Tod Bolsinger

How Twitter is Transforming the Church: A Shout Out to #NextChurch #PCUSA

Doug Pagitt calls it the “Inventive Age”.  Rex Miller refers to it as the “Digital Age”.  Thomas Friedman calls it a “flat” world.  Our Mid-Council Commission uses the language from “adaptive change” theory and calls it ‘giving the work back to the people”…err…pew.

Whatever it’s called, it’s happening. I encountered it last year at the Next Conference in Indianapolis.  Perhaps the most important conversation about the future of the church was not happening on the platform but literally in the pews.  It was not the conversation that was being broadcast through the microphones, but was being engaged through the twitter feeds.  It was the conversation of the “Next Church” that was already happening. One famously said, “The Next Church looks a lot like the Last Church”.  And by all accounts, the platform and voices this year at Next is very different.

The same thing happened at the Fellowship Gathering in Orlando.   But this time, it wasn’t a tweet, but a text.  A pastor who was in the “under 45” gathering sent me messages while I was across the state speaking for another gathering.  He told me that the energy amongst the younger leaders was NOT primarily about changing ordination standards, but about whether the PC(USA) was too stuck in its old forms to really change.

Across the theological divide there is a growing generational consensus.  An ‘emerging generation’ wants a different conversation and even more than that, they want the opportunity to actually try something different.

Our Mid Council Commission Report suggests a flattened hierarchy and a season of reflective experimentation.  It seeks to create the conditions for exploring the ‘adjacent possible’ (a term I first learned at NEXT last year) and re-engaging the pew to the presbytery.  It mostly seeks to give the ‘emergent generation’ room to create the kinds of ecclesiastical structures that will serve the emerging forms of church that we need in a changing world. 

An brief excerpt from our report:

At the heart of adaptive change is the requirement to “give work back to the people most affected.” We believe that the constitutional changes we propose are an expression of the conviction that health and vitality, faithfulness and fidelity will only come about through more congregational engagement, more personal responsibility-taking, more passionate convictions, more freedom and creativity within safe, clear shared boundaries than ever before.  We must have structures that encourage adaptation toward health and faithfulness, toward those who are willing to keep maturing, who are motivated to take on the mantle of calling and personal responsibility by continually re-engaging and re-committing to each other, and who are from start to finish utterly committed to the missional principle of the local congregation as the primary locus for participating in the mission of Jesus Christ in every context.

This week, John Vest is at NEXT looking for conversations.  Next month I’ll be leading up one at the Fellowship Gathering on the West Coast.  Our Commission members are eager to go anywhere, speak to anyone, start a conversation and stimulate a new one.  We believe that our report is a conversation starter, and if adopted, could create a wildly wonderful season of creativity and collaboration, of missional experiments and worshipping communities, of neighborhoods and ‘networks’. 

And it all started with a tweet.

The Mid Council Report: It's about Healthy, Vital, Missional Congregations #PCUSA

Congregations.  healthy. vital. missional. congregations. 

Not congregationalism, but congregations in 'covenant communities' seeking together to discern the connectionalism that will enable them to thrive and further the reign of God in the local context.

Here is a word-picture of our guiding principles.

The whole report can be found here. 

More to come.  Much more.  We are very hopeful that a good conversation that could transform an entire denomination is just beginning.  Please come join us. 

 

Mid Council Report is now posted #PCUSA: The Guiding Principles

Our final report is now posted. John Vest and I will be blogging about it over the next few weeks trying to keep a good conversation going. The report is lengthy, but there is a 15 page executive summary within a 43 page section that lays out our argument for a "season of reflective experimentation" to bring genuine adaptive change to the denomination for the sake of missional congregations. In addition, there are full reports on the data we collected, the best models we discovered and the work of a racial ethnic task force. We hope this will encourage lots of good creative conversation.

http://oga.pcusa.org/media/uploads/oga/pdf/mgb_commission/mcc_final_report.pdf

To begin the discussion, it seems best to lay our cards on the table.  After a long season of listening to the church, when we moved to the 'experimenting' and 'discerning' phases, we developed this set of Guiding Principles.

