Binau Installed as Academic Dean
“Missional Church, Missional Seminary: Beyond Blueprints”
August 31, 2011
Trinity Lutheran Seminary
Dr. Brad A. Binau
It is a distinct honor to have been called and now installed as the Academic Dean of Trinity Lutheran Seminary. And it is a pleasure to have this opportunity to speak to you on the theme “Missional Church, Missional Seminary: Beyond Blueprints.” That I am standing here at all, that I have anything to bring to the tasks ahead is the result of what so many of you have done for me. You have taught me, pastored me, mentored me, inspired me, challenged me, tolerated me, and loved me. Thank you. And for all who have been kind enough to offer their congratulations let me remind you that I haven’t really done anything yet. My modest goal is that you will still be willing to offer your congratulations a year or two from now!
Part One: The Spiritual Crisis
Almost three years ago, at the end of September, 2008, Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine addressed us in this space. That morning the stock market gathered speed toward an historic plunge that only a few weeks later would take the global economy over the precipice and plunge us all into uncharted waters. And that morning Jim Wallis declared that the crisis into which we were headed was not primarily economic. Rather, he said, the crisis facing us was a spiritual crisis. Something deep inside me said, “He’s right.” Three years removed, having been washed downstream by frightening rapids, I am more convinced than ever that Jim Wallis was right: The crisis besetting us as a nation, as a culture, and particularly for us as church and seminary, is fundamentally a spiritual one.
But let us be clear: declaring a crisis spiritual in nature does not mean that we are bereft of a spiritual presence. Indeed, the Spirit of the living God, the Holy Spirit that baptizes us into the body of the resurrected Christ, has not departed. We are not in a spiritual crisis because we have too little spirit or too little spirituality. What makes this a time of spiritual crisis is the extraordinary pressure being exerted upon us by other spirits – spirits of greed, fear, division, despair, indifference, anxiety, self-preservation – that tempt us to believe that we can somehow paddle upstream, ascend the waterfall and once again control our destiny in calmer waters. This is a time to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4.1). We define this time as one of spiritual crisis because it presses us to define which Spirit we will trust above all others.
Far from being a catastrophe, this spiritual crisis is one of great opportunity. Economist Paul Romer has said, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” What would be catastrophic would be for this crisis to pass without our trust in God’s Holy Spirit being deepened.
In our Lutheran service of Morning Prayer we frequently use a prayer that asks God to help us define who and what we trust. (I will alter slightly in keeping with the watery metaphor I have been using). We pray:
O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by waters as yet untraveled, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
I love that prayer. I have prayed it countless times. But I never had the opportunity to take that prayer as seriously as I did a year and a half ago when I had an experience that prepared me in no small way to be standing here today.
In January, 2010, I was in Haiti with a group of students and Trinity graduate, Pastor Doug Hill. On Monday morning we flew into Port-au-Prince, and by Tuesday afternoon we were in Jacmel on the southern coast. At 4:53 p.m. the earthquake struck claiming hundreds of thousands of lives and forever changing millions more – ours included. Incredibly no one in our group was seriously injured. Within minutes our Haitian friends took charge and for the next three days we were in their hands. But it wasn’t until Saturday, four days after the earthquake, that I discovered what it means to be called to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by waters as yet untraveled, through perils unknown, to be given the gift of good courage, to know that God’s hand leads, and God’s love supports – even when we do not know where we are going.
On that Saturday morning our Hatian friends said, “The food is running low, the road to Port-au-Prince is blocked and there is no access to the airport. We need to get you out of here and there is only one way to go: across the ocean to the Dominican Republic. Somewhere in the conversation I heard a Haitian friend use the word “yacht,” and I thought, “Well, OK! This will be sort of like Gilligan’s island in reverse!” That thought evaporated in an instant when later we arrived at a seaside village and were introduced to our transportation: two skiffs, maybe fifteen feet long, equipped with single outboard motors. (It turns out that “yacht,” in Haitian Creole means “pretty much anything that floats.”) Those two boats, and the skill of some Haitians we had not met before, had to get us across forty miles of open ocean.
