Against the background of plural worldviews and competing interests, the church event is assuming an increased profile in the struggle to maintain Christian identity, a bolstered status as the marker of what it means to be Christian. In the face of a secular culture, church events become sharply focussed as a way to remind ourselves who we are. Churches pour huge amounts of energy into the music, preaching, environment and promotion for church events. Compare this to the time of Christendom, when most went to church on Sunday and Australia was a “Christian nation”. The church event had less focus and less energy, because it was not the only reminder of Christian identity.

In Christendom, the church and its purpose was affirmed by other cultural markers of Christianity, such as public prayers, significant media comment by church officials, no Sunday trading, honouring of Christian holy days.

Now, the range of cultural markers of Christian identity has reduced. So, the church event has acquired increased importance. But should it be this way? What are the alternatives to spending huge amounts of time, energy and money on an event that still requires people to come to us? I still think the church event is crucial as a public opportunity for people to encounter God through the community of Jesus, but we need to spread our resources around. There are other expressions of church that need our attention.

After having these thoughts, and I tend to have them frequently (not sure what that says about my state of mind!), I tell myself: “Dave, stop thinking that. We’re not in competition. We’re all in the same game.” Christian leaders often say the same thing: “We are not in competition”. When a new church starts up down  the road, or a ministry begins that needs the same sorts of leaders as you do…”We are not in competition”.

Let’s take a look at this aversion to competition, or the aversion to publicly admitting it. For this blog, I’m not examining the role of competition in business, sport etc, but between Christians groups.

Ostensibly, we don’t want to compete because we believe we are part of the “one body” of Jesus Christ. That’s true in an abstract sense. All people following Jesus are working towards revealing the Reign of God in all dimensions of life. However, this is not true in a practical sense – we are not working in one big church or mission organisation. There isn’t one “Jesus Church” to which all of us are members. There isn’t one big mission agency. Instead, there are thousands of groups, denominations, agencies etc, all trying to do the same thing in different ways. I think this is basically a good thing, because it allows variety of expression.

However, often these different bodies are quite similar: they have similar objectives, try to connect with a similar demographic, and need similar types of leaders. This is not a problem for anyone until these groups find themselves in the same ‘territory’, whether that be a university, neighbourhood, city  or ‘media space’. When this happens, competition can’t help but occur. It doesn’t usually occur on the level of the people they are trying to reach; there’s more than enough people to go around. But it happens more on the level of money and people. Money to resource their activities, and people to be contributors to making a Christian ministry or mission happen.

Up to now, I’ve been describing the situation, but the question is – Is Christian competition bad? Regular readers of this blog will know that I am going to give some thoughts on both sides of the question.

Christian competition is bad
On the ‘Yes’ side, Henri Nouwen certainly thought competition was in (umm) competition with the values of the Kingdom. He reveals:

I am constantly surprised at how I keep taking the gifts God has given me– my health, my intellectual and emotional gifts– and keep using them to impress people, receive affirmation and praise, and compete for rewards. (The Return of the Prodigal Son)

Christians in competition communicate that even when groups are on about the same thing, they can’t work together, a disappointing advertisement for the command to ‘love one another’. It’s a drain on the resources of time, energy and money of Christian groups. They all need to spend themselves in self-promotion in order to show their distinctiveness amongst the others, and self-promotion is poison to the good news. Smaller groups, who need to continue their valuable ministry, end up folding while the strong, populated and wealthy groups cannibalise the rest. Competition simply reflects the values of the success-oriented culture we find ourselves in.

Christian competition is good
On the ‘No’ side, arguing for competition as a necessary dimension of our existence:

[T]he Bible describes human beings making choices to stand against natural limitations of any kind when these are the result of the Fall, of sin, or of a broken world. Competition is necessary in order to struggle for that balance required to live …We compete in order to fulfill our purpose as human beings and live. (Udo Middelmann)

The benefits of competition are well-argued by economists, and I think some of them apply to Christian groups as well. There are often Christian groups and churches in which there is little spark left. Christ is with them as ‘two or three gathered together’, but as an organised group it is time for them to disband. A little competition from other groups can be persuasive. Competition also helps us clarify what our special ‘charism’ or gift is. Rubbing up against other groups refines what we are trying to do, and motivates us to improve what we do.

A Way Forward
In Perspectives on Competition – Christian & Otherwise, Dr. Sharon G. Johnson and Dr. Galen Smith give 4 approaches to Christian competition, in which they frame the question in terms of Christ’s relationship to competition:

1. CHRIST RESISTS COMPETITION: In this approach, competition is seen as antithetical to Christianity. It deserves no place in the individual or communal endeavours of Christians. It is a symptom and sign of evil in our world.

