Part III: ‘The Missional Migration’

From ‘The Great Spiritual Migration’ by Brian McLaren

Read Part 3 (chapters 7–10) of ‘The Great Spiritual Migration’ by Brian McLaren. Read the short reflection below, then comment about the reading or the reflection!

7. The Beautiful Romance

Even though Jesus led a bunch of people on a religious love revolution, convincing them to follow a new way of doing things, amassing thousands of like-minded people to risk their lives for something bigger, many faithful people resist the connection of the faith to social movements and organizing.

Through Greg Leffel, we learn about social movements. His dissertation, Faith Seeking Action is the basis of McLaren’s description of what movements have to do with Christianity.

Movements ultimately have 4 options

“First, if conditions change and render the movement irrelevant, if its leaders alienate or lose the interest of the followers, or if elites manage to intimidate leaders and followers into silence and inaction, a movement might simply fail. Second, a movement might succeed in convincing relevant institutions to accept is proposals; in this way, it might succeed and go out of existence. Third, a movement might succeed and then retool around a new set of proposals and thus be renewed or reborn. Fourth, if the institution in question decisively refuses movement proposals, the movement may form a new competing institution.” (132)

So movements have different life-cycles and experience of bumping up against institutions. Even as they are ultimately born from the weakness of institutions or when they fail to meet the present reality of those dependent on them.

Six Movement Components:

1. Opportunity structure
2. Rhetorical framing and conceptual architecture
3. Protest and messaging strategies
4. Mobilizing structures
5. Movement culture
6. Participant biography

Movements are born of opportunity and the ability of leaders to name the problem and the better tomorrow. They grow through the articulation of why their way is better and giving their followers a part to play and monitoring how it functions. For the movement to survive and thrive, it needs to make sure the movement’s culture matches the goals: living the Kin-dom to bring the kin-dom.

Lastly, we make sure the story isn’t just about the movement, but the participants. That they connect their story to the greater story.

While there are many examples of movements over the last several decades, perhaps the most effective one is the rise of the Religious Right in the 1980s. (144)

McLaren here draws a connection, not just between movement and the faithful, but between the movements and the institutions they are born to wrestle with. Going even further and naming that the two are not only linked in a moment, but a forever embrace.

An embrace threatened by the widespread anti-institutionalism of our present age.

“Rekindling that beautiful romance between institutions and movements may soon become a matter of human survival.” (146)

8. Salvation from the Suicide Machine

McLaren shares a Biblically consistent, but frightening idea from Matthew: that in trying to save our lives, we lose them, but to lose our lives for Jesus’s sake, we find them. So what if our attempts to save the church only hasten its demise? What if the only way to save the church is to stop trying to save the church, but instead join God in saving the world?

And he does mean literally saving the world. We’ve created an economy which functions like a suicide machine, extracting good from the world and excreting waste back into it. Our economic foundations are built, not around measuring all parts of even our economic reality, but merely the slender bits which allow wealthy individuals and corporations to profit off the very health and vitality of the planet. And we have all of us, including the church, bought into this.

This suicidal system is built on external and internal fuels. Internally, we have an insatiable “desire to acquire”: a bottomless pit of jealous keeping up with the Joneses and acquiring the very things which will make our hearts sing — only they never do. Because we are never able to arrive and be happy here. Consumption isn’t getting ahead: it’s treading water. And to keep us afloat internally, we need a limitless supply of external fuels. Which we don’t have.

“Only a powerful spiritual movement can challenge our institutions and communities to defect from competitive consumerism and take part in collaborative regeneration. Only a powerful spiritual movement can challenge Christians to extract ourselves from being the docile chaplaincy of an extractive economy. Only a powerful spiritual movement can help us migrate away from our trivial pursuits and ridiculous arguments (organs and pianos or guitars and drums? suits and ties or blue jeans and sneakers?) so that we can instead join God in God’s holy work, God’s primary mission: saving the earth and its inhabitants from human evil and folly.” (152)

Christianity is not dealing with its complicit role in the suicide system.

“Greed and exploitative politicians and their corporate allies could not ask for a better partner in crime.” (153)

For we go along with it as long we’re fine. As long as it is not us, but them.

“Obliviousness has reigned, but now we must face the inconvenient truth that can set us free: the version of Christianity which we have supported is perfectly deigned to produce a civilization that is unsustainable, conflicted, our of balance, and vulnerable to catastrophic collapse.” (153).