We divided ourselves and what was left of our luggage between the two boats. We piled in along with a number of new Haitian friends who also needed to vacate Jacmel. Doug’s boat chugged away first. Ours pushed off – a venture of which we could not see the ending. It seemed to me like there was far too much ocean, and not nearly enough boat – through perils unknown. And then our engine wouldn’t start. We were floating into the ocean and the engine wouldn’t start – and wouldn’t start, and wouldn’t start. Give us faith to go out with good courage – I actually prayed those words. But at that point I would have accepted any kind of courage, even bad courage. I did not have a good feeling about what was happening.
Finally the engine caught hold and we moved out. Most in our boat traveled well, despite the extreme heat and the choppy seas. After a few hours, though, I leaned over the side and threw up – a combination of anxiety, stale water, and flat out sea-sickness. Along the way we passed Doug’s boat which had a smaller motor and considerably more weight. And then it got dark. And we motored on – not knowing where we were going, our fate in the hands of others who we had to trust did know. And we made it. Somehow, in almost total darkness – it was only one day after the new moon – our boat found its destination at the Dominican boarder. Praise God! But where’s the other boat? Not a light, nor a sound between us and the horizon to signal the presence of the other half of our group. That was the low point for me, scarier than the earthquake itself, scarier than anything I’d ever experienced. What if, having “come this far by faith,” forces beyond our control got the last word? That was a spiritual crisis. Could we trust, no matter what happened, even if we didn’t survive this, that God’s love through Jesus Christ would support us? Or would we yield to a lesser, more elemental spirit?
After half an hour of anxious waiting the Haitians decided that Doug’s boat may have run low on fuel and had to beach up somewhere. So in the darkness, the same Haitians who had brought our boat to safety headed back out on a rescue mission. And indeed, that is what had happened. Low on fuel and carrying too much weight their Haitian pilot tied up on a rocky shore, offloaded his passengers and trusted that his Haitian colleagues would find them – which they did. And somehow, on a moonless night, in choppy water, with the tiniest of flashlights and truly heroic energy that kept several passengers from serious injury as they re-boarded, the hand that had been leading us and the love that had been supporting us, reunited us. And in a few days we were home.
I tell this story not to describe a miracle of how we were saved. I refuse to call it a miracle, lest I then be called on to explain why there was no similar miracle for the hundreds of thousands who lost life and limb. No, I tell this story to remind myself, and to suggest to you,
that to serve God means we will be called to ventures of which we cannot see the ending,
that we will not always know where we are going but getting there requires giving up any illusions that we are in control, and that there is a guiding hand and loving support already at work in the future to which God is calling us.
Part Two: The Missional Response
I commend to all of you an excellent book called Leading Causes of Life. Its authors, a hospital administrator and a Presbyterian pastor, propose that coming to grips with spiritual crisis means not so much moving away from the causes of death, as moving in concert with the things that cause life. They say the most basic thing to get right in life is the question. It increases the odds a great deal if you hang around people with a history of asking great questions. And the question only leads toward life if it is in the language of life.
Here is what I propose we do for the next few minutes. I propose that we hang around the thoughts of some very bright “question askers,” authors and thinkers who have been asking “What does it mean to be the church of Jesus Christ in this time of spiritual crisis?” These are people who frame questions, not in the language of “what is necessary to avoid death?”, not in the language of what ought to happen, or what we must do, but in the language of life. They write with what theologian Mary Grey calls “the grammar of connectedness.” They do not ask, “What must we do to bring life to all the things around us that are dying?” These people who have developed a history of asking great questions are asking, “How do we partner with the work that our life-giving God is already doing?”
Specifically I have in mind people who have been writing about, thinking about, and asking questions about the missional church. Because the question I want to ask this morning, the question I want all of us to ask as we go into our collective future, is this: What can we learn from the missional church about what it means to be a missional seminary? But before I go any farther, let me try to define what I mean by “missional.” This is a crucial task because, as missional author Alan Roxburgh has noted, “The word ‘missional’ seems to have traveled the remarkable path of going from obscurity to banality in only one decade.”
