In what ways can the church learn from academia, and vice versa?

Claire Smith

Interestingly enough, this question takes me back to a hymn from my childhood, a few lines of which I’ll share:

thy people owned thy goodness, and we their deeds record; and both of this bear witness; one Church, one Faith, one Lord.

It seems to me that the academy, as far as religious studies that are particularly concerned with Christianity and hence the church, is not separate and distinct from the church. Many members of this academy are part of local congregations and are often relatively active. Some institutions are denominational in nature, while others have their genesis in various denominations. Even while serving a wider cause, the mission of the church remains at the forefront. In thinking of the relationship between this aspect of the academy and the church. Therefore, it seems that in considering how we learn from each other, one of our primary tasks would be to hold each other accountable as proclaimers of the love and reign of God. Thus, it is a mutual, reciprocal relationship.

In looking at the church, I’ll speak in terms of local congregations, where the concept of the church becomes more concrete. It seems at times that at the congregational level, the big push is to go out and act, to do something. This is especially so as many congregations face declining or stagnating membership in the face of rapidly changing neighborhoods and a world that has suddenly arrived on their doorsteps. The academy faces these realities as well and has to deal with them, though from the perspectives of its various disciplines. What the academy does is to help us to prayerfully pause and reflect and bring larger concerns to bear as we apply other frameworks—such as sociology, theology, biblical studies—to better grasp our realities. In this way our practice is considered rather than merely reacting to what we face.

I think here particularly of the missional church movement, which combines reflection on the church and God’s intention for it with practice. The congregations’ actions, therefore, become rooted in knowledge of missio Dei and God’s reign. The rich conversation between congregations and the academic discipline results in a more prayerfully considered and consistent practice.

The academy and congregations need each other for greater faithfulness to God’s mission. Youth ministry is one area that has made great strides in this direction of mutual encounter and learning. The more accessible nature of recent scholarly publications in this and other subjects suggests that the concern of mutual engagement is being addressed. The ongoing issue is not so much whether the academy and congregations are thinking about the same thing but how they can find a common place for conversation so that they are in an ongoing relationship, constantly learning from each other.

How does the congregation become aware of the academy’s research and findings in particular areas, and how does the academy better hear the concerns of the lives of the congregations so there is a greater dialogue between the two in which critical reflection and thinking informs and is informed by how the church encounters the world? Therefore, we need to ask, How do we serve together as proclaimers of the love and reign of God?

Chris Folmsbee

An acquaintance of mine named Bryan Bademan is the executive director of the MacLaurin Institute in Minneapolis. The MacLaurin Institute’s mission is to build bridges between the “church and university in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, bringing theological resources to the university and academic resources to the church. Our goal is to strengthen Christian intellectual life in this region by creating public space for leaders in the academy and church to address enduring human questions together.” (Visit http://www.maclaurin.org/ to learn more.)

When I was a youth pastor in Minnesota a few years ago, I was moderately engaged with what the MacLaurin Institute was doing. I went to a few events and forums with a couple of my colleagues, and that was about it. If I were back in Minneapolis today, I’d be more deeply occupied by what they are trying to accomplish.

More than at any other point in my life, I now think it is enormously significant that the church and university (academia) continue to seek meaningful ways to work collaboratively to stretch each other theologically, relationally, socially, academically, etc.

Here are five keys I think the church and university should consider when attempting to learn from one another.

1. Build on ideas. It is critical that both the university and the church trade ideas in a way that builds on the ideas of others rather than exchanging ideas for the sake of being right. The opportunity to exchange ideas for the sake of deeper levels of understanding helps push one another to a more full-bodied generosity that can often lead to deeper conversation and shared experiences.

2. Multiple perspectives. In the same manner that we might seek to build on ideas rather than settle on any one that is “right,” so too should we seek to allow multiple perspectives to influence the thinking and living of one another. Although it can be difficult to remain consistently open to others’ perspectives, it is critical in order to more fully understand each other as human beings. A commitment to embracing multiple perspectives can stretch us and mold us into people of open-handedness rather than people of close-mindedness.

3. Respectful debate. Building on ideas and allowing for multiple perspectives will inevitably lead to debate. There is a good chance that it won’t lead to respectful or healthy debate unless we are intentionally guiding it in that direction. I have noticed, however, that groups of people that allow for ideas to be built upon and allow for multiple perspectives grow closer to one another through steady conversation and inclusivity. Respectful or considerate debate that stimulates thinking or spurs one another on to more deeply comprehend a particular contrasting issue or even to broader realization of a shared thought is critical for the university and church to collaborate for greater learning opportunities.

4. Practicing situational thinking. I don’t have any firsthand experience with this as it relates specifically to the church and university. However, in my experience leading teams and working collaboratively with others, I have noticed that reliably positioning a thought or concept beyond where you currently are helps establish a forward momentum. Any time we can build scenarios or imagine for the sole reason of further thought development, I think it can help the dialogue to remain active and provide the energy for continued discussion when conversation seems to pause.

5. Practical and positive evaluation. Self-evaluation and peer evaluation in an encouraging and truthful environment are hugely significant. How do we know if we are growing in our ability to live generously, think more ecumenically, or be more accepting of one another and our individual ideas if we don’t practice evaluation? People will disagree with each other, no doubt. It isn’t about whether we disagree. It is about how we choose to disagree. Evaluation can mark our growth in thought as well as our expansion in how we choose to relate with others.

The church and the academy need one another to effectively engage the mission of God to restore the world to its intended wholeness. Consider your involvement or role in organizations such as the MacLaurin Institute. Is there a place for you to engage the conversation and help build bridges of shared theological and academic resources in your community?

Scot McKnight

One of my favorite pastors used to say something that irritated me, and time has only eased my irritation slightly. He used to say, “The dumbest farmers grow the best potatoes.” Our community had lots of farmers, and I’m not sure how any of them tolerated the pastor’s comment. Well, perhaps I do know: They too were caught up in an anti-intellectualism that often found its scapegoat in the professor. (I haven’t said this yet, so I’ll say it now: I’m a professor, and I take offense.)

The stereotypes, were we to use them of other jobs (say, a woman’s decision to stay at home or a Mexican immigrant working a landscape job or a Korean working at a dry cleaner), would require scorn and denunciation. But for some reason, one can insult intellectuals for being well-nigh useless or so egg-headed they are of no use to anyone but God and a few philosophers.

