PART ONE: UNDERSTANDING OUR TIMES
These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. Revelation 3:14b-16
Overwhelmed by Complexity
We came to Boston in 1964. Now it is 2009. We’re still here. Same neighborhood. Same church. Same job. But in many ways, everything has changed! From the very first day on the job, we were hit with a sense of tearing fragmentation. We felt pulled in a million different directions at once. As the days, weeks, and months went by, we longed to focus on just one task, but it seemed as if we were always trying to manage eight or nine mammoth projects at the same time, the whole while being interrupted by many people and their immediate needs. We felt manipulated by the restless city and overwhelmed by the complexities of the lives of its individuals.
We had been on the job five months when Judy and I decided to report to our board every job, duty, and act we had performed to date, no matter how menial or insignificant. We put down how many hours we spent on each activity. When Judy typed it up, we had filled six two-columned, single-spaced pages.
The process of compiling that report caused Judy and me to step back and begin to think objectively about what we were doing. It also reinforced the feeling that our lives were fragmented and the needs and complexity of the city were overwhelming us. I began to ask myself if we were really doing any good. What were we trying to do in the chaos? What were our goals?
Apart from the original board mandate to “get people saved and into a good church,” it seemed like our basic, working goal in this harsh environment was fairly low—just to be active in ministry without causing too much damage. I realized I had no idea how to understand what was going on around us, much less what good or bad we were doing.
At the end of any day, a huge number of unplanned activities had occurred over which we had no control. It seemed to me at the time that reality was so chaotic that the practical, Western approach of trying to divide these many needs and activities into manageable pieces and dealing with them separately would have only burned us out.
“I’m not going to just be manipulated by all these forces,” I announced to Judy one night. “Somehow we’re going to get above that; we’re going to make a major shift in our thinking.” We began to keep our eyes and ears open to discover how the system worked and how we could work within the chaos for the good of the kingdom.
It appeared that everything was constantly moving. Did anything in the city not move? I reasoned that, if I could find something stable, like some truths about society that were consistent across thousands of years, then I would be onto something, and I would have something firm to build on, a place to stand in the midst of the chaos of the inner city.
As I searched for answers to understand our times and how to do ministry in my difficult urban environment, I leaned on God all the harder and prayed all the more. The feelings of desperation in my heart kindled within me a desire for “doing the Bible.” Please understand I mean more than “doing what it says,” which is a starting point. By “doing the Bible,” I mean that I want to see that the things that happen in my life are biblical things, the experiences I have are biblical experiences, and the patterns I see working in my life I also see working in the lives of people in the Bible. For example, if I am to live biblically here and now, if what happened in the Bible is going to happen in my life, I would expect to see churches as a result of myministry!
In those early days, neither Judy nor I could have imagined how God would eventually use the Emmanuel Gospel Center to support the birth and growth of literally hundreds of new churches in the coming decades through various supportive ministries and partnerships. We have seen the book of Acts demonstrated in our city!
Understanding My Culture
Armed with determination to figure out how the complexity of the city really worked, one of the first things Judy and I stumbled upon was a social construct that has become a cornerstone of how we do and teach ministry. It started when Judy noticed that our neighbors had a very basic way of classifying people into two groups, as epitomized in a statement a woman named Rose made to her:
At first I was really afraid to meet you, but I found out you’re like a real person I can talk to—not like a social worker.
Judy was pretty flabbergasted until she realized that Rose was not castigating all social workers. Rather, Rose was referring to the estrangement she felt relating to professional people. When talking with a social worker, a person who was talking to her for some practical reason, she experienced an “us/them” dichotomy of herself as the “client” versus “the professional person in charge behind the desk,” a person “who does not really know me.”
We began to see this dichotomy everywhere. On one end, close, personal, first-order or primary relationships shaped the way people related to each other. At the other end, the way people related was shaped by impersonal, second-order or secondary relationships. As we continued to explore these ideas, it was very easy for us to see the mainstream culture of the broader society in Boston as being dominantly secondary in nature. That is, most of the people in the culture had secondary relational characteristics. We began to call the broader culture secondary culture. We also began to see that many people from the various ethnic cultures exhibited more primary relational characteristics, and so we began to talk of groups of people who collectively took on characteristics of the relational dimension as primary culture.
