Mark Vitalis Hoffman on technology and the body of Christ
My day has arrived to be featured on the Religion and Media Blog Tour 2012 with Professor Mark Vitalis Hoffman (website, blog), Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg. (More information and a listing of all the tour stops here.) In August, LTSG, in partnership with Luther Seminary, will launch of a new religion and media concentration in its MAR program. Read Mark’s response (and my question to him) below:
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Greetings, Adam! Thanks for participating in this blog tour. I spent 10 years at Hope Lutheran in Fargo, and through that connection I picked up on your work with The Project F-M. I’ve been enjoying following your blog for some time now. I’ve been all the more interested reading about your studies at UND in Religious Communication and Digital Life. You posed the following question to me:
When Christians gather for worship, they often refer to their church as “the body of Christ.” In claiming this, they seek to emphasize the communal nature of worship. But one congregation is just that one congregation while the body of Christ is all believers everywhere. How might technology used in worship connect believers across town, across time zones, and even across all time?
My initial thought is that we are already connecting with the body of Christ across time and space without the need of any modern technology at all! Our Scripture, liturgy, prayers, and hymns are all the expressions of a long history of global Christianity in which we participate. I get what you are saying, though, and some of that participation can feel rather minimal when it mainly consists of an occasional song from an African or Central American background. Further, I suspect many Lutherans, for example, feel more connected with the 16th century reformers than they do with the Christians in the Baptist or Presbyterian churches down the street. Worse, I know that many times we don’t have much communion in church with the person in the pew in front of us beyond the sharing of the peace. Can the use of technology in worship do anything about this?
It may be coming sooner than we think, but I’m not ready yet for the kind of thing envisioned by Google’s Project Glass. (Check out the video on that page if you haven’t seen what this is about.) Basically it is a way of continuously connecting the real world with the virtual world. I’m trying to imagine being in worship with a pair of these glasses on. It might be great to have access to the Bible text and check out a cross-reference or pull up the history of a hymn as we are singing it. But do we want to be able to summon everyone’s Facebook status as we look around the sanctuary in order to build greater community?
I just happen to be reading an article by John Fea on “rooted cosmopolitanism.” Though he is reflecting on institutional loyalties and the tendency to equate success with being somewhere else, I like the contrast of encouraging both the rootedness of life within a community and the broad perspective of being a global Christian. There are both technological and non-technological things we can do to increase our sense of connection within the congregation, but I do like the possibilities offered by technology to connect globally. I’ve been an advocate for the Sister Parish organization. Their goal is to promote
inter-cultural and ecumenical understanding by establishing linkages between churches in the United States and faith-based communities in Central America. The linkages are based on direct, person-to-person contact, with delegates living in each other’s homes and sharing each other’s realities.
It’s a wonderful effort and is often a life-changing experience for the participants, but it takes a lot of coordination and money. The person-to-person contact is critical, but this kind of interaction can both be promoted and sustained through technology. I think it would be fantastic to connect with a congregation from somewhere else around the world using something like Skype. (Yes, there are technology challenges, especially in developing regions of the world, but it’s becoming apparent in a place like Africa that smartphones are eventually going to allow everyone access to the Cloud.) To use virtual media to give a face and voice to real Christians around the world would be a helpful corrective to the complacency evident in much of Christianity in the United States. Instead of just praying for or contributing money for those who are hungry, we could actually connect with them. Or we could hear directly about the challenges facing Palestinian Christians or the persecutions experienced by Malaysian Christians or share the joy of the lively and growing communities of faith in Africa. I think it’s possible, and I’d like to think that our biggest problem will be trying to figure out time-zone issues!
And now a question for you and your readers: When you are in worship, are you seeking both a local and global connection? If the connections were only possible through technological media, would it still be real and meaningful?
My context, leadership strategy, & recent discoveries
A lot of my work leading The Project F-M has to do with understanding the context of Fargo-Moorhead, the broad context including young adults, older folks, and the established congregations in town. And then there’s the issue of my leadership, my self-awareness and approach to ministry. I’ve recently made some seemingly simple observations about both that have gone a long way in helping The Project F-M move forward.
