Back in the House!

Sorry to have been away from the helm most of last week. As I told Lee Anne, life was a bit busy the past two weeks, actually. I will be on a business trip next week and on vacation the week after that. Making sure I got everything in "shore leave" mode before I left the plant meant bringing stuff home from work, and that left little time for blogging.

I tried installing w.bloggar on the laptop I checked out from work, but it is locked out for installing new software unless one has an admin ID. I also am unable to add new hardware, rendering my wireless card useless, and I left my own laptop at home. However, I did manage to install Pocket Blog on the iPAQ, so I may be able to post something from the airport tomorrow. That should be interesting, but only if I can figure out how to get a wireless connection. For those of you who are seasoned travelers and techno-geeks, I'm sure this seems like second nature, but this techno-bronto is still taking baby steps. I guess if all else fails, I COULD go back to just blogging with MT instead of w.bloggar. (The horror ... !)

Darryl Dash had a post on Friday picking up on an Andrew Hamilton post at Backyard Missionaries. I commented briefly on Darryl's post, but I'd like to pursue it further here rather than hog his comments section.

I'm coming soon to the "rubber meets the road" phase of the D.Min. program at Gordon-Conwell. Someday, very, very soon, it would be really, really helpful towards receiving the degree if I were actually to propose a thesis topic, get it approved, and write the thesis. That's where I find myself at this point, trying to write the proposal while also doing a second year project, which I hope will also feed into the final thesis. (I've actually finished the third year residence, but I still haven't done the second year project, which puts me WAY out of sequence.)

I told my wife once while I was still in seminary that I wondered if I was going to spend the duration of my ministry as a funeral director, helping churches cope with the death of their congregations. Even before I started working on this degree, I had been concerned with the long term viability of mainline denominations and their congregations. Then, as part of the research for my first year project, I read Death of the Church, by Mike Regele. Regele combines demographic and cultural analysis with the work of William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book, Generations, and concludes that the church is faced with an inevitable decline relative to its Constantinian standing. (In seminary I was taught that we ministered to a post-Constantinian, post-Christian context. Fifteen years later, in my D.Min. program, I read Leonard Sweet, and he tells us we minister to a pre-Christian context. I hate to imagine the change I can expect over the next fifteen years.) Regele concludes that the church's only hope is to die in order to be resurrected to new life in a different form (he phrases it more eloquently, though), which brings me back to my common area of interest with Darryl.

(Side note to Daniel Baker -- with reference to your July 5 post, am I using enough parenthetical asides here? :D )

Sooooooo ... as I have read many of the fine blogs out there written by "emerging churchers" and their fellow travelers, I have recently found myself wondering how one would do a new church development (NCD in Presbyterianese -- that's church plant for the rest of you) in my denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), using insights from the emerging church movement. The main idea here is how to do an NCD without ever building the building or paying a full-time staff. However, as I have tried to think this through in terms of Reformed ecclesiology, worship and preaching and good, old fashioned stodgy Presbyterian polity ("decently and in order" taking precedence over sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia on any given day), one question with which I wrestle is how to structure worship in the Reformed tradition if preaching is not the central act of worship.

Len Sweet tells me we're now pre-Christian, so the first question I asked myself was, "OK, if we're pre-Christian, then what did the church of the New Testament and its worship and community life look like?" Simple. They met in homes and eventually gathered in larger groups for worship. So, I've been envisioning a network (dare I say, "web?") of house churches, gathering periodically in something perhaps similar to The Worship Freehouse as a way of incorporating E.P.I.C. worship on a larger scale.

But what to do with preaching? Even in my own experience I have seen some shifting that may point the way. In seminary, I was schooled in the ways of the "liturgical reform movement," with its efforts to recover the importance of the liturgy in worship, particularly the proclamatory role of the sacraments, and by the time I was ordained in 1992, the office to which I was ordained was no longer Minister of the Word, but Minister of Word and Sacrament. (Interestingly enough, my ordination certificate used the former title even though the change had been made a number of years before. I guess they wanted to use up the old certificates laying around the presbytery office!) Andrew Hamilton and Fred Peatross (among many of you) have really made me begin to rethink this entire aspect of corporate worship.

Comments, ideas, anyone? (Especially you Presbyterians out there!)

Posted by Mike at July 21, 2003 12:31 AM | TrackBack