AquaChurch 2.0: Piloting Your Church in Today's Fluid Culture

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INTRODUCTION

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.

—PSALM 107:23–24 KJV

AquaChurch.

I know what some of you are thinking: Haven’t I seen this before? Yes, you have. I wrote AquaChurch back in 1999 and over time, it went out of print. However, constant cries of how can I get a copy of this book? were heard from individuals, pastors, and college and seminary faculty. The publisher David C. Cook approached me recently about getting AquaChurch back out in print and I enthusiastically said, YES! We both agreed, though, that in this fluid Aqua-culture, things have changed a little since 1999. Actually, quite a lot. So, the decision was made to bring the book back out as AquaChurch 2.0—same basic content, but some upgrades and updates.

AquaChurch, as a title, needed to remain the same because it’s still fitting for what the church needs to become if it’s going to thrive in today’s culture. Notice I say thrive, not survive. In my 1999 book, SoulTsunami, I described the coming wave of culture change that could swamp and overwhelm the church. There I suggested strategies for surviving that tsunami of change and encouraged church leaders to think seriously about keeping the church afloat in the midst of that wave.

AquaChurch took that concept a nautical mile further, providing missional arts that allowed church leaders to successfully navigate the waters of a culture totally foreign to those of us who were born modern rationalists. It helped churches sail unknown seas as they sought to reach people drowning without hope in Jesus Christ.

AquaChurch 2.0 goes a little further still.

Our goal in the church must go beyond surviving to thriving in this new culture. We must provide Jesus’ message in forms and language people in today’s culture can understand and embrace. We must develop ministries that continually adjust and change with our continually changing culture. And we must be about leading people to the source of Living Water.

What we face can be seen as a threat, but also as an opportunity of perhaps unprecedented proportions. USAmericans today are more open to the supernatural—to spiritual things—than they’ve been for several generations. Even with the hostility toward the church and organized religion via Christopher Hitchens and the new atheism, people are still interested in spiritual things. The reality is the church is the last place they’d look for something spiritual. More possibilities are available to us today for accomplishing our task than ever before. And God is still God! Our job is to serve our Creator and Sustainer God by presenting Jesus in containers out of which others will be clamoring to drink.

In AquaChurch 2.0 you still won’t find formulations, but invitations. Other resources promise to give you a map that charts out the route, a formula in which you fill in the blanks, a recipe for you to add water and stir. In a culture that still prefers the fake, the artificial, the simulation to the real thing, a lot of people will prefer going with the map.

We refuse to go in that direction. We won’t give you anything but the real thing. Instead of maps, here you will receive travel guides that will help you in orienteering. Instead of maps, here you will find missional arts that will help you to navigate your ministry. Instead of some magic bullet fill-in-the-blank formula, instead of some quick-fix, one-size-fits-all pantyhose solution, here you will find navigational principles connected with nautical images. Plus here you will be encouraged as you encounter the Guide who goes with you wherever you go.

When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, Now go out where it is deeper, and let down your nets to catch some fish (Luke 5:4). So get ready to set sail once again, going out where it is deeper, in this great adventure called life and ministry.

THE CASE FOR AQUACHURCH

PART ONE: THE TRAPS OF MAPS

We’re all explorers.…

We’re all in pursuit of fundamental truths. That’s what exploration is all about.¹

—EXPLORER AND TITANIC DISCOVERER ROBERT BALLARD

A Postmodern Parable

You and your party have just landed at the Miami airport in the wee hours of the morning. You race to the car rental counter. Amidst your huffing and puffing you see in the distance a light still on behind the counter. When you collapse on the counter’s ledge, a smiling attendant greets you by name and says, We’ve been waiting for you. Hertz has stayed open for you after they learned your flight had been delayed.

After some pleasant, grateful banter, the attendant hands you the keys and inquires, Where are you headed?

I’m going to the marina, you pant.

Do you need a map?

Are you kidding? You think I’m driving through Miami at one in the morning without a map? I hear the motto for this city is ‘Sorry We Missed You.’ You bet I need a map.

You take the map, stuff it under your arm, collect the rest of your luggage, and head for the car with your party.

You’re now driving out of the airport and trying to decide which way to go. But the signs are confusing. You take snapshot glances at the map while driving, but within a few miles you’re hopelessly lost. You pull nervously to the side of the road and turn on the map light. You keep studying the map and looking at the road signs. Something’s not right.

Then someone says, Give it here. They begin examining the map more closely. They say, "Look at this date. It says ‘copyright 1955.’ Fear and disgust come into your eyes.

