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And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and full of truth.
– John 1:14

I have drawn out Terra Nova’s system of living out the gospel from John 1:14. If the body of Christ is to live out the mission of Christ, it must be the things that John represents—present, full of truth, and full of grace. We have created three zones out of which that happens: Justice, Culture, and Mercy.

Mercy

Everyone needs help at some time, whether from self-inflicted wounds, societal ills, or family sins. To be present to give that aid is to administer mercy and grace. In this way, we try to reflect Jesus’ presence, being full of grace, and we try to reflect what the prophets commanded, that we are to do justice and to love mercy.

Be Particular

Again, we believe that being narrow and deep is important. In a world where, as Bob Dylan said, “There’s so much oppression can’t keep track of it no more,” we must choose something and commit time and resources to being Christ in its midst. People will undoubtedly try to suck you into their “cause du jour,” but being pulled in many directions will only leave you ineffective and frustrated. Being particular allows for laser-like focus on one or two issues, bringing intensity and depth that lead to real change.

Living Out Mercy

We chose homelessness as our focus for living out mercy. That has meant a holistic approach beginning with the issue of street homelessness. Working with other churches, we are developing an in-from-the-cold program utilizing inner city churches equipped with cots to house the homeless in the wintertime. We also work with the only shelter in our county, a non-Christian agency called Joseph’s House ministering consistently to the people who come through their doors. Here we can make a difference, demonstrating the love of Christ through providing food and companionship. But this is an itinerant community. Perhaps more importantly, we have developed deep relationships with the staff at Joseph’s House, revealing life in Christ to those with whom we can have an ongoing dialogue.

Joseph’s House partners with The Lansing, a sort of halfway house for some folks who are ready to move out of Joseph’s House. It differs from transitional housing in that some of its residents will always be in an assisted living situation due to mental illness or other issues. Terra Nova provides volunteer staff at the Lansing, individuals who have the gift of loving people society has thrown away, and treating them with the dignity and respect they deserve as those created in the image of God.

Lastly, Terra Nova partners with Habitat for Humanity, providing homes for those who need an extra hand extended to them. From immediate homelessness, to crisis shelter, to continuing shelter, assessment and care, to ultimately home ownership, we believe we are addressing the issue of homelessness in a deep and effective way, thereby living out the mercy of Christ.

Narrow and Deep

We as a church are trying to live out an imitation of Christ in being present, full of truth, and full of grace. I strongly encourage planters to pick issues that make sense to their congregational identity, their cultural DNA, their geographical footprint. I further encourage them to take the time to choose what they do and invest in it narrowly and deeply.

We are happy to share anything we have learned regarding city life, homelessness and human trafficking with any church pastors and planters who wish to dialogue more.

Note: For more info go to terranovachurch.org.

Pastor Dad

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Gospel Incarnation Series [Part 2 of 3]: Click | View Series

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and full of truth.
– John 1:14

I have drawn out Terra Nova’s system of living out the gospel from John 1:14. If the body of Christ is to live out the mission of Christ, it must be the things that John represents—present, full of truth, and full of grace. We have created three zones out of which that happens: Justice, Culture, and Mercy.

Justice

Truth is the building block of all law. It is the building block of all “rightness.” The binary process of declaring right from wrong only comes from God, the Great Lawmaker. When we represent justice, we are acknowledging that we as human beings violate the truth and live in “unrightness” and that we want to shine the light of rightness into a dark world.

Light in Darkness

We have chosen the issue of human trafficking, a very dark place that desperately needs Christ’s glorious light. It has been our philosophy that in the incarnational presence of culture, justice, and mercy, narrow and deep is better than wide and shallow. Our call to intervene in human trafficking has led to a partnership with Love 146.

Practically, this means for the past two years we have put together and held a festival called Abolition Week. We shared films, Derek Webb came out and performed, and speakers who have dedicated their lives to abolition were featured, including Ben Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous, and Rob Morris, founder of Love 146. The local arts center, local bands, restaurants, businesses, and radio stations partnered with us to promote, host and sponsor these events. The larger city community was invited to share in these events to raise awareness and action to combat human trafficking.

