Rose Madrid-Swetman

Meditating on Isaiah 58
The Message

I love retreat! Silent retreats (well semi-silent) and our annual Women’s Retreat…Thanks to Donna and Leslie for the pics.

This afternoon I go to this beautiful place until Saturday afternoon with about 35 women to laugh, cry, take in the beauty, laugh, eat, make space for God and one another…this is one of the highlights of my year. This is the view we have. We stay a few steps away from the beach (some of us will actually stay in a beach house literally on the beach). The scene is Useless Bay on Whidbey Island. The majestic Olympic Mountains are in the background. It is supposed to get in the 80’s the next two days…Perfect
HAPPY BIRTHDAY ERIKA!

A change of pace for a moment:

I am in the midst of writing an eighty page paper documenting the process we have gone through to birth two mission groups. Hopefully we will have our website updated with more of our history in the next few months.

A mission group is a group of people that join around a passion to serve others, usually driven by one or more entrepreneurial leaders gathering a team. These leaders are joining their passion with some area of God’s redemptive purposes in this world. The group develops its own leadership, mission, purpose, values, and organizational structure. The group functions under the VCC board of directors until it reaches viability. Once the group and the Board agree it is time, the group spins off with its own 501c3 status and becomes an entity unto itself.

Our dream is that we would help birth multiple mission groups over time. We know of folks who instead of planting a conventional church are actually planting a mission group with the dream of a church being birthed in the midst of the mission. There has been great conversation about sustainable models of church in the past week or so. It is a much needed conversation. One way I believe we have to think about the future, no matter what size congregation we are is how to garner resources beyond our size. Church of the Savior has pioneered a way to bring the healing ministry of Jesus right into the neighborhood with their mission group model.

While not adhering exactly to the COS model, they gave us an imagination to what we perceive is God’s path for us. You see we began a journey about five years ago to discover why our church had a reason to exist. When we began to ask that question partnered with inquiring prayer, our vision of what it meant to “be” the church was forever changed.

We are only five years into our journey toward what we now name as our grand experiment. I wrote a piece for Scot McNight’s Jesus Creed blog that will be posted sometime in the next few weeks while he and Kris are in South Africa. It is a short piece on how and what we focus on as a congregation so I won’t go into that here. I will link to it when it is up at Jesus Creed.

Bullet points for my paper:

We decided to grow a church big rather than grow a big church

Mission group development, includes those dreadful words from the 90’s; mission, vision, values. Somehow in the mission group context they are life giving if you want to be faithful to the mission.

Leadership – what kind of leadership within the church is required to let go of control enough to let others run with their passion and vision. This seems to scare pastors. We are often asked (sincere) questions that reflect this fear: how do you make sure leaders of mission groups stay on track with your vision? What about resources, do they take away from people giving to the church or serving in the church? Our vision is to “incubate” kingdom activity through those that are responding to God for the sake of the world. The mission group model has shown us that there are resources of not only money, but time and talent beyond what our local church could ever provide. The amount of resources that are available when you invite people to partner for a grass roots cause continues to amaze me.

There is a need for structure to organize around the mission. We are a mysterious blend of organic community and organizational structure for the work of the kingdom.

All kinds of people get to play. Those that follow Christ and those that wonder about following Christ but in the meantime want to make the world a better place work together for kingdom purposes.

We partner and collaborate with the City, the School District, Social Service Agencies, the local Food Bank, the County Housing Authority and many other sectors of our city. We are at the table where the needs and resources of our community are discussed and then addressed as best they can in collaboration to make the “community livable again”.

More later including:

Some specifics in mission group creation, including financial sustainability.

How a congregation moves through the kind of change necessary to cultivate incubating passion for God’s healing in our world…incubating, or the term “birthing” is interesting. My friend is a doula, she has a lot of stories for walking alongside a woman giving birth. I, myself have given birth tree times and my husband’s first wife, Wendy was a mid-wife. He witnessed the pregnancy process and birth of hundreds of babies. The birthing metaphor is fitting for where our journey has taken us these past few years and very metaphoric for where we are heading.

“The church is an ecclesia, which means an assembly that has been called out in a public way as a sign, witness, and foretaste of where God is inviting all creation in Jesus Christ. The church, in its life together and witness in the world, proclaims the destiny and future of all creation. Local congregations are embodiments of where God is calling all creation to be through the power of the Spirit. The God we meet in Jesus calls the church to be a community of people who no longer live for themselves and their own needs but as a contrast society whose life together manifests God’s future for the whole of creation.

