aXiom was created to help leaders from churches and neighbourhoods find a path towards hope for the church in a changing context. The church has been marginalized in the Canadian scene, but, rather than despair, we believe that there are some ancient truths about the nature of God, His people and the mission that He invites us to participate in that bring a sense of hope for the future. In a time of turmoil, aXiom is designed to
produce a picture of the future that will instill a sense of dependence on God, a deeper love for the church, and a creative imagination for helping local missionaries to believe in neighbourhood transformation through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

These leaders from Forge teach aXiom alongside of help from local leaders:

Karen Wilk

Karen is also on the Forge Team as a neighbourhood missional practioner and teacher. She has been a pastor in several local churches for almost 25 years and has served in a number of missional leadership capacities with her denomination. She is the author of a number of devotional books, her most recent being, “Don’t Invite Them to Church – Moving from a Come and See to a Go and Be Church”.

Howard Lawrence

Howard has served as a senior pastor in a number of churches for over twenty years. On staff with Forge, he helps churches, denominations and leaders to see neighbourhood churches emerging in an increasing number of communities. Howard has also served his denomination as a missional consultant and was the National Director for the Connecting Church in Canada.

Cam Roxburgh

Cam is the National Director of Forge. He has been teaching aXiom material in some shape or form for 10 years in various cities across Canada and internationally. Cam is also the National Director of Church Planting Canada and is the Senior Pastor at Southside Community Church, a multi-congregational church in the Vancouver, BC area.

Anthony Brown

Anthony is the Director of Education for Forge. He has a long history of helping leaders and churches to transform their neighbourhoods in Vancouver and in his native land, England. He currently teaches at Regent College in Vancouver and preaches often at various churches around Vancouver, BC.

aXiom is divided into six sessions which are primarily based on Jesus’ words to a leader in those days about the greatest commandment.

Session 1 – Introduction to Missional Church
A look at theology, missiology and ecclesiology.

Session 2 – Heart
How personal spiritual discipline and corporate practices of worship are crucial parts of what it means to be a missional people.

Session 3 – Mind
How a commitment to the study and application of God’s revelation of Himself to us can shape our lives and bring about neighbourhood transformation.

Session 4 – Strength
How time-tested practices of stewardship of our time, treasure, talents and creation are integral to carrying out God’s mission.

Session 5 – Neighbour
Living out our faith while not abandoning the proclamation of the greatest news ever.

Session 6 – One Another
How the way we learn to live together biblically affects the very nature of community.

* aXiom is specifically designed to bring practical help to leaders who desire to see a fresh approach to how we are doing/being church. Besides some teaching, there are many designed discussions, reading and practical assignments to help the learning process.

Click the “aXiom” box on the top right of the page for aXiom details!

“America now has the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen. What we don’t have are people who can think for themselves; people who can formulate a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things, people with vision.”

The article offers that technology itself pushes us in this direction: toward quick solutions, away from the deep reflection that might observe a new way forward, a new way of thinking about the problem and its relation to a larger whole. Like Brueggemann, Deresiewicz intuits that the pace of our lives causes us to miss small openings: ” the space for imagination to expand and take shape is inversely proportional to the speed at which we live.” (Hopeful Imagination)

SO when Deresiewicz looks at the research around multitasking, things become more interesting:

“A team of researchers at Stanford wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it? The answer – they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find .. were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: The more people multitask, the worse they are not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.

The researchers found that multitaskers are worse at every kind of cognitive function. “They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information.. they were more easily distracted. They were more unorganized, unable to keep information in the right conceptual boxes and retrieve it quickly. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking: switching between tasks.”

Deresiewicz continues, “Multitasking, in short, impairs your ability to think. Thinking.. requires concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea of your own… My first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s..

From here Deresiewicz goes on to talk about concentration, attention and the importance of solitude.

Elsewhere Peter Block, the author of Community: The Structure of Belonging, asks about the future of community. He writes,

“All of us, in one way or another, are in the conversation about the relationship between electronic technology and community. Does the technology build community and relationships or become a substitute for them? Does the internet act as a catalyst to get me out of my house or become a way to burrow further into it?”

