Category: Book Summary

The Politics of Jesus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

by John Howard Yoder

Yoder wrote his book to illustrate the non-violent social ethic behind Jesus’ teachings. If we view Jesus mainly as the Lamb of God, who came solely to save his people from their sin, we will fail to understand that Jesus also came as the anointed and rightful King of Israel, the Messiah whose purpose was to introduce a new kingdom and way of life that will supplant and overthrow the kingdoms of this world. As Jesus told Pilate, his kingdom is not of this world, nor do its adherents use the tactics and weapons of this world. Nevertheless, Jesus and his kingdom posed and still pose a real threat to the existing order of things. For that reason, Jesus was nailed to a cross as in insurrectionist with “The King of the Jews” emblazoned on the sign above his head. In so doing the powers of the world system hoped to put an end to his kingly aspirations and the radical social change espoused by his teachings. They failed.

According to Josephus, Herod imprisoned John the Baptist out of a fear that he might foment an insurrection. The mood of the people was restless, and their hope was that a Messiah would soon appear who would lead a successful revolt to throw off the oppressive power of Rome. John announced the coming of such a leader, the long awaited Messiah, the promised son of David. John identified Jesus as the promised one, the Messiah. Later Jesus corroborated to his disciples that he indeed was God’s anointed one. But Jesus did not come to fulfill his followers expectations. Rather, he came to fulfill his Father’s will, which was first to die as God’s Lamb to atone for sins and reconcile people back to God. After his resurrection he promised to come again one day to finally and fully install God’s glorious kingdom on earth. In the meantime, his followers are to preach the good news of his kingship and kingdom, as it spreads and permeates the world system as leaven permeates a lump of dough.

Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness prior to his public ministry were all related to his kingship and how he would gain authority and power. Would he use the methods of the evil powers of the world system (and Satan) or employ the hidden, counter-intuitive, and mysterious way of the cross? Would he “buy” his support by feeding the multitudes with bread? Would he bow down to the idolatrous pull of power and glory? Would he save himself from being put to death as a blasphemer by being thrown from the parapet of the temple? Jesus repulsed each of these temptations, remaining true to his Father’s will. Only one temptation assaulted Jesus throughout his ministry – to avoid the cross. It came from the mouth of Peter. It confronted him in the garden of Gethsemane, and it made one final attempt to lure him away from the full acceptance of his path to glory as he hung on the cross. His tormentors challenged him to save himself if he really were the Messiah.

Jesus would have been justified in calling twelve legions of angels to rescue him and usher him into his rightful place upon the throne of Israel, but that was not God’s way. The way of the cross demanded that he shun any attempt to use the methods and means that the ungodly powers and principalities that run the “cosmos” employ. Jesus refused to use armed force and violence to defeat those who had the most powerful armed forces in the world and used them to intimidate and punish any who might resist. His kingdom would come another way by another dynamic altogether. That is why he told Pilate:

“My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” John 18:36 (ESV)

The principalities and powers use violence and intimidation to conquer, oppress, rule, and enslave. The dominant myth in our world, which almost everyone has adopted unquestioningly, is that it the only possible way to survive and thrive in this world is by operating according to the rules imposed on us by the spiritual world system constructed by satanic world powers. Walter Wink, in his book entitled The Powers that Be, calls this the myth of redemptive violence.

Jesus was born in Israel at the zenith of Rome’s world domination and military power into a nation which was under its thumb. He arrived as the long awaited Messiah, who, it was thought, would lead the Jews in an armed revolt against her oppressors and restore her former glory as a world power. These expectations were only partly right. Jesus actually came as the LORD of LORDS, the ruler of the universe, to whom every knee would one day bow; however, he came to install a radically different kingdom that would not be ruled or influenced by the principalities and powers of the satanic world system. For this to happen, he had to first defeat those powers through the mysterious work of the cross.

Jesus and the Jubilee

Yoder shows that Jesus’ teachings were profoundly influenced by his understanding of the meaning of the Jubilee, which many believe occurred in AD 26. The four main prescriptions of the Jubilee were:

  1. Leaving the soil fallow,
  2. Remitting debts,
  3. Liberating slaves, and
  4. Returning family property to each individual.

The second and third points are central to Jesus’ theology and teaching. (p.61) The Lord’s Prayer is a jubilatory prayer, the theme of which is

“the time has come for the faithful people to abolish all the debts which bind the poor ones of Israel, for your debts toward God are also wiped away. ” (p.62)

The Galilean peasant had been reduced to slavery because of the horrendous burden of taxation imposed by Herod the Great. This situation was further exacerbated by absentee landowners who hired intermediaries to manage their properties. These “stewards” were often crooked, cheating both the landowners and the tenant farmers. Jesus came to liberate the poor from oppressive debts, the prisoners from prison, and the brokenhearted from their pain and hopelessness. In so doing, Jesus attacked another bastion of the principalities and powers – the use and abuse of wealth to dominate and enslave. Instead Jesus advocated radical generosity and the renouncing of every form of worship of Mammon.

His kingdom and his followers would operate on another plane altogether, which called for a new mentality (metanoia – change of thinking, repentance). His kingdom would be known for its unselfishness and sharing. The jubilee also meant that slaves would be set free, which extended to those held in bondage to sin. The Jewish authorities took special offense at his claiming to have authority from God to forgive. In the Lord’s prayer, Jesus shows that debt is paradigmatic of evil, which is especially interesting in light of the United States hopeless servitude to Mammon and the resulting staggering indebtedness that has engulfed us. Jesus came to liberate slaves, debtors, and sinners and to install a new social ethic in his new kingdom in which slaves would be set free, debtors released, and sinners forgiven.

The Cross

The demonic cosmic world powers were enraged at the presence of this new king and his new kingdom ethic that threatened their rule. The Romans operated fully under this evil cosmic system and unquestioningly attempted to stamp out any type of insurrection that posed a threat to their domination. The Jewish leaders were complicit and sought to maintain their place, privilege, and power within the Roman hierarchy. Anyone (Jesus) who posed a threat to that position would be dealt with using brutal force.

As opposition to Jesus grew, he began to teach his disciples that he must die an insurrectionist’s death on the cross. He called his followers to commit themselves to being a

“community of voluntary commitment, willing for the sake of its calling to take upon itself the hostility of a given society… a disciple is to share in that style of life of which the cross is the culmination… [a] community of disciples [with] sociological traits most characteristic of those who set about to change society: a visible structured fellowship, a sober decision guaranteeing that the costs of commitment to the fellowship have been consciously accepted, and a clearly defined life-style distinct from that of the crowd.” (pp. 37-39)

When Jesus entered Jerusalem in Luke 19:36-46, he did so as the Messianic son of David. His “cleansing of the temple” illustrated his authority in the spiritual realm. With the people behind him, his next logical step would have been to gather an army and assault the Roman garrison, but he would not. Instead Jesus retreated to Gethsemane to await his fate. His enemies understood that they must put him to death because his claims to be the Messiah were clearly understood and could only lead to trouble for the powers that currently ruled.

Scot McKnight’s book, The King Jesus Gospel, is very helpful at this point. McKnight clearly demonstrates that the gospel is much more than proclaiming that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Rather, it must be clearly declared that Jesus is also the LORD of LORDS who is coming again to take the throne of David, which is his by divine right. Jesus destiny will be to usher in the full expression of his Father’s jubilee-oriented kingdom. It is vital to understand that Jesus’ messianic claims were political in nature, which the Romans, Herod, the Jewish authorities, and Jesus’ own disciples clearly understood. If we fail to understand this, our gospel message will be diminished. We must proclaim Jesus, the Messianic King of Israel, not just forgiveness of sins!

The cross stands for the person who loves his enemies, whose righteousness is greater than that of the Pharisees, who being rich became poor, who gives his robe to those who took his cloak, who prays for those who evilly use him. The cross is not a detour or a hurdle on the way to the kingdom, nor is it even the way to the kingdom; it is the kingdom come… Jesus was, in his divinely mandated…prophethood, priesthood, and kingship, the bearer of a new possibility of human, social, and therefore political relationships. His baptism is the inauguration and his cross is the culmination of that new regime in which his disciples are called to share…[We cannot] avoid his call to an ethic marked by the cross, a cross identified as the punishment of a man who threatens society by creating a new kind of community leading a radically new kind of life. (pp. 51-53)

Such an understanding of the cross is central to Yoder’s book. He writes:

The believer’s cross is, like that of Jesus, the price of social nonconformity. It is not like sickness or catastrophe, an inexplicable, unpredictable suffering; it is the end of a path freely chosen after counting the cost… it is a normative statement about the relation of our social obedience to the messianity of Jesus. Representing as he did the divine order now at hand, accessible; renouncing as he did the legitimate use of violence and the accrediting of the existing authorities, renouncing as well the ritual purity of noninvolvement, his people will encounter in ways analogous to his own the hostility of the old order. (p.96)…

Between the absolute agape which lets itself be crucified and effectiveness (which it is assumed will usually need to be violent), the resurrection forbids us to choose, for in the light of the resurrection crucified agape is not folly (as it seems to the Hellenizers to be) and weakness (as the Judaizers believe) but the wisdom and power of God. (1 Cor. 1:22-25) (p. 109)

Principalities and Powers

Yoder’s chapter entitled Christ and Power gives the reader insight into the nature of spiritual warfare and the church’s mission to manifest the wisdom of God in the face of hostile world rulers. From the beginning of creation, “powers” have had their place in God’s order. When Paul wrote that all things “subsist” in Christ (Colossians 1:17), the Greek word used was the same root as our modern word “system.” In Christ, everything systematizes and holds together. (pp. 140-141)

Rather than being benevolent, as they were at the time of creation, they now seek to

  1. Separate us from God’s love (Romans 8:38),
  2. Rule over those who are far from God (Ephesians 2:2),
  3. Hold us in servitude to their rules (Colossians 2:20), and
  4. Hold us under their tutelage. (Galatians 4:3)

These structures or powers which were created to serve us, have become our masters and guardians. (p. 141) Yoder points out that tyrannical domination by the powers is nevertheless better than chaos. God orders the powers under his sovereignty. (Romans 13:1) We cannot live without them, because that would be chaos, and we cannot live with them, for they have absolutized themselves and demand from the individual and society unconditional loyalty, bringing us into slavery and harm. (p. 143)

Yoder writes:

If then God is going to save his creatures in their humanity, the Powers cannot simply be destroyed or set aside or ignored. Their sovereignty must be broken. This is what Jesus did concretely and historically, by living a genuinely free and human existence. This life brought him, as any genuinely human existence will bring anyone, to the cross. In his death the Powers – in this case the most worthy, weighty representatives of Jewish religion and Roman politics – acted in collusion. Like everyone, he too was subject (but in his case quite willingly) to these powers. He accepted his own status of submission. But morally he broke their rules by refusing to support them in their self-glorification; and that is why they killed him… Here we have for the first time to do with someone who is not the slave of any power, of any law or custom, community or institution, value or theory. Not even to save his own life will he let himself be made a slave to these Powers… He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them [in the cross]. Colossians 2:15. (p. 145)

The Work of the Church and the Powers

Paul wrote that the church is the vehicle for “the manifold wisdom of God” to “be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.” [Ephesians 3:10 (ESV)]

The very existence of the church, in which Gentiles and Jews, who heretofore walked according to the stoichea [elements of reality] of the world, live together in Christ’s fellowship, is itself a proclamation, a sign, a token to the Powers that their unbroken dominion has come to an end… All resistance and every attack against the gods of this age will be unfruitful, unless the church… demonstrates in its own life and fellowship how believers can live freed from the Powers. (p. 148)

This is a monumental insight! The church must model freedom from Mammon, nationalism, racism, and every other dividing, enslaving Power. Seeing this truth unmasks how the modern “conservative” church has embraced the Power of revolutionary politics in order to justify the use of violence to resist a tyrannical government, something Jesus never taught nor modeled. It also takes the mask off of the “health and wealth gospel,” which has been co-opted by Mammon. It is vital that the church breakthrough in all these areas as an act of obedience to Christ and defiance against the rule of the Powers.