How would you like to get around a 2020 Miami using an 1895 map? Or a 1955 map? Or even a map to begin with? Would you rather have an up-to-the-minute computer on your dash (e.g., GPS), or a map?

In the ancient world, maps and globes were as valuable as rare spices and precious metals. No one wants to be like that misguided, misbegotten nineteenth-century army in Paris that set off for the Prussian border without the right maps.²

Philosopher A. C. Grayling, in his preface to the Oxford University Press attempt at an introduction to philosophy, writes: If you intend a journey, you do well to consult a map.³

No wonder remapping is such a buzzword in almost every discipline and field. We are entering a new future. There is no way back. We can only feel and find our way forward. Everyone everywhere is looking for the right maps.

Novelist Salman Rushdie speaks for the majority. There is a need for political fiction, for books that draw new and better maps of reality,⁴ something which he himself tried to do in his cartography of East and West called The Satanic Verses (1989).

A World of Mapping

• Instead of taking linear notes, make iMindMaps with trees, pictures, colors, symbols, and patterns.⁵ First developed by Britain’s Tony Buzan, this method of storing information aims to imitate how the brain actually works—which is not through outlines, columns, or neat lines.⁶

• University of Chicago social anthropologist Ernest Gellner is convinced that the central task of social thought is this: We need some kind of orientation, some kind of overall map of possible social forms, of the kind of features which go together, of plausible transitions, of incompatibilities.⁷

• The biggest section of the book Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion (1993) is dedicated to Maps and Positions. A whole new theological geography is emerging, a spiritual map of a polycentric world and a polycentric Christianity.⁸

In the business world, the concept is Go global—but get a map. That’s why the biggest movement in corporate circles throughout last two decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first has been re-engineering or reinventing. Re-engineering is the corporate name for remapping, and re-engineering has been the name of the game among the Fortune 500.⁹ Maps come in the guise of recipes for organizational change, Total Quality Management (TQM), Future Visioning, Repositioning,¹⁰ and Business Process Re-engineering, for example.

The same search for savior maps can be seen in the church as well. The argument states that churches must develop life remapping for people, and not just for burned-out boomers and their deflated life projects. This approach is highly seductive. Doesn’t a road map tell you everything you need to know … except how to fold it back up again?

One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.¹¹

—Author and artist Henry Miller

Or does it?

Maps Lie

Our problem is this: Jesus never gave us a map that says turn left here or right turn only or no outlet. Jesus gave us signs and signposts, but not maps. Why?

Because Jesus never lied.

When the psalmist asks the question, When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do? (Ps. 11:3), the answer is not to find a new map. Why? Why don’t we offer you a map for your outward-inward journey?

Because we don’t want to lie either.

Every attempt to draw a new map of reality is really an exercise in lying. The title of geology professor Mark Monmonier’s book on maps, How to Lie with Maps (1991), is playful and punning. But it’s also true. Every map is, by definition, a lie: A single map is but one of an indefinitely large number of maps that might be produced for the same situation or from the same data.¹² There has never been a map without omissions, concessions, and interpretations. The main purpose of a map is to help you find your way. The map is not the way, however.

Cartography is not topography. Don’t believe me? Look at any city map. Do you remember seeing how simple the interchanges from one route to another appeared on paper, but when you drove through them they actually involved nervous breakdowns?

A party of economists was climbing in the Alps. After several hours they became hopelessly lost. One of them studied the map for some time, turning it up and down, sighting on the distant landmarks, consulting his compass, and finally using the sun.

Finally, he said: Okay. I’ve got it. See that big mountain over there?

Yes, answered the others eagerly.

Well, according to the map, we’re standing on top of it.

You cannot get the lay of the land from maps.

It is not down on any map; true places never are.¹³

—Herman Melville

Maps lie big time. Take a look at the way maps trap us.

The Traps of Maps #1: No Map Is Accurate

The first reference to a map in the Bible is found in Ezekiel 4:1, where God told Ezekiel to outline on a clay tablet a plan to lay siege to Jerusalem. But the first written reference to a map was made by the Greek historian Herodotus, and it was a sneer: For my part, I cannot but laugh when I see numbers of persons drawing maps of the world without having any reason to guide them.¹⁴

A map is a flat depiction of a huge sphere. Any two-dimensional mapping of a three-dimensional sphere distorts shapes, distances, or areas. One’s choice is either to preserve true relationships between areas (equal area projections) or true angles and shapes (conformal projections). Most maps try to create a balance between the two and do neither very well.

