Missional Leadership And The Freeway - Part Two
This is "Part 2" in a three-part post. The other parts can be found here:
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Not Demographically Or Culturally Diverse Enough?
In 2001, when The Salvation Army asked me to plant a church in Hamilton, their desire was for it to be a "Generation X church". At that time that was the language of doing a new form of church in order to reach a younger generation of postmodern people. "Emerging" and "postmodern" weren't really concepts that were talked about in the church very much (at least not in my circles) back then. They basically wanted a new church for a new generation.
Evangelical churches across Canada had been losing young adults in droves (and other age groups as well) and The Salvation Army was no exception. This is partly due to the fact that the church has not necessarily always continued to contextualize its mission and the message of the gospel very well. And yet as Bob Dillan says: "the times, they are a-changing".
The Salvation Army were desperate enough (Forward thinking enough? Stupid enough?) at that stage to let a snotty-nosed, non-ordained kid start a church. They took a huge risk... and continue to.
When we started The Freeway I would say we were more hyper-modern than anything. It took us a couple years to stop doing some things just because that was the way we knew to do them (heavily influenced by the church growth movement, modernism, our church contexts, etc.), and instead to just follow Jesus, invite people to be part of his Kingdom, be a "called-out" community, and keep in mind the heritage from which we came.
At first we even said on our website: "while our style tends to reach Generation Xers and their children, we hope that anyone would be able to find community, grace, love and ultimately Jesus here." But that didn't feel right for very long... not that it wasn't true. But eventually we came to grips with the fact that this really wasn't an age thing, or a hip thing, or a candles, sofas, and no-sermons thing. What we were experiencing in terms of a paradigm shift was beyond that of age, culture, gender, background, etc. We also came to grips with the fact that we were to be about living in, being part of and helping to redeem a neighbourhood... a neighbourhood which is very demographically diverse (and fairly culturally diverse) and we needed to reflect that.
However, The Freeway as a church community has overall continued to be very young... and very white, demographically. Approximately 70% of our community are between 21 and 35 years old and approximately 95% are white. Our current leadership (the cohort) sort of reflects that - the youngest member is 21 and the oldest is 35 (I'm not saying who's who) all of them are white.
If it were up to me, I would say that we are not demographically diverse enough as a community (or leadership) to really have an impact on our neighbourhood. I have read some great articles and books on the need to be purposefully diverse. Here are some of them: book, pdf article, online article, online article, etc. I have had conversations with Dan Sheffield and others about this whole thing. But I do not know how to organically shift the community from all white, mostly young to a more diverse community. I want to. I just don't know how to... and it's not just up to me anyway.
We don't really reflect the people we are trying to incarnate the message and life of Jesus for. And while I understand it's not really up to me to choose who is part of our church community and who isn't... and I think Jesus has placed particular people in this particular context for a reason, I do think we need to intentionally reflect the community we are trying desperately to serve, if we can. We need to think about possible reasons why we aren't more diverse. We need to make a move, a change, something. Clearly the Kingdom of God is diverse and if we are to reflect that Kingdom here on earth, we must in fact be diverse as well.
Our leadership (along with our "called out" community) must reflect the community/neighbourhood we are trying to serve. Notice I didn't say "reflect each member of the church community we are a part of". It is not about us as followers of Jesus, it is about the community outside that God has called us to serve. In trying to create missional community we musn't get too caught up and spend too much time making sure that all the "christian hangers-on" are satisfied. That would be a waste.
The role of pastors/leaders in a missional community is not to care for the people who have been around the church community for a while, but aren't moving towards Jesus in their journey. They should exist to model what following Jesus is like, they should tell the story of Jesus in a way that inspires, they should, as prophets, call the church to move and shake and love the neighbourhood in which they live... but they don't exist to meet the needs of all the church folks. Those who follow Jesus must learn to encourage, care for, inspire each other in the church community.
At The Freeway, we are simply not diverse enough, either as a community or as a cohort. What to do?
Let me leave you with this quote from Soong-Chan Rah from The Congress On Urban Ministry (via):
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Not Demographically Or Culturally Diverse Enough?
In 2001, when The Salvation Army asked me to plant a church in Hamilton, their desire was for it to be a "Generation X church". At that time that was the language of doing a new form of church in order to reach a younger generation of postmodern people. "Emerging" and "postmodern" weren't really concepts that were talked about in the church very much (at least not in my circles) back then. They basically wanted a new church for a new generation.
Evangelical churches across Canada had been losing young adults in droves (and other age groups as well) and The Salvation Army was no exception. This is partly due to the fact that the church has not necessarily always continued to contextualize its mission and the message of the gospel very well. And yet as Bob Dillan says: "the times, they are a-changing".
