The Five M’s: Weekly Summary

Sunday
The church is at its greatest vitality as the “Jesus Movement,” and the institution is merely the vehicle for that movement. —Richard Rohr

Monday
The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. That might be a perfect motto for all reconstructive work. It does not destroy machines or monuments but reinvigorates them with new energy and form. —Richard Rohr

Tuesday
Has the Church become mechanistic like so many other world systems? Is it “stuck in a rut,” and if so, can it find its way out of the rut into a new future? —Ilia Delio

Wednesday
Founders are typically generous, visionary, bold, and creative, but the religions that ostensibly carry on their work often become the opposite: constricted, change-averse, nostalgic, fearful, obsessed with boundary maintenance, turf battles, and money. —Brian McLaren

Thursday
Spiritual outbursts almost always precede real reform. Might spiritual discontent be today’s prophetic edge, needling institutions to listen, to change, to be more responsive and relevant? —Diana Butler Bass

Friday
The gospel always wants to dislodge itself from the places where it gets stuck and embedded in the narrow, cultural structure. So, we all take steps to free it, find our way, again and again, to an expansive tolerance and a high reverence for paradox. We need to allow the Church to become a movement again. —Gregory Boyle

Creating a Congregational Manifesto

Minister, entrepreneur, and author Cameron Trimble encourages churches seeking new life to create a “congregational manifesto.” Such a practice helps congregations—and other community groups or families—come to terms with what their core beliefs, values, and hopes really are—and to participate with God in living them out. Trimble suggests discerning the following questions in community:

Start by writing down your congregation’s core values. What are the values that define how you want to live together and make decisions? Kindness? Integrity? Ingenuity? . . . Honesty? . . .
Next, write a list of strengths you observe in your church. Think about the moments in your history that make you the most proud. Have you taken courageous stands for justice? . . .
Now write down your passions. What ministries rally the most people? Which have endured the longest?
Next, write down what concerns you, as a congregation, have for your community. What breaks your heart? What makes you want to rise up in action and change it? . . .
Now write down what shared experiences have shaped you. Think about times you came together and did something great. Think of times when a death in the congregation shook you to the core. Think of times of conflict. What failures have made you stronger? Think of the generations who have attended and where they are now because of the church. . . .

Start to group these into themes. . . . Create short statements that you then develop into a single paragraph. Or, you might write out a poem. Or, you can create a statement.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Reference:
Cameron Trimble, Piloting Church: Helping Your Congregation Take Flight (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2019), 44.

Explore Further. . .

Listen to Jacqui Lewis interview Civil Rights movement icon Ruby Sales on Love. Period.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Jenna Keiper, Untitled Church I (detail), 2020, photograph, New Mexico, used with permission. Toni Frissell, Minnie Burden, barefoot, riding a horse (detail), 1964, photograph, Library of Congress, public domain. Jenna Keiper, Untitled Window (detail), 2020, photograph, New Mexico, used with permission. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Image inspiration: The left and right photos are of stone monuments: solid and unmoving. Between them the fresh energy and movement of a horse and rider breathe life into this trio of images. How can we stay connected to the energetic, movement origins of our religions?

Prayer for our community:

God, Lord of all creation, lover of life and of everything, please help us to love in our very small way what You love infinitely and everywhere. We thank You that we can offer just this one prayer and that will be more than enough, because in reality every thing and every one is connected, and nothing stands alone. To pray for one part is really to pray for the whole, and so we do. Help us each day to stand for love, for healing, for the good, for the diverse unity of the Body of Christ and all creation, because we know this is what You desire: as Jesus prayed, that all may be one. We offer our prayer together with all the holy names of God, we offer our prayer together with Christ, our Lord, Amen.

Listen to the prayer.

A Movement of Inclusion

Diana Butler Bass writes of the diversity of Christianity’s spiritual movements, the well-known and the less so. She lists some that are known to many:

The Benedictine renewal, the Franciscan movement, the Brethren of the Common Life, the Protestant Reformation, the Anabaptist community, the Methodist and evangelical revival, the Great Awakening, the Oxford movement, the Pentecostal revival. Others, I suspect, are remembered by no grand title. . . .

