselves. We can’t afford to do group therapy and call it church. Nor can we simply define ourselves and not fundamentalist or not conservative. Negativa will not suffice. What is needed is a solid articulation and dynamic organization of community and a tradition that houses a robust theology and aggressive engagement of the world that it finds itself in.

Those are some of my thoughts. I would love to hear some of yours! -Bo Sanders

Filed Under: engaging, latest, thinking Tagged With: book, books, church, collapse, concern, decline, demise, Diana Butler Bass, evangelical, God, gospel, Griffen, jesus, john cobb, Mainline, misional, Mission, religion, religious, Spirit

Global Leadership and Local Ministry with Martin Sanders

June 5, 2012 by Bo Sanders 5 Comments

Martin Sanders is the head of Global Leadership, runs the D.Min for Alliance Theological Seminary in Nyack, NY … and most importantly, he is Bo’s Dad. That’s right! Its the BoDaddy’s Daddy (as Tripp says).

Among Dr. Sanders’ works are The Power of Mentoring and The Family You’ve Always Wanted. The Power of Mentoring has been reworked and released in French. Global Leadership is in 37 countries and has been involved in leadership development on every continent.

He recently finished a DVD on life change. The small group booklet that goes with it will be done by the end of the month. Here is the link to the YouTube promo video. http://youtu.be/k0pSK07rSv035 years in ministry, including 25 as a Seminary Professor, provided Bo and Tripp with plenty of material to ask questions: Leadership, Mega-Churches, International, Regional, Generational, Denominational and Historical.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Filed Under: engaging, features, living, podcast, thinking Tagged With: Africa, Alliance, Asia, ATS, Canada, church, Europe, Global Leadership, International, Martin Sanders, Mission, Seminary, South American, Theological

Post-Contextuality

March 21, 2012 by Bo Sanders 15 Comments

by Bo Sanders
posted at Ethnic Space

Contextual theology was the subject of my Master’s thesis.* I was, and continue to be, enthralled with the possibility that the gospel could be uniquely expressed in every culture in a manner that was both authentic and indigenous to that group’s place and time. Lamin Sanneh goes so far as to say that it is the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian religion and that unlike Judaism, Islam, Hindu and Buddhist traditions there is no language, place, culture or time that is inherently superior for expressing the gospel. In Whose Religion Is Christianity: the Gospel Beyond the West, he has it like this:

Being that the original scripture of the Christian movement, the New Testament Gospels are translated versions of the message of Jesus, and that means Christianity is a translated religion without a revealed language. The issue is not whether Christians translated their scriptures well or willingly, but that without translation there would be no Christianity or Christians. Translation is the church’s birthmark as well as its missionary benchmark: the church would be unrecognizable or unsustainable without it… Since Jesus did not write or dictate the Gospels, his followers had little choice but to adopt a translated form of his message. (Sanneh p. 97)

When I wrote the thesis, I had yet to really encounter liberation or post-colonial thought in depth. My interest in contextualization arose from being a church-planter in a Missionary denomination. I did not realize at the outset of the project just how strong the critique contextual theology brought to classical (traditional) approaches. Since then I have engaged de-colonial, feminist, liberation, post-modern, and pluralistic voices that have even harsher critiques.

I keep circling back, however, to a much simpler concern: the practice of the church.

It is in this concern of practice that I have stumbled onto - and now stumble over - a haunting inconsistency between our thought and our practice.

The irony is thick. In my experience, those who are most excited about missions and evangelism are quite fond of the Bible. They often reference the Bible and even say things like “In the Bible” as a validation for doing something a certain way or “that’s unbiblical” as criticism of something.

Yet, never in the Bible do you see anyone intentionally learning another language in order to present the gospel. In the Bible, God repeatedly used dual-citizens and bi-lingual folks to get the message out. In the book of Acts we see three examples:

a miraculous bridging of the language barrier at Pentecost
the Ethiopian eunuch was a bi-lingual traveler who took something back to his ‘home’ in Africa
Saul/Paul was a dual-citizen who took the message to the Roman Empire

That, it seems to me, is the Biblical model for missions. (This is true whether or not one translates the Great Commission as the imperative “Go” or the more passive Greek rendering of “as you are going”. The precedent of Acts is the same.) The Biblical model is very different than the Colonial model we are so familiar with.

The past 5 centuries have had their effect – but now that the whole world is ‘mapped’ and ‘spoken for’, maybe its time to move away from the colonial obsession with conversion and trust the bilingual and dual-citizens among us to translate to and for their cultures. We would need to repent of our compulsion to import ourselves into foreign peoples or countries and then impose our cultural expectations on them.