It is thus a fundamental error to conceive of the position of the church in the New Testament in the face of social issues as a “withdrawal,” or to see this position as motivated by weakness, because of Christians’ numerical insignificance or low social class, or by the fear of persecution, or by scrupulous concern to remain uncontaminated by the world.

What can be called the “otherness of the church” is an attitude rooted in strength and not in weakness. It consists of being a herald of liberation and not a community of slaves. It is not a detour or a waiting period, looking forward to better days which one hopes might come a few centuries later; it was rather a victory when the church rejected the temptations of the Zealot and the Maccabean patriotism and Herodian collaboration. The church accepted the gift of being the “new humanity” created by the cross and not by the sword. (pp. 147-148)

That Christ is Lord, a proclamation to which only individuals can respond, is nonetheless a social, political, structural fact, which constitutes a challenge to the Powers… The Powers have been defeated by… the sovereign presence, within the structures of creaturely orderliness, of Jesus the kingly claimant and of the church which is itself a structure and a power in society. The historicity of Jesus retains , in the working of the church as it encounters the other power and value structures of its history, the same kind of relevance that the man Jesus had for those whom he served until they killed him.(pp. 156-158)

Revolutionary Subordination

The chapter with the above title discusses what theologians call the Haustafeln, the early Christian ethical thinking. Yoder shows that it was not merely an adoption of an already existing teaching, but was in fact quite revolutionary. An example of this teaching can be found in the following passages – Colossians 3:18-4:1, Ephesians 5:21-6:9, and 1 Peter 2:13-3:7.

The subordinate person in the social order is addressed as a moral agent. She [or he] is called upon to take responsibility for the acceptance of her position in society as meaningful before God… Here we have a faith that assigns personal moral responsibility to those who had no legal or moral status in their culture, and makes of them decision makers…

In the Haustafeln,… the center of the imperative is the call to willing subordination to one’s partner… Subordination means the acceptance of an order, as it exists, but with the new meaning given to it by the fact that one’s acceptance of it is willing and meaningfully motivated… [which gives people a] new kind of dignity and responsibility… They are all related specifically to the person of Christ and the work of the church. (pp. 171-176)

Yoder shows that the teaching of the Haustafeln was necessary because the Gospel so liberated those who had previously had no status or standing that they had to be shown how to accept a subordinate role in society where necessary.

After having stated the call to subordination as addressed to those who are subordinate already, the Haustafeln then go on to turn the relationship around and repeat the demand, calling the dominant partner in the relationship to a kind of subordination in turn…That the call to subordination is reciprocal is once again a revolutionary trait. (p. 177)

To accept subordination within the framework of things as they are is not to grant the inferiority in moral or personal value of the subordinate party. In fact the opposite is true; the ability to call upon the subordinate party to accept that subordination freely is, as it was in the Haustafeln, a sign that this party has already been ascribed a worth that is fundamentally different from what any other society would have accorded. (p. 181)

The liberation of the Christian from “the way things are,” which has been brought about by the gospel of Christ, who freely took upon himself the bondages of history in our place, is so thorough and novel as to make evident to the believer that the givenness of our subjection to the enslaving or alienating powers of this world is broken…

But precisely because of Christ we shall not impose that shift violently upon the social order beyond the confines of the church… We may have reason to hope that the loving willingness of our subordination will itself have a missionary impact… The voluntary subjection of the church is understood as a witness to the world. (p. 185)

Relating to Secular Government

Yoder next addresses how revolutionary subordination affects our relationship with secular government. This is perhaps one of the most important chapters in the book, considering how conservative Christians have bonded with the American revolutionary ethic of armed resistance to tyranny. Yoder writes:

There is a very strong strand of Gospel teaching which sees secular government as the province of the sovereignty of Satan. This position is perhaps most typically expressed by the temptation story, in which Jesus did not challenge the claim of Satan to be able to dispose of the rule of all the nations… Romans 13 was written about pagan government. It constitutes at best acquiescence in that government’s dominion, not the accrediting of a given state by God or the installation of a particular sovereign by providential disposition… There is a strong strand of apostolic thought that sees the state within the framework of the victory of Christ over the principalities and powers… In the book of Revelation, most pointedly in Chapter 13, we find an image of government largely comparable to the one we referred to in the earliest portions of the Gospels. The “Powers” are seen as persecuting the true believers… (pp. 194-196)

Yoder makes the case that Romans 13:1 means that:

God is not said to create or institute or ordain the powers that be, but only to order them, to put them in order, sovereignly to tell them where they belong, what is there place… there has been hierarchy, authority, and power since human society existed. Its exercise has involved domination, disrespect for human dignity, and real or potential violence ever since sin existed. Nor is it that by ordering this realm God specifically, morally approves of what government does… God orders them, brings them into line, providentially and permissively lines them up with divine purposes. (pp. 201-202)

The Christian who accepts subjection to government retains moral independence and judgment. The authority of government is not self-justifying. Whatever government exists is ordered by God; but the text does not say that whatever the government does or asks of its citizens is good. (p. 205)

The willingness to suffer… is itself a participation in the character of God’s victorious patience with the rebellious powers of creation. We subject ourselves to government because it was in so doing that Jesus revealed and achieved God’s victory. (p. 209)

“The lamb that was slain is worthy to receive power!” John is here saying…that the cross and not the sword, suffering and not brute power determines the meaning of history. The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience…The triumph of the right, although it is assured, is sure because of the power of the resurrection and not because of any calculation of causes and effects, nor because of the inherently greater strength of the good guys… but one of cross and resurrection. (p. 232)

The name “Christ,” that is, the one anointed to rule, …. was inseparable from the political concerns then related most intimately to fulfilling the hopes of his people in their oppression… The choice that he made in rejecting the crown and accepting the cross was the commitment to such a degree of faithfulness to the character of divine love that he was willing for its sake to sacrifice “effectiveness.”… What Jesus renounced was thus not simply the metaphysical status of sonship but rather the untrammelled sovereign exercise of power in the affairs of that humanity amid which he came to dwell…

But the judgment of God upon this renunciation and acceptance of defeat is the declaration that this is victory… affirming that the dominion of God over history has made use of the apparent historical failure of Jesus as a mover of human events. (pp. 234-236)

This gospel concept of the cross of the Christian does not mean that suffering is thought of as in itself redemptive or that martyrdom is a value to be sought after. Nor does it refer uniquely to being persecuted for “religious” reasons by an outspokenly pagan government. What Jesus refers to in his call to cross-bearing is rather the seeming defeat of that strategy of obedience which is no strategy, the inevitable suffering of those whose only goal is to be faithful to that love which puts one at the mercy of one’s neighbor, which abandons claims to justice for oneself and for one’s own in an overriding concern for the reconciling of the adversary and the estranged… It is rather our readiness to renounce our legitimate ends whenever they cannot be attained by legitimate means itself constitutes our participation in the triumphant suffering of the Lamb. (pp. 236-237)

There is a widespread recognition that Western society is moving toward the collapse of the mentality that has been identified with Christendom.

Christians must recognize that they are not only a minority on the globe but also at home in the midst of followers of non-Christian and post-Christian faiths. Perhaps this will prepare us to see how inappropriate and preposterous was the prevailing assumption, from the time of Constantine until yesterday, that the fundamental responsibility of the church for society is to manage it…A church once freed from compulsiveness and from the urge to manage the world might then find ways and words to suggest as well to those outside its bounds the invitation to a servant stance in society. (pp. 240-241)

Conclusion

I urge you to read both The King Jesus Gospel by Scot McKnight and Yoder’s work. Understanding the truths found in these two books will enhance your concept of the gospel and the cross. They will give you greater clarity concerning what it means to be part of the church’s call to manifest God’s wisdom to the principalities and the powers. You will see how important it is for the church to be the new humanity that lives out the teachings of Jesus in a world enslaved by sin and the world system of powers and principalities. You will find yourself being stirred in the core of your being with an excitement that comes from serving and proclaiming the King of Kings and his world altering kingdom Gospel. May the church arise from is slumber and malaise to become the world changing force she was designed to be!

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Radical

Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream

by David Platt

Platt, a pastor of mega-church in Birmingham, AL, has written a very refreshing and impacting book that navigates the tension between the attractional church model and the Great Commission. He says he is on a journey in which God is showing he and the church he pastors how to do God’s mission as a church.

His biggest fear “even now, is that I will hear Jesus’ words and walk away, content to settle for less than radical obedience to him.” (p.3)

The book opens with a critique of the American church as a whole. Platt writes:

“I am convinced that we as Christ followers in American churches have embraced values and ideas that are not only unbiblical but that actually contradict the gospel we claim to believe.” (p.3)

“…somewhere along the way we had missed what is radical about our faith and replaced it with what is comfortable. We were settling for a Christianity that revolves around catering to ourselves when the central message of Christianity is actually about abandoning ourselves.” (p.7)

The American church has created for itself:

a nice middle-class Jesus…who doesn’t mind materialism and who would never call us to give away everything we have. A Jesus who would not expect us to forsake our closest relationships so that he receives all our affection. A Jesus who is fine with nominal devotion that does not infringe on our comforts, because, after all, he loves us just the way we are. A Jesus who wants us to be balanced, who wants us to avoid dangerous extremes, and who, for that matter, wants us to avoid danger altogether. A Jesus who brings us comfort and prosperity as we live out our Christian spin on the American dream. (p.13)

Hopefully we can all see how such a mentality is not really a worship of Jesus, but of ourselves. (p.13) This is no small thing. As Platt puts it:

“We may have loved a god that we made up in our minds, but the God of the Bible, we hate.” (p.30)

Platt points out that the root of the problem is found in our American culture

“that exalts self-sufficiency, self-esteem, and self-confidence. (p.32)

Note the contrast, however, when we diagnose the problem biblically. The modern-day gospel says, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Therefore, follow these steps, and you can be saved.” Meanwhile the biblical gospel says, “You are an enemy of God, dead in your sin, and in your present state of rebellion, you are not even able to see that you need life, much less cause yourself to come to life. Therefore you are radically dependent upon God to do something in your life that you could never do.” (p.32)

We realize we are saved not just to be forgiven of our sins or to be assured of our eternity in heaven, but we are saved to know God. So we yearn for him. We want him so much that we abandon everything else to experience him. This is the only proper response to the revelation of God in the gospel. (p.39)

Instead of trusting in our own abilities and serving a God of our own making, the gospel beckons us to abandon ourselves to God and his mission of reaching the nations with the gospel, depending on his ability and provision.