First, it can be difficult to launch a new ministry when the status quo of ministry around you is pretty established in its ways. That’s not a slight against any of the wonderful congregations in Fargo-Moorhead; it’s just the case. Many folks who love Fargo and are active in ELCA churches here tend to describe the area’s churches as “traditional,” “conservative,” and “part of Christendom.” (Again: I’m not picking a fight, just reporting a description. It’s cool with me. Really.)
The issue for our more outside-the-box ministry, then, is how to function in this context. I’ve found Ron Heifetz’s work helpful here.
Significant change best (and most easily) comes after some sort of disruption. Broadly speaking, the Project F-M is attempting adaptive change in our community and in the church. Heifetz distinguishes between technical and adaptive change stating that technical change is something an expert can bring about. Adaptive change, on the other hand, requires a community to change its values, behaviors, and attitudes.
I’ve come to understand my work with the Project as attempting adaptive change in a place that would much prefer technical change. We haven’t had the disruption here to warrant adaptive change. That makes it pretty tricky work.
Second, it’s OK — no, it’s great — for congregations to carefully claim what type of person/family/new member they’d most fully be able to welcome into their community. Congregations cannot be all things to all people. I’m totally cool with them focusing their evangelism ministry on particular aspects of the community (as long as it doesn’t intentionally exclude).
If a congregation is great at youth ministry, then claim that and advertise it. Be bold. If you have a wonderful place for retirees then, perfect, claim that. Similarly, if a new family comes and they drove past another church on the way to yours but other other church might fit them well, tell them about it. They can save gas and be faithful disciples.
Yes, I really value diversity, I’d rather not congregations become monocultures. So, again, if a congregation wants diversity then they need to claim that, and reach out and invite diverse folks to their community. Similarly, if a congregation wants to become a neighborhood church again, it needs to visit folks in the neighborhood, knock on doors, host community meals, etc.
My hunch is that new church developments think much more carefully and clearly about the demographics and psychographics of folks they hope will attend their church; established congregations, while they perhaps once emphasized this, have grown to consider this sort of thinking as “market driven.” I’ve come to think it’s just good leadership.
Third: goals, goals, goals. After a few months working with the Project I brought a six-month plan to our Board that included a series of benchmarks for our work going forward. That was helpful to really get us moving from to more task-oriented leadership.
Now in 2012, we have even more fire under our feet because nothing focuses the mind like financial troubles looming in the same calendar year. (No, I’m not worried about buying food next month, but we are doing some good work on our questions of longterm financial sustainability.) The trick with leading our new ministry seems to be setting short-term goals, noting our progress on them, and then flexibly making the next list.
Again, these reflections are nothing brilliant or new, but they are incredibly helpful for me to note as a leader. Recently I’ve been astounded by how just a little clarity on our approach can add up for a much fuller picture.
So, ministry leaders out there: what realizations about your leadership style and/or context has affected your work? What kept you from realizing it sooner?
image by ivanmarn
No Need for Church | The Christian Century
An essay of mine, “No Need for Church: Ministry with young adults in flux” is published in the Feb 8, 2012 edition of The Christian Century. A teaser is posted below, which is also available to all readers on the Century website. To read it in full, find a dead tree edition, or subscribe and gain full online access.
Within the metro area of Fargo, North Dakota, and Moorhead, Minnesota, are scores of vital mainline churches. So why are 45,000 young adults—close to a quarter of the entire population—not connected to any of them?
In economic terms, it’s not a supply-side issue; there’s simply no demand for church from the young adults. In my new call as developer of young adult ministry in the Fargo-Moorhead area, I’ve been meeting and talking with young adults in area pubs and coffee shops. After only a dozen conversations, it became clear that what many mainline churches here offer—the worship, the programs, the intergenerational community—fails to connect with many in their twenties and thirties. Perhaps this was predictable, but for me, a 28-year-old pastor called to work with other young adults, it’s been a troubling discovery….
For the full piece, visit: The Christian Century website.
Occupy Wall Street & Christian Theology, a Conversation
Last night at Theology Pub we hosted a conversation consider the Occupy Wall Street movement and Christian theology. In truth, when I scheduled the topic, I was a bit nervous about how it would go. After all, the Christian church these days sometimes feels more like a corporate conglomerate than a fringe movement taking to the streets. The conversation, however, went beautifully and I left contemplating the many cross-over notions of Christianity and the #Occupy movement (OWS).
