Toward a Missional Economy, Part 5

This is part 5 in a 6 part series on moving churches toward a missional economic practice. You can check out the previous posts by clicking: Part 1: Manna in the Desert, Part 2: Manna in the Postmodern Desert, Part 3: From Wealth Building to Gift Giving, and Part 4: From Scarcity to Abundance.

From Altruism to Reciprocity
The third, and perhaps most difficult, shift is the move away from altruism and toward reciprocity. It has becomes clear in recent years that charity often exacerbates poverty by creating a one-directional patron/client relationship between those who give and those who receive. When we treat those with little money and material possessions as though they have nothing, we exclude them from their human vocation of work (i.e. “gathering” in Ex 16) and thereby debilitate their role in the community. Even worse, we create relationships of co-dependence that merely serve to perpetuate the modern hierarchies of power and control. In altruism, the patron remains powerful and the client remains weak. With altruism the implicit goal is not equality, it is relief. Continue reading…

Toward a Missional Economy, Part 1

I recently spoke on “Economy and Mission” at Verge L.A. 2009. Since starting Twoshirts.org almost two years ago, this has been a significant subject of study for me and it has direct bearing on how we shape community – something we’re currently neck deep in defining over at Ikon Community. So, over the next few days I’ll share my Verge presentation here in the hopes of stimulating some thoughtfulness about how missional churches might follow the Holy Spirit in cultivating subversive, grassroots economic communities in a desert of greed and inequality.

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I am an economist. Not by education or by training. The truth is I don’t know much about “macroeconomic rigidities” or “consensus forecasts,” but what I do know, perhaps naively, is that the heart of economics is merely the stewardship of resources, or, quite literally the “rules of the household” (Greek: oikos & nomos). Therefore, I am economist simply by living.

This means you are an economist too. It doesn’t matter if you’re poorly educated or hopelessly impoverished. Economics isn’t about what you know, or how much you have; it’s about how you handle what you have. Everyone has stuff, and everyone has a way of figuring out what to hold on to and what to let go of.

Obviously, then, God is also an economist because God has stuff – lots of stuff! So if, as I take it, “mission” means going where God goes and doing what God does (John 5:19) then a critical question for us is, “What is God the economist doing?” Or, perhaps a more helpful question for shedding our cultural prejudices would be, “What are the rules of his household?” Continue reading…

Church Told to Stop Feeding the Poor

UPDATE: Today the AZcetnral.com news site picked up this story. Some of the quotes in the article are priceless.

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Crossroads United Methodist Church in Phoenix feeds the hungry, but today they were told they can no longer continue this practice because in doing so they constitute a “charity dining hall” and, as such, are breaking local ordinance.

Even though this hateful decision has been masked in a facade of local code issues, Rev Escobedo-Frank rightly identifies at the root issue:

“Or, are we just discriminating against people who are poor and who don’t have homes, because we don’t like what we feel when we see them? The real issue, is not that there are hungry people out there, or that we serve food in church, the real issue is that we are afraid. Afraid to reach out a helping hand; afraid to see what the economy could do to us; afraid to face our worst fears…”

Afraid indeed.

Last year I wrote over at Twoshirts.org about the case of a Detroit teenager accused of murdering a homeless man: Continue reading…

Film Festival, and other busyness…

For those of you who poke in here now and then my apologies for the lack of blogging lately. I’ve been pretty busy with lots of changes:

