The Big Idea
On a Friday that does not preceded a Spring Church Sunday night worship service, the blog posts cover a variety of topics. We’ll return to our series on Ruth on a Friday that precedes a second or fourth Sunday night, but in the mean time, enjoy this week’s reflections.
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POST BY MATT MCCOY
10 minute read
How does the structure of Spring Church serve, promote, and foster the mission of Spring Church?
We have two graphics which illustrate how we answer this very important question by arranging our time together around “The Big Idea.” For every liturgical season in the church calendar, we focus on one particular “Big Idea” that helps us embody the Story of what God is already doing in our neighborhood.
If we think of the Big Idea as a river, then here’s how Spring Church is entering into the incredible reality that:
“God is at work and at play in the everyday joys and frustrations of ordinary life.”
The attentive reader might want to quibble with me about the use of the word “ordinary” to describe life right now. We’re in the midst of a global pandemic, there’s rioting in the streets, we’ve got a presidential election coming up during one of the most polarized times in our history. This is “unprecedented,” not “ordinary.” Yet, when I read the Bible, I see God at work and at play during pandemics, plagues, and famines, I see God show up in the midst of rioting, and God is a part of the leadership in every nation. This might be new to us, but it isn’t new to God or to our faith.
As we look at this Big Idea river, we see lots of uncommon friends playing together, with a variety of access points, represented by the dock, the rope swing, the slide. And, in church as well as in a river, people find their own access points all the time. There’s several different ways a person could enter into the Big Idea at Spring Church, so let’s take a moment and learn about them.
Let’s start at the top right hand corner.
Because our mission is “Uncommon Friendship and Common Discipleship,” we wanted a name that captured the feeling of what it’s like to follow God in spaces where we are with people whom we perceive as different than us. In the Old Testament, the springs outside the city were places where anyone could come and gather, so we went with Spring Church, to capture the emphasis we place on spaces where a variety of people can access and be an active part. Our Big Idea flows within the Christian Story, and in this liturgical season we chose Ruth to be our guide. Our twice-a-month worship services are centered on how Ruth helps us engage with what God is doing in our neighborhood during this ‘unprecedented' time, and I’ll unpack more of this with the second graphic later on in the blog.
We have two distinct ways to help prepare people for our worship services.
First, in order to help people discover how to talk about our services to the people in their neighborhood, we have short videos that we post on social media (Facebook & Instagram).
With each video, we give a two minute summary of the focal point of our worship service in everyday language, connecting it to our everyday lives.
If a friend of Spring Church is wanting some guidance on what their faith has to offer their neighbors who don’t care about church, the video is the place to start. Also, the videos are handy for helping youth (with short attention spans) figure out what the service is about.
Second, on the other end of the attention-span spectrum, we have the blog. Our diverse church requires that our worship services are accessible to a wide range of learning styles and mental function, and we wanted a space where someone could take a deeper dive into the Bible, theology, history, and places for more exploration.
With each blog, we give the biblical and theological underpinnings of each worship service.
If a friend of Spring Church is wanting more theologically robust engagement, the blog is the place to start. While the video uses everyday language, the blog might give someone a chance to learn some new vocabulary words. I like how Elayna Simmons put it, “The blog feels like the required reading before a college class, and it helps me show up to church knowing where we’re going to go together.”
Flowing down the Big Idea river, we come to Heading North.
If my heart is a compass, then whatever I love most is magnetic north, and I’ll be drawn towards it. We all get to pick whatever it is we love the most, and for a Christian, north is Jesus [1]. Thus, Heading North is our ‘community of practice,’ where we get the opportunity to discover, learn, and practice the spiritual practices necessary to enter the Christian Story. If a friend of Spring Church is wanting to learn the basics of things like how to pray, how to listen to God’s voice, and how to read the Bible, Heading North is the place to start. In the midst of restrictions around Covid-19, Heading North is the heartbeat of our Common Discipleship.
Going across the river, we find an answer to the question, “How does uncommon friendship in the church help help us address racial reconciliation in our current moment and social climate?”
A few years ago, our friends at the Global Church Project put together a seven episode video series on Race, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation. They did this, in part, because the decline of Western Christianity has corresponded with a decline in the global role of Western Civilization. “Western people, who have been responsible for the major part of the missionary outreach of the past three centuries, are no longer accepted as leaders by the rest of the world.” [2] This opens up a unique and beautiful opportunity for us. By listening to internationally diverse teachers, we can take a step away from the divisive language used by Americans, and can take a step towards God’s hope for reconciliation, as it is displayed by theologians around the world. If a friend of Spring Church is wanting to learn how the Global Church can help heal the racial wounds in America (and why the global voices are so important right now), this small group is the place to start.
