Small Batch: Local, Organic, and Sustainable Church

By C. Andrew Doyle

Small Batch explores the emerging denominational movement into planting missional communities. As the church finds its way into the new millennium, it is faced with the need to think of its mission as an ancient future Christian community. Theology to practical guide, stories from the front and communities to discover, books to read, and small group study questions make Small Batch a handbook for individuals interested in the growing movement of planting new Christian communities. Through the movement of the spirit and shared common life and staying deeply rooted in the ancient practices of Christian community, the denominational church is being reborn in a new mission context. Small batch communities are popping up across the country with a new mission fervor. They are locally focused. They are organic and deeply rooted in the community and derive their strength from the care they give to local concerns. They are sustainable because they begin to find new economies that support the work. Bishop Doyle explores the sending churches that are planting greenfield ministries and multiplying churches who are spinning off new contextually oriented mission communities. What we discover in Small Batch is that the gospel will not be deterred by size or economic realities, and we are even now able to see the future shape of very diverse Christian mission.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524500146

C. Andrew Doyle

C. Andrew Doyle, the ninth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Texas, summarizes his autobiography in six words: "Met Jesus on pilgrimage; still walking." He is author of Vocātiō, Unabashedly Episcopalian, Orgullosamente Episcopal, A Generous Community,and The Jesus Heist. Follow him on Twitter at @texasbishop. He lives in Houston, Texas.

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© 2016 by C. Andrew Doyle.

Library of Congress Control Number:         2016907814

ISBN:               Hardcover              978-1-5245-0015-3

                 Softcover                  978-1-5245-0016-0

                  eBook                   978-1-5245-0014-6

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Rev. date: 05/16/2016

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Foreword Moon Launch

Chapter 1 The Shift

Chapter 2 From Opaque History to Autopoetic Mission

Chapter 3 Renewed Mission Field

Chapter 4 The Birth of Vitality and Mission Amplification

Chapter 5 Church and the Continuum of Mission

Chapter 6 Emerging Small Batch Communities and Their Values

Chapter 7 A Budding Missiology

Chapter 8 Small Batch Leadership

Chapter 9 Starting Your Small Batch Community

Chapter 10 Three From The Beginning

Chapter 11 Frequently Asked Questions

Chapter 12 Communities of Inspiration

Chapter 13 Let There Be No Misunderstanding

About the Author

Endnotes

If it is of the spirit

we will see it all around us,

springing up in a variety of places.

—Mariann Budde

In order to find the center

you have to go to the margins.

—Mark Beckwith

Acknowledgments

The amazing thing about this book is the incredible people undertaking incredible missional ministries against huge oppositional forces. They have found, scrounged together, taped, glued, and knit communities together through their own investment of time and resources. I am grateful that each person took the time to share with me his or her story, thoughts, learning, and time. This book is not possible without the firsthand accounts of people doing amazing gospel work. They shared e-mails and many had phone conversations.

Let me thank Paul Skeith, Emily Scott, Scott Claasen, Katie Nakamura Rengers, David Peters, Oliver Glass, Andy Parker, Sara Shisler Goff, Bob Leopold, Bob Lowry, Kerlin Richter, Steve Kinney, Debbie Allensworth, Jim Liberatore, Angie Thurman, Casper de Kutie, Angie Thurman, and Bertie Pearson. This book is a far better contribution to the discussion of the future of the church because these people gave me a good amount of their time and shared their story. As a bishop I am always aware that what makes ministry fantastic is the gift to work with the people you have read about in this book.

I am grateful for a tremendous staff. Canon Kai Ryan’s introduction is a wonderful challenge to the church to be tenacious and undaunted in our courageous missionary efforts. Canon John Newton helped with a good bit of reflection on my thoughts and helped me to put a great deal on paper. We then invited our team (Bishops Dena Harrison and Jeff Fisher and Canon Mary MacGregor) to reflect and give us feedback on direction. Our thoughts are the collection of over one hundred years of congregational experience. Wisdom always come from sharing and conversation. I am blessed to have wonderful conversation partners.

All of this makes me want to be a better minister and to make room for others to follow in their footsteps, which I think are the footsteps of Jesus. The church has much to learn as it enters the wilderness of a new missionary age. I am grateful for a Moses generation who are leading us bravely into God’s intended future.

Introduction

When I was in seminary, like many folks, I studied Martin Luther, who is best known for his ninety-five theses; however, I stumbled upon a little known work, On The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.¹ The overall work is Luther’s examination of the sacraments. At the time, people only received the bread at the Eucharist. Luther advocated for the restoring of the cup to the laity so they could receive communion in both kinds. The proposition is that the sacraments and the church itself are held captive by the church’s structures, just as King Nebuchadnezzar besieged and enslaved the Jews in 528 and held them captive in Babylon. In complete Luther-esque style, using plenty of colorful comparisons, Luther offers that the church may not itself possess the dream of God. If this is the case, it needs to be reformed.

