Sustaining Grace

Innovative Ecosystems for New Faith Communities

Scott J. Hagley, Karen Rohrer

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781532687617
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christlicher Dienst

Sustaining Grace explores the dynamic between new faith communities and denominational systems through the lens of stewardship and sustainability. As a collection, these essays suggest that to facilitate ecologies for innovation in our current era, established congregations and new faith communities must model the sustaining grace of God to one another in creative ways. Thus, problems of sustainability are not for church planters to solve alone, but rather are related to the theologies of stewardship and the ecclesial system to which they belong. Issues of vision are not for denominational systems to theorize alone, but are given shape on their historic foundations in the creative and prophetic structures practiced in new faith communities. This book speaks to a central tension in the growing movement of church planting--the mutual need of and the mutual frustration between establishment leaders and innovators, conservators and risk takers. Standing at the contact point of that tension in one of the wealthiest mainline denominations, 1001 New Worshipping Communities and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary engage the question of faithful stewardship with voices reflecting and strategizing on each side of the tension, broadening the conversation to include those beyond the Presbyterian Church, and bringing both the academy and practitioners from church judicatories, church plants, and traditional church communities to offer a theologically grounded, practical, and generative conversation.

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Sustaining Grace

Innovative Ecosystems for New Faith Communities

Scott J. Hagley

In one of the opening scenes of Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972), the son of a wealthy medieval textile merchant, when offered the family business, instead strips off his brightly colored clothes and walks naked through the streets of his hometown of Assisi. Courageous, devoted, and incredibly vulnerable, the film captures what will become the parabolic power of medieval mendicant movements. This figure whom we know as St. Francis of Assisi took public and prophetic action, visibly protesting the trappings of wealth and the economic assumptions that promote it. The film wants us to see that the rest of his ministry was the natural extension of this initial act. St. Francis and those devoted to his way lived lives of radical dependence upon the generosity of others, demonstrating in their vulnerability the surprising abundance of medieval economic life and the scarcity experienced by those groaning under economic oppression.

It is not as though St. Francis demonstrates a way of life offered to everyone. He did, in the end, put clothes back on that were made, presumably, by a textile merchant. Gifts of shelter, money, and food were generously offered by those who made a living making, building, buying, and selling in the emerging economies of medieval Europe. And yet, the Franciscan presence signals the contradictions of economic life. Money cannot buy love or meaning, and its circulation threatens to corrupt whatever it touches, but we also cannot do without it. Francis can march naked in protest, but eventually he has to wear something and draw an income from somewhere.

Creative and transformative movements often make their home in the invisible contradictions of an era. They do not always display a universal path through various social tensions, but rather raise questions, create discomfort, and agitate for new dreams to emerge. Parabolic and prophetic actions function as a means of grace within cultures and social ecologies deadened by ideological boredom.

While perhaps not a new mendicant movement—innovative, entrepreneurial church leaders across the United States often find themselves in their own St. Francis moment. The statistics on mainline protestant church attendance are well known to denominational leaders and an experiential reality for churchgoers. Yet, in many of our denominations, our most promising leaders have shirked the mantle of nostalgia and imagined a different kind of future for mainline Christianity. In systems that assume particular economic and cultural capital for ordained ministry, pioneering leaders are cultivating Christian communities bi-vocationally, on shoestring budgets, and sometimes without theological education and a clerical collar. In denominations rich in real estate and endowments, these leaders are imagining church communities meeting in homes or third spaces, even envisioning repurposed church buildings as community centers.

By shedding comfortable religious structures and forms, these church leaders make themselves a compelling and provocative presence. On the one hand, they visibly protest the trappings of white, mainline civil religion. As new faith communities meet in living rooms, pubs, and elementary school gymnasiums, their energy and activism draws attention to the internal contradictions of denominational systems that protest social inequalities while drawing down endowment funds to maintain functionally empty heritage buildings. On the other hand, the vulnerability of such emerging communities makes them dependent upon whatever coaching, funds, benefits, and insurance such denominational systems can offer. But, as with St. Francis, these new leaders—and the communities they cultivate—are a means of grace for their reluctant denominational systems. Their presence punctures the ideological boredom of mainline religion, provoking new possibilities and dreams for Christian community in the United States; and yet their prophetic status makes them vulnerable and uncomfortably related to the denominational systems that need them.

Let me state my thesis as clearly as possible: American Mainline denominational systems need pioneering, adaptive leaders to experiment with new forms of Christian community, to dream a new shape for Christian identity in our present context. So also, pioneering, adaptive leaders need mainline denominational systems to provide the support that might make their work sustainable over the long haul. A creative space is opened by this contradiction: those setting aside the nostalgic covering of legacy congregations need the continuity and security these congregations provide, at the same time, legacy congregations need to learn to dream new dreams. This book explores the dynamic between new church development and denominational ecologies from the perspective of stewardship and sustainability. As a collection, the following essays suggest that in order to facilitate ecologies for missional innovation in post-Christendom, established congregations and new worshipping communities must image the sustaining grace of God to one another. Thus, problems of sustainability are not for church planters to solve alone, rather they are related to the theologies of stewardship and the ecclesial interconnections of the systems to which they belong.