I happen to love knowledge and the intellectual life, and there’s nothing quite like reading a gifted writer who can in one paragraph tie together some intellectual heavyweights that both expand the mind and make intelligent readers aware that they are standing on the holy ground of the discovery of truth. My favorite writer like this is the Jewish writer Joseph Epstein, who has the singular gift that ties together breadth of knowledge, uncanny bits of juicy information, a cynical distrust of big claims, and a biting humor that turns the page on its own.

Which brings me to the first thing churches learn from the academy: critical distance. My own 25 years of leadership in the church leads me to think that the arena in which churchgoers are least capable of critical distance is politics, with one’s theology and one’s family tying for second place. Academics have learned to be critically distant. We can examine an argument and then present the alternatives in such a way that our students often clamor for what we personally think.

Every time I sort out some options for students—say, on how to understand the Lord’s Supper (real presence, sort of real presence, real “absence”—and we often call these transubstantiation, consubstantiation, and symbolism), and some student says, “Which do you believe?” I rock back on my heels momentarily and say, “Yes, critical distance permitted me to give each view its fair hearing so the student could sort it out.”

By the way, sometimes I refuse to tell the students, and sometimes I do tell them. It depends on the gravity of the issue. Recently we had quite the discussion about hell and universalism, and I sorted through some options and then said, “If you want to know where I stand, I’ll tell you, but you’ll have to ask me.” (Yes, a student asked.)

Which now leads me to what I think the academy can learn from the church, and I will use words that balance “critical distance” but which might not make sense until explained: uncritical proximity. One of the distinctives of the church is passionate commitment to the gospel, to God as Trinity, to the Lord Jesus Christ, and to historic faith—even, at times, when it isn’t completely obvious. And what makes the church durable is its willingness to stand with the church and let our “faith seek understanding.”

The academy essentially teaches us to believe only what we understand (and can demonstrate). The church teaches us to believe and that faith will open our eyes to even more understanding. C.S. Lewis famously said this: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

And there you have it: the alternatives that need to exist together. We need those folks who say, “I believe what I can understand,” and we need those folks who say, “I believe in order to understand.” We learn from the academy in the former and from the church in the latter.

I’m not sure we can put these together: critical distance in order to understand and uncritical proximity in order to understand. But as a Christian I believe in the gospel story about King Jesus, and it is through that story that the world and the Bible make sense. As an academic, I am compelled to make sense of texts and history and ideas through critical distance, but that form of knowledge will never lead to me to the depth or the mystery that uncritical proximity grants me through the grace of God’s gift to us in Christ.

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Theology is complicated, but it needs to be communicated in a simple way. What has to be done in order for us to do that?

Brooklyn Lindsey

Studying God is intimidating. If it isn’t intimidating, then a study in humility might be a better use of our time—at least at first. Since God is ever present, perfectly loving, all creative, all knowing, all powerful, and sovereign in all things including love, grace, justice, and truth, it seems futile for us in our finite minds to even try.

But we must grapple with theological ideas. We must go to the depths to try to understand because the difference and reason for studying God in the first place is grounded in a relationship where God can and will reveal his character, story, and hope as we grow in relationship to him.

The source of our study is a living, God-breathed revelation of who God is and what God is about (the Holy Bible). So, while we’ll never nail down everything, we are able to know and understand more than we could ever ask or imagine if we would simply dive into the relationship and the Word with expectation and malleability.

With that said, to communicate the story of God—to study him and offer ways of understanding God to others—we ourselves have to be rooted in Scripture. Not only do we need to be rooted, but we need to be built up in it with openness to the Holy Spirit guiding us as we read and respond to it. No person, no matter how brilliant or enlightened, can study the one true living God without having a relationship with the one true living Word—which became human and made his dwelling with us (John 1:1).

When you look at the account of Jesus’ life on earth, you see theological lessons everywhere. I asked a local hero (our pastor) what he thought about communicating theology in a simple way, and he referred to Jesus constantly telling the stories of God by telling the people to “do this,” and when this happens because of who you are or because of who I am, then “do that.” Jesus gives us how-to stories as he lived among the people. It was in how he lived his life that he expressed who God was and is today.

We’ve got to teach the story of God by telling it—not just with our lips but also with our lives. We also have to be living with our eyes open to teaching moments and be prepared to record them, repeat them, and use them to teach with zeal as Jesus did.

Another method for studying God is to get people to learn the story by telling the story. When people get involved in the text and learn how to tell it on their own, they become involved in it, and that involvement leads to connecting points for them individually.

Dan Boone, a friend, pastor, and preaching professor told me, “Understand the issue from the depths. Write it down in academic language that would be acceptable to a solid theologian. Then translate it for an eighth grader, test it on an eighth grader, ask the eighth grader if there are any words or concepts that are confusing; then rewrite it and tell it from memory.”

In his book Preaching the Story that Shapes Us, he helps us understand how to exegete the group we are speaking to. “The biggest mistake we make with theological ideas is that we stop with getting it said and do not work equally hard on getting it heard. The message is in the ears, not on the lips.”

How will your listener hear the idea? How will it be received? What is it like to feel it being said? This is where we should spend our time after understanding the idea “at the depths” then translating it.

Our three-year-old is getting a lesson in theology every day, when we teach her the stories and words of the Bible, when we apply them to the little things in life that she can understand, and when we model to her a sensitivity to God’s voice and to the needs of others as we live it out in front of her. I think we can do this in all areas of life and ministry—teaching theology by living out the story and making connecting points for people to grab onto and learn on their own.

For me it’s about…
* Being rooted in God’s Word
* Remembering that the knowledge of God, a heart bent in faith, and the practice of our beliefs work together
* Translating the story of God in contextual ways
* Applying the Word of God each and every day to our own lives, until illustrating it and modeling it becomes first nature to us again….

God is not through with any of us yet, and it is in us and through us that Christ is being revealed. It’s exciting to think and know that each and every day we have an opportunity to become more like he is; to be transformed by the renewing of our minds; to understand who we were meant to be all along; and then to find ways to teach that to others along the way is our gift and responsibility.

Chris Folmsbee

The only way to make theology simple is to ignore it.

Theology is to be lived, not merely comprehended. Simple means easy, straightforward, effortless, etc. To make theology simple for others, in my opinion, is to teach a sleeping faith.

Concepts of God may be made understandable, but mere ideas of God are just that—static thinking. Theology is to be a dynamic activity that moves past a mental understanding and toward soulful expression. Theology is most effectively taught and learned in application, not simply in suggestion.

To make something simple is to make it minimal. Do we really want to reduce God to the smallest most reasonable reality? Or do we wish to explore and explain a big God who is more complicated than simple and more dynamic than static?

