Dr. Christine Pohl is professor of Church and Society/Christian Ethics. She has taught at Asbury Theological Seminary since 1989.

Hospitality is at the center of the Gospel. A life of hospitality is essential to the life of a follower of Jesus. “Hospitality condenses a lot of the meaning of the Gospel.”

A Rich Tradition
There is a rich tradition of hospitality in scripture:

Genesis 18 – Abraham and Sarah – Unexpected guests are offered hospitality… food and rest. They discover they’re hosting angels and receive a message of joy and hope.

John 1 – Jesus was not received hospitably but he was hospitable. He welcomed people and fed them.

Luke 24 – The Road to Emmaus. When he breaks the bread they recognize him.

Rev 3:20 – Jesus standing at the door knocking.

Eden – humans hosted in a garden, Exodus – food from heaven, Jesus says he himself is the bread of life, the bread form heaven…

A Powerful Apologetic
In the first century hospitality marked the gospel as authentic because people from diverse ethnic backgrounds shared meals together and treated each other hospitably. This was a great witness to the watching world. It was a very powerful apologetic.

Almost everything happened around hospitality and shared meals. In the context of hospitality they nurtured new believers. It wasn’t easy even then. They had to remind each other to remain hospitable. The overlap of household and church is where hospitality happened.

But it was not just a Christian practice. Hospitality was generally viewed as a pillar of morality on which the universe rested. It was seen as a form of mutual aid and was often connected to the divine. But only Christianity tied it so closely. The ancient church was convinced that opening their doors to the poor and helpless was the way of Jesus but also did it because they might be entertaining angels. (Heb 13:2)

Our welcome to strangers will reenact God’s welcome to us. We welcome one another as Christ welcomed us. The practice of hospitality roots us in mundane things: food, security, shelter…

Hospitality is at the heart of congregational and pastoral care and outreach and worship. Christian hospitality is different. It isn’t a way of reinforcing social standing but a way of negating it. We are to welcome everyone, not just people who are able to return a favor.

Protestant Reformers recovered the practice. We’ve domesticated it, turned it into hosting only family and friends. The loss of a biblical hospitality practices was at the root of the formation of welfare and other social services.

Why Recovery of Hospitality is Important
1. Gives us a fresh lens to think about our faith

2. Crucial to the credibility of the gospel. People today are convinced less by rational arguments (although those too are important) than lived-out beliefs

3. The number of people who are coming to faith from non-Christian backgrounds. It encourages personal mentoring, accountability and relationships that are formed through hospitality

4. It helps to reconnect church and home. “The front door of the home is the side door of the church.”

5. Our culture is open to mystery (in fact, dangerously so) and as Christians we have a window into the ultimate mystery.

Challenges when we embrace this practice
Why do we hesitate? What makes it hard?

It rearranges our lives and lifestyles. Our lives are more exposed. When we invite people and share ourselves it exposes our deficiencies and weaknesses. It unravels our attempts to project a certain image. Vulnerability. Hospitality stretches us.

It is riskier today; we can’t always welcome everyone. But people don’t always need a social worker or a therapist; they need a friend, someone to care for them.

Summary
Consensus here is that this was a lot to take in for one session… and I haven’t done the session justice with these notes. I’ll be getting and reading her book and there’s a study guide too.

David Fitch is the Betty R. Lindner Chair of Evangelical Theology at Northern Seminary and the founding pastor of Life on the Vine Christian Community in Chicago.

What is “ideological church”? How does it undermine mission? Ideology is the study of how ideas form social groups. When we church plant we are forming a sociological group. We gather people around a way of life.

How do churches get ideologized? We gather people around a vision that often subtly puts down other churches in order to differentiate. But why not state what we’re for rather than organizing by what we’re against?

1 Cor. 3:22 – whether Paul or Apollos or Ciaphas, all belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God. Paul is calling us out of ideology and ideological church.

We’ve become known by what we’re against. That’s the kiss of death for mission. When we do that we gather other people who are mad about the same thing. We just seem prone to manufacturing ideology. When we ideologize we only attract those who already agree with us and cut off the people who don’t. It helps to drum up business when we sloganize. It draws people of like mind.

People coalesce around ideological objects. The problem with this is that we lose you reason for being once the object we’re against disappears.