In a global era it is time to stop importing and imposing our cultural entrapments into alien environments and presuming that we know what is best for them. There is enough migration, travel, immigration and cultural exchange that we can now trust God that this will happen in the right time and in the right way – without us taking matters into our own hands any longer and asking God to bless our efforts. The era of elaborate organizations for foreign missions needs to come to an end.** They are unbiblical – and I think they always have been – but now they are also inappropriate for our age.

The move toward contextual theology helped me see that we have to move beyond contextualization in missions and evangelism. The Colonial era was an ugly one for the church and we need to move out its methods – not just for the word’s sake but because it undermines and discredits the very message we are trying to convey through it.

*different groups utilize different forms of contextualization – Catholics tend to call the process ‘inculturation’ for instance, others use a similar move called ‘indigenization’.

** I know dozens of missionaries and understand that they are passionate. I mean no harm to any one of these folks that I care so much about. I have delayed putting this out for more than a year out of my concern for their feelings.

Filed Under: bible stuff, church history, engaging, latest, thinking Tagged With: Bible, book, books, colonial, Contextualization, Culture, evangelism, Global, God, gospel, jesus, Mission, missions, translation

Kony 2012 and Apple’s Mr. Daisy

March 19, 2012 by Bo Sanders 10 Comments

There were two stories in the news last week that fascinated me as I watched them unravel. The first was the meteoric rise of the viral 30 minute video Kony 2012 that took over Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. The second story was an NPR radio episode of This American Life about working conditions in the Apple factories in China. The story centered around a play/monologue by Mr. Daisy about his trip to China to investigate the matter. Over 1 million people had downloaded that NPR podcast – by far an all time record.

Both stories turned tragic last week. Invisible Children, the group responsible for Kony 2012, came under heavy criticism. It turns out that the conflict as it was presented was not all that accurate – It had been accurate in the early 2000s but after 2004 no longer represented the true affairs of the country and Joseph Kony himself had left Uganda and migrated to a neighboring country.

People accused the film’s star Jason Russell and his Invisible Children crew of knowingly misleading people and falsifying content in order to elicit a greater emotional response.

The Apple story went down a similar road for Mr. Daisy. It turns out that he had taken some artistic license in presenting his one-man-show and that not everything he claims would qualify as ‘journalistic standard’ of truthfulness. For instance, while he was in China for that week, he saw a news story about some factory workers in another province suffering horrible effects from a chemical. He never went to that province nor talked to those workers but just imported that story and connected it to his subject. The result was that this one factory seemed to be layers and layers of horrific working conditions – but in reality what was presented was an amalgamation of many factories in several provinces.

In the follow-up interviews this weekend Mr. Daisy said that he took license with the facts because he wanted people to care about this. He knew that the conditions were bad and so orchestrated the story to draw a response.

These two stories, taken together, point to a series of issues that are relevant to the church and her theology.

The first issue is complacency. Both of these ‘presenters’ knew that some tweaks and modifications needed to made in order to overcome our collective complacency. We see so much bad, that unless something is really bad – it just doesn’t register. We are so overwhelmed with images, adverts, messages and pleas that unless something is sensational or horrific, we have evolved mechanisms and filters to catch it and screen it out. The result is that we become complicit in maintaining the status-quo and passive participants in the system, structures and institutions that comprise the ‘Powers the Be’ that Paul reference in Ephesians 6.

The second issue is Paternalism. At some point white people from the West are going to have to stop thinking that the solution to what ails Africa or Asia is us coming over and fixing it. Now, I applaud the generous heart behind both Invisible Children and Mr. Daisy but until we repent of our Colonial impulse and step away from that model of missions, we are going to continue to run into problems and run over the very folks we purport to be helping.

We want to help – that is great.
We do it in our way – and that is hurtful.

There is no doubt that in global system of international trade and foreign policy that the church must come to terms with our inter-connectivity and inter-relatedness in a way that transcends outdated clichés and antiquated platitudes of centuries past. We live in an evolving world that is experiencing exponential and radical change.

I love that good folks want to care about that and not just go shopping to bury their head in the sand. BUT until we repent of our ongoing paternalism and acknowledge the devastating effects of our colonial missions we will continue to replicate the harm and multiply the devastation.

As Christians, do we need to think through and address our participation in the global market and international structures that dominate our contemporary economy? Yes.

