The Glocal Church II

In my previous entry I discussed the secular dimensions of what I see as the next great revolution of our generation and how it is reshaping our definition of locality. My argument was that technological advancements in the realms of communication and transportation have affectively made the world a smaller place...and since locality is primarily about accessibility, as our accessibility increases our local spheres of influence and relationship also increase!

In this post I'd like to discuss a primary spiritual dimension of this next great revolution. My argument is simple: church is about to change! In fact, the transition has already begun, and if we are to catch the wave of the next great move of God we must shift our hearts and minds into alignment with what God is doing in the body of Christ!

So what is God up to, and how will it change the way we do church? From my perspective the answer to that question is found in Malachi 4:5-6.

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.

We have entered into the season in which God is releasing the spirit of Elijah within the body of Christ, and the role of the spirit of Elijah is to return the spirit of fatherhood and sonship to the body of Christ. God is removing the curse of fatherless from the earth by causing there to be a turning of the hearts of fathers toward their children, and the hearts of children towards their fathers. Where this does not take place, a curse remains on the land.

To state this clearly, God is reviving the role of the spiritual father in the body of Christ, and in doing so he is teaching us how to become his children, and how to become mature sons and daughters of God! This is the great revolution that is just now beginning to break forth in the body of Christ that corresponds to the social revolution that is happening in the world. Together, these two great movements will completely transform the way we see church, the way we see our role in the kingdom of God, and the way we grow in our relationships with each other and with God.

However, when I say this this movement is just now beginning I do not mean that people are just now beginning to speak of the realities of spiritual fatherhood and sonship. In fact, the concepts are as old as the body of Christ itself. Paul referred to Timothy as his true son in the faith, and in Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy the concept of the spiritual father has always remained strong. However, Luther and the reformers threw it out because Jesus said that we should call no man father. The result has been an overly individualized form of Christian spirituality that has pervaded the Protestant world, manifesting itself most prominently in the tens of thousands of denominational entities that have cropped up since the reformation.

Yet, even in the past 100 years talk of spiritual fatherhood has begun to creep up in Protestant circles as many evangelicals (especially pentecostal-charismatics) have begun to sense the presence of this reality and have sought to trace its contours.

But the nature of spiritual fatherhood and sonship -- what it really means -- has yet to be adequately articulated and understood within these circles. We've known about it for a long time, but we're just now beginning to understand it. The next step is that we actually begin to practice it!

In the next move of God pastors will begin to see themselves as the spiritual fathers of their congregations and church members will begin to see themselves as the sons and daughters of their respective houses. The result will be an increase in the authority of the set man to bring freedom to the hearts and minds of the sons and daughters of the house and an ability to pass down the things that God reveals from one generation to the next (see Deuteronomy 29:29).

This will change the way we see and do church because what we will look for will be completely different from what we have looked for. The concept of the local church is a spacial concept and it is dependent upon transportational and communicational restrictions. But what will happen as those restrictions are being alleviated by technological advancement is that people will no longer look for a church in their region to join, but will join themselves to the man or woman of God who gives birth to them through their teaching. Sons and daughters are born through teaching, just as we are all born again through the incorruptible seed of the word of God which lives and endures forever (1 Peter 1:23).

This shift in my thinking has taken place gradually over the past few years, but has hit its tipping in just the past 6 months, and it was my experience with the Bermudez family in Oklahoma that brought my thinking on this subject to its present place of clarity. Rene and Naomi Bermudez live in Oklahoma just outside of Tulsa. Through a series of events, Rene discovered a couple of my sermons on youtube and was blessed by them. He them shared them with his wife, who was also blessed. Then he discovered Living Hope's website (one of the two churches that I pastor) and my podcast there and began listening to sermon after sermon with his wife. Then he discovered my blog and facebook fanpage and began digesting everything I communicated there. Finally, he discovered that Living Hope live-streams all of its services and began gathering his family around their computer to participate in our services from Oklahoma.

At the time Rene contacted me he and his family had already been following our ministry for three months. They listened to every sermon, read every blog post and every facebook status update, participated in every service. The only thing they were missing was a connection to the community. Rene finally contacted me with a request that confronted me with a hole in my paradigm: "Can we become members of Living Hope from Oklahoma?" I didn't know what to say; that request didn't fit into my paradigm...so I told him I'd have to pray about it and get back to him.

But how could I turn him and his family away? I had this sense that they had been born into my house through the teaching they had received! I was now responsible for this family just as I am responsible for the teaching. But how could I receive them? They are in Oklahoma, for God's sake! How could they be a part of the community from Oklahoma?!?

Then I realized that the technological advancements in the realm of communication had already begun to answer that question. One of the most powerful community builders that Living Hope has is a facebook members group. As soon as we receive people into membership we add them to that online community, and the interactions that happen there are nothing short of amazing! When someone feels down, they let the group know and the members encourage one another right there on the wall! So much love, so much care, so much encouragement is communicated there, it causes me to marvel!