“God gave his people his image for a reason – so they might multiply his image throughout the world” through the preaching of the gospel. (p.65)

“And to disconnect God’s blessing from God’s global purpose is to spiral downward into an unbiblical, self-saturated Christianity that misses the point of God’s grace.” (p.71)

“…we have…drawn a line of distinction, assigning the obligations of Christianity to a few (e.g. missionaries) while keeping the privileges of Christianity for us all.” (p.73)

Platt invites the reader to

“let your heart be gripped, maybe for the first time, by the biblical prospect that God has designed a radically global purpose for your life…God has created us to accomplish a radically global, supremely God-exalting purpose with our lives…and God has designed our lives for a collision course with the world.” (p.83)

Discipleship

Chapter Five shows the reader that Jesus has a surprisingly simple plan to give us a global impact – discipleship.

One of the unintended consequences of contemporary church strategies that revolve around performances, places, programs, and professionals is that somewhere along the way people get left out of the picture. But according to Jesus, people are God’s method for winning the world to himself. (p.90)

Platt points out that disciple making must take place outside the four walls of the church building, out in the community where people live, work, and play. The church must forsake its obsession with the attractional model and be willing to become the mobile church. Discipleship is more about relationships than events. Platt points out that the Great Commission not only commands us to go, but also to baptize, through which believers become identified with the church, the larger community of believers with whom we live our lives and go on mission. He writes:

“…we will multiply the gospel only when we allow others to get close enough to us to see the life of Christ in action.” (p.99)

“Jesus’ command for us to make disciples envisions a teaching role for all of us.” (p.100)

This raises the bar in our own journey with Christ. In order to teach someone else how to pray, we need to know how to pray. In order to help someone else learn how to study the Bible, we need to be active in studying the Bible. But this is the beauty of making disciples. When we take responsibility for helping others grow in Christ, it automatically takes our own relationship with Christ to a new level. (pp.100-101)

Embracing the call to be a disciple maker requires us to listen to Bible teaching as if we will need to pass it on. It’s one thing to hear a sermon for my on sake, but if I will need to share what I learn later with someone else, I will take notes. It changes everything.

“It is multiplying because the people of God are no longer listening as if his Word is intended to stop with them. They are now living as if God’s Word is intended to spread through them.” (p.103)

Mercy Ministries

Chapter Six, entitled “How Much Is Enough?,” looks at how Christians should relate to the poor.

“According to Jesus, you can tell someone is a follower of Christ by the fruit of his or her life, and the writers of the New Testament show us that the fruit of faith in Christ involves material concern for the poor…If there is no sign of caring for the poor in our lives, then there is reason to at least question whether Christ is in our hearts…if our lives do not reflect radical compassion for the poor, there is reason to wonder if Christ is really in us at all.” (pp.110-111)

Platt shows how the modern obsession with glorious buildings is really an Old Covenant idea. In the New Covenant, God’s temple is formed by“living stones,” people, and the emphasis for us should not be on structures but on people. In this chapter, the author also shows us the reason for worldly wealth, which is to have more to give.

God asks us to give sacrificially “to care for the needy around us.” (p.126)

“But the truth is, there will continue to be millions and millions of people who do not hear as long as we continue to use spare time and spare money to reach them. Those are two radically differing questions. What can we spare? and What will it take?” (p.129)

“What would happen if together we stopped giving our scraps to the poor and started giving surplus? What if we started giving not just what we are able to give but beyond what we are able to give?” (p.130)

“The lesson I learned is that the war against materialism in our hearts is exactly that; a war. It is a constant battle to resist the temptation to have more luxuries, to acquire more stuff, and to live more comfortably.” (p.136)

Platt points out that it is easier to ignore faceless need. Once we come to know those in need, everything changes.

As I see their faces, I realize that I have a choice. You and I both have a choice. We can stand with the starving or with the overfed. We can identify with poor Lazarus on his way to heaven or with the rich man on his way to hell. We can embrace Jesus while we give away our wealth, or we can walk away from Jesus while we hoard our wealth. Only time will tell what you and I choose to do with this blind spot of American Christianity in our day. (p.140)

Responsibility to Preach the Gospel

Chapter Seven deals with the urgency of preaching the gospel to those who have never heard. Platt points out that people will not be sent to hell for not hearing the gospel. Rather those who have never heard will be sent to hell for rejecting the God who created them and reveals himself through creation. Every person comes into this world with a predisposition to be God’s enemy. We cannot excuse inactivity in world missions with the hope that somehow God will give the unreached a pass because they never heard about Jesus. If this were the case, the worst thing we could ever do is preach the gospel to them and thereby bring them under stricter judgment.

“More than five thousand people groups, totaling approximately 1.5 billion people, are currently classified as ‘unreached’ and ‘unengaged.’.. Even worse, no one is currently doing anything to change their situation. No one.” (p.158)

(While, I might not agree with this last conclusion, I am impacted by my responsibility to take the gospel to those who have never heard. – Pete)

Platt goes on:

” The purpose of the church is to mobilize a people to accomplish a mission. Yet we seem to have turned the church as a troop carrier into the church as luxury liner. We seem to have organized ourselves, not to engage in battle for the souls of peoples around the world, but to indulge ourselves in the peaceful comforts of the world…The reward of the American dream is safely, security, and success found in more comfort, better stuff, and greater prosperity. But the reward of Christ trumps all these things and beckons us to live for an eternal [reward]. (pp.170-172)

Radical obedience to Christ is not easy; it is dangerous. It is not smooth sailing aboard a luxury liner; it is sacrificial duty aboard a troop carrier. It’s not comfort, not health, not wealth, and not prosperity in this world. Radical obedience to Christ risks losing all these things. But in the end, such risk finds its reward in Christ. And he is more than enough for us. (p.181)

The last chapter is a challenge to try a radical experiment for one year. Platt asks the reader consider committing to five things over the course of twelve months.

  • Pray for the entire world.
  • Read through the entire Bible.
  • Sacrifice your money for a specific purpose.
  • Spend your time in another context.
  • Commit your life to a multiplying community.

In Luke 10:2, Jesus tells us to pray to the Lord of the harvest that he will send out laborers into the harvest. “When Jesus looked at the harassed and helpless multitudes, apparently his concern was not that the the lost would not come to the Father. Instead his concern was that his followers would not go to the lost.” (p.187) Prayer, therefore, is critical to the mission.

The Word of God cannot be minimized. If God’s people do not spend adequate time reading the Bible, how will we ever fulfill our mission? As for sacrificial giving, Platt points out:

“We are an affluent people living in an impoverished world. If we make only ten thousand dollars a year, we are wealthier than 84 percent of the world, and if we make fifty thousand dollars a year, we are wealthier than 99 percent of the world.” (p.194)

We will answer to God for how we spend our wealth.

The challenge to get outside our comfort zones recognizes that for us to be  incarnational Christians, we must get involved and minister where the people live rather than expect them to come to our church world. We must immerse ourselves in their lives, culture, and needs. Platt also encourages believers to give at least one week per year to world missions. He claims convincingly that what we learn in going will dramatically impact our effectiveness closer to home. He includes all believers in this challenge when he writes:

Consider what happens when all of us begin to look at our professions and areas of expertise not merely as means to an income or to career paths in our own context but as platforms for proclaiming the gospel in contexts around the world. Consider what happens when the church is not only sending traditional missionaries around the world but also businessmen and businesswomen, teachers and students, doctors and politicians, engineers and technicians who are living out the gospel in contexts where a traditional missionary could never go. (p.203)

Lastly, Platt makes a case for committing to a local body of believers that is pursuing the mission of God, where radical commitment to Christ is taught and modeled.

“…look for the best avenue within that community of faith to be about making disciples.” (p.206)

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The Complete Book of Discipleship

by Bill Hull

First of all, Bill has been on his discipleship journey for about forty years. He has been writing about this topic for a long time, too. This is one of those books from which you will be quoting. Not only is there a wealth of information, but Bill challenges his reader to the core.

Bill deals with the “elephant in the room” – consumerist non-discipleship Christianity. He shows how capitulation to our culture has robbed the church of her obedience, power, and vibrancy. He also addresses the false notion that discipleship can be thought of as a program for new believers that can be checked off the list and moved beyond. Discipleship is a lifetime journey.

Bill gives his readers a brief overview of the history of discipleship in the church, beginning with the Greco-Roman world up through Dietrich Bonhoeffer. At the end of the book he catches us up on present thoughts and practices. He also covers the marks of a disciple, the stages of discipleship, what is involved in spiritual transformation, the various approaches to disciple making, the role of small groups in the process, how discipleship works in the church, leaving a generational legacy through discipleship, and, finally, the future of discipleship. At the end of the book, referring to some of Barna’s research, he gives five examples of churches which seem to be doing a good job at making disciples, each one doing it a different way.

Some of the “gems” that I have taken from my reading of this book are below. I suppose everyone will be impacted slightly differently, depending on where each of us are in our own journey; but, I believe any serious disciple will benefit from giving this work a chance.

The Discipleship Cycle

(The graphic below is my design.)
Bill shares that most churches do a pretty good job at focusing on growth in knowledge of the Bible, learning ministry skills, and focusing on inner character transformation. Where we break down is usually in the area of being personally accountable to a mentor and in making a commitment to invest in at least one other person at any given time. I would add that unless sharing the Gospel with those who do not yet know Christ is added to the cycle, we will miss a fundamental aspect of disciple making.

Bill talks about entering into training rather than simply trying harder. He emphasizes the importance of cultivating the inner life, something that is a little foreign to many evangelicals formed by our consumer culture. Bill also is big on having a manageable way to measure progress, which evidences his leaning toward the engineer mindset. (See my summary of Peter Block’s book, The Answer to How Is Yes.) This does not mean we become regimented or program-oriented, but it does require giving some thought to providing a way to facilitate growth.

One of the best sections addresses the need for leaders to “detox” by giving up the “gods” that traditionally have ruled over our concept of church “success” and which militate against true discipleship. The first of these is the worship of attendance. Quoting Dallas Willard, Hull writes:

We must flatly say that one of the greatest contemporary barriers to meaningful spiritual formation into Christlikeness is overconfidence in the spiritual efficacy of “regular church services.”… One way to give up the god of attendance is to replace it with a different goal. When our goal moves from wanting recognition from others to the transformation of others, we put the god of attendance in its place. (p.265)

Secondly, leaders must stop bowing down to the god of “increase.” I will quote one line:

“Perhaps the toughest place to decrease is in the influence and power we hold over people around us. Any leadership based on increasing the leader is wrong.” (p.267)

The third “god” that must be dethroned in our lives is “competence.”

The culture honors competence. But the myth of competence is thinking that we’ll outgrow our weaknesses, sins, fears, and disappointments. The myth is that we’ll reach a place of spiritual competence where we’ll “get it together.” Those times never come. In fact, as we become more like Jesus, our dependence on God increases… Our wounds and weaknesses are real; our inabilities are exposed for others to see. When we lead with our weakness and our wounds, we gain a powerful way to touch others around us. (p.268-9)

Hull exhorts leaders to focus on the development of the inner life and giving ourselves over to the principle of discipleship.

“The principle of God’s plan of discipleship is the impact of one life on another – the character, skill, and perspective of one godly person influencing another willing person.” (p.270)

A final benefit is that this book provides a wealth of lists of reading materials for the person who wants to go deeper into learning about this most interesting and important topic. You should read this book!

