The Different Life

The People I Love

2010-05-12T09:28:00.000-07:00

I spent a couple of years in a serious depression. I was in it long enough that I didn't really know the difference anymore. I've tended towards depression for most of my adult life, but for most of that time I managed it, or at least thought I was managing it. I'm what you call a high functioning depressive. Even when it got really bad, I got work done. I met my obligations. I got out of bed every day. I knew there was hope. I just couldn't feel it. I didn't feel much at all.

My ability to function probably kept me, for many months, from getting the help I needed. Once I did, things started to change pretty dramatically. Emotions came back that I'd not truly felt for years. Bad news became easier to take. I found myself able to forgive some people and situations I'd been trying to forgive for years.

I found hope. I rediscovered the people I love.

I shared all this with my congregation. It felt risky. I felt exposed. It's not that I thought anyone would look down on me. This congregation is generally loving and accepting. I was more concerned about how this information would be interpreted by my critics.

When things go well in the church, ministers are often credited with that, even if they don't deserve it. And when things go badly, ministers often absorb most of the blame. For some people, the idea had already gained some traction that any problems we were having must have originated with me. I feared that some would take my admission of a personal problem as cause to dismiss every reform I'd ever tried to initiate. It would all be written off as a manifestation of my depression.

To be fair, the vast majority of people in our fellowship did not respond that way at all. There were a couple of people who had that "Now everything will be perfect" notion, as if the only thing that has ever stood in the way of our fulfilling God's will was me - a convenient if unrealistic conceptualization. But most people responded as I hoped they would. As friends. Friends who have often misunderstood me, but friends nonetheless.

It's been a number of months now, and what is changed is only as interesting as what has not changed. I feel love for people - people I knew, intellectually, that I loved, but couldn't feel it. I have more joy in my life, but I also get hurt more. I don't feel angry all the time, but in place of the anger there is sometimes pain. Problems and conflicts do not go away. I just look at them differently.

The failures of the modern church did not vaporize. They are still there. The prophet Jeremiah was probably a depressive. That didn't make him wrong about failures of his generation. It made people regard him as a serious pain in the ass, but it didn't make him wrong.

I find myself here, working alongside, and sometimes against, people I love, trying to fix what is broken, as best as I know how. With few exceptions, the Christians I've known are well meaning, loving, and moral people. But there has been a system failure. The church today is not formed or functioning in the way it was intended. We can do better, only by aspiring to Scripture and the ways of Christ, and not by adopting the methodology of another human church or by holding dogmatically to our previous experiences.

Like all families, we have our problems. Some among us regard me as one of the family therapists. Some regard me as one of the identified patients. In either case, the truth will set us free.

The Church as We Wish to Know It

2010-05-11T05:09:00.001-07:00

The most recent edition of Leadership Journal featured and article entitled, The "We" We Want to Be. It was a very thoughtful exploration of what spiritual maturity looks like from a collective church standpoint. I've given this a lot of thought over the years, and I find this to be one of the most challenging and frustrating aspects of ministry. To have any collective sense of direction or pattern of growth is nearly impossible in an organization so given to the societal norms of individualism.

If I, as a minister, or if we, as church leaders, attempt to establish a common direction or goal, it is generally rejected. Not necessarily in principle, but at least in practice. The goal may be accepted as healthy, Biblical, useful... it's just not my goal. So we all, as individuals, decide whether or not we will actively participate. I think many people would be offended by my even challenging this assumption, but how exactly is a body to function if all its parts determine their goals and purposes independently of one another?

People have accused me of being too controlling, and of trying to force my will upon the congregation. And I would be dishonest if I didn't acknowledge that I've as much capacity for selfish interest as anyone else. But I also have to conclude this assumption is largely rooted in the fact that I'm trying to craft a collective direction for people who are interested, primarily, in individual pursuits. That's not to say that we never come together to get things done. But I think we tend to do so on a very controlled and individualized basis.

So what, if any, "we" do we want to be? Some people seem to think of the church as primarily a social outlet. Some think of it more as a community service organization. I've known some who saw the church as a professional networking opportunity. Some regard the church as an opportunity for self improvement. Some seek constant encouragement, as if the church were a weekly motivational sales meeting. Some want the church to be their 24/7 therapy group. Some seek ritual and tradition. Some seek theological innovation. Some just chase around from church to church after whatever they find exciting. I know some churches so focused on evangelism that it's not church unless there is some kind of "come to Jesus" appeal made. Other churches are always focused on healing and miracles. Certain kinds of people seem to be drawn to these different environments and assume this is what church is supposed to be. So, where is there a collective direction?

If you could fashion some measurement device or survey, my guess would be that, in one form or another, most Christians will expect the church to facilitate their individual goals, growth, and direction. While the church has this potential, I don't see how it ever could have been considered its primary purpose.

Though it is entirely Biblical, one of the most offensive things you can do in the church today is actually expect people to put themselves second.

Things I Cannot Change

2010-05-07T08:09:00.000-07:00

I recently checked a friend into a long term alcohol treatment program. It got me thinking about the serenity prayer, especially that "things I cannot change" part. I've not had a very good track record for dealing with stuff I can't change. I've spent way too many nights lying awake worried about problems outside my ability to fix.

This week, a young couple with ties to our congregation lost their baby just two days before the delivery due date. I don't know them personally. I do know the family. I've done a lot of grief counseling over the years, and I've officiated at the funerals of people who went before their time. But I am at a loss to comprehend the kind of pain involved in losing a child. Like everyone else here, I suppose, I wish there was something more that could be done besides the offer of company and comfort. One of our members, a man who has been extremely close to this family for years and actually married the young couple, has been ministering to them as best he can. I've been praying for him, as well as for the family.

A Good Weekend

2010-05-04T05:24:00.000-07:00

I had a really good weekend. I think the church had a really good weekend. I preached a sermon on the impact Christian love should have on expectations and conflict resolution in marriage and in the church. It seemed to be well received. Of course, we all tend to fail to apply such messages to ourselves, so the ultimate impact of such a teaching is in the hands of the Spirit. But I think it is significant, at this point in our journey, that on the whole, the fellowship received this somewhat confrontational message without reading a lot of subtext into it.

But the real excitement this weekend was the Prince and Princess Ball. This was an event that is part of The Guild student and family ministry project. The students attend a formal medieval ball and are waited on by the adults. It was great fun for everyone involved, and we had plenty of volunteers to make it all happen. The kids were beautiful, the decorations were terrific, and a lot of people came together to make it all happen. I left the ball Sunday night feeling like this is what ministry is supposed to be like. I'm feeling grateful for our regular Guild volunteers, grateful for the extra volunteers that showed up, both for prep and the event, grateful for my wife and her talent in the kitchen, grateful for our congregation, grateful for all the smart and talented and compassionate kids we are blessed to have with us, and grateful to God for a wonderful evening.

The Ball was an answer to prayer on several different levels.

Peeves and Obstacles

2010-04-30T05:49:00.000-07:00

I'm not a very patient man. I've gotten a little better over the years, but not much. Impatience is a character flaw for anyone who has it, but it is a particular liability in ministry. Ministry in the established church takes a mammoth amount of patience.

Discipleship, which I'm proposing here as the Biblical answer to the deficiencies of today's church, is a slow process. Jesus, himself, spent three years with his first twelve disciples, and it is painfully clear that even at the end of that time they are still "not getting it" a good part of the time. We tend to think we are doing much better — that the vantage point of history and years of Sunday School have provided us with the clear answers. I sincerely doubt this is true. I imagine Christ looking on us today and thinking, "Two thousand years of trying and they still don't get it!"

A few years ago an influential member of our fellowship accused me of thinking I had all the answers. I thought about that for a while, then responded by explaining that I actually know more about where I don't want to go, than where I want to go. And that is really true. Discipleship is a journey with an undefined (from our human vantage point) destination, because it's truly about following Jesus. And Jesus has not offered us a complete description of the journey. Trusting him is really the point of it all. And our need to control the journey and its outcome is not really about discipleship.

It's been my observation, and my frustration, that the church would rather repeat well known mistakes than take the risk of making new ones. And, in order to facilitate that dynamic, the church will pretend that it's well known mistakes are good ideas.

All of a sudden I realize I'm no longer a ministry rookie. I've been at this for quite some time. I'm no longer just the idealistic, inexperienced upstart who tries to change things, I'm the battle worn and experienced idealistic upstart. And as I reflect on that journey so far, I see the thing I've had the hardest time with, the thing I've tended to become angry and bitter about, is the unwillingness of the church at large to concede its own failures.

The model of church that we've evolved is relatively easy. We take very few risks. Our commitment level is moderate at best. And our expectation is generally that we will feel "good." We are understandably reluctant to trade all that for a life of discipleship. In fact, we probably won't trade it, unless we come to the conclusion that the journey we could take is more virtuous and honorable than the one we are on. We would have to conclude that righteousness demands it.

But that is quite a leap. The fact is, the church today does a lot of good. It is feeding hungry people and, at least at a minimal level, it is spreading the Gospel. When good deeds are done, and the Gospel is repeated, good things are going to happen. But the church is also losing membership and influence. It's members are less Biblically literate. We cannot seem to cultivate an organic discipleship. Concluding that the church is healthy because of the good it does is a bit like eating in a restaurant that can't pass its health inspections, simply because we like the flavor of the deserts.

I ordered Hugh Halter's new book. The description talks about the outward signs of church success, and the reality of a church that is in decline. This is an extremely well documented reality. And yet, we seem to prefer the superficial signs of success over the embrace of what is. I've tried to present hard numbers at times, to people who responded by saying, "you can make statistics say anything." These are people who rely on such hard data for their jobs and their investment decisions. But in regard to church, we would much rather embrace blissful ignorance.

This is, perhaps, the most formidable barrier to discipleship truly recapturing the heart and mind of the church. And it is the one thing I have the most trouble forgiving us for.

So, Now What?

2010-04-26T14:42:00.000-07:00

I'm painfully aware of how presumptuous it is to assume one has a grasp of the problems, much less the solutions. I've read more than a few of those church leadership and growth books, and thought I'd found some great answers, only to discover a few months later that the trend of the moment is rarely useful in the long run. So now, whether I'm considering the problems or the solutions for the church, I try to stick close to the only reliable source we have, the Bible.

There is this really great scene in the series Firefly where River starts "fixing" the Bible to by removing and rearranging pages to something that makes more sense to her. Shepherd Book, retrieving his Bible, explains, "You don't fix the Bible, the Bible fixes you."