I’m tired of inviting people, and I’m tired of other people inviting people into a simple faith. I want to invite people into a complicated faith; a faith marked by density, doubt, and disorientation. That is a faith worth teaching and learning—not a faith made simple.

I realize that people need things brought to their level in order to understand. I have three children, ages 11, 7, and 5. They have a hard time wrapping their minds and hearts around theology, practical or otherwise. However, honestly, I don’t really want to help them develop a simple faith. I don’t want them developing a predictable and controllable faith; I want to invite them toward discovering a difficult faith that more closely resembles the realities of life—complexity and perplexity.

When I teach my children stories about God, I don’t make them seem easy by reducing them to their minimal concepts. Instead, I make them what they are—adventurous, demanding, and so big that their imaginations have to work to even remotely give them a chance at connecting.

This is why we have so many unconvincing Christians populating our churches. They don’t know a God other than the simple one they had passed on to them, in a clean, easy-as-pie, mild, smooth, simple-as-ABC kind of way. I hope my kids never say, “I get it” when it comes to God. When we say, “I get it,” what we are really saying is, “I’ve mastered it,” and that is not at all what a working theology is.

Too much time is spent trying to make theology simple, and not enough time is spent wondering. I’m ready for a shift in our approach to teaching. I’m ready for an approach that proves the vastness and fullness of God rather than the triviality in which God is usually taught. I’m ready to be invited and to invite others into a theological journey so filled with risk, danger, openness, and uncertainty that it elicits fear and inspires astonishment as opposed to being comfortable and relaxing. Frankly, I am done with the simple. God cannot be fathomed.

What is our infatuation with making things simple? We do this so people can worship a God they can understand? That seems like a very small view of God and also a small view of man. How about, instead of caring how to make theology simple, we care more about how we make theology what it really is—a deep, eternal, unfathomable abyss of wonder. Let’s face it, theology isn’t simple and can’t ever be simple unless we ignore it, which unfortunately is what a lot of people choose to do. Sadly, much of the church is asleep in its faith.

Scot McKnight

I have a friend who sent me a manuscript for review. He said he had written it for “laypeople.” He wanted to make some difficult philosophical and theological subject clear to laypeople. He tried. He tried hard, and he told stories, and I had to tell him what John Ortberg once told me about something I had tried to write for that every evasive audience, the “layperson”: Not even close.

Theology can be complex. The Trinity, which I consider so foundational to so many doctrines and ideas—like what love is or how fellowship is designed—is as complex as it gets. Great theologians have pondered Trinity with terms like person and have had to resort to great Latin or Greek terms to make things clear—like hypostasis or perichoresis. Indeed, it can get incredibly complex, and a theologian friend, LeRon Shults, sometimes speaks of things like “absolute futurity,” and most of us are left baffled and wondering what the in the world such an expression might mean. And many, because they are driven to a lack of understanding, resort to Who cares? or, It must not matter, or it would be clearer. I don’t think anyone questions the reality of the complexity of (this sentence structure! or) theology.

The issue is how to make great ideas clear so the ordinary person not only grasps them but can live them out.

I’ve done more than my share of thinking about this because so many people have asked me about it, and they’ve asked me because I have some success at doing this. The success I’ve had relates primarily to two people: my wife, Kris, who reads my stuff and tells me with straight-shooting language whether it’s clear and meaningful (and they are not the same thing); and John Ortberg, who simply told me that my stuff wasn’t close but that I needed to keep working. And he encouraged me so much that I kept working.

First, read those who do this well. Three names come to mind, and you may well think of others. Mortimer Adler, whatever you think of his Thomism or his theories of education, could write so clearly that many learned philosophy from him. C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, though dated in language and form and even ideas, is perhaps the single best piece of popular theology and apologetics written in the 20th century. And N.T. Wright is unquestionably the best writer on biblical subjects alive today.

Second, focus on the forest without the trees and only later bring in the trees. Get the big picture in mind and keep it in mind. Avoid building a case through the accumulation of details and then drawing a conclusion. One of my editors said to me that I needed to learn that lay folks don’t read a book unless they trust the author, so just believe they do and write what you think is true and forget trying to prove everything. I counseled a young author who was trying to make the jump from academic writing to lay folks with those words, and it made a huge difference for him. It is too easy to get trapped in the approach—methodical, abstract, accumulation of evidence—of scholarship and thinking that clear prose in that mode works for laypeople. It often doesn’t.

Third, let significance shape your writing. Until you know why your subject matters to ordinary people in their ordinary lives, you aren’t ready to write theology at a simple level. But once you do, everything can fall into place. I use The Jesus Creed as an example. I could have written a book on the Jewishness of Jesus, which quite frankly is interesting but doesn’t really “matter” to my mom or dad. Instead, I baptized the Jewishness of Jesus into the waters of significance: how to live the Christian life in accordance with how Jesus understood it. That turned the book from “history” to “significance.”

Fourth, learn what subject matters really matter. A friend of mine wrote an 800-page book “for the average reader.” He’s a very good academic writer. I told him that the “average” reader doesn’t want 800 pages on any theological topic. Any! The point here needs emphasis: Not only do we need to learn to let significance shape our writing, but we need to learn what length is needed for the layperson for what subject. The layperson isn’t (generally) interested in a 600-page (even if clearly written) book on the Pharisees. Strive for two pages. That’s about all that is needed.

Fifth, develop a pace that permits comprehension for more readers. The wildly successful The Purpose-Driven Life, by Rick Warren, had a trick: one simple idea in each chapter. One idea leading to another. That’s the secret. Scholars tend to have 10-15 ideas in a given chapter, and sometimes five quick points in one paragraph, each important and each needed but not drawn out enough for the average layperson to grasp what’s going on. It doesn’t matter how clear of a writer you are if your pace is too fast. Slow down. One idea per chapter. Save the other ideas for another day.

Finally, read your stuff aloud to someone, asking for feedback, until it all makes sense at the auditory level. I can’t emphasize this enough. Make the prose so clear that someone can sit and listen to you and enjoy what you are reading. Until that happens, you need to keep writing because it will otherwise be “not even close.”

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What three books do you recommend on the subject of leadership development and why?

Danny Kwon

As I complete my PhD in organizational leadership, I can tell you that I have read well over 100 books on the subject of leadership over the past three years. They range from theoretical and academically inclined books for those taking a more scholarly approach to leadership studies, to those that are practical in nature and include step-by-step principles and practices for leadership. Personally, while I would not say that I enjoyed all of the books I have read, I do believe that each and every one has something to say about leadership and, in particular, leadership development.

While each book was chosen with ministry in mind, I also chose them because of the unique way they have contributed to our local ministry and leadership development. Moreover, I tried to choose each one based on the unique perspective it is written from.