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The Faith of Leap

The Faith of Leap: Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure, and Courage

by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch

By the authors’ own admission, this was a book that began with a focus on mission and communitas and morphed into being a treatise on adventure and risk taking. The subtitle is “Embracing a theology of risk, adventure, and courage.” Frost and Hirsch show how the church is called to embrace a culture of liminality in order to complete its mission of bringing God’s kingdom to our communities.

Liminality is the term we use to describe a threshold experience. It is composed of any or a combination of danger, marginality, disorientation, or ordeal and tends to create a space that is neither here nor there, a transitional stage between what was and what is to come. As a result it is experienced as a place of discomfort and agitation that requires us to endure and push into what is to come. (p.19)

Part of the nature of liminality is that it is an adventure with an uncertain outcome that tests us, bonds us, and pulls out of us the genius of innovation and creativity. Necessity is the mother of invention. Most churches begin rather liminally, perhaps as a house church or some other type of plant. At the beginning those involved understand and participate in the adventure, but, unfortunately, most churches move as quickly as possible out of the liminal stage into safety, security, and equilibrium. This often changes the very nature of the church and causes the people lose focus, energy, and purpose – a slow kind of death.

The authors contend that God’s mission of redemption in the world is the proper catalyst to bring life and meaning back into the lives of Christians. In other words, rather than being worship-driven attractional churches, we are called to be mission-driven servant churches. This does not mean we cease to worship. Far from it! But we do not stop with worship. We allow our worship of God to propel us forward into the mission of God.

We are the people born of the missio Dei. This means that the church is a result of the missionary activity of God and not the producer of it. The church is therefore defined by its mission and not the other way around.  And this mission of redemption is not yet fulfilled; therefore, we are still on the Journey. As in our previous books, we say that Christology (our primary theology) determines Missiology (our purpose and function), which in turn determines Ecclesiology (the forms and expressions of the church.)…The church doesn’t have an agenda; it is the agenda. The church doesn’t have a missional strategy; it is the missional strategy. (p.21)

Quoting Hedrik Kraemer, the authors write:

…the church is always in a state of crisis and…its greatest shortcoming is that it is only occasionally aware of it…The church “has always needed apparent failure and suffering in order to become fully alive to its real nature and mission…And for many centuries the church has suffered so little and has been led to believe that it was a success…Let us also know that to encounter crisis is to encounter the possibility of truly being the church. (p.23)

Another quote is ascribed to Catholic theologian Hans Kung:

A church which pitches its tents without constantly looking out for new horizons, which does not continually strike camp, is being untrue to its calling…[We must] play down our longing for certainty, accept what is risky, live by improvisation and experiment. (p.24)

Being in liminal situations forces us to deal with the unfamiliar, which can light the fires of the entrepreneurial spirit.

Innovation usually arises out of a sense of need, even desperation, as organizations strive to keep the edge. Living systems theory maintains, rightly, that the sweet spot of innovation takes place on “the edge of chaos,” or on what is called a “burning platform” – a situation where the organization is threatened with possible dissolution…This in turn can trigger the entrepreneurial spirit, because such displacement puts a person and an organization in an environment that creates the possibility of “opportunity recognition.” One of the rules of innovation is Think like a beginner, not an expert. (p.48)

Movements happen when the church manages to shake off its collective fears and plunges into the mission of God in the world, where, while experiencing liminality and disorientation, they also get to encounter God and each other in a new way. (p.53)

Communitas in [Victor Turner’s] view happens in situations where individuals are driven to find each other through a common experience of ordeal, humbling, transition, and marginalization. It involves intense feelings of social togetherness and belonging brought about by having to rely on each other in order to survive. (p.56)

Mission, then, becomes the driving or catalytic force behind community, one of the four main functions of the church.

Since Constantine, the church has mostly been driven by a worship mentality, as it gathers once or more a week for music, singing, and teaching. Community and discipleship usually happen as the church gathers for worship. In this model, mission is something extra the church does when it is not meeting together, and is usually relegated to an elite group called “missionaries.” But when mission becomes the catalytic force in our churches, everything else is heightened and comes in line with God’s purpose for the church – to seek first the Kingdom of God and be his ambassadors of reconciliation.

Most churches are mainly audiences and any member of an audience is dispensable. As soon as you know you’re dispensable, the impetus for attendance is lost….Liminal churches are more like repertory theater companies…For a liminal church, there needs to be a similarly common ordeal, and everyone needs to be committed to the challenge collectively. Without significant levels of buy-in or stake holding by the team, the possibility of significant levels of innovation and energy are reduced. (pp.99-100)

In this model, mission catalyzes discipleship.

We have a friend who says she believes churches should get Bible teaching “on a need-to-know basis.” In other words, a church should open their Bibles together and learn from Scripture according to the contextual challenges and ordeals they are currently facing together. Sadly, many Christians don’t “need to know” what they hear each Sunday, and so they retain very little of it. (p.119)

I don’t fully agree with the above thought. As a Bible teacher, I understand the need for people to have a solid foundation of Biblical truth so that they are prepared for what life throws at them. However, I do agree that more of our teaching and preaching should be designed to equip people for actual ministry. In fact, I believe teaching should happen in the midst of actual ministry, in an apprenticeship format. Jesus taught truth and modeled ministry. Then he sent his disciples out to teach and do ministry.

Real discipleship must include involvement in ministry or it is only instruction, not discipleship.We are called to teach people to do everything Jesus commanded, not just know about it. And remember unused truth is lost truth…If our congregations are not engaged missionally in the ongoing work of serving the poor, feeding the hungry, challenging society, preaching the gospel, and responding to unbelief, they will have little need for our teaching. (p.120)

Regarding the function of leadership in the liminal church, the authors refer to a book entitled, Surfing on the Edge of Chaos:

It is so counter-intuitive today for a leader to push his or her church toward chaos [liminal uncertainty] when everything within them tells them to move back to the center, to stability… Real leaders ask hard questions and knock people out of their comfort zones and then manage the resulting distress…The role of leadership here is to continually unsettle the community, holding its feet to the fire of mission and marshalling the God-given potential that emerges in times of dissonance and uncertainly. Part of the key to effectively “surfing the edge of chaos” involves helping community members to overcome the toxic levels of risk aversion currently present in our churches. (p.131-2)

Frost and Hirsch point out that Jesus brilliantly addressed the problem of risk aversion in his disciples with these familiar words:

“For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Matthew 16:25 (ESV)

Jesus knows that if we can be freed from our aversion to loss, our whole outlook on risk would change…We are averse to loss much more than we are attracted to gain. But this was an aversion that Paul had abandoned by the time he wrote to the Philippians. For him all was gain, because he had lost his life for Jesus’ sake…part of the key to understanding why many Christians seem so loss-averse…[is because] for many of them their relationship to Jesus is located in the pledge of life, not the life they pledged. (p.136-8)

In other words, many Christians come to God as consumers rather than as servants. God is seen as a divine servant catering to our needs and desires, instead of our Master and Lord for whom we lay down our lives. God help us!

Leadership looks to unleash the missional capacities in the people of God. Living systems theory generally teaches us that leaders should disturb, but not direct, their organizations. This means that leaders have to remember that in living systems, things happen that you cannot predict, and, once they do, those events can set off avalanches with consequences that you could never imagine. You can disturb a church by embracing the risk of taking it into liminal space and remaining there until the God-given potentials of the people are accessed…Missional leadership isn’t about social engineering or barking orders to compliant underlings. If there is any manipulation involved, it is about manipulating the environment to unleash the congregation’s latent missional potential – its apostolic risk-takers, its prophets, and its pastors…It’s important to realize that leadership can’t dictate outcome…The trick is to create a design that allows a community to face issues squarely, to learn from itself, to come up with its own solutions to its problems…Taking the risk of leading a community of believers into mission and then daring to believe that in such a chaotic environment new solutions will emerge from within the community itself is often a step too far for many church leaders. But we are convinced that embracing such a risk is essential.(p.148-151)

Of course, all the above must be done with a complete reliance upon God.

The next to last chapter addresses the missional church’s call to neighborliness.

A missional church sees itself as a sent community, and where incarnational mission is the organizing function, social context becomes an extremely important matter. In effect, a missional church identifies itself to some considerable measure as God’s gift to a town or village or neighborhood…A key issue for any group willing to embrace the risk and adventure of mission is to dare to believe that they have been sent to stay home. That is, that home might be the very best place for them to serve, and the missionary call to “go” might still apply, but it is a going deeper, not a going away. (p.184)

The authors suggest that we should see our locality as being “genuinely important to our missional calling.” It is as we have discovered at Life Community Network, we are called to pastor the neighborhoods in which we live, as well as go to the nations. Perhaps churches need to consider relocating to the neighborhoods they serve, or even to abandon buildings altogether in order to force their congregations to think “outside the four walls.” This is not for everyone,  but it could be for some. It has been for us.

Short-term mission trips are fine as far as that goes, but they are often manageable, bite-sized experiences to compensate us for the fact that we should see our own homes as mission fields, our own neighborhoods as liminal spaces, our own culture as the sphere of adventure to which we’ve all been called. (p.201)

Referring to Jesus’ parable of the mustard tree, the authors write:

…the mustard tree is a sprawling, bushy shrub that sends out this massive unruly root system. It can be harder to uproot a mustard tree than a far taller cedar. Stuart [Murray Wilkins of Urban Expression in the U.K.] said when we look for signs of the kingdom, we often look for the big things, but maybe Jesus saw the kingdom as spreading and persistent. Stuart’s advice was not to try to plant massive churches but to cultivate churches with deep roots, – like a spreading weed that will not go away. A lot of traditional church-planting strategies are aimed at cultivating cedar-like trees. But if we take our neighborhood more seriously and engage more seriously in relational proximity and cultural exegesis, we could end up planting mustard bushes, deeply rooted and vastly spreading. (pp.201-2)

The book is loaded with examples of groups and individuals who have launched various expressions of missional kingdom work around the world. I feel sure that you will be inspired by this book and highly recommend it.

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Small Is Big, Slow Is Fast

Small Is Big, Slow Is Fast: Living and Leading Your Family and Community on God’s Mission

by Caesar Kalinowski

This excellent book highlights some of the teachings of Jesus that are counter-intuitive to many church planters and pastors. It contains principles, examples, and practical pointers for those who are interested in pursuing a life on mission in community with other followers of Christ. Even though the author is heartily pro-church, his missional journey began when he, as a megachurch pastor, became disenchanted with “doing church” as many of us have practiced it. He wrote:

After a few years, I began to chafe a bit, wondering if Jesus had died on the cross so that a few chosen people in a church service could “do” the ministry while pretty much everyone else just sat there, passively and silently watching. Was this what God had in mind? Was this the hope we had for growth and maturity as a follower of Jesus? Was the highest goal for most of my friends to become an usher in the church building . . .? [Kalinowski, Caesar (2014-10-28). Small Is Big, Slow Is Fast: Living and Leading Your Family and Community on God’s Mission (p. 25). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.]

He decided to adopt a different approach to church, through which he has learned numerous ways to help her become more effective in its mission to preach the gospel and make disciples.