I find that conceptualization helpful. The Bible fixes us. In that phrase rests some assumptions that define our faith. First, we are broken. And second, we need something outside ourselves to fix us. It's my impression that the things that are off the mark about today's western church are the things we have done for ourselves in spite of Scripture. We hold onto these things, even treating them as sacred and ordained, but they are from us.

So I have to think that discipleship, simple and organic, is the better answer to our challenges. It sounds oversimplified, even to me, to say, "Oh yeah, all those problems could be redeemed by re-engaging the ancient practices of discipleship." Nevertheless, I think it's true. The self sacrificing nature of discipleship undermines the consumerism of western Christianity. The multiplication nature of discipleship decentralizes leadership, thus discouraging celebrity and encouraging the exercise of diverse gifts by multiple believers in each fellowship. The deliberate process of discipleship extends beyond our current educational models into an active and challenging journey that promises to facilitate genuine spiritual maturity.

I've been hammering away at the idea of discipleship for years, and I've often run into a problem with my conceptualization. Christians tend to reject the idea that we are not already practicing discipleship. Of course, I'm hardly the only or the most credible person to make this observation. Nevertheless, we tend to so closely associate discipleship with Christianity that we think being one is the same as being the other. Actually, I tend to agree, but in the opposite way. Where most of the western church seems to be saying "If you are a Christian you are a disciple," I'm saying, in concert with Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Dallas Willard, and countless others, "If you are not practicing discipleship, you are not really living the Christian life."

The scary thing is that real life discipleship is foreign enough to us that most church leaders aren't really sure where to begin. For that matter, I certainly can't claim any expertise. I have enjoyed a dsicipleship relationship with certain mentors in my life and I have, with those who've allowed me, attempted to disciple others. I've read just about everything I can find on the subject, and I've made a study of the concept in Scripture.

Nevertheless, I'm no authority on the subject. But it strikes me that the advantage of discipleship is that it is not particularly dependent on expertise. In fact, I think it kind of works against us to assume expertise. The people I've tried to disciple, for example, are not people to whom I think I'm particularly superior in any way. Christian discipleship is unique in this regard, because we don't seek to make people like ourselves, but like Christ. And in regard to emulating Christ, we all share our human weaknesses. So it actually works to simply share the journey with another, talk to them about what we have learned, and give them room to make their own mistakes.

I've been considering, for quite some time now, the implementation of a discipleship "experiment." I'd like to gather some people who are willing and ready, and walk with them through a process in which my own leadership would be considerably decentralized. There would be some instruction. There would also be experiments with spiritual disciplines and missional activities. There would be a whole lot of discussion and shared journey.

I've imagined this process because I think it mimics the experience of Jesus' disciples. Certainly, there was instruction, which often challenged their status quo assumptions. But discipleship was hardly limited to education. It was an active process, wherein disciples participated in the spirituality and mission of Jesus. And, very importantly, those who made the journey chose to make it.

Problems First, Then Solutions

2010-04-22T15:47:00.000-07:00

In keeping with the spirit of my last post, the role of the critic is to use what may be wrong to point to and encourage what might be right. So what's wrong? I mean really wrong? Not just the standard, "Oh yeah we could probably do better than that." And certainly not the "Well, I can't prove that it's right or wrong but I prefer it my way." I'm talking about where we really miss the mark. In some things I think it pretty obvious. In other things less so. But the mark has to be set by the Bible, not by me, and not by the latest church growth strategy book.

So how have we, as the church, diverted from Scripture? Anyone who has read any of the many books on that subject will probably not be very surprised by my views. There is nothing new about what I'm going to write here. These problems have been well documented by Christian writers, thinkers, leaders, and scholars of many different backgrounds. But I feel like I've got to clarify them for my own use, in order to then clarify my prayerful search for Biblical solutions. So here goes, in short format:

Note: These are generalizations. I know it. Anyone with half a brain who reads this will know it. For my purpose here, generalizations are helpful because they identify common trends.

The church has traded discipleship and its identity as the body of Christ for membership and consumerism. The church has traded spiritual maturity for denominational indoctrination. The church persists in its denominational identities in spite of clear instruction from Scripture to the contrary. Discipleship, the only modality of the early church, is, in its original form, extremely rare today. The leadership of the church has come to center around personality and high profile pastors, rather than the fivefold leadership gifts practiced organically within the body. The church has, all too often, sanctified materialism, promiscuity, and other sinful behaviors, or pretended they are not problematic within our fellowships. The church rarely practices confession, even though we've seen it's power when it is employed. The church is more Roman than Jewish in its orientation and practice, even though Judaism is its true root. The church is not global in its approach to poverty, nor is it local in its approach to fellowship. Individual preference has replaced submission and calling. What we want to do we label as God's leading, even if our direction is contrary to Scripture. We have virtually nullified the need for grace by changing the definition of what it means to be a good person to something we are capable of achieving. That is, we've lowered the standard to what we, and almost anyone, can accomplish rather that holding ourselves or anyone else to the standard of Christ.

Whew! Not a fun list. And many would contest me on it, I'm sure. But this is what I see. And, in keeping with the purpose of criticism, I going to try to identify some Biblical directions that contrast with these trends.

Towards Better Things

2010-04-21T13:24:00.000-07:00

I've often thought that I might make a good film critic. I'm a big fan of movies, but I have a critical nature that tends to unpack and analyze things. I know some people can't stand critics. They'd rather not think too hard about their entertainment, and to them a critic is like that English teacher in your life that can't help but bring your grammatical errors to your attention. I have, as you might expect, a different view.

I believe that film critics have the potential to raise the standards of movie making. They can, though they seldom do, hold Hollywood accountable for its excesses and irresponsibility. They make very clear what's wrong with the movies we watch, but they also call our attention to the true gems. It gets difficult, after all, to distinguish what is good, unless you are willing to identify what is bad. If you praise everything, then what do you say when you encounter something genuinely praiseworthy?

I think the common Christian view of the modern church is a bit like film reviews in a high school newspaper. Everything gets five stars, even when it stinks. Sometimes I get the impression that we believe that if we think highly of everything, it will actually be good. Consequently, we rarely reconsider the directions the church has taken.

When someone like me comes along, who is inclined to look at the church through a critical lens, people either find it refreshingly honest, or irritatingly pessimistic. But any critique of the church has to be like a movie review, the intent behind finding what is wrong is the opportunity to recognize the really great things when they come along.

More specifically, a critique is not really helpful unless it suggests a new direction. That is my intent, to seek out and implement solid Biblical directions that promise to fix what ails us. Of course, if Christians reject the critique, they also reject the possible solutions. We assume then, that we don't need to do anything or go anywhere new because what we were doing and where we were going are already just fine. Or, sometimes, we recognize things are probably not what they should be, but we are resolved to the deficiency, believing the way things are is a dynamic we cannot overcome.

While many, maybe most, people find criticism inherently negative, it occurs to me that criticism exists because of the belief that something better is possible.

Long Worship Service

2010-04-18T19:12:00.000-07:00

This morning our worship service ran too long. The director of our upcoming mission trip planned the service, and it would have been fine, except there were several people involved in presenting different things, and some of us, myself included, spoke longer than the few minutes we intended. Anyway, the end result was the service was two hours long - forty-five minutes longer than normal.

I never used to pay attention to such things, but to keep the peace I've maintained a sort of unspoken social contract with the congregation. I generally plan our gatherings so they will last about 75 minutes, and I'm pretty diligent about keeping it from ever exceeding 90 minutes. Today was a rare exception, but I've already heard there were some pretty disgruntled people after the gathering.

Foreign missionaries often have this problem. They are not accustomed to the hard scheduled time constraints we employ here in the states. People here can get downright nasty if you allow your worship service to run beyond what they expect. Of course, this morning's gathering didn't really need to run as long as it did. Had I known it was going to, I certainly would have abbreviated my own contributions to the morning. But it bothers me that this is such a big deal.

American Christians are very much accustomed to rigid limitations on the time and effort they are expected to expend on worship or ministry. If you exceed these expectations, you often hear about it. An hour and fifteen minutes seems to be about the limit for an organized worship gathering. Ten hours a month devoted to a ministry and people start talking about "burnout." Of course, we have lots of rationalizations for all of this. We are busy people, with important things to do.

There is something about it, though, that eats at me...that makes me question our devotion. I know that a worship service or hours spent in service of a particular ministry are not necessarily indications of our faithfulness, but it's also hard to believe we are really surrendered to Jesus if two hours of worship or two hours of ministry in a given week are enough to deplete us.

I've been feeling regret today for letting the service run so long, but I also regret that I'm conditioned to think it's a problem.

Biblical Integrity

2010-04-16T06:15:00.000-07:00

Our situation is a little unique in the modern Christian world. We are an independent congregation governed by local elders. Thus, the authority common to the more predominant pastor led church model is not common to me. As a minister, I can suggest a vision for our future, but I certainly cannot dictate it. I don't have a problem with that, as I don't think it's healthy to build the local congregation around an individual. But, having the authority to set direction in the hands of several is a bit complicated.

In our particular congregation, I've rarely been denied the opportunity to try things, but I've often been denied overt support. That is, I've been allowed and even encouraged to try approaches, to attempt to influence people, and to teach on Biblical direction for contemporary ministry. But rarely has the leadership identified and endorsed any specific direction for the congregation. And, influence leaders in the congregation have, at times, subtly undermined things we've attempted to do by making dismissive statements in the background. So, we've often found ourselves at an impasse in regard to a congregational vision.

Recent events began to change that, but at the moment it feels like we are a bit stuck again. Of course, I know some of my critics will say I'm only complaining because I'm not getting my way. And I am as subject to selfish desires as anyone. But I find that those who complain the loudest about "my way" are primarily concerned that if I get "my way" they won't get "their way." Though Christians tend to make their complaints using spiritual terminology, it is still, more often than not, a question of self interest.

Thus, when we dispute over our vision for the local church, we are, quite often, disputing, not over theological or doctrinal ideas, but over preferences and opinion. This, in and of itself, I don't mind. People have opinions and ideas, and should be free to express them, so long as we don't equate our opinions and ideas with the will of God. Unfortunately, that happens all too often.

For me, the most disturbing thing about the church today is that the Bible does not seem to literally matter. Most Christians will take exception to such a statement, but I'm convinced it is true. In his book, Knowing Christ Today, Dallas Willard points out that western civilization, both secular and Christian, has so separated faith from knowledge, that when confronted with new knowledge, we are capable of rejecting it in deference to our faith. Which indicates that our faith is not informed by knowledge. So if our faith is rooted in the modern church, and knowledge of Scripture challenges the practice thereof, we favor our faith over that knowledge.