Leadership: Theory and Practice, by Peter Northouse, is the most scholarly or academic book I have chosen. Frankly speaking, I don’t know if many people outside those studying leadership on a serious academic level will be reading this book. However, he does have a book that is more practically geared, called Introduction to Leadership: Concepts and Practice, that may be more appropriate for a general audience. What I love most about these two books is that they give a general introduction, history, and explanation to major schools of leadership theory and how it applies to real-life situations. Understanding the differences between transactional versus transformational leadership, the definition of servant leadership from an organizational leadership perspective, or team leadership models, has been extremely valuable as I seek to develop leadership in our youth ministry with our pastoral interns, adult volunteers, and student leadership. Moreover, having an overall picture of leadership theory has generally enriched and informed how I want to practice leadership development.

Peter Drucker’s seminal work, Managing the Nonprofit Organization, is a must read for anyone in ministry and considering leadership development. While the title presupposes the idea of management, Drucker has long been acknowledged for his more general contribution to leadership. The church is, of course, a nonprofit organization. Hence, Drucker’s work gives tangible principles and practices for directing and leading churches and ministry that can be used for leadership development and can subsequently foster an overarching vision for leadership and how we lead in our churches and youth ministries. As such, Drucker writes about topics such as organizational mission, performance, management, work relationships, and personal development in terms of leadership and management.

By far the most practical and easy-to-use book for leadership development is Essential Leadership, by Kara Powell and the Fuller Youth Institute. I have personally used this resource for leadership development for my adult volunteers, and I found it very beneficial. For starters, it comes with a leader’s guide and a participant guide. This is a valuable resource because it enables our adult volunteer leaders to better engage in their development personally but also from the perspective of the ministry as a whole. Second, the topics in this book cover a wide range that will equip those in our ministry to consider and grow in the wide range of issues that relate to our ministries and may even stretch our ministries. Finally, I found that using this comprehensive resource has enabled our volunteer staff to become more than just people who show up to youth events and activities. Rather, they have moved to becoming true shepherds and leaders.

Scot McKnight

I have a confession to offer: I neither look forward to reading nor do I even like leadership books. I’ve read a few, like Seth Godin’s Tribes and Nancy Beach’s Gifted to Lead. And, yes, I’ve read a few others, but I don’t like them and don’t get much out of them, and I say this as one whose pastor, Bill Hybels, is a leadership guru. Yes, I read Ruth Tucker’s Leadership Reconsidered because it sorted out models of leadership for me and gave me a handle on the discussion.

It’s not that I think the books are bad or that leadership is a bad idea. I’m just not wired to think the way leadership books think. My biggest complaint, and it doesn’t apply to all of these books or to any of them from cover to cover, is that they too often go in the wrong direction. They move from leadership models in our world and then find biblical verses about elders that say more or less the same thing. Or they find examples of leaders, like Joseph or Nehemiah or Jesus or Paul, and show how they did back in Bible days what leaders are now just finding—with the tone and implication that if leaders read the Bible, they’d have known this long ago. The movement I see too often is from here to there. It’s the wrong direction. We are called to move from there to here.

But there’s another leadership approach, and it can be called the deconstructive approach. Some say leadership is servant leadership, and they go to Mark 10:45, I didn’t come to be served but to serve, and show that Christian leadership is completely otherwise. That’s helpful, but I get cranky and cynical when I read this sort of thing because I wonder what’s next. Will they then slip in the leadership models into that servant leadership model? Sometimes they do.

Yet, I know there are more or less leaders in the Bible, and there are clear guidelines—say, in the Pastoral Epistles—about how the church’s leaders are to operate and guide and mentor and lead. Yet I’m still not satisfied. Maybe I’m just cranky.

So I want to put my idea on the line and see where it leads us. We have one leader, and his name is Jesus. I want to bang this home with a quotation from Jesus from Matthew 23, where he seems to be staring at the glow of leadership in the eyes of his disciples, and he does nothing short of deconstructing the glow:

But you are not to be called “Rabbi,” for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth “father,” for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one Instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

Instead of seeing myself as a leader, I see myself as a follower. Instead of plotting how to lead, I plot how to follow Jesus with others. Instead of seeing myself at the helm of some boat—and mine is small compared to many others—I see myself in the boat, with Jesus at the helm.

Maybe I just have not read enough of the leadership books to know that I’m repeating what leadership books say. Maybe not. What I do want to say, though, is that leadership too often places the pastor or some person in the front and having others be guided (and following) that person, and that, I dare say, distorts the entire gospel. Jesus was willing to say that his followers didn’t have a rabbi of their own, didn’t have a human father in a position of ultimate authority, and they didn’t have an instructor who was their teacher. They had one rabbi and one instructor, and his name was Jesus, and he was Messiah. They had one father, and he was Creator of all. They were to see themselves as brothers, not leaders. That’s straight from the lips of Jesus.

There is something so profoundly deconstructing about Jesus’ words here that we need to take them much more seriously every time and any time we begin to talk about leaders and leadership. My contention is that we are not leaders but followers; that Jesus is the leader; and that any leading we do is by way of following.

That’s a rant. It happens to be one I believe.

Oh, the three books on leadership. How about four: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John!

Mike King

Here are the three leadership books I recommend and why.

1) The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, by Peter Senge. Peter Senge wrote The Fifth Discipline in 1990. This book continues to be a seminal work on a systems-thinking approach to leadership and organizational culture. Senge discusses five disciplines that nurture a productive learning environment:

1) Personal Mastery. I think this is congruent with spiritual disciplines. A leader in a learning organization must be a learner. A leader must know herself and be self-aware. A leader must be willing to pick up his cross, pursue Jesus Christ intimately, and pour out his life for others. A leader must be able to hyper-focus on her vocation and not become diffused by trying to do too many things.

2) Mental Models. We all have assumptions deeply embedded in our minds about how the world works and what we think we must do to make things happen. Often these mental models are false constructs of how the world around us actually works.

3) Shared Vision. Creating a shared vision as a community of people stimulates synergistic engagement instead of sterile compliance.

4) Team Learning. In situated learning theory, I would call this the activity of a “community of practice” that leads to genuine learning and creativity.

5) Systems Thinking. This is the “fifth discipline” that allows one to integrate all of these disciplines into a new way of thinking and viewing reality.

I would put The Fifth Discipline in my list of top 20 books that have had the most influence on my life and the way I think about how the world works. This book provides an excellent paradigm for seeing beyond the seeing to comprehend and grasp dynamic complexities and the non-linear ways that systems work. This book has helped me better understand the complexities of leading a large organization, working in the church, dealing with challenging interpersonal issues, thinking about youth ministry, building relationships, and developing a rhythm of spiritual formation.

