Category: Book Summary

Surprise the World

Surprise the World: The Five Habits of Highly Missional People

by Michael Frost

In his first chapter entitled “Living Questionable Lives,” Frost lays the groundwork for the rest of the book by writing that the church is made up of two groups with reference to evangelism and the Great Commission.

 

 

 

 

Contrary to the myth that every believer is an evangelist, the apostle Paul assumes a twofold approach to the ministry of evangelism. First, he affirms the gifting of the evangelist  — interestingly, not the gift of evangelism but the evangelist herself is the gift (see Ephesians 4: 11). Second, he writes as though all believers are to be evangelistic in their general orientation. (Frost, Michael (2015-11-23). Surprise the World: The Five Habits of Highly Missional People (p. 2). NavPress. Kindle Edition.)

The book is not concerned with helping the evangelist. Rather, it focuses on practices that can be adopted by the rank and file of the church that will make us all more effective ambassadors for Christ.

In other words, the biblical model is for leaders to (1) identify, equip, and mobilize gifted evangelists (who then take a leadership responsibility for the church’s evangelism) and (2) inspire all believers to live questionable lives. If all believers are leading the kinds of lives that evoke questions from their friends, then opportunities for sharing faith abound, and chances for the gifted evangelists to boldly proclaim are increased. In brief, our task is to surprise the world! (p.5)

This twofold approach literally transformed the Roman Empire. While evangelists and apologists such as Peter and Paul were proclaiming the gospel and defending its integrity in an era of polytheism and pagan superstition, hundreds of thousands of ordinary believers were infiltrating every part of society and living the kind of questionable lives that evoked curiosity about the Christian message. They surprised the empire with their unlikely lifestyle. (p.7)

They were literally the most surprising alternative society, and their conduct raised an insatiable curiosity among the average Roman. (p.10)

Our challenge is to find what similarly questionable lives look like in the twenty-first century… There’s an old communication theory that goes like this: When predictability is high, impact is low. In other words, when the audience thinks they know what you’re going to say, and you go ahead and say it, it makes very little impact. On the other hand, when an audience is surprised or intrigued, they will think long and hard about what they’ve heard. (pp.12-13)

To fulfill the evangelistic mandate that Paul and Peter and the gospel present us with, we need to be propelled outward, into the lives of our neighbors, but also upward, into deeper intimacy with Jesus. This isn’t merely an individual challenge; indeed, Paul seems to suggest that we fulfill our evangelistic mandate collectively, as we also move inward into a self-consciously Christian community, acknowledging the evangelists we’ve been gifted with and the responsibility to live questionable lives that we’ve been vested with. We need to become a godly, intriguing, socially adventurous, joyous presence in the lives of others. This won’t be a matter of simply doing somewhat surprising but occasional things. I believe we need to develop a new set of rhythms, or habits, that foster a missional lifestyle that intrigues others. (p.14)

A New Set of Habits

Frost has written a practical guide to change how we live. His purpose is to help us develop into a new way of thinking and living, which is highly biblical. Jesus told his followers that only those who put his teachings into practice are wise. We cannot think ourselves into being missional: we must act our way there. It is…

…the challenge of finding regular rhythms or habits that transform our everyday lifestyles. (p.17)

Just as a society’s desirable habits are shaped by and help shape that society’s values, so can an individual’s personal habits should flow out of his or her values and help develop them further. We learn by doing. In my own experience, after adopting missional practices because of conviction of its being the right thing to do, I gained greater depth of understanding and insight from putting those convictions into practice. God opened up my mind to truths I had not seen before.

The trick is to develop habits that unite us together as believers, while also propelling us into the lives of others. We also need habitual practices that don’t deplete our energy and burn us out, but rather reenergize us, replenishing our reserves and connecting us more deeply to Jesus. (p.22)

Frost devotes most of the remainder of the book to laying out five practices that can be adopted by the average follower of Christ that will produce a more missional mindset and lifestyle.

“the central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people.” (p.25)

The habits Frost gives form an easily remembered acrostic – BELLS: Bless, Eat, Listen, Learn, and Sent.

Bless

Frost suggests that we adopt the practice of regularly blessing at least three people around us each week, at least one of whom is not in our church, through words of encouragement and affirmation, acts of service, and thoughtful gifts. Research indicates that people who do such things:

…had almost 50 times as many conversions than the “converters”! The “blessers” were 50 times more successful at helping people find their way back to God! (p.35)

I do not know if those figures are accurate, but blessing people certainly opens their hearts.