To be continued.

Death By Love

Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears tackle some of the most serious redemptive aspects of Jesus' work in these twelve letters of counsel to individuals. Find out more.

Gospel Incarnation Series [Part 1 of 3]: Click | View Series

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and full of truth.
– John 1:14

Incarnation

In one sentence, John gives us a presentation of the incarnation embedded in this chapter that is largely poetic and very different from the rest of his narrative writings. John seems to be a simple man who writes out of that simplicity, but in this paragraph, he tries to say incredibly complex and large statements about creation and the incarnation in a more poetic and theological way.

I have drawn out Terra Nova’s system of living out the gospel from John 1:14. If the body of Christ is to live out the mission of Christ, it must be the things that John represents—present, full of truth, and full of grace. We have created three zones out of which that happens: Justice, Culture, and Mercy.

Culture

Culture is that place of presence where you stand with people and are part of them. It calls for you to be exactly who you are. In my case, being a guy who published a small press and independent recording label, who used to read poetry in clubs, whose friends were all sorts of oddball, semi-urban, hermit artists, being missionally present meant opening a gallery and reaching into a quickly changing downtown area of Troy that was becoming “artified.”

Culturally Present

The Terra Nova Gallery (www.terranovachurch.org) has become a popular destination for Troy Night Out, our city’s monthly attempt to draw people out and into its restaurant, music, and art scene. In fact, we’re one of the top two galleries in the city. When our church was averaging about 200 people, we were also averaging about 200 people at the monthly gallery event, only ten percent of whom were from Terra Nova. These twenty or so individuals were and continue to be given an opportunity to be missional culturally as they not only mingle with the many visitors to our gallery, but visit, support, and get to know the greater arts community at other galleries in the city.

We have encouraged everyone to identify a place where they need to be culturally present. Culture, most simply defined as a shared set of words, cues, and artifacts that are understood without translation, differs from person to person with plenty of overlap. I have challenged every person in our community to represent Christ within their culture, because it is on that singular level that the incarnation of the gospel happens.

To be continued.

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"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." –John 1:14

Incarnation and Constancy in the Information Age

This new era can be unnerving, especially if you are a creature of habit. The constant stepping into a new palette, the continual discovery of fresh ground, the never-ending job of being a pioneer can take its toll on some. But there is something common to even the world moving at our speed today. It is a thing that anchors and gives basis and meaning in this fast-paced flow. It is the person and presence of God.

The Scriptures say before the mountains were made, God was, and that he is God from generation to generation. And that one generation comes and another goes, but God remains the same.

The formula of incarnation is not just being present. John 1:14 makes it clear that Jesus was present with a fullness of Truth and Grace. Those are unchanging attributes of God. They existed before the incarnation. It was God being present in human form that amazed the Galilean fishermen.

Temptations of the Ages

Presence alone leaves us imbalanced and with only the empty draw of the age. The Industrial Age could tempt people into pragmatism, to think that simply by creating an acceptable system, they could make something work without the presence of the Holy Spirit.

This world without artifacts—the world of constant change—can mesmerize many with dizzying daily revelation of the new. In the Information Age, the nightmare is that people, especially church leaders, could become so enamored with the novel that they could forget the Eternal and the Permanent. They could leave Christ out as they incarnate. They could move into time without Truth, excitedly entering an age without God, and bringing to flesh—incarnation—only themselves.

Sociology to Missiology

Without understanding our cultural environment, we could become self-marginalizing people, holding the truth in an odd isolated bunker, sadly outside of the cultural norm. And yet, if we become people who are obsessed with culture without the love of Christ—hip without being grounded in the Eternal, trendy without Truth—ironically we are made irrelevant by our idolatry of relevancy.

Sociology is only valuable to the church when it connects to eternal truth and becomes missiology.

To be continued.

