Steven Hovater

Words

  • Missional Discernment

    A core practice of discipleship is discernment. In missional churches, part of the community’s work is discerning what God is doing around us, and how we are being drawn to participate in the missio dei.

    “Discernment is the church’s way of life; it is its whole way of being in the world. I would go so far as to say that discerning and joining the missional life of God comprises the life of the church. There is no being of the church that precedes its doing. The church discovers its identity as it finds itself in mission—the mission of God.”

    — Mark Love

    That discernment happens on several different levels:

    1. Individuals explore their own calling, learning to perceive God’s action so they can join it, or sometimes simply bear witness to what God is doing around them.
    2. Brothers and sisters in the community help each other discern ways God may be calling each other into participation in the Spirit’s work.
    3. The community discerns together how God may be calling them into action together.

    Discernment begins with observing, both materially what is happening and the kinds of feelings accompany those events.

    Reflection then leads to interpretation—often beginning with the simple word “perhaps”.

    No matter which of the above levels of discernment were working on, we learn to say to each other—or ourselves—something like “perhaps God is calling us to get to know this person that keeps popping up in our social circles in different places, who seems to be trying to figure out their life with God.”

    Or, “We feel our hearts going out to kids whenever our friends who are teachers tell us stories about their students. Maybe God is trying to get us to pay attention to their needs and develop some sort of partnership to serve them.”

    Or, “I’ve noticed that when you talk about your coworkers, your heart seems to be breaking for their struggles with their families. Perhaps God is leading us to create some sort of space where we can help them develop some wisdom about family issues like parenting or marriage.”

    A missional church naturally and intentionally has a lot of these kinds of conversations. It becomes part of the church’s DNA to consider those things out loud.

  • James K.A. Smith on How Our Loves, Longings, and Habits Drive Behavior

    A Christian education cannot be content to produce thinkers; it should aim to produce agents. Such formation not only offers content for minds; it also impinges on the nexus of habits and desires that functions as the activity center of the human person. The driving center of human action and behavior is a nexus of loves, longings, and habits that hums along under the hood, so to speak, without needing to be thought about. These loves, longings, and habits orient and propel our being-in-the-world. The focus on formation is holistic because its end is Christian action: what’s at stake here is not just how we think about the world but how we inhabit the world—how we act. We are what we love precisely because we do what we love.

    – James K.A. Smith1

    What Smith gets right here is the moving of education—whether we’re thinking of the University, seminary, or Bible classes or sermons at church—from something we think of as strictly intellectual, or also candidly affective, training our desires so that we will act in a certain way in the world. Thus, education is not just about the head, but about the heart and the body as well.

    That’s a really important corrective for much of what happens in all of those spaces where “teaching” happens.

    1. James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 2013, p 12. ↩︎

  • Graduation Weekend!

    A huge milestone weekend for our oldest daughters as Micah and Izzy are set to graduate on Sunday!

    Looking forward to celebrating these two!

  • David Bosch on Mission, Theology, and the Church

    “Mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God…There is church because there is a mission, and not vice versa.”
    – David J. Bosch1

    Missional theology starts with God.

    Church movements sometimes struggle navigating the relationship between practice and theology. The missional movement that’s developed over the last 40 years is not immune to that, and sometimes devolves into an instrumentalist praxis that makes it a defense technique against the institutional failures of church. (See Andrew Root’s critique.2)

    However, I do think that at the heat of the movement has been a marriage of the practical and the theological. For example, there’s been a lot of thought on how the ecclesiology of the movement is grows out of a robust trinitarian theology.

    David Bosch, the South African missiologist whose work, particularly Transforming Mission, is an important part of the missional family tree, articulates one of the key principles in the quote above. “Mission” for the church originates in how we conceive of God—”mission” is simply another expression for God’s desires or intentions. God wants something.God’s actions are not random, but come from God’s nature, God’s desires. How we understand what God wants—how we interpret the actions of the Father, Son, and Spirit revealed in scripture—give us a framework for how we can see God’s activity in our own contexts.

    That’s the heart of missional.

    1. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 390. ↩︎
    2. In, for instance, Evangelism in an Age of Despair, 2025. ↩︎

  • Huddle

    The whistle blows and the bodies
    Shift, settle, relax.
    For a moment there is
    stillness,
    reflection,
    assessment.
    They untangle the chaos so there may be
    measurement.
    Perhaps celebration.
    But most of the time the celebration must wait,
    there is more work to be done first.
    So they return to their side of the line,
    The new line,
    and join the huddle.
    There they gather,
    to hear the play-call,
    a code that will arrange their bodies,
    determine the set of rehearsed movements.
    In the huddle there is potential,
    ambiguous only for a last moment,
    before the truth will come out.