Frost warns us that blessing people in order to convert them misses the point. Rather we bless people because we are blessed by God and can pass that on to other. It is what we do. According to God’s promise to Abraham, we were put here to bless the nations. Love blesses with no thought of being paid back. Jesus did this regularly. Also, we must study people so that our blessings actually make them feel blessed. Giving is not about making us feel good. It must be done to add joy, strength,and value to others. We must also be prepared for our gifts and blessings to be misunderstood or rejected.

Eat

In this chapter the author shows us how to practice hospitality around the table in order to open doors into the hearts of people in order to eventually share the gospel. He asks us to eat with three people a week, at least one of whom is not in our church.

But I want you to know that this isn’t merely good missional strategy. It is a way to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. English pastor and author Tim Chester once posed the question, “How would you complete the following sentence: ‘The Son of Man came . .  .’?” There are three ways that the New Testament completes that sentence; while the first two are well known (and might have come to your mind when you read Chester’s question), the third is surprising:

“The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10: 45, ESV).

“The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19: 10, ESV).

“The Son of Man came eating and drinking” (Luke 7: 34). (Frost, p.44)

The table ought to be the primary symbol of the Christian gathering. It represents hospitality, inclusivity, generosity, and grace. (p.46)

The invitation to share a table is a profoundly meaningful one in every culture. So I’m calling you to foster the habit of eating with three people each week. You won’t need to add a great deal into your often already busy schedule. You already eat three times a day. That’s twenty-one meals a week. I’m simply asking that you bring another person to your table for three of those. Or if you want to cut corners, you could bring three people to your table for one of them. Your meal could be an elaborate dinner party, or it could be breakfast, or even just coffee and a donut. Just sit across a table from three people this week, and . .  . talk. (p.47)

Sharing meals together on a regular basis is one of the most sacred practices we can engage in as believers. Missional hospitality is a tremendous opportunity to extend the kingdom of God. We can literally eat our way into the kingdom of God!

If every Christian household regularly invited a stranger or a poor person into their home for a meal once a week, we would literally change the world by eating! (pp.47-48)

Opening our table to others is a tremendous act of friendship. Jesus ate at the table of those who were considered sinners by those who merely point the finger at others without loving them. In the case of Zaccheus, it resulted in his conversion. Frost points out that the missional principle is that communion often precedes conversion.

All I’m asking, initially, is that you invite three people to share your table, at least one of whom isn’t a churchgoer. But what you’ll find happening is that people will reciprocate your hospitality. You’ll start getting return invitations. And when that happens you’ve got serious missional traction. (p.56)

Listen

In this chapter, Frost asks us to develop the habit of spending at least one period per week listening quietly and intently to the voice of God’s Spirit.

Fear and laziness are mission killers. Fear of persecution, fear of standing out or causing offense, fear of having to answer someone’s tricky questions  — fear will shut down missional engagement every time. Likewise with laziness: I don’t mean the kind of laziness that has you lying on the couch eating Doritos and watching sports on television. I mean the inner voice that prompts you not to bother with reaching out to another person, not to bother with offering yourself in the service of others. Laziness tells you that you don’t have the time; laziness whispers to you that you need to take care of yourself first. In fact, fear and laziness will motivate you to come up with dozens of reasons why you can’t or shouldn’t open yourself to others. It is the countermanding voice of the Spirit that will help us resist our worst impulses. (pp.58-59)

Our practice of generosity and hospitality must be intentionally nurtured and sustained by the disciplines of solitude, silence, and prayer. We need to learn to listen to the voice of God, particularly as he shapes us as missionaries and fills our hearts with love for those to whom he sends us. (pp.60-61)

Don’t try to connect to God the Holy Spirit on the run. Set aside a designated time each week. I’m only asking for one (although if you want to do it more than once a week, be my guest). See it as a precious time alone, just between you and God. Block it out in your calendar. Let people know that Monday night or Saturday morning, or whatever time you designate, is your time of solitude. (p.62)

The difficulty for many people seeking to live missional lives is negotiating the spectrum between being withdrawn and judgmental on the one hand and entering fully into a social setting that might be considered ungodly on the other… Trying to figure out how to sit somewhere in the middle  — a godly, intriguing, socially adventurous, joyous presence in the lives of others  — is tough. I don’t think we’re clever enough on our own to find that balance. That’s where the missional voice of the Spirit comes in. (pp.67-68)

Learn

In this chapter Frost asks us to devote at least one period per week to the study of Christ and his work in the Gospels in order to better acquaint ourselves with who he is and how we fished for people.

