• The collective destiny of groups
• Identifying and opposing the kingdom of darkness
• New revelations
• Ecumenical in focus
• Socialistic in practice
• Geographically-based
• Kingdom theology
• Biased presentation

Encounter with God Program

Four Factors for Growth

1. Development of an impact or Encounter church in highly visible and accessible areas of strategic cities.  
2. An evangelistic philosophy that will be satisfied only when the Lord returns.  
3. Resources concentrated by the sending agency and the national host church.  
4. A financial commitment to an Encounter Fund that is designated solely for the purchase of land and the erecting of buildings for the new Encounter churches.  

Encounter with God: Guayaquil Model

• Fall 1987 the new model was implemented in 7 churches which averaged 20% annual average growth.  
• This led to 42 local campaigns and 810 decisions to follow Christ.  

Basic Principles: Guayaquil Model

1. Work only with churches who subscribe to the four Encounter principles and establish those principles as their long-range goals.  
2. Work only with pastors who have vision for growth.  
3. Use existing resources with no dependence on outside financing.  
4. Use mission funds only for evangelistic efforts.  

Strategic Planning

Developing an Urban Strategy

1. Start by creating a prayer base for your activity
2. Gather data [Census data, sociological studies, regional reports, first-hand research {visit urban planning commissions, utility companies, local government agencies, leaders of social service agencies, community associations, churches}]
3. Create a strategy map: buy a large map of the region showing every street. 
4. Delineate the neighborhoods: Identify your boundaries; place some kind of marker for religious sites, etc.  
5. Create a template for your report possibly including

• population pyramids
• A small map showing boundaries
• Housing information
• Immigration patterns
• Marital status patterns
• Income
• Employment
• Religious preferences
• Community description
• Recommended strategies for planting cell groups

1. Make Population pyramids
2. Develop a neighborhood analysis
3. Cluster neighborhoods into categories
4. Take surveys of population awareness
5. Conduct surveys or interviews to gauge population receptivity [discover which population segments are turning to Christ in churches or parachurch organizations.  Discover which population segments are most vulnerable to cults and what causes them to respond.  Interview people in different neighborhoods.  If people are responsive in one area, check the same population in another neighborhood.  
6. Create your strategy, document it and publish it.  
7. Select key areas for penetration (a responsive population in multiple neighborhoods could all be approached by a single strategy)
8. Use a checkerboard planting pattern: Combine people from 2 or more cell groups to penetrate an unreached area between them.  
9. Create an actual strategy

• Who are the responsive segments we have discovered?  
• Should we seek to penetrate several groups as a test of receptivity before focusing on only one?  
• Which groups should be reached first?  How will this start help us reach others?  
• Where do these groups live?  
• How should we communicate with them?  (word-of-mouth, house to house survey, direct mail, Twitter?)
• What will be our reason for contacting them?  (small groups of various kinds?)
• Where will we meet them?  Their homes?  Some neutral site?  
• How many groups can we launch in six months given our resources?  

DAWN: Disciple a Whole Nation

DAWN aims at mobilizing the whole body of Christ in every nation in a determined effort to fulfill the great commission through the goal of providing a bible centered congregation that is relevant and within walking distance of every village and community around the world.  DAWN believes that in order to disciple a nation, every person in that nation has to at least have heard the gospel proclaimed to them clearly and seen in an example of a believer in their own language and culture.  Only then can they make an informed decision.  For this to happen, there has to be a witnessing church in every community.  DAWn therefore aims at igniting fires that lead to internally driven rapid multiplication of churches.  

DAWN: Origins

• In the 1970′s, Vergil Gerber was conducting church growth workshops in 50 countries.  
• His workbooks were translated into 40 languages.  
• Jim Montgomery was the founder of DAWN.  
• Founded in 1985.  
• He was overwhelmed by a desire to see the glory of the Lord cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, to see Jesus Christ incarnate in all his beauty, power and love in every small community of mankind.  
• Launched his dream with the publication of a classic, “DAWN 2000: 7 Million Churches to Go” which birthed the DAWN Movement around the world.  
• Over three million churches have been planted directly or indirectly.  
• Dawn Ministries has projects in 94 countries in seven regions and aims to see every country in the world adopt a similar plan for completing the Great Commission.  

The Endorsements!

