Q approach to mission

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The Oregonian (Apr30,2k11)

Culture, Christianity and 'Q' 

bring hope to Portland

Published: Saturday, April 30, 2011, 10:00 AM     Updated: Saturday, April 30, 2011, 5:41 PM

 by Steve Duin, The Oregonian 

Only evangelicals who confess they don't have all the answers would gather, 600 strong, in the Crystal Ballroom under the banner of "Q." 

And only in "unchurched" Portland could this unorthodox approach to Christianity and culture yield such unexpected and powerful results. 

Q is the brainchild of Gabe Lyons, whose 2010 book, "The Next Christians," chronicled "the good news about the end of Christian America." Lyons believes the Gospel is about the infusion of beauty, grace, justice and love into a world that desperately needs them, not legislating and politicizing a moral code that others are forced to obey. 

To encourage "Ideas for the Common Good," Lyons launched the first Q gathering in 2007. He was persuaded to bring the three-day event to Portland by Rick McKinley, the pastor at Imago Dei, and Kevin Palau of the Luis Palau Association, who have long encouraged the church -- think SouthLake Foursquare and Roosevelt High -- to come, in all humility, to the city's aid. 

"If you take the Gospel seriously, you can't retreat and hide. You have to engage and serve," McKinley says. "The church needs transformation just as much as the city does."

In the beginning, Lyons notes, most of the Q presenters were tightly affiliated with the church.
 

Cornelia SeigneurGabe Lyons, the founder of Q, intervews Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

No longer. The band playing the Crystal Ballroom last week included astrophysicist Jennifer Wiseman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society; actor Mark Ruffalo; Bobette Buster of the USC Film School; and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the "Ground Zero" mosque. 

"If we as Christians desire to be involved in the creation and development of culture," Lyons wrote when the Imam invite raised a ruckus, "we need to be willing to enter into the free exchange of ideas that are already happening around us." 

"You risk misunderstanding in the name of communication and dialogue," Palau said. "But I get what Gabe is doing: pushing the envelope." 

And pushing past preaching to the choir into an inspired and restorative exchange of ideas. 

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Hat Tip to Steve Bishop, editor, The Reformational Daily
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Comment:  I recommend you click up and read the entire article.  But I wonder why "the free exchange of ideas" in a search to produce "Ideas for the Common Good" has to be juxtaposed to the inherited churchly structure, denominational or congregational doctrinal standards (traditions), a moral orientation lovingly maintained to generate and ever regenerate a moral community with communally understood shared mores.  If you've got a dualism at work, then your particular traditions of faith and practice sets up an either/or, so that to get to the practice of free exchange of ideas with representatives of other Christianities and other religions (for instance) in the search for Ideas for the Common Good you have to turn against your particular heritage of faith and morals, in the process coming to regard them as no good.  

That's to say that the only good is the common denominator, and the particular good of your now-abandoned former faith with its particular enculturation / instantiation in a churchly denomination where its adherents share experience of its moral guidelines over the decades -- that particular denominational good can't also be good practice becawz it isn't common, universal.  The tendency of universalisms is to render diversity as innocuous, fringe-like, decoration.  Either/or, church-tradition/idea-exchange, bases itself on what in the first place is a closed Christianity that cuts itself off from society and the soceital structures of neiborly broad communcations, not believing in common grace.  

Closed Christianities in the first phase of each cut adherents off from the neiboring world and from depth-communication in one's daily vocation, so that the church is the only place the Christian feels at home.  In the second phase, the exchanges in freedom of daily life in our h+ly differentiated societal structures, once taboo, are now brawt into the "sacred space" at the expense of the particularity of the different liturgies, the varying doctrinal orientations, the particular moral ambience.  These are all kicked out, so that the free exchange of ideas is all and everything.  The former values are not to be reformed, rather they are excommunicated as too restrictive, too unfree; this is the complaint of those who have never lived in zones of free exchange outside the church where there are no hosts or anchors or over-arching rules of discourse, indeed of morals.  Too bad! that poorly normed church life is now swamped by the inrushing free exchange of ideas, an exchange that coud be usual Christian practice outside the church itself, so that the church may be itself. The pendulum swings from churchism to exchangism, when what is needed is an integral normative practice of both church and exchange across the broadband spectrum in all the public spheres of existence today.

-- Owlb