Moving Forward

Let’s first establish a well-known principle that we usually cannot do things better until we properly assess where we have been and where we are now. It is important for us to gratefully acknowledge all the positives about the church as well as critique its deficiencies, with a heart to help her move forward. In fact, it often takes somewhat of an outsider to do this because we become culturally blind to many of the church’s problems and challenges. Our quest to find a better way of doing church almost always starts with a gnawing sense that something is wrong, coupled with a hunger for something better.

Caesar wrote:

I wondered what it would be like to live in real community with others, not just saying hello to them once a week and shaking hands. I wondered what it would look like to intentionally disciple each other to greater faith in Jesus, living together as God’s missionary family, here in my own neighborhood. There was one huge problem in all of this. I had zero not-yet-believing friends. In fact, I hardly even knew my neighbors. I was too darn busy pulling off all the programs that went on throughout the week (after week after week) at the church building. (p. 26)

The author observes:

What I learned was that the way the disciples of Jesus lived was not only in stark contrast to his own culture, but was upside down compared to everything else at that time, both Jewish and pagan. A pattern of teaching and living began to emerge that was profound, yet much simpler than I had seen or experienced in my own life. There was an “all in” nature to life in the kingdom of God, but the process for getting in and living out this life was somehow . . . uncomplicated, less pressured and mustered up, less programmed. (pp. 26-27)

Kalinowski ended up pursuing the “missional” model of being the church. Here he defines the concept:

Missional carries with it the idea that our lives should be radically oriented around the mission of Jesus, the same mission that he sent his disciples to replicate — making disciples who make disciples, as a family of missionaries, together. (p. 27)

The concept is easy to grasp and usually generates some positive response; that is, until we actually get down to trying to incorporate it into our daily lives.

…not everyone who was a Christian was willing to jump right into this new “missional lifestyle” with us. They all agreed that this was biblical, but their existing preconceptions of Christianity, the church, and their own priorities acted as a huge gravitational pull backward, away from a life where the priority and focus was living on mission with God. Apparently we still had a lot to learn about how best to implement Jesus’ methods of making disciples. (p. 28)

Small Is Big, Slow Is Fast

What the author shares in the remainder of the book are principles that can help those who pursue the missional type of lifestyle and church.

The promise is also clear. After the good news of the kingdom takes root and changes your own heart, Jesus promises it will expand outward to include others. The seemingly small first steps you take to cultivate growth in your own life will grow over time and have a larger effect on others. We are not called to build elaborate, structured programs and systems and then expect lots of people to come on in and fill them up for us. Instead, we are to plant small (gospel) seeds that will eventually grow into changed lives, changed families, and changed communities. Small is big. That’s the first kingdom principle that Jesus taught. But it wasn’t the only one. Continuing with his disciples, Jesus taught them another kingdom code: slow is fast… The pattern: Like yeast, a catalyst for change and growth, the gospel begins to affect our lives slowly at first, igniting a change within us that influences every aspect of our existence. (p. 30)

Multiplication Wins

The next principle Caesar introduces is that healthy life forms reproduce and multiply, which is God’s goal for the church. It is my belief that, if we do the hard work of laying down our lives and living for the kingdom of God, multiplication will follow. But this is no small task. The sin nature and our consumer culture is so ingrained that we generally resist what it takes to be truly missional, and easily slide back into traditional ways of thinking and acting.

A life lived on mission with God, where your focus and priorities are reoriented around making disciples who make disciples, does not happen like flipping on a light switch and suddenly become a reality in your day-to-day experience… And just as we saw with Jesus and his followers, you will need to start small, go slowly, and learn to trust God himself to guide you. (pp. 38-39)

Dealing with Self-Centered Materialism

The first thing we must confront in ourselves is our sinful preoccupation with our own lives, comforts, and priorities. Missional living is an arch-enemy to self, since it puts God and his priorities first, which mainly involves pursuing his kingdom and lovingly serving our neighbors.

…if the worldly stuff still looks so good to us that it’s on the same list as Jesus, on the same shelf of priority in our hearts, then we will never be of much use in doing the work of his kingdom. Ouch! (p. 46)

Gospel Motivation

The next chapter is about the proper motivation for being a disciple who makes disciples. The author explains why guilt and a works-based approach to motivating people will never work. Instead he suggests that followers of Christ need to understand the bigger picture – the restoration of all things.

The restoration of all things has one goal — that God would be glorified! Discipleship is the only mission that Jesus gave his church. It is how the gospel goes out and multiplies and accomplishes the restoration of all things. It is the power of the gospel that sets us free and saves us. It is the purpose of the gospel that then sends us out to make more disciples of Jesus who now live in light of the same good news. The gospel is not just about my individual happiness or God’s plan for my life. It is about God’s plan for the world. (pp. 63-64)

Kalinowski adds that discipleship is the process of moving people from unbelief to faith in Christ in every area of life. We are all on this journey of faith.

Often there is a large gap between what we say we believe in our head and what we truly believe in our heart. I call this our Head-Heart Distortion. The process of closing the gap between what we know in our head and what we believe in our heart is called “sanctification.” Sanctification is what discipleship is all about. I often say it this way: “Discipleship is the process of moving from unbelief to belief, concerning what is true of God, and now true of us, in every area of life.” (p. 64).

The Reason to Get Involved

One of the big obstacles that missional people must overcome is the tendency to hang out exclusively with other followers of Christ. Jesus left the comfort and bliss of heaven to join us here on this sin-tormented planet. The least we can do is make it our goal to hang out with those who need him, not just with those who are already in the family of God.

And as for the idea that we should avoid people to remain holy — come on! Jesus was the holiest person who ever walked on this planet. In fact, his holiness — the way he perfectly imaged the character and nature of God — is what led him to hang out with people whom the religious establishment had declared unclean. Our ongoing involvement and relationship with others, especially those on the margins, begins when we profoundly grasp God’s grace. Our selfish and fearful instincts are to keep our distance. But Jesus let people like that kiss his feet. He’s the friend of riffraff, traitors, the unrespectable, drunks, druggies, prostitutes, the mentally ill, the broken, and the needy — people whose lives are a mess. He ate with them, hung out with them, and invited them on a journey. (pp. 77-78)

Once the author shows the need for being intentional in our efforts to connect with those who do not yet know Christ, he uses the remainder of the chapter to give some very helpful suggestions and tips on how to be effective at this.

What Next?

The next point the author makes is that it is necessary to intentionally invite others into our missional communities.

Our goal is not to have a group or program that we call our “missional community.” Our co-mission is to lovingly invite the people God has purposely brought into our lives to join us in community as together we share the story of the gospel, make disciples, and learn to live as an extended family following Jesus together. That’s what starting a missional community is really all about. This is not a fad or the latest church growth technique or a new name for small groups or cell groups. It is rediscovering the church as oikos — an extended family on mission — where everyone is important and has a vital role to play.  I like to think of it this way: Joining God on his mission is joining his family. It’s going with our Dad and Brother Jesus, guided and empowered by the Holy Spirit, out into the world to do the family business. (pp. 95-96)

Caesar explains that missional groups must embrace being organized and organic. In other words, we need planned and unplanned activities, just as a biological family does. If we leave out one or the other, community life will suffer.

He makes another great point that missional communities ideally should live in close proximity to foster more opportunities to do life together; otherwise, we easily drift into being small groups who are not really living the missional life.

…an MC that is made up of people who do not live relatively close to one another will have a very hard time really making disciples and developing others to do the same. Their best intentions usually dissolve into a weekly meeting that they call their “missional community,” and it is nothing more than an old-school “small group” with new language and higher hopes. So when it comes to building a family on mission from a network or neighborhood, I would suggest that you shoot for those closest to you and trust God for growth and multiplication as your collective relational network expands. (p. 107)

At LifeNet, we are still challenged in this area. Eventually my hope is to have true neighborhood-based groups, which get together regularly and impact the community in a positive way. Currently, we are somewhat scattered, which makes it more difficult to be spontaneous. We also wrestle with the American phenomenon of extreme busyness. Our schedules tend to be packed.

Caesar makes a good point that such regular interactions with the missional community are essential to genuine discipleship.

But I want to stress that since the goal of discipleship is to see every part of our lives come in line with the truth of the gospel, being and living more and more like Jesus, we have to be sure that we are actually in the normal stuff of everyday life with the people we are discipling. It is one thing to be a witness to someone. It is another thing to disciple them in all of life. (pp. 107-108)

Remember, this all starts with your family. You will never lead others further or disciple them “better” than you live this out in your own household. This can be challenging for us to get our heads and hearts around, because many of us have built our Christian lives around a Sunday church service or a midweek small group time and an occasional service project. But if you treat discipleship and mission like a weekly meeting or events on a schedule, that’s all they will be. And unfortunately, your relationship with God will mirror what you live and practice. Life with God will be nothing more than a scheduled event, a few times a week. (p. 109)

Discipleship takes place amid our ordinary day to day activities. If we include others in these activities, it gives us the opportunity to speak into their lives and demonstrate kingdom living. Discipleship can be compared to re-parenting people according to the truth of who they have become through faith in Christ. They are now beloved children of God who need to learn to think accordingly.

…there are three main components that must be taught, lived out, modeled, reminded, and retaught over and over: gospel, community, and mission. These three elements are the foundation, the core we return to, that consistently helps disciples connect to God in every area of their lives. We need to help people increase in the rhythms of living out the gospel together in community, living more and more like a family. And it takes consistent growth in the mission of pursuing people who are not yet part of the family and seeking those God has specifically called us to make disciples of. (p. 120)

Discipleship happens in a gospel-centered community that is living life together on mission. This is because a community that does not have the gospel as its center and purpose is just another social group or club. And it’s when we really live out Jesus’ mission that our true need for him and the gospel is revealed in greater ways. The Spirit uses these experiences and the various parts of the body in our community to help us conform to Christ. This is how true discipleship happens — not in a classroom, but in a family of missionary servants. (p. 122)

I have learned that the secret to increasingly living our lives together on God’s mission is to move away from seeing discipleship as something that needs to be tacked onto an already busy schedule, toward seeing all the normal stuff of life as full of opportunity for discipleship and growth in the gospel. This is not a call to life plus mission; rather, it is a call to life on mission. (p. 124)

Leadership Development

The author uses the next chapter to communicate the necessity of identifying and developing leaders. New communities cannot be successfully launched without new leaders.

But if all of our efforts never lead to new leaders being sent out on mission to start new extended families (oikos), then we just become another self-focused group that never grows. Or perhaps we become intoxicated with our group just getting larger and larger under our own leadership and direct supervision. Remember, healthy things always grow and reproduce themselves. If your missional community grows larger but never multiplies, it is not healthy. In my earliest experiences with starting MCs and planting churches, I learned that I had to keep my eye on the prize of ongoing leadership development. (p. 131)

Not everyone is willing or able to lead. Part of our task is to identify those who are and develop them, teaching them how to lead, giving them leadership opportunities, and coaching their growth.

Conclusion

Kalinowski offers some practical guides in the Appendix, which may or may not be useful, but are worth a look. What I came away with after reading this excellent work is that missional living is mostly about fully committing to community life in pursuit of fulfilling the Great Commission. It is one thing to individually commit to and model such living, and quite another to bring an entire group along for the ride. The need to spend lots of time together in planned and unplanned activities requires a wholesale lifestyle change for most people. John Maxwell once said that groups cease to grow when they are unwilling to pay the price required for that growth. May the Lord help us to embrace New Covenant missional living in the place of our isolation and “comfortable Christianity.” It will take the Spirit’s help for this to happen, but we must be willing and obedient. Help us, Lord!