• Peter Wagner:: “DAWN is the best strategy yet developed for world evangelization.  It is the best program I know of for bringing the church growth to the grass-roots level on an international basis.”
• Ralph Winter:: “DAWN is the most basic strategy of all strategies. There are other things that need to be done besides DAWN but that is the starting place for completing the GC.”  

Saturation Church Planting (SCP): Biblical Vision/International Strategy

Israel’s calling: Missions to the nations.  Genesis 12:3, Isaiah 45:22, Isaiah 60:3

The greatest challenge to completion:

• Theological: an interpretation of multi-culturalism and post-modernism leading to universalism (A Western Christian problem)
• Personal: prayer urgency producing passion for the harvest. 
• Practical: the goals of the Body are not organized into comprehensive plans, isolated tactics not melded into coordinated strategy.  

How can the whole church work together in a common strategy to disciple the nations?  Its simpler than you may think!

Vision & Goal.  Tactics & Strategy

• Vision is a compelling ‘word picture’ with the ‘end in view.’  Trying to articulate as precisely as possible that which you are trying to accomplish in the end.  
• Goals connect vision and reality.  Measurable, time-sensitive.  Tell us whether we have made progress towards the vision.  [When a goal is set, we begin to wrestle with the challenges that we have never faced. . . leading to. . . ]
• Strategy: the comprehensive means of accomplishing the goal.  
• Tactics: the component elements of the comprehensive strategy.  

Saturation Church Planting:

• DAWN goal: 1 disciple-making community for every 500 people in every ethnae and people the group in the nation.  
• DAWN strategy: to mobilize the whole church to disciple the whole nation through SCP.  
• Dawn tactics: to engage denomimations, schools, para-church missions, local churches, and lay people in setting individuals goals hich contribute directly to the national goal.  

DAWN Utilizes:

• Advanced church growth technology
• more extensive research
• a broader base of coordination
• a longer term and more demanding process
• an extensive accountability system.  

Process to mobilize a whole nation:

1. Identify potential leaders/watchmen
2. Initial research and analysis “harvest field” nation and ‘harvest force’ church
3. Develop network of intercessors
4. Hold initial rally
5. Form a national committee
6. Complete in-depth research
7. Develop prophetic message
8. Hold DAWN congress, set national goals
9. Implement denominational programs
10. Review accomplishments in two years

How has the DAWN strategy impacted other nations?

• First DAWN Project in the Philippines
• Goals for 50,000 churches by AD 2000
• Current growth on target to achieve goals
• Brazil.  
• Venezuela.
• Peru. 
• Romania
• India
• China
• Malaysia
• Egypt. 
• England

The Transformations Paradigm

The Road to Community Transformation:

• Stage 1:
• Spiritual Mapping
• Reconciliation between churches
• United prayer meetings
• Public re-committal to community or land
• Prayer walking
• Stage 2: Spiritual Breakthrough
• The prayer burden begins to lift
• Divine revelation and instruction occur
• Christians begin to take bold action in the light of this revelation
• Reconciliation takes place between the church and the community
• The Christian community rallies under intense spiritual warfare
• Power encounters take place
• Large scale conversions take place
• Churches grow
• Stage 3:
• Converted political and spiritual leaders formally renounce historic ties to the spirit world. 
• Socio-political renewal sweeps the community.  
• Community transformation and divine miracles are acknowledged by the secular news media. 
• The community begins to export spiritual light to other places.  
• Believers maintain their victory through devotion to fellowship, prayer and the Word.  

Critiques of this model handed out in class.  

Also: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~rseaborn/apostles.html

By Steven Neill

1. The turning to Christ as Savior and friend.
2. The turning to the ethical standard that the church teaches.  
3. The turning to the world in which Christ works.  
4. The turning to the fellowship of believers among whom one receives support.  

Mega-Strategy

Churches grow as they minister to the felt needs of undiscipled people, usually by developing new ministries.  

A need= an identified discrepancy existing between a present condition and a desired state

• May be expressed by an ‘owner’ (motivational)
• or an authority (prescriptive)

Relationship Between Evangelism and Social Action

1. In most societies, the church’s service and compassionate ministries provide credibility for the gospel.  
2. Some facets of the gospel’s message are better communicated through the church’s service (diakonia) or fellowship (koinonia) than merely through proclamation (kerygma).  
3. Involving new disciples in caring ministries in a necessary phase of their conversion, enablig the gospel to be incarnated in their personalities and life-styles.  True discipleship is behavioral.  
4. In regard to cross-cultural service, the church has two opinions: (a) raise up enough indigenous converts for them to minister to their own people, or (b) keep sending cross-cultural servants and thereby keep the recipient population dependent on the sending population.  

