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Sacred Space: Why I’m Bi-Vocational

August 13, 2009 By Chris Brown 7 Comments

My sacred space is a cafe.  It’s the cafe where I work three shifts a week, serving coffee, tea, smoothies, and baked goods to the variety of people who come through our doors.  It’s nothing fancy, but it’s one of the local independent cafes in our part of Pittsburgh that attracts the graduate students, the internationals, the professors, and the eclectic and eccentric assortment of characters who inhabit Squirrel Hill.  And it’s sacred space for me precisely because the people around me there aren’t all other Christians. In fact, most are unchurched or de-churched.  And I love them.  As one who experiences God when I’m engaged in mission, I see the Holy Spirit at work when I’m around people who are just starting to get to know Jesus. The cafe becomes sacred space for me every time I have a deep conversation with a coworker or listen to a regular customer share their life-story.  The relationships I’ve been able to develop with co-workers and customers are sacred relationships.  Some people talk to their barista they way one does to the proverbial bartender, and at times I feel like taking off my shoes because I know I’m on holy ground when someone opens up to me.

I’m a pastor, but I sometimes say the place where I do the most real ministry is the cafe.  On the surface, I’m “bi-vocational” (working half-time for our church and part-time at the cafe), but I don’t really see any separation between my two jobs.  There’s been some good conversation recently in the PC(USA) about tentmaking, or bi-vocational ministry, as a viable option for more and more pastors and congregations.  The reason most often given seems to be financial: a church can’t afford a full-time pastor, so the pastor gets another job.  I applaud other pastors who do this, but I think the conversation needs to get beyond the financial reasons for tentmaking.  Here are the reasons why I chose to be bi-vocational: (1) Mission – As a new church development pastor, my “second” job gives me an entryway into the community.  Every day I meet people who would normally never set foot inside a church.  And wherever I’m meeting them is exactly where I’m called to be.  (2) Leading by Example -Working a second job that’s not explicitly a “ministry” vocation also gives me an opportunity to teach and model for members of my church how we as disciples can find meaning in our “ordinary” jobs.  Our churches are filled with people who are discontent with their work and who rarely think of their jobs as places where they can participate in the Kingdom of God. How much of that disconnect is the result of an over-professionalization of clergy?  What would it look like to really reflect in our lives the truth that almost any job can be used to serve God?

Early this morning I met my co-pastor and another friend for coffee in my sacred space.  This afternoon I’ll return and work for four hours, looking forward to whatever conversations God brings my way.  In between I’ll do a little “church work”, but in reality there’s no separation between the two – each job complements and enriches the other. Whether on church time or cafe time, I work and pray, and I look for Christ’s presence in the breaking of bread and the pouring of coffee.

Filed Under: Churches, Emergent, Jobs, Presbymergent Tagged With: NCDs, new church development, Pastor, Tentmaking Bi-Vocational, Vocations

Evangelism as Honesty

July 8, 2009 By Chris Brown 5 Comments

This is the first post in another summer series for Presbymergent called “Evangelism: What is it good for?”  My answer: The Integrity of the Church.  We aren’t authentic followers of Jesus unless we’re honest about who he is.  And we aren’t faithful to His mission unless we’re willing to share honestly about him with people who aren’t his followers.  But often we’re hesitant to do so, and we tend to make evangelism much more difficult than it really is.  Stereotypes of pushy evangelists with contrived illustrations of the Gospel haunt us.  We’d rather keep silent than be perceived as the angry fundamentalist preaching turn-or-burn. So we usually choose silence.  Or we use the word “evangelism” to speak of bringing new members to our congregations.  A certain program or event may put more people in the pews on Sunday, but it’s not necessarily evangelism.

