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What Post-Structural Christianity Has To Say About The Death of Missions & Church-Planting

What Post-Structural Christianity Has To Say About The Death of Missions & Church-Planting

Last updated on: September 25, 2010 at 10:33 am by George Elerick

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What Post-Structural Christianity Has To Say About The Death of Missions & Church-Planting 2010-09-25T10:33:24+00:00 George Elerick

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{This is a continuation on from something I started talking about here: Post-Structural Christianity}

Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.
Jacques Derrida

I used to think it mattered what kinds of shoes I wore. If I had the latest name-brand thing or if I was able to purchase the new Ipad. Sometimes, I still do. Status seems to run through the veins of our society. Status anxiety seems to be an inherent issue that draws society into wars of competition. We have somehow constituted what it means to be one of the “Joneses”. This spirit of competition has aggressively led to the ghost of entitlement haunting us around every corner.

This spectre has found a way into Christianity.

But, this ghost has been around longer than our society would care to confess. Competition has been around for thousands of years. We see this in the parable of Cain and Abel, the story of two brothers who were offering their best to God, but one was turned away transforming an act of sacrifice into death. Which is ironic, because the death of an animal led to the death of a human. I think in that moment, we forgot that we were all connected and competition itself attempts to remind us what happened to Cain and Abel and keeps us from discovering what it could look like to not be in competition.

Some churches base their success on numbers.

Others on how innovative their ministries are. Some define their status on how cool their leader/speaker is.

Competition abounds

. One seemingly common thread amongst these churches and those that fall in between them is a perpetuating force called Missions.
I used to go on missions trips. I used to do Vacation Bible Schools and even the dreaded door-to-door.

People weren’t people, they were numbers, they were status. People essentially became commodities.
Unfortunately, because the way missions is, people are just hidden behind hipper rhetoric (e.g., missional).

I think because Christianity has followed the structures of the past, Missions seems to be morphing more and more into itself. Christianity has fallen into the trap of status and entitlement. But, what of Post-Structural Missions, what could that look like? Well, I think to better answer that, we have to go to one of the many sources for the inspiration behind what we now call Missions. At the end of Matthew as Jesus is heading ‘home’ he challenges his followers with these words: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in[a] the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:19-20 (New International Version)

I think when we come to these verses we have to realize that there is a context in place.

An oppressed people are writing this.

On top of that oppression are a people within this people group who are beginning to define themselves by the words of Jesus. If you take those two points into account what we then have is quite possibly a metaphor of a Jesus who is not merely divine but someone (Jewish) who is fully aligned with the Creator God. This is terribly important to remember when reading such a narrative. When it says that he sits at God’s right hand, this is ancient rhetoric written to impress upon the reader who the community of writers think Jesus is.

When we enter into this narrative as participator and Jesus is speaking to those listening and Jesus says make they would have the word ‘bara’ in Hebrew. Bara is the same word for create. When was the first time we hear create? In the Garden with God.

Jesus is essentially empowering them with creating better worlds. When we hear the word we might hear the word ‘force’ or ‘you have no choice’, this is why I think calling it a challenge cheapens the beauty of this passage, whether Jesus said it or not. The word disciple is the word talmidim, which itself is a word of action, movement.

Interestingly, the word for baptism in Hebrew here doesn’t mean ‘dunk’ in water, its an action term. When we piece these terms together, what we don’t get is what we now know as Missions, we get a life of creation, action and divine compassion. Not a challenge to make people believe, or get people into chairs, or to buy the nicest sound equipment. Jesus inspires them to go live life on the edge. He is making them realize that their lives matter, to an oppressed people still learning how not be victims, this is an incredibly powerful thing to hear.

So, post-structural Missions means we have to intentionally walk away from the stodgy invasion rhetoric hidden with our hegemonic Frankenstein called Missions. It means we can no longer look to those before us to inform us how we should be. It doesn’t mean that they did it wrong, it means we are here – now and the way we are discovering how to do things has to be influential for now. It would be like to trying to use a horse and carriage to get from one end of the town to the other while others are using cars, you could use it and it would get you there, but it wouldn’t be relevant to now. This isn’t saying that the idea behind the idea needs to die, its saying our addiction to try and instiutionalizing it needs to.

Missions has become the very oppression Jesus spoke against.

I have got to be honest, I think Missions as is, needs to die. Harsh, I know. For me the idea behind what it has become is nothing more than getting members for a cool club that occasionally does work in the community. We need something better. And what we have isn’t good enough. It’s too controlling. Too constitutive. If we take the Matthean worldview of what Jesus said, than we can enter into a world where we realize our lives effect those around us, and the way to make a dent in the world isn’t to force it, isn’t to creatively market Jesus or to find ways to endorse our beliefs, in that verse its about lives. How we treat one another. How we feed the hungry. Clothe the poor. And love the outsider.

Church Planting has become Frankenstein’s offspring.

Its another word for hegemonic exploration and spiritualized fascism. Also, when you think about church planting is there a word-for-word verse that comes to mind? For me, the idea behind church planting is another buzz word for Missions. What about life-planting? People-planting? Not because we need new rhetoric, but because if we are going to change the world, it starts with ourselves. We cant simply rely on outmoded ways of doing things and rebrand them with cultural nicknames. Post-structural church planting inherently self-implodes. What I mean by saying that is because of the nature of post-structuralism and the structural nature of attempting to institutionalize community expression, they are incompatible as partners.

I see Jesus consistently challenging institutional mindsets and all the rhetoric that attempts to canonize it. Even the word community has come to a place where it has become a hidden justification for instiutionalizing a movement. The nature of a movement is that it moves. It breathes. Is alive. Developes and evolves. The church is in a state of incredible and exciting growing pains, some things that naturally come with the growth spurts is a falling away of things. Some might ask, well, what do we put in its place, and this is the crux of what I am dealing with here – we think if something fails we have to put something better in its place. Much like people who try revive dying churches, sometimes I think they aren’t committed to revive the church, but rather the idea of the church.

Post-structuralism says we must be able to look beyond the structures. See beyond the institutional platitudes that come with it and begin dreaming beyond the institutions. It doesn’t necessarily mean we have to orphan these ideas, but it also doesn’t mean we have to save them either. Post-structural Christianity inherently is something that challenges the structures in place. Its a proverbial 95 theses across the board.

It’s uncomfortable. It’s not politically correct. It’s meant to change the way we see each other, the world, and what we say we believe and tranform it not into another belief system, but into something that transforms the globe. Its beyond missions and church-planting, its life-planting. Building into people, not for bigger numbers, or orthodox salvation, but for post-colonial transferrable transformation. In one word, that’s called love. We are called to Love our neighbour, not change them. Love them.

Post-structural Christianity says we aren’t tied down to the constrictures of the past. That history itself can be rewritten. That we need to see beyond our need to be competitive and keep things alive just because. It’s faith in humanity and the church is incredibly visible in the freedom it illicits and implies by allowing people to see beyond what has been offered and to offer something completely different, unsettling and transformative.