Target group in the City: A Seminary Strategy

Groups who ministered to

• Unwed mothers in Rockland County
• United Nations representatives and families
• Families of abused children
• After school tutoring programs for the poor

The point was that there are many groups of people who were not being ministered to that could be reached in the city through service.  

Early Beginnings of the C&MA

• Ministry to immigrants on the waterfront of New York.  
• Soup kitchens
• Berachah House of unwed mothers

Bear Valley Community Church: A Case Study

• Singles
• Those involved in cults
• those needing to free or low-cost medical care
• Runaway kids
• Mothers of Pre-schoolers
• Alcohol and drug rehabilitation groups
• Coffee houses for street people
• Sports teams
• Hospital visitation
• Jail ministries
• Counseling teams
• Foreign students
• Rest Home Ministries
• Missionary assistance
• Ministry to Fathers
• Jewish outreach ministries
• Abuse victims
• Youth ministries
• Social service ministries

The church grows be meeting the needs of the people in its community.

http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/

http://www.perceptgroup.com/

Ring Study, Drive Time Study, Zip Code Study, Specific Area Studies

Traditional Demographic Information

• General Population Changes
• Racial Groups
• Age Group
• Educational levels
• Income Levels
• Family Groupings
• Employment Information
• Psychographic Groups

Psychographics: The study of the values, behavior, and lifestyles included in a demographic profile.  

Depth of analysis depends on how you define the areas.

Reaching Receptive People: Churches grow when they learn to identify and reach people or groups that are receptive.  

The Law of Receptivity:

• Some people are more responsive to the gospel than others, and a given person is more responsive now than last year.  
• Whole populations swing back and forth on an imaginary axis from hostility, to resistance, to indifference, to interest to receptivity and some people are at all points on that axis at any point in time.  
• In every season some groups and some peoples are receptive. 

Indicators of Receptivity:

1. Unchurched people who are linked, by kinship or friendship networks, to active, credible Christians are more receptive than other people.  
2. People are more receptive to new groups and classes than from long established groups and classes.  
3. Sometimes a more indigenous ministry will reveal a people to be receptive.  
4. Churches grow as they identify people with needs that the church can minister to, either by: (a) extending ministries already in place, or (b) building new ministries.  
5. Populations in which any religion is growing should be perceived as open and searching for something.  
6. People among whom
7. People experiencing a major culture change tend to be very receptive.  
8. Various forms of population mobility induce receptivity.  
9. In most seasons, in most nations, “the masses” are more responsive than “the classes.”  
10. Personal dissatisfaction with themselves and their lives opens many peoplt to the gospel of grace and a second chance.  
11. People who are ‘like’ the people already in active in a church, particularly its newest members, will be more receptive than the surrounding culture as a whole.  
12. People experiencing life transitions are more receptive than people in stable periods of life.  
13. Visitors to a church’s worship services are frequently

Follow-up of Church Visitors

• When someone from church follows up with a brief, get-acquainted visit within 36 hours, 85% of them return for a 2nd visit.  
• When the visit was within 72 hours, 60% of them would return.  
• When the visit was after 72 hours, 40% return
• If the pastor made the visit, all the percentages were cut in half.  

• No longer a valid distinction between pastors working in home country urban contexts and overseas. 
• Urban pastors need the skills in linguistics and cultural adjustment once only needed by foreign missionaries.  
• Study: 9/10 of all missionaries going to 2/3 world countries came from small towns themselves.  Most overseas missionaries ended up in rural environments.  [Why?!  (a) Lower cost of living.  (b) It was assumed this is where the unreached people lived.  (c) They were trained in methods of rural engagement.  Cities were complex, pluralistic cultures.  (d) They felt more at home in rural and small town contexts].  
• Headquarter mentality of missionary societies abroad-located on missions compounds in the city but have no effective ministry to that city.  
• Professional church leadership comes overwhelmingly from the existing professional classes in suburbia.  
• Ministers are given tools to exegete scripture–Greek, Hebrew, etc.  But few tools to exegete the city such as social psychology, urban politics and urban history, etc.  
• Most theological education offers: (a) standard prescriptions for opening a franchise.  (b) Training that assumes all environments are culturally neutral. 

