Urban Ekklesia

House Church. Urban Church. Organic Church. Multicultural Church. Simple Church. This is a space created for both humble and passionate reflection on the missional, emerging church in urban North America.

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Location: Bronx, New York, United States

A space for thinking out loud and inviting others to join the refining process. Justice, mission, politics, the city. Everything is connected. Theology is life.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

relational networking as norm

Occassionally, I travel to speak with churches in various places and every now & then I'm asked a question by an individual or two: How will people find you if they come into town and they want to use the phone book to find a church? My answer: They probably won't find us (though they would likely find us if they used the internet rather than yellow pages) becasue this is all really rooted in the networks of relationship. Relationship is a powerful medium. When we experience loss in ministry, it hurts more ( I've even felt this impact recently). When we experience victory, we're filled with joy because of the impact of relationship, and I've celebrated this joy many times. It is a powerful medium for the Gospel.

This morning I drove Malissa Endsley and a young women who has been living with her for the past few years to LaGuardia Airport. This young woman is going to college on the "left coast" in L.A. The two of them are staying at the McCullom's this week. The McCullom's are a couple working to reach the diverse populations of West Hollywood through planting organic/simple churches. I've been in their home, shared lunch standing by a taco truck, and enjoyed dinner in a Thai diner, and Malissa, also acquainted with the family, knew to make a phone call before their trip out west. Our young Bronxite turned Californian has an opportunity to meet them and stay in their home because of Malissa's relationship to them.

If we read Rodney Stark's Rise of Christianity, it is likely that it wasn't much different during his mission work stretching across the Mediterranean region. Paul leveraged his Jewish connections, networked with former co-workers, and took advantage of family/friendship relationships throughout the diaspora. The early church was connected through a web of relationships. Connecting through relationship rather than primarily through signs, buildings, and yellow pages (although our internet presence is actually quite substantial), but in a world of MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Google, Skype, and other such tools we find that relational networking is once again coming out onto center stage.

It is a new world indeed, and I've thought a lot over the last year about the value of missional experimentation. The reality is that many of us have been doing what missionaries have been doing overseas for years. We've been attempting to figure out how to faithfully practice missional engagement in our North American context. We, as a people, have generally thought as if missions is something that only happens "over there" somewhere. However, now that that myth is steadily fading, we must emerge from our religious enclaves to do the painful work of trial & error discovering how to engage -- as a people on mission -- with North American cultures.

God is indeed moving and doing some interesting things and teaching us a great deal along the way. I'm thankful for the many missional, incarnational workers across this continent who become a node in a web of relationships and missiological experimentation. As a result, none of us ever need to be truly alone.