• We live in a post-Christendom context that calls for continual re-consideration of our mission, our structures and our practices in order to be faithful to Christ and fruitful participants in God’s mission to the world.[i]  This reality is now undeniable.  We live in a new day, a new epoch.  It is as significant as it was for the Reformed tradition to be transported from Europe to America, and it requires no less a reconsideration and reformulation of our way of being the church.  And if we do not do so, the will eventually die.
• The missional congregation in a healthy, faithful covenant community is the center of the mission and faithful life of discipleship of Jesus Christ. Congregations are the “basic but insufficient” form of God’s mission in the world.  (G.10101) The Congregation is the basic form of mission, but for congregations to be faithful to their mission also requires them to be in covenant relationships with other congregations for shared authority, accountability, edification and missional support.
• Councils exist to serve the mission of the congregations in their local context.  In the words, of Louis Weeks, president emeritus of Union Theological Seminary, “The highest council in the church is really the Session. The rest of the governing bodies serve the Session.”  Presbyteries are “covenant communities of missional congregations”[ii] and the center of our corporate life, governance and mission together connecting congregations to each other and the larger witness of the Church.  It is a “collegial bishop” charged with preparing and ordering the ministry of teaching elders, it is a covenant community of missional congregations, it is the “balcony” that offers a broader perspective to congregational leaders so that they might serve wisely and well in their specific contexts.
• This report and our recommendations are committed to refocusing the mid council structure on one goal: serving fruitful and faithful missional congregations. To that end, our structures, especially our mid council structures, must engage and serve the mission of God in the world through missional congregations and partnerships, not our institutional or denominational concerns.
• There is no “one size fits all model”. Ecclesial structure follows missional function and is always marked by a commitment to being covenantal and contextual. The best ecclesiastical structures are discerned by those who live in it together.  They will be contained within the frame of our shared constitutional life, but those structural changes should ordinarily come from the local context, not the “national office”. The new Form of Government and the passage of Amendment 10A indicate a shift of authority to the local contexts for discerning the shape of a mission and we want to affirm and build upon that shift.
• Our structures must serve and support healthy, shared, spiritual and collaborative leadership between ruling and teaching elders.
   
• This report continues, builds upon and lives into the decisions made by the church to accept a new Form of Government and place the discernment of fitness for ordination on local churches and presbyteries.  Our proposal is a next step in a trajectory that we believe will result in further collaborative creativity by the whole church in every context.
  
• We envision a “big canvas with a clear frame”.  While remaining securely within the “Foundations” of our theological and governance tradition, we call the church to create the conditions to energize collaborative creativity, missional innovation and relational accountability with permission for many different models of middle councils to emerge that will foster the vitality and fruitfulness of missional congregations. 

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[i] Guder, “The Presbytery as Missional Context”, p.3 “Perhaps the most pervasive and powerful reduction made in the course of the western church’s gradual establishment, as it became more dominant in its social and political context, and as the assumption took hold that everyone born and reared in this territories was Christian, was the fact that the essential character of mission in the biblical sense gradually faded away.  Mission is not needed if everyone is already a Christian!...The contemporary exploration of the church’s essentially missional vocation challenges unquestioned attitudes formed over centuries that the church is to be defined more in terms of its maintenance than its mission.  What is meant is, of course, the concern for the maintenance of the church as an institution.  That concern turns the church inward, centers its attention upon itself and its members, upon its survival and their religious needs.  The institutional inwardness of western church contradicts the clearly missional calling of the church in the New Testament defined by Jesus on the Mount of the Ascension: ‘You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8).  Thus, Newbigin’s question can be paraphrased: How does the church truly regain its understanding of itself as called and sent, remembering that the term mission means, in fact, “sending” (see John 20:21)?  How does the church move beyond the idea that Christian identity is basically a geographical or cultural or organizational concept? (emphasis ours).

[ii] This definition is from Darrell Guder, “The Presbytery as Missional Context”.