What if evangelism were simply about honesty? I believe evangelism is honesty about Jesus and what the Church has believed about him for two millenia, as well honesty about our own failures individually and collectively as the Church. First, honesty about Jesus.  If someone asked you to tell them about a friend, would you launch immediately into an apologetic to prove something about your friend, or make-up some metaphor to explain why the person you’re talking to has to meet this friend?   Probably not.  You would simply tell them who your friend is.  Likewise, we don’t need any contrived or forced presentations of the Gospel.  Jesus said to his disciples, “You will be my witnesses.”  Witnesses are generally expected to tell the truth of what they saw, nothing more, nothing less.  That makes the commission fairly simple: be honest about who Jesus is.  Honesty about Jesus also means telling his whole story, not reducing his life to his death. We have tell the truth about his teachings, his deeds, his confrontation of principalities and powers, his death, and his resurrection.  That leads to honesty about the Kingdom of God, which in turn leads to honesty about the mission Jesus passed onto his disciples.   When we look at evangelism this way, the pressure’s lifted off our shoulders; we’re just responsible for reporting what we’ve seen and experienced in Jesus, not for converting someone under our own power.
We can’t be honest about Jesus, though, without being honest about ourselves: our individual failures to become authentic disciples, the Church’s frequent betrayals of the mission of God throughout history. In a culture that feeds on plastic and advertising all day, authenticity and integrity speak with power.  In my ministry context, I encounter a number of de-churched people, many of whom have been deeply wounded by people or things bearing the Christian label. One told me this weekend that when he was in the Church, Christians were the most immoral people he knew. We lack integrity.  The first step to regaining that integrity is confession: admitting to the world our failures to be authentic followers of Jesus.  On the one hand, we’re admitting that we’re human.  People within the Church have screwed up often since day-one and won’t cease screwing up until the Kingdom of God comes in its fullness.  But our humanity isn’t an excuse not to seek integrity.  How often do we buy into lies that make it easier for us to stop following Jesus?  How often do we distort Jesus’ teachings to make them easier for us to swallow? A life authentically lived as a community following Jesus will speak more powerfully than words, and that’s the next step toward regaining integrity.  What does it look like to live individual and communal lives that give substance to what we say is truth about Jesus?
Filed Under: Presbymergent, Theology Tagged With: Evangelism, mission, Theology

Christendom and “The Presbyterian Establishment”

July 25, 2008 By Chris Brown 31 Comments

Two days ago, I opened an envelope from Louisville to find a copy of a new occasional paper from the Office of Theology and Worship: William Weston’s Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment. I cringed. Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment? So I began to read, and my fears were confirmed. “It is time to rebuild the church’s Establishment,” he writes. “Decency and order require it.” (p.12)

Weston’s thesis is this: The anti-establishment attitude of the 1960s is what led to the decline of the denomination. Our preoccupation with political correctness (“a straightjacket for the church” p.12) has removed from power the “tall-steeple” pastors who should rightly lead the denomination, and thus contributed to the PC(USA)’s lack of influence and authority in society. The solutions: remove representation rules, “abolish all the current advisory delegate categories”, and reinstate the core of tall-steeple pastors who lead the Presbyterian Establishment.

How much longer will we continue trying to preserve Christendom? This paper seems to me to be an example of the church failing to rightly interpret its context: Christendom is over, and the national structure of the denomination is never going to have the authority it thinks it once had. Weston certainly does have some ideas which would benefit the church: actual parity of ministers and elders, smaller presbyteries, smaller (or non-existent) synods. But the very term “Presbyterian Establishment” connotes a desire to preserve the institution for the institution’s own sake. Do any of the suggestions in “Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment” really help the church adapt to its context in the mission field of post-Christendom North America? Are there better ways to renovate the PC(USA) than by re-roofing a building whose walls are crumbling?

Filed Under: Leadership, PC(USA), Polity Tagged With: Establishment, Papers, PC(USA), Theology

Submissive Subversive Service to the Church

January 4, 2008 By Chris Brown Leave a Comment

The church I’m currently interning with, The Open Door, is entering into a new phase in its life. In the coming weeks BJ will be leading us through a series considering what it means to be “covenant partners” with God, with one another, and with the world around us. Another side of that covenant partnership for us is our relationship with the denomination. As a new-church-development of Pittsburgh Presbytery, The Open Door has been Presbyterian by default since its inception. But what does it mean for us to really be Presbyterian? Why should an emergent church-plant need to have a connection to what seems like the overly-institutional PC(USA)?