I think that if we’re being sent into the world to live intriguing lives, arouse curiosity, and answer people’s inquiries about the hope we have within, we need more than ever to know what Jesus would do or say in any circumstance. (p.72)

Lots of churches seem to get the idea that to be missional we must go out to others with the Good News, rather than merely wait for people to come to us.

But the term incarnational refers to another dimension of mission. It describes not simply going out but also the difficult work of going deep with others. Just as God took on flesh and dwelt among us in Jesus, so his followers are called to dwell among those to whom they’re sent. (p.75)

Sent

Frost asks us to keep a journal of how God uses us to reach others with the Gospel via the other practices.

Why do I want you to journal your experience? Well, as Anne Broyles says, in keeping a journal, “what our mind is thinking and our heart is feeling becomes tangible: ink on paper.”[ 33] Indeed, journaling is more than just a way of thinking things through: It is a recognized spiritual discipline. More than just recording your thoughts, however, I want you to identify ways you mirrored God’s work of justice, reconciliation, beauty, and wholeness in the world. This will be more than writing, “I shared Christ with someone today” or “I treated a confused student kindly today.” It will be about helping you to sort through the myriad everyday ways you operate as God’s ambassador in your world. I want you to explore how your commitments to craftsmanship, care, and commerce reflect the things of the kingdom. (pp.93-94)

This chapter contains a number of creative ways to journal which will make it more interesting and rewarding.

Keeping a journal and recording all the ways you are mirroring God’s work in the world is similar. It will start to shape the way you think about yourself. You will eventually come to self-identify as a missionary, a sent one. You’ll be looking at your life and how you conduct yourself differently, and the journaling process will reinforce this in creative and useful ways. (p.96)

Discipleship, Nurture, and Accountability

This chapter gives many practical tips on making missional living habitual and effective. The idea is that being missional becomes our lifestyle, not a one and done program.

But missional effectiveness grows exponentially the longer we embrace these habits and the deeper we go with them. (p.99)

Frost states that habits take quite a while to form so that they become a natural part of our lifestyle. He suggests that we need people around us who can help us remain true to our purposes – accountability partners who are walking the same road of discipleship. This is where “the rubber meets the road.” It is one thing to philosophically agree with being missional and quite another to make it part of our everyday life. The reward is in the doing.

This book is short and sweet and definitely worth the time needed to read it. My hope is that we will all put at least some of these practices into our lives. Even if we do not journal, we can begin or increase the other four. But just for fun, why not journal, too? You might like it.

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The Rest of the Gospel

The Rest of the Gospel: When the Partial Gospel Has Worn You Out

by Dan Stone and David Gregory

Hopefully the title of this book intrigues you. The authors are implying that their potential readers likely have only heard part of the good news, and, as a consequence, are missing out on the inner rest that knowing the complete gospel affords.

Dan Stone experienced considerable frustration in his attempts to live out the Christian life until God finally opened his eyes to the realities of the finished work of Christ and the indwelling Holy Spirit. He spent the next twenty-four years traveling and speaking about the mystery of the gospel: “Christ in you the hope of glory.” He wrote:

 

 

Christ living in us and through us, as us, is the only hope we have of experiencing the glory God intends for our lives. David Gregory and I have written this book to help you enter into Christ’s fullness in your life. [Stone, Dan; Gregory, David. The Rest of the Gospel: When the Partial Gospel Has Worn You Out (p. 11). Harvest House Publishers. Kindle Edition.]

Part One: Union with Christ

The first six chapters of the book deal with the foundational realities Paul taught in Romans 6-8. I had the great privilege of being introduced to these truths near the beginning of my journey with the Lord through reading Watchman Nee’s fabulous book, The Normal Christian Life. I have discovered over the years, however, that many, if not most, followers of Christ do not understand these things. The work of the cross rendered a death blow to the power of sin and the Law to rule over us. Believers have died to sin and the Law and have been joined to Christ in the Spirit. This combination of death and life is the source of our ability to live as overcomers by faith.

Part Two: Soul and Spirit

To experience our union with Christ, the Holy Spirit has to give us revelation on two truths. First, we have to have a revelation that we died in Christ, that we are dead to sin, dead to the law, and dead to ourselves as our point of reference. Second, we have to have a revelation on the difference between soul and spirit and how to manage it. Until these two truths become fixed in our spiritual consciousness, we’re never truly going to live out of union. (p. 78)

The authors effectively use an example of a swing to communicate the difference between soul and spirit. The idea is that we are firmly anchored in Christ to an unchanging and stable relationship with God in the spirit in the eternal realm. In the temporal realm, where the body and soul abide, our experience is variable and changing. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It is just how things are. When we understand that we must live by faith in the unchanging realities in the spirit, it brings peace and rest to our souls. We no longer measure “how we are doing” by how the soul and body are faring or feeling. Instead, we always go back to our rest in the eternal position we have in Christ.