The only truly accurate map would be the one in the fable by Jorge Luis Borges—a map so large and accurate that it would be the exact same size and shape as the place being represented.¹⁵

Just as any truly accurate representation of a particular geography can only exist on a scale of 1:1 (imagine the vast, rustling map of Burgundy, say, settling over it like a freshly-starched sheet!) so it is with all our abandoned histories, those ignoble lines of succession that end in neither triumph nor disaster, but merely plunge on into deeper and deeper obscurity; only in the infinite ghost-libraries of the imagination—their only possible analogue—can their ends be pursued, the dull and terrible facts finally authenticated.¹⁶

—François Aussemain

However, a one-to-one correspondence is not a map. It is the real thing, as this dialogue from Lewis Carroll makes clear:

We actually made a map of the country on the scale of a mile to the mile!

Have you used it much? I enquired.

It has never been spread out, yet, said Mein Herr. The farmers objected: They said it would cover the whole country and shut out the sunlight! So now we use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.¹⁷

One of my favorite Picasso stories tells how he was accosted by a stranger in a railway station one day. Why don’t you paint things as they really are? the stranger asked. Picasso feigned not to understand what the gentleman meant. Whereupon the stranger pulled out of his wallet a photograph of his wife. I mean, he said, like that. That’s how she is.

Picasso coughed softly and said, She is rather small, isn’t she? And somewhat flat?¹⁸

The Traps of Maps #2: No Map Is Current

Forty-nine square miles of New Jersey are missing from the latest map. A decade ago the Garden State claimed 7,468 square miles of land. Now the state is down to 7,419 square miles. It has gone from being the 46th to the 47th largest state.

You think we had parking problems before, said one legislator.¹⁹

A New Yorker cartoon shows a man returning home and asking his wife, slumped before the television, whether any new autonomous republics had declared themselves while he was out.

In the modern world—in which those of us who are boomers grew up—one could assume a steady state universe. No longer. Our environment is ever-changing, fast-paced, unpredictable. I fully expect to wake up to a different world than the one I went to bed in.

One of the greatest explorers of the past one hundred years is Robert Ballard. In terms of undersea discovery, he and Jacques Cousteau have no equals. He also found the Titanic, the Bismarck, and led more than 110 underwater expeditions. His advice for exploring, which begins with the declaration, We’re all explorers, ends with Work today involves traveling in uncharted territory, navigating the unfamiliar terrain of a new economy for which no maps exist.²⁰

In the first six months of 1992, so many rapid changes occurred that the National Geographic Society had to revise its world map six times. Newman Levy once depicted mapmakers Rand and McNally in a conversation about making world atlases in a world that changed so rapidly:

Time was when this business of ours was grand,

Said Mr. McNally to Mr. Rand,

"When our toughest job was to sit and think

Shall France be purple and Britain pink?"

Remember those days, McNally said,

"When we’d plan a map a month ahead,

And we’d know, if it came out at noon, let’s say,

It was up to date the entire day?"

Those days, said Rand, are gone totally.

You said it, brother, said Mr. McNally.²¹

Change is happening so fast, we can’t really imagine the world of our parents, and we can’t really imagine what will be our children’s world. There is a new Web page every two seconds, a new product every thirty seconds. World knowledge now doubles every eighteen months, with more new information having been produced in the last thirty years than in the previous five thousand. Decades are now measured in centuries and millenniums when one moves from chronological to cultural time.

Moore’s Law states that microprocessing speed doubles every eighteen months, and computer costs drop by half in that same time. Ray Kurzweil has shown that Moore’s Law will make possible a $1,000 purchase of the computing speed and capacity of the human brain by 2020. In fact, change has become so exponential that Moore’s Law will be defunct as the type of technology known today is replaced by new forms of circuitry around 2020.²² No wonder one study concluded with the observation that the half-life of paradigms appears shorter and shorter as human affairs become increasingly complex.²³

I bought the latest computer; it came completely loaded. It was guaranteed for ninety days, but in thirty was outmoded.²⁴

—Bill Ihlenfeldt

What is fresh and innovative today is stale and obsolete tomorrow. If you’re doing church the same way you were a year ago, or even last week, you’re falling behind and failing.

The Traps of Maps #3: No Map Is Impartial

There is an old expression: as skewed as a medieval map.

Every map promotes politics.²⁵ Throughout history, to map a domain was to own that domain. Some historical atlases idealize the real world in order to control it. Others are designed to embody a culture’s common view of itself. But every map is a political statement. A map is a cultural construct, a model of what a generation sees. Maps are never neutral. In fact, a map is the continuation of politics by other means. Each map portrays areas and presents information according to a particular vantage point. A map depends on the position from which it is drawn and the period in which it is conceived.