So we accepted the Bermudez family and livestreamed them into the next membership course. We gave them a Barnabas Partner (I ministry we created to help integrate people into the life of the house) and introduced them to the body. We welcomed them into membership along with the others who went through the process, and then added them to the facebook group. The result is that they are more connected to the life of the house than some people who live around the corner! The community loves them and they love the community! In fact, they are so interactive in the facebook group that someone invited them to their home for dinner, thinking they lived nearby!

How is it that a family in Oklahoma watching a computer screen can be more connected to the life of a church than people who live around the corner from it? Because the life of a church is not regional life, it is spiritual life, and the Spirit transcends space and time. Where the life of the Spirit is imparted between a spiritual father and a spiritual son, there we have a manifestation of "church" that is more family oriented than regionally oriented. The idea behind the local church is that family and community can only happen within a particular locale. This is not true even in the natural! When I moved from the Bay Area to Pasadena to go to Fuller Seminary my parents did not say, "Its been great having you as a Robinson, but now your first priority in Pasadena is to find a new family to be a part of." No, I was always a son of Peter and Diane Robinson, and that sonship has never been a spacial phenomenon. So why do we send off church members to new cities and instruct them to find a new spiritual family? Because our concept of the local church is communal, but not familial. When you are a son, you are a son, and that transcends location.  And how do I know who my sons are? My sons are those who receive my teaching! And my spiritual father is the one whose teaching I receive as a son. Wherever this occurs in the world, we've just begun to experience church the way God intends it in the days to come. Locality, from this perspective, is a spiritual phenomenon, not a regional phenomenon.

In the next post I want to flesh out spiritual fatherhood and sonship with greater detail in order to reach for greater clarity on this all-important reality! Thanks for sticking with me. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

The Glocal Church

We are living in the midst of what I consider to be the third great revolution of the modern world. The first was the Industrial Revolution, the second was the Technological Revolution, and these two have given birth to a third: the Social Revolution. The result of the first two revolutions was to make available to the masses what was once available only to the few. The result of this third revolution is to make the masses available to the masses. Not only do we now have access to creative innovations that can enhance the quality of our lives; we now have access to each other!

The two primary contributors to this revolution have been advancements in the realms of transportation and communication. Advancements in transportation have given us greater physical access to each other and advancements in communication have given us greater virtual access to each other, and the way in which the tension between these two areas of advancement is resolved will determine the shape of the future of the modern world.

I say ‘tension’ because it seems that transportation and communication are rivals at heart; the more you have of one, the less you need of the other. Traveling to visit a friend is unnecessary if you can communicate with that friend just as effectively in the privacy of your own home, and communicating with your friend remotely is not so attractively if you find that you can travel to their location without inconvenience. We are finding that moderns highly value both efficiency and intimacy and the realms of transportation and communication are advancing as transportation becomes more efficient and communication becomes more intimate. Because both of these values are entrenched in human nature, we can be sure that both realms will continue to advance and neither will ultimately overshadow the other. There will always be contexts in which we prefer the efficiency of virtual presence over physical presence and there will always be contexts in which we prefer the intimacy of physical presence over virtual presence and for each of us the balance between the two will be at a slightly different place.

While these two areas of advancement seem to be working against one another, in actuality they are working together in a powerful way. (To put it in Hegelian terms, the thesis of transportational advancement and the antithesis of communicational advancement has produced the synthesis of Social Revolution.) The result of the Social Revolution has been the radical redefinition of the term ‘local’. Remember when ‘local’ calls were restricted to your area code and calling even just a few cities away was considered ‘long distance’? Now nationwide calling plans are the standard! That means that – as far as calling plans are concerned – California and New York are ‘local’ entities. What is more, Skype, iChat, Facetime and the like have given us the capacity to have communicate with people in other nations just as easily as we communicate with someone across town. This means that, from a communications standpoint, the concept of ‘local’ is relative to the availability of technology. The ‘local’ and the ‘global’ are becoming less and less antonymous and more and more synonymous. The local and the global are coming together, and this is where the idea of ‘glocality’ is coming from.

So what does this mean for the church?

What the concept of glocality is doing is expanding our understanding of the nature and meaning of the local church. Every other sector of society has transcended a regional concept of locality except the church. Companies are outsourcing and offering remote employment opportunities and communicating through telepresence, etc. Clubs are providing international memberships. Schools are offering satellite programs and online degrees, and the list goes on! What all of these entities are discovering is that locality is about accessibility, and if we can utilize communication technologies to supplement the lag in the development of transportational technologies to make local resources accessible at a global level, we have effectively localized the globe!

