This year we gather at the Vallombrosa Retreat Center located in Menlo Park, just south of the City of San Francisco, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Twelve of our members (and six guests) will gather in person and the rest will join in online. Thanks to our host for giving a brief overview of the San Francisco Bay Area context and their experiences of the Missional Challenge and Faithful Innovation:
Context of the San Francisco Bay Area
According to the Pew Research center, roughly seven-in-ten Americans call themselves “Christian.” But less than half the residents of San Francisco identify as Christian (48%). More than a third (35%) of people in the metropolitan area are religious “nones” (atheists, agnostics and those who say their religion is “nothing in particular”). This makes San Francisco one of the most unchurched areas in the country, second only to Seattle. 10% of San Franciscans call themselves agnostic, compared with 5% who are atheist.
San Francisco has deep spiritual roots and a distinctive spirituality. Christianity came to the Bay Area in the 18th century through the witness and work of Roman Catholic missionaries. The population swelled in the 1840’s with the California Gold Rush. Protestant congregations began to be established here in the mid-Nineteenth century, but never to the extent of that of comparable cities on the East Coast.
The Gold Rush led to a distinctive embodiment of the quest for the American dream, the California dream, i.e. to get fast wealth or fame in a new land. The dream of the Gold Rush led to farming, oil drilling, movies and microchips. Historian Douglas Firth Anderson makes the case that the California version of the American dream led to a primary spirituality that he calls “mysticism.” The West Coast, and San Francisco in particular, have led the nation in the way of mysticism, the prevalence of optimistic privatized religious experience.
Our 2023 Host
The host for the ICEF gathering is The Center for Church Innovation, an affiliate center of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. They were formed in September, 2022, the result of two organizations coming together: Newbigin House of Studies, led by Dr. Scot Sherman, and The Church Innovations Institute led by Dr. Patrick Keifert. Their dream is to see flourishing faith communities engaged in God’s mission with other partners building the Beloved Community.
They are currently engaged in adapting the Partnership for Missional Church (PMC) process developed by Dr. Keifert (and others, many within ICEF) for congregations to innovate their capacities to be renewed in God’s mission. They began in November, 2021 working with congregations in the Episcopal Church in the Bay Area (the Diocese of California). The project is called “Vital+Thriving Congregations”. They are adapting the PMC process for congregations emerging from the pandemic, most of which have faced significant decline and increased irrelevance in a deeply resistant culture. They are seeking to develop a robust, scalable and reproducible process for communities in mission to discover the movement of the Spirit and their unique challenge and call. We describe this process as “discovering God’s preferred and promised future” and “unlocking the congregation’s capacity to build the Beloved Community.” During the ICEF gathering they will explore and reflect on this experience.
This year they have begun a new initiative to nurture and support NWC’s within the Diocese. The last church plant in the Diocese of California was in 1978. This new direction represents a dramatic change in ecclesial culture. Working with the National Church Planting staff of the Episcopal Church, their team has embarked on 3 NWC projects. They have strong connections with other church planting networks here in the San Francisco Bay Area, and as part of our ICEF gathering they will explore and reflect upon their experiences.
Our Missional Challenge
Our missional challenge is faithful innovation in renewing congregations and New Worshiping Communities (NWC’s).
In the post-Christendom missional era, the work of revitalizing inherited tradition churches—renewing congregations— and starting NWC’s usually happens in separate and distinct wings of the overall renewal project. At the Center for Church Innovation, they are attempting to foster a culture where both renewing congregations and NWC’s learn from and encourage one another. This is called a culture of “Faithful Innovation”.
Faithful Innovation
Both renewing congregations and NWC’s are engaged in processes of innovation. Both are engaging a Christian imagination to explore what is possible, experimenting, failing, learning from failure, and seeking a positive outcome. “Faithful innovation” speaks to both the tradition in which these congregations/NWC’s are rooted and to the context in which they live and serve. For many inherited congregations, faithfulness speaks more to the notion of rootedness in tradition than it does to attention to context and changing environment. For many NWC’s, faithfulness centers on paying attention to relevant cultural symbols, norms, and practices, often in ways that test the rootedness to the inherited tradition.
They are seeking wisdom from ICEF members and invited guests to explore ways where church judicatories, mission agencies and educational centers have sought to create learning environments that facilitate faithful innovation for an entire system. Can struggling congregations seeking to create new intentionality in their mission and NWC’s come together in a holding environment where they help each other? How do they innovate faithfully new ways of being church that grow out of their tradition and connect with a rapidly changing world?