This is another way of saying that we have assigned authority to our own traditions, experiences, feelings, and religion. The Roman church, after Constantine, assigned itself this kind of authority, and in spite of reformation, most of us still make the same assumption at some level. It basically works like this: We are the church. Whatever we do and whatever we have experienced is indicative of what the church does. If the content of Scripture appears to contradict what we do or what we have experienced, we can disregard it because... We are the church.

The net effect is that when the Bible establishes our direction for us, we are very slow to adopt that direction in actual practice. Many who sincerely believe they are following Christ are actually following a mixture of their religious experiences, their impressions of Christ, and an unhealthy portion of selfish intent.

I'm not real big on the modern church "vision process." It's been borrowed from the corporate world of commerce, which is another problem. But I find the typical process incredibly self centered. Often, we seem to be seeking our vision as informed by Christ, rather than Christ's vision as employed by us. And the strongest indication of that is the fact that the Bible actually gives us some pretty clear directions that we disregard because they do not fit our religious experience.

A Welcome Chaos

2010-04-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

After my last post I checked on a couple of other blogs I follow and found that they, too, had written about church plants. Hugh Halter's blog and Neil Cole's blog both focused on it, with Cole's blog featuring a long list of the challenges involved. Points well taken in contrast to my "church plants sometimes look like greener pastures" posting.

I have to say, however, the chaos of a missional church setting would be welcome to me. Cole's blog talks about all the weeknight meetings training different groups as they plant home churches. I'd really like to have at least one group of people prepared to be trained for such an endeavor. That's something I'd really like to work towards.

My house is abuzz today with poultry. I've been raising chickens as a sort of hobby, and today I have chicks hatching in an incubator, twenty-six new chicks and four goslings that just arrived from the hatchery, all in addition to my fifteen mature layers and my rooster, Stew. My kids are extremely excited by all this, but to tell you the truth, so am I.

I'd love to feel that way about ministry. I'd love to be caught up in the excitement of things happening at all levels, and life bursting out everywhere. I've been trying for a long time to involve everyone in our congregation in everything we are trying to do, and I think I've only frustrated them and myself. At this point, I think I really need, for the sake of productivity and my sanity, to work intensely with a very small group of people who want to explore all the possibilities of what the church could be.

Church Plants

2010-04-05T05:54:00.002-07:00

About ten years ago my wife and I seriously considered an opportunity to work with a then recent church plant up in Washington State. Ultimately, it didn't seem to be where God was leading us at the time, but I was certainly intrigued by the possibilities. I realize, of course, that church plants have there own challenges and difficulties, but for many in an established church ministry the thought of being in a setting where the church has not had time to accumulate any baggage is very appealing.

Some day I think I would like to be a part of a church plant, though as I've considered all the options and possibilities, I'd be most interested in some kind of home church network. It is my perception, at this point in the journey, that the effort to restore mission and discipleship to the local church is inhibited by the way we structure "church." I believe the home church format better lends itself to these.

One of the things I've learned from colleagues in church plants is it doesn't take long before established church folk start showing up, and bringing their baggage with them. The environment of a church plant is exciting, and inasmuch as American Christianity is very much about pursuing a feeling, that excitement is a draw. The problem is, these church plants often find themselves burdened with the dead weight of Christians who want that excitement but who are not particularly mission minded.

Hugh Halter at Adullam here in Denver is rather blunt on this point. He sees the missional church as made up of those checking out Jesus and those committed to serving him in a missional way. There is no in between. Hugh is rather unapologetic about the fact that the health of the missional church is often dependent on our willingness to invite people to leave if they've no intent to serve.

On the other end of the church spectrum, Saddleback church in CA requires its members to get involved in a ministry, or go worship somewhere else. I wonder how that really works in a mega church setting. I've often seen people sign onto a new ministry and then do nothing about it for years, so they must have some way of holding people accountable.

I know some will perceive of such things as overly controlling, but the American church is deeply afflicted by an audience syndrome. Paul often describes the church as a body, made up of many parts. Well, the American church is about three-quarters appendix. The appendix is a body part with an indefinite purpose, and when it's removed, you don't really notice its absence. That is the effect that audience has on the local church. A few members serve in the various ministries, and the rest observe.

I think that's what happens when mission gets misplaced. In the absence of mission, churches turn inward, and get focused on how we are feeling for Jesus rather than on what we are doing for Jesus. And it's not enough to merely support missions, we need our churches to be populated by people who share a strong sense of mission and calling on the local level.

What About the People?

2010-04-04T05:54:00.002-07:00

It's a fine distinction, inasmuch as the people of the church are the church, but I'm not really all that negative about my fellow Christians as individuals. I think the vast majority of the people who populate our churches are sincere, kind, well intentioned individuals who are genuine in their desire to follow Christ.

It's not a doctrine thing either. My evaluation of the American church has nothing to do with who "gets it right." In regard to theology, every Christian fellowship has its strengths and weaknesses, and the grace of Christ covers us rather than individual righteousness.

But I do believe there is something broken. Ultimately, I think we've been lulled to sleep. I'm a big consumer of books and resources that center on discipleship and mission, and there are many such resources to be had. But at some point I begin to realize the reason these books are so popular is we've very little idea how to practice discipleship and mission. These qualities, once fundamental to the identity of the church, are largely dormant.

I deeply appreciate and admire those who are laboring in Christ to restore these qualities, and I'm praying that our little fellowship can grow and thrive in these areas.

A Parody?

2010-04-03T09:20:00.002-07:00

I've been mulling over a comment in my last post about American Christianity being largely a parody of genuine faith. That sounds pretty harsh, and probably deserves some more attention. I know there are a lot of really great things being done by Christians, the churches they attend, and the parachurch organizations that they staff. I know that most of them are devoted, at some level, to worship and prayer. Most of them do a really good job of caring for one another. The poor and the hungry matter to them.

The old cliche is that Christians are hypocrites, but I find that is generally as true of those who make the accusation as it is of those they seek to describe.

The church is populated by imperfect people (myself included) and it always has been. That's not my beef. I'm certainly in no position to condemn anyone for being a sinner.

What motivates my "parody" comment is a comparison between us and the early disciples. Men and women have been martyred for the cause of the Kingdom, and we are reluctant to be inconvenienced. If I had to summarize what I think is broken, I'd say that instead of following and doing for Christ, American Christians (again, with notable exceptions) are mostly feeling and donating for Christ. Our expectation of church and faith is wrapped up in our beliefs about how it should make us feel.

I meet people all the time who are passionate about serving Jesus. But my impression is the American church is currently overwhelmed with people who are just "feeling good" for Jesus. If they stop feeling good, they'll probably be gone. And there is little sense of any calling or mission they may have that reaches beyond themselves.

I guess it's not hard to tell why people who feel that things are pretty good the way they are find my views overly negative or even threatening. It's a tension I've learned, more or less, to live with.

On the Offensive

2010-04-02T16:40:00.002-07:00

Recently I built up a list of offenses with a group of people within my congregation. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I've been depressed and angry and that's been coloring the way I talk to people - not such a good thing. On the other hand, I'm told that no one is questioning my commitment to the truth, and that the things I preach have all been directly from the Bible. So if I tell people the truth, and they get offended, who is responsible for that?

I'm not trying to be flippant here. The fact is, even on my best behavior, I tend to offend people.

Wait a minute. That's not quite right. I mean, it's not like I offend everybody. I offend my fellow Christians. Not all of them, but quite a few of them.

I've been doing some pretty serious soul searching about this. I know there are times I say things that do not, perhaps, need to be said. There are also times that I say things that probably need to be said, but which no one really wants to hear. But I think the real issue is that my fellow believers don't like what I think. And what I think is that, while there are some profound exceptions, I find most of American Christianity to be a parody of genuine faith.

While some have found my observations of the modern church interesting or even exciting, others struggle with them. They find me judgmental and arrogant, I suppose. But it's not like I'm claiming to have done so much better. I'm really not all that impressed with us (the western church), in much the same way that the unchurched are not that impressed with us. This is not what a preacher is supposed to think in the American "evangelist as entertainer and cheerleader" church culture.

When I critique the church, some perceive it as church bashing. They feel like I'm undermining something that is dear to them. But I don't usually think of my comments as negative. If I criticize the way we are, it's usually because I believe we can be better - more Biblical, more Christlike, less worldly.

Still, this is not what many people expect of a preacher today. I'm not at all sure what to do about that.

Bad Blogger

2010-04-01T06:29:00.003-07:00

OK, so its been forever since I posted anything here. I'm a really bad blogger and I know it. I started this blog because people told me it was a great way to create content for our church website, but I'm afraid I still don't get it.

My wife and most of my friends have Facebook accounts, and I don't really get that either. I know it's a good way to keep up with old friends, but it also seems to make your closest friendships more superficial. After a while, it seems to me, people choose to relate via the internet rather than in person. When our friends get together now, they have conversations about what transpired between them on Facebook. It's like they've nothing else to talk about. And the content of these accounts is not exactly profound. It seems to me that our culture has sort of given up on doing or saying anything of significance, and now we just treat the everyday and the mediocre as if it was significant.

Honestly, I feel that way about blogging. I follow the blogs of some of the leaders in the missional church movement. I've read their books and attended their seminars and really benefited from both. Their blogs, on the other hand, not so much. Oh, now and then there is a gem of wisdom, but overall blogging doesn't seem to be about that.

I've been writing a book for the last couple of years. It's not a long book. It should have been finished more than a year ago. But I find when you write a book you labor over every page. It's a huge investment of time and effort, and you want it to come out just right. A blog, on the other hand, requires virtually no investment (no pun intended). Let's face it, if it weren't for blogs and facebook and twitter and all the rest, none of this stuff would ever get written or published, because the vast majority of it isn't all that interesting.

I've been writing this blog for the benefit of a potential audience to thoughts about the missional experience of church. The few replies I've received since I began have mostly been from people who wanted to argue some point only vaguely related to my topic. I figure they can start their own blogs for that. I've decided to stop writing this for other people, and start writing it for myself. God knows I need the outlet, and most of the time I'm probably the only one reading it anyway.

However, one thing I do crave is the opportunity to share the missional journey with others who are taking it. So, if you are on that journey and something that turns up here resonates with you, I'd love to hear from you.

Playing with Jesus?

