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Subterranean: Why the Future of the Church Is Rootedness
The landscape of Christian spirituality in the West is no longer lush with green grass and wild flowers blooming. Instead, across the country we find dry terrain where churches no longer can expect interested seekers--yet most of our solutions for addressing this predicament link to anxiety around our performance and personality. Rather than going back to the boardroom to cook up new techniques for a trendier church, let's ask more meaningfully rooted questions. Do we know how to be present in our neighborhoods? Do we know how to be present in community? Do we know how to be present to the in-breaking kingdom of God? There is a growing groundswell discovering that we have become uprooted and detached from each other in the way we express being the church. We need a subterranean movement that plunges below the surface into a way of being the people of God that carries an unwavering incarnational creed. Dan White Jr. uses crisp criticism, narrative theology, and tangible practices to uncover a hopeful pathway for being radically rooted in God's world. ""Dan White has penned a well-written, distinctly prophetic book on incarnational mission. In it he calls us to a life beyond the standard cultural obsessions and to a faithfulness that is rendered through rootedness, abiding, witness, and service. A welcome addition to the books on prophetic missionality."" --Alan Hirsch, author and activist ""For too long the church has caved in to the desires of a world addicted to self-destructive speed and geographic displacement. But no longer, says White. God is seeking to re-place his people, to invite us into the radical act of stopping in a restless world, to be deeply rooted, to be witnesses to the life our world could experience if it truly surrendered to Christ. This inspiring and practical guide will help you in that monumental endeavor."" --Michael Frost, author, The Body of Christ in an Age of Disengagement ""Want a sneak peak into the future of the church in North America? Read this book. Better yet, want to join in this bold new future? Join with others and create local practices as inspired by this incredible resource. Rooted in courageous practice, White has written a pioneering guide that pinpoints the cancerous defaults of the contemporary church, while also casting a practical vision for how we can all join in God's abundant future."" --Tim Soerens, coauthor of The New How Neighborhood Churches Are Transforming Mission, Discipleship, and Community ""The bias toward up is powerful in church culture. As leaders, we want to be up-and-comers and eventually at the top. If our grand vision isn't realized, we pull up stakes and move on. In this fine book, White makes an impassioned case for down. 'Up-rootedness' abstracts us, but 'rootedness'--in community, place, and the unfolding work of God--is the truly radical trajectory of the church. It's difficult to imagine a more important message."" --John Pattison, coauthor of Slow Church Dan White, Jr. co-planted Axiom Church when five families dove into the city of Syracuse, New York, to cultivate communities in diverse neighborhoods. He is also a church strategist with the V3 Movement, coaching cohorts from around the country through an eighteen-month missional training system. Finally, he is also cofounder of the Praxis Gathering. Dan finds deep delight in dwelling around the table with good coffee and a good conversation. He blogs at danwhitejr.com.
196 pages, Hardcover
First published August 24, 2015
17 people are currently reading
118 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 23, 2022
“There is a way to be meaningful Jesus communities on God’s earth that our ‘success’ is not awaking (10).” Contemporary church culture has focused more on what “works” than on what humanizes. Immersed in a culture that values size, information, and speed, the local church in the West often substitutes stage presence for community presence, spiritual knowledge for spiritual practices, and results for patience. This not only reflects our culture; it feeds our egos – if we succeed by the culture’s metrics. But ask just about any pastor and you’ll discover that we pay for this success with our exhaustion and anxiety. White suggests that instead of an industrial church complex driven by market metrics, the future of the church is “rooted,” focused on fidelity, locality, and community. The future of the church is organic, not mechanic. It is simple, not complex.
The Church that Jesus started with his disciples had a relational infrastructure that ministered the gospel to the relational brokenness of their worlds. It’s soil rather than spreadsheets that are needed to grow deep roots. Shifting means we must “confront our contemporary assumptions of what it means to be a significant church (12).” Ironically, in order to produce Kingdom fruit we may have to let go of our need to be significant and make an impact. We have to shed the need for applause both individually and corporately. Can we do that? What do we lose if we don’t? Are we willing to give up the power that comes with attention?