Evangelical Reluctance: Reasons

1. Greek-mindedness: thinking is focused on analysis, breaking the whole into parts separated from the context; good news is interpreted in one-dimensional terms.  Rather Hebraic thinking focuses on synthesis rather than analysis, intuition over empiricism; system rather than segment, the integrated whole over the part.  
2. Class captivity: Middle class treasures predictability, privacy, possessions and power.  They are taught to dislike unpredictability, public displays of feelings, poverty, weakness, and dependency.  They assume certain facts about life quality such as the relative safety and proper functioning of public services.  Anything less reflects weakness and dependency leading to shame.  Therefore theology should deal with matters of the spirit, not material issues.  Preaching is cognitive, dispassionate, linear, sequential so as to avoid loss of control or eruptions of spontaneity.  [it's all about needing to be in control or to feel like the situation is truly under control even if an individual isn't in control].  
3. Professional priesthood:  Institutionalized training of technicians who are highly skilled in the art of running a church.  While the laity sit as spectators.  Because of specialized training necessary, the limits on time, the passive role of the laity the minister is restricted to activities within the church.  The church becomes self-focused, non-evangelizing, and boring.  
4. Self-Defense: as white evangelicals have captured material resources they have been captivated by the comforts they bring.  Orientation shifts to getting rather than giving.  Energy guarded rather than expended.  
5. A misunderstood mandate: “Love the Lord with all your heart soul and mind and love you neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12;30-31).  This has been interpreted as a spiritual, soulish activity only.  But love is about meeting needs in concrete, incarnational ways.  Case Study: John Wesley preached 45,000 sermons in his lifetime and wrote 223 books and pamphlets.  He started a free dispensary for medical aid to the poor.  He organized a friends society to aid needy strangers.  He supported efforts for elementary education.  He opposed the slave trade.  He encouraged prison reforms.  

Basic Barriers to Urban Ministry

1. No enough organized prayer in the city.  
2. Too few properly trained leaders, both pastors and lay.  
3. Most evangelicals lack vision, motivation, and a burden for the lost.  
4. Churches and pastors have a rural mentality.  
5. Failure to use the opportunities given.  
6. The Christian community lives as if it were in a ghetto, out of contact with non-Christian friends.  
7. Churches do not cooperate with each other.  
8. Christians live busy lives and have many meetings.  
9. There is a generation gap  between existing leaders over 55 and newer leaders under 30.  
10. Lack of suitable buildings and facilities.  

Questions Ministry Leaders Should Ask in Coming to the City.  

1. What is the church?  People or structures?
2. How do I develop local leadership?
3. How can I bring in my expertise without intimidating local people?  
4. How do I identify and overcome barriers to communication?  
5. How can the old core of faithful folk be renewed for new mission?  
6. How do I handle the diversity of languages and social groups?
7. Which comes first evangelism or community -building?  
8. How do we care for special groups-the elderly, the bereaved, broken families.  
9. How do we initiate dialogue with suburban churches?  
10. How do we cope with community problems?
11. How do I cope without support systems?  

Factors Diverting Attention Away from City Populations and Ethnic Evangelism

1. Ambivalence toward immigrants: natives tend to fear competition and diversity.  
2. The negative image of the city: cities are viewed as too bit or too bad to be redeemed.  
3. Fear of the social gospel: the social gospel grew up in the city but was built by its advocates on a shaky theological foundation, which was liberal and weak.  
4. White flight to the suburbs: between 1963-1983 massive white shift to the suburbs- demographic map changed- strongest urban churches today are non-white.  
5. “Pith helmet” stereotype of missions: romance of traditional missions vs. local responsibility.  
6. Cultural inflexibility: difficult to release long-held patterns of worship, discipline, pastoral leadership, and training
7. Inadequate theology of the city: the bible is read and theology is discussed in ways that filter out pressing issues such as social justice, poverty, suffering and urban density.  

• Majority of inhabitants depend on non-agricultural activities.  
• Population density of over 400 people/sq. kilo
• Basic level of municipal government.  

According to the US Census Bureau: Fully developed area of the city, adjacent build-up areas with a minimum population of 50,000.  

