In Mark 2:1-12, a passage we are all very familiar with, a paralyzed man is lowered down through a roof, interrupting Jesus' evening lecture. This disruption is pretty surprising in itself - these men dig through a roof! Jesus' response to this unexpected intrusion is equally surprising. As a lame person the paralytic would have been on the outskirts of the religious community, seen as unclean and ritually unfit to participate in the activities of the people of God because of perceived sins (the thought was he was lame he either suffered because of a sin he committed or a sin his parents committed). His friends, whoever they were, were so determined to have this gentleman have a face-to-face meeting with Jesus that they dug a whole in someone's roof in order to do this.

Jesus is equally surprising in that he takes this intrusion of an outsider to put the kingdom of God in full display. Rather than doing the simple thing and heal the paralytic, he first offers him forgiveness. This was an act only God could perform and a proclamation that would bring the paralytic back into the God's people. This is, in my reading of the text, the main problem for the Scribes (who are caught up protecting their institutions and prejudices), it is what creates the charge of blasphemy:

“Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”” (Mark 2:6-7 NRSV).

But to press the issue, Jesus goes ahead and heals the man as well. Then instead of having him stay for the rest of the evening chat Jesus sends him home (elsewhere I've likened this to a kind of missionary sending). Jesus took this lame man who had destroyed someone's roof, forgave his sin and offered him a new life by healing him. It's interesting also to see that there is nowhere mentioned anything about a particular "gospel" message being preached to the paralytic - the good news was this reconstitutions of this man's spiritual and physical well-being in a way that he could now be truly apart of the people of God.

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This past quarter was spent studying Quaker missionary Everett Cattell. I was interested in his contributions as a Quaker missiologist and how his mission theology informed his vision for Quaker renewal. This is because my dissertation is largely rooted in the question of how renewal within traditions takes place, my argument will be that renewal/innovation takes place within a tradition through missional engagement with local culture. During this period, I posted a number of short articles looking into a few of Cattell's ideas:

• Everett Cattell: Quaker and Mission Theologian
• Everett Cattell on the Great Commission (pt. 2)
• Everett Cattell’s Principle of Authority (pt. 3)
  
• Everett Cattell: Communication As Witness (pt. 4)

Here I want to offer a few summarizing points to draw things together. There are (at least) three features that would comprise what we might call Cattell’s "missional ecclesiology."

First, Christian disciples, regardless of whether they are at home or in the 'field,' are “missionaries or ambassadors for Christ” (Cattell 1981). This is what he calls "missions without adjectives," the church is called to make disciples everywhere, not just in “foreign lands” (Cattell 1965). Cattell’s focus on the Great Commission as normative for all Christians leaves a missiological residue on everything he touches. That is to say, rather than having Biblicism, Quakerism, or even holiness as his framework, Cattell understands the nature of the church as essentially missionary: “We are all missionaries if we belong to Christ. And we are all under obligation to make disciples” (ibid.).

Second, the church is first and foremost a people, organic and mobile. This community is held together by the Holy Spirit in koinonia (community/fellowship) that transcends both time and place. Koinonia helps to name a messianic stance the church has towards its institutions. The church is rooted in the messianic inasmuch as a) the koinonia is structured and bound together by the Holy Spirit (which can work in structures but is not bound to it), and b) it operates in light of the reality of God’s (coming) kingdom. With the emphasis on koinonia, Cattell is able to remain at the level of ambivalence towards institutions, even suspending their role in favor of God’s messianic act of reconciliation and relationship that cuts across structures. One might say that when it comes to institutions Cattell’s attitude is, “Don’t let sentimental attachments and traditionalism stand in the way of the kingdom’s progress!”

Third, the church is political and missional and takes a third-way approach to church in society. An ambassador for a kingdom may participate in a mission by delivering a message, but both the status of the ambassador and that message are political. There is no way for the faithful, missionary church, to remain uninvolved in the world because kingdom of God calls for diakonia (Service). Yet the way the church responds will always be modeled on the way Jesus responded. In his Shrewsbury Lecture he wrote:

“From the incarnation we also learn that the Word having become flesh “dwelt among us.” This settles the question of withdrawal from the world. Periodically in the history of the church, the pendulum has swung toward the monastic ideal, whether celibates in an institutionalized holiness, or Quakers building new colonies peopled only by their own kind, or evangelicals staying out of politics, and avoiding public life, all for the purpose of keeping uncontaminated by the world.

Jesus ate with sinners, dealt with sinful women without scandal, made no effort in the daytime to escape the crowds, even touched lepers, and went everywhere doing good. The religion of withdrawal is not for Christ’s ambassadors. Withdrawn Christians have lost their sense of mission - indeed, one wonders whether they are still Christian! Jesus lived dangerously. So must we. Our contact with people must be such as to naturalize us in their presence. God spoke once through angels and the shepherds were frightened almost to death. But Jesus was born. He spoke their language...He completely belonged. And to all his followers comes the same challenge of identification” (1963).

Further, when writing about communism Cattell makes the point that communism is never so evil that the church can do anything in the name of protecting against it! While the church may never withdraw, it is also to remain obedient to the way of Christ. “War is never justified…” So, “Let us Friends in our day be as courageous in living fully our Christian testimony at any cost even as ancient Quakers did...Let not our Quakerism be a Christianity of the meetinghouse only - let us be Christ-like in our whole range of public and private life” (1958). Faithful witness to Christ is living out the pattern of the incarnation, and this vision of witness traverses both the political and missional currents of faith.

