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Engaging and Discipling Nones: a Missional Coaching Handbook

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Engaging and Discipling Nones: a Missional Coaching Handbook Doctoral Project Approval Sheet This doctoral project entitled ENGAGING AND DISCIPLING NONES: A MISSIONAL COACHING HANDBOOK Written by JERRY DAVISSON and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Ministry has been accepted by the Faculty of Fuller Theological Seminary upon the recommendation of the undersigned readers: _____________________________________ Dr. Cindy S. Lee Doctoral Projects Administrator _____________________________________ Dr. Kurt Fredrickson Associate Dean for Professional Doctoral Programs Date Received: June 1, 2020 ENGAGING AND DISCIPLING NONES: A MISSIONAL COACHING HANDBOOK A MINISTRY FOCUS PAPER SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY FULLER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE DOCTOR OF MINISTRY BY JERRY DAVISSON JUNE 2020 Copyright© 2020 by Jerry Davisson All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Engaging and Discipling Nones: A Missional Coaching Handbook Jerry Davisson Doctor of Ministry School of Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary 2020 The goal of this project is to create a Missional Coaching Handbook that can be used by pastors and church leaders to coach parishioners on how to engage and disciple the Nones in their unique context toward holistic gospel flourishing. A gap exists between missional understanding and missional praxis in the churches of the Association of the Churches of God in Oregon and Southwest Washington. A new discipleship model needs to be implemented that utilizes coaching to equip parishioners to reach the Nones in their communities. This study explores the history of the Association and the changing understanding of mission through the years. The project also examines the challenges facing the diverse communities that make up the Association in the wake of the disintegration of Christendom and the rise of the Nones. Through an examination of literature and the critical theology of the Missio Dei, a revised understanding of missional ecclesiology was deemed critical if the church hopes to reach the Nones. This study used a coaching model to activate the missional imagination of those being coached and to help them develop “missional moves” into their neighborhoods in response to the handbook. A group of pastors in the Association was enlisted to coach parishioners through the content of the handbook. The goal of the project is to find a way to move parishioners from consumers of religious goods and services to true missionaries in their neighborhoods to help reach the Nones and bring kingdom flourishing. A missional coaching approach was helpful in assisting parishioners to gain a better understanding of how they can impact their community. However, due to the small number of participants, more study is needed to see if this approach can be effective in bridging the gap between knowledge and practice over a long period of time. Content Reader: Kurt Fredrickson, PhD Words: 300 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to begin by thanking my wife Kris for lovingly encouraging me throughout this project. Your love for Jesus and desire that others might know him are an inspiration. Thank you for being my partner through this crazy journey. I want to thank the churches in the Association of the Churches of God in Oregon and Southwest Washington for allowing me the space to write and experiment in ways to bring God’s kingdom to our neighborhoods. Thank you, Pastors Linda, Jon, Larry, and Nathan, for leading your parishioners through the handbook and giving me encouraging and essential feedback. Thank you to my editor James Hansen for pushing me to be a better writer. Finally, I want to thank my family and friends for believing in me and for helping to shape who I am. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii PART ONE: MINISTRY CONTEXT INTRODUCTION 2 CHAPTER 1: THE ASSOCIATION OF THE CHURCHES OF GOD IN OREGON AND SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON 10 PART TWO: THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 39 CHAPTER 3: A THEOLOGY OF MISSIONAL SENDING 71 PART THREE: MINISTRY PRACTICE CHAPTER 4: MISSIONAL COACHING TRAINING AND IMPLEMENTATION 100 CHAPTER 5: MISSIONAL COACHING HANDBOOK 113 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 122 APPENDICES 126 BIBLIOGRAPHY 164 iv PART ONE MINISTRY CONTEXT INTRODUCTION I began my current role as District Pastor for the Association of the Churches of God in Oregon and Southwest Washington (hereafter, Association) on April 1, 2017. My wife Kris and I moved to Portland, Oregon after twenty-one years of ministering in Central California. I had been serving the church in Tulare, California for about twelve years and I was struggling with the way we were doing ministry. I did not have the language to articulate my uneasiness with our ministry approach requiring people to come to us to find Jesus. Nor did I have language for the changes I was seeing in our Western context