The question ties in to much larger questions, questions like “what does it mean to be human?” and, “how do we build a sustainable future?” And the story that Block uses to get at these questions is the story of Faust.

“Faust, an early symbol of modern people, [makes a deal] with the devil. Faust wants to develop a property and needs the land owned by two elderly people who won’t sell. Frustrated, he asks Mephisto to take care of this couple. Mephisto gets the job done, but the method he uses shocks Faust. He had not reckoned that his development project would cost the lives of this couple…

“Later, Berman comments on what is behind Faust’s drive for development: his longing for the new and innovative world. Partly it may be the drive for power, but he says, ‘there is another motive … that springs not merely from Faust’s personality, but from a collective, impersonal drive that seems to be endemic to modernization: the drive to create a homogeneous environment, a totally modernized space, in which the look and feel of the old world have disappeared without a trace.’”

Is it our illusions about progress that drive us? Is it our belief that the ends will justify the means? Is it, as Jacques Ellul might have phrased it, that we pursue not the kingdom itself but “the false presence of the kingdom?” Maybe Block has got it right when he opines, much as Ellul would have done,

“The concern, however, when technology becomes the future and especially the future of community, is that we become an extension of the technology..”

We become what we adore, what we worship.

In 1983 Howard Snyder published Liberating the Church: the Ecology of Church and Kingdom. The work began to give me a language for the discomfort I was experiencing in my own setting. At the time I had just discovered the work of Jacques Ellul. The two writers began to push me outside the boundaries of a system which was as much mechanized as organic.

Snyder reminded us that our word “ecology” is related to the Greek word “oikos” (house) and oikonomia (our word “economy.”) The whole world is God’s household, and his ordering of it is his economy. Snyder writes that, “Fundamentally, the Universe is not ordered logically, psychologically, nor sociologically, but ecologically.” (50) Snyder connects God”s rule to shalom, an embracing metaphor. He continues,

Will we opt for technology or ecology? This is not an either-or choice, but a question of dominant models. Will we view the world essentially as a machine or as a garden? Will we see the earth as a factory or as a home? Will we opt for technology or ecology? This is not an either-or choice but a question of dominant models… If the controlling reality is technosystem, mechanistic technology takes over and life suffers from being squeezed into the “clockwork orange” habitat for which it was never meant…. (43)

The clincher follows on the next page when Snyder writes that, “As men and women become like their gods, so they become like their models. A machine model (a technosystem) produces human robots; an organic model (an ecosystem) produces healthy persons.”

“Our wisdom about individual transformation is not enough when it comes to community transformation.”
Peter Block

Block makes this bold statement in the Introduction, and if he is right, then much of our literature and practice around discipleship will prove inadequate – possibly even counterproductive – for the church in the coming generation.

The arrival of Peter Block’s book, “Community: The Structure of Belonging,” was momentous for me. Reading the introduction and looking over the table of contents, I realized that Block has done something that no one else has done, filling a gap in the literature and practice of community transformation. In the WELCOME he writes,

“This book is written to support those who care for the well-being of their community. It is for anyone who wants to be part of creating an organization, neighborhood, city or country that works for all, and who has the faith and the energy to create such a place.”

A little later he continues,

“Community as used here is about the experience of belonging. We are in community each time we find a place where we belong. The word belong has two meanings. First and foremost, to belong is to be related to and a part of something. It is membership, the experience of being at home in the broadest sense of the phrase… The opposite of belonging is to feel isolated and always (all ways) on the margin, an outsider.

“One goal in exploring the concepts and methods of community building in this book is to increase the amount of belonging or relatedness that exists in the world. Experiencing this kind of friendship, hospitality is not easy or natural in the world we now live in.

“The second meaning of the word belong has to do with being an owner: Something belongs to me. To belong to a community is to act as a creator and co-owner of that community. What I consider mine I will build and nurture. The work, then, is to seek in our communities a wider and deeper sense of emotional ownership; it means fostering among all of a community’s citizens a sense of ownership and accountability.