At times I fear that “missional” will suffer the fate of words like “transformational” and “co-dependent” and “spiritual” which, because they were used in well-meaning attempts to explain so much, have come to mean very little with specificity. Time will tell if “missional” is a word for our time only, or truly a word with lasting power. I am convinced that as long as there is a triune God, “missional” will be the best way to describe what God is doing. I will try in what follows to make a strong case for that claim. Those who easily dismiss “missional” as a momentary fad have, in my experience
• seldom drunk from the deep wells of missional literature,
• acquainted themselves first-hand with the insights and questions of missional thinkers,
• or experienced the passion of truly missional congregations.
As near as I can tell the term “missional” has been in use for over a century, though most agree that its real coming out party occurred in the early eighties and that only as we moved into the twenty-first century did the word “missional” attain its current level of popularity. Along the way a variety of theologians clarified the relationship of mission and missional to the Latin missio (sending) and suggested that we need not so much a “theology of mission” as a “missional theology.”
For me, “missional” is best understood as the adjectival form of mission. And I am hard pressed to explain the meaning of mission better than South African theologian David Bosch did in his classic book Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (1991).
Bosch pointed to the decisive, and in his view irreversible, shift away from “a narrow, ecclesiocentric (church-centered) view of mission,” to an understanding of mission as God’s mission. Mission may in the past have been understood as primarily soteriological (saving souls), or cultural (extending the benefits of the Christian West to other parts of the globe), or ecclesiastical (the expansion of the church numerically and territorially), but no more. From the mid-twentieth century on, mission has been increasingly “understood as being derived from the very nature of God” as expressed in the phrase missio Dei – the sending of the Son and Spirit, and eventually the church, into the world by the Father. Mission is therefore a Trinitarian matter and, as I have argued for about a decade, should be at the core of our self-understanding as Trinity Seminary. (I say it one more time with feeling: We are the only seminary in the ELCA with an explicitly doctrinal name. Let’s mine that for all it’s worth!)
So, as Bosch goes on to point out, we are not talking about the church’s mission but God’s mission. Mission is less what the church does than who God is. This notion was captured most famously (though many have said it in one way or another) by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams: “It is not the church of God that has a mission. It is the God of mission that has a church.” Or as our own Mark Allan Powell has put it, “the mission of the church (not to mention the seminary) is simply to be the result of what God did on Easter. No more, no less.”
So what might we learn from those who are asking, “What does it mean to be the church of Jesus Christ in this time of spiritual crisis?” What key characteristics of a missional church can help us discern what it means to be a missional seminary? I offer seven thoughts.
1. Rethinking “Membership”
Missional churches are giving up on the language of church “membership.” Unless we are speaking in an organic sense of “members of Christ’s body” (Rom. 12.4, 1 Cor. 12.12), membership language typically connotes (to borrow some words from Douglas John Hall) “paying your dues, learning your lines, committing yourself to the upkeep of properties (because institutions always require a lot of property), contributing to the salaries of those who serve the institution full time (as we say), and so forth.” Missional churches tend to speak instead of participants.
They create a variety of ways to engage whatever level of interest potential participants have and then seek to strengthen the “breadth and depth of their commitment in the faith.”
Missional seminaries will always be centers for the formation and cultivation of ordained clergy, but increasingly they will offer more opportunities for a diverse population whose ability and willingness to participate in theological education varies greatly. Engagement with a missional seminary need not mean membership in a “club of the already certain.” Rather, it will mean participation in a discernment process supported by the conviction that there are many degree and non-degree paths to the service of our missional God.
2. Leaving the Building
I am looking to get a t-shirt that I have seen a few students wearing that says, “The church has left the building: gone outreaching.” Or better yet, I’d like to create one that says, “The seminary has left the building: gone missional!” Missional churches are getting over their “edifice complexes.” They are learning to prioritize ministry over buildings. They are realizing that for too long, too many churches have said, “We can’t afford full-time ministry,” when the actual issue is that they can’t afford their buildings. The comparison is not exact. Seminaries do need space to house resources – like books, and faculty and staff people. But missional seminaries are quickly discovering that the delivery of theological education is tied less and less to bricks and mortar. The vast resources of the internet require only modest physical structures to house them. Electronically mediated theological education means that the seminary is leaving the building. But more than that, think what it might mean if local congregations, mosques, synagogues, or even coffee houses or community centers were to become seminary classrooms. That would be missional – doing what God has called us to do in the midst of what God is already doing.