2009-11-03T10:13:00.000-07:00

I stumbled upon something this week that caught me a little off guard. I had read a book review in which the writer lamented the phenomenon of the “cuddly Jesus.” This is the idea that we have sometimes made Jesus so feminine that no self respecting man would want to follow him, and we’ve characterized him as such a safe, passive, “buddy” that really, no one would be inspired to following him.
That struck me as an interesting observation, so I did a search for “cuddly Jesus” to see what other writers might have to say about it. What I got back was information about Jesus “toys.” I’d heard rumors, from time to time, about Jesus action figures, but I had no idea just how many Jesus toys are now available. Most of them seem to be manufactured with good intentions, such as the Jesus puppet, for use in Bible classes and storytelling. The action figures of Jesus and other Bible characters are supposed to help our kids act out their favorite Bible stories. And the plush Jesus dolls (think Beanie Baby) are supposed to help kids “bond” with our Savior. Other toys are so cynical as to be considered blasphemous by some, such as the “Jesus Astronaut Action Figure” (a limited edition, no less) and the various bobble-head and talking dashboard Jesuses.
I am tempted to take offense at these last few products, but I know it is, for the most part, the shallow, card board cut-out version of Jesus that they mock, and not the real, Lion of Judah Jesus. So, I feel obliged to extend some measure of grace, even if I find the some of the offerings pretty tasteless and rude.
Blasphemy, as I understand it, is limited to those who know they are messing with God, and do it anyway. I don’t get the impression the makers of these toys really know who they are dealing with. I mean, if Jesus can hang on the cross and ask his Father to forgive those who put him there because they don’t understand the significance of their actions, then I guess we can handle it when the world gives us some ribbing about our Christian images and idiosyncrasies.
What I actually find more disturbing are the toys intended for our good. I don’t want to be overly pious about this. I can certainly understand the argument that if our children have toys that reflect their favorite heroes, they should have a toy that reflects the ultimate hero of humanity. But there is a definite ironic ickyness to having a Jesus that we can so easily manipulate. Or a Jesus that is perpetually warm, soft, and cuddly. We may well be forging a bond between our kids and Jesus, but what Jesus? Is this the revolutionary Jesus, who upset the social and religious order of things? The Jesus who is the living image of the invisible God? The Jesus who endured death on our behalf and invites us to take up our own cross and follow his example? Is this the dangerous, powerful, and controversial Son of God? Or is this the Jesus that we can leave on the shelf or in the toy box until we are ready to play? Is this the “always a comforter, never a confronter” Jesus that our culture has so embraced?
Perhaps I’m being overly cynical, as I often am. But our world has an infatuation with a Jesus that always affirms, always comforts, always endorses my own plans. He is a Jesus whose actions I can control; whose presence is my decision. He is fun to play with, but He is not the Jesus of the Gospels.

The Best Buy

2009-10-08T12:04:00.000-07:00

The phone rings during dinner and a the voice of an enthusiastic stranger on the other end thanks you for a moment of your time and explains they are calling people in your area to solicit their opinion about something. Perhaps they even tell you about the sweepstakes you won but, mysteriously, don’t remember ever entering. And, of course, they assure you they are not asking you to buy anything. How likely is that, really?

Truth be told, we are being sold something all the time, whether it be a product, an opportunity, a candidate, or just an idea. The world around us is absolutely chock full of stuff we don’t really need but “can’t live without.” And there is always someone at hand, ready to sell it to us. This is, perhaps, never more true than when someone claims they have nothing to sell.

Over recent decades, we have evaluated the effectiveness of churches based largely on their sales appeal. Success, it is implied, comes in the form of the three B’s: Buildings, Budgets, and Butts in the seats. If you had these things, your church was considered successful. Visitors would flock through the doors to see what all the fuss was about. Members prided themselves on the attendance measured by thousands, the collections measured by millions, and the new church campuses constantly under construction. Leaders could write best selling books and speak at seminars about how to replicate their success.

Now many Christians are beginning to question this well packaged and efficiently marketed brand of church. How, we may ask, can anyone argue with the obvious success of these ventures? Well, to begin with, one would be hard pressed to make the argument that Jesus was motivated by any one of the three B standards. In fact, his ministry seems to demonstrate just the opposite as a standard of success. He was apathetic about buildings and budgets, and, rather consistently, it was a tiny minority that answered his call to discipleship. So, would we then argue that Jesus was not “successful” in ministry?

It would be far more accurate to say that Jesus subscribed to a different standard of success. He did not offer a product for us to consume like a new shirt or a TV dinner. He offered us something that would consume us. Something that would require self denial and missional zeal. Something that would replace the life we thought we wanted, with the life we were made for. Something that would replace our will with his. Sadly, even in the light of redemption and grace, there have been relatively few takers over the centuries. The Gospel has always done better in the hands of a zealous few than in the pocket of ambivalent masses. A few, consumed by it, will always do more good than a thousand who buy it.

Even as we have clambered to satisfy our own definitions of success, the church has borne fruit, though sometimes in spite of ourselves, rather than because of our efforts. These successes don’t negate the fact that our definitions have often been dramatically different from Christ’s. And they will never change the truth that we will advance the Kingdom more by living in it, than by trying to sell it.

Power Broken

2009-10-05T12:21:00.002-07:00

A new construction project at my house involves, among other things, expanding and upgrading our utility systems. A sub-panel must be installed to power the addition, a tap line must be added to our water/pump system, and new hydronic heating loops have to be created. As we consider all the things we would like included in these improvements, the question has come up a couple of times: What about a generator?

At least once every couple of years we have a big enough ice or snow storm to take out our electricity for more than 24 hours. And every time it happens, the discussion about generators comes up. Given the infrequency of these prolonged outages, it is an expense somewhat difficult to justify. But in the midst of the storm, the ability to pump water, fire the heaters, and keep the freezer from defrosting prove to be powerful motivators.

It is at these times that I become aware of just how dependent we have become on these conveniences. I find myself almost constantly flipping light switches, anticipating power that isn’t there. And the cave like qualities of those windowless basement bathrooms become apparent, even though we seldom notice this when they are washed in warm incandescent light. And since, like so many mountain households, our water is supplied by a well, the absence of power also means an absence of running water. But I still forget that I can’t flush the toilets or wash my hands in the sink. The simple fact is, these are conveniences so common to my daily life that I take them for granted. And while I will probably eventually break down and buy a generator, there is a part of me that recognizes the inherent value of going without from time to time.

There is, of course, the unpalatable reality that these things I consider basic necessities are not even available to large numbers of the worlds population. But there is more to it than simply having grown accustomed to these luxuries. Modern utilities have helped to convince us of our own independence, power, and control. With a simple light bulb, we are no longer accountable to the cycle of the sun. With a pump or a public water utility, we no longer need a communal well or the shared responsibility of carrying water to provide for the needs of the community. With power lines strung to my home, I can pretend my household is an independent island; that I neither need anyone else, nor do I answer to anyone.

But then, when the power goes off, the independence I think I have is no longer such a great thing. Honestly, one of the reasons a generator would be such a welcome addition to our infrastructure is the fact that it would help me maintain my illusion of control. But one of the things I actually like about the occasional storm and outage is the way my neighbors and I all come out and work together to take care of things. There is a certain admission of powerlessness that undermines our pretense of independence. And the resulting community is, actually, very enjoyable. Needing each other, it turns out, is really a very healthy thing to do. And the control we think we have, when we really think about it, turns out to be a rather tenuous illusion. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Like Jesus

2009-06-01T11:58:00.002-07:00

One of the things we've been trying to overcome is the tendency of Christian people to have, exclusively, Christian friends. Even new converts to Christianity, after a few years, tend to have minimized or abandoned their relationships with non-Christians. Part of this is understandable, I guess, as we tend to surround ourselves with people who share our values. A person who goes through a values shift, like a Christian conversion, probably naturally seeks out those who will understand that shift. Still, we make a keep a variety of friendships with people whose values are diverse from ours in other ways, so why are we so exclusive about faith?

A lot of this is probably cultural. I know I grew up in an atmosphere where you sort of avoided places where you knew people would be sinning. Problem is, I can't seem to find a place where people aren't sinning - even at Sunday morning church service! So really we avoided people who had sins we didn't. We might practice self righteousness, pride, apathy, or hypocrisy, but hey, we didn't get drunk or sleep around, so it's all good, right? Kind of silly in retrospect.

At this point in my journey, I'm starting to wonder if the reason we've neglected friendships with non-believers is not because we are so much better than them, but because we are not really better than them at all. We are more religious, perhaps, but we are not, as a rule, what we claim. We are not Christ-like.

I mean, the rhetoric is that to be a Christian is to be Christ-like, or at least aspire to that. But it can be rather startling how much we Christians don't look much like our King. In fact, it seems to me we expend a considerable amount of energy justifying the differences.

I don't mean that I expect everyone to start wearing a robe and sandals and start wandering from town to town preaching, but if our lives are going to have the single minded Kingdom focus that Jesus asks of us, I don't see how we can continue to live so much like everyone else, and still hope to be like Jesus.

Our Dishonesty About Consumerism

2009-05-18T11:28:00.002-07:00

There are few things I have less patience with than Christian dishonesty. This ought to be a contradiction in terms, but it's not. There are some things we have not come clean about. There are lies we tell ourselves that bleed over into lies we tell other people. Most of those lies, it seems to me, have to do with sex and money.

I'll save the discussion of sexuality for another post. Here are some of the lies I think we've told ourselves about money:

We are not wealthy. Bull. I live in an affluent community and I've discovered that, no matter how much people make, they don't consider themselves truly wealthy. That's a description always reserved for the guy that makes a thousand or a million more. This is almost more pronounced among Christians, because the teachings of Jesus are so critical of materialism. We simply don't want these teachings to apply to us. But if we are going to look at wealth in relative terms, let's be honest. Rather than the inevitable comparison between my estate and the millionaire's, how about I compare myself to the developing world? By this standard, my affluence is astounding. And my household is at the low end of households in this community. Which means, if I'm rich, we are all rich, and everything Jesus says about wealth and the standards of stewardship to which the wealthy are accountable applies directly to us.

We are not materialistic. Double Bull. I can't tell you how many times people have told me that it's not about how much money or stuff we have, but it is about our hearts. And I agree with this, in principle. But that doesn't mean I can embrace the same consumer mentality as the secular world and pretend I'm not being materialistic because I have a different attitude about it. As a matter of fact, if I pursue the same accumulation of wealth as the rest of my consumer society, the evidence all points to the probability that my attitude towards wealth is not significantly different from anyone else's.

If I have more, I'll be able to serve the Kingdom better. Right. That's why Jesus always went looking for the wealthy to make disciples. Because the Kingdom is so dependent on your personal and professional success. Granted, many of us are extremely generous with what we have, and someone is always trotting out the story about the guy who made millions but lived on $10,000 a year and gave all the rest away. Problem is, that isn't us. The Kingdom may indeed benefit from our financial successes, but for most of us, that won't happen until our homes have gotten bigger and our cars have gotten newer. In other words, we serve ourselves first, so let's not pretend our pursuit of materialistic goals is altruistic.