No historian can even guess how many small movements of individuals or congregations have existed in the past, movements made up of those who experienced God in new ways that remade their lives and communities without much notice or credit. Some movements lasted only a short time and were local events; others lasted decades or centuries and spread throughout Christendom. Such things are part of the long historical process of renewing faith. How would any religious tradition stay alive over hundreds or thousands of years if not for the questions of discontent and the creativity brought forth by longing? [1]

Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle, the founder of Homeboy Industries, the world’s largest gang intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry program, writes of his hope for the continued movement of the Church towards greater love and inclusion:

My friend Mary Rakow says, “The Church is always trying to come to us from the future.” So, we need to allow it. Jesus lived, breathed, and embodied a boundary-subverting inclusion. If it’s inclusive, and wildly so, then you know you’re warm. You are close to it. Nothing is excluded except excluding. . . .

We are always hopeful that the Church will see its Copernican Moment, when it decides that its center is not located in Europe, in white males, in mandatory celibacy. We all hope against hope that it will become the “wonderful adventure” that Pope Francis envisions. Church as movement and not decorative institution. . . .

The gospel always wants to dislodge itself from the places where it gets stuck and embedded in the narrow, cultural structure. So, we all take steps to free it, find our way, again and again, to an expansive tolerance and a high reverence for paradox. We need to allow the Church to become a movement again. Jesus says if you’re not gathering, you’re scattering [see Matthew 12:30]. We either pull people in or push people out. We attract in the same way Jesus did. . . .

The disciples aren’t sent out to create an institution fortified by uniformity, just another tribe highly defended against all outside forces. Certainly, Western Christianity goofed some things up: it fostered separateness; it bet all its money on the “sin” horse; and it relied so heavily on external religious exercises. Clearly, we are being propelled into the world to cultivate a movement whose ventilating force is an extravagant tenderness. The disciples didn’t leave Jesus’ side with a fully memorized set of beliefs. Rather, theirs was a loving way of life that had become the air they breathed, anchored in contemplation and fully dedicated to kinship as its goal. [2]

References:
[1] Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (New York: HarperOne, 2012), 89–90.

[2] Gregory Boyle, The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2021), 128, 134, 137, 140.

Explore Further. . .

Read Liz Theoharis of the Poor People’s Campaign on Jesus’ solidarity with the marginalized.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

Whenever I need companions on the Way, they were there, never too early and never too late. Sometimes my companions were people, sometimes books, sometimes beautiful places, such as restful gardens. God’s love is there leading me onward. The most amazing companion is God teaching me through my imagination.
—Carole H.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Change Is Never Comfortable

Father Richard writes about the role of prophets and priests in the process of collective transformation. Prophets remove our illusions and help us see reality clearly, which for those of us in settled institutions often feels like a loss of security. Priests lead us on a path of returning to meaning and transcendence:

The role of the prophet is to direct and legitimate necessary deconstruction. The prophet’s path is of descent, and is never popular, nor easy. It is about letting go of illusion and toppling false gods. The prophets are often killed.

True priests talk of union, communion, love, transcendence, religion, connecting this world and the next world, and giving back a coherent world of meaning. Everybody usually likes the priests and they quickly become established and comfortable in almost all cultures.

But we’ve had too much priesthood and not nearly enough prophecy, in my humble opinion. The result has often been religion for religion’s sake. How can we envision a new world when we have never fallen away from the old? [1]

Religious scholar Diana Butler Bass writes of Christianity’s tension between the pastoral and the prophetic when it comes to upholding the institutional status quo:

Religious faiths struggle between the pastoral and the prophetic, comfort and agitation. In a very real way, institutions are inherently pastoral—they seek to maintain those things that give comfort by baptizing shared values and virtues of a community. They reinforce the way things are (or were) through appeals to divine or supernatural order. They are always slow to change. Institutions resist prophets. Prophets question. They push for things to be different. They push people to behave better toward one another. They want change.