My takeaways from White’s book are that
1. Church begins with the neighborhood, not the church service.
2. Kingdom growth is slow and requires patience. That’s ok.
3. This takes a different kind of leader than what we’ve been producing.
(In David Fitch’s Afterword he also mentions these 3 things.)
Let me go a bit deeper.
Like Jesus, our discipleship is meant to happen in the places where life happens. Yet our method of training is to “remove people in order to teach and train” them (37), and in the process we divorce information from immersion. When we look to Jesus as an example, it’s clear that his message was communicated not only in the content of his teaching, but in his way of teaching. His methods illustrated his message (46). It’s worth asking what our modern methods communicate about what we believe concerning Jesus and his Kingdom. What does our excessive focus on size, stage and speed teach others? “We are shaped by the techniques we employ (36).”
A starting point is to think of the local church in terms of fidelity, locality, and community. Each of these traits requires intentionality, and each can produce fruit and kingdom multiplication, and yet a ministry centered on fidelity, locality, and community will stand in stark contrast with the contemporary church industrial complex.
Fidelity refers to allegiance to Jesus and one another. The enemy of fidelity is a “personal relationship with God,” where “faith becomes transactional, not covenantal (78).” Fidelity to Jesus creates a community in contrast with the kingdoms and empires of the world. To see that such fidelity bears fruit, one only needs to look at churches that grow under persecution and rejection. It’s their faithfulness to Jesus that produces fruit, not their programs or events. Perhaps we undervalue the power of fidelity in western culture.
By locality, White means that we focus on what God’s doing in the neighborhood more than on what he’s doing in the church building. God is always local, and we begin by listening and asking, “What is here? Who is here? (94)” “Early Christian communities were identified by their location, clearly noticeable as Paul greets church’s meeting in a particular home grated to a particular place (93).” The difficulty is that the neighborhood is messier than the church meeting. For one thing, what’s happening in the neighborhood is more difficult to measure than what’s happening in the building. And yet in Luke 17:20, Jesus says that the Kingdom of God doesn’t come with things that can be observed. In other words, our traditional church metrics (attendance, budgets) do little to reveal what is actually happening in the Kingdom. Second, the neighborhood will challenge and develop our leadership skills in ways that are different from conventional church leadership. Third, focusing on the neighborhood limits our ministry to being with people. If ministry in the western church largely takes its cues from corporate business and/or the entertainment industry, ministry in the neighborhood is more like gardening. Listening, patience, and hospitality are key virtues to cultivate ministry in the neighborhood. “The renewal of our churches will not start on stages, it will start around our tables (143).”
“A church with faithful qualities of fruits of the Spirit simply does not go viral, and I’m not sure these virtues lead to rapid expansion.” (50) “Are we OK with God moving slowly? (52)” “Does God have to move fast for God to be moving? (53)” Too often our growth outpaces our maturity. The result is always damage to the mission. “Patience makes space for people as organisms, not machines, and makes space for God as mysterious, not predictable.” “The cultivation of community is head-poundingly slow (55).”
The industrial church complex has largely replaced community with events. “The New Testament is not a record of big explosive event after big explosive event (122).” Rather, “the explosive quality of the gospel of Jesus was that Jews and Gentiles, women and men, slaves and free were being knit together to declare something with profound social implications. Former enemies were now sharing a meal, orbiting around the bread and wine of Jesus the Messiah (122-23).” There was very little “machinery” to hold this in place (123). The more complex our organizational structures and the more prolific our programs, the more difficult it will be to cultivate authentic community. Developing communities will require us to become organizational minimalists, yet this is difficult when we’ve discipled our congregations to be consumers of religious goods and services.
White finishes his section on community by describing what it looks like to partner with one another for the Kingdom. Partnership isn’t about control, but about availability. We partner by being available for one another, by recognizing the abundance that each of us brings to the table, about taking one another’s humanity seriously, and about “linger[ing] with people for who they are and where they are (145).” The biblical word for partnering is “fellowship.” Partnering is about belonging. “In any discipleship relationship, the content of what is learned is a bit less important than the relationship itself. It is prolonged presence that communicates what is essential (151).”