It's judgmental to assume that people are being materialistic. Ohh Pleeease! I can be honest enough with myself to acknowledge that I'm materialistic in my choice of a home, a car, a computer, and cell phone, and on and on and on. But I should assume there's no materialism involved in the choice to drive a Hummer, or buy a 7000 square foot home? That's rediculous! Of course it's materialism. But in defending the materialistic practices of others, we are really defending our own barely bridled materialism.

We are rampant consumers within a society where consumption is a value, having little to do with need. It has shaped the modern church, and the modern practice of Christianity. And the fact that we fit in so well in this setting is not an indication that our behavior is acceptable, but is rather a cause for shame.

Religious Institutionalism

2009-03-18T09:49:00.002-07:00

We have good reason to hold religious institutions in suspicion, but no more or less than we do other cherished cultural institutions. While our culture is largely founded upon the idea of rugged individualism, the reality is that our institutions have, as an intrinsic purpose to their being, the goal of turning out a relatively uniform constituency. Governments are infamous for their inefficient bureaucracies and apathetic non competitive workforces, because government does not reward innovation nearly as well as it rewards uniformity and compliance. Public schools, which have the presumed goal of educating the youth of a society, actually produce relatively few truly bright students, because the environment and curriculum is too uniform to produce creativity, too programmed to produce self teaching learners, and just generally too much geared toward the lowest common denominator. Thus, our educational institutions produce a few remarkable students, and an exceedingly large number of unremarkable or even deficient students. Granted, the self motivated can sometimes glean an exceptional education, but it must also be presumed that this environment suppresses the real potential of others.

These institutions produce a public that is educationally sufficient, industrially uniform, and easily manipulated. This might explain why, as a nation, we are willing to believe that the government, with its lackluster management track record, is going to suddenly and magically possess the ability and knowledge to fix our ailing economy. We are not, generally speaking, taught to think for ourselves or to resolve our own problems.

But further, it illuminates a frightening reality about the institutional church. That too, I'm sad to say, has as a central goal the production of a uniform and marginally educated membership. Religious institutions, as a rule, do not produce members who routinely think for themselves about the faith, but rather individuals who are loyal to the institutions interpretations of Christian principles. Nor do these institutions teach their members to seek or expect a calling. That is, we have all sort of bought into the idea that a few people have a calling from God to do something of significance for the Kingdom of Christ, and that the rest of us have no higher calling than membership in the institution.

At its worst, institutionalism in all its expressions becomes a vehicle of indoctrination rather than hope. A few will emerge as leaders. A few will excel as students. A few will rise to prominence in the work force. And a few will follow the Spirit of God into new places. The remainder of the society will practice rigid compliance.

The frightening prospect in this, for the church, is that it suggests a subcultural ethic in which a few are called to walk in the Spirit, and the rest are called to membership, wherein they participate, by proxy, with the Spirit led among them. Too many Christians in the church today are entirely too content to let others live the life of a disciple for them, while they donate a bit of time and money and try, generally, to keep their noses clean. Too many more non-believers reject the faith entirely because its original import and vitality have been dimmed by institutional varnish.

Seems like we need a good old fashioned rebellion.

The Organized Religion Problem

2009-03-17T13:09:00.003-07:00

So, if I'm not opposed to organization, then what, exactly, is my issue with organized religion? It has mostly to do with the way an organization tends to separate us as individuals from our responsibilities. Large companies incorporate, in part, to insulate themselves from liability or, in other words, to avoid a measure of personal responsibility for the actions of the company. I'm afraid churches often work the same way. It is somewhat symptomatic of our culture. We turn over more and more responsibility to the government, relieving ourselves of the threat of personal responsibility for our success or failure. We let public schools educate and partially raise our children for us, and we become less responsible for their future. We let organizations accomplish the work of being the church for us, and we then get to just "go to church." We may opt to be more involved than that, but as a baseline, all we expect of ourselves is to show up on occasion, and perhaps to fork over a little money for a good cause. Thus organized religion fosters an atmosphere where church is a place I go, rather than a movement of which I am a part.

Most people reject organized religion, it seems to me, for fairly legitimate reasons. Organized religion is not what it purports to be. It does not accomplish, in large part, what it was created to accomplish. It actually has a tendency to make its members less accountable to the ideals of the faith, by diminishing these as a matter of personal responsibility in favor of a more corporate responsibility.

The flip side of this problem is that few of the people who claim to have a problem with organized religion are doing much at all about their spiritual health, either in or out of organized religion. There is hard spiritual work to be done, if we are at all serious about it. But most people don't seem to be prepared to do it. Some will rely upon organized religion to be spiritual for them, and some will do little or nothing about faith and will blame organized religion for their disinterest. Neither will do the hard work of following Jesus.

Organized Religion

2009-03-16T16:21:00.002-07:00

In our community, like in so many others, there is a high level of skepticism about organized religion. Since I make my living as a minister, some people make the mistake of thinking I'm a sort of advocate of organized religion. Truth is, I'm probably as skeptical as they are. But I don't think its the organization that is at issue. I think the issue is the import people place on the organization - making a specific practice of religion the point of religion.

If you think about it, when we say we believe in God, but not organized religion, its a little like saying we believe in accounting, but we're against organized accounting. So we will practice accounting, but we will reject accounting software, accounting firms, CPA's or anything else that appears organized.

Organized religion is merely a tool we use to accomplish certain objectives of our faith. Some people have tried to make that tool more than a tool. Some people have used the tool very poorly. But it's still just a tool. The sad thing is we sometimes get so focused on keeping the tool of organized religion in motion that the tool isn't even accomplishing its purpose. The resulting emptiness and irony of organized religion is easily recognized, and thus, we reject it.

Towards a Transformational Community

2009-01-29T12:28:00.003-07:00

"Community" has been a focus of my ministry for some time now, but I'm fairly certain that many of the people I talk to about it—even those who listen so often they are tired of hearing about it—don't really understand what I'm talking about. It's not really their fault. It's just that real community is such a rare commodity today, that people often are not aware of its existence. We don't know what we are missing.

So, when I start talking about community, a common reaction is for people to say, "Oh yes, I have that...I have a great community." When, in fact, what they may more likely have is a healthy social network. They have friends. In regard to their church involvement, they have a sense of belonging and they feel welcome and valued. These are all great things, but they don't approach the level of community required for our mission. Real community is interdependent and nearly constant. Few people have that outside their immediate families, and many don't have it at all. As a society, we are far too independent to form healthy communities.

I'm working from the premise here that the ministry of Jesus, and of the early church, invoked a rather profound level of community that, in addition to being very close knit, was extremely countercultural, and yet, integrated with the larger surrounding culture. This band of believers, living out their countercultural identity while integrated in community with non-believers and pagans, had a transformational influence on people.

In other words, the experience of that faith community and its radical adherence to the person and teachings of Jesus, impacted others such that they became radical disciples of Jesus as well.

In the absence of such deep community connections, modern evangelism has become much more individualistic. Its all about a personal relationship with Jesus. We "get saved" as an extremely individual experience, then, ideally, become integrated into a faith community. I'm pretty sure this is backward. I think we are integrated into a community, in the context of which we encounter Jesus. It's no mistake that Scripture associates such public declarations as confession and baptism with the decision to follow Jesus. These point to the fact that salvation is inherently realized in a community context.

What's Different?

2008-12-24T07:38:00.002-07:00

At a seminar I heard Hugh Halter say that people often want to come to their worship gatherings to see what they are doing that's different from the rest of the church world. The problem is, it isn't that different. Their worship (at Adullum) is not remarkably different from what you might experience at any Sunday morning assembly at the local community church.

I took some comfort in hearing this, because, from the standpoint of evaluating how we are living out our calling to "the different life" our Sunday gatherings are remarkably unremarkable. We do meet in a sort of circle configuration, which is kind of different. And our congregation is extremely friendly and welcoming (I'm pleased to say they are this way naturally, and not because they've been coached to be so). And my preaching is very Bible focused, and pays more attention to cultural contexts than many preacher today seem to do. But, overall, I don't think you would enter our worship time and go, "Wow, these people really are different!"

I could be wrong. But I'm thinking the difference is not in our assemblies (And it is our western notions of big church and Sunday services that always has us looking their for what a church is made of). Rather, its in what we are becoming at home and in our neighborhoods that I hope the real difference is beginning to emerge.

I mean, the whole idea of incarnational ministry is that through the body of Christ (the church), God continues to reveal himself (to be incarnated). Our lives are meant to give flesh to the Gospel. Incarnation is not most evident when God's people meet together, but rather when they are simply living and building community. It happens in homes and between friends. It happens in work cubicles and block parties. It happens whenever the people of God are willing to live like Christ in a context where Christ has not been evident.

And sometimes, it happens in a stable.

Merry Christmas.

Natural Spirituality

2008-12-10T12:06:00.002-07:00

On Saturday we will have a whole bunch of kids here at our facility for our annual Santa Breakfast. I look forward to this every year, because we get to meet a lot of people from the community, and because it's great fun to see all the children having fun and interacting with Santa.

Kids are a big part of my ministry here - from homeschooling my own, to serving kids in our community. I was a family minister before I came here, and it has always been important to me to develop the faith of children. Lately I've been working on a comprehensive approach to the spiritual formation of children. Several people have participated with me in a discussion about this, and I think the biggest challenge is keeping the whole thing natural.

In traditional ministry settings, "comprehensive" translates: organized, formal, educational, and institutional. These are the things we know and gravitate towards. I'm not opposed to programs and ministries, and our discussions about spiritual formation will ultimately result in the creation of these. But I don't want programs to become the central component of spiritual formation, because I know that doesn't work.

So, rather than creating a "Spiritual Formation Ministry," I guess you could say we are trying to cultivate a culture of spiritual formation. And if we are successful in doing that, it will, of course, not be limited to kids. It will become the cultural reality for everyone in our fellowship.

Attention Evergreen Locals

2008-12-02T13:15:00.000-07:00

For those of you who live in the area, an announcement:

Breakfast with Santa!

Enjoy a breakfast of hot pancakes along with crafts, prizes, and, of course, a visit and pictures with Santa. It's great fun for the whole family, and it's free! Breakfast will be served from 8-11 a.m. on Saturday, December 13th at Evergreen Community Church of Christ, 29997 Buffalo Park Road in Evergreen (Next to Three Sister's Open Space). Contact the church office (303-674-6459) or consult the website for directions: www.livedifferentchurch.org.

Reading the Signs

2008-11-17T11:51:00.004-07:00

Last week my secretary said something that I had been thinking but had been almost afraid to say myself. She said that ever since our day of prayer and fasting, things have been happening around here, and there is a different kind of energy in the air.