Urban Cluster: Density settled territory that has at least 2,500 but fewer than 50,000

Rates of Urbanization: 

• 1900: 13%  220M
• 1950: 29%  732M
• 2005: 49% 3.2B
• 2030: 60% 4.9B
• 2050: 66% 6B

93% of all urban growth will be in Africa and South America.  

Urban Foot Print: The area affected by the existence of the city [food, water, energy, pollution, transportation systems].  

• London: 125 times its surface area
• Vancouver: 200 times its geographical area

Global Foot Print: Draws from everywhere in the world [human, social, economic, etc]. 

• Decisions made by governments and corporations.  
• Urban lifestyles and attitudes.  
• Patterns of demand and production.  
• Media and communication.  

Urbanization: The process through which urban settlements grow and develop.  This may proceed at different speeds in different ways.  

According to David Harvey: streets, institutions, structures, power structures in which that community lives and by which it organizes itself.  

Urbanism: Cultural impact of urban.  The culture of a city is often hybrid, fusing a multiplicity of cultural forms, values, and lifestyles.  

Counter Urbanism: a demographic and social process whereby people move from urban areas to rural areas.  

Pseudo-urbanization: the condition in which a large city has been formed in an area without functional infrastructure to support it.  

Suburb: Commonly defined as the residential areas which surround the central area of the urban area of a town or city.  

Suburbs commonly characterized by:

• detached single-family homes.  
• some suburbs have a degree of political autonomy
• lower population density than inner city areas/neighborhoods.  

Commuter town: an urban community that is primarily residential, from which most of the workforce commute out of town to earn their livelihood.  Many act as suburbs for nearby metropolis.  

Edge City: an American term for a relatively new concentration of business, shopping, and entertainment outside of a traditional urban area in what had recently been a residential suburb or semi-rural community.  

Exerb: describe a ring of prosperous communities beyond the suburbs that are commuter towns for an urban area.  

Boomberg: Incorporated places having more than 100,000 residents that are not the largest cities in their metropolitan areas and have maintained double-digit rates of population growth over consecutive censuses.  

Delocalization: Uproots activities and relationships from a sense of place, displacing those that might be considered local into a new arrangements that are distant or global [ie, Walmart].  

Globalization: the process by which local or regional phenomenon is transformed into global phenomenon with the result that the people of the world are united into a shared set of perceptions or values or participate together in world-wide trends.  

Gentrification: movement of affluent people into lower class areas.  

• demographic shifts.  
• rising level of family income
• decline in proportions of racial minorities.  
• decrease in household size.  
• rent, real estate, property taxes increase
• results in culture change.  

Two models of urbanization discussed: 

• Concentric Ring Model [richer people live further out, poorer families move in].  
• Hoyt Sector Model 
• Multiple Nuclei Model

     Cain was tasked to build a city.  It was built as a tribute to his son.  

After the flood: Genesis 10:8

Tower of Babel: Genesis 11:1

Soddom & Gomomorah: Genesis 13:12; 19:52; 19:25

How Sin Breaks a City

1. The diversity of the city under sin creates a place of racism, classism, and violence.  
2. The cultural-development power of the city under sin creates a place of pride, arrogance, excess, overwork, and exhaustion.  [The city allows us to mine cultural resources.]
3. The spiritual restlessness of the city under sin makes the city of a hot-bead of cults and false beliefs.  [Cities were intended to be religious centers.]  

A Biblical Theology of the City

1. The city is God’s invention.  Our future is a city (Heb 11:10/Rev 21 & 22).  

• Cities develop culture.  Genesis 1:28.  The cultural mandate directs mankind to build a God honoring civilization.  The end of creation is the work of the second Adam (Jesus) and the New Jerusalem is the climax of the creative work therefore God was calling Adam & Eve to be city builders.  

How do cities develop culture?  

1. Like the garden, it is a place of refuge and safety.  A metaphor for divine protection.  
2. Cities should be seen as cultural mining or development centers (Rev 18:22-24)

• Unique numbers of people unlike me
• Minorities ban together for mutual support.  
• Unique numbers of diverse people.  High density!
• Sin takes this divine strength (diversity) and turns it into a place of strife and conflict.  
• We’re with people like us and people different from us.  

3. Cities as a place to meet God.  

• Cities play a crucial role in cultural, global, and personal encounters with God.  

1. The Greco-Roman World: City-State: Paul’s missionary journeys to the cities; by 250AD 7 urban bishoprics in Gaul and 100 in Italy; by 313 there were 1200 in N. Africa alone.  

