Audio sessions from the Acts 29 Boot Camp San Diego

Advance apologies for the content of this blog entry, which contains some academic terminology, but for the case of church leadership it is relevant and necessary.

Drew Goodmanson of Kaleo church in San Diego has posted to his blog some of the sessions from the Acts29 Church Planting boot camp in San Diego this year. One of the speakers was Dr. Mike Goheen, whose doctoral dissertation on Lesslie Newbigin’s ecclesiology (http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/dissertations/1947080/inhoud.htm) was pivotal for me not only in increasing respect for Newbigin, but in my choice of a masters thesis, which I’m writing on missional ecclesiology.

Audio from four sessions of the boot camp, including two cuts by Mike Goheen and one each from Dick Kaufmann of Harbor Presbyterian in San Diego (Dick was executive pastor for Tim Keller up at Redeemer in Manhattan for an extended time) and David Fairchild of Kaleo in San Diego. The audio cuts are here:

http://www.goodmanson.com/2007-04/13/acts-29-regional-church-conference-audio-sessions/

Having given a first listen to them, I was struck especially by Goheen’s message on missional ecclesiology. Early in his talk he quoted eminent church historian Jaroslav Pelikan:

“The doctrine of the church became, as it had never quite been before, the bearer of the whole Christian message for the 20th century, as well as the recapitulation of the entire doctrinal tradition from preceding centuries.”

This quote, from page 282 of Pelikan’s epochal book _Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture_ from 1989, sets forth the importance of ecclesiology, and what he said of its significance for the 20th century becomes ever more true as we go deeper into the 21st. One of the issues behind the decline of the church in the West in the 20th century that continues is the unquestioned assumptions of Christendom (Constantinian) ecclesiology that reigned in most of the church then and continues today in much of it.

Thousands of churches here in the U.S. and doubtless as well in the other parts of the English-speaking world are affected by this — bewildered by both the breadth and the pace of cultural change, churches have ready answers to questions people were asking half a century ago, but many have become so irrelevant to those outside the traditional tribe of the church that they have dropped from visibility altogether.

As Ed Marcelle of Terra Nova Church outside Albany observed, perhaps the only hope for the survival of some of these churches will be to put up a sign and some velvet ropes outside and sell tickets to Japanese tourists who want to see an authentic American church of the 1950s. But like Ed, I don’t want to come across as speaking these words in anger, but with deep compassion for my brothers and sisters in these churches. That is the ecclesial world that made my conversion possible — I owe those sorts of churches a lot, and the people in their congregations carried the water for Christianity for a whole century. I want to honor their sacrifice and contributions of the past, even as together with a new generation of church leaders we move into an uncertain future that’s full of opportunity but also full of challenges.

Enough of abstracts — one of the things that comes out of Goheen’s talk is the need to move from the ecclesiocentric view that characterizes much of the declining church and return to a Christocentric Trinitarian missional view. “As the Father sent me, so I am sending you,” said Jesus in John 21: The Father sent the Son, the Father and the Son send the Spirit, and the Father, Son and Spirit send the church, not for the sake of the church, but for the sake of the world. The church is not only the community of the gathered, but the community of the scattered — sent out into the world to be instruments of God’s compassion, mercy and reconciliation, incarnating the redeeming presence of Jesus.