The next wave of revival will be sustained by the glocalization of the church. The future of church in the 21^st century is glocality, and this applies not only to the mission of the church to reach the nations for Christ, but to the membership of local churches as well. This element of glocality will come into being not simply as more religious resources (like podcasts, live streams, books, etc) are made more readily available at the global level, but as the element of commitment/covenant is added. We already have access to a surplus of information, but what we are starving for a corresponding surplus of intimacy. What we are finding is that information without intimacy is ultimately empty!

The availability of information, goods and services was the product of the technological revolution, but the availability of community is the promise of the social revolution. The social revolution gives us access to relationships that we otherwise would have no access to because of physical distance. The church of the 21st century must learn to harness this power of connectivity and exploit it for the purposes of the kingdom of God! We must go beyond the dissemination of religious goods and services and actually bring the people of God into covenant relationships. When this happens we will exchange the pervasive consumerism that plagues contemporary Christianity for a robust sense of global presence facilitated through covenantal relationships. Satellite memberships: its the next wave for the church of the 21st century, and in my humble opinion, the future looks bright! 

In the next several posts I’d like to explore this idea further in order to reflect upon the biblical, theological and practical implications of it. I hope you join me for the journey, and I'd love to hear your thoughts and responses!

DTR: Define the Relationship!

Parenthood, childhood, friendship, courtship, engagement, marriage... All of these are forms of relationships. They are not mere titles or roles, but they are forms that relationships may take. Neither are they arbitrary, or easily changeable! There is no such thing as pure relationship...relationship that does not take a specific form. Every relationship is specific, and the ability to identify and cultivate the specific form of a relationship will determine the power of it either to heal or to destroy. Happiness happens when relationships are properly stewarded, grief is the result of a failure to properly steward relationships, and the failure to properly steward a relationship begins with the failure to properly define it.

The task of defining the relationship is the task of determining its purpose and therefore the responsibility of each party. For instance, if you are a parent, the purpose of your relationship with your child(ren) is relatively obvious. If you hesitate to correct/instruct/encourage/discipline/engage them because you're worried about overstepping your boundaries, you've misunderstood your responsibility in the relationship. But if you understand that you bear the responsibility to raise them properly and to shape their character, then you will rebuke them when they need to be rebuked, encourage them when they need to be encouraged, instruct them when they need to be encouraged, and you won't feel any angst about it because you're clear on your role and responsibility.

However, defining the relationship can also be a difficult thing to do. For instance, if you are a member of a local church your relationship with your pastor is not primarily a friendship. Your pastor has a responsibility toward you and you have a responsibility toward him/her. If you try to transform that relationship into a mere friendship you will miss out on the resources that that relationship is supposed to procure for you. The failure to properly define that relationship will ultimately lead to grief!

The most poignant context for misdefining relationships is within the complex of possible relationships between members of the opposite sex. It is essential for your present and future happiness that you properly define your relationships with members of the opposite sex so that you can be intentional about stewarding those relationships correctly! The failure to do so will lead to grief...to much grief...too much grief!!! So for God's sake, listen to what I'm about to say!

The most common mistake that single friends of the opposite sex make is allowing for long-term ambiguity in regard to the nature of the relationship. Have you ever been confused about how to define your relationship with a member of the opposite sex? Have you ever found yourself having coffee and thinking, "We're just friends, right?" Ambiguity happens when a male and a female develop a friendship that is more intimate than their other friendships with members of the opposite sex, yet not quite intimate enough to be called a "relationship." So what is it? Its not a friendship, its not a relationship...it can only be defined as a train-wreck waiting to happen!


Why is this the case? Because a relationship that cannot be defined cannot fulfill any specific purpose! Non-purposive relationships are also non-directional, and therefore aimless. If you are confused about the nature of your relationship with someone, confusion becomes the definition of that relationship...and a relationship characterized by confusion can only create confusion. The primary principle for the health of any relationship is the principle of clarity! If you are friends, be friends. If you are boyfriend and girlfriend, be boyfriend and girlfriend. If you are only friends but are acting like boyfriend and girlfriend, you are deceiving yourselves! But before you move into the dating/courtship stages too quickly consider what I have to say next.

The dating and courtship levels of relationship must fulfill a specific purpose as well, and that purpose is not simply to do away with your loneliness! Many people date just so they can have someone to date...so they don't have to be left out on Valentines night. Dating and courtship are not simply for the sake of the thrill of companionship. That mentality leads to debauchery. The purpose of dating/courtship is to move toward marriage. If you are not interested in getting married, you shouldn't be dating. If you know in your heart that a particular person is not marriage material, you have no business dating them!

Keeping this principle in mind will create boundaries in your thinking that will protect you from much grief. Pursue clarity, reject confusion, embrace responsibility. Do this and you'll find happiness!