In my 3-28-08 post I vented. My frustration with the ineptness demonstrated by folks in megachurches who sometimes control the purse strings and make decisions that damage lives and retard God’s kingdom purposes simply boiled over.

It was triggered by a very real situation where three families serving very competently and effectively with CRM in diverse areas of the globe were stung by a church last week, which made such hurtful, ill-conceived decisions and then used the l0-40 window as justification.

But on a more constructive note, what should a church do when faced with decisions on the allocation of resources for those committed to serving in a missions posture? How do you realistically juggle priorities? What is a church to do? Several years back, I wrote the attached article to address just that issue. It lays out a practical formula and process where such financial decisions can become a “win-win” for all involved.

This is well worth the read.

Apostolic Passion.pdf

I remember the first time I read this. The lights finally went on! I was not some misfit. I wasn’t an aberration in ministry.  Just because I was not gifted or called to be in a pastoral role in the church in its local form, I still had an equally valid calling to ministry through God’s church in missionary form. My gifts and experience clearly indicated a “sodalic” calling. And people with sodalic, apostolic callings must have apostolic structures if those callings are to be adequately fulfilled.

One of the more common ways to divvy up the pie has been to view the world through ethnic lenses …through the grid of “people groups.” This of course is consistent with the “ta ethne” of Matthew 28 and is an incredibly useful means of evaluating the task remaining to those who name the name of Jesus and take seriously his imperative to disciple the nations.

Another helpful perspective is to look at the world through socio-economic levels. We do this often in InnerCHANGE, CRM’s order among the poor, as we grapple with engaging that portion of a population in any given context which is “poor” and even “desperately poor.” This also is a profoundly biblical means of viewing people since God’s concern for the poor throughout the whole of scripture is a theme that is commonly overlooked and minimized.

And there are other lenses through which we can take a close look at the challenge such as urban vs. rural or developed vs. developing world, etc …

But there is another way that gives us perspective to view the world through what I would call “belief blocs.” When we parse up the global scene in this manner, the whole of humankind can be broken into three major camps:

1.)The Religious Bloc

The religioius bloc is the largest of the three and it is primarily composed of those adherents to the major non-Christian world religions: Islam, Hinduism, traditional Chinese religions and Buddhism:  Islam with 1.3 billion followers, Hinduism with 870 million;  Chinese relgions with 405 million; and Buddhism with 379 million.  All told, these blocs make up 40-50% of the world’s peoples.

2.)The Secular Bloc

This is the bloc that is getting increasingly astute attention and analysis in the West as Christianity rapidly continues its disestablishment from western culture and as the cultural phenomena of “Christendom” passes into history. We find the secular bloc primarily in the post-industrial, increasingly post-modern West, although there are also significant pockets of this bloc evident in the booming urban centers of the developing world which are inevitably influenced by the dynamics of globalization.

It would be a mistake to view all secularized peoples through the grid of the postmodern which is actually a subset of the secular. While the shift in the West from modernity to post-modernity is titanic in its nature and implications, there are huge percentages of secular peoples who cannot be lumped together with those whose worldviews are decidedly postmodern. This includes large numbers of nominal Roman Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants who are decidedly secular but have not navigated the jump to post-modernity and may not for several generations.

3.)The Animist Bloc

A large percentage of the world remains in what anthropologists refer to as animism, that form of belief that melds the natural world into the spiritual and is expressed in a dizzying array of folk religions.

Unfortunately, this is the bloc that has defined missionary efforts in the popular mind throughout the West and has been hard to shake. Jungles, pith helmets, tribal groups, etc., are still the images that have shaped the popular understanding of the missionary task when in fact, the secular and the religious blocs are by far the majority of the world’s peoples.

So what does this mean? A few thoughts and observations:

1. Missionary efforts to advance the Christian movement must be tailored very differently for each of these blocs. Conversely, the training necessary for those who minister within and to these three blocs is quite different. One size does not fit all.

2. The religious bloc has historically presented the most stubborn obstacles to the advance Christianity. Most missiologists agree that the key to future success within these blocs lies in effective contextualization although the ongoing debate about what that means and how far one goes in such a process is robust.