The history of Christianity can be told as a story of the tension between order and prophecy. Jesus came as a prophet, one who challenged and transformed Judaism. A charismatic community grew up around his teachings and eventually formed into the church. The church organized, and then became an institution. The institution provided guidance and meaning for many millions. And then it became guarded, protective of the power and wealth it garnered, the influence it wielded, and [the] salvation it alone provided.

Many of the people in the church did not seem to notice, but some did. What the church taught seemed at odds with their experience of life or God. . . . They questioned the way things were done. They experimented with new ideas and spiritual practices. . . . They bent the rules and often broke them. The established church typically ignored them, sometimes tolerated them, often branded them heretics, tried to control them, and occasionally killed them. When enough people joined the ranks of the discontented, the institutional church had to pay attention. In the process, and sometimes unintentionally, the church opened itself up for genuine change and renewal. . . .

Organized religion fears such outbursts; but spiritual outbursts almost always precede real reform. Might spiritual discontent be today’s prophetic edge, needling institutions to listen, to change, to be more responsive and relevant? [2]

References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2001, 2020), 196. [2]

Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (New York: HarperOne, 2012), 88–89, 91.

Explore Further. . .

Read Nahum Ward-Lev on the positive vision of the Hebrew prophets.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

An Opportunity for Transformation

Author and CAC teacher Brian McLaren has spent decades thinking about change in the church and why so many resist it. Here he summarizes what often happens to our religious institutions once they lose their original purpose:

The pattern is predictable. Founders are typically generous, visionary, bold, and creative, but the religions that ostensibly carry on their work often become the opposite: constricted, change-averse, nostalgic, fearful, obsessed with boundary maintenance, turf battles, and money. Instead of greeting the world with open arms as their founders did, their successors stand guard with clenched fists. Instead of empowering others as their founders did, they hoard power. Instead of defying tradition and unleashing moral imagination as their founders did, they impose tradition and refuse to think outside the lines. A religion that cuts itself off from the example of its founder while still bearing the founder’s name often becomes little more than a chaplaincy for other ideologies, offering its services to the highest bidder. No wonder so many religious folks today wear down, burn out, and opt out.

And no wonder more and more of us who are Christians by birth, by choice, or both find ourselves shaking our heads and asking, “What happened to Christianity? What happened to Jesus and his beautiful message?” [1]

Minister, entrepreneur, and author Cameron Trimble sees the decline of church structures as an opportunity to ask questions that matter, to rediscover and renew our faith:

What is church really about? I’ve always understood the church as being a community with a shared story in our scriptures, which binds us together. Church is about weaving relationships together so that life for all of us is more deeply rooted in Love. Today, I would offer that the church also offers a platform to work together to build a world that acts and advocates for the common good of all of us. We are warriors, lovers, peacemakers, protectors, prophets, thinkers, and dreamers who gather together to celebrate our heritage as children of God. At the same time, we are fearlessly willing to stand up and stand in for those our culture might oppress. When we live consciously aware of our power to shape our world for good, we live lives of meaning. We are our own most fully human and fully sacred expressions. We are whole. . . .

We have an opportunity in this moment of our great transformation. We can approach this time as survivors, desperately clinging to our structures and ways of being. Or, we can see ourselves as pioneers, setting out in the face of the unknown to discover new ways to live faith-filled lives. The inevitable decline of our structures gives us the chance to let go of what might hold us back from that adventure. Nothing today will be the same ten years from now. Why not architect the kind of faith movement we want to see twenty-to-fifty years from now? What do we have to lose? [2]

References:
[1] Brian D. McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World’s Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian (New York: Convergent, 2016), 5–6.

[2] Cameron Trimble, Piloting Church: Helping Your Congregation Take Flight (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2019), 132.

Explore Further. . .