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Right Here Right Now: Everyday Mission for Everyday People

by Alan Hirsch and Lance Ford

Alan Hirsch, one of my favorite authors, provides a theological framework for missional practice, something much needed. In this and his other books, he will challenge your thinking to the core. Entrenched deception has to be confronted head on.

The church in America must rethink her priorities and practice if we are to become the life-giving force we were designed to be.

Section 1: Putting Our Hearts into It (Missional Paradigm)

In the first chapter, Hirsch explains how to view daily life with a missionary’s eye.

The second chapter is devoted to helping us to actually see the people around us instead of looking right past them as if they were “extras” on a movie set who have no real purpose beyond being part of the background.

The third chapter talks about putting our gospel beliefs into action.

Section 2: Wrapping Our Heads around It (Missional Analysis).”

The fourth chapter deals with Western affluence and the church’s spiritual bankruptcy. Americanism is examined as an opposing force to God’s kingdom. The fifth chapter speaks to the need for Christians to simplify their lifestyles in order to further our mission. The sixth chapter tackles the gnarly problem of what is wrong with life in suburbia, including the idolization of the nuclear family.

Section Three: Doing Something about It (Missional Action)

Chapter seven addresses house churches and and small groups as communities of mission. The following chapter focuses on the missional and apostolic power of hospitality. The last chapter is entitled “Salt Blocks and Salt Shakers” and looks at the need to take the gospel outside the walls of the church.

Section 4: Debriefing

Several “elephants in the room” are exposed, which need to be removed, if the church is going to make a turn around in our culture in the 21st century. The challenge is the need for Christianity to become a people movement instead of a church institution.

Hirsch suggests a new definition of the church as the following: a Christ-centered covenantal community that prioritizes worship, discipleship, and mission.

Another “elephant” is the prevailing view that people tend to completely associate the kingdom of God with the activity of the church. Hirsch quotes Reggie McNeal on this topic:

“…we need a kingdom-shaped view of the church, not a church-shaped view of the kingdom.” (p.248)

Hirsch goes on to say:

“…it is going to take the whole body of Christ as a fluid, dynamic, witnessing agency, active in every possible area of life, to bring the gospel of God’s love in to his world.” (p.249)

A third “elephant” is the attractional-extractional model of the church.

If Christianity is going to once again become a world transforming people movement, we cannot extract people out of their cultures by attracting them into the church culture.To do so effectively cuts them off from the very people they are best equipped to reach with the gospel. Hirsch writes: “So, assuming that we bring them to our church, and we happen to do a good job at it and effectively socialize them into our church community, we are in effect snapping the natural, organic connections that they have with the host community they come from. This is very problematic because we know that the gospel travels along relational lines.” (p.251)

“Attractional forms of church in missionary contexts eventually are self-defeating because the church quickly exhausts its supply of relationships and because the new converts quickly become a cultural clique or religious ghetto increasingly marginalized from the original culture.” (p.252)

Another issue that needs examining is related to sustainability. Hirsch writes about the fact that many “everyday Christians” feel too tired and pressured after work to devote much time to missional pursuits. The author suggests that we need to take a look at the work situation and make any needed changes rather than abandon the mission.

If we do not take steps to provide greater time and energy to the mission, it will be difficult if not impossible to sustain the effort of mission.

Another practice that can help maximize sustainability is to do ministry in pairs or groups, rather than maintaining a lone ranger approach. By working together we support each other and train others to do the work, which increases sustainability. The third area that is connected to sustainability deals with the size of our church communities.

The author suggests that assemblies in the 30-120 range are most sustainable. Many smaller groups can be led by “non-professionals,” thus increasing sustainability.

Hirsch also advocates networking with other like minded ministries and networks in the area in which we are working.

The last “elephant in the room” has to do with finances for the full-time worker. He has several good suggestions. This book is a treasure trove of great quotes and ideas. You will want to hang on to your copy for future reference and possibly use it as a study guide for those interested in missional Christianity.

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On the Verge

on the verge: a journey into the apostolic future of the church

by Alan Hirsch and Dave Ferguson

Alan Hirsch is a great author, made better by teaming with Dave Ferguson. On the Verge is a treasure trove of information and ideas about the missional-incarnational apostolic church movement. I believe it should be in the library of every pastor and church leader and referred to repeatedly. In this article I will mention some of the great ideas I personally gleaned from it.

One of the key points in the book agrees with what Neil Cole emphasized in his important work, Organic Church: smaller is better for reproducing churches. Although Dave Ferguson is a mega-church, multi-site pastor, he is working to go small, too.

The authors advise their readers to think movementally, structure as a network, and spread like a virus.

Smaller is better for a movement for a number of reasons. The authors have a couple of graphics to show this. One compares different varieties of church structure on a continuum moving from institutional to what they call “movemental.” The most institutional form of church is the sacramental “high church” such as the Catholic or Episcopal Church. Moving toward “movemental,” the next kind of church is what they call the traditional church, which would include most mainline Protestant churches. Next we have contemporary churches, which include mega and multi-site churches. The next are what the author calls micro-missional. This is the kind of church LifeNet is here in Alamance County, NC. The final step in the progression are “apostolic movement” churches which multiply rapidly. Hopefully this is in LifeNet’s future. It is hopeful to me that we seem to be positioning ourselves well to be a part of what some believe is a new kind of reformation of the church, moving it away from what some call the building-centered “Constantinian” model to the networked small group model seen in the New Testament and more recently in China.

The move away from the Constantinian model is a move away from the church as an institution toward a paradigm that is a “more fluid, adaptive, reproducible, people movement.” (p.32)

The authors are not “against” any form of church, but they encourage at least a hybrid approach to mission – not so much either/or, but both/and. This is the basic theme of Hugh Halter’s book, AND: The Gathered and Scattered Church, which I have also reviewed. Alan Hirsch also penned an important book entitled The Forgotten Ways. Some of that book’s content is reiterated in on the verge, mainly in a recapitulation of his concept of “Apostolic Genius” and “mDNA.” The basic idea associated with Apostolic Genius is that every church – in fact, every believer – has encoded in him or her all that is necessary to launch a gospel people movement, just as a single acorn has the potential to produce an entire forest over time. This idea seems to be confirmed in the house church explosion in China where every believer is taught to be a church planter. They teach their disciples that “conversion is commission” and “baptism is ordination.” (p.44)

Missional DNA (mDNA) is subdivided into six elements, which, if present in a group, according to Hirsch, will produce a people movement. They are Jesus is Lord, disciple-making, apostolic environment, missional-incarnational impulse, organic systems, and communitas. If you want a more detailed analysis of each, please read either on the verge or The Forgotten Ways.

Another necessary ingredient of a genuine people movement is a “chaordic” approach to structure and organization. People movements move and grow so quickly that it is impossible to control them. Leaders must rely on organic systems of networking which depend on holding common beliefs, loyalties, purpose, principles, and values. This is in contrast to trying to maintain a controlled top-down managed environment.

Quoting Dee Hock, the author of The Birth of the Chaordic Age, the authors say that churches that embrace a chaordic model must have “enough order at the center to give common identity and purpose, [and] enough chaos to give permission to creativity and innovation.” (p.46)

Movemental churches will experience a continual cycle of “seeing” (imagination), “getting it” (shift), and “doing” (innovation). The authors cover these steps in detail later in the book in four parts: Imagine, Shift, Innovate, and Move.

Imagine

In the section on imagination, the authors write:

…reframing the central paradigm of the church is one of the keys to change and much-needed innovation. A paradigm shift is a change to a new game, a new set of rules. And this in turn means we must reactivate our underutilized imaginations. Verge church thinking therefore is first and foremost an exercise in a distinctively apostolic imagination…(p.61)

…the godly imagination, because it is grounded in the gospel and inspired by the Holy Spirit, is hopeful, creative, and transformative. Applying this, we would then say that the fundamental job of apostolic imagination is to produce out of the church we now experience a vision of the church Jesus wants us to experience. (p.68)

Mission inspires innovation, deeper cultural engagement, and calls for more integrity in our witness. And because mission is tied to the very being of God and to the work of Jesus, it offers the imagination a profoundly rich resource in engaging culture, incarnating the gospel, sharing faith, and forming faith communities.

Reengaging missional ways of doing church is a direct route to renewal of our theology and ecclesial imaginations. (p.69)

If you do not get anything else from this book, please let the last quote sink in. LifeNet has been putting this into practice for several years now as a church, and it has fundamentally changed how we view and practice “church.” We have moved from seeing ourselves primarily as a group that meets on Sunday in a building to being a network of neighborhood-based missional communities exploring ways to connect as friends. We are ministers of reconciliation with those who live, work, and play around us. For us this led to the rather radical step of letting our building go in order to focus on increasing our community presence, while still meeting together as a network at least monthly. As the authors have said, unless we put action to our imagination, we will never have innovation.

What we are now is not likely to be what we will become, at least on the structural and organizational side of things. The book gives a handy acronym for the ongoing process of innovation – IDEA. Imagine and investigate, design, experiment, and then make adjustments as needed.

Unless we break free from the “psychic prisons” of our old paradigms, we may be headed for a European experience, where only two percent of the population is involved in the church. “We need to [be willing to] give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever the Spirit will lead us, and laugh at our own nakedness.” (p.88)

We need to become risk takers and get out of the boat as did Peter. We must allow the Spirit to break down restricting paradigmatic walls (strongholds of the mind, so to speak).

For example, did you know that 65% of the leadership in the Chinese underground church are women? (This is a genuine chaordic people movement which has seen the church grow from two million to around 130 million over the last sixty years during a time of intense persecution.) The number of women pastors gets even higher in church movements in India and elsewhere. This is not surprising when we consider that women played significant roles in early Christianity. Over 40,000 of Yoido Full Gospel Church’s 50,000 cell churches are pastored by women. Either God is allowing and blessing a paradigmatic error that allows women to be pastors, or these ground breaking Christian movements are on to something. (p.95)

Shift

The next section is about the shift that needs to take place if we are going to become a movement. One of the most interesting ideas I got from this part of the book is that we need to help the people in the church adopt missional practices so they can act their way to obedience and understanding.

Because Jesus designed the church to be a disciple-making system, it should be expected that everyone in the movement has an active role to play. No one who claims faith in Jesus is exempt from the call to follow him. It should be an explicit expectation that when someone comes to faith, they immediately get involved in the church’s practices – even before they might fully understand why they are important and how they express the ethos of the movement…Don’t reward mere spectatorship and attendance. Require active involvement in what it means to become like Jesus. Only in this way can we expect to create Jesus followers out of a church full of Jesus admirers. (pp.174-5)

So developing core practices must be seen as the “business end” of the Verge church process…The Hebrew worldview was a life-oriented one and was not primarily concerned with concepts and ideas in themselves.We simply don’t believe we can continue to try to think our way into a new way of acting: rather we need to act our way into a new way of thinking. (pp. 176-7)

The authors suggest developing an acronym that helps people remember the church’s values and practices – VISA: Visit, Invite, Serve, and Ask. Encourage our folks to Visit their neighbors to show interest, friendship, and to offer to pray for them. Secondly, ask our people to routinely open their homes to show hospitality, to Invite their friends and neighbors over for a meal, games, dessert, etc. These times around a meal can provide some wonderful opportunities to talk about deeper concerns, including the Gospel. It shows people that we care. The “S” stands for Serve. People can look for ways to practically serve in the community in a way that says we love and care about people. Lastly, we want to develop a practice of Asking God to work in the lives of those around us and to give us opportunities to be lovingly bold in sharing our faith.

