i think you are right in terms of the freedom and “wildness” of the Spirit…it feels dangerous…and maybe that is what we need…for the church to re-discover the wild…

i’m really resonating with the “reciprocal life of gifts”…

Wow, there’s so much here. I feel like this topic is expanding at an alarmingly rapid rate – which is perhaps a positive indicator that a fresh inquiry into Pneumatology has widespread implications. That’s good news! Some thoughts:

I would agree we’ve limited our imagination – I think we still have much to explore in terms of what the Spirit is doing in terms of racial reconciliation, women’s issues, forgiveness in a political context, economics, and (at the risk of seeming puritanical) sexual wholeness.

Still, I think more so than limiting the realms in which we look for the Spirit at work, we tend more frequently to contain the Holy Spirit entirely. I think there’s a “wildness” to the Spirit – indeed, to God on the whole – that we’re very uncomfortable with. To be blunt, I don’t think, by and large, we’re willing to “Go wherever the father goes and do whatever the father does.” In my view revealing that to us is not only what the Spirit is largely doing, it is also what it means most to be “missional.” Personally, I think we’d rather know and approve well ahead of time what God is up to before we commit to it. But…that’s not Christ’s example, is it?

In the U.S. we’ve commodified everything. In a market-based society there’s simply no alternative to commodification if you care about being publicly recognized as successful. Let’s face it, most of us care about being recognized. I know I do.

In my experience spiritual gifts inventories are largely useless because they’re entirely based on a person’s experience. People who have successful experience teaching are indicated as “teachers.” If you have no experience, you have no indicators (in which case you’re just guessing – and, by extension, so is the test).

I think a healthy community is a far better “living” spiritual gifts inventory. One of the things I’ve noticed about genuine leaders over the years is that they are often able to intuit a person’s gifts and potential – even if that person is very young (I’ll bet most of us had a leader call out our gifts when we weren’t even aware of them). Good leaders who hear from God have a knack for looking at people and “seeing” what’s there when other (especially that person) don’t. Parent’s (who are simply another kind of leader) often can do the same thing with their children. I’ve known many parents who could tell you what their children’s spiritual gifts were at a very young age.

I think this indicates something about the role of the spirit-filled community in the formation of individuals – which then of course loops back to form the community in turn. There is a very tangible cycle of intuition/proclamation/experimentation/ reflection/intuition that strongly resembles praxis. Again, I point back to the reciprocal life of gifts; I think the economy of the spirit is an economy of gift-giving.

Positive Deviance reminds me of Affirmative Inquiry. When I was on staff at a larger church in Ohio we experimented with Affirmative Inquiry among our larger leadership circle (approximately 50 leaders) as a means of discerning what God was leading the entire church toward. I was a way of trying to move away from the dominant senior pastor model. It was an interesting experiment, but very difficult and with mixed results.

I’m flattered that you pointed toward our little church plant community as an example of positive deviants. I think we’ve stumbled on some promising possibilities, but we have a long way to go before I could begin to say we’ve succeeded. I might also recommend Jason Evans and The Ecclesia Collective as well as Mark Van Steenwick and Missio-Dei. I can think of several others, but along with Kevin Rains (who Steve mentions above) all these folks have long term experience finding fresh expressions that seem to make a real difference.

We have so much more to learn about Jesus, about church, about God Himself and we will constantly be on a journey of discovery until Jesus comes back. It will never be perfect, but it will improve over time. This is essentially the reason I used the title ‘Evolving Church’ in my blog, because the church is always going to be evolving, adapting, changing over time, because its made up of living beings who are constantly evolving and a culture that is always changing.

There are bad things about past churches, but not all ‘new’ churches are brilliant or get it right either. Its about knowing what we can take from the past and what we can discard, and taking what we do keep and re-interpreting it for today’s world in a creative innovative way, as well as continually discovering new things. Not being afraid to ask questions or take risks and move forward, and it all works together.

The one constant that underlines this all of course is God, whose essential nature and character never changes and is always with us no matter what happens.

