The Land Beyond Technique: The Illogical Adventure of Mission
“Faith is neither belief nor credulity, neither a reasonable acquisition or an intellectual achievement; it is rather the conjunction of an ultimate decision and a revelation, and bids me bring about the incarnation of the ultimate reality today, the Kingdom of God present among us. I am summoned by a Word that is eternal, here and now, universal, personal. I accept this summons. I am willing to act responsible; I enter upon an illogical adventure, knowing neither its origin nor its end. Such is faith.”
- Jacques Ellul
One of my favorite narratives in Scripture appears in Acts 16. It’s an easy text to overlook, as it’s full of complicated names and unfamiliar geography, but for those who are able to work past that discover a text that showcases one of the most remarkable moments in all of the New Testament.
At the onset of the chapter, the Apostle Paul and his companions are embarking on what we commonly refer to as his “second missionary journey.” They begin attempting to live out the same missional techniques they had tried before (see Acts 13:5; 14:1). That strategy was to enter a metropolitan center in the region they traveled in, look for the synagogue, and have Paul preach the Gospel message. But here, as they travel through the providence of Asia, this strategy seems to hit a roadblock from the very beginning. In multiple verses, we’re told that the Spirit would not allow them to preach or enter a given area. Now this isn’t spelled out for us, so it’s hard to know what this means. Did they get a feeling of unease crossing a border, a premonition, or word that they would face resistance? We can only offer conjecture. Regardless, just a few verses into the chapter the whole trip seems to be stuck in neutral.
Then, in the middle of the night, Paul has a dream about a man from Macedonia begging them to come and help. This dream startles Paul enough to wake up his comrades and tell them about what has happened. I love that verse 10 tells us that they “concluded” or discerned together that this truly felt like a calling from God, and not just some indigestion from dinner for Paul. This might seem small to us, but this calling would mean jumping on a ship across the Aegean Sea to bring the Gospel to the European Continent for the first time.
So they pack their bags and go, and make their way to a well-known city called Philippi. It was not only a place known for its role in the Roman Empire (go Google the Battle of Philippi), but as an incredibly wealthy place of trade and commerce. Yet, the excitement of being in such a vibrant urban locale was quickly dampened by the fact that Paul and his companions don’t seem to find obvious answers as to why they are there. In fact, reading between the lines of Acts 16, there is no synagogue in the city as there were not enough Jewish men to warrant the construction of one. Once again, their go-to missional strategy is out the window.
Instead, on the Sabbath, they get word of a place of prayer outside of the city walls. There they discover a group of women praying and they begin to talk with them about Jesus. Lydia, who was likely a successful businesswoman in fashion, was among them. We’re told that God opened Lydia’s heart, and she and her whole household were baptized. We know that household (oikos in Greek) was more than what we often imagine today. This likely meant a sizable grouping of people linked together economically and communally who probably lived on Lydia’s compound. So this is no small feat, and likely was the first house church planted in Philippi, though spoiler alert, the rest of Acts 16 tells us more pop up right alongside this one.
Now, as remarkable as all of this is, it doesn’t take an astute Bible student to notice one important missing detail of the story. Whatever happened to the man from Macedonia? I love how Stephanie Williams O’Brien breaks this down in her book Make a Move:
So the “man from Macedonia” in Paul’s dream ended up being a woman in the fashion industry. I’m not sure why God didn’t just give Paul a dream about Lydia. My hunch is that if Paul tried to wake up his buddies in the middle of the night to start packing because he had a dream about a rich lady across the sea beckoning for him to help, they would have rolled their eyes and gone back to sleep.
Sometimes the Bible reads as pure comedy and this is absolutely one of those moments. Paul and his friends have their best-laid plans up ended at every corner, and instead find themselves on an illogical adventure following the Spirit on a journey where the math doesn’t add up. When the dust settles, though, the end product is something far more beautiful and mysterious than they could have ever imagined. It’s probably not a coincidence that Paul will declare while preaching in Athens in the very next chapter, “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.”
In the 20th century, the French philosopher, sociologist, and theologian, Jacques Ellul, wrote extensively on the idea of technique. For him, technique was more than just skill or form in a particular field or activity. Instead, he defined it as, “the totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” For Ellul, it was natural that a society saturated in Enlightenment thinking, where reason and logic were of the utmost importance, would come to see efficiency as the ultimate metric for success and goodness. In fact, Ellul would point to efficiency as a god to modern people; the more efficient something is, the better it is. He states, “Technique worships nothing, respects nothing. It has a single role: to strip off externals, to bring everything to light and by rational use to transform everything into means.”