In Subterranean: Why the Future of the Church is Rootedness, White presents us with a different way to be the church, a new social order, a new way of being human that is centered on Jesus Christ and cultivates deep roots in the neighborhood. I believe that what White describes grows strong trees. The alternatives are just tumbleweeds.
The Church that Jesus started with his disciples had a relational infrastructure that ministered the gospel to the relational brokenness of their worlds. It’s soil rather than spreadsheets that are needed to grow deep roots. Shifting means we must “confront our contemporary assumptions of what it means to be a significant church (12).” Ironically, in order to produce Kingdom fruit we may have to let go of our need to be significant and make an impact. We have to shed the need for applause both individually and corporately. Can we do that? What do we lose if we don’t? Are we willing to give up the power that comes with attention?
My takeaways from White’s book are that
1. Church begins with the neighborhood, not the church service.
2. Kingdom growth is slow and requires patience. That’s ok.
3. This takes a different kind of leader than what we’ve been producing.
(In David Fitch’s Afterword he also mentions these 3 things.)
Let me go a bit deeper.
Like Jesus, our discipleship is meant to happen in the places where life happens. Yet our method of training is to “remove people in order to teach and train” them (37), and in the process we divorce information from immersion. When we look to Jesus as an example, it’s clear that his message was communicated not only in the content of his teaching, but in his way of teaching. His methods illustrated his message (46). It’s worth asking what our modern methods communicate about what we believe concerning Jesus and his Kingdom. What does our excessive focus on size, stage and speed teach others? “We are shaped by the techniques we employ (36).”
A starting point is to think of the local church in terms of fidelity, locality, and community. Each of these traits requires intentionality, and each can produce fruit and kingdom multiplication, and yet a ministry centered on fidelity, locality, and community will stand in stark contrast with the contemporary church industrial complex.
Fidelity refers to allegiance to Jesus and one another. The enemy of fidelity is a “personal relationship with God,” where “faith becomes transactional, not covenantal (78).” Fidelity to Jesus creates a community in contrast with the kingdoms and empires of the world. To see that such fidelity bears fruit, one only needs to look at churches that grow under persecution and rejection. It’s their faithfulness to Jesus that produces fruit, not their programs or events. Perhaps we undervalue the power of fidelity in western culture.
By locality, White means that we focus on what God’s doing in the neighborhood more than on what he’s doing in the church building. God is always local, and we begin by listening and asking, “What is here? Who is here? (94)” “Early Christian communities were identified by their location, clearly noticeable as Paul greets church’s meeting in a particular home grated to a particular place (93).” The difficulty is that the neighborhood is messier than the church meeting. For one thing, what’s happening in the neighborhood is more difficult to measure than what’s happening in the building. And yet in Luke 17:20, Jesus says that the Kingdom of God doesn’t come with things that can be observed. In other words, our traditional church metrics (attendance, budgets) do little to reveal what is actually happening in the Kingdom. Second, the neighborhood will challenge and develop our leadership skills in ways that are different from conventional church leadership. Third, focusing on the neighborhood limits our ministry to being with people. If ministry in the western church largely takes its cues from corporate business and/or the entertainment industry, ministry in the neighborhood is more like gardening. Listening, patience, and hospitality are key virtues to cultivate ministry in the neighborhood. “The renewal of our churches will not start on stages, it will start around our tables (143).”
“A church with faithful qualities of fruits of the Spirit simply does not go viral, and I’m not sure these virtues lead to rapid expansion.” (50) “Are we OK with God moving slowly? (52)” “Does God have to move fast for God to be moving? (53)” Too often our growth outpaces our maturity. The result is always damage to the mission. “Patience makes space for people as organisms, not machines, and makes space for God as mysterious, not predictable.” “The cultivation of community is head-poundingly slow (55).”