Luther would expand this criticism of the church to all facets of its ministry. In many ways, Luther, like all the reformers, felt the church had lost its way. It had become about church more than the mission of Christ in the world. The great reform moved people to read the Bible, create their own forms of religion, and become spiritual pilgrims on their own. The reformers and their followers realized the church was not bound to the hierarchy and economic forms of the day. They freed it to explore new life.

The church has since then believed that ministry—and the ministry of the sacrament of the Eucharist—was an important and key ingredient to Christian community. Certainly this is true in the Anglican tradition. So important is this reality that, during World War II, Florence Li Tim-Oi, a Chinese woman, was ordained by The Right Reverend Ronald Hall, Bishop of Victoria, Hong Kong, in 1944. He did this because the Japanese invasion caused the men to flee. The Reverend Li Tim-Oi went into the occupied territory to minister and celebrate the sacrament for the church members left behind. We understand that the sacrament is part of what it means to be an Anglican community.

No denomination today would fault the reformers for their work. Yet like the Roman Catholics of Luther’s day, we have imprisoned the mission because of our love of doing church and worshipping in church buildings. And we are inwardly fed by ministry focused on those who are members. We are stuck. It has been difficult for us to imagine doing mission work outside of a particular economic model, a one priest–one church model.

As we begin to think about sending out people to start small batch communities, communities focusing on ministry with a particular group, we must face the fact that the mission will not be very sustainable if we have to provide full-time clergy for each one. This is exactly the problem.

Our mission, our ability to start new communities, cannot be dictated by the economics of the situation, nor the training or any of the structural pieces that get in the way. We must, at the end, free the church from its Babylonian captivity by a modern structure that no longer serves the mission. Moreover, like Bishop Hall, we must use all means necessary to create our sacramental communities.

This is so key as we think about moving to a distributive system of church mission with a multiplication of small batch communities that are networked with churches. So let us envision a free mission supported by the church that roots itself around a table set in the world.

Foreword

Moon Launch

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered a now-famous speech where he challenged America to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. What Kennedy proposed was radical, a sign of the changing world and emerging scientific and human capacities. The task exceeded human knowledge. America succeeded, in part, because of the ingenuity and courage of astronauts. NASA gave the astronauts their best training. They learned how to make a home in a small space capsule. They learned countdown procedures, plans and simulations for correcting errors, and all of the details of their capsules, modules, and landing gear. Trial runs proceeded in their newfangled space suits. All was top of the line. But there was one experience beyond any purchase price or human power to produce, one thing we might consider essential. Their training lacked actual time in space.

Astronaut training could not really prepare men or women for the experience of being 239,000 miles beyond the Earth. It could not offer a place to practice the totality of the experience of stepping out onto the surface of the moon or the utter loneliness of handling a disaster during the hours when Mission Control was out of range. Scientists could not even duplicate the conditions of space. Astronauts had to enter the foreign reality in charge of expensive missions and perform tasks on which their lives depended, without ever having experienced space itself. Until repeated space travel expanded human comprehension of space conditions, every astronaut set out with that basic training deficiency, a lack of time in space. To compensate, they took on their assignments with courage, trust, and a good deal of bravado.

What does it take to lead in times of transition? The answer is that same crazy combination of courage, trust, and audacity. This I know for the Bible tells us so. Back in the day, the Lord was working through Israel’s leadership dilemma. Samuel, Saul, or David? None were especially well-prepared to lead the people of Israel in the topsy-turvy world in which they found themselves. Samuel’s call came at the end of the age of the Judges, when Israel needed relief from the drunken and selfish exploits of Eli’s sons. The tribes were hardly a unified people at that point. Samuel was just a boy when the Lord wrenched him out of his sleep. Samuel led like a prophet-judge. But history marched on. For the people of Israel to thrive in the unfolding age, they needed a new vision of community and leadership. Loosely connected tribes could not endure the pressures from more organized neighbors. So Israel demanded a king, and the Lord had Samuel anoint Saul, a Benjaminite from the least of the tribes, who was searching for lost donkeys when doused with Samuel’s king-making oil. Saul led as he could, but he was beset by flaws, and the Philistines just wouldn’t let up.

So God sent Samuel to anoint a ruddy-faced and handsome boy too small to stand up under the weight of Saul’s armor. In their turn, Samuel, Saul, and David said yes when appointed to lead. Like the astronauts, each needed to have had his own share of courage and audacity to face the complicated challenges into which he stepped. However, none knew what that leadership or office would entail.