2. CHRIST AND COMPETITION IN PARTNERSHIP: In this approach, competition is an aid to the work of Christ in the world, and Christians should be involved in it. God is a competitive God!

3. CHRIST REFORMS COMPETITION: competition is seen as a qualified good, that Christians should be involved in, but need to challenge at some points. It is given by God, but in a fallen world is in need of redemption.

4. CHRIST AND COMPETITION IN PARADOX: this approach holds an uneasy tension with competition, recognising that the Bible warns against competitiveness, but also recognising that Christians are often in situations of competition that may contribute to the Reign of God.

My preference, when thinking about competition between Christian groups for resources (time, energy, money), is for the 4th approach. Competition exists, it can be good and it can be bad, it’s consequences can be good and bad, at times it seems to reveal God’s character, at times it seems to obscure it.

Your preference?

Here are some of the “enemies of renewal” that he identified:

1. Entertainment: “give them (young people) a god who can be the object of their unreconstructed emotions, and distract them endlessly from being left naked before God”. Ouch

2. Problem solving: beware problem solving as ‘plugging gaps’. “We are in a danger of putting an end to that lifelong task of listening and absorbing that is involved in growing into the space Christ has opened for us”

3. “Trying to fit God around the edges of your identity, rather than allowing God to shape us from within”

Great stuff. He is one of the pioneers in attempting to integrate inherited church with emerging/missional church. Luckily, the Bishop in my diocese has a similar mindset (Andrew Curnow).

]]> http://davefagg.com.au/2010/07/rowan-williams-on-fresh-expressions/feed/ 0 http://davefagg.com.au/2010/07/807/ http://davefagg.com.au/2010/07/807/#comments Fri, 02 Jul 2010 02:04:09 +0000 Dave Fagg http://davefagg.com.au/?p=807 This an extract from my regular newsletter for supporters of Seeds Bendigo:

Friends, I’m finding it difficult to write you this letter at the moment. I’m finding it difficult to put into words what is going on in Long Gully, both for me and the community around me. This is not because anything particularly negative is happening, but because it’s increasingly clear that the work of ‘being neighbours’ is a mysterious one.

I’ve been catching myself saying “It depends….” a lot. Why?

I love models, and patterns; finding common things across different places is very satisfying to me. However, much as I would love to have a formula that can be ‘multiplied’ in other places, I often find that so much of what we do is very specific to our place, and the people in that place. Is it good or bad to have lots of programs? Depends on the people and the place. Should we have a paid role in the community we are serving? Depends. Should church services be held in ‘church buildings’ or somewhere else? It depends. Is it better to stay in one place for decades, or move on quickly? It depends.

To give a specific example, we don’t tend to have a lot of our neighbours over to our place. It’s not for want of inviting; it just doesn’t seem to be something they feel comfortable with. A while ago, this would have created quite a bit of anxiety for me, because home-based hospitality was the crucial in my early years of mission. But I now realize, this depends on the character of the people and place.

Why all this ambiguity? I think it is due to 3 factors: place, people & time. All of these work together to alter the way we live out our faith. When we look at Jesus in the Gospels, and at Paul and the early church, the way they did things altered according to circumstance. Jesus called some to follow, others to stay; Paul travelled constantly while others stayed put.

So what stays the same across time, space and personality, and therefore what we need to get right, is not models or patterns or formulas, but character. Both working on our character, and also being shaped by the character of God, the colour of which is most clearly shown in Jesus and the fruits of the Spirit.

His main point, I think, sheds light on a key tension within my own movement, which in the fashion of Wendell Berry, I will call the Movement for biblically-based Christ-centred Spirit-empowered evangelism + justice-making + church-planting + community-growing + disciple-forming + godly child-rearing  + creation-caring + music-making + other good stuff which we haven’t thought of yet, which tends to exist on the fringes of inherited church structures.

Why doth it shed such light? Aly He points out that conservatism has an ‘organic’ approach to change. He doesn’t mean home-grown food. He means that change is tied to what has gone before, it ‘grows’ out of the past, as a plant grows from its roots:

…human society is organic. It is something that has evolved slowly and naturally, incorporating the wisdom of generations and gradually leaving behind those things that have proven themselves to be folly

Conservatism has no place for complete breaks with the past in order to forge a new and bright future, and when you put it like that, you can see why it has it’s roots in the French Revolution, which certainly tried to erase the past in order to blaze a new and more excellent future, mostly by killing its opponents.

