“Alan Roxburgh engages with attendees of PGF’s “Moving Back into our Neighborhoods: The Work of the Missional Church” in San Diego.”[/caption]God is not primarily concerned with getting people into our churches, Alan Roxburgh told those attending a pre-conference workshop August 20 that kicked off the Presbyterian Global Fellowship Consultation, “Moving Back into Our Neighborhoods: The Work of the Missional Church,” August 20-21 in San Diego, Calif.
Roxburgh, Canadian pastor, theologian, author, and vice president for Allelon Canada, addressed the consultation’s theme by challenging those gathering for what seems like another conference about church to look toward the places where people are – neighborhoods.
He admitted that most of the time what draws attendees to a conference such as this one is the desire to have someone, an expert, recite more effective ways to “make church work.” “The real spiritual shift is not about ‘making church work’ but about discovering what God is already up to, out there ahead of us, in the neighborhoods and communities where we live,” suggested Roxburgh. “Attending to that, without it becoming a program to get people in, is what I think is the most critical spiritual need at this moment.”
PGF is calling the gathering a consultation to distinguish it from a conference where speakers provide information and to emphasize the communal learning environment in which participants are asked to engage in the dialogue with those presenting.
Conference organizers had intended this, the fourth regional PGF Conference this year, to be a smaller regional gathering. “We were expecting in the range of 150 people to attend,” explained Solana Beach Church pastor and conference host Mike McClenahan. More than 300 people have registered from places as far away as Florida and Ohio.
For the one hundred or so folks who attended the pre-conference workshop it was a time of challenge, conversation, and engaging the “spiritual imagination.”
“We don’t care what the structure or the story of the tradition is of a particular church — we are not trying to change it or make it different,” explained Roxburgh. “But we believe that God is up to something and that is the shift — the shift of imagination that needs to take place,” he continued. The challenge is that most people need time to allow this shift. “You don’t begin to create this stuff at the level of structure,” he asserted. “You create it at the level of experiment where you begin inviting people and it starts small — that is how worlds get changed,” Roxburgh said.
“But don’t most people just want really nice worship with air conditioning, and then to go home?” one attendee asked. Roxburgh acknowledged this sentiment, but pushed back against the assertion.
“People might not know how to put language around it, but their hunger is there. Our calling is to ask, ‘How do we attend to and listen to the hungers that are out there?’” Roxburgh responded.
The problem goes beyond those attending churches, but also with the way that clergy are formed. “Part of the challenge is that those of us who have been trained and formed as clergy have been trained and formed to function inside something called church,” he asserted. The problem, he suggested, is that “we often don’t have a clue how to function in any other way.”
Roxburgh insisted that this is not meant to blame clergy or congregants, but to open up a shift in awareness to something new. “We [pastors] spend almost all our time and energy running and making work the programs and the things that we are supposed to do inside this building and to a large extent we are disconnected from our own communities and neighborhoods,” said Roxburgh. “We are running a system that systematically disconnects us from the stories of our people, and it is in those stories that God is present.”
Church leaders need to find the stories, listen, and follow them as God leads, he said.
The PGF consultation, “Moving Back Into Our Neighborhoods: The Work of the Missional Church,” officially began this afternoon (August 21) and runs until August 22.