This theme of sustaining grace emerged from a three-day writers’ conference at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in April of 2018. With generous funding from 1001 New Worshipping Communities (NWC) and the Presbyterian Foundation, the Reverends Karen Rohrer and Michael Gehrling, and I convened a group of thirteen church planters, academics, and judicatory leaders from around the United States to work together on the question of stewardship and sustainability for New Worshipping Communities. While genuine differences exist and remain between the participants, we discovered in our conversation the ecological dimensions of these questions: sustainable, faithful work in church planting requires a holistic approach, imagining congregations as imaging God’s sustaining grace to one another. In what follows, I will unpack this insight to introduce this book and its themes.

A “Mixed Economy” for Our New Missional Era

On the opening pages of The End of White Christian America, Robert P. Jones describes the elevator ride to the observation deck of One World Trade Center. While tourists ascend to the platform, a time-lapse video displays the transformation of Manhattan from a colonial outpost to the steel-and-glass skyline it is today. Up until the twentieth century, St. Paul’s Chapel and Trinity Church were the most noticeable and pronounced structures dotting the Manhattan skyline. As the timeline moves toward the present day, however, these tall-steeple churches are dwarfed and eventually rendered invisible as churches are “eclipsed architecturally and culturally by commercial centers.”1 Throughout much of American history, White Protestantism claimed cultural power and prominence. The various adaptations of Protestant Christianity—from early evangelical revivals to the consolidation of mainline ecumenism and the emergence of neo-evangelicalism in the second half of the twentieth century—could claim a significant moral and public voice. But this era has passed with as much speed and discombobulation as a patched-together time-lapse video.

We mostly talk about these shifts in the negative. It is the end of an era; we are now post-Christian or post-Christendom or post-modern. Such terms describe a liminal space. We know we have left one reality, but we have no idea how to talk about the new one. Such terms, however, unnecessarily problematize cultural change and suggest the problem with Mainline Protestantism is one of relevance. Our society has shifted away from Christianity, these terms suggest, and so we need to change in order to claim our rightful place in American public life. But what if the point is not to return to some era of hegemony, but rather to discover the shape of Christian faithfulness within this “new missional era”?2 What if the missio Dei invites us into a different kind of public witness than the one previously enjoyed by Mainline Protestantism? New worshipping communities often lead such discovery, helping us to navigate the basic elements—soil, air, water, and shelter—of our new missional era.

The Soil We Cultivate: The “Disestablishment” of the Church

Churches in the United States have had to learn to cultivate Christian life in the soil of religious disestablishment. For denominations descended from European state-churches, like Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian, the United States provides a different kind of social and political context for religious practice and expression. The legal separation of church and state has created a tumultuous and creative religious economy, where ecclesiastical bodies must learn to operate without the security and authority provided by a political entity.3 Upstart movements like the Methodists in the nineteenth century, and Baptists and Mormons in the twentieth have shaped the American context in ways not seen in Western Europe or even, to a lesser extent, Canada. The church in America has always had to grow in the soil of disestablishment.

“Disestablishment” names not a singular legal arrangement structured by the First Amendment, but rather a peculiar way in which religious practice and organization has taken shape in the United States. In Colonial New England, the Puritans enjoyed cultural, political, and religious hegemony until the field preaching of George Whitefield and the First Great Awakening. Prioritizing individual decision and personal piety, Whitefield’s preaching undermined the social arrangements and the ecclesial imagination that sustained Puritan and Anglican establishments.4 This prioritization of the individual has as much to do with the shape of American religious practice as the separation of church and state. Most Christian communities in the United States embody some commitment to individual choice and voluntary participation. Americans largely choose their Christian faith, regardless of polity or theologies of baptism.

Besides revivalism and the constitutional protections for a pluralist public sphere, an increasingly diverse and morally fragmented population also creates a sense of religious disestablishment. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the United States has become more religiously diverse. We hear a lot about the “Nones” and “Dones” in relationship to Christianity, but we hear less about American Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist communities in our cities. In many ways, both Mainline and Evangelical Christian communities are unprepared for faith formation in these new pluralist public spaces. Yet, like soil turned over in a garden, the present uncertainty of Mainline and Evangelical congregations in majority cultures is consistent with the ongoing processes of disestablishment representative of the American context. This is one reason why, in movements like 1001 New Worshipping Communities of the Presbyterian Church (USA) (PC[USA]), the constitution and leadership of new worshipping communities are much more diverse than the denomination as a whole.

The Air We Breathe: Our “Secular Age”

At the beginning of A Secular Age, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor asks why, over the past five hundred years, Western societies have shifted away from theistic assumptions.5 Previously, the burden of proof fell on those who imagined a world without God, whereas now those who believe in God must offer reasons for their commitment. In making this comparison, Taylor articulates the background conditions of contemporary religious belief.6 Modern secularism is not really about the decline of the church or the subtraction of religion from public life. Rather, it is one way of describing the modern social...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributing Authors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Sustaining Grace
• Chapter 2: A Small Shift toward Sharing All Things in Common
• Chapter 3: Sustainability in God’s Good Order
• Chapter 4: Stewards of Grace
• Chapter 5: Sustainable Churches Have Discipled Leaders
• Chapter 6: The Stewardship of Prayer and Play
• Chapter 7: Learning to Listen
• Chapter 8: Forming Generous Disciples
• Chapter 9: Democratizing Church Planting
• Chapter 10: Stewardship of Gifts
• Chapter 11: Stewardship of Leadership
• Bibliography