Should the “church meeting” or the “church community” take priority at the outset? (Part 2 – A “community led” model)

This post is part of a number I'm doing for the Radstock Ministries blog, which can be found here.

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COMMUNITY-LED CHURCH PLANTS:

Under this approach, the church planting team focus on community formation through strengthening relationships within the team, and building new connections with the community they seek to reach. Their concern is to commend the depth and quality of Christian relationships to the watching world, and to listen to the new culture before establishing a public meeting (if ever).

Again, this approach has a number of immediate positives:

• Creates a strong & immediate emphasis on relationship building: The church plant is established with a culture that is all about mission through relationship building (as opposed to a “hold a meeting and they will come” approach). The business of mission is more likely to be understood as a deliberate pattern of life rather than a something limited to times in the week.
• Energies are devoted to relationships which then act as a pathway into Christian community. In the early days (when resources are limited) energies can be given over to spending time with other Christians (e.g. house church, team bible study and prayer,…).
• Builds a strong awareness of local culture before committing to forms/styles of public meeting and teaching. Delaying setting up a meeting, delays the first impression until it can be more tailored to the context.

However, this approach also has potential limitations:

• Delays creating a potentially important pathway into Christian community: In many (sub)cultures, a church meeting remains an normal/acceptable thing to do, and an easy way, low commitment way to “check out” a new church plant. Likewise, it delays “flushing out” Christians in the community the planters seek to reach.
• The danger of intensity: A small group of people who know each other well, and share important common features (e.g. a lifestyle shaped by the gospel, middle class accents, everyone in work…) can be intimidating for newcomers. A public meeting provides a degree of distance and freedom to opt in or opt out. A private gathering does not.

These portraits of meeting-led and community-led plants are simplistic (even caricatured) to emphasise the contrasts. They do I hope serve to highlight some of the strengths and weaknesses of the two extremes.

The question then is: How do you establish a right balance in a particular context?

Should the “church meeting” or the “church community” take priority at the outset? (Part 1 – A “meeting led” model)

This post is on the Radstock ministries blog here.

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What should be the focus in planting a new local church? Is establishing a church meeting the best strategy? Or are there contexts where a church planting team would be wise to focus on to building the church community in other ways?

In a way, it’s a “chicken and egg” kind of question. A meeting helps establish community (as people gather together). A community will inevitably meet (to sit together under God’s word and share lives). So it might seem strange to ask “what should a church plant focus on?”. But at a time when resources are often stretched, the team’s focus needs to be clear and deliberate. Where is prayer and energy best devoted?

I would suggest that the “culture gap” between the church planters and the community into which they plant is the key determinant of whether to focus on a meeting or community building.

To help make the point, here are two (intentionally polar and slightly caricatured) examples:

MEETING-LED CHURCH PLANTS:

With an undergirding of prayer, this church plant’s immediate focus is to establish a church meeting (which then gives the scope of the church community). In all likelihood the “sent church” closely resembles it’s sending church in the way that it meets.

This approach has a number of immediate positives…

• The public meeting creates an immediate pathway into the new Christian community. Local people familiar with the new churches meeting (or with an independently awakened spiritual interest) can simply walk into the meeting and encounter Christian community from day one!
• The public meeting may bring in relationally connected Christians. Advertising may bring in like-minded Christians from the area who were unknown to the team, and who might join the church! Local Christians bring deeper more longstanding relationships with the locals than any of the planting team possess.
• A public meeting can be quick to establish: Since new meetings are often based upon the forms and practices of the sending church, they are often quick to establish, and the “sent” planting team is immediately familiar with what’s going on.

However, meeting-led church plants are not without potential limitations…

• The danger of focussing on the meeting to the exclusion of other priorities: The planting team typically lack the resources that the larger sending church. Valuable time and energy can be drawn away from friendships and (pre)evangelism to meet the practical requirements of a public meeting.
• The difficulty of contextualising the meeting: You only get one chance to make a first impression. Setting up a meeting after little contact with local community means it can be hard to contextualise to the new setting. Subsequent review and change by the team has to do battle with inertia and habit (on the part of the church planters). In the worst case, the first locals to experience the new meeting may go away thinking the church doesn’t “get people like them”, share that impression with others putting them off, and may be slow to give the church a second chance 6 months later when the church has changed to be better contextualised.
• The risk of being job-led rather than gift-led: The desire to reflect the sending churches practices can mean that less attention is paid to team members’ God-given gifts and more “we think this job needs to be done, someone will have to do it”.

(Continued...)

Is there anything wrong with short-selling? - Stewardship and the importance of capital being both productive & risk-bearing (2)

Following on from a previous post, I want to quickly look at how the Bible addresses the ethics of short selling for investment purposes. What is the Christian response to short selling? Amidst all the commentary on the credit crunch, I'm yet to read a thought-through biblical discussion of the subject. Hopefully this will raise some fruitful questions...

