Working in Denmark 2011
By Pat Taylor Ellison

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When our International Research Consortium met in Copenhagen this past April, Pat Keifert and I were both privileged to attend, since the cost of our travel was covered by earnings from three days of work with Danish church leaders. This arrangement of work days was thanks to the gracious efforts of our partners there, Dr. Hans Raun Iversen, Sabine Kleinbeck, Birger Nygård, and Mogens Mogensen.

One of those work days was with advanced church leaders from Copenhagen and its surrounding area. We presented, along with Dr. Frederick Marais, the lead consultant for the South African Partnership for Missional Church, a lesson called “Six Excellent Mistakes We’ve Made,” in which we highlighted the errors in planning and teaching that even well-meaning and intelligent leaders made that led us down the wrong path. These mistakes included assuming that if we would use only the right strategic tools and techniques, Christian community would form, and assuming that if we would simply give people enough information, they would automatically form a new culture. Highlighting these six mistakes got considerable rich conversation going among that group.

Perhaps our mistake that fit the Danish situation best was our continual underestimation of the power and influence that the Christendom paradigm has on the imagination of ourselves and the churches with whom we work. And in Denmark, where thousands of persons still have their babies baptized, still go through confirmation, get married, and are buried from the Church, the power of Christendom is strong: the church building is still a milestone location of life. The Danish church is in the wonderful position of being seen as a stable, grounding, important place for rituals of life. And, at least in many Danish Christians’ lives, their associations with church – prayer and music, for example – are positive and uplifting. But many Danish pastors will say that those ritual moments are the only moments most of the people of their parish come in, and we may never know how those experiences affect people’s day-to-day life with their families and with their co-workers and neighbors.

When we would suggest, as we often do, the missional church belief that the church’s job is to be taken up into the mission of God in the world, we encountered both real excitement and true confusion. The deep listening and then experimenting required to find out what God is busy doing in a community doesn’t feel like a good fit with the stable, positive presence for life rituals that people have come to expect from the Danish Folk Church, which is tied in many ways to the government, the calendar, and physical property. It seems fixed in place and time. When we think of missional churches, we think of flexibility and of the nimbleness of moving with the Holy Spirit. It makes sense that people doing ministry in the Danish Folk Church could have trouble envisioning how do be nimble in fixed places and times; at the very least, creative thinking and missional imagination will be needed. Certain leaders understood it right away, especially those in ministry to immigrant peoples and transient populations of the city or countryside, for whom creative thinking is the only way to create bridges between unfamiliar people groups.

I learned that our six mistakes (among many others) are worth sharing with leaders who may have been thinking about missional church for years as well as with those who haven’t thought about it yet. That’s partly because we continue to learn by sharing our mistakes and what they have taught us, reflecting on and articulating what we have learned in the presence of others, and it’s partly because the church (especially Christendom kinds of church) is risk- and failure-averse, so sharing what good can come of mistakes is a powerful witness to the mission of God.

Pat Taylor Ellison, Ph.D., is the managing director of research for Church Innovations.