Renewal for the Friends Church, according to Everett Cattell, was not going to be easy and would require a disavowal of preciously held commitments. The hard work he called for was to realize the missiological nature of Quakerism, which was birthed out of a call and an encounter with the living God. Cattell would concur with missiologist David Bosch who said the Spirit enables the past to be efficacious (Bosch 1991, 86). It is not that Cattell was against the distinctives of Quakerism; rather he thought they should never be the primary focus of how we maintain our identity. Quakers are to be a church-in-mission. That this, so to speak, was to put the cart before the horse. What Cattell was interested in was the church joining God's work today and allowing the particularities and contextualizations to be formed in light of that work.

The Old/New of Quakerism

What drew me to the Friends initially, probably not unlike many others, were the early testimonies. This conversion of sorts happened while I was at Malone College (Canton, Ohio), studying Bible and theology. There are many wonderful “old” things about the Friends that we all love, sometimes it might even be said that we love those things too much. While there are some great things from the past the Quaker tradition has the potential to offer “new” ideas, critiques, and theological reflection for our troubled world. One group of Quakers called, Convergent Friends, are looking into some these questions about an old/new faith and meeting together to discuss renewal with our tradition.

Blogging as A Way of Building A Community (of Convergent f/Friends)



As a young and earnest Evangelical Friend I desired to learn as much about Quakerism as possible, so I turned to the history books as well as the web. And, shortly after that, I started blogging.  I hoped to use my blog to dialogue with others, ask the hard question, and reflect theologically on Quakerism and the challenges of today's culture. Not long after that I found the long-time Quaker blog the Quaker Ranter. The author Martin Kelley is an unprogrammed "liberal" Quaker from FGC who has strong “conservative” leanings and is an outspoken Christian. Martin was the first Quaker I “met” who blurred my preconceived notions about the categories we’ve assigned to one another. Our blogs helped to bypass the denominational boundaries and the space and place that separated us and join us together in a common desire to see Quakers engage our culture missionally. 


If you were just to look at each of our respective locations in the Friend's church you wouldn't find two individuals further a part. But I found this to be anything but true once I started reading and listening to what Martin had to say on his blog. I realized that he was talking and thinking about the same questions that I was, and that he and I, from opposite ends of the Friend’s family tree, were standing almost side by side. Our blogs offered a way interact with each other while not feeling threatened by the common stereotypes and misinformation that can often dominate these kinds of encounters.  Since that time I've met many wonderful Quakers online (many who I consider close friends), including an unprogrammed Friend from San Francision, Robin Mohr, a woman many of us refer to as the mother of convergent Friends.



These online friendships is really how “convergent Friends” all started out, at least in its contemporary manifestation (discussions about historical convergent Friends like Everett Cattell and Lewis Benson is for another post).  The web has acted as a meeting ground for Quakers all over the world.  It gives us a place to come  together and share ideas, dreams, struggle through difficult questions, get mad, make-up and build friendships. Not only have convergent Friends used the web as a medium to facilitate a conversation otherwise not physically possible but these are conversations that have been waiting to happen! We've found so many Friends from all over who have felt the same as us; Robin has said many times, "the Winds of the Spirit are blowing across all branches of Friends."  These friendships are more and more finding their way into people's living rooms, porches, coffee shops, pubs, and meetinghouses as we gather to eat together and hear one another’s stories. 



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This is the second part of a two-part essay written on Technology and Gospel order. You can find part one here.

The Gospel Order and the Nature of the Church

What Quakers call ‘Gospel order’ holds a particularly useful and rich account of the church participating together as the body of Christ under the reign of God. Theologically, Gospel order illustrates a set of powerful-practices that enable this kingdomlike reordering of our world discussed in part one. Gospel order is the structure of the Christian koinonia operating under the reality of Christ's Kingdom come. Within this structure all people are given room to express their gifts endowed by the Holy Spirit. For George Fox the body of Christ needs to recognize these gifts and put them to use, as he said, “Every member in the church hath an office: and is serviceable”(Roberts 118:2008).

But Gospel order is more than recognizing a ‘multiplicity of gifts’ as John Howard Yoder puts it in his outstanding book Body Politics, and it also goes beyond a simple non-hierarchical view of the body of Christ. Instead, it names the very nature, it’s being, of this body. Theologian Lloyd Lee Wilson explains that Gospel order retrieves the peaceful order established at creation:

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This is the first part of a two part series I am doing on Technology and Gospel Order.

There seems to an over-saturation of new forms of technology today, log online and see the many “tools” for making social connections, collaborating with others, and sharing knowledge and life experience. Take for instance Wikipedia.org, an online collaborative reference site that has been found to be as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. The argument goes that the collective intelligence of everyone editing a “Wiki” exponentially exceeds the expert-knowledge of those who for Britannica. People gather together on Wikipedia as a shared-space to collaborate together on a topic they find meaningful to them. This names the advent of what Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture calls “participatory culture.”

Social aspects of the web are becoming increasingly popular, just three years ago only 1/3 of the people in a class I was an aid for knew what a blog was, today it’s far more unanimous. Awareness is not a problem any longer, but what is a problem is understanding how as Christians to interact with these new technologies. The fact is, the virtual reality of digital media is increasingly encroaching upon the real of the physical world. First I explain how technology is a power, and because of this the variety of options the church has in responding. Taking one particular stance, that of “parry-participation” I argue that a theology of gospel order acts as the Christian counterpoint to participatory culture.

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