This is the fourth regional gathering offered by Presbyterian Global Fellowship, and is being hosted by the San Diego Presbytery. Presenters include Roxburgh, vice president of Allelon Canada, and Mark Lau Branson, Homer L. Goddard Associate Professor of the Ministry of the Laity at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif.
The focus of this session was the possibilities of change, getting beyond what most church leaders are currently doing.
Roxburgh first pointed out what this session would not include. “This is not about folks who have gone before us doing it wrong or making it bad. …We are not here today because we are looking for a new fancy way of being the church,” critiquing conferences or programs that simply seek new or more marketable methods of church growth. “We are here to recognize that while we were working hard to make our churches good and effective and serve people, the world outside just began to change in ways we could never imagine.”
There is no ‘master plan’ to deal with the new world that we find ourselves in, according to Roxburgh. “It’s very Presbyterian to ask, ‘What’s the plan?’ but there isn’t a plan or a strategy for what God is up to in our neighborhoods,” he continued. So the question becomes, ‘now what?’
Roxburgh and Lau Branson used a visual metaphor about Plato and Aristotle to demonstrate the point. In a painting representing both, Plato is pointing upward while Aristotle is pointing downward. The upward pointing of Plato represents the idealization of the ‘ideal’ while the downward pointing of Aristotle emphasis the importance of remaining in the particulars to find ‘the real.’ Roxburgh and Lau Branson told conference participants that it’s time to get into the ordinariness of life, the looking down instead of spending all their time pointing up to (and planning, strategizing and studying) the ideal.
“If you want to know what God is up to, get out of your churches and go into your neighborhoods, without your baggage,” urged Roxburgh. “If you want to know what it means to be the church in your context, stop doing these studies on the nature and purpose of the church and go sit at the table with ‘the other’ and you will get all kinds of clues about what your church needs to look like.”
He quickly added that this does not mean giving up being Presbyterian, or throwing out all existing structures or rearranging the organization. What it does mean is a change in imagination that can be both scary and risky. It is a move from asking questions about the church and the nature of the church toward attending to what God is “up to out there in the world” suggested Roxburgh. This attending is not the work of experts, but rather is the ordinary work of the ordinary people of God.
Look at General Motors, Roxburgh said. It’s not likely that corporate executives didn’t know about change, or that change was upon them. “They saw the need to change, they could articulate the need to change, and they kept on doing the same practices that they had always done,” he observed. General Motors and the church are not all that far apart in this instance, he suggested.
It is precisely that past success endangers future change. The shift is not a technical one (a change of method), but an adaptive one (an upheaval).
Instead of learning techniques and programs, church leaders should learn to enter the stories of those in their neighborhoods with the belief that it is through those ordinary, everyday, Aristotle-pointing stories that the Spirit of God is up to something in the world. “Most of the time there is very little place for any of us to believe that the stories that nestle down in our guts are actually important and significant to what the Kingdom of God is about,” said Roxburgh.
“If going back into the neighborhood to sit at the table of ‘the other’ is how we enter into how God is at work, how do we do that when we remain convinced that the best way to bring the Kingdom is to create a master plan or get trained in a new evangelism program?” he asked.
Participants were asked to ponder, discuss learning to create space in our churches, to point downward with Aristotle, and to risk making an adaptive shift in order to listen for the clues in the world around us of what God wants to do to transform the world.
The two-day conference happening August 21-22 near San Diego, Calif., is an attempt to enter into dialogue around that question, but then to take that dialogue and put it into action.