As a contrast society, the church is formed around beliefs and practices, which continually school and form it in a way of life, which cannot be derived from the particular culture in which it is found. The culture in which we find ourselves, and within which we are called to be that people, is now designated as late-modern or postmodern. It is a context where the explicit story is that everyone lives within his or her own expressive rights. We live in a context where it is simply assumed that the operative and appropriate means of living in a tolerant and open society is to create environments, which do not step on or over any specific set of personal rights, feelings or wants. This is part of the madness of the needs-centered, seeker-driven mentality of the church. These approaches actually believe they are faithful to the tradition when, in fact, they undermine the elements essential for missional faithfulness. We want to affirm everyone’s need for personal autonomy to such a degree that we have lost the resources provided by Scripture and great tradition to shape, form and create a people as a contrast society.”

HT: Allelon

Recently, (while speaking of what it means to belong to a faith community) I have heard it said, our culture is swept up in elevating the rights of the one at the expense of the whole (we have become narcissists in search for personal autonomy) however, in the community of faith it is often the opposite, we elevate the whole at the expense of the one, folks lose themselves and don’t know how to differentiate in a way to belong inter-dependently.

Years ago a very wise person suggested that the “one” and the “whole” always are held in tension. There are times when a person is in intensive care and is dependent on the whole. But most of the time, part of our ability to heal is in our ability to give, to serve, to follow the example of Jesus self-sacrificing love. Elizabeth O’Connor, scribe for the Church of the Savior has much to say about the tension of belonging to community and healing our true selves in many of her books.

Rob Bell (though he was a huge part of it) was not the only reason last Tuesday evening was such a great time. Person after person that I have talked with have commented that this is the way church ought to be. Walking in the door there were smiling faces, tables of food, wine flowing, great live music. Right away you knew you were entering a party and you were welcome. People were hanging out, lots of laughter, lots of conversations around the room. Over the next half an hour the space filled.

Jim Henderson master creator of all things OTM is brilliantly skilled at creating great spiritual conversations. He knows how to network people (from very different backgrounds and ideologies) and bring them together. He asked Rob Bell to talk about his new book, Jesus Wants to Save Christians (Zondervan) coming out in Fall 2008 Everyone there loved his talk, so much to think about.

Rob and I had talked about the conversation we would have about women in leadership. I was excited for this conversation because I knew how Rob had courageously led his own church through the change of an all male leadership structure to include women on every level of leadership.

Another surprise hit of the evening was Andy Himes’ monologue about his growing up in the South in the 60’s and the injustice that surrounded him, even in the church. It caused him to lose his faith as he saw blacks repeatedly mistreated. It was powerful.

It was all so good, I wish we would have had more time to hear more from Doug Pagitt, Todd Hunter and Sunil Sardar. Sunil Sardar is the founder of Truth Seekers, an organization dedicated to end caste in India. Did that register? Ending caste…please pray for Sunil and Truth Seekers.

We, Vineyard Community Church say thank you to all who came and participated. Everyone made it a great happening.

Tonight I was reading through the journal I kept in 2003. I read through my entries on my trip to Mozambique, Africa and Church of the Savior in Washington D.C. Some of the entries from Africa brought tears to my eyes.
While at Church of the Savior we heard a number of amazing practitioners, one in particular jumped out at me tonight (I am re-reading some of my thoughts so I can shape my dissertation proposal), it was a talk given by a man named Bill Haley. Bill had just returned from a trip around the world visiting Christian communities that were or had been successful in bringing about personal, societal and global transformation. (Sidebar - I was struck by the fact that five years later we use similar language in our community about following Christ to serve others in three realms: personal, local and global). He talked about Wilberforce and the Clapham’s (social reformers within the Church of England.
Bill then talked about small communities of Christians committed to prayer, study and service as the most powerful tool in God’s hand for personal, societal and global transformation. Then went on to name some of the groups he studied and visited:
The Sisters of Charity
The Iona Community
L’Brie
Various monastic communities
Church of the Savior
The common denominators he found:
1. The Communities are Christ centered - Jesus is the reason they exist and they know him as a suffering God
2. There was some degree of life together
3. They had strong leadership - leaders that had a strong inner sense and a focus “what is not yet needs to be done” there are things God wants to do in the world
4. There was a great willingness within the community to live sacrificially
5. There was a profound reliance on prayer
6. There was an external goal - the entire community internalized an external goal, namely, they existed for other people, social justice was equated with loving God
7. There was shared discipline
8. There was a high expectation for membership (individualism was not part of their language or practice) they realized they could get more done with 10 committed people than 100 people who were not committed to the mission
9. They all had a commitment to commitment - you choose how you live

Here was Bill’s definition of Christian community:
An interdependent group of Christians whose lives are centered around Jesus and ordered by love, who share common goals and common commitments and who together intentionally seek to love God and love their neighbor.