EXPLORER...field notes for the emerging church
An e-publication of Leadership Network
Number 38, June 4, 2001
Todd Hunter has been a church leader and student of cultural movements for over thirty years. He began his Christian journey in the 1970's, became a leader among church planters in the 80's and in the 90's became the leader of the Association of Vineyard Churches. Last year, he made a major shift to direct his energies toward helping the next generation of leaders plant churches in the context of a changing worldview and assumptions about church and faith.
Two weeks ago in Seattle, Hunter spoke to a national gathering of church leaders about five differences he has observed between the questions and issues being raised now and twenty-five years ago. The following are excerpts of his remarks.
The first thing, is that in the modern world we were taught not only to accept, but also to exploit individualism. The predominant metaphor we were taught in the early church growth literature was to put enough "goods on the shelf." What that meant was to look at your entire mission field not as a community but to slice it into parts. We were taught to not challenge you about your individualism and whether or not that fits the spirit and the data of the New Testament and whether or not that helps us or harms us in becoming the authentic people of God. We were not taught to challenge the idea that we can actually pick up God's agenda and work with God. We were taught to exploit it so we could get more people in our church. I'm not saying that in some ugly, crass way. I'm just saying that's how we conceived of success.
With any young person I am working with today, that is not on their radar screen and this gets to the whole point of worldview. With respect to the Boomers in this room, one of the best things we could do is to simply admit we have been given as much or more by our worldview than we have by the spirit and data of the New Testament. We simply were uncritical. We just didn't think about it. We lost the whole point of the worldview. It's an unseen paradigm. You don't challenge it naturally, you live in it.
When I'm dealing with these young people, they are living in a different reality and their reality is more based in community. Now I know you hear this all the time and you read it, but until you start actually dealing with people who have this worldview, I think it's difficult to get all the implications. Falling out of that concept of the difference between individualism and a worldview that embraces and thinks first in community terms, are all kinds of implications for understanding church.
A second, somewhat related issue, is that we were driven by numbers. Most of us are a product of our times. There are very few people who can step out of their time and be a prophetic voice in church, or just out of raw brilliance, step out of their times and speak into it. A Galileo can say fundamentally that "No, the earth is not the center of the universe, the sun is," but most of us are simply a product of our times.
My entrance into Christianity was mostly through Chuck Smith, arguably the most well known evangelist in the western part of the United States. He had an absolutely booming, growing church; Calvary, Costa Mesa. Then I met John Wimber and his church was booming. Twenty-five years ago, you would have a hard time finding one of us who didn't dream of having a mega church because we thought that was success. I'm now coaching thirty-one young church planters and not one of them dreams of having a mega church. They dream of churches that are making a difference in their community and doing social justice and helping people become authentically spiritual and getting past all the hypocrisy. They think more in qualitative terms not so much in quantitative terms.
Difference number three is a huge leadership assumption. I think the dominant paradigm passed down to us in corporate hierarchies and in military models has given us a certain assumption of what leadership is. Do military and corporate CEO models square with the spirit and the data of the New Testament? The question needs to be asked. But even setting that aside for a second, I can tell you and so can others who think about this stuff, that the executive management models are moving away from those kinds of absolutely hierarchical assumptions.
The young leaders I am working with don't think of themselves as sitting at the top of a hierarchy, having come down the mountain like Moses with a vision and now they are selling their vision and trying to get everybody to participate in their vision. It's not that they don't have a vision, but it's the way they think of their vision. It is more community derived and the way they think of getting ownership of a vision is different from the way we would have thought about it.
In the last year of working with young people, I've found that I have to dial myself way back. When I was twenty-three and starting my first church, my big question was, "How can I be the leader so the people will follow me and do what I want them to do?" Now I am having to dial way, way, way, way back and become almost invisible because I have too much influence that stifles the human spirit and quenches the Holy Spirit. Even secular business people are saying that our hierarchical approaches to management cannot contain the human spirit. Over a period of time, those hierarchies quench the human spirit.
All I simply mean to say is that they tend to be more participative. For some of you, that is axiomatically not leadership. You can't even conceive of leadership apart from, "Look, darn it, this is my bus and I'm driving it. If you don't like it, get off it." That's the way most of us Boomers have conceived leadership. Am I saying that was totally bogus? No, of course not. There was an aspect of leadership in that, but I think leadership exists on a continuum. The best, most Godly, mature leaders I know are able to naturally and easily move along a continuum from being autocratic to being participative. The young people I am working with are more towards the participative end of the spectrum and the way they think of getting goal ownership and imparting it is significantly different.
Difference number four is the way we think of the nature of the Church. If the Church is simply a warehouse for people who have said a prayer so that when they die they can go to Heaven, that naturally leads to a certain way of doing church. But again, does that square with the data and the spirit of the New Testament? If we start with the question of what it actually means to be the people of God, which is the Church, now that is a fascinating question.
When you think of church, what do you think of? I can tell you most people think of it as a place or a set of events. If you are in a Vineyard church, you think of thirty minutes of uninterrupted worship, announcements, a sermon, and the ministry time. If you are an Episcopalian, you think of the liturgy. What if we started re- conceiving ourselves as the people of God and what we do on Sunday morning is very incidental to who we are as a people? Part of what I am uncomfortable with about this discussion is that I am waiting for it to move away from Sunday mornings. Until it does, we are not going to get the real root of what it means to be the people of God.
The difficulty in asking these reconstructive kinds of questions is that they are very threatening to the status quo which very rarely appreciates being asked tough-minded questions.
One of my big concerns is how can we get Boomer leaders to turn from defending what they are doing to coaching, enabling, empowering and facilitating what these guys want to do.
The last difference concerns the nature of salvation. What does it mean to be saved? Does it mean we are going to Heaven when we die? Or does it mean something like no, individually, we are the people of God. Fast-forward to the covenant with Abram when God said, "I am going to bless you and make you into a great nation." Why? Genesis 12:3, "So you can be a blessing to the whole Earth." Fast-forward to Jesus, Jesus is what Israel had always been intended to be, people filled with the promise to bless the whole Earth and create the people who were supposed to carry that on. This is where I am saying significant theological work needs to be done. Because if you conceive of soteriology as some sort of mechanistic thing that allows you to get to Heaven when you die, I guarantee you, you will lead one kind of church. If, for you, being a Christian means being the people of God on earth and trying to figure out what it means to be the light of the world in our actual life, I guarantee you will come up with a different way of doing church. Happily, the young people are thinking of doing that.
Copyright 2001. Leadership Network, 800-765-5323,
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