     The city as a symbol of civilization shifted from being primarily a religious shrine to being a city state with a military and socio-political center.  New roads and trade expanded teh influence of military and social controls.  Middle of the 3rd Century AD, this wave of urbanization hit its climax with hundreds of urban bishoprics being established throughout Spain, Italy, and North Africa.  The decline of the Roman Empire returned the once great cities back to isolated and autonomous hamlets.  The church functioned from the 5th to 11th centuries as a preserver of Rome’s urban political past.  

2. Medieval World: Marketplace (commerce): The Crusades (1096-1291); Renaissance; Reformation

    Cities found identities as permanent market-places.  Commerce began to be the center of focus.  The Crusades (1096-1291) dramatically expanded trade routes and extended the influence of European cities.  In the 14th century the Bubonic Plague decimated urban areas.  The Renaissance began to introduce change in the mentality in teh 15th and 16th centuries toward secularism and the church became marginalized.  The Reformation challenged this trend.  In Germany 200 cities of populations more than 1000 became the seedbeds for Protestant movements.  

3. Colonial Empires: Machine (Industrial Revolution): European Colonialism (1790-1810); US Industrial Revolution (1790-1890)

     With its epicenter in Europe’s colonial expansion cities grew as empires searched for natural resources and slaves.  Industrialization grew following the Napoleonic Wars leading to more global expansion and internal urbanization.  [England was the leader in this movement.  The US followed and between 1790 and 1890 its total population grew 16x and its urban population grew by 139x.  The rest of the world was largely rural and missions strategy focused on reaching rural people.]  At home in the West, rising urban poverty and immigration led to a strong anti-urban bias fed by ethnocentrism.  

4. Present: Monster (Super-Cities): Shift to the Global South

     Following WWII urbanization dramatically accelerated everywhere in the world except the West [in 1895 the number of urban dwellers was double the world's population in 1800.  Africa has had the highest rates of urbanization.  From 1920 to 1980 it quadruples from 7% to 28%.  Asia's urban population was 40% of the total in 2000.  74% of Latin America and the Caribbean live in urban areas].  One feature of the urban wave is the growth of the agglomerates, especially in the Southern hemisphere [in 1900, 18 cities had populations over 1 million; 13 were in the West.  In 2000, 354 cities had more than 1 million and 236 were in developing countries.  14 were mega-cities with more than 10 million, most in developing world; by 2015 this will double.]

Two Trends Shaping Urbanization and Implications for the Church

1. The growth of cities in non-Christian or anti-Christian countries combined with the erosion of the church in the northern hemisphere is multiplying the non-Christian urban population.  [in 1900 cities added 5200 new non-Christians urban dwellers per day.  In 1997 cities added 127,000 non-Christians per day.  in 1995 of the world's 10 largest cities, 7 were located in countries with minimal Christian impact]

2. Increasingly, the majority of the lost people are the urban poor.  [1/2 of the urban population in the southern hemisphere live in shanty towns and squatter villages.  in 2000 1/3 of the world lived in cities in less-developed regions.]  The last frontier in missions may be the masses of urban poor with no gospel witness!

Rural Faith in the City

• The new reality is rural to urban migration [20% of the human race migrated from the rural to urban context in teh 80s and 90s and the trend is accelerating.  
• Unfortunately rural religion does not prepare Christians for urban life
• Transition is difficult for new immigrants: new language, new land, new jobs, new types of housing, new neighbors.  
• They will adapt, but slowly.  

Case Study: Appalachian Migrants

• In the 1940s, 50s, and 60s the largest internal migration in the history of the US occurred.  
• Moved out of Appalachia (western NC, VA and eastern TN, KY, Ohio all of WV and much of PA) –collapse of traditional coal mining. 
• Moved into the Rustbelt cities (Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Akron, Cincinnati, etc) for jobs. 
• Easter 100 Campaign: Plant 100 churches on Easter Sunday 1987
• These two churches did the worst of the 100 efforts (those in Lexington).  
• WHY??
• External characteristics change rapidly
• But worldview changes slowly
• Appalachian people: distrust denominations, did not believe in ordained clergy, they are clan-based, maintained rural mind-set.  