A compelling answer for me comes from our sisters and brothers in the New Monasticism. Of the 12 Marks of the new monasticism, the fifth is “Humble submission to Christ’s body, the Church.” Ivan Kauffman has written a great essay in the book School(s) for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism (Eugene, OR: Cascade 2005) explaining what this meant for him and his community. Reflecting on his roots in Amish and Anabaptist traditions, he notes that through their separation from the Church, the radical reformers lost the lessons that the Church had learned throughout its history. This led to what he describes as an inwardly-focused legalism. “Even though we were once again proving the futility of Pelagius’ teachings (and the realism of Augustine’s arguments against them), we had no way of knowing this since we were cut off from the church’s past” (p. 70). In contrast, the communities associated with the New Monasticism are following the example of older monastic communities and sustaining relationships with various denominations. By remaining connected to some form of the visible church, monastic communities connect to what Kauffman calls the Great Tradition of the Church, including the great lessons of its history.

But monastic communities don’t just receive the tradition: they have the power to influence and shape the future of the tradition. To show this principle, Kauffman refers to the impact Benedictine monasteries have had on the Church. “The Benedictine’s submission to the church did not result in their being submerged in the much laxer practices of the wider church; it instead resulted in the wider church being transformed by the example and teaching of the monastic communities” (p. 75). This is the exciting part for those of us who see hope for new life coming into the Church right now. For a denomination preoccupied with divisive and bitter in-fighting, the presbymergent community’s ties to the PC(USA) show a new way to be the Church. By modeling community instead of bureaucracy we are agents of change. There is a subversive (in the bottom-up sense) but positive quality to our submission to the church that eventually transforms it and blesses it.

I agree with previous posts that Presbymergent is not here to “save” the PC(USA), but we can serve the denomination as a part of Christ’s body. Describing the challenges of his community’s relationships to both the Mennonites and Roman Catholic Church, Kauffman says “We tried to make it clear that our goal is to serve the church” (p. 78). As The Open Door matures, I’m praying our community will be a servant to the presbytery and the denomination. We already maintain active partnerships with several other churches in our presbytery. What does it mean for us to be the ecclesiola in the ecclesia, a fringe of the church working to bless the whole church? I don’t think it means being another special interest group, lobbying at GA, but this is why we should be excited about what Bruce Reyes-Chow is doing by running for Moderator. If we are intentional about our connection to our presbyteries and the General Assembly, the effects of the Holy Spirit’s work through us can ripple out wider and wider, bringing missional reorientation in the larger church. Then, like a monastic community blessing the institution of the Church, the thoughts, voices, and ministries here can be a blessing to the denomination and the individual congregations to whom we’re bound in Christ.

Filed Under: PC(USA) Tagged With: Community, Monasticism

presbymergents in the Presbyterian Outlook

November 17, 2007 By Chris Brown 3 Comments

The most recent issue of the Presbyterian Outlook (password only required to leave comments on articles) is filled with articles by and about presbymergent personalities:

Enjoy!

Filed Under: Churches, Presbymergent, Press, Seminary

“Always Reforming: Emergence in the Presbyterian Church”

September 27, 2007 By Chris Brown 4 Comments

Last April, in a string of comments on Presbymergent, some other people and I brainstormed the possibility of a special gathering for “Presbymergents” at Pittsburgh Seminary.  In just three weeks, that idea will come to fruition as . . .

Always Reforming: Emergence in the Presbyterian Church

October 12th & 13th, 2007, featuring John Franke, Karen Sloan, Adam Walker Cleaveland, Brian Wallace, BJ Woodworth, Andrew Purves, Scott Sunquist and a whole host of other amazing pastors, leaders, teachers, and students. This is a big event for Pittsburgh Theological Seminary (where I am a student), but also for Emergent Pittsburgh, and the local churches which will be participating, such as The Open Door.  If you’re in the area, please consider coming – it’s going to be a great weekend!

For more information, just check out Emergent Pittsburgh. 

Filed Under: PC(USA), Presbymergent, Seminary