Well, I started out with some prognostication, and then I got distracted, and got back on track regarding my thoughts on The Decade Ahead for the Emerging Church. As I set up my thoughts and predictions (scary word) in that post, I asked three pairs of questions, the last of which was, “where is the world outside the church in all of this? Do they benefit at all, or are they worse off?” And then I pretty much didn’t answer that one, just the other two. This set of questions is fundamentally different because they have to do with the church’s interaction with the world, and are therefore the most important (certainly to the missional crowd, at least). For these reasons, I felt a separate post was warranted.

I love the TED site and the many Talks thereon. (I’d love to attend the conference someday.) Today I gave a listen to Barry Schwartz‘ talk titled “The real crisis? We stopped being wise.” I’m all about wisdom. Not that I necessarily have any, I just know how important it is, and how difficult it is to attain. I enjoy the book of Proverbs for this reason as well, in the hope that I might glean something to help my pursuit of wisdom. That could be why I enjoyed this talk… or it could be because I’ve never been much for rules and incentives, which Schwartz also tackles, suggesting that they can tend to work against the cultivation of wisdom. Considering the workings of legalism in institutional/hierarchical structures, I’d have to say that he’s onto something.

A few weeks ago I asked, “Where are the Doors to the Church?” There were several good points raised in the comments following, and I wanted to respond at the time… but time got the better of me. I wanted to resurrect the metaphor once more, as some of the comments had me thinking about it a little further.

As we describe it, the path that most people take into the “house” of faith is not a door per se, at least not one that people simply walk up to and fling open, as it were. People are led in, or let in through relationships. This is the way it should be, and the more I thought about the scenario, the more I came back to a passage in John 10:

Just when you think the conversation might go away quietly, Bill Kinnon sticks his nose into it. But then again, he can have that way of hitting it spot-on in his commentary. Like this time. So in this running dialogue, I was going to title my post Maynard on Kinnon on Keller on Fitch on Kimball — because that’s the rough outline of the conversational thread — but then just the title of the post would be too hard to follow. As it happens, Tim Keller has responded to David Fitch’s response to what it sounded like Dan Kimball was saying on the Out of Ur blog. Keller outlines some of his experience in small and large churches, then summarizes,

Vineet Nayar in a Harvard Business publication says It’s Time to Invert the Management Pyramid, which Ryan Bolger follows up by saying We Must Invert the Pastor Pyramid. I’m not really very big on chasing down business strategies to apply to the church, but it’s always striking to notice how all the really good organizational ideas that the churches adopt are ones which the business realm has had a grasp on for a decade or more. With this in mind, whether one takes the result as a prescription or not, it is instructive to take note when the business realm begins to find fault with their old organizational method and begins imagining or suggesting an alternative structure. The Harvard article states,

I know I already quoted from the book, but it’s a good one. Page 27:

Senator Bill Bradley defines a movement as having three elements:

1. A narrative that tells a story about who we are and the future we’re trying to build
2. A connection between and among the leader and the tribe
3. Something to do–the fewer limits, the better

Too often organizations fail to do anything but the third.

Matt Stone did a Church &amp Politics Quiz that looked interesting, so I took the test as well. My score is plotted on the graph image, which looks to be about the same as Matt’s. The quiz suggests I see the role of the church as primarily a prophetic one. Since my score is pretty much along the midpoint of the vertical axis, I’m in between “Radical Reformer,” a group which would “see a strong prophetic role for the church and combine this with a robust call for political engagement to seek social and political change” and the “Quiet Critic,” representing those who “steer away from a direct role for the church in politics, instead emphasizing the church’s purity by maintaining a separation from the state. From this perspective, the church best shares the gospel by being an alternative community that models Christian love.”

I just finished reading Miriam Toews‘ latest, The Flying Troutmans (US Cover pictured above, Canadian cover below). I was annoyed that I missed the book launch at McNally Robinson. I remembered at 10:00 that night, so I went down there the next day and bought a copy. When I stepped up to the cashier, I asked if they didn’t have any flatsigned copies (they usually do after an author event like this). He checked and was also surprised that they didn’t, but told me I could just bring my book back, “She’s in here often enough.” True, she’s a local author, but somehow I don’t see myself hanging around the bookstore like some kind of stalker waiting for her to appear so I might accost her with pen in hand.

I read Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody not long ago, and I’ve mentioned it here a few times already. The subtitle of the book is, “The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” and I must say that it provides some excellent food for thought on the future of the institution contrasted with the power of loosely-affiliated mass collaborative efforts. The word “organization” might be used, but in some contexts it creates an expectation of more formality than actually exists.

Yes, it’s come up before in connection with the “feminization” of the church and the drive to get more men engaged. So as Scot McKnight pointed out now USA Today says,

Churches nationwide are fretting and sweating to reel men into their sanctuaries on Sundays.

Women outnumber men in attendance in every major Christian denomination, and they are 20% to 25% more likely to attend worship at least weekly.

In an effort to but male butts into the pews, 121 Community Church has geared everything toward men.

If anyone’s been counting carefully through the previous eight posts, they’ll notice two things. First, there are more than 50 ways to define missional. At least, there are more than 50 posts on the subject which have appeared in connection with the June 23^rd synchroblog which got this whole mess going. Secondly, the astute observer will notice that I’ve skipped summarizing one of the posts — my own. I’ll rectify that today, and then carry on with some kind of synthesis of everything else that’s been said in this little adventure. Oh, and my apologies to anyone who’s getting tired of the Blues Brothers image… I don’t normally reuse my post images, but I thought I’d try a unifying image for this series as a visual tip that they go together.