In my lifetime, I have seen one of the most dramatic cultural shifts in all of human history. The world has changed! Since the middle of the twentieth century, it seems the entire Western culture has shifted from being the relationship-centered, primary culture it was for most of human history to becoming a construct-centered, technologically based, secondary culture. We now live in a dominantly secondary culture where the majority of the people are secondary in relational orientation. This societal change I call the Great Transition.
There has been a huge shift in the balance—or in where we find ourselves along the continuum—of primary and secondary aspects of culture in our Western world. Not only in the Western world but also increasingly in many parts of the developing world, the masses of many cultures are now living as did the small elites of the past. All these cultures are increasingly dominantly secondary. That was not true for my grandparents, and even my parents.
I wonder about what the Great Transition means for Christianity. Today, the masses of the populations in our Western culture are secondary in orientation, in contrast with other, more relational cultures, where the masses are dominantly primary. And here is what particularly troubles me. I am not alone in hoping that God will soon send a new, great revival to Boston. My hope is that the Quiet Revival will grow into a larger movement of God. But how can revival come to Western Christianity if we no longer have a relational orientation, which was the social seedbed of the revivals of the past? Can there be spiritual vitality contextualized to an impersonal, secondary culture?
Does Christianity fit the culture around me? Is the gospel message relevant and alive in today’s world? Of course it is! I am convinced, now, that our new, dominantly secondary culture can actually nurture a vital Christianity! I hope that by the time you reach the end of this book, you will agree.
Understanding the Urban Church
One day, I invited a small but growing African American, urban, storefront church from our own neighborhood to hold a service at our little neighborhood mission. They happily agreed. They were not familiar with the mission tradition and did not know how we normally operated, so on their scheduled day, instead of sending a preacher and a song leader, The Mount Calvary Baptist Church brought their entire robed choir and much of their forty-plus member congregation. The music, praying, and preaching were breathtaking!
We were so surprised! It was a wonderful fellowship service. Something I saw that evening changed me, and I have never been the same. The change in me eventually brought about changes in the strategy of our entire ministry. As I looked around the Emmanuel Gospel Center that night, I realized that our people were not being “preached at”—they were a church congregation having fellowship with another Christian church. At the close of the service, Mount Calvary invited us to do the same. They did not play the games we suddenly discovered we had been taught to play. For the folks at Mount Calvary, there was no room for an “us” and “them” dichotomy. They loved us openly and treated us like family. This was not a mission service. This was church!
This was one experience that introduced me to the indigenous church in the city, churches that I discovered had an invisible quality of spiritual vitality. I have thought a lot about the kind of spiritual vitality I was looking for, and I am learning to describe what was just an inner urge back then. To me, true spiritual vitality is found when an organic Christian community is outwardly fulfilling its highest purpose in ministry. By “its highest purpose,” I mean being in tune with God’s will for us and doing all that we do in a way that follows his designs. When something is spiritually vital, discernment, teaching, leadership, and outgrowth flow from prayer. A shared inner faith experience evidences the community’s alignment with the Bible. In a vital church, mutual honesty, learning, and true caring characterize people’s relationships with God and with each other. Further, there is a shared sense of mystery about the living dynamic that generates exciting Christian experience and expression.
Understanding the City
Many of the first lessons we learned were lessons of the street—things that you pick up when your hands get dirty doing grassroots ministry. But a more conceptual framework came along to help me understand our complex urban environment: a new social science birthed across the river from us at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What surprised us was that we were already learning some of the same things these social systems theorists were writing about.
In 1971, I read Urban Dynamics by Jay W. Forrester1 who is considered the founder of the social science of systems thinking. Systems thinking looks at large systems like businesses, organizations, cities, and cultures from a wide perspective, taking in overall patterns and cycles in the whole system instead of focusing on isolated fragments or single events. This broad view can help us identify the real system-level problems in our world and understand how to address them so that real change can take place. When I first looked at Forrester’s book, its extensive math and statistical analysis was mostly a maze of information out of my reach, yet I sensed immediately that what he was observing about complex systems was very critical information for us as we sought to understand how to do the Bible in the city. One by one, I explored the different parts of his theory, and, in time, found each of them relevant to urban ministry.