Several weeks ago we called our little congregation to a day of prayer and fasting. We had plenty of people who agreed to participate, and it has been very exciting to me to see what has happened since then. We've had a steady stream of visitors. We've added a couple new families to our fellowship. Several people are considering or have already started new missional efforts in their neighborhoods.

Not everything has been good, of course. Our new website was hacked last week, just a short time after the new changes went live. Our main web guy, my friend Dan, is still trying to get the site back up. But even that event is kind of interesting. I mean, we've been on the web for years without incident. We launch a revision of the site designed to reflect our missional goals and nature, and within weeks we are attacked. This happens even as focus group of some of our newest members were affirming how important an effective webiste is to their finding and choosing a church of which to be a part. It makes me think the enemy is unhappy with what we are doing, and that can only be good.

Here's the thing, though... what we are doing is simply leaving our path open so we can be led where God wants us to go. This, as opposed to setting up our program and asking God to bless what we are doing. Some of the things that are developing will, no doubt, eventually be represented in "program" form, but hopefully their development will be more spirit centered and organic.

I find that genuine ministry seems to be happening in some unexpected places, and that we, as an organization, have less direct control over these things. I think this is healthy, and I'm watching with anticipation to see where some of these things go.

Yesterday, I received a particularly encouraging affirmation. My wife and I got to have lunch with a couple of our newest members. After sharing with me how some things I had been speaking about interacted rather profoundly with things the Spirit had been leading them in, she shared with me an observation that I agree with, but would not have put half as well. "For some reason," she said, "God's attention is focused on this church."

New Website

2008-10-29T11:59:00.003-07:00

I haven't written anything here in quite some time, in part because I've been writing and editing some content for our new church website. I think its coming along great! This is an improvement we've been working on for some time now, and we hope it will make the site more interesting and interactive.

If your are interested, check it out: www.livedifferentchurch.org

Faith and the Ferris Wheel

2008-09-05T09:11:00.002-07:00

I’ve always enjoyed amusement parks, so when my kids got free tickets to Lakeside amusement park in Dener as a reward for successfully completing the local library summer reading program, I was good to go.

I had never been to Lakeside, but I had read some of the history of the place, and I was looking forward to enjoying the park during this, its 100th anniversary season. And I did. With the possible exception of an attraction called “Starship 2000.” This “ride” is essentially a centrifuge sized for human beings. Its true purpose is apparently to flatten your internal organs against your spine. I’m fairly certain it may be the antichrist of amusement park rides, and I am opposed to it on entirely theological grounds.

Aside from that, I had a great time. Lakeside is a nostalgic old park of the type often imitated by the newer parks. It is a mix of Coney Island and art deco, which gives it a very retro classical appeal. And though the facilities could use an influx of capital to improve maintenance and landscaping, in many ways, Lakeside is an ideal family amusement park. Except for one thing: It’s old. It struck me that, while modern amusement parks often attempt to mimic the classical feel and nostalgia of the great old parks, as a culture, we are not predisposed to actually attend the great old parks. We have come to prefer the newer imitations of the original over the original.

I guess we like the newer parks because they feature carefully controlled guest environments. The attractions are often faster, and feature licensed characters from our favorite movies. They can accommodate larger crowds and larger events, which also means they have longer lines. They offer different attractions to appeal to different members of the family, which often means that, rather than attending together, family members split up to go and do their own age appropriate thing. I like those newer parks, but I have to say that Lakeside, smaller, older, and much more simple, was a nearly perfect place to be with my family.

The dynamic I’m describing here is the same that has frustrated me about the modern church. Anyone who wants to take an honest look knows that the church as it exists today is very different from the church of the first century. And while cultural differences are to be expected, one can easily make the case that we have fundamentally changed the definition of the church. This has not made us a more effective vehicle of the Kingdom, as far as I can tell. Even in apparently thriving Christian communities, I am hard pressed to identify, in the western world, churches as vital and fast growing as the early church. And yet, we prefer our modern imitation of the original, over the original. We enjoy a more controlled environment, with flashier, if less substantive, attractions. We can accommodate larger crowds. And we divide ourselves generationally.

A return to the original demands that we relinquish the convenience and control to which we have become accustomed. The early church was more raw, and if I may say, more real than what we have experienced. It was, in a sense, more dangerous and unpredictable, because God’s Spirit controlled the action in a much more direct fashion than we allow today.

But, honestly, given a choice between a church built by God and directed by his Spirit into miraculous things, and a church built by humanity out of foam and fiberglass to represent the miraculous, which would you choose?

Ownership

2008-08-17T13:14:00.002-07:00

Well, here it is the middle of August, and I haven't posted a word since mid-June. As bloggers go, I'm afraid I've not been very diligent. But I do have something on my mind that might be worth sharing:

My wife wondered aloud this afternoon, as we left our Sunday morning assembly, "I wonder if there's anyone's toes you didn't step on today?"

She's probably right, though I didn't set out to offend. I've just got a bee in my bonnet about ownership. It's been a pet peeve of mine for some time. I cringe every time I hear someone saying that the way to motivate people in ministry is to give them ownership. This corporate culture notion of ownership is about as far removed from Scripture as you can get. And yet our culture is so enamored with ownership as a concept, that we tend to accept this advice with little thought.

Lately I've become frustrated with just how pervasive the notion of ownership has become. It occurs to me that the things we use to define church are all rooted in ownership. The things that frustrate me about organized religion: the focus on facilities, budgets, attendance, and hierarchy, all speak to our desire to own and control the church. Consider: If we speak of a church "closing its doors" the assumption is that congregation no longer exists. Its members must disperse to other places. Now, how is it that closing the doors of a building is so readily equated with ending the fellowship of a congregation? When did the external conveniences of church, such as an owned meeting place, become the church itself?

It goes much further than this, of course. Our denominational identities allow us to slap a brand name on the church, guaranteeing to some extent that we will be able to control membership and the content of our worship. This is exclusively about our ownership and control, as far as I can tell. Which is, I suppose, no big deal if the church is just a human religious organization, as so many people see it. But if it is of diving origin, then such attempt to own and control it are out of line.

I've not had much success pursuing this point of view, to be honest. I've no particular interest in being identified with any particular denomination, but some in our fellowship still experience strong ties to the denominational identity. What scares me about this is that I believe God's Spirit is quenched by our ownership and control. It's like we are asking God to work through our structure and our plans, rather than us responding to His.

Mission Mindset

2008-06-16T09:39:00.003-07:00

We've just returned from a mission trip to the Navajo Reservation near Bluff, Utah. It was a productive and blessed week; the culmination of four years of relationship building. We finished construction of a hogan meeting house for a group of Navajo believers there, and we look forward to beginning a series of local service projects on the reservation, which we hope will also be a great blessing to our Navajo brothers and sisters.

Each year when I return from this trip, I am mindful of the challenges of translating missions into a local setting. On a mission trip, the team is fully focused and committed to the task at hand. They are blessed to serve, and anxiously await God's hand in things. Upon returning home to all our normal distractions, it is difficult to have that same kind of focus; the same openness to opportunities. And we've been lulled into thinking that God is not likely to act in powerful ways at home, in the same manner we've come to expect on these ventures to new places.

This year I am keenly aware of how slow and difficult a process it is to befriend many Navajo people. They are generally distrustful of outsiders—particularly white outsiders—and often with just cause. It's been relatively easy to go and build something or complete some job that needs doing. The relationships we've created over the years have been more challenging. They simply cannot be rushed. They take time and attention. I am thrilled that we have finished the hogan (a project three years in the making) but I am convinced the real victory here is that we've come to be loved and accepted by some of our Navajo hosts, and we very genuinely love them in return.

I bring this lesson home with me, and consider how our area is not all that different in terms of the challenge of relationship. It is not that difficult to create programs, host events, or complete service projects. It's another thing altogether to create genuine community with people. Evergreen and the surrounding area is filled with highly independent, rather postmodern and largely unchurched people. When they have questions about life, they do not seek answers from churches or from the Bible. They look on committed Christians with some degree of distrust, or write them off with the familiar, "That's great if that works for you but I'm not into the whole religion thing."

Of course, they are into religion. It may be nothing more than the religion of self or some generic spirituality, but people here are very religiously committed and fervent. What they are not so keen on is the truth, as allowing any singular truth to be defined is a threat to individuality, which here, and in American culture in general, is often considered the ultimate good.

Most churches here end up competing over the minority of residents already inclined to attend a church. They sponsor big programs and events to draw them in.

We have begun to operate on a different premise. We want to be in conversation with unchurched and dechurched people about life and faith. This requires that we invest a great deal of time and respect in building relationships with people. We can't expect them to come to us, and we cannot force Jesus upon them. We must go to them, build community with them, and let them open the doors to spiritual conversation.

Our culture is accustomed to immediate results and gratification, so building relationships without some evangelistic plan of attack feels a little open ended, but this is about letting people learn to trust and love us, even as we learn to love and trust them.

As an example, I've got a bunch of neighbors coming over this weekend to help me build a ramping bridge from my driveway to my front door. These people, at various levels of spiritual awareness and religious participation, are not coming to my house as my "target population" or "evangelistic prospects." They are coming as my friends. And I can say, with great honesty, that I love and appreciate each of them. We are becoming a community, and I am choosing to rely on them in my time of need. I strive to be, within the context of that community, a man of God, and I look forward to the times they trust me with their spiritual questions, but I do not try to steer conversations. As I see it, my job for now is to love them and invest myself in them. Their personal spiritual journeys are far more dependent on God's work in their lives than on mine.

Along these same lines, God has opened another very interesting door. A few of us here, through a very interesting series of events, have come to host an "open mike night" at a local restaurant and tavern. This is not overtly evangelistic in the sense that we sing and play many secular songs, and there is no "come to Jesus" speech made at any point in the evening. But we do slip in a few songs that reflect our heart for God, and we are enjoying the opportunity to connect with local musicians and their friends.

We wait anxiously to see where God is going to take such opportunities.

Blessings,
Doug

Questioning Denominational Identity

2008-04-27T16:09:00.002-07:00

I grew up in a fellowship that considered itself non-denominational. That was the ideal anyway. We wanted to simply be Christians, and not identify ourselves as anything but. Unfortunately, this sort of morphed over the years into a certain pride about our non-denominational status. We kind of went from being just Christians to being the only Christians. Our fellowship became very sectarian and exclusive.

This is ironic on several levels. I mean, how do you become prideful about your denomination if you are claiming you aren't one?