Four signs a church is being ideologized

1. Organizes around what we’re against. Us vs. them
2. A perverse enjoyment about the things you believe. “Whew, I’m glad we’re not them!” “See, we’re right after all!”
3. The idea that was good originally gets removed from practice
4. It works to distance us from on-the-ground real life. It distracts us from living the belief in any way.

We must break the cycle of ideological church. Ideology shapes us to have a posture over against someone else. We simply become antagonistic.

What is consumerism? Is it a behavior? It’s more than a behavior; it’s a worldview, a way of understanding the world.

Luke 15 – The Parable of the Prodigal Son. The younger son represents consumer Christianity. He doesn’t want his father; he wants his father’s stuff.

Commodification: We have come to believe that nothing has inherent value. In a consumer culture everything becomes a commodity. Divorce, abortion, slavery, pornography, prostitution… these are all examples of commodification. People have no inherent value other than what they can provide for us. There are more slaves in the world today than any other time in human history. This is possible when we see people as having no inherent value.

And we tend to see God this way. He has no inherent value other than what he can do FOR us. God revolves around me.

Alienation occurs when we separate a product from the means of its production. We begin to believe that these things only exist to satisfy our desires.

All of our production of bibles, bible studies, and other materials aren’t making a dent in biblical illiteracy. Why? We only want to know what God can do for us now. We’re not interested in the grand story. God is a product we consume; we only want what we can get from him. “We’ve made Jesus into the duct tape/WD40 combo pack. He’s what you need to fix just about everything.”

Consumer Christians are fat Christians. So we try to give them to “exercise”… “get on mission”. So they come to believe that they’re supposed to be doing something FOR God and when people “get” this we consider it a victory. This is an overreaction to consumer Christianity. We’re turning Christian consumers into unbalanced Christian activists.

We have made mission into an idol. We’ve made the mission of God into something more important than God himself. We must be careful that we don’t so overreact to consumerism in our churches that we fall off the other side. We can’t make activism into an idol.

God doesn’t need you to accomplish his mission! Does he prefer you to obey? Yes, but your value and significance does not depend on what or how much you do.

Implications
John 21 – Jesus asks: Do you love me? Then feed my lambs, tend my sheep, feed my sheep. Our first task is not to call people to a mission, but to call people to Christ. The sheep belong to him, not to us.

When we make mission the “be all, end all” we tend to take the same calling, our calling and make it universal for everybody. But it’s not our job to impose a calling on them; Jesus will do that. Our job is to lead them to him so that they can hear his call to them.

The Dilemma
We do have “fat Christians” but what’s the solution? Lead them to Christ and then leave them there. Take the mantle of calling off our shoulders and put it back on His shoulders. They are his sheep; let us feed them well.

Summary
This was unexpected and is bound to be unpopular with some attendees, but it had a much-needed corrective tone. We do tend to overreact, thinking that our response to negative trends must be completely absent of the characteristics of that which we are reacting against.

Has mission been made into an idol? In some ways and in some places, yes it has. I would venture to say that the CPC is one of those places where this danger exists. Skye’s talk runs quite contrary to the thrust of the previous CPC.

***Recommended as a good companion to Skye’s talk: “Church Planters and Missionolatry” [He didn't mention it and I’m not sure he’s read it, but his talk reminded me of it.]

Roger serves as the district executive coach of 26 Baptist General Conference churches in Alberta with a mission to help establish and empower missional, disciple-making leaders and churches.

Worskshop: What sustained Jesus for mission? What is the connection between spirituality and mission? What does the Great Commandment say about the structure and substance of a “missional spirituality”? What practices will enlarge our hearts for mission, disciple-making and church planting?

Emil Brunner – “The church exists by mission as fire exists by burning.”

John Frame has a book coming in 2012 called “Missional Theology”. “Missional” is not a fad or church growth theology. It’s not going away. It is embraced by a wide variety of theological perspectives.

“The North American church culture is not spiritual enough to reach our culture.” – Reggie McNeal. Does this imply that the culture is more spiritual than the church? How is he defining “spiritual”?

John 4:31-35 – Jesus and the woman at the well… The sustaining food of mission is to do the will of the Father. A missional spirituality feeds and forms mission.

We are discipled by our culture by consumerism, celebrities, technology, etc. These shape people’s spirituality. And so we need “counter practices”.

“Temple Spirituality”
Temple spirituality believes that if we run people through enough programs, they’ll come out the other end “spiritual”, equipped, and capable.

Temple spirituality says that ministry occurs on the weekend at the church building. This is a “temple fixation” rather than teaching people to experience God on the road, as they go. Helland says that people are not shaped by temple spirituality… this is what leads to the lives of Christians being no different than those of the larger culture.

Video: The Missional Church Made Simple

Jesus spent more time on the road than he did in the temple. He didn’t try to transform culture; he took on the culture. It’s not about doing missional things but about being a missional people. It’s both an identity and a worldview shift.

Spiritual formation is about enlarging the size of our heart. Teaching is transformational to a degree but unless we put these into practice, they are just ideas and won’t amount to much. Practice is part of teaching.

There is no place for a personal piety that doesn’t work out in actual mission. The issue is not methodology. It’s about being a missional people. How do I become like Jesus in my context? If there’s no evidence of transformation in our own lives, then we have no message for others. Don’t just study the bible; push bible studies into bible practices.

Summary
Helland’s workshop emphasized the importance of both teaching and practice in forming a missional spirituality. Missional spirituality is embodied love. Obedience and remaining in Christ are key practices for discipleship.

Takeaway quote: “If there’s no evidence of transformation in our own lives, then we have no message for others.”

Dr. Gary Nelson is the President of Tyndale University College & Seminary and author of “Borderland Churches: A Congregations’ introduction to Missional Living” (Chalice Press, 2008).

The church he attends in Toronto is a reflection of his community. It’s very diverse and it is known because of its involvement in the community. Yet the pastor feels like a failure because there are only about 90 people there and the worship leaves a lot to be desired. Yet 60 of the 90 people weren’t even going to church before they went there. This is actually success. The measuring sticks that we’ve been given are wrong. If we use the wrong measuring sticks we’ll miss what God is doing.

Jeremiah 29:4-7 is experiencing a revival of interest. You can’t understand it without understanding Psalm 137. Jeremiah 29 is a response to 137. Gary’s paraphrase of Jer: “Get over it. I brought you here. Deal with it. Be the church here and now.”

We get stuck remembering the good old days, but they were never actually as good as we remembered. Memory has a way of making things seem better. We think having services at different times or not wearing ties is revolutionary, but it’s not. A lot of our responses in the last 20 years have been a response to what our memories told us. People are not waiting for your worship team to get better before they start attending your church.

Between 1955 and 1989
1955 – Canada was still a churched culture. Edgar Bailey was named one of the top 10 preachers in Canada by a national magazine. Now? Would MacLean’s run such a story? No (although Doug Koop says “Maybe…” and he’s thinking of pitching . This would not be an acceptable idea. [this is more humor than anything else]. Canada is no longer a churched nation.

He recommends a book by Mark Noll called “Whatever Happened to Christian Canada?” Church became meaningless in our society because we stopped believing in evangelism.

1989 – We wake up to discover that people aren’t going to church anymore. The big churches were ok but overall attendance took a nosedive. People weren’t angry, just apathetic. While we were doing attractional church, we became irrelevant.

We are driving people to get involved in their neighborhoods but everything about church structure pulls us back. But being with people destroys their caricatures and preconceptions of what Christians are.

More and more Canadians have less and less Christian memory. They’re not looking for a better church experience; they’ve never had a church experience. More people sail in Vancouver than go to church. Not only are people not coming, they don’t even has the inclination to.

Suggestions
It’s time to listen to what God is saying to the church in Canada. Our context is profoundly different than the USA – our present is their future. Until we understand that small church pastors will feel like failures.

The church doesn’t have a place at the table in Canada. We’re on the edges and that’s where we should be. It makes nominality impossible. The missional conversation has not emerged in Canada from the seminaries like it has in the US. It started in an urban context with churches struggling to understand the urban context. Nelson say this is a much better way.

It’s not 1955 anymore and it’s time the church in Canada wakes up to that fact. God wants us to do what he wanted Israel to do in exile in Jeremiah 29. Settle down, plant ourselves in our place of exile and seek the prosperity of the cities around us.

What people need to know is who we are, but they won’t until they’ve met one of us and begin to wonder if we’re actually different that their preconceptions. It’s time for the church in Canada to become itself and to stop mimicking others.

Summary
Nelson makes a good point about the differences between Canadian and American religious culture. If our present is their future, why do we rely so heavily on literature that emanates from their experience?

Session one of this year’s Church Planting Congress in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Jethani starts by inviting the conference attendees to sing Amazing Grace together. “Was blind but now I see…” Is this just poetic, a metaphor, or could it be more literal?

What was distinct about Mother Teresa? It wasn’t just was she did in the world, but how she saw the world. She saw things differently.

We are the most well-resourced Christians in the history of the world… and yet stats show that we are losing ground. How can this be explained? Its not about a lack resource, its about a lack of imagination. If we don’t see the world differently than the people around us then we will never change the world.

Parables designed to illuminate a different was to see the world. We have resources but we don’t have “eyes to see”.

1. How do we see the world?
Judas betrayal in the garden… Jesus and Peter… same experience, different responses. Violence, non-violence.

Peter sees the world as a dangerous place to be responded to with force. Driven by fear, he seeks control. This is a conventional view that informs the way we lead as church leaders. So we seek to mitigate fear and are fueled by that instead of love, compassion, and generosity. And so the fruit of our ministries looks the same as the fruit of the world. He cited that there is no statistical difference between evangelical Christians and non-believers in areas of divorce, racism, and immorality. [A claim that is debatable at best, dubious at worst. But let’s not get into that now…]

The problem is we don’t see the world differently so we use the same tools and reap the same fruits. Jesus rebukes Peter for this. Live by sword, die by sword. We live in a different way. Jesus is full of faith rather than fear.

“If we don’t see this as a God–with-us world we cannot be Christian leaders…” When we see the world this way, we are released from fear. We cannot lead like Jesus if we see the world through conventional eyes?

So, what fear is driving you?

2. How do we see the church?
In 1965 Walt Disney bought 43 square miles of swampland with a vision to build a city on it. They thought he was crazy. Then he died. Eventually it was built and opened, but it wasn’t what Disney envisioned. They built a theme park instead.

[You could see the Jesus/church analogy coming from a long way off…]

It’s a parallel to the church, which began with an innovative and imaginative leader, Jesus… who says, “You can do the things that I have done…” The Holy Spirit comes and this happens… then… something else started to happen… expansion. Subsequent generations of Christians didn’t have Jesus’s vision, so they went back to what they did best and used conventional means. The wild imagination of Jesus gets diluted and they go back to conventional thinking.

The church began as a fellowship, then became a philosophy (Greece), then an institution (Rome), then a culture (Europe), then, in America, an enterprise.

We use the structures and methodologies of consumerism and force them onto Christianity. The church becomes a corporation, an event, entertainment, religious goods and services. We do this in order to reach a consumer society. We sell comfort, but nobody grows spiritually by being comfortable. We only grow through suffering via either discipline or trial. So if our goal as churches is comfort, we’ll never have spiritual growth.

How much time and resources do we put into our worship services? What if we took 10% of that and taught people to pray? Worship services have their place but their glory always fades. Do you see the church as an institution or as the people of God? [false dichotomy alert – can't we see it as both?]

Are our churches rooted in the conventionality of our culture or in the imagination of Christ? Vision… imagination… how do we see the world? Are we driven by love or fear? How do we get the mind of Christ? By God’s amazing grace.

We don’t need more money, strategies, methodologies… but more Jesus Christ. Ask God to pour out his spirit and fill us with the mind of Christ.

Summary:
Jethani is a compelling speaker. He speaks with confidence and doesn’t rely on notes except for lengthy quotes. He issued a good, strong challenge to us as church leaders.

He displayed something that I expect to be a common thread here over the course of the conference: cynicism about worship services and “church-as-it-is”. Granted, one of the reasons we’re all here is a sense of dissatisfaction with “church-as-it-is”, but the last Church Planting Congress (Calgary 2009) was saturated with this type of cynicism so I’m hoping this ones steers more clear of that.

That’s it for tonight. More tomorrow.

I’m in Winnipeg this week at the 2011 Church Planting Congress. Here are some of the featured speakers: Christine Pohl, David Fitch, Gary Nelson, and Skye Jethani. More info on speakers here. Info on workshop leaders here.

I’ll be posting here as often as I find something interesting to post about. Hopefully I’ll find a lot!