I just finished checking out a post Rob Fairbanks reposted called Planting a Church is in Your DNA. The whole thing is worth a read, but I’d like to point out one section in it:
…in some cases, our best churches have been planted by the inexperienced. My first few opportunities to witness this came in Asia (distinct countries and cultures). In one case, a 15 year old boy was leading a network of four churches- each with several hundred attendees- that he had planted after his conversion at 11 years of age. In another case, a 13 year old girl planted her first of four churches before the age of 17. I remember in the Philippines an 80 year old woman who had no pastoral experience had planted more than a dozen churches after the time when most people are retired.
I find it interesting that it’s noted that some of the most vital churches observed were started not by clergy but by the least likely of sources. The whole thing reminded me of a quote I had highlighted while reading Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage
Michael Faraday, who had little mathematics and no formal schooling beyond the primary grades, is celebrated as an experimenter who discovered the induction of electricity. He was one of the great founders of modern physics. It is generally acknowledged that Faraday’s ignorance of mathematics contributed to his inspiration, that it compelled him to develop a simple, nonmathematical concept when he looked for an explanation of his electrical and magnetic phenomena. Faraday had two qualities that more than made up for his lack of education: fantastic intuition and independence and originality of mind.
Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly and unaware. The “expert” is the man who stays put.
McLuhan notes that it is because Faraday was not a “professional” or trained on “how the world works.” I’ve been thinking about what this means for approaching Christian theology and the shaping of church and liturgy and it makes me think that as it pertains to thinking through this, there is a need to embrace those who aren’t trained as well as those who are.
Theology is certainly a realm which is professional dominated. While there is a certain degree of need of theological accuracy, it seems that the domination of too much rigidity can also be a death blow to actual activity. I can be challenged in my own life by a fear of doing new things because of a theological perfectionism.
I think that to a certain extent for us to move forward in mission, there is a need to embrace this sort of amateurism that is okay with pushing at the edges and asking the questions we’ve been trained not to ask. Not that by itself it will be enough, but there is a certain amount of energy and creativeness that just won’t be found by those already trained by the institution of church.
It’s not even that I am anti-institution or anti education or something, I just think that we need to find that way to embrace the amateur who loves Jesus, and make Jesus shaped things center to what were doing more than any sort of “well this model works, but that doesn’t, and you need to do this, but not that” kind of approach. Let somebody go who loves Jesus and you will see something happen, because for some reason, God likes to create these things that look like chaos, but end up being something really good.
