Many of your know that I am part of The Transform Network, a missional community formation network.  This spring we’re having our first gathering on the East Coast.  I’m going to be speaking at the event.  You should consider coming. It’s FREE.  And yes, we are hoping to have a West Coast gathering.

As we were in the early stages of development, I wrote a short paper on missional community formation trying to reframe the conversation.  Much of it has been a long dialog I have had with many who participate in the Emerging church dialog.  I am grateful for the work of Phyllis Tickle who opened this up for me.

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Missional Community Formation Network – A New Framing Story

Summary: There is little doubt that the church is experiencing a dramatic and well-documented shift over the last fifty or more years.  With the advent of science and technology, the world is rapidly changing.  Denominations are in overall decline and church attendance for those under 35 is significantly waning.

Yet what if this process is opening us up to the possibility of a larger framing story, one that requires a new way of thinking about how we organize and engage God’s mission of restoration in community?

The Traditional Framing Story

In 2008, Phyllis Tickle released The Great Emergence. It documented the radical shifts that were occurring in the church over the last 100 years with the advent of science and technology.  It suggested that the fundamental assumptions of the church were being exposed, examined, and potentially re-organized.

Tickle offered a language for understanding and communicating how the church organized itself into four dominant frames or categories: liturgicals, social justice, renewalists, and conservatives.

Each category had a primary but not entirely exclusive framing story: Liturgicals around the framing story of liturgy; Social Justice Christians around social justice; Renewalists around gifts of the Spirit, and conservatives around The Word.

Each category gathered together under its own building, and church authority, belief sets, and rules flowed out of the organizing body.  Unity was based primarily on a specific interpretation of doctrine or beliefs, or practices within the category.  Within each of the four quadrants were smaller organizing bodies around subsets of these principles.

• Social Justice Christians: (Traditionally mainline Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Lutheran denominations)
• Conservatives: Evangelical denominations
• Renewalists: (Charismatic and Pentecostal denominations)
• Liturgicals: (Roman Catholics and Anglicans denominations)

Embedded within the four categories was the idea that our identity was found inside the category.  Historically, crossing boundaries was typically frowned upon from within the category.  The lines between each were often considered hard and fast, especially within more traditional circles.

The inherent problem of the four categories is that they reveal the historical nature of how we deal with conflict of opinion through schism and disunity. The unfortunate legacy of both the Great Schism and the Reformation was permission to divide.  Each claimed to be the “correct” form of belief and practice.

But the very presence of four categories revealed a problem.  How can four categories claim to be right if they believe and practice something different? Finding a basis then for unity amidst diversity becomes deeply important to the health of the church at large.