The Salvation Army were desperate enough (Forward thinking enough? Stupid enough?) at that stage to let a snotty-nosed, non-ordained kid start a church. They took a huge risk... and continue to.
When we started The Freeway I would say we were more hyper-modern than anything. It took us a couple years to stop doing some things just because that was the way we knew to do them (heavily influenced by the church growth movement, modernism, our church contexts, etc.), and instead to just follow Jesus, invite people to be part of his Kingdom, be a "called-out" community, and keep in mind the heritage from which we came.
At first we even said on our website: "while our style tends to reach Generation Xers and their children, we hope that anyone would be able to find community, grace, love and ultimately Jesus here." But that didn't feel right for very long... not that it wasn't true. But eventually we came to grips with the fact that this really wasn't an age thing, or a hip thing, or a candles, sofas, and no-sermons thing. What we were experiencing in terms of a paradigm shift was beyond that of age, culture, gender, background, etc. We also came to grips with the fact that we were to be about living in, being part of and helping to redeem a neighbourhood... a neighbourhood which is very demographically diverse (and fairly culturally diverse) and we needed to reflect that.
However, The Freeway as a church community has overall continued to be very young... and very white, demographically. Approximately 70% of our community are between 21 and 35 years old and approximately 95% are white. Our current leadership (the cohort) sort of reflects that - the youngest member is 21 and the oldest is 35 (I'm not saying who's who) all of them are white.
If it were up to me, I would say that we are not demographically diverse enough as a community (or leadership) to really have an impact on our neighbourhood. I have read some great articles and books on the need to be purposefully diverse. Here are some of them: book, pdf article, online article, online article, etc. I have had conversations with Dan Sheffield and others about this whole thing. But I do not know how to organically shift the community from all white, mostly young to a more diverse community. I want to. I just don't know how to... and it's not just up to me anyway.
We don't really reflect the people we are trying to incarnate the message and life of Jesus for. And while I understand it's not really up to me to choose who is part of our church community and who isn't... and I think Jesus has placed particular people in this particular context for a reason, I do think we need to intentionally reflect the community we are trying desperately to serve, if we can. We need to think about possible reasons why we aren't more diverse. We need to make a move, a change, something. Clearly the Kingdom of God is diverse and if we are to reflect that Kingdom here on earth, we must in fact be diverse as well.
Our leadership (along with our "called out" community) must reflect the community/neighbourhood we are trying to serve. Notice I didn't say "reflect each member of the church community we are a part of". It is not about us as followers of Jesus, it is about the community outside that God has called us to serve. In trying to create missional community we musn't get too caught up and spend too much time making sure that all the "christian hangers-on" are satisfied. That would be a waste.
The role of pastors/leaders in a missional community is not to care for the people who have been around the church community for a while, but aren't moving towards Jesus in their journey. They should exist to model what following Jesus is like, they should tell the story of Jesus in a way that inspires, they should, as prophets, call the church to move and shake and love the neighbourhood in which they live... but they don't exist to meet the needs of all the church folks. Those who follow Jesus must learn to encourage, care for, inspire each other in the church community.
At The Freeway, we are simply not diverse enough, either as a community or as a cohort. What to do?
Let me leave you with this quote from Soong-Chan Rah from The Congress On Urban Ministry (via):
Within a decade or so, the majority of Christians in the United States will be non-white. I can say that with confidence because all the sociological trends, all the ways the white church is declining and all the ways the immigrant church, the African American church, the Spanish-speaking church is growing by leaps and bounds.
Within a decade, in every metropolitan corner of the United States, we are going to see more non-white Christians than white Christians. Why is it that the leadership is still all white? Time magazine does an article on the top 25 evangelical leaders. Twenty-three of those spots are filled by white evangelicals. Why is it that the face of the "emerging church" is always white?
I look at invitations I get to conferences on the emerging church, and it's the same old story. They'll have a leadership of 40 people, and one or two will be non-white. The message is that the next generation of leadership that is supposed to come out of this emerging church movement is a perpetually 29-year-old blond male with a goatee.
The emerging church is not that 29-year-old blond male with a goatee. The emerging church is the young black male in the urban setting. The emerging church is the young Latina female. The emerging church is the second-generation Haitian American. The emerging church is the child of Brazilian immigrants. That's the true emerging church.
And when we talk about leadership, we have to see that the leadership of the next generation cannot be all white because that's what we've had to put up with for the last 50 years. The white captivity of the church means that there is time when those of us coming from the boundaries, not in the existing power structure of the American evangelical church, need to take on greater positions of leadership.
Even though we might feel we're not up to the task, even though our self-image tells us we're not good enough, not strong enough, or not white enough, it's time for us as young Asian Americans, Caribbean Americans, Native Americans and Latino Americans to start taking on the mantle of leadership.
Labels: leadership, the freeway, writing