You can usually tell where a map is made by noting which country is positioned in the middle. For example, from the beginning of the Crusades to the sixteenth century, world maps produced by Christians always had Jerusalem, the navel of the world, at the very center. While Marco Polo and his successors did their best to give cartographers accurate profiles of new lands, medieval scholars continued to draw circular maps that became worthless to navigators at sea because they positioned the East (where Christ will come again with the rising sun) at the top of the world, and Jerusalem at its center.

Remember the world map your grade-school teacher pulled down from the wall? Most likely it was a Mercator projection map. Gerard Mercator allowed pilots for the first time to chart a straight line on a navigational bearing. But he did so only by projecting massive distortions of parallel meridians, which inspired other cartographers to project their own distortions. Another projection map, by Van der Grinten, was a favorite of Cold War anti-communists, who used it to their benefit. It showed a larger-than-life Soviet Union at the top of the globe like a Sherwin-Williams can of paint, gradually spilling out and covering the earth.

The Soviets projected their own Cold War map, which showed the USSR vast and central, and the USA divided and weak, split into two sections, with one half at each side of the map. Since 1989, USAmericans have switched to the Robinson projection, which reduces the Soviet Union from being 223 percent larger than life to only 18 percent larger.²⁶

Australia, tired of Mercator’s Eurocentric view of the world and weary of always being at the bottom, came up with the McArthur’s Universal Corrective Map of the World, which places the Southern Hemisphere at the top and Australia at the middle where Europe usually is. As weird as it looks, the McArthur Map is just as accurate as any of the others.

The Traps of Maps #4: No Map Will Get You There

Maps are notoriously difficult when it comes to application. A vast theological difference separates trying to find your way in life and being led through life. The former is based on human effort; the latter is based on the gift of arrival.

Remapping doesn’t respect the self-organizing capacity of complex living systems. Mathematician Kurt Gödel proved in his famous Incompleteness Theorem (1931) that no system of mathematics, no scientific theory, no mental map can ever offer an absolutely complete description of anything.²⁷ Nothing is ever as it seems. Nothing is ever as is seen. To fathom the world at its core we must pass beyond maps and theories to risk reality through the fury of lived experience.

Margaret Wheatley, in her critically acclaimed Leadership and the New Science, argues that maps are the old paradigm.²⁸ Complexity theory makes a mockery of maps. That’s why remapping always fails. Re-engineering, restructuring or whatever name remapping comes wrapped in are the last gasps of the old rigid command-and-control models of movement.

In her inaugural address as president of the University of Puget Sound, Susan Resneck Pierce stated,

I have come to recognize just how little, at the moment of my own entry into college, our educational system had anticipated the world in which we now live. The questions faculty asked my generation, the advice our parents gave us, and our own hopes and dreams did not anticipate the social changes that would come.… They did not prepare us for the new kinds of ethical and public policy questions that we would need to face as a society and as individuals, questions that often have been the direct results of medical advances and new technologies.²⁹

Look at the Bible. Go from beginning to end, from Genesis to the maps. You can’t reduce God’s way of working with any biblical figure to a cute formula or a colorful map. Each person’s map of the world is as peculiar to that individual as a voiceprint or a thumbprint or a heart song.

It’s amazing to me that people still look at a church like Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, and say, We should be like that. Willow Creek is a unique church. There is only one Willow Creek. To seek simple formulas for complex missions is to incubate mediocrity if not misconduct of mission. One person’s plan is another person’s poison. Even Willow Creek has now decided that it needs to do Willow differently than it has for thirty years.

Becoming a Mariner

You can’t create a map of terra incognita. You can’t consult maps in a world where the terra is no longer firma. In a new world with no familiar landmarks, you can only explore the new world for yourself. Google culture is unmappable on flat surfaces. It cannot be reduced to two dimensions. Mapping is now nonlinear. It’s more like a spider spinning a web, says Brian Shannon of the Corps of Engineers. You’re moving back and forth, building something one line at a time until you have a complex network that captures a place.³⁰

To lead by traditional maps is to set a whole train of losses in motion.

The civilization characteristic of Christendom has not yet disappeared, yet another civilization had begun to take its place.³¹

—Harvard’s George Santayana in 1913

When you change the question, you change everything. When you change the question, you change the playing field, you change the mission field. AquaChurch 2.0 changes the question from Where is my map? to Where is God calling me to navigate my life and my ministry? The top challenge of leadership is this: How do you get people to ask new questions, to think in different ways?