More simply put, we’re swimming in an age that conditions us toward efficiency, one where almost no work or aspect of life is untouched by its reach. Some of this is good, no doubt. The advancements in technology, medicine, and science allow us some incredible comforts. That said, the reduction of life and flourishing to the economy of efficiency and productivity is ultimately leading us to disenchantment. Life is no longer mysterious, wonder-inducing, or transcendent, it is merely a formula. Ellul declares, “Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it… Technique denies mystery a priori. The mysterious is merely that which has not yet been technicized.”
We feel the effects of this in the most basic places of our lives. We cannot walk into a bookstore without being met by display racks of self-improvement books telling us how to live a better life. Social media is full of influencers offering us “hacks” on how to shortcut everyday problems, or giving us advice on maximizing any number of areas on health, beauty, or lifestyle. Pick this diet, choose this self-care rhythm, meditate with this practice, invest in this, and your life will be fulfilled. Even a walk into many churches these days means listening to a 30–40 minute message that sounds more like a Ted Talk than anything else. Everywhere we look we’re told that life is nothing more than a series of decisions and making the most productive choices is how we curate our lives. Is it any wonder then why the novelist, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry predicted, “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
So it shouldn’t come as any surprise then that when we start talking about the church and its language around faith and mission we see the same sorts of ideas emerging. I’ve been to enough conferences, hopped on enough webinars, and read enough books on Christian ministry to know that we are obsessed with techniques and best practices. We have an entire market that has been built on telling us that with enough human ingenuity, right leadership practices, and technological solutions, we can grow churches and reach those who are far from God. Innovation and new missional strategies are the keys to unlocking success and scaling ministries efficiently, and anyone refusing to adopt both is merely lazy or incompetent.
To this end, Paul Sparks, Tim Soerens, and Dwight J. Friesen in their book The New Parish, compare modern Christianity to the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18. In their stand-off with Elijah on Mount Carmel, these so-called prophets rely of using the right incantations and/or religious techniques to foster a response. It’s a story of folly with their false god and systematic beliefs getting exposed. Sparks, Soerens and Friesen remark, “Perhaps we all need to ask some prophetic questions regarding our own god of technique. ‘Why isn’t technique bringing us the life we thought it would? Surely the god of technique must be powerful. Maybe he is daydreaming or using the toilet or traveling somewhere. Or maybe he’s asleep, and we have to wake him up?’ It’s time to stop believing the lies about technique’s capacity to control the outcomes. It’s time to laugh at this false god and stop paying it so much respect. It’s time to return to faith in the living God.” They go on, “Too often in our best efforts to serve God, love people, and care for creation, it’s possible to build altars to the clever…Why is it so easy to surrender our God-given agency? Why is so tempting to order our affections around a system of thought that another community has forged rather than operate out of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our own place?”
The reality is that it is hard to draw many connections between the Apostle Paul and his companions and what most of us know in our day-to-day realities of ministry. They operated with a real belief that God was an active agent in the world, and that at any moment their techniques or strategies might get turned upside down.
More importantly, everything about Acts 16 lacks efficiency or even a linear process that one can extrapolate to apply to a different context. These faithful disciples seem to make decisions incrementally, often “wasting time” by our standards, testing where the Spirit was indeed opening doors (and/or closing them). Obedience clearly trumped the need to be effective. Alan Roxburgh says, “Almost all the books I read right now in terms of ‘missional’ are, in one form or another, proposals for fixing and/or making the church more effective…My contention is that church questions are not the questions that preoccupied the early Christians. We need a reorientation of our imaginations to engage the world opening up before us. The good news is that the Spirit is breaking the boundaries and containers into where we have put the Gospel.”
Yet, I think there’s something even more compelling here. There’s something incredibly wild and adventurous about the kind of faith that pursues mission the way read about in Acts. Following God is stepping out into the mysterious, a place full of surprises and new experiences. It’s not that these early Jesus followers believed God was unknowable, but rather that He couldn’t be boiled down to a formula or a comfortable set of theological propositions. In the same way, mission in our day and age will likely mean unlearning our technical certainty to step into a more adventurous faith probing the depths of what God is doing. The aforementioned Alan Roxburgh talks about us becoming “detectives of divinity,” searching for God in our ordinary rhythms and neighborhood spaces. It’s a wild pursuit that readily expects that God might show up in the most surprising places and call us to the most unexpected people. It’s a reality that far few in North American Christianity know.
In fact, If there’s anything I’ve learned in the last few years it’s that’s when we finally give up best practices, silver bullets, marketplace metrics, and the compulsion to find the next innovation, faith and mission get truly fun. God has something far too beautiful and wonderful to be reduced to those trying to act like experts or attempting to sell us something. There’s an undomesticated faith waiting to be found, and the journey begins when we stop trying to make the math add up before we begin. It is one of taking risks, leaving behind safety and security, defying guarantees, admitting the futility of our methods, and stepping out of the boat.
“Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of humankind. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too. And this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and recreate the human heart, because it is just where he seems most helpless that he is most strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully.”
- Frederick Buechner