Rain City Hymnal

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"The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn."–Alvin Toffler

A Contrast of Two Times

History has had a few moments where one concept or process would change the direction and practice of a society. At one point words were enough. Then some ambitious person assigned letters or characters to represent words, immediately changing the world forever. When that print was mass-produced, ideas were more easily preserved and distributed. The printing press and pamphleteering (the 18th-century equivalent of blogging) are attributed as key factors in such revolutionary movements as the Reformation and the American colonial uprising against Great Britain.

In the earlier part of this series, the Industrial Revolution, which produced and moved goods with new speed and standardization, was presented as a powerful force for changing the world. It was responsible for the shape of schools, suburbs, and churches as we would eventually know them.

The Dawning of a New Era

Then came the new era, the Information Age. Man was no longer to merge with and mimic a machine; he was buzzing electrically like a central nervous system. The world was immediate, relentless, and perpetually in flux. In many ways, the Information Age is characterized by concepts that are precisely the opposite of the previous era.

Industrial Revolution vs. Information Age

Key Contrary Concepts of the Ages:

• Standardized vs. Customized
• Localized vs. Borderless
• Control vs. Influence
• Hard Product vs. Evolving Versions

In the second part of this series, I will be discussing changes that are necessary and part of the learning curve for those who wish to pastor in this new world. These will include:

• How to lead in a flatter structure and restore a biblical body theology
• Discipleship as a fluid journey versus solid circuitry
• Being part of a network, moving from the record store to a peer-to-peer community
• Being present everywhere: multi-sites and hotspots
• The tension of living in the culture of constant change and being counter to it

To be continued.

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Church, Shiny and New

The great monument to the Industrial Revolution church would happen when the generation born at the end of the Industrial Revolution, the Baby Boomers, would receive power and modify the remnants of the Agrarian Church. They turned it into a full, humming, efficient church factory—a campus, a massive movement capable of producing and programming disciples on a grand and standardized scale.

No longer would the factory necessarily be bleak and uncomfortable. No longer would working conditions be dim. The mall, the centralized center of consumption, and the factory, the massive center of production, would come together in the world of the church. This was now the standardized church with the fullness of creature comforts. It was the glory of the modern world.

That megachurch would become all that many have written about. It would adopt even the model and languages of its factory and business forefathers, where the church pastor would behave like a CEO and discipleship would be like assembly lines. They created linear processes.

This is not an effort to judge or condemn the mega- or attractional church. They are faithful to their calling. They incarnate. Others may spend time criticizing how well the experiment worked. The pastors of those churches may even write books recognizing their shortcomings. I simply note the history and point out to those inclined to condemn that there is no line of North American evangelical church history without them. There are no continuations, modifications, or reactions without their presence.

Revolution, Un-Revolutionized

The world had changed. The Industrial Revolution had brought with it precision and control. There was a top-to-bottom pyramid structure that would be, by its nature, successful everywhere it could touch, where its power could be diurnally felt. It would be this very strength that would be its undoing, as the world became electronic and limitless, and to have influence meant never even having to touch when things became high-tech.

That change would be a great shift, and just as the Industrial Revolution made those who were separated from their Agrarian forefathers very different, it was even more so with those who were born on the other side of the Information Age. They found a brave and new world, and with it new ways of incarnating church. These ways would ultimately invert the previous ways. Control would no longer be the virtue, but would become the very anchor that would not allow progress.

If the Industrial Revolution was about standardization, localization, and control, the Information Age was about to demand the exact opposite, and the church would need to understand how it would shift accordingly.

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In the 18th Century, the Presbyterian, Congregational, and Anglican Churches were the predominant Christian movements in America. By the end of the Industrial Revolution, two small and nearly unheard of groups, the Baptists and the Methodists, would dominate the scene. This new time called for fast expansion, movement as quick as the railroad, and methods that were pragmatic structures. As the Industrial Age threw the rate of change into high gear and pioneering lands were formed, those groups who incarnated to the change won the day.