In last week’s news roundup on NPR, NY Times columnist David Brooks said, “I think the Tea Party is like, 11 percent of the country. My estimate is that Occupy Wall Street is 2 or 3 percent of the country in what they actually want to do.” I’m not sure what Brooks thinks “they actually want to do,” but last night a fairly mixed group of young adults — Christians, atheists, seekers, seminarians, pastors — was definitely more than appreciative of the movement. Here’s why.
First, we considered how OWS might connect to Jesus’ notion of the “kingdom of God.” (See Brian McLaren’s piece here.) Conversation hinged on what a new version of the world might look like, one in which there is less income inequality, everyone has a voice, and diminished injustice. We considered, also, how the Kingdom of God is something that is not only coming in the future, but something that we can glimpse here and now. Perhaps OWS can remind and inspire Christians to live out that kingdom mentality.
Second, since the OWS folks seem to be living out certain intentional practices such as offering hospitality, food, prayer, tearing down of golden calves, and so on, we wondered with Elizabeth Drescher how OWS might be seen as a spiritual practice. Folks were less open to this notion, as they didn’t see religious identity as a determinative aspect to most folks’ participation in the protests. Certainly there are exceptions (such as the Protest Chaplains), but I was personally intrigued how folks seemed to be willing to make a distinction like, “People do this not because they’re Christian, but because they’re fed up with injustice.” I don’t like that distinction one bit, but it seemed to drive several persons’ thinking and went over without much debate.
Third, the move of OWS to “kill the Buddhas of power and hierarchy in our society,” as Nathan Schneider considers here, was quite compelling to folks. Our young adults needed almost no time to point out different idols of wealth, power, prestige, celebrity, nationality, even unquestioned democracy that needed to be called to account. (Of course, it’s always easier to point out the false idols of others than it is to claim your own hangups.)
Finally, we ended with a brief consideration of how sin (both personal and societal) might be way to put Christian language to the brokenness OWS folks are protesting.
At the end of the night, my uneasiness about the OWS topic has subsided, only to be replaced by another troublesome reality. Our conversation went so well, tapping into much of Christian theology and the Bible, that I mourned the fact such polite, wide-ranging, political conversation would be difficult to host in many mainline churches. But then again, according to the young adults gathered last night, it’s not Christians who push this justice stuff anyway.
image by Rob Sheridan
Never Kill A Question
A Thoughtful Christian.com Post
The young adult emergent ministry I lead takes a different sort of approach to event planning than the approach of most congregations. From our inception, the bias of our leadership was not to jump to planning activities and events because, well, there’s plenty of churches in Fargo-Moorhead that lack young adults. “Why guess what young adults might want and guess wrong again?” our ministry’s board members figured.
So instead, using a community organizing approach, the ministry is committed to meeting with young adults and asking them what their values, needs, questions, and hopes are. Then, only when we know real live 20-30 somethings who aren’t currently connected to a faith community, we plan events.
Out of these conversations with young adults has come a consistent refrain: they want places where young adults can ask real questions about faith, forums that are open, supportive, open-minded, and don’t immediately jump to the “official” answer as if that solves all.
Out of these yearnings, we’ve developed Theology Pub, a bi-weekly discussion at a bar. In a society where sex, politics, and religion are still difficult to talk about (not just snicker about, but really disect) in diverse public settings, at Theology Pub we make a space for open discussions of faith and religion. With the help of a small group, I come up with the topic for the night and publicize it beforehand. I bring to the evening a discussion sheetfor everyone with some quotations on the topic, as well as some questions, and then whoever shows up goes to it. It’s heavenly to see.
I consistently get two comments from young adults about the events, one explicit and one implicit.
Explicitly, they really like the diversity of opinions of the folks who show up. This week, for example, we had several devout Roman Catholics, an Atheist, several Unitarian Universalists, a few Lutherans (including pastors), a Pentecostal, and several whose faith resisted any labels. The diversity of the group assures that there will be plenty of questions and disagreement. And we love it.
Implicitly, in my conversations with folks before and after Theology Pub, I find that they assume (and I’m going to say “rightly so” in most cases) that the institutional church down the block is not a place where they can go to find a forum to ask their questions. Few churches provide open spaces for theological dialogue. Events like Sunday School tend to be about teaching a specific lesson to a group of insiders rather than providing a space for outsiders to consider what they might believe.