What has this got to do with the above-mentioned movement? There is a tension in this movement, and therefore within myself, between wanting change to happen slowly, in continuity with the past and at the same time calling for massive reconstruction of the whole of our culture according to the radical vision of Jesus Christ. I want to move with the slowest person in the community, but I want the war to stop now. I want to value the past, the traditions, the hand that has fed me, but woe betide the church structure that stands in the the way of the prophetic voice of Jesus through the ages.  Waleed Aly would call these two approaches to change ‘conservatism’ and ‘revolutionary’.

Both of these approaches to change are needed in our movement. There are times when decisive, sudden and un-usual (that dash is intentional) change is needed, and times when slow, organic change is needed. I would also say that these approaches to change depend on each other. Revolutionary change will struggle to last, if happen at all, if the slow and incremental and organic changes have not been taking place. And organic approaches to faith will simply wither and choke on their own reverence for the present and past without the tectonic slide of revolutionary change.

(The image to the right is called “The Foreign Tree”. According to the site I got it from: These painted engravings ridicule the unrest wrought by French revolutionaries by contrasting French subversion with British stability. The “British Liberty Tree” (depicted in the preceding image) is assigned to the mock Latin genus of “Stabilissimus,” while the more sickly looking “Foreign Tree” in this image is put in the genus “Subitarius.” Notice in the background of the latter, a guillotine, symbol of all that is wrong with France.)

Interestingly, quite a few people said they didn’t want to give regularly, but that if Seeds Bendigo had a particular need, they would consider it – and they told me to put it on my website…so, you asked for it! A list of the things you could give ($$ and otherwise) to the work of Seeds!

• $500 for fruit trees for the Hope…It Grows! garden
• $500 to install a desk to accommodate the extra people working at St Matthew’s
• $200 for pavers for paths
• a pergola!
• $800 for a sculpture in grounds of St Matthew’s
• a crane to dispose of an old shed
• a 3 x 3m workshed

There’s a start! Feel free to contribute some or all of these costs. You can donate at http://www.givenow.com.au/saltbushinc or by emailing me at davefagg@optusnet.com.au

Missionaries need to talk over people. Regularly. Frequently. With godly vigour and fervour. I’ve been through some soul-searching over this one, people, but the kingdom of God requires rudeness beyond measure, inconsideration like we have never dreamed of. Yes, we need to start interrupting monologues with witty comments and jokes. Brothers and sisters, divert the flow of verbal sewerage into the decontamination plant of conversational purity with well-placed questions. Ah yes, even questions that have nothing to do with the conversation whatsoever. Place a gag in those overworked gums of that child of God, fill that space where they drew breath with a barrage of your own trivial stories…

Well, maybe I got a bit sweaty about that one, a little extreme. So, in the interests of paradoxical truth, let me know speak of the opposite. Keeping my trap shut is a lovely phrase, which I’ve never thought about until now. ‘Trap’ being my mouth….now that’s an intriguing metaphor. What does my mouth entrap exactly? Most of the time, myself. Little wonder that short passage in James has become so famous.

Yet, I feel strangely unmotivated writing about shutting up and letting someone else talk. ‘Being a good listener’ has become such a part of “good” Christian identity that I am loathe to add to the mass, or morass, of verbosity about why we should listen and how we should listen and that listening to people’s stories will change the world. It’s all so…polite, which is probably why I vented my spleen previously.

But, I will manfully try to justify why keeping your trap shut is a missionary virtue:

• I don’t often have anything useful to say: in mission, you will often befriend people who are in pain. They may be isolated, unemployed, ill, mentally unwell, oppressed, abused, dirt poor; often simultaneously.  I haven’t experienced this kind of enduring multiplicity of pain, my daily experience of hardship being lack of chocolate. Talking much in the face of this pain is harmful; the best we can do is make sure they know we’re listening

• When I do have something useful to say, it doesn’t need many words: in graced moments, the right thing worms it way through thickets of useless platitudes. Our words and the situation of the person happily congeal. When this happens, stop. Keep your trap shut. Say your bit and don’t wreck it by (my personal downfall) repeating the same truth in 3 other ways.

Well, that’s about all I can think of at the moment.

