In our church community, we have people gathered around helping the poor, working with victims of sex trafficking, renewing the arts, raising missional families, caring for a specific neighborhood or the environment, serving underprivileged children, homeless, refugees, immigrants, and countless other needs. Organizing community around mission ensures that the kingdom of God is not an afterthought or an option for the spiritually mature, but the heart of what it means to follow Jesus.

THE NEW HELLENIZATION

Is it really possible to renew culture through missional urban tribes? I believe so. When Alexander the Great conquered the world, the genius of his influence was the idea of Hellenization. He sent functioning Greek communities into a conquered region to spread the values, customs, language, arts, and ideas of Hellenistic culture. Over the course of time, this Greek influence spread, so that regions were not just captured militarily, they were captured and transformed culturally. The Greeks were so effective in their task that many Jewish people even forgot their language and had to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, while New Testament writers also penned their stories and letters in Greek. Alexander’s real genius wasn’t military power; it was his power to capture the imagination of his world.

In many ways this is what Jesus called his disciples to do and still calls us to do today: to go into our communities as functioning missional tribes, modeling, loving, reclaiming, and recovering cultural capital for his kingdom and the world. After all, what did Jesus create, but a missional tribe: a group of people from different backgrounds, centering their networks, norms, and values around him, bringing peace and renewal and hope wherever they went. They were a city on a hill, the light of the world, and as these groups went from city to city, they “kingdomized” their world through love and justice and mission and truth.

Several years later, Anna is still in the city, and she has found her tribe. Anna has quite a broken past: addiction, alcoholism, promiscuity, and low self-esteem, which led to abusive relationships and destructive behavior. But God is redeeming these broken things in her life and using them as her mission. She is gathering around others with similar stories to bring hope and healing to those still finding their way. She is a part of a team that counsels battered women when they are admitted to hospitals and does makeover nights for victims of sex trafficking. If you ask her if she still wants to be an actress, she will say, “Not really. I don’t need to act to tell a story. I am part of a better story in the world — the redemptive drama of God who has invited me to join him in the renewal of all things. I have found my role in the story and am living it with joy.”

Two thousand years later, Jesus is still forming his tribe, and he invites us in. May we hear his call, organize our lives around his needs and passion, and bring his kingdom into the networks, norms, and values of our lives.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. How have you seen the effects of cultural defragmentation in your community? How has this impacted your church?

2. If you are a part of a small group at your church, how well does it do in integrating the missional aspects of the kingdom of God into your life? What can you do to help shift it out of “church world,” and back into the needs and passion of culture?

3. Have you ever been a part of an urban tribe? What was it organized around?

4. What is one of the central passions of your heart? How can you gather those in your community around this passion?

5. What are a few of the needs in your immediate community? How can you network with those in your area to address these needs?

6. How do Jesus words in John 20:20-21 speak to the issue of engaging culture? What shifts do you need to make in your own life to live in the “sentness” of Jesus?

END NOTES

1 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

2 See summary by Robert Putnam at http://www.bowlingalone.com.

3 Putnam, Bowling Alone, 19.

4 Ibid., 404.

5 Ethan Watters, Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family and Commitment (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003).

6 Howard Fineman, “Our New Tribes,” in Newsweek, January 26, 2009, 61.

7 Ibid.

8 Ethan Watters, “Urban Tribes and Social Dark Matter,” transcript of presentation on May 15, 2004 by Heath Row at Fast Company website at http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/heath-row/urban-tribes-and-social-dark-matter.

9 Ibid.

10 Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, English Translation (London: Sage Publications, 1996).

11 Ibid., Forward.

12 Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

13 Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us (New York: Penguin Group, 2008), 1.

14 Ibid., 22.

15 Richard Rohr with John Bookser Feister, Jesus’ Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount (Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1996).

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