Of course, this brings up the important question I ask myself daily: how do I balance providing an open space for questioning with teaching what the Lutheran Church (ELCA) believes?
I continue to wrestle with this one, in more ways than I can account for in a blog post. But I keep coming back to the point that having opportunities for faith-filled conversation, for places to ask tough questions, is a vital ministry in and of itself. Surely there’s room for more, but starting with the questions isn’t a bad place to start. After all, it’s where we meet many young adults.
A pastor friend passed along this powerful poem last week that beautifully describes our approach. May it bless you as it did me.
Never kill a question;
it is a fragile thing.
A good question deserves to live.
One doesn’t so much answer it as converse with it,
Or, better yet, one lives with it.
Great questions are the permanent
and blessed guests of the mind.
But the greatest questions of all are those which build bridges to the heart,
addressing the whole person.
No answer should be designed to kill the question.
When one is too dogmatic or too sure,
one shows disrespect for truth and the question that points toward it.
Beyond my answer there is always more,
more light waiting to break in,
and waves of inexhaustible meaning
ready to break against wisdom’s widening shore.
Wherever there is a question, LET IT LIVE!
-a poem by Gerhard Frost found in his book, “Bless My Growing”
image by Mauro Sakamoto
Reworking, Reconsidering, & Re-doing Young Adult Ministry
Also posted at Gathering Voices
I just got in from a lovely block party celebrating National Night Out Block Party Night. At the party several friendly folks asked, “So, what do you do?” I always hesitate a bit when I get that question these days. It’s complicated.
I see myself as part pastor, part faith based community organizer, part event planner, and part sojourner. To answer folks, “I’m starting a new church” is way too simplistic and misleading, since The Project F-M has never really conceived of itself as a traditional church — it’s in response (or reaction) to the traditional church, actually.
Last week I attended the ELCA Mission Developers Conference in Newark, NJ. The conference is held twice a year for new Mission Developers, to help orient them on how the ELCA does mission development (roughly equivalent to “church planting” in other denominations). The conference has a great value in connecting developers to learn from one another, and presenters set some theological framework for starting new faith communities. While much at the conference was plenty good stuff, I struggled at many points thinking, “But this just won’t work with young adults.”
I really appreciated Lara’s thoughtful post yesterday, “What Do We Do With Young Adults?” It gets at some of the contextual challenges of church for folks in their 20s and 30s. And it has me thinking, if I were king of the world and arranging a mission development conference focused on emerging young adult faith communities, what questions and issues would I be sure to tackle?
- Spiritual but not religious - this phrase is used by many of the young adults with whom I speak in one-to-ones. It’s a great phrase because it describes for so many their discomfort with the church. It’s really helpful. I like it. But it’s not particularly descriptive. I’d love to tackle, in a group setting that accepts this phrase as positive (or at least benign), all the facets of its meaning.
- What about the aversion to worship? A lot of the 20-30 somethings I chat with are very spiritual, think about faith often, seek community gatherings, but are really hesitant to be connected to anything called “worship.” I have my theories, but I’d love to hear what the experts think about this, and if it’s an across-the-board phenomenon.
- What’s the right balance between making space that’s open to everyone’s questions and making a space that communicates (broadly speaking) what the Church believes? Pretty self-explanatory. The folks I connect with really want a place to tackle tricky theological issues. But they want a place to ask questions, not be spoon-fed answers. I’d love to hear how other mission developers walk this line — or where they cross it.
- Please don’t emphasize congregational sustainability, stewardship, or looking like the model of churches that have existed for 100 years. This model of a church with 150 members, a 100K annual budget, and shiny building is just dandy for many, but it’s not the mindset of most young adult focused churches I know. The problem is that we know how to pull that traditional one off, but other models are trickier. Thinking outside the box is difficult, and I’d love the opportunity to honestly talk numbers with other emergent mission developers without the assumptions of traditional models.
- How can the unique gifts of young adults these days be put to use for new ways of ministry? I feel like much of the literature around young adults and the church these days is about how young adults are different than other generations. That’s great. It’s certainly true. But most of what I read gets stuck in explaining how, even though things are different, we don’t have to lament. Little I’ve read takes the approach of truly rejoicing in what this generation has to offer the church. How would our conversations look be different if we said, “God has blessed us with a generation that does not accept the B.S. of previous models. Hallelujah! Thanks be to God. Now what?”