In spite of these problems, I am still drawn to the nondenominational ideal. I suppose some level of corporate organization in the church is inevitable, but whenever that organization starts to become the core of our identity I get nervous. Which is why I feel so strongly about this next pair of ideas:

Christocentric vs. denominational

All this really means is I think we need to stop putting our faith in the "rightness" of our human organizations and put our faith in Jesus. Though I will always be influenced by the particular Christian heritage of which I am a part, I don't want that heritage to define me or the fellowship of which I am currently a part. I'd simply like to, as best I can, be a follower of Jesus.

I realize that this is heretical talk to some. From about the third century on, the church has assumed, on one level or another, that it had the authority to redefine itself, and to manage its membership in accordance with a narrow spectrum of doctrinal beliefs. The proliferation of Christian denominations that exist today has its origin in the assumption that "my church is just a little more right than your church."

This makes me wonder: When did the church become "mine?" And where does the Bible give us the authority to segment and divide the church just so we can work and worship exclusively with people who believe exactly as we do? And why do Christians waste so much time insisting that if others were truly being faithful to Jesus they would believe "just as I do?"

It strikes me that a great many of our differences could be successfully accommodated if only we could remain focused on the core principle that Jesus is Lord.

Following Jesus

2008-03-22T14:51:00.002-07:00

The next pairing of ideas I want to talk about - discipleship vs. membership - is something that has been on my mind a great deal lately. I often find, when I talk to Christians about restoring discipleship as a core practice of the faith, they stare blankly almost unable to comprehend what I mean. Discipleship is, in the simplest of terms, about following Jesus, and our experience of church has duped us into believing that if we keep the traditions of modern western Christianity, we are, in fact, following Jesus.

What Jesus said about it was, if we wanted to follow him, we would need to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him. At the time, this was taken quite literally. It meant you denied your own will and agenda to replace it with the will and agenda of Jesus, based on the belief that his will is superior to our own. It meant that you took on his mission, and thus his burden, even to the point of great persecution or death. And it meant that you followed him, allowing his life and the direction of his Spirit set the course for your life.

Oddly enough, today we don't often interpret these words as literally. When I hear Christians talk about the deny self, take up the cross, and follow passages, they somehow find a way to make this almost exclusively about dealing with their personal sin. Self denial is about dealing with our sinful nature. Taking up the cross is about fighting our sin just as Jesus fought our sin with his sacrifice. And following is about living your life by the moral standard of Jesus.

Sadly, there is no mention of our participation in mission, our role in building up the body, the use of our spiritual gifts, or our commission to take the message of Jesus to the world around us. In the age of the modern church, these are the vocation of professional clergy, missionaries, and a handful of committed lay volunteers. But the New Testament makes very clear that there is no such distinction between disciples who serve the mission of Jesus, and disciples who are mere members of the church. We are a priesthood of believers.

The original disciples, recruited to be "fishers of men" would be very surprised to hear that discipleship was merely a matter of personal moral improvement. It was a life directing mission and belief. Modern Christians believe in Jesus. Disciples believed Jesus was the only genuine source of life, meaning, transcendence, and salvation, and they lived accordingly.

True discipleship has been moderated to the point that if we attend Sunday services, give some of our money, sit through a few sermons, and possibly volunteer some time to a church ministry, we are living the life to which Christ called us. Oddly enough, many of the things Christians do to feel spiritual or Christ focused have their origin in human tradition and not in the life and ministry of Jesus. For a helpful book on this subject, check out Pagan Christianity: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices by Frank Viola and George Barna. While I differ with some of their conclusions, this is a very eye opening book.

The misconception that "doing the church thing" is the same as following Jesus spills over, I think, into our notions about Biblical study. In a recent conversation with some of our church leaders about our educational efforts, including Sunday school, small groups, Bible classes, and sermons, the consensus seemed to be that the purpose of these educational efforts was to encourage. Odd as this may sound, that really bothers me. I wish that we looked on Biblical studies as a source of transformation. I wish that we approached the Bible expecting it to undermine our human thinking and to defy our expectations. I fear that we approach the Bible expecting it to reinforce or perhaps clarify what we already believe. This is, I think, the result of our membership ideology. Since the call of discipleship is moderated to mean being a good and moral person who attends a particular fellowship, the use of Scripture gets moderated to include only personal moral instruction and reinforcement.

One of the things I really like about missional church thinking is that the mission is always directing my attention back to the Scriptures, not to reinforce my belief, but to seek real answers to missional problems. For instance, when people come to me with suggestions about how we can market the church or to advocate some leadership technique, I often find myself asking the question, "How is this reflected in the life and ministry of Jesus." With some regularity, I discover that the thing being advocated is little more than the latest in human thinking about corporate organizations. This doesn't automatically make it a bad idea, but it does cast doubt. If we are trying to live out a divine and organic reality, it serves to reason that many human and structural ideas may not apply.

The idea of discipleship I've proposed within our fellowship is that we would follow Jesus as literally as possible. I don't mean that we will start dressing in sandals and robes, but I do mean that when Jesus says he is the way, the truth, and the life, we reorganize our life around the idea that the ministry of Jesus is our roadmap for mission, the truth of Jesus is the truth that guides us, and the life of Jesus is the source of our hope. If we are true disciples, I believe our choices, priorities, daytimers and checkbooks will all reflect these truths.

Vision and Movement

2008-03-03T12:50:00.002-07:00

Organic vs. Institutional

In talking about organic church, I am borrowing terminology from Neil Cole's wonderful book, The Organic Church. Cole talks about his experiences as a church planter, and proliferation of house churches and third place churches that result from a very organic approach to faith. This is a very oversimplified summary, and I would really encourage you to read the book if you haven't already.

For my part, I'm basically using the term to describe the church as it existed before it was an institution. It was a movement then, a seat of your pants, often persecuted movement, that could only exist if its proponents kept a clear focus on the vision of their leader, Jesus Christ. For centuries, it had no buildings, very little hierarchy, and no corporate identity.

I won't take the time to go through all of the history here, but in summary, there were various leaders in early Christianity who sought to control the church, but none were broadly successful until the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine. While Constantine is often credited with bringing Christianity into mainline credibility, he also gave himself the authority to restructure the church. He gave it a hierarchy based on Roman governmental systems. He constructed elaborate church buildings. He contributed to the formation of various church policies. His reforms led to a distinct clergy-member separation, a divorce of the church from its Hebrew roots, and the institutionalization of what had been an organic, spiritual, community based movement.

The main problem with institutions is that they can continue to exist even after everyone involved has lost sight of what is really important. In other words, a movement can only exist so long as it maintains a vision. But incorporate that same movement into an institution, and the institution will continue to exist regardless of vision. This is, sadly, often the case in organized religion.

Organization and institutions have their place. But they are meant to be the tools of the church, not the church itself. The church is to be, very simply, a collection of disciples. And disciples are, quite simply, those who have devoted their lives to following a Rabbi. In this case, the Rabbi is Jesus.

The organic church accomplishes its purposes in an organic way. It grows, not by expanding its structures, but through disciples who build relationships and community connections. It is relational, like a family. It plants seeds of truth, and watches to see what happens. The original church was the result of a way of life, rooted in discipleship and faith in Jesus. The institutional church may use the language of discipleship and faith, but it has become invested in perpetuating its own structure and identity along with the Gospel.

Oddly enough, we've lived so long with the institutional church that many Christians think we can't live without it. At times, I'm not sure we can live with it.

Blessings,
Doug

A Turn Towards Mission

2008-02-26T10:41:00.002-07:00

Well, I guess it's time I started to unpack some of those pairs. I'll begin with two that are closely related:

Community Focused vs. Internally Focused

The modern church has become a monument to itself. Its facilities, services, programs, and ministries are 90% focused within the church, to provide support, encouragement, inspiration, and community to its members. These are not bad things, but they miss the point. The collective mission of the church is to shine the light of truth into dark places; to share hope with the hopeless, and to just generally act and talk as Jesus would for the world's benefit.

When the people of Jesus lose sight of this core mission, they begin to focus, almost exclusively on themselves. The work of real ministry is replaced with the mounting responsibility of keeping happy church members who mistakenly think the church is supposed to revolve around them. At best, the internally focused church becomes isolated from its surrounding community. At worst, it becomes exclusive and self serving.

So the first step towards becoming a missional church is to learn to think outside ourselves; to reacquaint ourselves with the fact that we serve a purpose in the world, and not just within the walls of our facilities.

Missional vs. Attractional

Of course, not all churches become so internally focused. Some are very committed to service within their communities, and to reaching people with their message. We, however, are not only concerned with whether or not the church gets outside of itself, but how it does so.

The accepted standard for church methodology is to initiate benevolent or evangelistic campaigns with the intent of attracting people back to the church. Thus, the church's focus within the surrounding community is almost exclusively on getting people back into the church. The false assumption at work here is that real church and spiritual life take place nearly exclusively within church initiated and controlled environments.

Furthermore, once the church manages to attract someone, it begins to drive a wedge between them and the communities of which they are already a part. Thus, writers like Hirsch and Frost not only characterize these churches as attractional, but extractional, inasmuch as their intent is to attract people to the programs and resources they have to offer, then extract them from their other community relationships.

We believe this creates a bit of an ivory tower. Church people develop a certain arrogance about the distinctions between who is in and who is out of their group. And the mission is compromised in the sense that, in order for people to experience the good news about Jesus, they must enter into and submit themselves to our organized religion context.

In response, we are sorting out what it means to be genuinely missional, in the sense that getting people back to our facilities or into our programs is not a primary goal, and may not even be important. The missional church functions on a sending model. We are learning to see ourseves as sent out into the community, to connect with people, be a positive influence, and, when given the opportunity, to share the source of our hope.

We don't want to extract people from their current community ties. In fact, we would love it if they began to value Jesus themselves and share that discovery with others they know.

Church, then, becomes not a place to go to or a meeting to attend, but something that simply happens in the context of relationship and communities.

Blessings,
Doug

Outlining the Change

2008-02-18T10:05:00.003-07:00

We are entering into a phase in our process where, it seems to me, recruitment is the order of the day. We need the help of mission minded people to move forward, and we are seeking them from the outside and the inside. From the outside, we are seeking what you might call "suburban missionaries;" people who will be invigorated by our missional call, and will join us in the endeavor, even if it means changing homes and jobs to do so. We might consider such a call extreme in a domestic context, where missional efforts are generally viewed as secondary to our "real life concerns." But we are looking at our context as no different than a foreign mission field. Relocating and developing your own means of support is not at all unusual for someone going to another country to serve, so why should it be different here? This mission field is in great need of such people; people whose presence is motivated specifically by the mission.

