Table of Contents

How Do You Know If You Are Ready for Redevelopment?

by Jim Caprell

Reversing Unwelcoming Welcome Habits

by Peter W. Marty

Renewing a Mainline Congregation Requires More Than Praise Music and Small Groups

by R. Robert Cueni

How to Address the Stress Points in Turnaround Churches

by William M. Easum

Revitalizing the Rural (or Anywhere!) Church

by James A. Shelly

So Tell Me...Interviews with Faithful, Effective, and Innovative Leaders:  Featuring Ron Martoia

by Norman Jameson

Turnaround Congregations Moving from Decline to Health, Growth, Renewed Mission

by Marta Poling-Goldenne

Building the Human Resources Team

by Thomas G. Bandy

The Church That's Continually Opening New Doors

by Dale E. Galloway

Coaching Corner

So Tell Me...
Interviews with Faithful, Effective, and Innovative Leaders

by Norman Jameson

Featuring Ron Martoia

Jameson, a communications professional for non-profit organizations, lives in Raleigh, NC and appreciates the mountain biking trails of the nearby parks. Contact him at njameson@thecolumbiapartnership.org.

Ron Martoia is founding pastor of Westwinds Community Church in Jackson, MI, author of Morph! and the genius behind www.velocityculture.com. He is a leading thinker for helping to imagine leadership in a future filled with flux in the midst of an emerging church, and he is currently rethinking with others the process and content of theological education. He left Westwinds in June 2004 to leverage his gifts in a wider venue through consulting, writing, and seminars. He was interviewed after a Wired2Grow conference with emerging church pastors in Burlington, NC. 

Q. Do we need to reconsider the faith stories we tell to impact a secular culture?

A. It has to start with us examining, “Is the story we’re telling the fullest, best rendition of the story as we understand it?” I don’t think we are really attempting to do anything different than what great leaders throughout history have done. Martin Luther reread the story and when he read the Latin version of repent and believe, he said, “You know what, it’s not a complete story. Somehow this penance thing doesn’t seem to fit in with the whole story. It is abbreviated.” I think we need to do the exact same thing. We need to ask, “Is our version of the Gospel the full version and is the story we’re telling really the full story?” The reason why I think the culture likes the Jesus part is that’s sort of a litmus test for 1) Is the story we think we are telling being clearly communicated? and then 2) Is the story we’re communicating the full version that we think it is?

Q. We’re not telling the full version.

A. I think the construct of the story we have told—especially in the conservative evangelical church—has been short handed as “fall/redemption.” We recognize that we are broken and need to be fixed and God provided a fix in Jesus and as a result of that fall/redemption story we have to go out and be evangelistic in conversation. I don’t use the word evangelism usually; I use the word spiritual conversation because I think most people can grab on to that a little better. Do people resonate with the idea that they are broken and need to be fixed? Even if it’s a true statement it seems to me that’s starting the conversation midstream. Mainly, that starts the conversation in Genesis 3 when we’ve got a couple of chapters that lead up to Genesis 3 that start the story and start the conversation in a fundamentally different place. The whole story starts in a place of creation, which has a whole bunch of dimensions to it that we really never engage in in spiritual conversation, like that we’ve been created in God’s image. What does that mean? What do you mean that you and me and your lost neighbor, your unsaved coworker, that the people you know that aren’t connected to God, that they are made in His image too? Absolutely made in His image. We are made in His image. We’ve been made to be in relationship with God and with each other. We’ve been made to tend the garden or have a sense of purpose and destiny. That seems to me to be a very different starting point for the story. It doesn’t make fall/redemption unnecessary but it’s a very different place to start, a place that the average person disconnected from God can easily enter into.

Q. How do you penetrate the shell of a culture that says, “We just don’t need what you’re offering?”

A. I wonder if our need to convince people of their need is part of our problem? I look at what Jesus did, and while there are examples where need is pointed out, it doesn’t seem to be the controlling emphasis of the narrative. It doesn’t seem that Jesus went around constantly beating up on people and convincing them, “You’re broken and need to get fixed.” It seems to me it’s more organic than that. Jesus uses the metaphor of water with the woman at the well, and grabs the metaphor and says, “You know what, we’re sitting here talking about water and who is going to get whom a drink. Let me shift focus for a minute and I want to engage this H₂O in a spiritual H₂O sort of way.” She had a need that she was able to acknowledge but Jesus organically uncovered her and He didn’t beat her up to do it. He certainly didn’t seem like He was using much persuasion to do it. Same thing with Nicodemus who asks some questions and Jesus capitalizes on a metaphor and says, “You know, Nicodemus, you’ve been born into a family of Pharisees, a Jewish family first and foremost, a kosher kitchen, a Pharisee family, a family that keeps Torah and rules and regulations. And you know what, you need a clean start. In fact, you need to be born differently. Born again. It’s interesting to me how in the Nicodemus narrative we have Jesus just grabbing a metaphor that has almost become a definer of conservative evangelicalism. Born again: When it just seems to be a ready metaphor for Jesus, no more than living water was a ready metaphor. So, I wonder what would happen if we shifted gears in our spiritual conversation to say, “How do we allow needs to evolve instead of constantly trying to persuade people of needs that they don’t see?”

