A New Form Of Baptism – Bucket One, Bucket Two, Bucket Three…

Starting a Jesus-centred community, or church, from nothing is an exciting proposition. I mean, we literally get to rethink everything…EVERYTHING! From leadership structures to how resources are allocated, from expectations of what it means to follow Jesus to the space we meet in, all of it is up for discussion! Of course, we do have central pillars of unity – Scripture, Jesus and Mission – but we don’t have the cultural hang-ups, the customs, the power structures, the locational restraints of an existing church, which gives us plenty of room to play in.

Yet every ‘playground’ has some boundaries, some fences, and some tan-bark to break the fall when things don’t go so well – what are the boundaries and what is the process for a church plant? And what is going to be our process to ensure everyone plays nicely and no one gets hurt?

I think that this is the primary task of leadership. It is the process of facilitating and enabling a faith community to emerge and wrestle with some very core issues of identity and expression, and to come to a consensus which empowers the whole to be more effective, fruitful and united.

Whilst pioneering can be exciting, it can also be pretty scary for people who are part of the process, who find themselves playing in the church-planting playground. All of us invest different levels of meaning and significance into different expressions and experiences of church, particularly if we’ve grown up with certain expressions and have people we love and respect who still hold tight to these expressions. Once you start stripping these things away, it can feel very personal and it can be hard to understand what is happening. We can quickly realise that the very things that the new church are viewing as hang-ups are the same things that have provided a level of comfort, security and meaning in our spiritual journeys for a long time.

I often read sharp critiques of postmodernism’s tendency to deconstruct everything until there is nothing left. But deconstructionism in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, I actually think it’s a good and necessary process. Without deconstruction you cannot reconstruct, without pulling things apart you cannot put something back together again. Church planting, in essence, is taking the core essentials of the Christian faith and re-expressing, re-engineering, reconstructing them to engage in a new culture. It is when you begin to deconstruct beyond the boundary markers, when you step over the unity essentials where you hit problems and begin to miss the entire point of what you are doing.

The other problem we face is how to ensure a safe deconstruction-reconstruction journey which breathes life, depth and intimacy instead of alienation and hurt. Deconstructionism can be extremely bad if you either (1) go tooooo far, or (2) are not sensitive and thought out in the process of how it’s done. I’ve been thinking that a good process or rhythm would be to move through three phases of: exploration, experimentation and adoption.

We explore through Scripture, sharing, discussion and dialogue, trying to discern what the Spirit is saying to the faith community.

We experiment with how to apply these insights after exploration and hearing the voices of the community.

We adopt practices which resonate with and are meaningful for the worshipping community, and we continually critique our practices and positions through ongoing exploration and experimentation.

This should help to minimise the hurt of ‘change’ and at the same time create ownership and shared meaning throughout the whole community of the practices we do adopt. People would then know that when we’re in the ‘exploration’ phase on any given topic that we are just searching out, hearing perspectives, and working hard to hear what it is God is saying to us as a community. It’s important that in these exploration times that the individual wrestles with their perspective and motives and input them into the community for critique and feedback. We then start trying to apply this by adding experimentation to our ongoing exploration, before finally adopting practices and positions which resonates with the community.

So I imagine our Sunday gatherings will be quite minimalistic early on: perhaps just a talk from Scripture and a sharing of where the community is at? Over time we add expressions of worship, prayer, music, art, stories, media, sharing and other meaningful practices depending upon the exploration/experimentation/adoption cycle which is shaped by the community itself.

In this way, ‘worship’ will be both meaningful and indigenous to the culture we trying to engage with. I’m not sure how I made the jump to just ‘worship gatherings’, but the logic and the process can be applied to any number of the things mentioned at the start (leadership structures, resource allocation, expectations of following Jesus, space we meet in etc. etc.)!

Am I missing something here?

What do you think?