If, however, we do not first repent of our Colonial missions mentality, we will continue the pattern of paternalism and Imperial impulse that has created these very situations we want to address.

p.s. I know about Jason Russell’s ~~arrest~~ episode this weekend but did not want to distract from the bigger issue.

Filed Under: church history, engaging, latest, news, thinking Tagged With: Apple, book, books, Christian, church, downloads, Facebook, Invisible Children, Jason Russell, Kony 2012, Mac, megachurch, Mission, missions, Mr. Daisy, NPR, San Diego, This American Life, twitter, white, YouTube

God is great! Jesus is super … but is he unique?

January 10, 2012 by Bo Sanders 15 Comments

Over the next month we will continue ramping up for the Emergent Village Theological Conversation for 2012. We are very excited about bring the Emergent camp (who we love) into dialogue with Process thought (which we love) in a live-interactive-open ended- relational engagement.
These blog posts may come from the reading in preparation for the conference but I want to be clear about two things:

We are not under the impression that everyone is on board with the Process thought
We love to hear from other perspectives at they illuminate, challenge and respond to this ongoing exchange.

I was reading something that other day that really excited me. It was a comparison of the existential approach of someone like Rudolf Butlmann and the “powerful and illuminating analysis of post-christian existence” with the approach of someone like A.N. Whitehead in his book “Religion in the Making”.
It was particularly this sentence which caught my attention:

Bultmann’s belief that through Jesus’ death and resurrection a change was effected in the human situation at the most fundamental level can be examined as a historic hypothesis without introducing any ad hoc notions of a unique act of God.*

Fairly straight forward stuff, but it piqued my interest enough to go back and make sure that I understood the whole section leading up to it. What is interesting is that just before the above quote is this little nugget:

In such a context (exploring distinctive Western structures) the role of such historical figures such as Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus can been seen a bringing new structures of existence into being.

“Whoa! Hold it right there! I like it when you say wonderful things about how great Jesus is … by why do you have to include those other people?” I can hear my conservative and evangelical friends saying.
This is not the only time I have seen something like this and had the same reaction. (God is not One by Stephen Prothero springs to mind). It can almost be framed in this simply rubric

God is Great!
Jesus is super.
don’t elevate anyone else or Jesus won’t seem unique

I remember giving that original Homebrewed interview with John Cobb (ep. 38) to some friends and how uncomfortable they were (across the board) that Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, and Siddhartha Gautama may have been as open to the will of God as Jesus was.
According to Cobb, what makes Jesus unique is not simply that he was so open to the call of God but what God had called him to. In my circles you have to tack Bible verses on to the end of every major point, so I referenced Romans 5 that what God did in Christ satisfied something in God and changed humanity’s relationship to God. Was that enough? That God did something unique in Jesus … or does there also have to be an absence of affirming what may have done in others?

The other night I was talking to a college student from a different continent. She asked me why there was so much confusion in religion and if it “was the work of the evil one?”. I tried to explain how religions grew up in relative isolation during a much simpler time and they were simply not equipped to handle the complex world we now find ourselves in nor are they meant (or even attempting to) answer each other’s questions. They are just not set up for it.

Religions developed in a simpler time and are not set up for a) this level of complexity or b) this much overlap. There is going to continue to be a need for work to be done within each religion and between the religions (or traditions/communities). What will be the Christian contribution?

We all agree that if there is God that God would by necessity be great! Even those who don’t think that the God of Abraham is Allah and Jesus’ Abba will agree with that. Almost everyone agrees that Jesus was extraordinary. Even those who are not so sure about the accuracy of the historical record will acknowledge his impact. But was Jesus unique? Can we affirm something great in other figures without diminishing him?

Unfortunately those who have inherited an unquestioned view developed in Christendom’s monopoly will just quote John 14:6 and Acts 4:12 as if that settles the matter. A pre-existent Christ came down in Jesus and that is all you need to know.
This is why I am so intrigued to have Process theology as conversation partner. I am excited to hear what John Cobb has to say on Thursday morning at the Emergent Theological Conversation when we talk about Pluralism. I have been reading a lot of Cobb and when talks about the way that God was present in Jesus … it makes more sense than anything else I have ever heard on the subject. I would be interest in your thoughts. How does your tradition handle this? What will the future hold in this arena? Is the Christian tradition capable of this give-and-take of the 21st century?

*p. 86 of Cobb’s book

Filed Under: church history, conversations, engaging, latest, living, thinking Tagged With: Bhudda, book, books, Bultmann, Christ, Christianity, Cobb, God, Islam, jesus, Mission, pluralism, religion, Stephen Prothero, whitehead

Living the Questions