Q. How do Christians move beyond the historical, cultural model to move others toward faith?

A. The beginning stage of getting beyond it is, first, to embrace the idea that what we are hanging onto is a Western kind of structure. If we don’t even embrace that notion then it’s impossible. How many of us use Acts 2:42-47 as declaring the call for being engaged in small group ministry but never preach with the same vocal persuasion that you ought to sell everything and share it in common? It’s interesting how we pick and choose. There’s an example of a western reading of the text where we elevate the spiritual, but not the cultural.

Second, we have to start going back to something prior. Our tendency in the church is to deal with strategy, programs and initiatives, but we don’t very often go back and say, “How is this mental model I hold to really constructed?” When I give an alter call, that’s a particular strategy and a particular action, but what guides that? What guides and directs that is I have a certain sort of praxis that says we’re trying to grab people and get them into this thing so we can present this specific form of the Gospel to the point where there’s no question. In my church tenure of twenty years, I would have people come into a service and say, “Oh, so you don’t present the Gospel here? We won’t be back.” What they really meant was, “You’re not giving a particular form of an altar call as verified by us where people say a certain sort of prayer that qualifies them for an eternal seat in heaven.” It’s a relatively new innovation in church history. So what we end up with is an inability really to engage what the big rocks are in the jar, which happen to be more along the lines of the theological constructs we unwittingly hold in our mind.

I wonder if this second problem of learning to read outside our modern and western world requires a certain sort of communitarian theologizing, where we as community sit down and say, “Where do I have a blind spot here in my reading?” I don’t just mean in local church faith communities. We need to have pastors sit together and say, “Where are we reading this western? Where are we reading this modern?”

Those who have done any missions recognize more readily how much of what we do is very western and modern. It doesn’t take one going to India—although I’ve gone to India over a dozen times—or going to western Europe or parts of Russia to recognize how much of our Christianity really smacks of home town preaching, when you get into a context like that, and say wow, that message won’t work here. That presentation of Gospel won’t work here, that doesn’t resonate here. Let’s do theology as a community.

In our theologizing we’ve become highly individualistic. It’s more than you, the text and the Holy Spirit. It’s you and the community of faith. You’re part of a body, part of a larger organism than yourself. You’re also part of a historical trajectory. We don’t like that idea because it starts to smack of tradition and sounds Catholic to us. We don’t like that. But we are on a historical trajectory. We are part of a community and there is the role the Holy Spirit plays and there is a role that culture plays in helping us make sure the message we’re speaking is the message they’re hearing.

Q. You say there are theological sea changes going on. Name a couple.

A. Part would be this abbreviated story we’re telling needs to be augmented. I think us really recognizing that we have a doctrinal understanding of ecclesia that maybe is based on the past instead of the future. We are doing church the way we’ve always done church because it’s the only way we know to do church. But if Jesus really is the arrival of God’s future in the present and if we are heading back to the Garden, then what does it mean for us to be the arrival of God’s future in the present? What does it mean to invite people into the Garden? I think that might mean that theologically we rethink what we mean by ecclesia. It’s fascinating that on one hand we will admit the church is not a building. But I don’t know that in praxis we own it. I think there’s a very definite sense that we are still inviting people into a building. I think dominantly our ecclesiastical models are attractional, not incarnational. We throw a bigger or better party to increase market share. As a result, by being attractional we by definition are extractional. What ends up happening is the very people that are far from God we attempt to reach, we as quickly as possible sanitize to the very environment from which they’ve just come. Now they don’t hang out with their friends, whether it’s at the bar or at the bowling alley. Because now they need to be in a small group, and on a ministry team…and now pretty soon we've disconnected them from the very people they had the best leverage to reach.

Q. You say faith is like the trapeze artist who releases one bar before turning to catch the next, which he trusts will be there. Modern church leaders cannot let go of their trapeze. We have billions of dollars of property and centuries of accumulated investment in education and training. To turn around and not know the new trapeze will support change…how can we possibly bridge that gap?

A. If there was ever a time we needed to figure this stuff out with a cadre of fellow sojourners, it’s today. We have to start talking together about what trapeze gaps you have to shoot right now. Where are you having to let go and where do you have to grab a new trapeze, because the reality of it is the fundamental fear and risk is along the lines of these mental model shifts. It’s not about are we going to do baptism in a certain way. It’s not about are we going to have contemporary music. It’s way more fundamental than that. It’s way more insidious, subversive, powerful, and shifting than a little tweak of praxis. At some point in time there has to be a pace adjustment so we can think about the new emerging thing. Or we’ll continue to do the thing we’ve always done. We’ll continue to decline and pretty soon be obsolete and we’ll say, “God is doing a new thing, but we were too busy grinding out the old.”

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