3. Avoiding the “Chaplaincy Trap”
Missional churches are helping us see the importance of avoiding what I call the “chaplaincy trap.” When churches understand themselves as little more than a religious social service organization, pastoral leaders become chaplains hired to meet members’ needs – and all too often people in ministry are more than happy to fill this role because it allows them to get their own needs met. Often the “chaplaincy trap” involves a mindset that if the pastor, or “hired leader,” isn’t making the visit to home or hospital, leading the committee meeting, or answering the letter, real ministry has not happened. Missional churches are clear that all Christians are called and all are sent to participate in God’s mission. The first task of leaders is to invest themselves in other leaders, fostering a replication of gifts promoting a growth of ministry rather than the burnout of leaders.
Seminary faculty and administrators are not immune to the “chaplaincy trap,” being drawn into a mindset that our role is to serve the needs of our student “clients” or to teach and administrate in ways that help us get our needs met. Trinity, I am delighted to say, has largely avoided this trap, being guided by our mission statement which describes our work not as “teaching students” but as “forming leaders.” This helps us be clear that we are doing more than giving our students what they want. (Sorry, students.) We are doing more than serving our own interests. (Sorry, colleagues.) We are giving the church what it needs: a new generation of leaders. We are focused not just on what we want, but on what the mission of God requires – even if that stretches us beyond our comfort zones. But to become even more missional I would challenge this and all seminaries to think of former students in a new way: as research fellows. This is another way by which the seminary can “leave the building” – inviting alums to be our eyes and ears in the field. Their questions will shape and reshape our answers. And our answers will certainly be reshaped by their questions. Missional churches, and missional seminaries measure their vitality not by the number of members or students who come in, but by the passion of those who are sent out.
4. Replacing Programs with Practices
Missional churches are rightly questioning the value of programs (stewardship programs, youth programs, music programs, Sunday School programs, evangelism programs, etc.) and are claiming the wisdom of focusing on Christian practices. There is little need for a stewardship program when generosity (in many forms) has become a consistent practice. Youth programs (and the hiring of a college or seminary student to run them) can be laid to rest when all participants in the mission of God grasp the importance of practicing discipleship. Bible study and education programs die and are reborn in richer forms of Christian practice that involve immersion in the Word. Faithfulness to the mission of God is about unleashing imagination rooted in life-giving Christian practices, creating a culture of permission-giving rather than permission-seeking, and claiming the freedom to innovate and fail fast and well if necessary.
Here at Trinity we see this kind of imaginative spirit unleashed in our environmental awareness group, SEEDS (Stewarding Earth and Environment Daily and Sustainably), and in our Addiction Awareness Group. While I am under no illusion that this, or any other, Dean will ever be free of the duty to appoint faculty committees, we can at least hope that our committees invest more in practices than programs and that they are places where exciting ideas are born rather than where they go to die.
5. Doing What We Are
Missional thinkers are helping us question our notions of ecclesiology stressing that at rock bottom the church does what it is. Authenticity is a consistent theme of missional churches. To borrow Mark Powell’s words one more time, what the church should be doing is simply being the result of what God did on Easter. Likewise, missional seminaries will fulfill their calling to do what they are. And while there are many threads in the tapestry of authenticity, two especially must not be lost. One is that we are a community witnessing to the fact that the tomb is empty. That means that anyone who comes here, or anyone encountering one of us when we are “out there” will get a glimpse of the reign of God. To know us should be to experience what God did on Easter. The other thread we must not lose is that we are a community of learners needing to share our questions and answers and scholarship. As Dean I aspire to create more opportunities for this sharing, so that we can be more fully who we are – a community animated by theological curiosity. If need be we will even cut back on committee meetings!
6. Rediscovering the Triune God
But the most significant question that missional thinkers are raising – and it is a question for which our seminary can be uniquely grateful – is what the doctrine of the Trinity has to do with the missional church. In one respect this is not entirely new. As I have already noted the very notion of sending, the missio Dei, is inextricably embedded in the doctrine of the Trinity. But as missional thinking has continued to develop, additional Trinitarian perspectives have come to the fore.
