PAPAfest Session: Nurturing Spiritual Rhythms in Community

[Mark Van Steenwyk]

I just got a peek of the sessions for PAPA fest. They look great. If you're one of the 1000 who registered, please drop by my session on Saturday morning...here's the info:

Nurturing Spiritual Rhythyms in Community: Becoming the Uneventful Church

The Church in America is easily characterized as a weekly event facilitated by a few professional Christians in an expensive building. How do we move from event-based spirituality into a way of life with spiritual rhythms? In this session, we will look at the examples of several intentional communities--primarily MIssio Dei in Minneapolis--for ways to follow Jesus in a rhythmic way of life.

I was originally hoping to co-lead a session called Embracing the Empire: The Problem With Voting and Other Forms of the Politics of Coercion with Josh Kaufman-Horner, but the organizers felt as though there were too many "anti-empire" sessions and encouraged me to submit something else.

[Mark Van Steenwyk]

Yeah. My view of leadership has changed over the past few years. I started Missio Dei afraid of leading at all, because the only view I had was what you describe. But avoiding leading was worthless. What I've done over the last year or so is focus my energy on introducing and fostering rhythms and shared practices...and on building consensus and facilitating discernment. Most of the logistical stuff is handled by others. So even though I now exert leadership fairly strongly, the structure isn't really top down. It is, in some ways, a bit like being an abbot in a very non-authoritarian system.

[somasoul]

This is really good, Mark. This topic has been on my mind a lot in the last week, funny how you picked it. Part of this is the power structure that proliferates churches today. Churches feel like they have to have a paid minister, children's minister, worship minister, secretary, youth minister, minister of media, on and on. This discourages volunteerism, which in a Christian sense would mean discouraging folks to serve the church. That might be a good thing if the congregation were serving the community and if the leadership were putting in place power structures for the congregation to serve. But leadership isn't doing that and the Christian's time is spent feeding the church's power structure and little else.