Borderland Churches

A Congregation's Introduction to Missional Living

Gary V Nelson

• Publisher: TCP Books
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9780827202573
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Chiesa cristiana

Borderland Churches is a call to embrace the pluralistic, post Christian and postmodern culture with a sense of opportunity and hope. The author uses the image of the church crossing over into an "in -between time", a place where faith is lived outside the walls of the church engaging the community in incarnational ways. To live in that "precarious but exhilarating place where faith and other faiths and no faith meet." Only individuals and congregations that accept this new reality will be able to carry on Christian ministry in this new cultural situation. A TCP Leadership Series title.

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Learning to Sing the Song

BORDERLAND COMPASS POINT

The drastic changes that have occurred since the last century’s North American cultural religious acceptance of today’s secular environment demands that the church rediscover its ministry and mission. Psalm 137 offers insight into the challenge of “singing a new song” in the world to which God has called His people.

In the early nineties, I began my tenure as pastor of an “Old First Church” in Western Canada. For the previous thirty years, it had bled people. There were numerous reasons for its decline. Changes in the neighborhood, sociological shifts of suburban growth, and simple theological drift were all factors. It was painfully obvious that this once proud downtown congregation had become a shell of its past in size and influence.

The challenge of renewal brought me to that place along with the distinct feeling that I needed to experience things about which I had been preaching. Young and energetic, I had most recently been the director of an urban ministry training center where we studied and taught the skills necessary for ministry in the city context. A growing sense of being too young to be an expert and the need to test the concepts about which I had been teaching made me open to a call back to pastoral ministry. So, when this old downtown congregation contacted me, it appeared the perfect place for practicing what I had been teaching. I responded to the call but, within the first months, a deep sense of despair enveloped me, due in part to the presence of one of the church’s former ministers.

He had been the minister of the church in the 1950s. During his tenure, a Canadian national news magazine called Star Weekly sent a reporter across the nation over a six-month period to discover the top ten preachers in Canada. This former minister was chosen as one of them.

My awareness of that award became difficult to forget. Over my years as pastor of this same church, until the time of his death, this great man and accomplished pastor managed to mention this accolade to me in almost every one of our encounters.

This former pastor from the days of the church’s glory had just moved back to the city to settle into retirement and rejoined the church. His prior success, albeit thirty years earlier, gave him great confidence to judge that my approach to ministry was wrong. This confident belief fueled a mission for his declining years. He would take me under his tutelage, inform me on a continual basis of my pastoral shortcomings and lead me into the promised land, as defined by his view of ministry.

Every visit to his apartment induced emotional pain. My ego and my energy were drained. Through it all, he portrayed an amazing intuitive ability to discern the Achilles heel of my confidence. He ended each visit with the same refrain. “Gary, did you know that in 1955 I was named one of the top ten preachers in Canada by Star Weekly?” I braced myself for what was coming next, “Gary, have you ever been named one of the top ten preachers in Canada?”

I confess that I too often left these encounters seething. As I returned to my car, my mind would be spinning with an array of eloquent and pointed replies that I was determined to use the next visit. Some were gentle; others, cruel. I never did use them even though my quiver is still full. They did provide solace in my frustration and pain. It was not just that Star Weekly no longer exists as a magazine in Canada. It was also, more importantly, that this predecessor did not realize that in the times in which I was ministering no one even cared who the top ten preachers in Canada were.

We Aren’t in Kansas Anymore, Toto!

We live in different times than the ones that this competent and talented clergyperson knew. It is no longer 1955, when 68 percent of Canadians attended a place of worship on a weekly basis. More Canadians attended church per capita than in the United States. It is a marvel to think of a time when the instinct for the majority of Canadians was to get up on a Sunday morning and go to church. That was what people did in 1955.

Now, church attendance on a given Sunday in Canada is more like 13 percent. In some urban settings, it is even much lower. The institutional religious world has been drastically altered. Now pastors live and seek to lead effectively in a time when more people consider brunch the activity of choice for Sunday morning.

A discussion around the changing environment of culture and religious institutional life caused an older respected patriarch of our denomination to muse about ministry and its beginnings. He paused for a moment and then said, “Boy, I am so glad that I am not starting ministry now!” It was an amazing comment made by someone who had been very effective in the old paradigm. Somehow he grasped the complexity and vulnerability of the altered landscape of culture and society and its subsequent impact on the mission and ministry of the church.