Church Factory

On the denominational level the church practiced what companies and factories knew as a "brand." Denominations were marked by consistency. It was likely that someone who went to first denomination church of Hartford could walk in to Central Denominational Church of Chicago and expect, likely, the same pieces. This varied only slightly from denomination to denomination.

This standardization had existed before the Industrial Revolution, but it became clearer, easier, and more systematized. Manuals and seminary training allowed for near identical replication. That replication included minutia, belief, liturgy, and ecclesiology. It allowed churches to be identical, training to produce for those denominations individuals who were expected to know what others knew in that denomination.

The Suburban Church

The great societal shift during the Industrial Revolution would continue. The Agrarian world would become a wasteland. People would leave it in droves to hover around the new center of sustenance—the factory. They would get there in the symbol of the age—the automobile. And they would live in the most standardized communities that we had ever known—the suburbs. The church would find its place there and, just as in the Industrial Age, would hit its stride between the 1940s and 1960s.

The church, like other institutions, but arguably more so, always drives from the rearview mirror. It is always somewhat reactionary, always somewhat imitative when it comes to culture. I have often joked that being called a futurist in the church was very easy—just look at what was happening ten years ago and figure out how the church would do it.

To be continued.

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In The Flesh

The future of the Industrial Revolution, fueled by assembly lines, combustion engines, and steel, was one side of the spectrum that called for the church to incarnate. It did what it has always done: it brought eternal truth to time.

The Incarnation of Christ, best described in John 1:14, is that the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, and was full of truth and grace. God's perfect grace and unfailing and permanent truth never changed. These were both present before the Incarnation, and were true and understandable through the Incarnation. What changed was that he tabernacled among us.

We now understood Jesus to be the image, or in Greek the icon, of God. Just as on a computer we have an icon that, when opened or exposed, reveals lines of code that produce for us all the information stored within that icon, so now this was with Jesus of Nazareth. In him dwelt all the fullness that God had bottled. Jesus tabernacled in culture. He normatively existed within the words, cues, and artifacts exchanged by Palestinian people of his day. He was a carpenter and was understood as such. He was a Jew, and this was recognized mutually by Jews and Gentiles alike. He was native. He was organic. He was incarnate.

Incarnation in Culture

For Jesus to come as anything else would be like watching a badly synchronized film. His words wouldn't have matched. He wouldn't have been understood. He didn't wear a business suit, nor did he speak Chinese. He was Palestinian, speaking the language.

The church, the body of Christ, has learned that to incarnate it must bring the words, cues, and artifacts of its culture to the purpose of living, communicating, and extending the gospel. The gospel infiltrates culture and, as a result, culture now has a purpose. Some points of culture—those that are overtly contrary to the law of God—are modified or disappear when the gospel comes. For the most part, the morally neutral pieces of culture remain.

The Church Incarnate

One could argue whether or not the Industrial Revolution was morally neutral, but the point is moot. It came and went and was accepted. The church understood and, like the school and the factory, it incarnated. The church began to exercise control. It was a control that led to a great deal of continued split and division within the North American church. Part of the division was based on gaps. Those who had ruled in the first wave, the Agrarian Era, did not always understand the age to come.

To be continued.

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Reproducible Culture

Control was king. It was the valued currency of the period known as the Industrial Revolution. The value of that revolution was identical production. If you could create the system and reproduce the movements, then you could assemble each time-and-again without variation of product. The great emblem of this was the factory. On the assembly line men stood repeating, like gears, identical motions. Each time, if the system worked, at the end of the line came a finished product exactly like the one before and after. If the factory was the place where this happened, then the automobile was the everyday icon of the age.

The Industrial Revolution brought about a time of great economic growth and change. It was what futurist Alvin Toffler would call "The Second Wave." The first was the Agrarian Era. It was localized, offered little change, and was reproduced organically. It was tied to the earth and the seasons of the farming cycle. Man was closely related to a patch of land and slow repeating rhythmic cycles that would produce sustenance.