Part Three: Who Are You?

In this section, the authors teach that we must make the choice to identify with the new creation rather than the part of us the Bible calls the “flesh” or “old man.”

The flesh, or the false self, is simply the body and the soul operating apart from the Holy Spirit. (p. 102)

[Personally I define the “flesh” a little differently by emphasizing the link it has with the unredeemed body. Until they are resurrected in power, our bodies are still connected to the first Adam and link us to the fallen human condition. I believe the soul is a result of the combination of spirit with body. (Genesis 2:7) The new birth initiates a regeneration of the spirit, but this new spirit still lives in a fallen body which is destined to die and rise again. As such, the souls of unresurrected believers are in conflict, being the product of the new and old order of things. This accounts for the inner struggles we experience. (Galatians 5:17)]

The authors show us that the flesh has been crucified with Christ and stripped of its power to rule us (Romans 6:6), but it was not annihilated. It is still with us, ready to spring into action when we allow it. It never can be reformed or tamed. It must be continually put to death through faith in Christ’s finished work and the power of the Spirit. We must make the choice to identify with the new creation person rather than the old creation flesh. They encourage us to…

Thank God for your warts. Praise God for them, because He’s going to make them a blessing in somebody else’s life. Take back your humanity as the dwelling place of the Most High God. Make peace with you. When the Holy Spirit showed me that it pleased God to live in me, then I had to be satisfied with me. God was. Let it dawn on you that you are no longer a liability to God. You are a wonderful and beautiful and necessary asset. You are the vessel by which the world drinks. You are the means by which the world sees the love and life of God. As we rest in that, we move into a permanent position of being a faith person. (p. 120)

Part Four: Knowing God’s Ways

I finally had to say, “Lord, I’m tired of disagreeing with you. I’m tired of You saying through Your Spirit and the Word that certain things are true, and I’m saying back to you, ‘They’re not true.’ The only thing this produces is inner dissatisfaction and unrest. I’m tired of this roller-coaster Christianity. Up and down. Hot and cold. Lord, I’m going to do something that is crazy for me. I’m going to agree with you. I’m going to believe three things, even though they don’t look true in my life.” I said to God, “You say in Romans 8: 1, ‘There’s no condemnation.’ I’ve been saying there is condemnation. So now I agree with you. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. I am in Christ Jesus. There’s no longer any condemnation for me. I won’t take any more condemnation for anything that comes down the pike. And we’ll see what happens.” There was a second one: no separation. I said, “Lord, all these years I’ve known nothing but separation. I’ve known some nearness to You, but nearness still has some space in it— varying degrees of separation. But You say there’s no separation. I’ll agree with you. There’s never again any possibility of separation between me and You. If I’m really joined to You and You really express yourself through me, there’s no separation. I agree with you.” Then the final one: God causes all things to work together for good. I said, “How can that be? I’ve spent my life saying things don’t work together for good. But if You say they do, I’ll agree with You. All things work together for good to me.” (p. 131)

This section contains several excellent chapters describing the ways of God in the Spirit.

Part Five: Living in Union

This section goes into more depth on the central idea of the book that the ability to live the Christ life is derived from Christ’s actually living within and through us, as Paul described in Galatians.

"I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me. Galatians 2:20 (NASB)

The authors have an interesting chapter on temptation, from which I quote below.

Temptation is absolutely necessary in our life. If we see that, we see Satan is no longer our enemy because we’re seeing him from God’s point of view as a necessary prerequisite in our life for faith activity. When you’re no longer doing battle with Satan, you’ve pulled the stinger out of him. Not that we start calling evil good or we start denying Satan. I’m not saying that at all, because Satan is alive and present. But Jesus disarmed him at the cross (Colossians 2: 15). He no longer has any power over you. The minute you see that he no longer has any power over you, isn’t it amazing— you stop acting as if he has power over you. (p. 196)

This chapter addresses what is one of the most challenging aspects of living out of the spiritual reality of Christ’s finished work and the indwelling spirit. We still can be and are tempted to do evil, and our old man (the flesh) is entirely in agreement with the temptation. We must choose at this point whether to agree with the implied lie that sin is still alive and well in us or with the truth that we are dead to sin and alive to God. This is a faith choice made in agreement with God’s Word and in union with God’s indwelling Spirit.