at large and in the community I called home. I simply knew we were having little impact in our community and something needed to change. While serving the First Church of God of Tulare, I was introduced to Reggie McNeal’s book, The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church. McNeal begins chapter one by stating, “The current church culture in North America is on life support. It is living off the work, money, and energy of previous generations from a previous world order. The plug will be pulled either when the money runs out (80 percent of money given to congregations comes from people aged fifty-five and older) or when the remaining three-fourths of a generation who are institutional loyalists die off or both.”1 There it was. In a few brief sentences McNeal captured what seemed to be the trajectory the church was moving and her fate without some much needed change. Other authors such as Michael Frost, Lesslie Newbigin, Alan Roxburgh, David Bosch, Darrell Guder, Alan Hirsch, where also summoning the church to reimagine her missional calling. 1 Reggie McNeal, The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2003), 1. 2 Ministry styles in the 1990s, during the height of the church-growth movement, impacted my view of ministry and ecclesial success. In contrast to the missional movement, the church- growth movement focused its efforts on making the church and her programs attractive to those outside the church. According to Os Guinness, the church-growth movement sought the “renewal of the local church through the renewal of mission, as opposed to other priorities; and— importantly—to the renewal of mission through the employment of human sciences’ insights and tools to aid effective evangelism, particularly those borrowed from the fields of management, marketing, psychology, and communications.”2 For Guinness, the emphases of the church- growth movement were placed in the right areas, namely, “the centrality of the church, the priority of mission, the possibility of growth, the necessity of thinking of outsiders, the acknowledgement of culture and of cultures, the insistence on real results, and the wisdom of using the best insights and technologies proffered by the key disciplines of the human sciences.”3 Many churches found success using the models espoused by the church growth movement. These models included best practices in sociology, business, and technology to attract outsiders to church services and programs which emphasized quality and were marketed to specific target audiences. One of the downfalls of the church-growth movement was the need to keep developing and growing programs to keep pace with an ever-changing Christian consumers’ appetite. McNeal would lament how “several decades of the church growth movement’s emphasis on methodologies have conditioned church leaders to look for the next 2 Os Guinness, “Church Growth: The Movement of the Nineties,” Ligonier Ministries, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/church-growththe-movement-of-the-nineties, previously published in Tabletalk Magazine (January 1, 1992). 3 Ibid. 3 program, the latest ‘model,’ the latest fad in ministry programming to help ‘grow’ the church.”4 If looking for the latest silver bullet which would help the church to grow was not challenging enough for the local church pastor, things were about to get even more complicated. According to Phyllis Tickle, “Religion, whether we like it or not, is intimately tied to the culture in which it exists.”5 Western society is experiencing a period of rapid and discontinuous change. This should come as no surprise because, as Tickle further explains, “Every five hundred years, give or take a decade or two, Western culture, along with those parts of the world that have been colonized or colonialized by it, goes through a time of enormous upheaval, a time in which essentially every part of it is reconfigured.”6 We are currently seeing seismic shifts in every aspect of our Western culture and the world. The Church finds herself at the very beginning of modifications that will leave Western society and the local expression of our gathering looking very different in the decades ahead. According to many scholars, such as David Bosch, Michael Frost, and Darrell Guder, we are now living in a postmodern, post- Christendom, post-Christian, post-everything society. Currently, much of the Western church is operating from an ecclesial model that is shaped by what has been labeled Christendom. Christendom is defined by Michael Frost as “the name given to the religious culture that has dominated Western society since the fourth century.”7 This project will look extensively at what 4 McNeal, 95. 5 Phyllis Tickle, Emergence Christianity: What It Is, Where It Is Going, and Why It Matters (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2012), 19. 6 Tickle, 17. 7 Michael Frost, Exiles: Living in a Post-Christian Culture (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, Inc., 2006), 4. 4 Christendom is and how the post-Christendom culture in the West will require a paradigm shift in the way the church sees her mission.
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