“Belonging can also be thought of as a longing to be. Being is our capacity to find our deeper purpose in all that we do. It is the capacity to be present, and to discover our authenticity and whole selves. This is often thought of as an individual capacity; but it is also a community capacity. Community is the container within which our longing to be is fulfilled. Without the connectedness of a community, we will continue to choose not to be…”

“My intent in this book is to give definition to ways of structuring the experience of belonging – that’s why the first noun in its subtitle is structure. Belonging does not have to be left to chance..”

Already Block has made two critical moves: he has connected community to the whole process of human becoming and wholeness, and he has argued – and this based on experience – that structures will be critical in this journey. That opens new possibilities, even as it speaks against the anti-structure, anti-organization (gnostic, really) tendencies in the spiritualist paradigm so popular in emergent circles. He continues,

“I especially like the word structure because it stands in relief to our concern about style. To offer structures with the promise of creating community gives leaders relief from the common story that leadership is a set of personal qualities we are born with, develop, or try on like a new suit… We can create structures of belonging even if we are introverted and do not like to make eye contact.”

So – there you have it, this is the trajectory Block develops. Last night I finished reading the introduction for the second time. In the summary or precis that opens the introduction, a significant thesis is offered. If Block is correct, the implications are quite profound. Block writes, “We.. need to acknowledge that our wisdom about individual transformation is not enough when it comes to community transformation.”

Did you hear that? On the whole, western churches have focused on individual transformation. We haven’t done a very good job, perhaps, and the implications of the REVEAL study are in my mind. But we have for the most part assumed that individual transformation is the path to transformed communities. Or, in the other scenario too common in our churches, we have not thought community transformation a significant end, and we focused on individual transformation because we believed that God is not concerned for the well-being of our cities – “it is all going to burn anyway.” And who said eschatology isn’t important?

Further along in the introduction, Block advances his argument. His entire focus is on community transformation. On page 4 he writes,

“To create an alternative future, we need to advance our understanding of the nature of communal or collective transformation. We know a good deal about individual transformation, but our understanding about the transformation of human systems, such as our workplaces, neighborhoods, and towns, is primitive at best, and too often naive in the belief that if enough individuals awaken, and become intentional and compassionate beings, the shift in community will follow. The core question, then, is this: What is the means through which those of us who care about the whole community can create a future for ourselves that is not just an improvement, but one of a different nature from what we now have?”

“This is why we are not focused on individual transformation in this book. Individual transformation is the more popular conversation, and the choice not to focus on it is because we have already learned that the transformation of large numbers of individuals does not result in transformed communities. If we continue to invest in individuals as the primary target of change, we will spend our primary energy on this and never fully invest in communities. In this way, individual transformation comes at the cost of community (p 5. Italics mine).”

But individual transformation has been precisely the focus of western churches. Our soteriology has been a gnostic one – too often, divorced from life in this world. We have commonly lapsed into privatism, worried about our own lives. Our churches, like we ourselves, have been overly concerned for our own well-being and survival. Where is the Spirit of the suffering servant, who gave his life for the broken world? What if, as John 3:16,17 advance, God really does love the world? What is the call of the Spirit on this generation? What will it take for us to learn again to really dwell in the places where we live?

1. some of the theologies of conversion push toward perfectionism
2. a culture of professionalism pushes us toward a need for control
3. church systems are shaped by the need for performative leadership.

The authors argue that we usually select board positions because of demonstrated ability in managing the existing paradigm of church life. These people care deeply for the congregation, and they know how things have been done, but have little sense of alternatives. Furthermore, “performative” leaders (leaders oriented primarily around maintenance) are invested in success as measured by traditional church (and business) values. They do not want to risk shame by leading the church into unknown places. (183-84) Similarly, Kevin Kelly of WIRED Magazine writes,

“Organizations, like living beings, are hardwired to optimize what they know and not to throw success away. A company expends energy to move its butt uphill, or to evolve its product so that it is sitting on top, where it is maximally adapted to the consumer environment. Companies find devolving (a) unthinkable and (b) impossible. There is simply no room in most enterprises for the concept of letting go – let alone the skill to let go – of something that is working, and trudge downhill toward chaos.

