Nixon Multi

The Chemistry of Church Diversity
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8298-2048-5
Verlag: Pilgrim Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

The increasing demographic divide between the people in our churches and those in our surrounding communities should signal to us that in most congregations, business as usual is not a reasonable way forward. Ours is a profoundly multi world that requires intentionally multi churches with the capacity to connect across diverse groups of people and worldviews. From the author of 'I Refuse to Lead a Dying Church,' 'Multi' is an encouraging and practical resource to equip churches for transformative relationships and multivalent ministry.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nixon, Paul

Leseproben

PREFACE

Our Journey into the Century of Multi

In the final year of the final decade of the last millennium, my church was busy getting ready to launch our second campus. Not everyone at Gulf Breeze United Methodist Church was happy about this. The very idea that a congregation could be, geographically speaking, both here and there was a brain twister for some.

Their paradigm of church was a single, homogeneous worship community where:

familiar faces showed up in familiar places so that everyone could physically see everyone else, same time, same place, week after week;

we could watch the kids grow up and the grandparents grow old across the years, just like in a small village;

there was enough cultural sameness that we could all laugh at the same jokes on the front end of the sermon and appreciate the same music.

The fact that our church was now gathering in four worship services held at different times was unnerving. That we had recently split into two distinctive liturgical styles within the community further contributed to a sense of uneasiness. The band width of human diversity was widening at Gulf Breeze Church. It didn’t feel like a cozy church family anymore in the way a lot of folks had once experienced.

But now the proposal that we would launch a fifth service at a second location eight miles away—simultaneous with one of our existing services—this was too much. Even as people had begun to think of church in ways that transcended a single worship community gathered all together in one time and place, they had shifted to another assumption: that a parish is defined by a single facility, one church house in which many different activities can occur.

The second campus launched quite well (except for a problem on opening day when the toilets did not flush). We gathered hundreds of new persons from the get-go, about half of whom were either new to organized church or returning after a long time-out. There were beautiful stories—so many stories of lives blessed and transformed. Most of the contrarians shrugged off the paradigm-disconnect and joined in celebration that God was working so powerfully in our community.

Several years later, just as they were getting used to life in a church that met in two places, we began plans to add a third worship location and to shift from a single pastor model to three co-pastors. Three campuses turned out to be harder than two, with the necessary internal shifts and the expanding human diversity. It all seemed sheer madness to twentieth-century church sensibilities. It was something that could not possibly work. And yet, so long as the pastors stayed on the same page, it worked quite well.4

We had entered the “century of multi.” And though we were fixated on the novelty of church in multiple locations, we were stumbling into something bigger than our church’s relationship to noncontiguous real estate—something far bigger! The real revolution was our significant increase in the scope of human diversity that God was holding together in one multisite congregation.

All over North America, we are witnessing a revolutionary shift in what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the most segregated hour in Christian America,”5 as more faith communities blend cultural tribes and lifestyle groups into a common life. This multi movement promises to powerfully shape twenty-first-century Christianity, in which the multisite phenomenon will be simply a footnote in a larger movement of God. We are witnessing a twenty-first-century iteration of Pentecost: the rise of the multi church.

At the time that we opened our Community Life Center, in 1999, there were around a hundred multisite churches in existence across America, most of those nondenominational. Two decades later, there are thousands of such congregations, and they come in all sizes and denominational traditions. It did not take long for entrepreneurial church leaders to discover the wisdom of doing ministry in multiple places as one church. In fact, it is now the most dependable way to plant a Christian community presence in a new location or in a location where an earlier faith community has run out of steam. What seemed crazy twenty years ago has become quite common.

During 2009–11, Christie Latona and I studied churches in North America and Asia that were thriving in their initiatives to start new things for new people. The results of this study led to the Readiness 360 Project,6 by which we sought to measure essential aspects of a church’s culture that are highly relevant to its ability to do multiministry. (We were also trying to figure out why some mother churches eat their young!) We identified four key areas of local church culture relevant to multiplication and diversification of ministry, in addition to pastoral leadership. They are (1) intensity of spiritual practice and experience, (2) relational health within the congregation and between the church and its neighbors, (3) alignment with the church’s mission, and (4) cross-cultural capacities.7 This fourth item came a bit as a surprise, especially since we saw so many multisite churches following a franchise formula for each new place they opened. We discovered that while they may standardize certain aspects of their operation, they typically are also willing to dance with the idiosyncrasies of each local culture—to contextualize the gospel. This dance gives such churches a can-do flexibility that is lacking in many established congregations.

Most churches will choose to keep their main operations on one piece of property—and yet in this century of multi, they will still be challenged to a deep rethink as we move beyond assumed norms of homogeneity in church life and in culture to a world that runs multi—in varied ways. The issues of multi are almost inescapable for us.

A multi church is a congregation committed to embracing a wider range of human diversity as a part of its vision and practice. This diversity is nurtured at every level of its life, from the leader table to the worship crowd to the ministry teams. This commitment is driven more by love for our neighbors than by a quest for institutional survival amid changing demographics—although both motivations are alive in most multi churches!

This book is an exploration of how diverse people partner together to be church.

As we think together in these pages about the capacities needed for a multi ministry, three notes of caution are in order.

First, no church lives equally into all the possibilities of multi, nor is this necessary. So, if you hit upon a section in the pages ahead that pushes you to overload, relax. Panic is not helpful, and it can close down your openness to critical ideas that apply very readily to your church in the near term. The western world is quite diverse in terms of life experiences and worldview—and we can easily find ourselves polarizing around this or that. One of the promises of a deeply multi church is that we may be able to develop a greater resistance to polarization in the years ahead. The way your church lives into multi will be different than mine! And this is good.

Second, for a congregation to live well in a multi sort of way, there must a coherence of identity and narrative that binds it together amid the challenges of different life experiences, tastes, tribal alliances, outlooks, and so forth. This book is not an invitation to a free-for-all, where one idea is as good as another—there has never been a thriving spiritual movement that lacked an energizing core of commonality. Diversity will be experienced as a blessing only when we are cognizant of that which we hold in common. Lovett Weems says, “Rather than inhibiting diversity, a shared core identity makes greater diversity possible.”8 The Christ event will remain at the center of history for Christians, through it all. Churches that lose their Christology tend to evaporate.

Third, the ways that churches define their identity and narrative will vary from one church to the next. This in itself is nothing new in America, where we have lived with substantial religious pluralism for a long time.9

I’m glad you are reading this book! The first chapter (just ahead) builds the foundation for all that follows. It is based upon a metaphor that might take you back to high school chemistry. Fear not! I’m betting you will enjoy the next chapter more than you did high school chemistry.

4. For more on this, see my first book, Fling Open the Doors: Giving the Church Away to the Community (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002).

5. Martin Luther King Jr., Meet the Press telecast, NBC, April 17, 1960.

6. See “Readiness 360: Multiply Your Impact” at www.readiness360.org.

7. For a deeper exploration of an organization’s intercultural capacity, see a tool called Intercultural Development Inventory...