There is a helpful section on how to hear God. The authors are careful to avoid formulas, but they give principles, while encouraging the reader that all children of God have the innate ability to hear God’s voice through the Spirit. (John 10:27) I have found over the years that many followers of Christ do not recognize God’s voice, but once they begin to understand how God communicates, it becomes much easier for them to discern what he is speaking to them. I quote one paragraph below.

Second, we can do things to cultivate our ability to hear Him. One is to spend time with Him alone, just listening. I’ve observed that it’s very hard for most Christians to be all alone. We want someone to talk to because when we’re talking, we don’t have to face ourselves. And when we’re talking, we don’t have to face God. Prayer is listening as well as talking. It’s difficult to listen, though. It’s challenging to believe that you actually hear. Take time in silence to listen. (pp. 204-205)

The chapter on making decisions is particularly helpful. While reminding us of the importance of seeking God in prayer, the authors write that we should have more confidence in our decision making ability, since we are actually in union with Christ and share his thoughts. In other words, don’t be too hasty to discount ideas and impressions, especially if your heart is to please God.

Concluding Thoughts

This is an excellent book that is filled with practical examples of how to live out of our union with Christ through the Spirit. If you are a person who struggles with being “good enough,” please read this book. If you already know a lot about life in the Spirit, you should read this book, too. It cannot do anything but help.

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Salvation by Allegiance Alone

Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King

by Matthew Bates

This is an inspiring sequel to Scot McKnight’s The King Jesus Gospel and takes understanding the gospel message to an even greater level. This is not some abstruse theological book. It is eminently practical and very inspiring. It glorifies our risen Lord and King. The thesis of the book is that faith is better translated “allegiance,” under which more traditional understanding of faith, such as mental agreement and trust, are subsumed.

He quotes Josephus, a contemporary author from the general time period of the writing of the gospels.

Josephus was not trying to convince this rebel to turn away from private sins or to “believe” that God can forgive, rather Josephus wanted this man to join him in supporting the Jewish cause— that is, as I would put it, to show allegiance. So, what “repent and believe in me” means for Josephus in this context is “turn away from your present course of action and become loyal to me.” [Bates, Matthew W.. Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (pp. 4-5). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.]

Bates argues convincingly that the apex of the gospel message is not the crucified Christ but the risen and ascended Christ, who became Lord of Lords. The Lamb of God ministry, which culminated in Jesus’ crucifixion, was necessary to God’s being able to offer reconciliation to his rebellious creation, but the ascended Lord is he with whom we must relate now.

Faith Is Not

In this chapter Bates begins to lay the groundwork for his arguments that follow. He shows that true faith, while dependent of the revelation of the Spirit, is not anti-reason.

The key point is that true pistis [Greek: faith] is not an irrational launching into the void but a reasonable, action-oriented response grounded in the conviction that God’s invisible underlying realities are more certain than any apparent realities. (p. 20)

Faith will always produce a response toward its object. Faith in our Lord will result in acts of obedience grounded in that faith.

Furthermore, if we were to determine that in appropriate salvation-oriented contexts in the New Testament pistis most likely means faithfulness, or fidelity, or allegiance, then might not pistis by its very definition include concrete acts that are inseparable from allegiance? (p. 22)

This is the context in which James’ teaching must be understood. Faith without works is dead.

Loyalty and the Full Gospel

In this chapter Bates argues that over the years many have presented a skewed and truncated gospel, which is consumer oriented and presents Jesus as the answer to our need or desire to be forgiven and go to heaven without requiring anything of us. In this “gospel” discipleship is optional.

In reading Paul’s summary of the gospel, we quickly recognize that the gospel is not at its most basic level a tale about me and my quest for salvation (or even about “us” and “our” quest), but rather it is a grand, cosmic story about God’s Son and what he has done. (pp. 31-32)

In the truncated gospel, all that is required is a decision to accept what Christ provided coupled with a profession of faith (mental assent) to that truth. This misses the bigger picture that Jesus is now risen as Lord of lords and asks for total surrender.