“In the future, this forced march will become routine. The biological nature of this era means that the sudden disintegration of established domains will be as certain as the sudden appearance of the new. Therefore, there can be no expertise in innovation unless there is also expertise in demolishing the ensconced. In the [network economy], the ability to relinquish a product or occupation or industry at its peak will be priceless. Let go at the top.” (See also “Fitness Landscapes”).

Given the entropy of organizations, how do we empower change? In the final chapter, Roxburgh and Boren describe the need to “experiment into change.” They write that,

“The innovation of mission-shaped life in a church has to involve a broad cross section of the church if it is to actually enter the congregation’s DNA… The process of experimenting is a way of moving pass these episodic activities to transform the DNA toward continuing missional life. Experiments assist a congregation in learning its way into a new approach to being church together.

“The power of experiments is that they don’t require the whole church to do something all at once. Most people in a healthy church (70 to 75 percent) are .. relatively ok with the church at the moment. There are things they would change.. but they don’t want to cause conflict. This broad middle will continue to default to its professional leaders and opt for the status quo.. They will vote for, or even join, the mission project in the community.. but these actions don’t change the culture of a church or form an ongoing mission-shaped life…

“At the same time, a relatively healthy local church will have a small percentage of people who are eager and energized to experiment. These are the early adopters.. and usually comprise 10 to 15 percent of the church. These early adopters turn [the challenge that comes from the board] into an experiment..[and] once others in the church observe some [success] they start believing that they too can participate. In this way a growing number of people slowly start to learn new habits and skills of being Gods missionary people in their neighborhoods.” (185)

God is a perfect community of being. And the overflow of that loving relatedness is mission. The church, reflecting the inner life of the Trinity, exists in the rhythm of inward, and outward life.

I made a small set of diagrams to represent this. And I was reflecting on the typical three circle diagram most of us have used for years. Three overlapping circles picture mission, community, and worship. But really this is still the same rhythm of mission and community, inward and outward life, and then the third circle adds the upward dimension.

Reading in Clusters, and looking over the LifeShapes material, Mike Breen and crew add a fourth circle – Of. “Of” represents the connections between communities, the wider “catholicity” without which we run into trouble. So the original two circle picture becomes four circles, or a circle overlaid with a cross – arrows moving four ways. But personally I like the original two circle rhythm and then two arrows added – Up and Of.

In “Clusters” another diagram is added. Watch this – I like it.

In/Out/Up/Of corresponds nicely to the four notae of the church. How do you know you have an authentic ecclesial expression? When it is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. When it exists in the rhythm of community and mission, worshipping the one Trinitarian God, and related to the historical expression of the Church expressed in the ancient creeds, and related to a wider network of communities that exist in these same rhythms.

And we need to also hear some cautions. LeRon Shults closes his essay, “Reforming Ecclesiology in Emerging Churches,”

“My argument in this essay has not been that the creedal “marks”ˇ of the church are wrong, but only that they are not exhaustive. When interpreted in absolute and exclusive terms, noting the unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity of the church may in fact be misleading; these may actually mark forms of religious community that have little to do with Jesus’ way of knowing, acting and being in the world.

* Yes, followers of this way ought to work for unity in love, but this does not require the denial or denigration of the multiplicity of expressions of that love. The many forms of ecclesial becoming can serve together in the infinite ecumenics of divine grace.

* Yes, churches are called to become holy, but this does not require isolationist walls that protect “our”ˇ sacrality from “their” supposed profanity. Missional care in the way of Christ is embedded in the concrete, mundane concerns of oppressed others.

* Yes, Christian communities ought to be characterized by a universal embracing love, but this does not require an anxious political exclusion of others. Different polities can facilitate the service of the church while celebrating the particularity of each context.

* Yes, becoming ecclesial involves making clear our connection with the first apostles, but this does not require a blind repetition of the tradition. Followers of Jesus can be identified by their receptive hospitality to, for and with their neighbors and enemies.