Timothy Keller
Alan Hirsch has been a thought leader in the missional church movement for decades, and I’m delighted to have his insights on Movement Dynamics enriching our discussion. Movements are held together more by common vision than by rules and procedures. Their members are sacrificially committed to their causes rather than being in them for the benefits. Movements value risk, innovation, and change rather than safety, tradition, and stability. Movements tend to be “bottom up” and participatory rather than top-down, command-and-control organizations. Hirsch’s essay warmly affirms the importance and character of movements, yet does so with significant supplemental insights. I’d like to recap and comment on some that I think enhance the Center Church content. He does, however, push back against the material in one area that I will respond to at the end of this essay.
Movements from the Edge
How can a movement mind-set in the Christian church be cultivated? I was intrigued by Hirsch’s statement that “movements emerge from those parts of the church that are on the edge.” By that he means, I think, the parts of the church that are in a place of insecurity.
Churches that have experienced sharp declines and are facing extinction are “on the edge” and may be open to radical innovation. They also may simply hold on to the past and die, but I have often seen churches at their point of insecurity finally embrace movement dynamics, consistent with Hirsch’s insight. I would also argue that church plants are almost all, by definition, “on the edge,” because brand-new churches are not secure. They have to serve and reach people to survive. They have no laurels to rest on, no building to make them feel like they have arrived. New churches almost always exhibit more in the way of movement dynamics because of their insecurity.
I can go further. There are basically two kinds of church plants — those with core groups going out from existing congregations with financial and leadership support, and “pioneer” church plants, which essentially start from scratch, without a core group of Christians. We usually see more innovation and vigorous movement dynamics in pioneer churches, because they are more insecure.
This means we should also expect movement dynamics and innovation from churches among the less well-established and “respectable” circles and neighborhoods — churches on the edges of society. This can certainly be seen in how the churches in affluent and powerful areas of North America and Europe are much more institutionalized and stagnant, while churches among the grassroots in Africa, Latin America, and Asia are dynamic. There the classic traits of fast-growing movements are in evidence.
Movements and “Liminality”
A related insight is that movement dynamics are enhanced by an experience of “liminality.” Here’s Hirsch’s important passage on this:
Liminality is a sense of anomaly, marginality, and disorientation — even danger. Experiencing liminality is necessary if we wish to develop a sense of urgency and change the story. From liminality, we find the creative imagination to discover the new metaphors we need to sustain the church in its mission. Certain conditions of liminality are necessary to help us recover a more vigorous expression of the church (p. 253).
Hirsch immediately applies this idea to Redeemer. Most observers would look at our church, with more than five thousand in attendance, a growing budget and staff, and even a building, and assume we feel very much established and secure. That is not true — Hirsch is right. “For . . . Redeemer the liminal challenge is to be a gospel-centered church in the space of New York City.” Many evangelical Christian doctrines and beliefs are anathema to the NYC powers that be, and their power is very great. Even though we love our city and have an abundance of longtime New Yorkers and have adapted in many ways to the culture, we are still radically different and (we know) “offensive” to our neighbors in a number of regards. We always have a sense of “anomaly and vulnerability” to some degree. And Hirsch is right that this is definitely a factor that vitalizes and empowers movement dynamics in our case.
I can also apply this principle to what has happened to Christianity in North America in the hundred years since the split between fundamentalism and modernism. The mainline churches that were captured by modernism kept the buildings, universities, endowment funds, and all the trappings of the establishment. They remained at the center — literally so. Their churches were on Main Street or on the center square of the town. Evangelicals and Pentecostals were pushed out to the edge — literally so. Their churches were on the outskirts of town or were meeting in rented facilities. Their members were not taken from the leading classes of the town or of the great urban centers. They had to start their own schools and organizations from scratch. They also planted new churches at a rate vastly outstripping the rate of mainline church planting.
Yet all the innovation and energy lay with the evangelicals, who developed remarkable ministries (InterVarsity, Campus Crusade [Cru], and Navigators, just to name three) to convert university students and then new seminaries (Fuller, Gordon-Conwell, Trinity) that moved the numerous converts into church leadership. (I was part of that dynamic in the 1970s.) By the end of the twentieth century, the mainline churches were in sharp decline, with evangelical churches (and seminaries) outpacing the far better funded mainline institutions.
Many observers have seen marks of institutionalization and decline in U.S. evangelicalism for a couple of decades. But I’ll make a brief, bold statement, using Hirsch’s idea. The recent revolutionary changes in our North American culture’s sexual and moral standards may constitute a new forcing of orthodox Christians away from the center to the edges. As was the case one hundred years ago, there will be attrition. Many people will not want to follow their churches “outside the gates” of respectability and cultural acceptability. But the new experience of liminality will create a renewal of our movement dynamics and an explosion of innovation. Also remember that in the non-Western world, Christianity is young but extraordinarily vital, and our brothers and sisters there will be a source of new ideas and resources for the Western church, once our liminal status makes us more open to them. Lots of help may be on the way.
Movements and Leadership
When it comes to the structure of leadership in the church, Hirsch says, “Here I am admittedly more radical than Keller in my suggestions.” At this point, he gives perhaps his signature message about the structure of church ministry along the lines of Ephesians 4:11 – 16. He calls this outline of biblical church leadership APEST — apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers. Here in a nutshell, and elsewhere at length, he argues that every one of these functions is necessary for a vital Christian church, and that every one of these leadership roles is constitutive, not optional — given to us by God.
With a grin that I can see in my mind’s eye, Hirsch ends by writing, “The wonderful irony is that though Keller admits to being something of a cessationist regarding his theology of Ephesians 4, he remains one of the best examples of today’s apostolic leaders” (p. 263). That is extremely kind. And he is referring to the fact that I do follow the more traditional reading of Ephesians 4. I don’t see these as five abiding, distinct roles given to the church.
But before you read me as rejecting Hirsch’s insights, consider this. His concern is that the current model — that all ministry roles and leadership power reside in the ordained minister/pastor — is neither biblical nor able to promote renewal and movement dynamics. I think he’s right. And here’s one reason my thinking has moved in that direction. Over the past couple of years, I have been reading heavily in John Calvin’s works. To my surprise, I found that in his varied writings, he speaks about a varied, multi-role Christian ministry that has similarities to Alan Hirsch’s outline. In fact, though he doesn’t list them all in any one place, he acknowledges four kinds of ministers. Deacons were caregivers; elders were managers and overseers; teachers or “doctors” were experts in the Bible and instruction (and were not necessarily preachers); and preachers spoke the Word and administered the sacraments.
In most of Calvin’s lists, these are the only four kinds of “ministers,” yet at one place in his Institutes (4.4.2; cf. 4.4.4), he wrote that it made sense for an elder, pastor, or teacher in a particular region to also be designated a bishop. Calvin is quick to deny that bishops should have the power to ordain and excommunicate on their own, as the office had evolved in the Catholic Church. Rather, bishops must remain “subject to the assembly of [their] brethren.”1 Nevertheless, it was almost as if Calvin, while believing that the apostolic office had ceased, nevertheless saw that some had unusual gifts of leadership that should be recognized.
Now this is not identical to Hirsch’s APEST structure, but, honestly, it is not too far off. What I am saying is that it is possible to not believe in the continuation of biblical apostles and prophets and still recognize the need for a variegated ministry leadership structure much like the one Hirsch has seen to be so fruitful. This bears more discussion from those of us working in more traditional church denominations.
I thank Alan Hirsch for his encouraging, enriching essay and for his great love for the church of Jesus Christ.