Short-Comings of Rural Faith in the City

1. Rural faith is largely traditional: faith is usually inherited and unexamined.  Deviation from community standards is discouraged.  Face to face society with high social control.  
2. Rural faith lacks synthesis between doctrinal beliefs and Christian responsibilities that go beyond church.  They often find it difficult to relate Christian social responsibility to the urban context.  Personal faith often undergoes great trauma and may respond by holding on tightly to fundamentalism.  
3. Rural faith often presents the gospel in terms that leave large areas of human life untouched and unchallenged.  Rural oriented preaching keeps members socially tranquilized.  One study that 80% of Protestant youth who enter secular universities are lost from the church.  

By: Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo (UC Davis)

Dr. Watson-Gegeo struggles with the issue of expression of experience.  She tells her testimony of being a child and understanding that spirituality was not as it seemed in her fundamentalist Christian church.  She describes this sect as dysfunctional.  She attempts to describe her experience trying to join another group, a group in the Hawaiian Islands.  

As a graduate student, Watson-Gegeo goes to the Hawaiian Islands and moves into a lower working-class neighborhood.  Upon arriving in the community, she begins to understand that because she does not speak the language, she cannot experience or be a part of the things that the people believe and hold to be true.  As she learns the language, she begins to understand reality through two perspectives.  She compares this ability to experience multiple realities to an LSD trip, which is a little bit of a stretch, in my opinion.  

She describes three terms:

Conception: referring to the formulation of ideas, mental impressions, abstractions and general notions–otherwise referred to as words or concepts. 

Perception: referring to the process of an understanding or awareness acquired by and through the senses.  

Proprioception: referring to knowing within the body via information produced and communicated by sensory end organs throughout the body’s organs, tissues and cells.  (p. 3).  

Watson-Gegeo describes her experience of learning the Hawaiian language, or pidgin amongst the people she was living with.  Her language learning allowed her to begin to conceive of things, like time or death, in a new way because she had a different way to express it linguistically.  This began to free her mental conception of things from the binds of English and allowed her to fit into the collective consciousness of those she lived with.  She was accepted because she was able to express things the way that the locals normally expressed them.  She talks about being seen as one of them, but I question whether or not they saw her as that.  I have a difficult time believing that she was FULLY immersed in their thought patterns and conception of the world.  I’d like to have a discussion with her about how she can fully understand their language and their conceptions because of the use of her vernacular.  

She continues on in describing her experience, much of which is the description of their linguistics and the way that they influence their group consciousness.  She describes a physical experience that she had once when she got deathly sick.  She was continually reaching ASCs because of her illness and its effects on her body.  Her illness drove her so far from health that she was forced to go to the hospital.  The way she describes her experience at the hospital is especially significant.  She explains that the mind-body connection influences her ability to heal.  By going to the hospital she re-learned how to think about her illness.  Instead of conceiving of it as a pathway to new heights of consciousness, she was forced to adopt a new epistemology about her body.  

‘Life in a live-in medical clinic, the purpose of which was to re-socialize patients into a different ontology and epistemology in relation to the physical and social world.  At the Dallas clinic, I learned to speak a new linguistic register in Standard English involving more than one hundred terms used in patient communities within the clinic, but partially shared across several overlapping clinic discourse communities of physicians, nurses, paramedics, allergy testers, sauna personnel, receptionists, condo managers, medical specialists, patients and patient caregivers.  These discourse communities were associated with and organized around multiple habituses partly manifest in distinct sets of discourse processes’ (p. 15-16).  

She says that during her recovery, her spirit was so open to healing that she sought other forms of healing, which she doesn’t describe but, based on her descriptions of her experiences, I imagine is something spiritual or shamanistic in nature.  

Conclusion: Our conceptions arise in a sociocultural and sociolinguistic process whereby they are created for us even as we participate in creating them.  Our perceptions are not as fundamentally the direct experiences we may think they are, either, for the early on they, too, are socially and linguistically shaped.  Our proprioceptions–that is, our embodied perception–is self-referrential, but aspects of proprioception are open to interpretations that are also positioned, constrained, even may be denied by our culture, our language, and the state of scientific conformity at a given time in history’ (p. 18).  

My comments: This article was not what I had anticipated it being.  However, I am pleased with its demonstration of the way that linguistic restraints affect the body and not only the mind.  It leads to questions in my mind about spirituality and our ability to experience the Holy Spirit because of the linguistic restraints that we have due to our culture and our understanding of His ability to affect our bodies.  If we could understand the workings of the Holy Spirit in experiential language, then would we be opened up into a bodily experience of God in ways that we are not due to the ‘fundamentalist Christian’ culture.