Read Stephanie Spellers on the opportunities for the church amidst unraveling and change.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

A relative was recently diagnosed with aggressive cancer. It is inoperable and terminal. This person’s faith and love allow him to be vulnerable enough to share this with family and friends. A pattern of communication is set up in a way we can support him, learn from him, and practice vulnerability in all our lives. What a sacred gift.
—Barb F.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Opening Up the Machine

For centuries the Church has operated like a well-oiled machine, but the oil is running low and the machine is running down. —Ilia Delio

Franciscan writer Ilia Delio asks whether the Church is stuck in a “machine” stage of change. (To learn more about these stages, read Father Richard’s description of the “Five M’s”—human, movement, machine, monument, and memory—in Sunday’s meditation.)

With the rise of modern science, the world machine became the dominant metaphor of the modern era, and the Church adapted its medieval cosmology to the new mechanistic paradigm. . . . Has the Church become mechanistic like so many other world systems? Is it “stuck in a rut,” and if so, can it find its way out of the rut into a new future? Jesus lived with imagination, and he preached with imagination: “Imagine a small mustard seed,” he said. “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you” (Luke 17:6). He aimed to instill imagination in his disciples so they could think the unthinkable and do the incredible. Similarly, it is helpful to imagine the Church in a new way that enkindles us to think the unthinkable and do the incredible. [1]

Delio writes about open systems, like those found in the natural world, as a model for the Church to reconnect with the dynamism of the gospel. Here she writes about her own call as a religious sister to follow where God was leading:

I had come to a point of inner freedom where I knew God was calling me to do new things; thus, I was impelled to step out of the comforts of institutional life and, with another Sister, take the risk of living religious life in a new way. I think the term open system best describes our way of life. We live in a working-class neighborhood in DC and financially support ourselves (we pay taxes); if we don’t work, we don’t eat. We discuss the aims of the community together; we try to share responsibilities for the community as much as possible; we pray and play as community, but we respect the autonomy of each person and the work of the Spirit in each life. . . . An open-systems way of life works best on shared vision and dialogue and least on control and lack of communication. Trust is an essential factor, but trust requires kenosis, emptying oneself of control and power, and making space for the other to enter in. . . . An open-systems community, like the physical world itself, is based on relationships, not roles or duties but bonds of friendship, sisterhood (or brotherhood), respect, charity, forgiveness, and justice. Where these values are active and alive, life evolves toward richer, more creative forms, never losing sight that wholeness—catholicity—is at the heart of it. [2]

Reference:
[1] Ilia Delio, Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015), 117, 118,119.

[2] Delio, Making All Things New, 124–125.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on a flatter and more inclusive church.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Rediscovering the “Jesus Movement”

Yesterday’s meditation outlined a pattern of change based on what Father Richard calls the “Five M’s”: human, movement, machine, monument, and memory. Today Father Richard reflects on examples of individuals who were inspired by the “Jesus movement” to transform the “machines and monuments” in their lives.

Sometimes machine and monument people can be recaptured by the vision of the human and the movement. In the CAC’s early years, we were often visited by our friend Frank, who worked for the nuclear test site outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. In fact, Frank headed the operation for a number of years—and then dared, by the grace of the gospel, to call it into question. He even joined me once as we practiced civil disobedience at the test site. I will never forget seeing him walk toward me with a half-worried half-smile on his face. “I have trusted your teaching all these years. Now I have to trust where it has led me,” he said. We stood together as his former employees drove by and gave less-than-flattering gestures to their old boss. I was humbled and awed by such courage and humility. He had let go of his secure monument through an encounter with the man Jesus and the vision of the peace movement.

It’s hard and very rare to call your own job into question. When Jesus called his disciples, he also called them away from their jobs, and their families too (see Matthew 4:22). Of course, jobs and families are not bad things. But Jesus called them to leave their nets, because as long as anyone is tied to job security, there are a lot of things they cannot see and cannot say. This is one of the great recurring disadvantages of clergy earning their salary from the church, and perhaps why Saint Francis did not want us to be ordained priests. We tend to think and say whatever won’t undermine the company or brand.

Father Richard points to St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) as an example of how to make holistic change:

Francis of Assisi offers us a model of transformation because he did not attack the monuments or machines directly but went out to the edge and did it better. For his inspiration, Francis went back to the original dynamism and nonviolent style of Jesus the man.