Several of Forrester’s concepts explained why working in a complex environment such as a city is so difficult. These include:
- Drift to low performance
- Our intuitive solutions to problems are often counterintuitive
- Insensitivity to parameter change
- Resistance to policy change
Other concepts described how to take a positive approach, including:
- Internal revitalization and the city as a life form
- Leverage points
- Simulation models
Understanding God’s Living System Design
The corporate church in the city is a living system. The word of God speaks to an organic unity called “the church,” not to a collection of individuals, nor to an organization. Are we thinking the same way when we think about our church? When we make decisions, are we considering how those decisions will affect the entire body of Christ, which is one body according to Scripture? Are we truly aware that the church is a living body as the Bible teaches? Or do we think of our church as just the folks who show up on Sundays in one particular place?
Throughout his life, Paul centered his missionary work in cities, with people who had various complex networks. Why did he do that? I think he saw the city as an organism strategically designed by God that could, by its living, dynamic design, help extend the work of the kingdom of God. He realized that the city would spontaneously export Christianity to the region around the city.
When, in 1993, we discovered the Quiet Revival and that Christianity had 50 percent more churches and had grown in many ways while no one noticed, the common assumption was that Christianity was dying in the city. In fact, we could identify no program or person responsible for this growth. So where did all these churches come from? Beyond the obvious answer of “God did it,” which is correct, I wanted to know how he did it. In trying to answer that question, the only answer I could come up with—looking at it from dozens of angles over and over again—was that the Bible does have a method of ministry that fits the first century as well as the twenty-first. This biblical method is based on something so basic that it hasn’t changed more than two thousand years. And the only thing that made sense to me was that the Quiet Revival happened because 1) the body of Christ, as well as the city, really are living systems, 2) and since they are, in fact, living, we know they receive their life from God, and 3) that life produced the Quiet Revival.
Perhaps you are wondering, as I did, “How do I ever learn to minister in a complex interrelated, living system? How do I keep all the factors and variables straight? Don’t they bump into each other and get all tangled up? Can I even learn to do ministry that takes into account these larger living systems?”
I am convinced that Christians can learn to do ministry in alignment with the living system way that God works. We just need to learn to adjust our thinking so we see things the way God does and use the tools he provides. As a place to start, to illustrate the difference between living systems and the constructed world, join me in my kitchen as I consider my cat and my toaster.
The Cat and the Toaster
What is the difference between a cat and a toaster? Tough question? For a dozen years, I have asked this question in all my classes to help urban ministry students begin to understand the difference between living system design (the things God makes) and constructed design (the things we make).
God’s living systems have thoroughly interrelated parts. Unlike the toaster, if I try to fix my cat, Perky, with pliers, her whole system will be negatively affected. But also, I find I relate to living systems differently than I do to constructed things. I do not relate to Perky by understanding or cognitively apprehending just a few of her many complex parts. When I see Perky on the couch in my apartment, I don’t have to be an expert on her cochlea nucleus to appreciate her. I don’t have to know anything at all about her parts or her complexity to appreciate her. I relate to her as my pet, a cat, a fully interrelated and interdependent living being. I do not relate to Perky the same way I relate to my toaster. In fact, I don’t really relate to my toaster at all—until it is broken. I use its functionality, when it is working, but I do not relate to it. (Okay, I may yell at it when it burns the toast, but I do not relate to it.)
So, the essential difference between a cat and a toaster is this: The cat, representing the living creations that God makes, is a highly complex and thoroughly interrelated living system. The toaster, representing what people make, is a comparatively simple constructed thing.
Understanding Our Times
So what is all this about? We Westerners need to learn to understand our times and understand how the world that God created works. We understand the nature of organic growth in the physical world of God’s creation, but for some reason we have trouble seeing organic growth when it comes to our ministry or God’s living social systems. We go about our work in ministry assuming that everything in our world is of the same nature, fashioned in a simplistic cause-and-effect design, easily understood and easily fixed. We need to break out of that box.
Although the world is more like the cat, if our inner assumptions, or mental models, tell us it is really like a toaster, we will act as if it is more like the toaster, and be completely unaware that we are causing problems by treating living things with toaster tools. This inability to use the right tools might appear to be just a small problem in the way we tend to look at things, but in truth, it is huge.
Jesus observed the Laodiceans. He knew their actions and found they did not measure up to his standard. He challenged them about their deeds, and that same challenge comes to us today. As they were found wanting, so are we! We’re like the Laodiceans: dependence on our riches and technology has made us wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked. We need to own this and repent. How can we avoid continuing down this path? It starts with the way we think.
1 Jay W. Forrester, Urban Dynamics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969).
(text excerpted from The Cat and the Toaster, pp. 5–82)
This condensed version is 