Which is why it pains me to say that, yes, missionaries need to talk over people. Regularly. Frequently. With godly vigour and fervour. I’ve been through some soul-searching over this one, people, but the kingdom of God requires rudeness beyond measure, inconsideration like we have never dreamed of. Yes, we need to start interrupting monologues with witty comments and jokes. Brothers and sisters, divert the flow of verbal sewerage into the decontamination plant of conversational purity with well-placed questions. Ah yes, even questions that have nothing to do with the conversation whatsoever. Place a gag in those overworked gums of that child of God, fill that space where they drew breath with a barrage of your own trivial stories…

Having got that mini-sermon out of my system, let me continue. In my neighbourhood, there are many people who cannot stop talking. It seems that once verbal momentum is gained, attempting silence is akin to inhaling while underwater. Some people are just glad to talk to someone who will listen, others have axes to grind, others are nervous, others have stories they wish to repeat now and forever, others want to dominate the situation or haven’t had attention like this in too long. All these are perfectly rational reasons for talking continuously.

So how am I to respond? Being in a neighbourhood where crowded houses, arguments and noise abound, my middle-class nicety of waiting for people to finish talking is a disability. I have to interrupt, I have to verbally counterpunch. If I don’t, I will have a ministry of nods and mmms. There are valid reason for talking over people:

• to get the conversation on an open track, because nonstop talking is often a defensive manoeuvre to keep the other person at arm’s length
• to teach dialogue, not only conversational but intellectual
• to enable the other person to see me as someone having a valuable contribution to their life, not so that my needs can be fulfilled, but that they can look to others for enrichment

nb. To be followed by a post entitled “The Missionary Virtue of Keeping Your Trap Shut”

I visited Greg recently to invite him to lunch at 12pm. He asked me what the time was, as he had no clock and the one on his DVD player was wrong – he had no clock. Middle-class time is so important that I was momentarily gobsmacked by this small but significant clash of cultures – it meant that Greg would always struggle to turn up to anything on time. Think about the implications for relationships, health and employment.

In the Seeds community here, we are all middle-class. Our experience has been smudged in places by the same factors that affect our neighbours, but not in combination and not for long. Though we are trying to be in solidarity with the poor, our class loyalty is still to the middle-class, which distracts us in many and specific ways from our stated desire to be amongst the poor. I say this bluntly because unless I swallow this bitter pill, this dynamic will corrupt and deflate many of my efforts to love my neighbour.

‘Class’ and ‘Culture’ are abstract terms, but they jump out when we uncover some fairly ordinary items. How does our middle-class loyalty manifest itself?:

1. Spending time with the middle-class: we know the codes of middle-class relationships (when to speak, what to say, what not to say, how often to swear etc) but we don’t know how to spend time with those who live in generational poverty. Do watch the TV that’s always on? Is laughing at crude jokes OK? Should we ask personal questions? Because we have meetings to be at and people to see, we middle-class people have a sense of time which is cut up into segments for apportioning. Sitting for an hour on someone’s dirty lounge while watching wrestling seems like a waste of time.

2. Refusing the food of the poor: food is crucial to mission, as Jesus the glutton and drunkard attests. It connotes hospitality, connection and welcome. Even in our culture, refusing to eat someone’s food is extremely rude. People often offer me a beer or a Beam and coke can at their house, but this year I’m not drinking alcohol. The issue of accepting alcohol has nothing to do with ‘getting down to their level’ (what a hypocritical phrase of misplaced superiority) but of accepting the hospitality of those who we serve. We want to extend hospitality to them, but not the other way around…well, maybe it would be OK if they would only offer nice food. In my area, people generally eat unhealthily, and their children do too. This is a sensitive issue for middle-class  parents, who understandably don’t want their children eating sugary and fatty foods. Is the price of mission paying for dental work?! I don’t have children, so I’ll leave someone else to give a definitive answer.

These are just 2 examples – others are entertainment, physicality, sex, clothing etc

I don’t raise the issue of class because I want us to forget our family and friends, but to remind myself that cross-class solidarity is so difficult as to require regular self-scrutiny. Our middle-class upbringing is not evil, but has instilled norms of purity which seem as natural as the sun rising. Our desire to serve Jesus in the poor can’t be sacrificed for our middle-class sensibilities.

I’m nowhere near working all this out, but one initial thought is: perhaps we need to be a distinctive community that is consistent with Jesus, but endeavouring to be ‘not inconsistent’ (whenever we can) with the norms of the multiple subcultures we are faced with, while at strategic points being deliberately ‘of’ that culture or neighbourhood, and at other points being critical and standing against it. Our practice of incarnation needs to go beyond following the ‘pattern of Jesus’ so that a desired outcome will occur, and into “place-sharing” (Andrew Root) that hopes for transformation but is not beholden to it.