| A Letter From the President Click here to return to the Church Innovations web site. Steven Johnson at the opening of our Think Tank in Dallas last week set a high standard for the entire event. He drew me into his argument so quietly, intensely, and profoundly that I am still thinking about it often involuntarily. He began by reporting, “I know a man who lives in a bus.” Everything followed from this sentence as he told about a man in the small community in west Texas, Buffalo Gap, where Steven serves a congregation along with his work as a professor at Abilene Christian University. He described the almost iconic journey of forming Christian community, beginning with tentative one on one visits to this man and his bus home. He narrated the quite tentative and tense first encounters and the gradual movement of these two men becoming friendly acquaintances. He tells this story while also reflecting on the nature of forming a missional church, rightly noting the forming of a missional church requires the mutual hosting and dependence upon the stranger. The story about his knowing a man who lives in a bus becomes a moment in the greater narrative of Scripture and the subsequent creating of the church, then, now, and into the future. Steven makes much of this difference between a story, powerful as it is on its own, and its place within a larger, more comprehensive narrative, perhaps even a meta-narrative. He rightly notes the complex relationship between the story about the man he knows who lives in a bus and the biblical story and the subsequent development of a missional church. This complex relationship was the primary area of thinking, exploring, and experimenting in this year’s Think Tank, and most people caught this challenge. Some didn’t, and I wondered at their missing Steven’s main point and the basic question of the Think Tank. For most, however, the question of what God was up to in the individual stories that make up our own and others’ journey within missional church and the greater narrative of Scripture and the journey of the church within the life of a missionary God were fully captivating. They took the invitation into very practical, and very reflective, work in their small group cohorts. They wondered about their preaching, their visitation, their formation of new Christians and old within the biblical narrative. They struggled to learn from one another how the stories, indeed often shards of stories, of many contemporary persons might be knit into the greater story of the missionary God. The struggle to learn from one another separated the sheep from the goats in this event. Some came expecting to hear experts give the answers to how to grow missional churches. They were only modestly pleased with their experience. Those who came expecting to search and struggle with others on the central questions around story, narrative, God and the missional church went away exhilarated according to oral and written evaluations. As one senior pastor of a very large Midwestern mainline congregation that has been searching to find its own place in the economy of this Trinitarian God said, “I was treated as if I came with insight, competence, wisdom, and the willingness to learn, and I was rewarded with others colleagues who were equally insightful, competent, wise and willing to learn joining me in this vital conversation.” This kind of response thrills Church Innovations staff because we labor hard to precisely gather such insightful, competence, wise, and willing to learn leaders from very different social locations in the church. We hand-pick these leaders, personally invite them, and organize everything to engage them at their strengths as actors in this shared work. This year the critical mass of participants took our invitation seriously and joined the Think Tank as such participants. They took Steven Johnson’s challenging beginning seriously and jumped into the deep end and began to swim with us. The water was deep and fast, and chilly and cold at times, but the shared work and workers more than made up for those inconveniences. I am both delighted in our staff’s work and our partners’ faithful participation. In Christ's Peace, Pat Keifert |
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