I love the summery, playful feel of this river. I love how actively our Mission is displayed and embodied.
And now that we’ve had a chance to be introduced to the different ways a person might enter into the Big Idea, let’s take a look at how we arrange the pedagogical arc of our time together. How do we arrange our gatherings in a way that allows us to learn sequentially, proceed at a pace that is appropriate, and allow us to both learn from each other and teach each other?
Credit for guiding us on how to build a pedagogical arc goes squarely to Dr. Bruce Larson. He’s given so many hours of his time to teaching (and re-teaching) us the fundamentals of this approach. Anything I got right is because of him, and any mistakes are still due to me being a neophyte.
The Big Idea bubbles up at the confluence of two important invitations: What God is doing as I read the story of Ruth, and what the Holy Spirit is already doing in our neighborhood. Starting with the neighborhood, in the last few months I’ve heard some consistent things being expressed by my friends and family, and maybe you’ve said some of these things as well:
“I just don’t know what to do anymore.”
“I feel like I’m not doing anything about racial reconciliation, and it breaks my heart.”
“Where is God in the midst of all this mess?”
“My job seems so irrelevant now.” OR “I don’t have a job anymore.”
“I have un-followed everyone who disagrees with me on social media.”
“Everything seems so overwhelming. What do I do next? Where do I even begin?”
“What’s the big deal about insert something that is, in fact, a big deal HERE?”
“In regards to wearing face masks, why doesn’t everyone behave as I behave?”
All of these expressions above share a theme of doing, of wondering what should we DO, in this weird reality we find ourselves in.
So as I look at the neighborhood, and I see people struggling to figure out what to DO now, I think about vocation.
When I think about vocation and the Bible during normal times, I might think about Genesis, the Garden of Eden, of being co-creators with God.
But when I think about vocation and the Bible during crazy times, I think about Ruth.
The first three steps of this pedagogical arc form the introduction. They form the ‘river bank’ of the Big Idea river, so that we can enter into the Christian story around vocation. The words in blue are the “learning targets” for each step. Each Learning Target helps us discover how Ruth guides us into entering what God is doing.
Currently we’re on Step Two, and we’re learning that while our culture says we should be discipled by the best and brightest people we can imagine (and there’s appropriate times to do that), God often wants to be discipled by people who are invisible to us (Ruth the immigrant, who wasn’t recognized by the people of Bethlehem when she arrived at the end of chapter 1, is the person God used to disciple “the chosen people of God.”). Also, since we’re on step two, in Heading North we’re learning how to hear the voice of God, because that’s a vital Christian practice in order to participate with the Holy Spirit in the neighborhood. Our homework from Heading North last week is, “Ask God a question, and listen for the answer.”
Underneath each Learning Target is the way we evaluate and measure when we’ve learned what we needed at each step. We ask each other questions, and listen to our answers, to see if we’re able to do the sort of things that each Learning Target invites us to do.
So, again, since we’re on step two, we’re wanting to discover, as individuals and as a church, who are the invisible people that God is wanting to disciple us? Ruth invites us to ask that question, so we want to set aside time to enter into that question together. Once we feel like we’ve heard from the Holy Spirit and each other, we’ll answer that question and move on to the next step.
The last three steps of this pedagogical arc give us a way to discover our Christian vocation. They form the ‘water’ of the Big Idea river. Many people think that vocation, or calling, means using my gifts and abilities for some sort of meaningful work, but Ruth was a ‘gleaner’ (meaning she picked up grain that the harvesters left behind) who was living from meal to meal. Was she called to be a gleaner? Was gleaning the way she used her gifts to find meaningful work? We’ll discover that vocation is participating in what God is doing in the world, and in so doing, we’ll discover what our faith has to offer our not-Christian neighbors.
I am very excited to be on this journey with you!
Footnotes:
1 - James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love.
2 - Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret, p. 12. He wrote that in 1978, and wow, that quote still true. Last week I read an article from an attorney who specializes in political asylum, who observed that if an African-American were to petition for political asylum to another country, they would qualify, according to U.N. Guidelines. The attorney was not advocating that African-Americans flee America, rather, the attorney was pointing out that America is not the beacon of human rights and freedom that America thinks it is.