2) The Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, by Edwin Friedman. In many ways, Edwin Friedman takes what Peter Senge developed in The Fifth Discipline and advances it. The Failure of Nerve was actually completed after Friedman’s death. Friedman was a rabbi and a “family systems” therapist. He deals with the lack of leadership that exists in our organizations, homes, churches, and businesses because of our safety-conscious and data-driven culture that waters down and subverts true vision, risk-taking, and excellence.

Friedman describes how leaders are sabotaged by the people and organizations they lead and therefore must have the nerve and courage to nurture their own maturation, commitment, and skills in order to provide strong and firm leadership in their cultures. The book talks a lot about the important leadership characteristic of being a “non-anxious presence.” Friedman calls on leaders to rely upon their competencies and intuitive skills over and beyond reliance on the need for “more data” to fix problems. He values leadership stamina, confidence, and decisiveness over technique. One of the most significant contributions to the book is an examination of the concept of empathy and how too often this becomes an exercise of enabling dysfunction. This book adds an important element to the conversation concerning the tension between what it takes to build genuine community without dumbing down the organizational culture to the lowest common denominator.

3) The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. As I write this, I’m really struck by how related yet different and (at first glance) contradictory these three book recommendations are, especially The Failure of Nerve versus The Starfish and the Spider. Whereas Friedman calls for a strong, decisive, and self-differentiated leader who is willing to make an intuitive decision for the organization, church, community, family, or business; Brafman and Beckstrom are proposing a “leaderless organization.” I’m assuming most of the readers of Slant33 are familiar with the concept of the starfish/spider metaphor, so I won’t go into the content of this wonderful little book. I have used The Starfish and the Spider in numerous university and seminary classes I have taught on missional theology, leadership, and ecclesiology. It resonates with much of the emerging generation who are not interested in being in authoritarian environments. However, I believe it takes a strong leader, like the one Friedman talks about in The Failure of Nerve, who understands the dynamic complexities Senge talks about in The Fifth Discipline, in order to create the kind of cultural environment that Brafman and Beckstrom describe in The Starfish and the Spider.

What do you think? What books on leadership would you add to the list? Make your suggestions below in the comment section.

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Have Evangelicals lost their minds? (I.E., Is the greatest threat anti-intellectualism?)

Lilly Lewin

I am a practitioner. I like to apply my faith—live it out rather than talking it to death. My relationship with Jesus is practical and hands on. I’m about loving and relating to people. I like to use practical things to pray with, like seeing a car and using it as a reminder to pray for a friend who drives the same model or helping out a single-parent family.

As a teenager, I wasn’t one to question or need proof for my belief. I’d experienced God and his presence, and that was enough for me. I know that many people need more. They want the proofs and the facts to back up all they believe. But sometimes too much head knowledge can be rough on the practicality and the faith part of faith.

Too much of anything tends to be detrimental. When a person becomes extreme—either overly intellectual or extremely anti-intellectual—evangelical faith and evangelical witness suffer. We cannot share the love of Jesus if we are constantly battling over who is right and who is wrong or who is in and who is out. If our faith comes down to a list, then we’ve really missed the relational factor of the Savior.

If we overanalyze and overthink faith, we can come to believe that we can figure out life on our own. God becomes a nice idea rather than a unique Creator who longs to be in a relationship with his creation. And I’ve definitely met those who feel they have out-thought God and no longer need him, especially some teenagers of late. On the other hand, God has given us great minds to use and great intellects to achieve brilliant things. And we need scholars and teachers and those willing to dig deep in words and in the lab to discover new things.

Evangelicals have always been the practical ones. Until recently, evangelicals were the ones making sure the kingdom was about the people who aren’t here yet; helping people find Jesus and get to know him in a personal way. But lately the extreme side of evangelicals seem to have lost their minds. They’ve allowed fear to control their actions; like wanting to burn Qur'ans or allowing a television personality to become a spokesmodel for God.

The true threat to evangelicalism is fear. And instead of being about what we are for, many people are now focused on what they are afraid of. My Bible says, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-discipline.” Doesn’t yours? This fear of others has meant that we’ve lost a lot of compassion for the “least of these.” And doing unto others seems to have gotten lost too. And we are afraid of anyone or anything that is different from what we’ve experienced.

Fear makes us do stupid things. We overreact; we shut down; we choose to believe the worst rather than the best about a person or situation. We close ourselves off from people who are different and choose hate over love. Fear can also cause us to lose relationship both with others and with God.

Also, our love of TV and technology has increased fear. 24/7 media allows us to be overly aware of all that is going on all over the world all the time. And rather than using this knowledge as an inspiration to pray, the 24/7 nature of the news causes too many of us to panic. Hearing things over and over again causes confusion and anxiety. And entertainment media can also blow information out of proportion. Some people begin to believe that the world is out of control and that they have to do whatever it takes to defend themselves, their family, their faith. Many have become defenders, fighters, rather than peacemakers. And here may be where brains get checked at the door; thus, we forget that God is in control no matter what the news or the newspapers say. And we forget that God isn’t scared and really doesn’t need to be defended.

An additional negative about media is its ability to define people and things. Many of us have acquiesced to the media’s definition of who/what an evangelical is. Sadly, the word evangelical now is a label that isn’t positive. An evangelical is seen as someone who has the tendency to be “ultra-conservative, right-wing, tea party, afraid, and anti-everything.” Evangelicals too often are known for what they are against and who they are attacking, not for loving people or loving each other, or serving others or even serving one another. Why have we allowed the media to define and label, and why have we allowed the extremists to get all the press? Hum…

I’d rather see us embrace the evangelicalism that Menno Simons professed almost 500 years ago. He said, "True evangelical faith cannot lie dormant. It clothes the naked, it feeds the hungry, it comforts the sorrowful, it shelters the destitute, it serves those that harm it, it binds up that which is wounded, it has become all things to all people."

What would happen if I really live this out? Live out the Sermon on the Mount. Live out Simons’s quote. Not just love the Bible, not just believe the gospel, not just know and understand doctrine but actually love one another, actually love my enemies. And actually serve the least of these. And as I/we do, I/we will have less and less time to complain, less and less time to be fearful, and less time to attack others who believe differently. And the media will have a very different label for evangelicals.

Jim Hampton

Those of us who teach in seminaries often hear the old joke in which someone says, “How are things going at the cemetery?” I’m sure most of the time it is good-natured ribbing, but I also think it is often an indication of what people really think about seminaries (and about critical thinking in general). As one person put it to me when he learned I was a seminary professor, “Seminary is the place pastors go to lose their faith.”