I sincerely believe a lot of the church is sick and needs saving, but that’s not to say some have it all right and others don’t, being right isn’t the issue for me, that’s a different agenda based on insecurity. But where people are clearly misinterpreting scripture and using it to manipulate people, or supress a group of people (like women for example), or where they are acting in a way contrary to the nature and character of God there is a righteous anger that comes out, and its not about anyone being right, its finding what is wrong and trying to bring the love and peace of Christ into it.

Church and following Jesus, for me, is about the restoration of all things to how God originally designed them, and its only possible through the cross of Christ. Its about increasing the shalom of God in the world, and bringing heaven closer to earth. In a bigger context, saving the church is essentially saving the people of God, because we are the church. I think when people say that phrase they mean they don’t want the church to continue with its bad public image, with the hypocrisy and scandal in leadership in some churches, with divisions, with a faith that ignores the big issues of social justice and merely fits in with the establishment or convention, and a church of inaction which merely serves itself and tries to seperate the sacred and the common and put itself on a pedastal, rather than do what Jesus shows us, which is to bring Christ into the everyday, and bring heaven to earth by making sacred and everyday the same, in the sense that church and Jesus is part of everyday life, rather than just on Sundays.

Thanks for your post Jase, it got me thinking a lot.

I realize that we all do need to be careful that we don’t get on our high horses and shout out how wrong people are, and its not right to think that we are suddenly going to take away all the churches’ problems with one fell swoop, and niave to think others may not arise – we are human after all. It can be hard to separate our opinions, which may be strongly held, between our desire/need to be right (which is an easy temptation), and what is right, and between what we think God wants and what God actually wants.

We need to distinguish between these, and we need to be careful before making rash judgements or decisions about issues.

this pathological tendency of focusing on “not being” strips the power and significance from our faith communities, and i think blinds us…especially to how Jesus was: Jesus was ‘for sinners” not ‘against’, He spoke to the wellness and really ‘infected’ them with His righteousness.

i think this can be seen even in our post-charismatic-ness with the focus becoming pathologically-centered on what we have been calling in our conversation here ‘exotic manifestations’ and the hype and the eventual cynicism and almost delight at the frailty of humanity witnessed in such cases as recently in Florida with todd bentley, et al. it’s almost like the news-cycle here i america, mostly ‘negative coverage’ (meaning news of disaster and death)…our challenge is how do we re-discover wellness, or point to the positive deviants for those looking, because they usually are not hyped, less exotic yet still frail and following Jesus.

one positive deviant i would point to that i forgot to add on my recommendations would be the mustard seed with mike bishop: http://www.whatischurch.com/mustardseed/

I wrote a post based on the idea at http://deepchurch.org.uk/2007/05/15/the-wellness-of-church/

If I can cut and paste the core of that here:

‘In the world of psychiatry, students study not just the manifestations and causes of mental dysfunction, but the idea of ‘wellness’, of what helps the well part of a patient become ‘more well’. In the worlds of education, and business, rather than focus on people’s weaknesses, there is the move to explore and develop people’s strengths. In looking at developing countries,debt relief agencies, look for positive attributes for assessment, instead of previous models that just measured the bad ones.

This doesn’t mean you ignore glaring weaknesses and problems inherent to the system you are involved with. What it does mean is your focus stops being ‘what is wrong?’, and becomes ‘what is right?’. Back to a medical example, doctors have had to learn that referring to a pathologist, doesn’t lead to good health.

And with that in mind, I often wonder if we have made the mistake in our assessments of church, in becoming almost pathological. We look at current forms of church, and church in the past, with an eye to the ‘ill health’, the deformations, the things we dislike etc. Then we construct idealisations of church in reaction to this ‘sickness’ diagnosis. Church becomes about ‘not being’, and we measure who we are by what we don’t do, and what we are not. Are we left with any understanding of ‘wellness’ of the church at all?’

If you want to read more of me feel free to go to my blog (click on my name, you’ll be redirected). I look forward to reading more of your posts too.

There is much more I would like to respond to in this post, and hope I will given a bit of time. Thanks again for this post, and this series, its been very helpful.