• The Micah Film Festival is THIS weekend. I’m basically freaking out. But for those of you who don’t have plans this weekend let me suggest you come out to Oceanside to see three of the best, award-winning documentary films from the past year. You might be surprised to see God at work in secular film…
• If Micah goes fairly well I’m thinking of turning it into a non-profit and running a festival every year. I think there’s a need for an organization that helps people explore the intersection of God and culture through art.  Actually, my plans are much bigger than that, but then, my plans are always bigger than reality seems to allow.
• I’m working from home again – which is a good thing. The company I work for, Nobis Interactive, has split into three separate divisions and I’ve been given the leadership reins of “Nobis Aid,” the division that focuses on interactive media solutions for non-profit, faith-based, and social enterprise organizations. It’s basically the perfect job for me. I get to run web-based projects for amazing organizations doing very good work in the world – and I get to do it from home, keeping my own schedule and making a little time for my other projects (and I get to work on my Macs again!). So, if you know of any mission-based organizations in need of good web design, development, and marketing solutions send them my way.
• This also has freed me up to do more of the author interviews I did earlier this year at Christianaudio.com. I really love doing them, so I’m looking to connect with more authors in the coming weeks. If you haven’t listened to them, you can check it out by clicking here.
• Things are…shifting somehow with the Sunday night fellowship group. I don’t know exactly how to explain it but suffice it to say I think it’s becoming more concrete. People are moving from just having fun together to really sharing their fears, frustrations, and hopes. I suspect we’ll be committing to each other in a more intentional way in the coming weeks. That’s a very good thing.
• Speaking of the Sunday group, Jenell and I found a perfect space here in Oceanside for the community center. It’s a 5,000 square foot storefront just down the street from our house on Coast Highway. Two days after discovering it Jenell ran into the owner and he’s desperate to lease it at a killer rate. Now if we only had about 7k a month…
• All of this leads me to the obvious: it looks like we really are becoming an odd kind of church – even though we don’t look much like a one (and hopefully never will). Still, in a few weeks Jenell and I will heading to a conference with other planters where we’ll get to listen, brainstorm, and focus on what God has called us to. Consequently, I think there will be some changes here at the undergroundvineyard soon. Too many people around here know about that name and are starting to call us that – which was inevitable I suppose, but I don’t like it. Too negative, too pretentious.
• Jenell and I have been invited to visit a friend’s church in Las Vegas this month and speak to their leadership team about being incarnation/missional, etc. It’s funny, because he’s way ahead of the curve in my opinion, so it seems odd that we’ll be the one’s speaking when what we really need to be doing is listening to them (maybe I’ll figure out a way to make that happen!). If you’re interested, his name is Barry Diamond, and he basically blew up his church 4 months ago and transformed it into a decentralized, simple church model. They even gave up their building. Check them out here: http://www.lvlv.org/
• Next Monday Jenell and I will have been married for 18 years. Just saying…we rock.
• Next Sunday my 16 year old daughter Savannah will be flying to Ohio for 2 weeks to see her friends. I’m really going to miss her. She’s becoming a genuine friend to us.
• I have the best idea ever for an iPhone app. Seriously. If I had like – I don’t know – 100k in capital I think I could conquer the iPhone world with this idea.
• I’m seriously thinking of starting work on a book about how gift economics can radically re-orient our posture toward others, toward the world, and even toward God. But would anyone be interested in reading a book like that?
• Which brings me to Twoshirts.org. It’s steady but not really gaining ground. People join everyday and give things away everyday. That’s cool. But traffic has remained at exactly the same level virtually all year (about 110 visits a day) and the site itself is a year and a half old. It’s time for a change. I think we’ve shown that the core idea is viable, but if we want to reach more people and catalyze a genuine network of generosity we need to seriously rethink the architecture of the site, and possibly change the organizational structure as well. It could be a non-profit, but I’ve often thought it should be a low-profit social venture that seeks to reinvests financial proceeds into the community (both real and virtual). But what kind of product or service can Twoshirts offer that would fit the ethos of a mutual-helps giveaway site? I need help thinking this through.

I’m sure there’s more, but it’s late. I’ll be back next week with more posts and the changes I alluded to earlier. Take care all.

How Eddie Gibbs Ruined My Life

Picture me in the year 2002. A blissfully content 30-year-old youth pastor for a delightfully hip little church nestled in an upscale Rocky Mountain resort town. Skiing and snowboarding with affluent teenagers was my job. I highly recommend it.

What I don’t recommend is disturbing your ambitious ministry career with the highly upsetting claims of trouble-makers like Eddie Gibbs. IVP seemed insistent, in those days, on sending me books in the mail and on one of those fateful days of the young millennium they sent me a slyly unassuming book titled, Church Next.

I’m quite sure I was duped into reading it by the tastefully conservative cover art; its throng of crowds promising ministry prosperity to all who thumbed the pages. As if that weren’t enough, early on Mr. Gibbs sprinkled his prose with references to “post-modernism,” an intoxicating topic for young Gen-X pastors longing to make their own profound ecclesiological mark in an Evangelicalism largely dominated by ex Jesus movement hippies who still waxed wild-eyed from time to time about the “Christian communes” and counter-cultural radicalisms of their own youth.

Continue reading…