3. While the reality of the postmodern world in the secular bloc is a macro trend, it is mistake to superimpose that phenomenon onto the other two blocs when in fact, most of those in the religious bloc and the animist bloc have never even entered the modern world.

4. People may be in separate belief blocs and yet share many other cultural characteristics. While belief and worldview are seminal components of culture, they are not the only elements.

5. These blocs are not geographically determined. In fact, one can go into any major world-class city and find peoples from all three blocs living side-by-side and sociologically intertwined. While they may be physically near-neighbors, they may have great gulfs separating their belief systems.

6. All three of these blocs should be legitimate foci of missional effort, both from the local church expressions of the Christian movement that may be co-existent and/or near and from the apostolic expressions of the movement which are called of God and designed specifically for the crossing of cultural, socio-economic, and belief system barriers to represent the good news of Jesus.

A fairer comparison would be to compare local congregations of today with the local churches that were spawned by monastic communities. The diocesan structures actually emerged as a result of the apostolic activity of Celic monastic communities. The historical interplay in the centuries following Patrick between the parish/ecclesiastical structure that evolved and the lingering effects of the monastic communities is a fascinating study in movement dynamics.

Celtic monastic orders were:

Sociologically flexible
Geographically mobile
Relationally transient

Historically, a shift inevitably occurred where authority shifted from the monastic communities to an ecclesiastical hierarchy. This shift was closely related to the leveling off, institutionalization, and even stagnation of Irish Christianity. Some church historians would probably describe this as “Catholicism in Ireland coming of age,” but in fact, this shift would more accurately be the beginning of an institution gaining ascendancy over a movement, modality over sodality, and the pastoral over the apostolic.

The more any existing local church can capture and emulate the apostolic functions evidenced in monastic communities, the more effective and vibrant that local church will be. But the church in its local form – by virtue of its very calling and nature – does not have the structural capability of maintaining such apostolic characteristics or momentum apart from the regular infusion of such dynamics from the outside. Hence, the necessity of sodalic entities. This is primarily due to the fact that:

Local churches are made up of “first-decision” individuals.

Discipline and the ability to remove people from the community is limited in the diocesan/parish structure.

Pastoral care, not mission and a commitment to militant expansion, are the primary values of most local congregations. Conservation and maintenance of the fruit, not multiplying the fruit, is the overriding value and focus.

The vast majority of those who are followers of Christ will not and should not be long-term participants in monastic communities. Only a small percentage of a believing population will ever effectively function as foundational and long-term members of a monastic community. Those that remain and thrive in monastic communities do so because their gifts and calling are conducive to life and ministry in a missional, apostolic structure.

Monastic communities multiply on several levels:

They multiply new churches
They multiply new monastic communities
They multiply new leadership for both

For example, in the Methodist movement, the class meetings evidenced many of the characteristics of such missional communities. But rather than maintaining their unique structural separateness, they evolved into local churches and eventually assumed a modalic hierarchy, i.e., a denominational structure. However because of their sodalic roots, the Methodist movement probably sustained its momentum, purity, and cutting edge longer than a movement with modalic origins. Similarly, the Christian and Missionary Alliance and the Salvation Army, both which started as mission movements, evolved into local congregations and then into institutionalized denominational structure.

However in the Celtic movement, the distinction between monastic communities and local churches was maintained more clearly for centuries. Maintaining this distinctive was one of the main factors contributing to the movement’s spiritual vitality, effectiveness in converting the whole of the society, and the longevity and pervasiveness of its influence. The monastic community, because of its structure, was able to maintain clarity of calling and focus far longer than the local churches it gave birth to and in turn, was a constant source of renewal, deep spirituality, and vision that fed these parishes for hundreds of years.

This model for multiplying churches could be difficult for most westerners because of Western individualism. The strong sense of “community” in the Celtic movement provided a sociological glue that held these monastic entities together and that dynamic is rare in the sociology of the West. Believers in other cultures may have more success in capturing this missiological dynamic.

Best book to illustrate these thoughts is The Celtic Way of Evangelism by George Hunter.