The arrival of missional people from outside our immediate fellowship will, we believe, also aid our efforts to recruit from within the fellowship. The problem, in short, is that we are all way too comfortable with church as we have known it. And that has not required of us much in the way of commitment or sacrifice. Again, the objective is to retrain ourselves to think as we would if we were missionaries in a foreign place. In that context, the work of the mission is front and center. Careers, accommodations and other resources exist in service of the mission. The church as we have known it has never held such expectations of us, and has often actually encouraged us to think of ourselves and our own selfish desires before the mission. Consequently, a great many well meaning Christians maintain the notion that "once I've obtained my arbitrary markers of personal success, I will be in a position to give, serve, etc." This is a sort of American ideal of Christianity: one in which I enjoy such personal affluence that whatever time or financial resources I commit to following Jesus does not really register as a sacrifice on my part. Such assumptions, I would argue, are incompatible with mission.

Recruitment raises a challenge for us, in that it requires that we be able to communicate the mission in a relatively succinct manner. On the surface, this may not seem like that big of a problem, but I've found it very difficult, because our experience of the church as we have known it is so second nature to us that we tend to filter all our information through it. So, if I say our goal is to be more missional, religious people tend to think of mission as they've known it: "My church supports missionaries in Thailand and Bolivia, and we sponsored a community outreach campaign last year." These may be good things, but they do not capture the spirit of what we mean by the term missional. Even my unchurched friends tend to filter what I am saying through the lens of their assumptions and experience of organized religion.

So, it simply isn't enough to state what we are trying to be; we really have to contrast what we seek to become against the status quo alternative. I've done some of that already in this blog, but now I feel the need to become more intentional about it.

What follows is not, at this point, a final draft of these notions, but rather a very rough draft of our emerging mission, as characterized by pairs of opposing ideologies and methodologies. In each pair, the first term represents the church as we believe Jesus intended, which is what we seek to become, and the second represents what the church as we have known it has generally been. Some of these terms I've talked about in earlier posts. The rest I will try to elaborate on in the future. Anyway, here we go. We seek to become:

Community Focused vs. Internally Focused
Missional vs. Attractional
Organic vs. Institutional
Disciples vs. Religious Members
Christocentric vs. Denominational
Incarnational vs. Indoctrinational
Adaptive and Contextual vs. Assumptive and Legalistic

At this point, I'm thinking these seven categories might capture it, but I'm fairly certain I will change my mind about that. As I build on these ideas, I would certainly welcome questions and suggestions.

Blessings,
Doug

Breaking Out

2008-02-01T11:45:00.000-07:00

One of the things unique about our journey here is that we are an established and modern traditional church, earnestly trying to make the shift to missional thinking. I've come into contact and read stories about many missional efforts, but most of them fall into the category of "church plants." They begin with a different premise, and the people that join the effort along the way are those who embrace that premise.

I don't have church planting experience to which I can compare it, but I do know that starting the missional shift in an existing church setting is difficult on all fronts. I encounter other church leaders who are interested in missional ideals, but more often than not they hope to apply some of these within their existing church structure. I suppose some would characterize us this way, as we retain most of our traditional elements: a church building, Sunday School, Sunday assembly, etc. Though I can say that at multiple levels we've at least been allowed to question these elements.

Hirsch and Frost, in their book The Shaping of Things to Come advocate that we ask really tough questions of ourselves, like, "If you were to start from scratch, would you build the same kind of church?" or "What would our church look like if we had to function without a building or assembly or even full time staff?"

We've been asking these kinds of questions and, to the best of our ability, allowing a safe environment to explore the possible answers. It has produced mixed results, to be honest. For some, these questions have set loose the apostolic imagination. For others, it produces great anxiety and fear. Truth be told, we still have many for whom the building and the assembly are church, though we are constantly trying to improve their definition.

The advantage we have in this process is a touch of desperation. I asked Alan Hirsch about this at a training in Denver. Alan entered into a situation in Melbourne where his hiring was a sort of last stand on the part of the church. If they couldn't turn around their decline, they knew they would have to shut the doors. I asked Alan how important that kind of desperation is to making the missional transition, and he said it was incredibly important. He challenged me to return to my congregation and carefully build the case for what the big problems are, not just in our fellowship but in the decline of modern Christianity across the board. He said that until we have accepted the problem, we will not collectively search out solutions.

So, for us, recent losses in attendance and finances have put us in a position to make changes. There is a fairly broad agreement in our congregation that we cannot continue as we have. Of course, there are a few dissenters. There are those who maintain that things are not all that bad, and that if I weren't always challenging the status quo, we wouldn't have lost the members we have, and all would be right with the world. But for the most part, our people realize you have to keep some serious blinders on to think this way. The only growing churches in our region are primarily tapping off members from other churches. There is little real growth, and very little meaningful engagement with the community. We are, as the adage goes, "preaching to the choir," because no one else is listening.

Thus, I find myself in a rather curious position. A drop in attendance and finance, which is among the greatest fears among modern church leaders, is actually the source of our opportunity. A mild desperation and a sense of urgency has opened the minds and hearts of our congregation's leaders and gatekeepers to new possibilities. These are all good people, who desire to be good disciples. But, let's face it. Few of us will make dramatic changes unless we believe we've no easier options.

As has often been pointed out to me, further losses combined with my own rhetoric about the fallacy of the institutionalized church may result in my talking myself right out of a job. And I have to admit, sometimes that fear gets the better of me. But most of the time I'm too amazed with what God seems to be doing here to spend much time agonizing about the unknowns of my professional future.

So, what exactly is happening? Well, its pretty simple, really. In fact, I'm not sure how much you would notice with a casual look. Since the missional church is an organic movement, and not an institutional approach, there are no new programs or ministries for us to refer to and highlight as "missional." Rather, there is a shift in focus. People are taking the time to build better relationships with their neighbors. They are hanging out in "third places." One of our guys started up a basketball team with a bunch of players he met at the rec center. It's all this kind of thing; people building relationships and having conversations. Not forcing Jesus into the conversation, but trying, as best we can, to represent Jesus as a community.

When we do have an organized activity, such as an upcoming Valentine's Banquet we are sponsoring, our focus is not on getting people to the church building, but on giving our members another opportunity to connect with their friends and neighbors. We encourage everyone who comes to bring a guest with them, not to sign them up for a Bible study or compel them to attend church, but just to show them a good time and to build the relationship.

It's still difficult to escape our institutional notions in defining the church, but I see us slowly opening our eyes to a whole different way of being a people of God.

Blessings,
Doug

The Institutional and the Missional Church

2008-01-27T17:21:00.001-07:00

I recently developed some graphics to help explain the differences between the institutional church as we have known it, and the missional church we hope to become. I started with the assumption that there is a gap between the Kingdom of the world and the Kingdom of God. The church was intended stand in this gap. In our fellowship, we often refer to the church as a border town, straddling the border between these two Kingdoms. The question we have to wrestle with is what form this border town/gap filling church will take. The church as we have known it is, primarily, an institution, so in my first illustration, I let a traditional church building represent the institutional church.

As a static entity, the institutional church requires support and resources from both the Kingdom of God, and the Kingdom of the world. And, in fact, it assumes the right to both. In this model, Jesus came to establish the church as the center of a new religious system, and now, within the confines of church membership, we have access to God's truth, power, blessing, and forgiveness.

We expect the world to find its way into this institutional church in order to enjoy the benefits of God's Kingdom. And we expect them to bring with them the human and financial resources to maintain the institution.

All of these resources, worldly and heavenly, are consumed in the pursuit of what Dallas Willard has called "sin management." This is, basically, the idea that the entire purpose of the church is to address the problem of sin, either by providing a vehicle by which people seek forgiveness, or a vehicle by which people seek to reverse the negative effects of sin and evil on the society at large. Since we are never done being sinful people, the work of sin management is never done, and the gap becomes more of a sinkhole, continually consuming all the resources the church takes in.

Another option is to imagine the church, not as an institution, but as a bridge. Thus, the objective is not to contain heavenly resources and distribute them within, but to become a sort of conduit through which the Kingdom of God is allowed to invade the world, and the world is granted free passage into the Kingdom of God. This model assumes that Jesus came to infiltrate the world with a Kingdom economy. Rather than establish a new religious system, his intent was to be a conduit between God and man. The church, as the body of Christ, then assumes the responsibility to serve the same mission.

This model is much more consistent with what we read about Jesus. His example suggests that the power, truth, and blessing of the Kingdom was not meant to be contained within religious structure, but was to "bypass the middleman" and come directly into people's lives.

I found these visuals useful in my own process, and I hope they are useful to others.

Blessings,
Doug

Missional Incarnational

2008-01-20T17:26:00.000-07:00

I suppose I should begin by explaining what I mean by missional-incarnational church. The terminology is becoming more commonplace in some circles, but these terms are often defined differently by different people. For the long version, read through Alan Hirsch's book, The Forgotten Ways, which is my favorite book on the subject. For the short version, I will offer my own, very simplified explanation.

Missional means that the believers are focused on telling the story of God. In the same way that foreign missionaries are men and women sent to far off places to connect with a culture and share with that culture the faith that sustains them, we are domestic missionaries, sent to connect with our own culture, and the tribes within it, to share our faith. Missional can also be understood in contrast to maintenance. We don't believe the church should exist merely to perpetuate itself or to provide for its members. It should always be focused outward; on blessing others. Or it can be explained in contrast to attractional, meaning that, rather than attracting people to a central location (a church building) we want to be the church living and interacting in a variety of community contexts.

Incarnational means that our objective is to act as the body of Christ. Just as we believe that Jesus is the incarnation of God, we believe we are to become like Jesus to others. If he was loving, compassionate, forgiving, wise, and enlightening to the world into which he entered, then we are called to be the same to the world we live in. We tell an ancient story of loss, hope, and redemption, not only through our words, but in the way we relate to people in our communities, the values by which we organize our lives, and the pursuit of a Christlike character.

So then, we are seeking to be missional and incarnational, a community of faith, living in and among a broader community, teaching others about the Jesus we know, not by indoctrination or assault, but by becoming, as much as we are able, the living representation of Jesus, his teachings, and his ministry.

Blessings,
Doug

2008-01-13T19:25:00.000-07:00

I'm starting this blog to chronicle my personal experiences as a Christian minister, striving to lead a wonderful little congregation in the Colorado mountains to become a missional, incarnational fellowship. I'm blessed with many people who are prepared to take this journey with me, but I also recognize many hurdles will have to be overcome.

I'm writing for several reasons. I'd like to give members of our fellowship the opportunity to explore missional incarnational concepts with me. I'd like to provide interested members of our community the chance to understand what our fellowship is all about. I'd like to meet others in my area (in the mountains near Denver) who are interested in this kind of life. And I'd like to engage, in conversation, other church leaders who share this passion.

Blessings,
Doug