Imbolc and the Snow Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: MVP. Snow storms. Tourney weather. Indiana. Small towns. The 1950’s. Mary and her morning ritual. Mark training a new generation of Saudi engineers and physicists. Diane healing. Shadow and her still forming personality. Chewy. Kate, always Kate. Bond and Devick. Sue Bradshaw. Dr. Buphati. Kristie Kokenny.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Salaam, dog sitter

Week Kavannah: Patience.  Savlanut. When I rush, slow down. When I want to speak, wait. When my inner agonizer arises, calm him, move on

One brief shining: Shadow scratches the familiar sound of a collar against nail; she cleans the Snow out from between the pads on her paws put there as she flew like a small black missile through drifts from the recent Snow, pure Dog and Puppy delight, oh Shadow.

New Apostolic Reformation. Finished my second book on this almost invisible movement. The New Apostolic Church by C. Peter Wagner. As I mentioned before, I studied with Wagner during the late 1980’s in a two week church growth seminar at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California.

This movement began to be understood as a new thing under the Sun thanks to Wagner’s academic work on church growth. He began as a student of church growth. Where was it happening? How was it happening? Were any of the things he learned replicable?

Those of us responsible for the health of congregations in the former mainline Protestant denominations sought answers to the opposite problem, church decline. That’s what led me to this prominent conversative seminary seeking answers that might help us turn things around.

My thesis for my Doctor of Ministry showed that the Presbyterian Church had begun to decline as a percentage of the U.S. population in the 1920’s though numerical increases hid that decline until the 1970’s. We were not alone. United Methodists, U.C.C., ELCA, and Episcopal churches had begun shrinking, too.

Maybe the church growth movement had some answers. Wagner had the most information and experience, so I went to him. Didn’t help. All the former mainline churches have continued a slow sinking into obscurity. Chatbotgpt offered these numbers about the Presbyterian church:

• 1983: 3,131,228 members ​
• 2013: 1,760,200 members.​
• 2022: 1,193,770 members.

Wagner looked at these and the comparable numbers for other mainline denominations, saw the decline in conservative denominations which was smaller, but still noticeable at the time, and declared the beginning of a Post-Denominational era.

Where were churches growing? In Latin America, China, and Africa. Pentecostal churches for the most part. Non-denominational. Also megachurches in the U.S. which had begun to plant smaller versions of themselves. These were the congregations Wagner began to call the New Apostolic Reformation. Denominations were a post-Luther Reformation phenomenon, usually created by division over doctrine.

These independent, non-hierarchical congregations had the current energy and vitality in the Christian church globally. Over the final years of his life, Wagner died in 2016, he served as a visionary apostle (his language, or, rather his use of New Testament language) to help these loose knit congregation develop cohesion without becoming denominations. An apostle in this sense has the same status as an apostle of Jesus. They lead. Prophets, a notch below them in spiritual authority, receive new revelation from God, the apostles execute the commands of the new revelation.

Neither apostle nor prophet had a role in church governance before the N.A.R. Instead there were denominational bureaucracies. These bureaucracies managed selection, education, and ordination of clergy who then served as employees of congregations.

The NAR form of governance, while eschewing formal bureaucracy, relies on individual, usually male, leadership who have power only in their domain.

This is getting too long for one post. I’ll share more tomorrow.