Innovate

The next section is called “Innovate.” Chapter 7 is entitled “Innovate or Die.” I remember when Buddy Walker once visited our church a few years ago when we were first learning to be missional. He told me that he believed unless we changed how we do church, we would cease to exist. He asked me a very important question: “If you had the choice between pastoring a megachurch or a network of “house” churches, which would you take?” I knew immediately that I would take the latter. It has taken us a while to get there, but we are now officially a network of missional-incarnational communities that meet in homes and other venues, and also as a network. Buddy had the word of the Lord for us, but it has been a slow process to fully embrace innovation. It is not easy to let go of what is known and familiar to launch out into the deep in pursuit of God’s mission. It sounds Abrahamic, doesn’t it – going to somewhere as yet unknown as led by God?

The Japanese character for “crisis” is a combination of the characters for “danger” and “opportunity” (or promise); crisis is therefore not an end of opportunity but in reality only its beginning; the point where danger and opportunity meet; where the future is in the balance and where events can go either way. (David Bosch, Missiologist p.203)

The authors describe some of the characteristics of what they call a Verge leader. He or she leads from the front, modeling the desired behaviors. Verge leaders have an attitude of curiosity instead of absolute certainty.

“The one who can lead with the crystal-clear vision of a general and still maintain the curiosity of a child is a special leader and will foster innovation in the people around him or her. (p.212)

A Verge leader leads with a Yes and asks how later, or as Peter Block puts it, “The answer to how is yes.” If we are going to innovate, we must create a culture of giving permission to release the creativity and innovation built into the people of God.

Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no, but saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. (p.218)

If we engage in a blue ocean strategy – and I believe we have to if we are to engage the 60 percent of the population that is increasingly alienated from our prevailing expressions of church – then we simply have to innovate…What got us here is unlikely to lead us there. (p.222)

To successfully make this paradigmatic shift to become a Verge church, it requires a leadership willing to kick people out of their steepled boxes. It requires leadership that pushes others beyond discussion about mission to actually doing mission. (p.228)

Move

Chapter 9 introduces the section called “Move,” which is about putting everything we have learned into action. It’s about transforming the church into a “viral, highly transformative, gospel movement. It’s a reproducing church whose sole focus is the mission of Jesus filled with people who are engaged in mission in every sphere of life. (p.259) The authors put forth eight rules for becoming a movement. If you want to read about all eight, you will need to get the book. I will mention a couple that were especially meaningful to me.

The Small Rules

In Church 3.0, Neil Cole champions the power of small things. Why is small so big? Small does not cost a lot. Small is easy to reproduce. Small is more easily changed and exchanged. Small is mobile. Small is harder to stop. Small is intimate. Small is simple. Small infiltrates easier. Small is something people think they can do. Big doesn’t do any of these things.

We can change the world more quickly by becoming much smaller. (p.287)

The Network Rules

“If the Apostolic Genius expresses itself in a movement ethos, it forms itself around a network structure…when you couple Apostolic Genius with networked structures, you have in front of you the potential for world redemption.” (pp.290-1)

Closing Thoughts

In some closing thoughts, Hirsch writes:

I have little doubt that the biggest blockage to people-movement is the professionalization of the ministry of Jesus Christ. It has two effects: (1) it limits ministry to an elite group which inevitably replaces the priesthood of all believers/apprentices, and (2) it lets the people of God…off the hook of their God-given calling to be apprentices who are agents of the King in every sphere and domain. (p.292-3)

He went on to write that the extraordinary and explosive growth experienced by the Methodist Church in the early days of the United States was due in large part by a

“mobilization of ordinary people – white and black, young and old, men and women – and the removal of artificial barriers to their engagement in significant leadership as class leaders, local workers, and itinerant preachers.” (p.293)

New understandings of doing ministry must be created with each new generation for the church’s mission to move forward…The day of the professional minister is over. The day of the missionary pastor has come. (Kennon Callahan, Church Consultant, p.299)

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Missional Small Groups

Missional Small Groups

by M. Scott Boren

If you are like me and have done all sorts of small groups over the years, maybe you are not too interested in another book on the subject. This one, however, is a little different. Boren attempts to get us to the life source of a small group, rather than simply hand us another set of principles to help us be successful when we gather. He writes about small groups not necessarily being the

“focus; they were simply a mechanism for carrying the kingdom of God to this world.” (p.19)

If we make small groups the “end all,” they will always fall short of our expectations. Again he wrote that he longed for a hidden “rhythm” that would permeate how we live that would enable us to reach those who have no interest in attending church. (p.20) Perhaps this is what you, too, are looking for as we all journey together towards a better and more effective version of missional and incarnational living.

“Instead of doing groups for he sake of experiencing community, groups experience community for the sake of participating in God’s redemption of creation.” (p.23)

Boren agrees with Alan Roxburgh that one of our most important tasks is to become good listeners and conversationalists with those who live around us. He names three topics about which we in the church need to discuss. The first one is about the need for God’s people to live as missionaries in our own land. The United States is becoming increasingly post-Christian and post-modern in its thinking. Unless we come to terms with that, we are in danger of becoming marginalized and ineffective. The second conversation topic revolves around what it means to be the church and how we must live incarnationally so that we are good advertisements for God’s kingdom. This requires commitment, communion, community, and commission. The third topic is about God, the gospel, and what God is doing in the world. (pp.24-25)

Boren defines being missional as “putting love where it is not.” (p.34) He says we must “learn to be relational in the way we interact with one another and in our neighborhoods.” (p.34) I would add we must become missional in whatever “context” we find ourselves, whether it be our neighborhood, workplace, school, civic club, sports team, and so on. God has strategically placed us where we can influence people toward God.

“Being relational and being missional are intricately connected. We cannot divide the two.The church has nothing to offer the world if it does not embody the message of Good News that it aims to share.” (p.35)

This is what it means to be “incarnational.” This is because the world is not interested in religious hypocrisy.

The author points out that small groups usually revolve around one of four stories – personal improvement, lifestyle adjustment, relational revision, and missional re-creation. I found the chapter about “Listening to Your Small Group Story” very interesting and realize now that before we became LifeNet we never really got past the lifestyle adjustment group.

Personal Improvement Groups

The personal improvement group is all about meeting with other Christians only a fairly regular basis that is convenient in order to do short-term Bible and topical studies and to share with one another a little about what is going on in our lives. The result is a fledgling sense of community and a perception that the quality of our lives improving. (p.39)

Lifestyle Adjustment Groups

Lifestyle adjustment groups require a greater commitment to making coming together a priority. A greater level of belonging results, too, as members spend more time together, do social events as a group, and learn to take care of one another. It is Boren’s contention that most church small groups in America are in this category. People learn to adjust their lives away from the influences and pull of the predominant culture. (p.40)

Relational Revision Groups

The third type of group is the relational revision group. In Boren’s words, the most important part of this

“group, however, is not the meetings; it is how we are connected the other six days…And this connectedness usually spills out into the neighborhood.” (p.41)

In this kind of group, the members are intentionally learning to do life together differently, that is, the kingdom of God way. This type of group chooses to make the presence of Christ central. (p.42) This type of group is something to which to aspire, but it is not the most missional expression.

Missional Re-creation Groups

The last type of group Boren describes is devoted to missional re-creation. This kind of group may move into and adopt a neighborhood, bringing non-Christians into the community dynamic. Creativity and flexibility are paramount, since no two groups of this type will look alike. The are able to adapt to the needs of the environment in which they minister. It is all about seeing what God wants to do in a neighborhood and together stepping up to the challenge. (p.43)

If you think about it, a good group actually embodies elements of from all four types. I do not believe that groups can just start out at the missional recreation stage. We have to work our way there by learning to love each other, by spending time together, and by keeping focused on God’s call to be sent out.

Becoming a truly missional small group is more of a journey than a destination. (p.48)

But, lest anyone think the transition will be easy or pain free, Boren warns,

“There is a Jordan River that divides Improvement and Adjustment from Revision and Recreation.” (P.51)

God takes us on a journey through the desert of frustration and emptiness to create in us a hunger that motivates us to cross over into greater fruitfulness that comes from becoming part of God’s incarnational mission to those who do not yet know Jesus.

Pastors must understand that people will not change or embrace the new paradigm simply by listening to sermons on the topic. We have a need to see God’s kingdom life modeled.Church leaders and those who have already caught the vision must live out what it means to be missional and incarnational and invite others into the experience. This journey into the missional experience will be filled with experiments. We must be willing to try things in order to learn what works and what does not. We must be willing to take risks and depend on the Holy Spirit. We must ask God to use us to reach and love people.

The second part of Boren’s book is devoted to “Practice.” Just how do we get from where we are now to where we want to go or, rather, where God wants us to go?

“Being missional is about who we are, not just what we do. Therefore missional life is not simply about the body of Christ having hands and feet so we do something for the world. Living missionally depends on how we relate to God and how we relate to one another as much as how we relate to those outside the church.” (p.63)

Christianity requires community if it is going to be modeled correctly. We learn to live and love as Christ would have us do and we invite others into the experience.

“The way we pray, the way we experience God, the way we interact with each other, and the way we deal with conflict is just as missional as anything we might do for those outside the church.” (p.63)

Boren argues that

“community is actually the context in which we do the [spiritual] disciplines. Spiritual formation is not something I do alone and then contribute to the community.” (p.64)

He identifies three rhythms of missional life that are broken down into practices that groups can adopt. The three rhythms are Communion – the practice of God’s presence, Relating – the practice of agape, and Engagement – the practice of interacting with the neighborhood. (pp.62-63)

The final chapter describes the character of the persons who will be leading these groups. All in all, the book provides a framework for understanding mission and provides some practical things that will help a group get there.

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Missional Map-Making: Skills for Leading in Times of Transition

Missional Map-Making: Skills for Leading in Times of Transition

by Alan J. Roxburgh

No amount of internal enhancement will result in a church’s ability to engage the changing context, because the people living in these neighborhoods are less and less prepared to go to a church. The purpose of map-making is to assist the people of a church in discovering that they need to attend to the environment in their neighborhoods even more than in their churches. (p.183)

Roxburgh lists eight forces that are reshaping our world and making our old maps for doing church irrelevant. These are globalism, pluralism, rapid technological change, postmodernism, staggering global need, loss of confidence on primary structures, the democratization of knowledge, and a return to Romanticism. The world around us is in the midst of a huge shift, but often the church continues to operate as if nothing has really changed. As a result we have become increasingly ineffective in reaching people outside the church. Roxburgh proposes strategies that will help us regain our bearings as leaders.

Assess How the Environment Has Changed in Your Context.

I needed a different imagination for what it means to be a church in a community and what it means to lead in such a church. One of the things this growing realization meant was that it would be possible to be a faithful community of God’s people only by reengaging the neighborhoods and communities where we live and learning to ask what was happening among the people of the neighborhood, attending to their stories, and cultivating receptiveness to being surprised by what God might already be up to among all these people who aren’t thinking about church or even God. (p.132)

Focus on Redeveloping a Core Identity.