However, we need to come to grips with the idea that being a critical thinker and being spiritually healthy are not polar opposites. In fact, as Dallas Willard reminds us, “We need to understand that Jesus is a thinker, that this is not a dirty word but an essential work, and that his other attributes do not preclude thought, but only ensure that he is certainly the greatest thinker of the human race: ‘the most intelligent person who ever lived on earth.’ He constantly uses the power of logical insight to enable people to come to the truth about themselves and about God from the inside of their own heart and mind” (quoted in James Sire, Habits of the Mind, p. 181).

Willard is building on the idea of St. Anselm in the 11th century: fides quaerens intellectum. "Faith seeking understanding." Anselm was not saying, "I understand, therefore I believe" nor yet, "I believe, therefore I don't need to understand." Rather, what he wanted to convey is that “Because I believe, I hunger to understand.” Learning feeds faith, and faith drives for fuller knowledge.

The problem, of course, is that being a critical thinker means we will sometimes (often?) have to consider ideas that seem to call into question previously held beliefs. Things we were taught in Sunday school, learned from our parents, or even heard from the pulpit are suddenly brought into sharp contrast with new information we’ve received. The reality is that this can be an extremely painful experience. No one likes to be told that what they have always held to be true may in fact not be. However, know that it is nothing strange, unusual, different, or unique. We who teach see it all the time. It is not your heart drying up. It is God trying to wean you off milk and onto more solid food. It's God trying to get you away from Snickers and Diet Coke and onto vegetables, fruit, and fiber.

This is a moral and spiritual process that many people—especially students of theology—pass through and which Paul Ricouer has described in three stages: first naïvete; critical awareness; and second naïvete.

Stage one is naivete. We have a simple, direct faith. We tend to see world in black-and-white categories. How do you know what to believe? What is right? The "authorities" tell us. Knowledge is absolute and unchanging—it is possessed by the authorities. Anyone who disagrees with the authority must be wrong. No compromise or negotiation. People raised in such environments often grow up to be stage-1 thinkers—authoritarian, dogmatic. However, when authorities disagree with each other (no matter what the area), it is deeply unsettling. How do you know which one to believe/follow? As soon as we have to explain why we believe one over the other, we have moved from stage-1 thinking. Just as Adam and Eve couldn't return to the garden, back to blind and uncritical acceptance of authority once they had tasted the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, so it is nearly impossible to return to stage 1 after realizing its oversimplifying inadequacies.

Stage two is critical awareness. That's when we start learning stuff. Greek, Hebrew, doctrine, philosophy, church history. We start realizing that not all devoted believers say things the way we do or think the way we do. We learn that much in the Bible isn't what we thought, that some important passages have major unresolved issues, many passages have two or three genuinely possible and mutually exclusive interpretations. The result is a pain like no other. We feel stripped of our faith, our certainty. And since that stripping happened through the acquisition of new knowledge, we blame all new knowledge. At this point, we feel we have lost our first love. In Christian education, we call this the liminal phase.

We can retreat back to the first naïvete and resist any further learning, focusing on techniques and skills of ministry (except, of course, the skills of exegesis and theological analysis). We can try to unscramble the egg and get it back into the shell. People responding this way deny that their response is one of fear.

We can become cynics, masters of Christian learning and language but detached from all of it; we see it all as metaphors, images, nothing as certain or normative. A lot of scholars end up here and assume you can't have a profound and certain faith if you “really know the score." Unlike the retreaters, people in this reaction talk about their disillusionment and disappointment. They make no bones about their cynicism and even come to enjoy shaking people up. But there is a third option.

Stage three is a movement forward. We learn enough to become, once again, humble and small in our own sight. We laugh both at our early, naïve egotism (Satan, the prince of darkness and father of lies, is personally after me, so I must be important!) and at our critical cynicism (I actually thought I was smart enough to overturn a consensus of Christian truth, teaching, and experience). We realize that both naïvete and cynicism are immature.

This stage is often called second naïvete. We recover our simplicity, our directness in faith, but we realize that our outlook, however true, is at best provisional, certainly partial, and that God has a life beyond us. We are fearless in learning but also fearless in our believing. Oddly enough, people who are authentically in the second naïvete typically decline to say so. They merely see themselves as pilgrims, knowing what they know, wanting to learn more, and wanting to please God; but they leave the ultimate issue in God's hands, confident that he is good on his word, even if we ourselves are not always sure of the best way to interpret his word. We don't shrink from faith, but we know that "we know in part.“

Charles Wesley, the great Methodist hymn writer and theologian, is famously said to have stated, “Unite the two so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety.” Wesley understood that to be a biblical Christian meant that one had to find ways to synthesize our critical thinking with our spirituality. As we learn to submit our intellect and our heart to God, only then we will discover what Jesus meant when he stated, “The truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

Scot McKnight

Mark Noll, the story goes, was irritated with the direction of American evangelicalism’s premier institution, Wheaton College, and opined publicly in a book-length rant, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. It was a good read because there is an undeniable anti-intellectualism among many evangelicals.

I see it in an utterly baffling observation like this: “What’s all this about the Trinity? I don’t see the word Trinity in my Bible.” Or I see it in American Christians who, in what can only be called a cocksure manner, utter strong words on behalf of the Tea Party or Republicans or Democrats but, when asked about the simplest of explanations of an economic theory, have absolutely no idea how the economy works. For some it’s as simple as an ATM: put in numbers, out comes money. An economic theory is at work and is perhaps the single most ignored factor in political discourse.

But my ire is most provoked when I hear such banalities from the lips of pastors and preachers who, though they are seeking to appeal to the populist audiences to which they minister, are propagating the sort of superficiality that erodes our faith and deprives the intelligent parishioners—and there are more than most care to recognize—of growth and exploration and, sometimes, of a faith substantive enough to survive the withering impact of intellectual questions.

But we need to be honest: The intellectual life is not for all; not all care about how Trinity and atonement connect; not all care to think theoretically about the design of the state in ancient Israel and how it was impacted by the New Testament expansion into a global movement and then to consider how that might be best lived out in our world. Nor do all care to explore the subtle and brilliantly attractive connections of faith and science. And not all that many want to explore Charles Taylor’s theories of modernity and secularism. Let’s admit that perhaps the majority don’t care about such things. There’s no more reason to make everyone into intellectuals than to make all of us baristas.