To navigate your church in the rapids of a fluid culture, forget the maps other people have drawn. Even for you personally to update redrawn maps becomes worthless when the very principles of mapping have changed. What leaders need to pilot the church on God’s terms are navigational skills that can help chart the appropriate course.

Sailors in the Bible were known as salites (mallahim) or ropers (hobhlim). People who ventured on a boat to set sail were called in Hebrew yorde, which takes at least five English words to translate, most often they that go down to the sea in ships (Ps. 107:23 KJV; Isa. 42:10 KJV). The captain of the ship was called in Greek kubernetes. A captain was one who (1) knew from experience the ways of the sea; (2) could perform all the diverse duties on board the ship; (3) could set and keep a true course; (4) assumed responsibility for the welfare of the ship’s passengers and cargo.

The captain was a navigator with skills that could take a ship from where it was docked to where it was destined to go. Today’s leaders need navigational skills that can take them from where they find themselves or where God has placed them to where God is calling them to go. To be a mariner is to learn the cartographical skills that will enable you to create your own map.

In the words of another, the chair of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation, Frances Hesselbein, the leader of the future needs to be a how to be leader, not a how to do it leader.³² This book will help you become that kind of leader.

The Me generations are on self-navigating journeys; we need to help voyagers on the routes of God-navigating journeys. Generation Me is being called to be self-navigators; we’re calling you to be divine-navigators. It’s time to get the church seaworthy and seagoing again. It’s time for the church to rediscover the vocation of voyaging.

’Tis the Old Ship of Zion Get on board, Get on board. Ain’t no danger in the water Get on board, Get on board.

—African American spiritual

Let’s now set off toward the new horizon. Get on your sailing gear as we prepare to embark on a voyage into the future.

THE CASE FOR AQUACHURCH

PART TWO: SCANNING THE HORIZON

To find your way in Postmodern Country you need a different eye, ear, compass and map.¹

—GARY PHILLIPS

There is a vast difference between learning and instruction. In instruction, you are trained by rote in what to think and do and be. In learning, you are trained contextually in how to think and do and be. This book is a learning manual, not an instruction manual.

Put Your Name on the Map

You need a map of your very own. Each leader must do his own mapping. Each person needs a map of her very own. Every one of us has unique spatial information that we need to integrate into our map-making. Every leader needs a map with his or her name on it.

No two churches are alike. No two pastors are alike. No two ministries are alike. No two people even understand their church the same way. You need a map of your ministry that is as unique as your thumbprint. To follow someone else’s map is to reduce your You-ness, to diminish the You-ness of you.

In this new world, we will increasingly do things that have never been done before. José Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. In an essay after the award, he argued that it is as impossible for twenty-first-century musicians to compose a symphony as it would be for twenty-first-century carvers to build a Corinthian capital. These were unique genres for unique times, and the time in which we find ourselves is calling all artists, including novelists, to embark on an odyssey that resonates with our times.²

In such an ever-new world, navigation becomes the greatest leadership challenge. Every leader needs to create his or her own map. But no leader dare create a map in isolation. Leaders learn from other explorers about their maps. A river’s course doesn’t change quickly, but the character and complexion of the river changes daily, even hourly. When white-water rafting, a rise or fall of even one inch can change a river drastically.

Leaders talk to other mappers and glean their wisdom before they go out on the river with their own maps. Don’t use others’ maps, but learn as much as possible from other leaders about the rapids and dangers of the river. Mapping requires mentoring from others who have known and shown the way. In the words of Gilles Deleuze, We learn nothing from those who say: ‘Do as I do.’ Our only teachers are those who tell us to ‘do with me.’³

The Church’s Inboard Navigational System

The development of missional arts for spiritual navigation must be the top leadership agenda. How ironic that the U.S. Naval Academy in 1998 cut out its celestial navigation courses for the first time in its history. Cruise control is not going to get anyone to the future.

AquaChurch 2.0 is intended to be a Garmin Navigational System for your church that parallels the inboard navigational systems for cars and trucks that has made road maps obsolete. The eighteenth century founders of my tradition (Wesleyan) used to talk about the need for Christians to develop disciplines and even produced a Book of Discipline to help disciples become disciplined about their daily walk with God. What we used to call disciplines are now being called spiritual practices. For reasons that will become manifest through the course of this book, our preferred vernacular is not daily disciplines or spiritual practices, but missional arts.