We live in a social context where coherent frameworks of religious and ethical meaning are collapsing, and in response, people form their religious and ethic commitments from bits of this and that…one of the most critical leadership skills is the capacity to cultivate an environment that the enables the reforming of Christian life around the core identity of the Christian narrative. Leaders must create an…

environment in which people [are] wrestling with Scripture rather than taking notes about dates and times and meanings and predetermined answers. This is about giving the Bible back to the people of God in the conviction that they can hear the Spirit in the midst of this wrestling…

In Protestantism, the great bulk of the emphasis on formation has been placed on the teaching and preaching roles of the pastor. But as important as they are, these roles largely omit the most critical element of transformation in the early church: learning and living a new set of habits and practices…This cultivation of our DNA is one of the core leadership activities needed at this moment in time. (pp.132-142)

Create a Parallel Culture.

Although counterintuitive to the modern, Western imagination, it is the daily application of practices, not great ideas or big ideals (preaching and teaching doctrine), that reformulates the DNA of a community and changes our reality…

We have just lived through a long period of the church’s history in the West when we simply assumed that most people were Christians; we assumed that just by the fact of living in this culture, we were formed as Christians. Most of us now realize that it was never quite like that and that we have lost the habits and skills of Christian formation…(p.150)

Practicing the Offices – Reading and Meditation on Scripture and Prayer

In the practice of the offices, we remind ourselves and each other of the cost of our commitment to following God; corporately, we learn to discern how we crowd out the Lordship of Christ, which should be the one essential focus for our lives as a people. (p.153)

Practicing Hospitality

Hospitality, a profoundly Christian habit, is a radically alternative practice in a culture where people feel like strangers to one another in their own neighborhoods and where we are too often turned into commodities that others want to use in order to sell their goods…People no longer know one another in our society. Trust is low, and fear of the stranger is high…Welcoming the stranger is a revolutionary act in the formation of a parallel culture…

Hospitality forces us to confront the ways our lives are driven by agendas and demands that push away relational encounters with others…Creating a gracious table does not include an agenda to “convert” the stranger but to create space to listen to the stranger, nothing more…In the practice of hospitality, we confront our own need for conversion to the Gospel of the Kingdom. (pp.154-157)

Receiving the Poor

I suspect that it will be very difficult to become map-makers in this new space without habits directed toward overcoming our isolation from those who are pushed to the bottom…Unfortunately, affluence often makes it hard to embrace the parallel culture of the kingdom…Economic discipleship is not a side conversation for the Christian. How might we engage the ways we are held captive by values that block our ability to live more fully as kingdom people? How might we discover ways of being God’s people that involve economic accountability and sharing?…Simply giving money to the church does not address the question of forming communities of the kingdom where people grow in their awareness of the economic powers controlling their lives…

Cultivating a missional environment calls for the practice of nurturing a listening friendship with someone outside one’s own economic world, which goes beyond taking on people as a project or volunteering at a rescue mission. (pp.158-159)

Form partnerships with the surrounding neighborhoods and communities.

The imagination for what a local community of Christians might be doing in their neighborhoods is found among the people themselves, not in programs designed for another era or deemed by leaders as essential to the inner life of a church…This is why the role of leadership is that of cultivator rather than program planner, a shaper of dialogues rather than a cheerleader for established programs…

Mission-shaped leaders create environments of permission-giving and experimenting in which these ordinary dreams might be birthed…

But to cultivate missional environments, leaders must learn how to attend to information, understand its power, and develop the capacity to help congregations to interpret and filter it in the light of their commitments…knowing how to help people reflect on information within the biblical narrative…[this] can be achieved only when the leader moves away from the need to promote strategies and visions and becomes present to the people…It will be out of these interactions [with the people in the congregation] that people will start to tentatively name experiments they would like to test in being God’s missionary people in the community… The great reality of the church is that by the Spirit, God’s imagination for the future is already among God’s people, an so the work of leadership is in the cultivation of the environment that will allow this imagination to gather energy…There is a place for certain forms of strategic planning, but these are now found not at the beginning or coming from the center, but toward the end as people initiate experiments in mission…[giving] a careful delineation of how the mission will be carried out…This means that strategic planning happens at a micro-level across the diffuse and dispersed experiments being conducted in the neighborhoods. The people themselves are taking on the responsibilities of strategic planning.

Leaders can be available to assist and facilitate, connecting people with resources and so on…as mission emerges, as groups of people start to gather and shape the ways they will engage their context in witness and with kingdom life, there is a need for some strategic planning…leadership skills required are not about command and control but the continual encouragement, cultivation, and support of people. (pp.170-181)

I have been part of a leadership team at LifeNet that has been trying to implement such thinking, but let me assure you that the old ways of doing things runs deep. The Holy Spirit is working in his people, but we must be in this for the long haul. Nothing of this magnitude happens quickly.

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Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood

Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood

by Alan J. Roxburgh

While sitting in a coffee shop filled with people one Sunday morning, Roxburgh asked himself the question:

How might we create the kinds of safe spaces where the real stories shaping people’s lives become the ones we own and address in our churches? How do we do church better on Sunday so that it is more relevant to where these people are? How do we get these people in the coffee shop to church on Sunday? Then I realized my questions were all wrong. (p.25)

He goes on to make the observation:

“A problem we face is that since the sixteenth century our questions have been shaped by the Reformation…the Reformation resulted in a focus that still controls our imagination – a focus on church questions that are no longer helpful in the missionary situation that confronts us. (p.27)

Roxburgh identifies the period between 1970 and 2000 as a time when the church rationalized technical success while the culture was shifting around them. It was an era of religious winners and losers as evangelicals and charismatics won the culture wars in terms of growth. The primary approach to the emerging cultural upheaval of post-modernism was to adjust, renew and fix the church through such movements as church growth, church effectiveness, and church health. (p.47)

In the 1990’s people began to dialogue about becoming missional, with its three-way dialogue between the church, the culture and the gospel. Roxburgh tells the parable of three long time friends who reunite after years apart. Rather than it being a time of mutual sharing, one friend is totally consumed with his own needs and desires, much to the disappointment of the other two, who soon go home saddened by the encounter. Later the author explains the three friends are the culture, the gospel, and the church, with the church being the self-centered one who tries to mine the other two for whatever can help make him more successful, rather than being truly interested in them. The church has become self-centered and infested with consumerism, careerism, and individualism. The church has studied the culture to design the best marketing strategies with which to lure people into attractional services.

The second part of the book shows how Luke wrote his gospel and the companion work  Acts to a generation of Christians who had somewhat lost its mooring following the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple and who were in the midst of intensifying persecution from the Romans. Roxburgh claims that Luke Chapter 10 takes us on a

“journey that moves from a primary focus on the church to the place of making the church work again in the neighborhoods and communities where we live so we can ask what God is already doing ahead of us in these ordinary places.” (p.71)

Scripture proposes a way of being in the world that attends to the concreteness of everyday life rather than romanticized idealizations of what the church or the culture ought to be…The world the biblical texts propose is not about the selling or marketing of a product but the re-forming of a world in the midst of the ordinary…the God of Scripture is known in the ordinary and the everyday. (p.77)

Roxburgh writes:

Our situation in North America today can be seen as very similar. For many of us the promises and expectations of the gospel seem to have failed. Just as Luke does not offer the Gentile Christians forms of adjustment, so our own crisis of meaning as Christians will not be addressed with one more set of tactics. Much of what is being offered today as “missional” are tactics for making the church more successful or effective…the need of our time is to allow the story of what God is doing in the world to reform us all over again in a different way. (p.89)

Still shaped by a Eurocentric Reformation, Christians in North America address a deepening identity crisis by continuing to wrestle with fundamentally ecclesiocentric questions about how to make the church work in the midst of cultural space of multiple narratives where the dominance of a settled, denominational, Eurocentric ecclesiology has less and less relevance. (p.100)

Luke will show that the issue is not God’s faithfulness but the narrow ways in which the gospel had been understood. (p.115)

God’s Spirit is breaking the boundaries of ecclesial life in the Western churches because they can no longer contain the ways in which the spirit is at work in the world. (p.118)

For Roxburgh, “the narrative begins in the context of discipleship” which is

“more radical than anything anyone has imagined. It is not about fixing or adjusting small areas of one’s life…it will probably not align with our expectations or fit with the categories of meaning that have shaped us to this point in our lives.” (p.121)

There are going to be lots of people who want to follow the Jesus movement as long as it fits with their settled assumptions of how things should turn out. But when the directions Jesus takes diverge from the expectations of what God is doing in the world, resistance is prompt and fierce. (p.122)

Roxburgh says that another main point Luke makes in Chapter 10 of his gospel is that we must leave our baggage behind. They were not to take a lot of baggage with them on their journey. In essence they were not to depend on their own resources…

the mission of God moves forward in the world when disciples of Jesus choose to become strangers in the towns and villages so they will be dependent on the hosts.  It appears there is a connection between being in the place of the stranger in need and being able to discern God’s working in the world. (p.124)

By this Roxburgh means that we must become listeners and learners, rather than people with set plans and all the answers.

Unless we release such baggage, we objectify people…we can’t listen to the person who stands before us as a human being – he or she is the object of our plans. (p.126)

We cannot ask the questions of what God is up to in our neighborhoods and communities when we think we already know…The language house of Eurocentric churches cannot provide the dominant story for being God’s people in a post-Christendom, globalizing world. (p.127)

Luke’s vigorous counternarrative…says that the mission is still central but not in the ways anticipated. (p.127)

The overall sense of this story is that Jesus sends his followers out on a counterintuitive journey of mission for the sake of the kingdom. (p.128)

It is among ordinary men and women, whose names will not be recorded or remembered, that God shapes a future. (p.129)

Roxburgh sets out a set of new practices for the church in the post-modern world that are derived from Luke Chapter 10. They revolve around the call to enter the homes and lives of the people who live around us. It is about

“entering deeply into the life of the other on his or her terms, not your own – eat what is set before you.”…This is where we are invited to plant ourselves in the local, having a commitment to the long haul. (p.140)

Our calling is to enter into their homes (dwell with and among them) and stay with them for quite a period of time without any plans to walk off if they or their ways don’t suit us. (p.141)

It is our honor to be welcomed to someone’s table…Luke is saying that one of the primary places where disciples should interact with others is at the table of the others. (p.143)

The Spirit is out there ahead of us, inviting us to listen to the creation groaning in our neighborhoods. Only in the willingness to risk this entering, dwelling, eating, and listening will we stand a chance as the church to bring the embodied Jesus to the world. (p.150)

Jesus’ work is about being sent out, about leaving places of familiarity, control, and security. (p.155)

The Lord of creation is out there ahead of us; he has left the temple and is calling the church to follow in a risky path of leaving behind its baggage, becoming like the stranger in need, and receiving hospitality from the very ones we assume are the candidates for our evangelism plans…the only way we can understand and practice again this kingdom message is by getting out of our churches and reentering our neighborhoods and communities. (p.162)

Roxburgh ends his book by enumerating ten rules for radicals and giving some practical suggestions for beginning this sort of ministry in the local church. I found this book to be deeply insightful and definitely worth the read.

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