The industrial church complex has largely replaced community with events. “The New Testament is not a record of big explosive event after big explosive event (122).” Rather, “the explosive quality of the gospel of Jesus was that Jews and Gentiles, women and men, slaves and free were being knit together to declare something with profound social implications. Former enemies were now sharing a meal, orbiting around the bread and wine of Jesus the Messiah (122-23).” There was very little “machinery” to hold this in place (123). The more complex our organizational structures and the more prolific our programs, the more difficult it will be to cultivate authentic community. Developing communities will require us to become organizational minimalists, yet this is difficult when we’ve discipled our congregations to be consumers of religious goods and services.
White finishes his section on community by describing what it looks like to partner with one another for the Kingdom. Partnership isn’t about control, but about availability. We partner by being available for one another, by recognizing the abundance that each of us brings to the table, about taking one another’s humanity seriously, and about “linger[ing] with people for who they are and where they are (145).” The biblical word for partnering is “fellowship.” Partnering is about belonging. “In any discipleship relationship, the content of what is learned is a bit less important than the relationship itself. It is prolonged presence that communicates what is essential (151).”
In Subterranean: Why the Future of the Church is Rootedness, White presents us with a different way to be the church, a new social order, a new way of being human that is centered on Jesus Christ and cultivates deep roots in the neighborhood. I believe that what White describes grows strong trees. The alternatives are just tumbleweeds.
April 3, 2023
Rootedness would have been a better title
I found the vocabulary of this book difficult to embrace, but the ideas are important. The plant metaphor takes some getting used to, and doesn’t seem dynamic enough for what new life means. Stability is a long established value of the Benedictines. This book seems like a Protestant take on it.
I found the vocabulary of this book difficult to embrace, but the ideas are important. The plant metaphor takes some getting used to, and doesn’t seem dynamic enough for what new life means. Stability is a long established value of the Benedictines. This book seems like a Protestant take on it.
May 9, 2016
Solid challenge to the church
This was a very good and challenging read. It pushes back against the mega church and church growth mentality many pastors and leaders have focused on and turns our attention back to a grassroots Jesus movement in our neighborhoods. Explosive growth is neither the norm, nor the goal of the church. Our metrics for success have in many ways been in the wrong places. This book points the focus back to Jesus and His call to impact where your church is placed in deep and meaningful ways.
While thoroughly Biblical and practical, I did find that there was an under emphasis placed on church gatherings. This is done almost to the point of making me feel guilty to spending time preparing for my weekly sermons. While the church should be missional and rooted in their neighborhood, we are also called to preach expositional sermons, worship corporately, train, equip, serve, disciple and send. So there should be both and inward and outward focus to the church (ala Galatians 6:10; Ephesians 4:11-13; Colossians 3:15-17).
This however is a minor critique as I found much more to be positive about than negative. I was encouraged, challenged, and love the church even more because of this book! Thank you!
This was a very good and challenging read. It pushes back against the mega church and church growth mentality many pastors and leaders have focused on and turns our attention back to a grassroots Jesus movement in our neighborhoods. Explosive growth is neither the norm, nor the goal of the church. Our metrics for success have in many ways been in the wrong places. This book points the focus back to Jesus and His call to impact where your church is placed in deep and meaningful ways.
While thoroughly Biblical and practical, I did find that there was an under emphasis placed on church gatherings. This is done almost to the point of making me feel guilty to spending time preparing for my weekly sermons. While the church should be missional and rooted in their neighborhood, we are also called to preach expositional sermons, worship corporately, train, equip, serve, disciple and send. So there should be both and inward and outward focus to the church (ala Galatians 6:10; Ephesians 4:11-13; Colossians 3:15-17).
This however is a minor critique as I found much more to be positive about than negative. I was encouraged, challenged, and love the church even more because of this book! Thank you!
May 9, 2019
This book was amazing. I stumbled upon this book, almost by accident. I am so thankful that i did. Dan White Jr. has the unique ability to put into words the things I’ve been ruminating on for years. There has to be a another way, a better way of being the ‘church’. Subterranean cuts to the heart of the problem and offers something deeper, a rooted faith that equips us for the future.
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January 24, 2016Много хубава основна идея и нелошо изложение, с което нямам несъгласия. Въпреки това, поради някаква причина книгата не можа да ме грабне и четенето вървеше много тегаво. И аз не зная защо.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews