Tension between Good News, good works? Baptist authors offer modes of biblical orthopraxy

To help local churches avoid the pendulum swing between mere social help or a proclamation-only approach to missions, three new resources authored by Southern Baptists offer methods for mixing tangible works with the verbal witness.

A Living Systems Network

Two professors from Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary are calling the church to re-evaluate its nature and values in light of its actions. Linda Bergquist and Allan Karr co-authored "Church Turned Inside Out: A Guide for Designers, Refiners, and Re-aligners," hoping churches might learn to align their actions and ministries with their stated beliefs.

Essentially a design book for new and established churches, "Church Turned Inside Out" centers on the belief that kingdom churches should be seeking holistic community transformation. The authors use many metaphors from various disciplinary fields but have borrowed language from the wildly popular ecological movement to describe the church's role in social issues.

"Churches are living things, not mechanical," the authors write, referring to the description of the body of Christ in 2 Peter 2:10 as "living stones"?a metaphor that dovetails nicely with an emerging worldview that is quickly eclipsing postmodernism.

"The adjective I use most frequently to describe this worldview is 'ecological,'" said Bergquist in an interview with the TEXAN.

Noting that she didn't coin the term and employs it differently from secular philosophers, Bergquist, who also serves as a church planting missionary for the San Francisco Bay area for the SBC's North American Mission Board, said "ecological in the broad sense of the word means something like systemic, whole, networked and connected. When you really think about it, it is a way of looking at the world that changes how we interpret all kinds of formal and informal relationships."

In short, this new worldview "demands a way to help people know how to live together on and with the earth," the authors write. As such, the church must take the task of improving the quality of life for all people more seriously.

"One of the new design tasks of today's church is to learn how to create contextually relevant, biblical structures that serve this kind of world," the authors state, urging church planters to create "a fresh expression of church" around a network or community.

In short, Bergquist and Karr offer the Living Systems Network as a metaphor for organizing the church around the organic idea of community. Interdependence is the key to this new paradigm for church design, a concept rooted in relationships rather than "completed tasks."

The authors are careful to distinguish between a secular understanding of living systems, and the metaphor employed in their book. "The living systems metaphor is holistic and systemic. If we view ministry and evangelism as part of a whole, we begin to see that they are not opposites but counterparts," Berquist said.

The authors use the idea of sustainability to convey how mercy ministries fit into the living systems paradigm.

A Stakeholder Approach

In their new book "The Convergent Church: Missional Worshippers in an Emerging Culture," two Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary professors employ a metaphor taken from corporate America to demonstrate how social ministries and evangelism may be fitted together in the local church.

Alvin Reid, professor of evangelism and student ministry, and Mark Liederbach, associate professor of Christian ethics, co-wrote the book as a response to the growing philosophies of the Emerging Church Movement (ECM) and the call to reflect a missional lifestyle among conventional churches.