We serve with God in a world and a church undergoing radical renovation. When the church undertakes ministry in this new millennia, we’re a little like NASA in its early days. We stand in the middle of the programs and sacramental life of a mid-twentieth-century church and know God intends a healthy and thriving future church. It’s like we stand on terra firma and gaze at the stars. We know we want to get to that future church, but we have little sense of how. And I don’t think Google maps will help us! We struggle to grasp the nature of the world of the future and the church that God’s mission there requires.

Changing at a rapid pace, our world needs an adaptive church. Brave souls have taken early adaptive steps, establishing alternative recruiting and training programs for lay and ordained leaders, experimenting with partnerships in our communities, and gathering communities for worship, fellowship, and service outside our traditional parish walls. Their efforts—both successes and failures—remind us that we can count on God’s abundant provision to sustain the life of the church in this transitional time. But in truth we see the future church like we see in a mirror dimly.

Grasping what will work in the future church is a little like space travel. You can’t experience it until you experience it. We live in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world, to use an acronym coined by the US Military War College and used by the futurist Bob Johansen and Bishop Doyle. That is the world in which we live, in which we do ministry. We have no choice. A VUCA world requires a VUCA-adaptive church, one that is visionary, understanding, clear, and agile. The ministry of a VUCA-adaptive church requires adaptive visionary leaders ready to go out and gain clarity and understanding by doing.

Most of us have been habituated in and for a church of a certain sort, designed to share the gospel in a certain environment, one that is stable, simple, and predictable. Or if not simple, it’s at least a manageable level of complexity. We are native in the attractional style of the church. We’ve adopted the leadership practices of a build it and they will come (and be saved) church because that is all we know. We need the courage and audacity to adapt. It would be downright destructive to pretend otherwise.

God’s work in the VUCA world needs a church that is missional, that is, courageous, flexible, diverse, and creative to its core. It’s a church defined not by buildings and those inside them, but by relationships and engagement with those not yet in the embrace of Jesus and his body.

Today, scores of lay folk and clergy are adapting. We are like the members of the Greatest Generation who may have grown up without a phone in their home, yet we have learned to use iPads and Facebook to keep in touch with grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Astronauts, even after dozens of space walks, will never be fully at home in space. We, those of us who love and lead the church today, in a similar way, will never be fully natural in the future church. How we engage in church now, however, impacts whether the future church will have leaders naturally adapted to the new environment. This part of our work resembles Samuel’s much more than David’s.

King David, coming where he does in the history of Israel, is born for leadership in a new age. You and I are like Samuel, leading God’s people at a time of transition so the church can thrive in new ways in a world just now unfolding. Taking on the work of growing Episcopal Christians at home in the future church will not be for the weakhearted. We will have to stop seeing the adaptations of newer or younger leaders as mutations to be eradicated rather than the life-sustaining modifications they are. But their modifications will mean they will not be able to thrive in the church in which we are most comfortable. There will be, in a sense, no turning back.

Scientists (and science-fiction-ists) have long imagined that the real way to equip human beings for the future will be genetic modification. If genetically modified plants survive so well, why not humans? But consider the implications of genetic modification in human beings. In Polly Holyoke’s novel for teenagers, The Neptune Project, Holyoke imagines a world in which the rise of the oceans and global political turmoil drive a community of scientists to conclude that they have to take radical steps if their children will have any future at all. They genetically modify their children so they could survive in an underwater world. By triggering the completion of the transformation, the parent-scientists free their children to live fully and freely underwater, but also limit them to their aqua world, a life into which their parents can never follow. In talking about the parents in her stories, Holyoke wrote,

Of course it was a terrible choice and the world as they saw it had to be racing headlong into disaster or they never would have attempted something so desperate … The mother in the story is first and foremost a scientist on a mission and didn’t really understand how wrenching it would be to give up her children.

As the church, we do pretty well at understanding grief and loss. We even know that God’s healing includes death and loss, so we resist the temptation to avoid death at all costs. Such aptitude should equip us for the occasional gut-wrenching experience of letting go of our secret hope that those who follow will maintain our church in a form fully recognizable to us, one that is not recognizable to many of the Christians who have come before us. In order to serve God’s mission, it’s enormously more important that the unfolding world can recognize the future church as a vibrant community in which to encounter the living God than it is for us to recognize it as our own. Bishop Doyle has said, We will continue in the apostle’s teaching, fellowship, and the breaking of the bread but we will not be the church of yesteryear or a bygone era.

Today’s adaptive leaders are migrating into a sending, missional outlook and habits. They minister as missional migrants rather than missional natives, trying hard to hold lightly favorite images of the way the church should be so it may become what God needs it to be. What we are invited to do is to intentionally disciple those who will mess up the church in