Factory-Made World

The Industrial Age allowed a level of control that would shift this balance. Mass production would remove the organic connections, the small tribal units, and the homesteading family. It would create, instead, a homogenization. The unintended byproduct (and with technological changes there always are unintended byproducts) would be the creation of a homogenized society. The success of the factory would drive others to imitate it.

The school system became, and sadly still exists as, an arcane tribute to the factory. Students would sit in rows of identical seats. Lunch bells, like work whistles, would ring. The students would exit the school room, much like a factory floor, and reassemble on another part of the factory assembly line, whether it be mathematics or history. The new foreman was the teacher, who would teach every student the exact same data in the exact same way.

The Rate of Change

Sociology is important as it points to the church. The church has always existed within a culture. When I use the term culture, I am referring to a set of words, cues, and artifacts that are understood by a group without need for translation. They are automatic; they are the fabric of communication and life.

Culture moves along and is impacted by a rate of change. That rate of change is how quickly we move ideas, goods, and people. As these ideas, goods, and people are moved, cultures—words, cues, and artifacts—are shared and translated. They morph and change and form new invariant cultures.

The rate at which the world changed was fairly stable from the time of creation through the Agrarian Age. The speed at which horses dragged chariots and carts made little difference between biblical times and the founding of the American colony. Sails on ships became more massive and the ships larger, but the speed of sea travel stayed relatively constant. The Industrial Revolution would radically change this, creating a large chasm.

The movement of information and ideas would now be forced by steel and pumping pistons, explosions happening at a molecular level, and the instant bangs would move people across continents and move mankind ever faster to what it would know as the future.

To be continued.

Vintage Church:

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The Backstory

"I know it's only sociology but I like it, like it, yes I do."

Conversations from our past often reenter the present on their own terms. Once easily forgotten, they can come back and be received again as surprisingly valuable. For me, this happened in the fall of 2004 at a training event for church planters in Albany, N.Y.

It was a joint training session involving a new church planting movement called Acts 29. I had met its founder, a young pastor from Seattle, two years prior at Spanish River Presbyterian Church in Boca Raton, Fl. He seemed jaded at an early age, leaning arrogantly on his stool with an almost venomous look in his eye. I desperately wanted to dismiss him, but everything he said intrigued me and seemed right, intelligent, and well-considered.

At that conference, I had a conversation with Mark, one that seemed no different than most of my conversations at the time. My mind was stuck on ideas about how the world was changing—had changed—and what impact it would have upon the church. It was a conversation I may well have forgotten had I not been sitting recently at an Acts 29 Boot Camp in Raleigh, N.C.

Control Versus Influence

Mark was closing the session, and it was an engaging piece on the nature of movements. In the midst of his talk, he mentioned the concept of control versus influence, and my ears perked up. That is exactly what we had been talking about a half decade ago in Albany. And then, in a gesture of humble attribution, he said he had gotten that nugget from me. I recalled the conversation, but I never would have guessed it would have stayed with Mark all these years.

Those ideas have now been developed much more deeply. The external dialogue of understanding has progressed and, thanks to a challenge by Mark that day in 2004, has become part of a church community called Terra Nova in Troy, N.Y. You see, at the end of the boot camp Mark's final words to me were that he enjoyed what I said and thought I was intelligent, but that he wouldn't listen because I was not planting a church. I felt a mix of confusion and anger, but finally it was a piece of confirmation. It was time no longer to talk about ideas but to see if these ideas meant anything to people.

Sociological Gaps Deconstructed

These articles will concentrate on two eras of time, their sociological and cultural symptoms, and what impact they have on the way we view society. They are the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age. Though these two eras remain connected, and one did not become extinct at the presence of the other, there still exists a massive chasm between them.

We have lived through one of these eras, which is best described as a great shifting in the tectonic plates of time. People who lived on one side cannot always fully understand those who lived on the other, so immediate is the change in such a vast space. That is why one of my sociological heroes, a Canadian philosopher named Marshall McLuhan, coined the term "Generation Gap." To be born on one side of this gap meant you would not understand or be understood by someone born on the other. That generation referred, of course, to the Baby Boomers.

To be continued.

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