Stewardship – ordering creation for the glory of God

The Bible doesn’t talk explicitly about short-selling, and there are few analogies for borrowing and selling what you do not own! Generally investment and the deployment of capital (of whatever kind) would come under the wider priority of stewardship – mankind is tasked by God to “work and take care of” creation (Gen 2v15), to order the world around us such that - by our efforts – God is glorified. It is clear from the parable of the talents and elsewhere that the reference point for assessing the success of this work of stewardship is the return of Christ.

Without wanting to press the individual statements of the parable too hard, the concept of “reaping what you did not sow” is clearly viewed negatively. Within stewardship there would seem to be a connection between "sowing" (i.e. the productive deployment of capital whether relational, financial, labour,…) and the reaping of it’s fruits (i.e. investment returns of whatever kind).

Is short-selling stewardship?

I want to suggest that short-selling is effectively “selling other investors a dummy”. Other market participants who would otherwise deploy productive risk-bearing capital unwittingly have that capital diverted into simply risk-bearing capital (without the accompanying productivity).

What goes on if I short sell shares in a company? Let’s trace it through...:

• Short-seller borrows 10% of ShoeCo from Investor A (who is a long term investor in the company. They have intentionally deployed their capital for the production of high quality shoes that will be a blessing to their wearers, provide a valuable outlet for the skills and giftings of leather workers and designers,…).
  
• Our short-seller sells the borrowed shares “short” to Investor B (who wants to buy the shares in order to deploy their capital into ShoeCo for the same reason).

What has really happened?

Investors across the market now think they own 110% of ShoeCo (we might think of investors A and B both owning "the same" 10%). That is only possibly because Short seller economically owns “minus 10%” and has created a corresponding synthetic long position in the market.

Effectively, our short-seller has replicated the economic risks and rewards of deploying risk-bearing capital productively into ShoeCo, but without any of the accompanying productive benefits (more shoes being made, talents being put to work,…).

Investors have been sold a dummy! Instead of deploying productive, risk-bearing capital, some of them merely think they have! They are arguably “reaping what they did not sow” (because there has been no sowing thanks to the facilitating actions of the short-seller). Capital has been diverted away from being productively put to work. (The two parties might just as well be spread-betting on the football, except the information they are acting on is financial/commercial rather than sport-based).

To make the point, let’s (simplistically) think about what would have happened if the short-seller hadn’t been a market participant:

Alternative 1:

Suppose investor A isn’t willing to sell to Investor B at a price they both like (let’s ignore other market participants to make life easier). Investor B has capital to deploy, and (let’s say) he likes Shoes…

• Maybe he buys shares in SneakerCo (thereby releasing an existing investor in SneakerCo to deploy their capital productively elsewhere).
  
• Maybe Investor B likes the supply chain that includes ShoeCo and so (unable to invest in ShoeCo at the right price) he buys shares in LeatherCo instead (ShoeCo’s main supplier).
  
• Maybe Investor B puts his capital to risk productively by investing in a shoe start-up with a talented young entrepreneur.
  

Whichever the outcome, Investor B’s capital is deployed in a way that is both risk-bearing and productive. There is some “sowing” of capital going on.

Alternative 2:

Investors A and B are able to agree on a price for 10% of ShoeCo’s shares. Investor A takes the proceeds and puts them to work in much the same way as Investor B in the previous alternative.

Without the presence of the short-seller, whatever the outcome, capital is deployed in a way that is both risk-bearing and productive. Man’s God-given mandate to fill and subdue, work and take care of creation is being furthered.

So the diverting of risk-bearing capital away from fulfilling the creation mandate would seem to be the Biblical grounds for objecting to short-selling. (I put my hand-up and recognise this a crude first pass at the question!).

Is short-selling facilitating stewardship?

Advocates of a free-market economy may argue that short-sellers grease the wheels. They help make the market more efficient by increasing liquidity, and enabling the views of more market participants to be reflected in the market price. Having the ability to short-sell allows an investor who sees a share as over-priced to actively express that view and thereby depress the price (by increasing supply of the shares). Otherwise, the same investor is obliged to sit on the side lines, and assume financial risk in some other way (hopefully productively).

To put that defence, it seems to me you would need to be able to show that:

• short-selling activity results in a more effective allocation of risk-bearing and productive capital than would otherwise be the case. (That may be true)
  

And

• that the benefits of heightened efficiency more than outweigh the “phantom capital” created in the economy by “selling dummies” to other potential investors. (I think that’s probably a tough case to make).

So on that basis, I would raise questions about naked short selling. Not because is bank-robbery. Not because the people who do it are necessarily immoral (although those who combine short-selling with rumour-mongering may act that way - see my previous post). In isolation, short-selling is a distraction from the creation mandate. It does not serve to bless, order or create.

(Aside:

I’m talking here purely about outright short positions.

I think it’s possible to put an argument that option-based hedging is OK (to the extent that general limited liability investment in shares and insurance are both OK). I would make that case because productive economic risk taking is being passed between market participants in a zero-sum game (i.e. there is no outcome where synthetic capital is being created and capital is put to work without being economically productive).

I think on this basis relative value trading is a grey area – you could put a case for it being a re-allocation of capital within the system (from the shorted asset to the long asset)… But it doesn't feel like a great case. Something to think more about…)