On The Verge Blog Tour Introduction

Alan Hirsch and Dave Ferguson
On the Verge: A Journey into the Apostolic Future of the Church
Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011. Paperback. $19.99

Many thanks to Zondervan for providing a review copy of this addition to the Exponential Series. I’m under no obligation for a positive review. I am grateful to Zondervan and its authors for the hard work they do in releasing excellent pieces of communication about the gospel, the church, and theology in general.

Perhaps in the spirit of the book, I’ve reimagined my approach and will blog about each section of the book throughout this week for the On the Verge Blog Tour.

The authors believe that the need of the contemporary church is to have mission as its organizing principle. For believers without congregational experience, missional church meets an approach that seems to be largely desired when gauging the response to this method thus far. By this approach, church becomes more socially involved. Believers who are currently in congregational settings can implement missional movements that affect the local community while benefiting from increasing the number and effectiveness of leaders and adding new believers. It is believed that an important component of this is the ability to produce reproducing churches with this missional focus.

The authors call this presentation of church an apostolic movement and see it rising in the Western churches. The warning given is that such change must come from the West because the church in the West is in serious decline. If the answer for the West was to come from other countries such as Europe, New Zealand, or Australia, it would have done so by now. So the call is a serious one (the call to re-imagine church and its mission) and the status of the church in the West depends on what the West does. Some recovery of the apostolic ways is presented in a paradigm the authors call Apostolic Genius. The authors see evidence that the church in the West is heading in this direction.

In all the research, ideas, and experience the authors share, they agree that we join the work of God in what he is doing in the church. So if this is in fact the direction God is going, “certainly, we must do our part, but in the end the church exists by the grace, presence, and power of God himself, and to him we must constantly turn if we are going to be the kind of people he wants us to be” (p. 21). I appreciate this statement of the authors because it shows the right perspective that we are called by grace, accepted by faith, and are expected to do something in order for justification to be realized.

After introducing how we are on the verge of the future, the authors present their ideas and respond to each other through 4 main sections:

1. Imagine
2. Shift
3. Innovate
4. Move

The authors admit that while there are some examples of mature apostolic movements, missional church is receiving growing acceptance by church leaders. After the apostolic age, churches became more institutional and rigid due to its marriage with politics. The increasing logic of secularization in the West is placing the institutionalized church in isolation with secular social constructs. The authors place the beginning of this move with the French Revolution.

The West is becoming multicultural. Yet, the most segregated hour continues to be Sunday mornings. A challenge facing the Western church  and its ecclesiology is how to balance the idea of church how Jesus designed it. Most church models are attempted copies of mega-churches. Yet, not all can be nor should be mega-churches. Some examples are that the financial resources and personnel talent to make a mega-church successful are not available to all churches. Thus, the strategy of many churches is flawed from the beginning. “The way we think about the church and mission…indicates why we desperately need to innovate” (p. 28). The church needs better imagination of how we do church.

What this also tells us is that churches are competing to reach the same audiences. The logical question that follows is then how do we reach those who are not yet being reached? The contemporary way of doing church was new and fresh some time ago, but is now experiencing competition in the formerly uncharted waters. A new approach will be required for reaching the un-churched in our communities.

The rise of information technology has changed social interaction and the way and availability that information is accessed. Information is no longer only in the hands of priests and centralized mediators. We are looking at a positive move toward “the ordination of ordinary people” (p. 31). The authors believe we must separate from institutionalized church to some large degree. Since the apostolic or early church movement was one of mission, the authors believe a return to that concentration is what God desires. They believe this is what Jesus intended.

On this point I diverge a little from the authors in that church as we know it must be replaced with what they’ve called Apostolic Genius. It is not because the method is not a good or a correct one. It is that instead of replacement or needing to be liberated from the current structure of church, it seems to me a blend is more in order. I don’t think the institutionalized state of the church after 2,000 years of what the church has gone through God intended to abandon. A lot of good came from the Constantinian movement that institutionalized the church. It had its negative implications to be sure, but it also had its positive implications.

Though there were great lessons in piety and purity learned from similar movements such as monasticism, the organized church was right to warn against isolationism that tended to stem from the monastics. It was the organized or institutionalized church that took bold stands against heretical movements while the desert fathers were largely disengaged. There were only two occasions in which Anthony of Thebes came out of his dessert confines to make public appearances to declare his positions: the situation with Diocletian and in support of Athanasius’ opposing Arianism. Let’s not forget the shoulders upon which we stand regarding what God has done with the institutional or structured church.

What I hear more predominantly from those who are frustrated with organized church is not so much the rigidity of programming as the hypocrisy of leadership. It is the lack of genuine love for people and their creative expression. What the un-churched desire to encounter is genuine leadership that is sold out for Christ and living the holy lifestyle that is preached; empowered by the Spirit to break the yokes in the lives of those who desperately long for such aid and realness. I agree wholeheartedly that an expected outworking of this includes missional activity in the community. I think where I differ is that I don’t believe the answer is as strongly missional as the authors do. The both/AND motif seems to lean more heavily on the missional side. We need organized structure too.

The authors say that the early apostolic movements were more “grassroots” and “movemental” as opposed to structured. This is a bit misleading. Some of the early churches took this shape because those Jews who supported Christ as the Messiah, i.e. enter Paul, were banned from preaching in the synagogues, which were organized assemblies of God’s people. This word for assembly, ecclesia, is not necessarily connoting only organic movement, though it doesn’t exclude that. The authors are correct to say that ecclesia was not meant to describe a building. The word carries forward the use of (Qahal) or congregation in the Old Testament, which basically means a group of people gathered for a particular purpose. The authors says that God “permits” (32) some level of institutional structure. I believe this tends to downplay the reality a bit. From the desert in the Exodus we start to see the use of organization and physical structures accompanying the Qahal. In the New Testament church, there was both local church regularly gathering (i.e. Timothy) and the work of outreach and mission (i.e. Paul).

The authors use a formula to describe the type of movement they are writing about:
Multiplication Church Planting + the Mission of All People Everywhere = Apostolic Movement

What empowers this move is a term the authors use and expressed in the beginning of this blog entry: Apostolic Genius. It involves 6 elements:

1. Jesus is Lord
2. Disciple-making
3. Apostolic environment
4. Missional-incarnational impulse
5. Organic systems
6. Communitas

I enjoyed a helpful section about the idea of community, which stated that clarifying purpose, principles, and belief within organized bodies strengthens more than the efforts of assets, expertise, ability, or management competence can do (p. 46). The people of God are first and foremost a covenant community. This is true. A helpful comment from Michael Fullan is quoted regarding two common failures in leadership : “indecisiveness in times of urgent need for action and dead certainty that they are right in times of complexity” (p. 48).

I’m looking forward to the discussion. More to come. Blessings, Saints.