But some people are intellectuals, and it is the calling of the Jesus Creed to love God “with all our minds.” This means the church—every church so far as it is able—must muster resources and make possible the exploration of the mind of God, the mind of Christ, and the mind of the church when it comes to intellectual questions.

Here are a few intellectual questions of our day, and a church that doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of the questions and the integrity required to tackle them seriously is irresponsible and in need of repentance.

I think of the massive shift occurring among our young adults about how to think Christianly while embracing some form of evolution. Most of my students don’t even question evolution but have profound questions about how to think through theological topics and what the Bible says in light of their embrace of evolution.

I think of the serious thinking being done today on the relationship of the state and the church. There is an instinct for many simply to align with a political party, and often enough the instinct is barely informed. But there are many today who want to ponder how to think Christianly about state, about economy, and about the kingdom of God in our world—and how the kingdom impacts the former. James Davison Hunter’s recent book, How to Change the World, is one sophisticated probing, and many crave conversation about these topics—and often from the angle of a particular expertise: economists have things to say, business folks have perspective… I could go on.

And I think of historians who want to know what Jesus was like in his Jewish world and won’t stand for banal analogies; they want to know who wrote Isaiah and are unconvinced it is a simple one-guy-did-it-all approach, and they want to work that into their doctrine of Scripture.

And I think of many who are deeply aware of how context and history and heritage shape what we believe, and they are aware that the Reformation’s questions and answers, while profound and valuable, are not ours—and they have new questions that transcend those questions and those answers, and pastors who want to regurgitate Reformation theology and pretend that is enough simply don’t get the job done for them.

And I think those who are studying contemporary culture recognize it is post-Christian and know that old methods don’t connect well. They want to explore a missiology for a new day.

So what can we do? Let me make three suggestions:

First, pastors need to recognize, legitimate, and support the value of the intellectual life. This means, at times, exploring some intellectual themes in sermons and classes. Some in churches like to hear a reference to Aristophanes and Shakespeare and even Richard Rorty.

Second, churches need to provide a safe place for intellectuals in a church community to gather with others, think about serious topics, and ponder away at issues that may not find resolution or that may—and here’s the reality—lead to answers that aren’t as safe as many pastors might prefer. Truth will win, so let’s work at it and not be afraid.

Third, intellectuals in churches need to demand that their pastor respect the intellectual life and that their churches provide a forum for intellectual endeavors. There is no reason why churches can’t invite Francis Collins to speak or ask a professional archaeologist to speak about recent discoveries. Again, the fields are ripe for harvest. Who will see the fields?

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Theology.Community and Salvation

What are some of the connections between community and salvation?

Steve Argue

Some of the connections between salvation and community that youth ministry workers might consider reflecting upon are:

What Does Connecting Me to We Mean? (Communal identity) It is no surprise that adolescents are naturally self-focused due to psychological, developmental, and socio-cultural forces. It’s also no surprise that young people typically mirror their cultures. From a western perspective, autonomy and individuality are strived for and celebrated. While having benefits, these cultural values can warp one’s need for interdependence—a necessity in development and the prayer of Jesus (John 17). Somehow, individuals must rediscover faith communities as essential, not optional.

Robert Webber (Ancient-Future Faith) reminds us of scriptural metaphors that define faith communities: the body of Christ as interdependent, tangibly expressing the very heart and healing of God together in our world. Salvation is found in our dependence upon God and each other, living out the very nature and purposes of God in ways that bless the whole world.

The people of God as the ones who, though different, find a unifying center in God revealed through Jesus Christ. Salvation is God giving us a new identity.

The fellowship of faith, where faith is practiced and grown as a verb, dynamically changing and growing as the community journeys together.

The new creation, where we celebrate renewal and resurrection in our lives. We gather as messed-up people, speaking hope and renewal to each other because of resurrection. Salvation is our message to each other that there is hope for you and me.

Kenda Creasy Dean (Practicing Passion) reminds us that adolescents have a tremendous amount of passion and seek to situate it in something equally as amazing. Salvation for adolescents, then, is showing them that the embodied, unifying, dynamic, hopeful faith community called the church is a place that is big enough for all their passion. This is good news for adolescents—salvation clarified and inspired by a community acting within the wonderfully complex, mysterious, multi-layered aspects of God’s saving grace. This is space big enough for adolescents to call home.

How Do We Connect the Narrative to Us? (Communal Discourse) The community acts as an interpreting community for young people, where questions can be asked and more questions can be offered. It is the place where faith language, symbol, and practice happen in the rhythms of life. Self-interpretation has its limitations, especially for young people who are seeking to discover and define their identities. Older people need space and skill to tell good stories from their own journeys (cf. Stanley Hauerwas, Growing Old in Christ), and young people need space to hear these stories, reflecting on their own.

Salvation, then, means inviting all into the narrative; finding connection in the midst of our diverse backgrounds and stories. It is what makes the church beautiful. It means not only young people understanding the narrative passed onto them but previous generations encouraging (and learning from) the next generation who continue the story with new language, ritual, and symbol. This may challenge some of our church/youth ministry assumptions about what participation with the whole community means and how we carry God’s narrative of redemption forward.

How Do We Embrace Suffering as Ours? (Communal Burden Bearing) Last month we had a worship service that created space for people to come and be prayed for. I listened to a wide range of stories that included both joy and tragedy. These are the stories that any faith community inherits. Faith communities that welcome young people open themselves up to their lives, embodying the good news.

More strongly, churches that commit to youth ministries must recognize that this move is not a step toward outsourcing youth issues. It is a portal to let all youth beauty, pain, drama, joy, expression, and messiness in. This is good news for everyone and one more picture of God putting the world back together.

Given limited space, these are some of my connecting points. What would you add?

Lilly Lewin

I just got back from a two-week pilgrimage with students, following the path of the Celtic missionaries who brought the gospel to Scotland and Northern England. Since we—the participants on the trip—all came from different places, we began to grow into community as we traveled together in a small van over winding roads (including some stops for vomiting along the way!). We lived together, sharing space and bathrooms very different from ours at home. We tasted new food and learned to cook new food and learned about different styles of leadership and communication. Then we repented when we really screwed it up.

Visiting places of incredible beauty, like the Isles of Iona and Lindisfarne, is a powerful way to encounter God. But laughing hysterically over jokes, burping, and finger puppets during evening prayer are also powerful and productive ways to engage God’s Spirit. By the end of the two weeks, we each had engaged God on our own, through what we learned from the saints of old and through each other along the way.