By I.M. Lewis (2003)

*Note: I am skipping the Sex theme in this article because I don’t find it particularly relevant to the topic of the course in its use for discussion in this text.  

” ‘Altered States of Consciousness’ is an umbrella term, applied to psychological and sociological phenomena regularly encountered in the study of trance, possession, and shamanism–all of which have significant if problematic links with music” (20).  

Somewhat of a working definition of ASC, according to Lewis.  

“ASCs are most clearly exhibited externally in the form that we commonly call ‘trance’ “ (21).  

So therefore, trance is the subcategory of ASC, or is it simply the manifestation of an ASC in a person’s outward or public display of an ASC?    

“Psychologists define it as a condition of dissociation, characterized by the lack of voluntary movement, and frequently by automatisms in action and thought, illustrated by hypnotic and mediumistic conditions” (23).  

A psychological definition of trance.  

“In all known cultures and civilizations, we find essentially two, at first sight contradictory processes which induce trance.  One involves sensory deprivation trauma, stress, illness, isolation, fasting and deliberate physical mortification as in many mystical religious traditions.  The other equally common stimulus, involves the sensory overloading–with musical and other sonic bombardment (especially monotonous drumming), strobe lighting effects, the ingestion of hallucinogenic drugs, and more mundane procedures like over-breathing and even strenuous exercise such as jogging (which has been shown experimentally to increase endorphin levels)” (24).  

“The public display of trance manifests an identity with a spirit and thus provides the member with a proof of sorts that he/she is truly a member of the cult“ (25). 

Here Lewis begins to discuss the cultural uses and forms of trance.  It is extremely important to understand that it does not merely function as an experience for the individual but it also serves to say something in the context of the culture.  In the case study that Lewis uses, it happens to be symbolic of the participation and membership of a cult or belief system. 

“The most common explanation of trance across cultures is that it is a manifestation of the invasion of the human body by an external spirit agent.  This may or may not, be coupled with the idea of soul-loss involving the displacement of the host’s soul by the alien spirit” (28).  

The description of trance across cultures is similar.  I find this very interesting and it seems to say something about the fact that God created us to not just be bodies or minds/souls, but also to be invaded by the non-physical world.  In the Christian context, this invasion happens when the Holy Spirit invades the human soul and makes His residence there.  This idea of invasion (or can I use the term possession?) creates a life-changing difference in the human.  We expect transformation in our lives or in the lives of other believers because of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, but we don’t expect trance.  And when I read this section of the text, the thing that strikes me when I consider the Holy Spirit’s place in my life is the idea of soul-loss.  I am no longer my own, yes, but should I deny myself agency because I am invaded by God?  

“Possession by an external spiritual force is, of course, a culturally specific explanation of behavior or of a state of being.  It does not necessarily coincide with trance” (28).

This is where Lewis uses sex as a metaphor in that it is both a physical act and a social act.  In the same way, trance and possession do not have mere physical or spiritual meanings and implications, but also send a social/cultural message to those around.  In many of the case studies that he used, Lewis demonstrated that possession can be a cultural explanation for things that may not actually be attributed, physically, to the possession of a spirit.  One simple example he cited included an explanation for having a cold as being possessed by a sneezing spirit.  

There are two possible ways to deal with possession: “One, aimed at expelling the spirit, is of course, exorcism with which we are familiar from our own Christian culture and which is common in Islam.  The other contrasting treatment, referred to usefully by Luc de Heusch as ‘adorcism,’ instead of seeking to expel the intrusive spirit, endeavors to come to terms with it, reaching an accommodation with it, by paying it cult” (29).   

“Possession then becomes the first step initiation into a spirit cult” (29).  

“Trance, as I am arguing, is cross-culturally the most conclusive public demonstration that a human being has been seized by a spirit, and, in the case of those who develop ongoing relationships with spirits, the regular expression of that relationship.  Consequently, it is hardly surprising that trance behavior should be conventionalized and culturally standardized.  As socio-cultural phenomenon, trance necessarily responds and conforms to local expectations: if it did not it could not be securely recognized as a signal of spiritual intervention in human affairs.  Hence, while it is also  cross-culturally recognizable state, regularly induced and sustained by particular musical rhythms, it nevertheless respects the cultural form given it in a particular society” (32-33).