Many effective and successful clergy persons from that old paradigm would be challenged to make sense of the new realities. Theirs was a time in which assumptions and positional authority were rarely challenged. It was simpler. A preacher could stand in the pulpit and wait for people to show up. To be one of the top ten preachers in the country meant something both inside and outside of the church. It still has some meaning in the United States, but, even there, it is waning into an in-house affirmation.

The visits with my predecessor continue to serve as a watershed story for my ministry journey to this point. It captures and mirrors the experienced realities we face in the North American church of the twenty-first century—experienced realities not always appreciated beyond cultural observation.

Profound shifts and alterations have taken place in North American society over the last few decades. Many want to label those changes with words such as secularization and postmodernism. Labels can be helpful, but they need to be unpacked. Their emotional experiences rather than their conceptual frames need attention. Like Dorothy looking around the new world to which a tornado has transported her, “We aren’t in Kansas anymore.” It is no longer 1955—or, for that matter 1975 or 1995—and the hope to return to “Kansas” is a futile dream. Kansas no longer exists.

Singing the Song in the Borderland

Our experience is similar to that of the writer of Psalm 137. Ripped out of the familiar world of Jerusalem, the psalmist has been dragged to Babylon’s vastly different world. The strange new rhythms of life, frameworks of beliefs, and foundations of relationships assault his sensibilities. A constant taunting is going on around him by those who know the comforting winds of the place in which he now lives.

They call to him. Maybe they challenge the seeming inconsequential nature of his past religious experience. “Come on, sing us one of those songs from Zion” Translation: “I dare you, sing one of those good old songs from your past. You know the song, the one that is meaningless!”

The anguish in the psalmist’s refrain is palpable. Out of a deep sense of dislocation and sadness he cries, “How do I sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land?” Translation: “How do I sing my song of faith here in this new world?”

There it is. This is the common experience of faithful people and churches in the present, those desiring to be conscientious and effective followers of Jesus Christ. They must face with honesty and transparency the impact at a cultural and community level. But it is not easy. Realizing the profound shifts that have made this world so different, they cry out, “How do we do this church thing in these strange times?” This is the journey that we all must take before we truly find our song for this time.

Singing the Song of the Past

If you grew up in church and remember a joyful past, then you will recognize the first stage in the journey. With melodramatic passion the psalmist remembers his past Jerusalem experiences and pledges his loyalty to that time and place. It sounds so familiar. Longtime members of the church, facing difficult times in the present, look back and remind each other how good it used to be. “Wasn’t it great when pastor so-and-so was here? My, he/she could preach.” “Do you remember how Reverend what’s-his-name filled our sanctuary worship service twice every Sunday?” “Youth used to flock to our programs on Friday night.” “The Sunday school attendance was such that we had to build new facilities. We had classes all over the church, even in the sanctuary.” “Do you remember when we first went to contemporary worship? People came from other places just to be part of what was happening.” “The pastor did it all by himself.”

Let us be honest. The past always seems better than it was in reality. It may have been very good, but the factors that made it possible are rarely discussed. The past has a way of refining and refinishing the rougher raw edges that truly existed. My parents, for example, remember my childhood in elementary school much better than it really was. It was a time of great difficulty for me. My grade four teacher, in consultation with specialists, placed me on a program designed to help modify my behaviors, which were disrupting the class. My devoted mother has kindly forgotten this. I put her through years of very difficult parent/principal meetings. That the principal in grade six was forced to place me at the back of the class, away from others, is written off as the act of a woman who “did not like little boys.” Memory has a wonderful way of forgetting.

Remembering, however, is important. It fuels the present by giving us a foundational experience. Many passages in the scriptures call us to “remember.” The problem occurs when those memories are romanticized and used as a rod to measure the present. They become a way of denying the reality of change in the present and a way of distracting oneself from the implications for change.

Sing a Song of Anger

The psalmist moves from melodramatic remembering to a more destructive response. Frustrated with the strangeness of this world and, in the midst of his powerlessness to sing into it, he gets angry. The last verses of this psalm are raw. They portray an anger that, when unleashed, becomes destructive. It is not reasonable and it certainly is far from rational. This cornered, religiously committed person just wants revenge.

So, he lashes out with the emotions of a surrounded wild beast with no apparent escape route. This new world frightens him and the results of this unsettledness are words full of spite and bitterness. These words even wish for destruction on the children of this strange world.