The Celtic missionaries—monks, abbots, and abbesses—were all about community. Their process was to move into the neighborhood and get to know the locals, learning the language of the people. While the monks on the continent were about separating from society, the Celtic monks believed in making themselves part of the local community and moving into its center. They didn’t throw out the art, music, and customs of the locals but helped them learn to see God and engage God through these things. The Celtic monasteries were places of hospitality, welcoming all who came to call. You were invited to eat with, learn with, and work alongside the Christian community.

In the Celtic monastery, one had a “soul friend,” who came alongside the seeker to help her learn to engage God and listen to her story. Today, more than ever, we need to be people of hospitality who are moving into the neighborhoods, learning the languages of our cultures, and helping others to see Jesus as we live and work and serve outside the church walls. We need to be and to help our students become people who listen to the hearts of others and go places where Jesus would go—among the outcasts and the poor and those outside the confines of the church walls.

Also, it’s important for us to find a community where we can safely share our stories and our hearts. We need other safe people to process the events and happenings in our lives. Each night along the pilgrimage we shared our experiences of the presence of God that day. And we also shared our frustrations when we didn’t feel connected to God at all. We had to learn to listen to each other and deal with stuff that came up in order to function on the road as a whole. People in a loving, kingdom community really do help us to connect our story to God’s story. As we listen to how others are experiencing life with Jesus, we learn and grow ourselves. We are never too old or too experienced to need this kind of community in our lives.

So to answer the question directly, the Celtic monks of old showed that how we live together reflects God’s love to those in the community and those who might be interested in joining us on the journey. In our two weeks, we had the opportunity to learn to love, share, serve, encourage, and say we are sorry. The people we hang out with really do impact how we live and act. That’s why we need to be a part of loving communities (which may or may not be churches. We all know many churches that aren’t loving or safe!) to help us live our faith.

Learning to live out our lives in the way of Jesus and following Jesus in a 24/7 way takes practice and encouragement. Salvation is caught, not just taught. Jesus didn’t have his followers memorize a bunch of rules or laws. The Jewish disciples already had enough of these. Instead, Jesus poured his life into the Twelve. They learned by doing; by practicing healing, casting out demons, praying and teaching and serving others. They went out in groups and in pairs and came back and processed together what they’d learned and experienced, the good and the bad. They practiced living out the kingdom of God, not just hearing about it. This was salvation; to do the kingdom as total beginners among friends. Jesus was comfortable with these untrained beginners doing the kingdom. And their friends didn’t have to be seminary professors to tag along.

In 2010, like in the 600s, people need to see the kingdom of God in action. They need to experience the people of God moving into their lives, loving and serving. As God’s people love and serve and share and listen and go the extra mile (doing their best in living out that “Sermon on the Mount” thing), then others will want to be part of the community and discover the gift of salvation.

Scot McKnight

Roman Catholics are taught that outside the church, there is no salvation. In Latin: extra ecclesiam nulla salus. Even if the official teaching of the Catholic church has nuanced this of late, the expression rankles even the most sympathetic of Protestants and evangelicals. For many, this line gives too much credit to the church. We’d rather it say, “Outside Christ there is no salvation.”

I would agree. We need the emphasis to be on Christ, but… Have you ever given much attention to the interconnectedness, the intimate union, of the Father and the Son in the New Testament? Or that this same union is extended to the church so we can say that Christ and the church are one?

Notice these words of Jesus: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). It gets deeper for Jesus: “Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (14:11). This unpacks, even if we can’t comprehend it, the earlier statement of Jesus: “The Father and I are one” (10:30). We get it: Jesus and the Father are a sacred unity.

But Jesus extends this in the most amazing of ways when he extends the union of Christ and the Father to his church—both amongst church people and the church people with Christ! He prays “that [his people] may be one, as we are one” (17:11, 22). He defines this in the next verse: “I in them and you in me, that they may be completely one” (verse 23).

Two facts then: Jesus is one with the Father, and we are one with Jesus Christ.

The apostle Paul carries on this second fact we learned from Jesus, and he says this in a way that brings all the glory to Christ. Paul overtly asserts two difficult-to-put-together ideas: We are “in Christ,” and Christ is “in us.” And Paul says “in Christ” there is “redemption” and “death to sin” and “eternal life” (Romans 3:24; 6:11, 23). In fact, if you chase down the “in Christ” references in Paul’s letters, you will discover all kinds of benefits: grace, wisdom, victory, new creation, etc.

If we put this all into one bundle, we get this: Christ and the church interpenetrate each other so much we can say they indwell one another. Now to our point: If we are one with Christ as Christ is with the Father, and if salvation comes in union with Christ, then the church mediates that salvation as the visible and spiritual and verbal presence of Christ on earth. But it does so under two restrictions: First, it mediates and heralds salvation only in union with Christ. Second, it does so most effectively only when it is one.

Jesus told his disciples, in the most famous sermon ever, the Sermon on the Mount, they were both the “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world” (Matthew 5:13-16). There are good reasons to think Jesus may have meant they were salt to the Jews (the word for earth is eretz, or “the land of Israel”) and light to the Gentiles, for Jesus shifts from “earth” to “world” and draws on the great theme of Isaiah that the people of Israel, in the last days, would be a light to the Gentiles.

In these two words, salt and light—one evoking the idea of preservation and flavor through penetration and the other enlightening the world through the good news of the gospel—we see how we are to mediate and herald Christ in the world. But we only do this as disciples of Jesus. We don’t do this through our own ideas or our own talent. As disciples of Jesus we get to be salt and light.

But Jesus knows this happens most effectively when the disciples are genuinely one. The words of Jesus both haunt and excite:

I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (John 17:20-23, emphasis added)

We can debate institutional vs. organic vs. missional vs. theological unity until we die, and we surely will, but the point is this: When we are one, as the Father and Son are one, we will be most effective in embodying and heralding Jesus himself to the world.

The church is called to embody and herald Jesus Christ to the world. The church, when it is one, embodies and heralds the love of the Father for the Son. And that same church, when it is one, reveals the truth of the claim that Jesus is who we say he is.

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In what ways can the church learn from academia, and vice versa?

Claire Smith

Chris Folmsbee

Scot McKnight

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Theology is complicated, but it needs to be communicated in a simple way. What has to be done in order for us to do that?

Brooklyn Lindsey

Chris Folmsbee

Scot McKnight

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What three books do you recommend on the subject of leadership development and why?

Danny Kwon

Scot McKnight

Mike King

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Have Evangelicals lost their minds? (I.E., Is the greatest threat anti-intellectualism?)

Lilly Lewin

Jim Hampton

Scot McKnight

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Theology.Community and Salvation

What are some of the connections between community and salvation?

Steve Argue

Lilly Lewin

Scot McKnight

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