  • The Importance of Perhaps

    “Perhaps” turns out to be a remarkably important word for any church seeking to join in the work of God.

    “Perhaps” is what enables discernment to begin. It lets you speak the beginnings of what you see God doing, holding it up for the rest of the community to join in discerning how what you see and sense fits into the missio dei, the great mission of God in the world. “Perhaps” lets you test the waters, holding up the possibility without having to defend it as certainty.

    Not sure where to begin speaking of God’s work in the world? Let “perhaps” be your on-ramp. Speak the word, and see what follows.

  • James K.A. Smith on Discipleship, Love, and Worship

    “Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it’s a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly–who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love. We are made to be such people by our immersion in the material practices of Christian worship–through affective impact, over time, of sights and smell in water and wine.”
    ― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

    We could hardly have a better modern guide to Augustinian spirituality than James K.A. Smith. His entire project orbits the thought and heart of the ancient Bishop of Hippo, and I think he’s talking about St. Augustine even when he’s not talking about St. Augustine.

    One of the things I think he does that is urgently needed in some circles of thought that I swim in is to connect Discipleship with Worship.

    Some thinkers, being rightly compelled to help the church reinvigorate intentional discipleship practices, wrongly dissociate dissociate what happens in worship from discipleship. Smith helps illuminate the formative power of worship—particularly in a world where alternative worship practices relentlessly sculpt us to be people whose capacity to love well and rightly is degraded and corrupted.

    Setting up a dichotomy between “worship churches” and “discipleship churches” takes what must be a “both/and” situation and makes it not just “either/or” but “neither”.

    There is not worship without discipleship. Nor is their discipleship without worship. Both are about love. Loving God and others well is the point of both discipleship and worship.

    Or to put it in Augustinian terms, both worship and discipleship are about a rightly ordered life of love.

  • Lesslie Newbigin on the Missional Leading of the Spirit

    From The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, 1995:

    The reign of God that the church proclaims is indeed present in the life of the church, but it is not the church’s possession. It goes before us, summoning us to follow. The practical implications of this will be discussed in a later chapter. Here it is enough to say that the picture given us in the Acts is one that is constantly being reproduced in the missionary experience of the church. It is the Holy Spirit who leads the way, opening a door here that the church must then obediently enter, kindling a flame there that the church must lovingly tend. (p. 64)

    And just below this, Newbigin goes on:

    My own experience as a missionary has been that the significant advances of the church have not been the result of our own decisions about the mobilizing and allocating of “resources.” This kind of language, appropriate for a military campaign or a commercial enterprise, is not appropriate here. The significant advances in my experience have come through happenings of which the story of Peter and Cornelius is a paradigm, in ways of which we have no advance knowledge. God opens the heart of a man or woman in the gospel. The messenger (the “angel” of Acts 10:3) may be a stranger, a preacher, a piece of Scripture, a dream, an answered prayer, or a deep experience of joy or sorrow, of danger or deliverance. It was not part of any missionary “strategy” devised by the church. It was the free and sovereign deed of God, who goes before his church. And, like Peter, the church can usually find good reasons for being unwilling to follow. But follow it must if it is to be faithful. For the mission is not ours but God’s. (p. 64)

    Yes, this has often been my experience, too. The most surprising avenues of mission open up as we pay attention: often in the most preposterous ways. And yet, there God goes to work, and the church must every time decide again to follow.

  • Moltmann on The Church and the Missio Dei

    What we have to learn from them is not that the church ‘has’ a mission, but the very reverse: that the mission of Christ creates its own church. Mission does not come from the church; it is from mission and in the light of mission that the church has to be understood….

    To grasp the missionary church theologically in a world-wide context means understanding it in the context of the missio dei…If the church sees itself to be sent in the same framework as the Father’s sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit, then it also sees itself in the framework of God’s history with the world and discovers its place and function within this history. Modern Catholic and Protestant missionary theology is therefore right when it talks about the missio dei, a movement from God in which the church has its origin and arrives at its own movement, but which goes beyond the church, finding its goal in the consummation of all creation in God.

    Jürgen Moltmann,

    The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 1975, p. 10-11

  • Time for Grace

    By its very nature, grace exists in time. Grace doesn’t just exist, it occurs, being given in a particular moment.

    God is gracious by eternal nature, but that grace is doled out in time.

    This could be one of those moments, you know. And so, on the chance that you’ve stumbled onto this page in a moment when you need a little grace…it is there for you. It is God’s nature to abound in grace.

    May you receive it. May this be a moment of grace for you.