People in church can sound very much like the psalmist. They can feel trapped in strange worlds that they cannot sing into. Their responses can appear unfeeling and angry. Christians speak vile words everyday, out of feelings of powerlessness and fear. They desperately seek to engage the threatening issues, but their words are surprisingly unlike those of Jesus. The terrible signs of protest over the issues of sexual orientation or words spoken at times by the political right are far outside the law of love set down by Jesus. Sometimes we need to make a stand, but never one that attacks.

Church fights can often spiral out of control. They emerge in the life of the congregation as a natural extension of community, but too often escalate into personal attacks. When they become personal, they invariably escalate transforming the conflict into destructive relational and emotional tirades.

Times Have Changed

Psalm 137 captures with a genuine humanness the church’s journey into the twenty-first century. It almost borders on the ridiculous to tell someone that times have changed. We experience change on a daily basis. New questions are being asked about sexual orientation, marriage, the family, and lifestyles in general. We are increasingly aware that a daily trip to Starbucks requires a financial transaction greater than the daily income of 40 percent of the world’s population. Terrorism events from New York to the Middle East burst the bubble of North American existence; the appearance of being safe and secure has disappeared. Of course, we are now living an existence that most people around the world have lived for many years, but it has changed our world and that seems to be what matters to most of us. Some eager souls may want to deal with this new emerging world, but, for most of us, fear grips.

Some of these changes feel like they have been imposed. We did not have choice so, why should we embrace this new reality? We did not ask or wish for this strange world in which we live. Why even learn the new song?

These are interesting but unrealistic questions. We seem to hold to the mistaken idea that everything around us can dramatically shift without requiring any adaptive movement on our part. It is inherently illogical, yet this is exactly what many of us do. We seem to think that church expressions are nailed down for all time. The way we have previously experienced church is the way that it should continue to be. Even worse is the mistaken idea that it will only take a few cosmetic changes to appear “contemporary” and relevant.

Fearing the Unknown

The intensity of the man’s anger when he confronted me after the service surprised me. After completing my sermon as the guest preacher in his church, he immediately came up to me after the service: “We haven’t changed this worship service since 1929.” The theme of my sermon had focused on the need to learn to sing a new song, given the changes occurring around us. He was not interested in this new song. He was convinced that the old one was quite fine. Unfortunately, like many of us, he thought this was a debate about singing hymns or choruses. It would be wonderful if it were that simple.

The depth of his emotions and the intensity of the expression on his face startled me. He was livid. Fear of the present and the anxiety produced by required or even imagined modifications struck terror in him. Knowing how to sing and realizing that the song may need to be different does not necessarily move naturally to singing the song that needs to be sung. In fact, if you are at all anxious about change, it may cause you to desire to dig in and sing the old song even louder.

I wanted to understand the tensions he was feeling so I probed just a bit. “Has anything else in your life not changed since 1929?” I asked. He was obviously startled by the question, and for a moment, stepped back in silence. Then with stammering and quivering lips, he replied, “No.” My reply came quickly and with the desire for him to reflect deeply on the fact of the change around him. I said to him, “If that is true, then it might be a good idea to think about what that means for your church.”

Learning to sing in this strange time has little to do with choruses or hymns. The cosmetic worship changes of the last decades of church life, while at times helpful, have also proven distracting. The desire to be more appealing and relevant in the rhythms of our worship to those who live in the borderlands is genuine. For some churches, altering our songs of worship was the beginning of a journey toward relevance and impact. However, the worship wars of the last two decades of the twentieth century were moments of trivial pursuit. They placed simplistic and shallow characteristics on people outside the influence of the church, making it sound ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Editor’s Foreword
• Foreword by Mark Buchanan
• Introduction
• 1. Learning to Sing the Song
• 2. Crossing Over
• 3. Recovering Our Roots
• 4. Landscapes and Tool Kits
• 5. Herding Cats
• 6. Missioning the Church
• 7. Mapping the Journey
• Appendix A: Song in the Borderland
• Appendix B: Getting to Know Your Neighborhood
• Appendix C: Neighborhoods Are Different
• Appendix D: The Three “Ls” of Learning about Your Community
• Appendix E: Questions to Be Asked in the Community in Which You Live and/or in Which Your Church Is Situated
• Appendix F: Sampling of Helpful Web Sites for Your Borderland Discussion
• Appendix G: Further Reading Possibilities
• Notes