Assisi is surrounded by city walls. Inside those walls are the cathedral and the established churches, all of which are good. That’s where Francis first heard the gospel and fell in love with Jesus. But then he quietly went outside the walls and rebuilt some old ruins called San Damiano and the Portiuncula. He wasn’t telling the others they were doing it wrong. He just gently and lovingly tried to do it better. I think that’s true reconstruction. Remember, the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. That might be a perfect motto for all reconstructive work. It does not destroy machines or monuments but reinvigorates them with new energy and form.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2001, 2020), 95–98.

Explore Further. . .

Read Rosemary and Rachel Harding on the spirituality of the Black Freedom movement.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

I was widowed at the age of 34, after only 9 years of marriage. I realized one day that I was using all my energy to avoid the pain I was afraid to feel. One day in my desperation I laid down and let it flow through me. As I cried I sensed a downward spiral, but suddenly there was a stop. At that moment God caught me. I knew I would still live with my pain but that with my faith in God I will survive what life brings.
—Sara L.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The Five M’s

In The Wisdom Pattern, Father Richard summarizes five stages of change that have taken place historically in religious and cultural institutions. He calls these stages the “Five M’s”: human, movement, machine, monument, and memory. This week we explore these stages as inspiration for spiritual renewal in our faith communities and our lives.

It seems that many great things in history start with a single human being. If a person says something full of life that names reality well, the message often moves to the second stage of becoming a movement. That’s the period of greatest energy. The church is at its greatest vitality as the “Jesus Movement,” and the institution is merely the vehicle for that movement. The movement stage is always very exciting, creative, and also risky.

It’s risky because God’s movement in history is larger than any denomination, any culture, or any tradition’s ability to verbalize it. We feel out of control in this stage, and yet why would anybody want it to be anything less? Would we respect and love a God that we could control? I don’t think so! Yet we move rather quickly out and beyond the risky movement stage to the machine stage. This is predictable and understandable.

The institutional or machine stage of a movement will necessarily be a less-alive manifestation. This is not bad, although it is always surprising for those who see church as an end in itself, instead of merely a vehicle for the original vision. We need “the less noble” parts of the Body to keep us all growing toward love (1 Corinthians 12:22–24). There is no other way; but when we don’t realize a machine’s limited capacities, we try to make it into something more than it is. We make it a monument, a closed system operating inside of its own, often self-serving, logic. By then, it’s very hard to take risks for God or for gospel values.

Eventually this monument and its maintenance and self-preservation become ends in themselves. It is easy just to step on board and worship at a monument without ever knowing why or longing for God ourselves. At this point, we have jumped over the human and movement stages and have become what authors Mark Gibbs and T. Ralph Morton called “God’s frozen people.” [1] There is no hint of knowing that we are beloved by God and invited to an inner journey. In this state, religion is merely an excuse to remain unconscious, holding on to a memory of something that must once have been a great adventure. Now religion is no longer life itself, but actually a substitute for life or, worse, an avoidance of life. The secret is to know how to keep in touch with the human and movement stages without being naïve about the necessity of some machines and the inevitability of those who love monuments. We must also be honest: all of us love monuments when they are monuments to our human, our movement, or our machine.

References:
[1] Mark Gibbs and T. Ralph Morton, God’s Frozen People (London: Collins, 1964).

Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2001, 2020), 92–95.

Explore Further. . .

Read Brian McLaren on Christianity as a movement of love.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The Five M’s: Weekly Summary

A Movement of Inclusion

Change Is Never Comfortable

An Opportunity for Transformation

Opening Up the Machine

Rediscovering the “Jesus Movement”

The Five M’s

Category Archive

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Stay connected

explore more

The Five M’s: Weekly Summary

A Movement of Inclusion

Change Is Never Comfortable

An Opportunity for Transformation

Opening Up the Machine

Rediscovering the “Jesus Movement”

The Five M’s

Category Archive

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