AquaChurch 2.0

Piloting Your Church in Today's Fluid Culture

Leonard Sweet

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781434767578
• eBook ISBN: 9781434702418
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

We live in a fast-paced, fluid world. A postmodern place where people are drifting, making mid-course corrections in every aspect of life, from careers, to relationships, to beliefs.

As church leaders, we must continually reshape our ministries to reach a society adrift. We must move from being adaptive to being proactive, remaining flexible while delivering a uncompromising message.

AquaChurch 2.0 is a guide for developing responsive and relevant church leadership. Fusing Biblical wisdom and modern-day insights, acclaimed author Leonard Sweet explores the essentials of leadership arts, including vision, creativity, and teamwork. This updated and revised edition will enable your ministry to navigate today's cultural currents, provide a beacon to your community, and connect with a postmodern world.

MISSIONAL ART #1

ORIENTING BY THE NORTH STAR: JESUS THE CHRIST

What!
No star, and you are going out to sea?
Marching, and you have no music?
Traveling, and you have no book?
What!
No love, and you are going out to live?

—ANCIENT FRENCH PROVERB

The first essential of navigation, and the place to start in map making, is establishing any position at any place that can be located at any time. We need a reference point that enables us to plot any position on the earth’s surface in relation to the stars.

In the art of sailsmanship, that reference point is magnetic north, the “pole star” or North Star. Fixed in the firmament like no other star, the North Star gives sailors a sense of direction and becomes their sure and constant guide.

But notice two things about this reference point known as Polaris.

First, what is fixed is not the point of reference itself, but one’s orientation toward that North Star. Wherever you are in the universe, that North Star may appear differently, but it’s the same guiding star. The pole star never changes. What changes is one’s personal coordinates and orientation toward the North Star.

Second, the earth’s axis of rotation points differently toward Polaris at different points in history. First described by Newton, the “wobble” in the earth’s orbit fractionally alters the alignment of the poles. Sometimes the earth’s axis of rotation points within one degree of the star Polaris. Other times it is farther apart. What this all means is simple: Sometimes the North Star appears brighter in the heavens than at other times.

The value of a Jesuit education was summarized by one grateful student: “You showed us where north is.”

What is our North Star, our fixing orientation?

Jesus of Nazareth is our North Star. The personal coordinates of Jesus, our “Morning Star,” our “Day Star” (2 Peter 1:19), are what keep us on course. Jesus’ last words to us were these: “I am … the Morning Star” (Rev. 22:16). You can find them on the last page of every Bible.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.¹

Christianity is a relationship religion. The core relationship is a relationship with Christ. Everything depends on the administration and management of that relationship. However, some of us are more careful about maintaining and managing relationships with our pets than our relationships with Jesus, God-made flesh.

With a cosmos changing at the speed of light, there are no fixed horizons. With a fix on the Jesus horizon, we have steering points to guide us in ever-new destinations.

For the raindrop, joy is entering the river.²

—Greatest Urdu poet Ghalib Mirza Asadullah Khan

Lose sight of Christ, and a sailor on the sea of life quickly becomes lost. When Peter took his eyes off Christ, he sank (Matt. 14:30–31). When we live by grace, we walk on water. Else we sink … in despair, in disease, in depression, in dread of the future.

Jesus and Today

French sociologist Jacques Ellul identifies three crowning achievements of the modern West: first, the emergence of a sense of self, resulting in the separation of the individual from the tribe, nature, or the cosmos; second, the development of the critical, scientific method; and third—most important—human freedom and individuality.³ Each one of these three, which provided dependable charts and fixed bearings for modern journeys, is up for grabs in today’s world. To navigate under such fluid conditions makes the certainty of a fixed point in the heavens more important than ever before.

The greatest question of the New Testament is often said to be: “What do you think of Christ?” Or, in Jesus’ own words: “Who do you say I am?” (Mark 8:29).

The closeness of identification between Jesus and the Christian community is more than metaphorical. Whenever John Wesley wrote in his journal, “I offered them Christ,” he was saying, “I preached.” Would that more churches had etched on their pulpits the words that admonish everyone who steps into the crow’s nest of one West Virginia church: “Sir, we would see Jesus.”

A biblical spirituality is relationship driven. It begins and ends with Jesus: does it sound like Jesus? see like Jesus? taste like Jesus? touch like Jesus? smell like Jesus? One of my favorite writers, the Canadian Robertson Davies, used to say that he read life and literature by the light of “a candle that is plainly marked ‘Manufactured by C.G. Jung & Co., Zurich.’”⁴ But as Christians, we read life by the light of a star that shone brightly one dark night in Bethlehem more than two thousand years ago and has lit up the skies ever since.

God lit up the skies more than two thousand years ago to show us how God can light up our skies today. Christians are people who live at the speed of light—the light of Jesus: “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). Christ is being “formed in you” (Gal. 4:19). For the indwelling Christ to be formed in us does not mean that we abandon our own space. Rather, it means that the indwelling Christ makes us more like ourselves at the same time we become more like Christ.

Artist/visual allegorist Stanley Spencer one day asked Sir John Rothenstein, Director of the Tate: “Do you know what good art is? It’s just saying ‘ta’ to God.” Good sailsmanship is saying “ta” to Jesus. It is navigating one’s life by the North Star.

One of the key influences on my thinking has been that of the missiologist Bishop Lesslie Newbigin. He reminded us that the key focus of the church’s mission is not the church but the world. In one of the memorial addresses at his funeral in 1998, it was noted that Newbigin knew everybody. He knew on a first-name basis all sorts of kings, queens, prime ministers and presidents, celebrities and zillionaires.

But the only name he ever dropped was the name of Jesus.⁵

Jesus and Values

As pioneers on an earlier trek westward came to appreciate and articulate, today’s explorers need to choose carefully the star to which they hitch their wagons. In the economic world, the guiding star is becoming EPIC values rather than profits. An approach to business that is values-driven and service-oriented rather than profit-driven and owner-oriented is perhaps the most significant stars-in-its-eyes transformation in twentieth- and twenty-first-century management.

I visited my friend today. He’s eighty-five and travels light, a wise and wonderful man. We spoke of many things, small talk and big talk, and then he said, “Yes, for most of our comings and goings maps are O.K., but for the Big Trip we still follow the Star!”⁶

—Poet/seminary professor Gerhard Frost

In the global world of business, the most distinguishing quality of a leader has become the ability to lead through values. Value setting has replaced goal setting as the primary task of leadership. Swiss organizational consultant Peter Koenig argues that the issue is not whether values-driven business is profitable. In fact, values and profits don’t necessarily go together. The issue is whether values are being followed for their own sake: “The only motive deserving of the name ‘values driven’ is one where the values are being expressed simply for their own sa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Aquachurch
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• introduction
• THE CASE FOR AQUACHURCH
• MISSIONAL ARTS FOR NAVIGATION
• notes