If you were planning or going to attend a mission development conference on young adult ministry, what would you hope to tackle?
A Lutheran, a Presbyterian, and a Zombie walk into a bar…
a Thoughtful Christian.com post
The question was on the tip of my tongue last weekend when Rev. Mark Hanson, the Presiding Bishop of the ELCA, spoke at a town hall forum in Moorhead, Minn. But I didn’t ask it. I feared my question wouldn’t be taken seriously. And, looking at the five hundred or so Lutherans gathered, it was probably the right call. I mean, let’s be honest, there’s a certain type of crowd that comes out to a standing-room-only event on a Friday night to hear a church bureaucrat speak. Folks had burning questions about church social statements, denominational strategy, and why it took their rural congregations 18 months to find a new pastor. I get that. But, even so, I so wanted to ask the question. Maybe I should have.
You see, Fargo-Moorhead last weekend hosted two VERY different events. Both synods on the Fargo and Moorhead sides of the Red River hosted their annual assemblies, so Lutheran pastors and lay leaders gathered to worship, conduct business meetings, approve budgets, and learn from speakers and workshops. On Saturday, though, downtown Fargo hosted something rather different than the Lutheran assemblies — the Downtown Zombie Pub Crawl. (The fourth annual Downtown Zombie Pub Crawl no less!) More than 1,000 people responded “Yes” to the Facebook invitation. They dressed-up like zombie — lots of blood and guts and scary makeup — and visited various downtown pubs. I have no way of knowing what percentage of synod assembly participants joined the ranks of the undead, but I have a good guess it was closer to zero than two.
Which leads me to my unasked question. Of course, it’s ridiculous because we can’t know. But, let’s consider it briefly. Ok, so here it goes: where would Jesus have been — the synod meetings or the Zombie Pub Crawl?
I mean, Jesus was all about getting people together and having a good time. He was certainly for more than a little imbibing — his first sign in John was turning gallons of water into wine — and I can totally see him rocking out to a disco ball. Who did Jesus tend to hang with but the outcasts, the folks on the margins, the folks for whom respectable society had no time or energy. Does that remind you, even a little, of zombie culture these days?
And, the synod meetings, as good as they were (much better than most Presbytery meetings, but that’s another post), didn’t push me to those margins. They didn’t send me into that uncomfortable space where I questioned my faith or my assumptions. They affirmed how to be a good Lutheran — boy they did that — but not as much how to be an edgy one. They told me about denominational resources and entertained me with hunky-dory illustration-filled preaching, but they did not convict me.
In my position as mission developer for The Project F-M I meet with lots of 20-30 somethings who aren’t connected to faith communities. Often, I hear stories of folks who view the institutional church as not open to questions, as expecting its members to fit a certain mold, folks who see the church as either dishonest or unaware of its own failings. And while I could give counterexamples here or there, usually I just listen because their experiences speak for themselves. Many many young adults in Fargo-Moorhead see the church as out of touch and not for them.
To be honest, I still don’t know how to answer the question. I don’t have any idea how Bishop Hanson would have responded. But here’s my hope — for my call, and for my church. I dearly hope that next year the synod assemblies and the Zombie Pub Crawl once again occur on the same weekend. And, if they do, I want to be edgy enough, to respond to Christ’s call enough, to be downtown instead of at the synod business meetings. And, there I’ll stand on a street corner with a bottle of wine and some bread, and I’ll preach of a man who too is undead. Jesus Christ. Jesus who cured the sick and caused the dead to rise. Jesus, whose blood was poured out for the salvation of the whole world. Jesus who lived on the edge and died there because of it. Jesus, who is promised to be present when we share the bread and drink the wine remembering him. Jesus, who loves Lutherans, and zombies, and a good party.
image by lusi
Additional Resources from www.TheThoughtfulChristian.com
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Everyday Parables: Learnings from Life, by James Taylor
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Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed, by William R. Herzog II
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“Parables of the Lost: Luke 15,” by Thomas W. Walker (Adult Study)
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“Understanding God’s Grace through Parables,” by Adam Fischer (Youth Study)
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