“But it may not be too late. And that’s why we so desperately need this third migration: from a religion organized for self-preservation and privilege to a religion organizing for the common good of all.”

McLaren argues that proposals, demands, and refusals to comply are necessary for the church to reject its role in the suicide system. And he shares three movement proposals:

1. Communities of missional migration speak up and if there are none in your community, start one.
2. Begin afresh with children, youth, and young adults.
3. Recruit different leaders and train them differently

The challenge of finding our lives through Jesus-work is not for the feint-hearted. It means embracing both our courageous voice and taking a supportive role for younger generations to rise in leadership.

9. You Are Social Poets

We are facing four great crises:

1. An ecological crisis
2. An economic crisis
3. A sociopolitical crisis
4. A spiritual and religious crisis

And in the midst of this, we have a crisis

“in which the religious institutions that should be helping us deal with the first three crises either waste our time or make matters worse.” (166)

The crux of these may be that sense of struggle which requires that we move beyond seeing people staying where they are or religious leaders drawing people to where they are, but for all of us to move (migrate) to that place none of us has been.

For this level of change to occur requires a 4-part process:

1. Intrapersonal change — we have to change internally, which must lead to
2. Interpersonal change — we have to relate and be human to one another, which prepares the way for
3. Structural or institutional change — in which our caring leads to more justice. But we all too often ignore
4. Cultural change — when all the behaviors, ideologies, and laws match. Racism persisted after the Civil Rights Act because there was no cultural change to end racism.

To bring such cultural change means we need to bring new commitments as Christians and Christian institutions. And we must also recognize how much has changed since the 1960s to find our most valuable approaches to this time. The ever-increasing power of corporations to have far more influence than the people coupled with the technological advancements which allow us to communicate and connect more rapidly and in ever wider terms means old tactics have a different impact today and may lead us to miss out on what is possible.

This shift will require more than individuals and Christians of conscience doing their good things. It means doing so publicly as communities with powerful, inventive, poetic approaches using creative solutions to build real cultural change in our communities through action.

And much to the ignored view of our dangerously limiting mantra “think global, act local,” we must recognize the place of every institutional grouping and how each one has a role to play. Individuals-to-churches-to-denominations-to-eccumenical-to multifaith collaborations-to-global communities. We must face that our work must take place at every level, not just in our own homes and personal action.

These crises and our need for action to deal with the great need in the world are built, not on our analytical and objective analysis, but from our commitment, our faith. It comes from that sense of beauty we see in the world and the potential for that to increase and not our fear that it’ll go away. Nor does it arise from cold reason and strategy, but from the deep desire and that vision of a better world, for the Kin-dom come. All the more reason we need to embrace our role, not only as activists, but social poets: creative writers of our social character —

“sincere and creative people who will rise on the wings of faith to catch the wind of the Spirit, the wind of justice, joy, and peace.” (181)

10. The Broken-Open Heart

Change is hard. Like, super hard. And it’s always hard. We face obstruction and crises of confidence. But why would we ever think doing the right thing would be easy? That love is easy?

“This difficult way, this way of love and suffering, this way of Christ is unavoidably the way of the cross.” (185)

The question isn’t if you’re going to get hurt. Or when. The greater question is what we do with the hurt. If we don’t deal with it or just stuff it down inside, we’re likely to react and retaliate or else run and hide. But if we wrestle with it and deal with it, we are more likely to find our hearts broken open to love.

The challenge is holy; it’s the way of the cross. It’s the way of Jesus. To disrupt and open those around him to a new way of seeing the faith and the world. This is well illustrated in the first several chapters of the gospel of John, and built in the 20th Century through Liberation Theology, which he argues

“Shouldn’t liberation be normative for a way of life centered in Jesus and his good news for the poor and oppressed? Perhaps we should call traditional approaches oppression theology or supremacist spirituality, and let liberation theology and spirituality be, for us going forward, simply Christian and normative.” (196)

This life, everything about it, is holy. As we learn from Dieter Zander, “everything holy” and we can be “playing with God,” seeing our work in light of joy and gratitude. The weight of the world is but the weight of work done joyously in concert with many others, migrating together, liberated from the oppressive forces of greed and the isolating influence of individual salvation and institutional protection. Love, joy, living.