One is that pneumatology, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, is finally emerging from the long shadow cast (at least in the Western church) by Christology. There is nothing wrong with focusing on Jesus, mind you! But missional theology – for church or seminary – that focuses primarily on doing what Jesus did will always be in danger of looking to the past for its blueprints rather than to the future for its inspiration. A robust Trinitarian theology guides us not only to replicate what God has done, but more importantly to anticipate the future into which the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the risen Christ, is calling us.
The other Trinitarian perspective that missional thinkers are now bringing into focus, more important even than a renewed appreciation for the work of the Spirit, is a profound emphasis on the “social Trinity” – an understanding of relationship as the very essence of who God is. The story of what numerous theologians have contributed to what Stanley Grenz called “rediscovering the Triune God” is too lengthy and intricate for me to retell here. Many have contributed to it, among them Trinity alum Ted Peters. But no one did more than the late Stanley Grenz to focus contemporary Trinitarian theology on what he called a “social God.” I commend his work to all of you who love God’s church and this seminary. Grenz emphasizes that God’s mission is to draw the entire creation into this relationship that God is – this perfectly balanced, self-giving, self-sacrificing, mutually-indwelling dance of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And God is calling us, as church and seminary, to participate in the divine reality of being community in the midst of the world’s brokenness and in so doing participate in the healing and reconciliation of creation.
7. Rethinking the Attractional Model
I have saved for last a difficult question, or set of questions, being posed by the missional church. Answers offered by the missional church in this area will likely be different for the seminary aspiring to be missional. I am referring to the matter of being an “attractional church,” one operating on the Christendom understanding that “if we build it, they will come.” Mission, by definition, means turning ourselves inside out for the sake of the world. It means “leaving the building” to discover and participate in what God is already doing in the world. While this seminary, and every seminary, can certainly do more beyond its walls, the fact remains that quality theological education requires a place – like the corner of College and Main – where we can daily be a community. The attractional issue is not an easy one for a misional seminary to overcome. Missional churches remind us that “new congregations do not come into being merely to service the existing members of a denomination who happen to live in a particular area.” But that is, for the most part, how the predecessor seminaries that we now know as Trinity came into being. We were from the beginning, and of necessity, an “attractional” seminary.
Yet I believe there is something to be gained by our reflecting on the “attractional” dilemma. Since God’s mission has us (more than us having a mission), we are called to be the community that God is. Consequently those who are attracted to this or any missional seminary will be drawn ever closer to the Triune God. The seminary is not a destination, but a staging ground from which we will all eventually depart. We need people to be attracted to the seminary. But the very transience of our community, with two-thirds of our student body replacing itself every year because of internships and graduations, means that those gathered need not stay gathered. Missional seminaries can remind the church that God gathers us so that when God unleashes us God’s mission will be advanced. Taken all together then, the questions raised by the missional church force a seminary like ours to raise a missional question of its own: What kind of seminary would God be calling us to create, and where would we be called to create it, if this one did not already exist? This is what it means to live in the freedom of God’s good news: except for the Word of the Lord which endures forever, everything else can change as needed. What kind of seminary would God be calling us to create, and where would God be calling us to create it, if this one did not already exist? That is the question that will guide us into our missional future.
***
This week marks the beginning of my nineteenth year on the faculty of Trinity Lutheran Seminary. I doubt that I will still be teaching, and I guarantee you I will not still be Dean, nineteen years from now in the year 2030. But God willing, I will be around in 2030 when Trinity celebrates two hundred years of theological education in Ohio. Nothing would please me more than to be able to say on that day, that as we moved forward from this day, we moved beyond blueprints, that we enthusiastically accepted the calling to ventures of which we could not see the ending, that we sailed over the un-navigated waters to which God brought us rather than seeking refuge over previously traveled roads that were now closed, and that the hand of God that led us, and the love of God that supported us, were all we ever really needed to be faithful to our calling as a missional seminary.
Thank you. Go in peace, and be the result of what God did on Easter!