That Jesus died for our sins and, as a portion of that “our,” that he also died for my sins is truly part of the gospel— emphatically so!— but it is imperative to realize that it is only a small but vital portion of the gospel as properly understood, not the whole gospel. It is also critical to recognize that “faith” is not primarily aimed at trusting in the forgiveness-of-sins process. For Paul does not primarily call us to “faith” (“ belief” or “trust”) in some sort of atonement system in order to be saved (although mental affirmation that Jesus died for our sins is necessary), but rather to “faith” (“ allegiance”) unto Jesus as Lord. (p. 39)

Thus allegiance to our Lord becomes the demonstration of repentance from going our own way. Water baptism is a public confession of allegiance to Christ. The early martyrs were not put to death for confessing that Jesus was their personal Savior, but for refusing to deny allegiance to Christ the Lord.

We have noted that the gospel proper is not so much a story focused on “believing that Jesus died for my sins” or “trusting in Jesus’s righteousness alone” as it is a power-releasing story about Jesus, the one who is now ruling as the allegiance-demanding Lord of heaven and earth. (p. 44)

Jesus Proclaims the Gospel

In this chapter Bates builds on what Scot McKnight brilliantly proves in The King Jesus Gospel.

My point is simple: there is only one gospel, and just as in Paul’s Letters, it is the transformative story of how Jesus, who preexisted as Son of God, came to be enthroned as the universal king. (p. 47)

He shows that Jesus proclaimed the gospel, just as did Paul. The gospel is not a presentation of justification by faith, although that doctrine is clearly derived from it, but it is the announcement that the promised king has arrived and now is seated on his heavenly throne waiting for his Father’s perfect timing to return as the glorious Son of Man who will judge the living and the dead.

Jesus proclaimed the one gospel by announcing the inauguration of the kingdom of God as well as its anticipated culmination. (p. 47)

Bates points out that the gospel…

…is the story of how Jesus the Son, who was chosen far in advance by God as the appointed Messiah, was anointed by God at his baptism as the designated Messiah, and then came to be the enthroned Messiah after his resurrection from the dead— the story of how the kingdom of God was made a concrete this-world reality when Jesus was installed as king and given authority to rule, uniting heaven and earth. (p. 50)

Properly understanding the gospel is important and often missed. Instead of being a presentation of God’s solution to the human need for forgiveness and reconciliation to God, it is…

“the story about Jesus’ career, a career that culminates in his attainment f heavenly authority.” (p.51)

When the gospel is properly presented, we gain a better understanding of the nature of faith (pistis).

Properly speaking, pistis is not part of the gospel but the fitting response to the gospel. Moreover, our justification is not part of the content of the gospel proper either; only Jesus’s justification is, inasmuch as the resurrection is the effect of his being declared righteous. Our justification is a result of the gospel when we are united by pistis to Jesus the atonement-making king. (p. 54)

Bates argues that the most important element of the gospel for us today is present heavenly reign.

We need to recover Jesus’s kingship as a central, nonnegotiable constituent of the gospel. Jesus’s reign as Lord of heaven and earth fundamentally determines the meaning of “faith” (pistis) as “allegiance” in relation to salvation. Jesus as king is the primary object toward which our saving “faith”— that is, our saving allegiance— is directed. (p. 67)

Bates argues that first and foremost the gospels present Jesus as the enthroned king of heaven to whom all allegiance is due.

Faith as Allegiance

This chapter is the heart of the book. In it he dives deeper into examining his claim that our English word “faith” can best be defined as allegiance.

…allegiance is a better overarching English-language term for what Paul intends with his use of the pistis word group than the more customary faith, belief, and trust. Now for four specific arguments in favor of allegiance. First, although pistis does not always mean allegiance, it certainly does carry this exact meaning sometimes in literature relevant to Paul’s Letters and the rest of the New Testament. Second, since Paul regards Jesus above all else as the king (the Christ) or the Lord, this is the most natural way for Paul to speak of how the people of God should relate to Jesus. Third, allegiance makes better sense of several otherwise puzzling matters in Paul’s Letters. Fourth, the proclamation “Jesus is Lord” resonated with Greco-Roman imperial propaganda, so that pistis as allegiance fits into the broader cultural milieu of the New Testament world. Bates, (p. 78)

I will not go into the depths of his arguments here, but they are very convincing. He claims that more traditional definitions of faith are subsumed under the idea of allegiance.

Paul’s use of pistis here shows that this word in and of itself does not map perfectly onto the English word allegiance; rather it can and does often refer to mental assent to a certain proposition and confidence in the reliability of God’s promise. Here for Paul pistis does mean something like “trust.” But I submit that our English term allegiance is a larger category capable of subsuming the notion of mental assent to the reliability of God’s testimony (belief) or of God’s promises (trust), while also foregrounding the idea that genuine mental assent goes hand in hand with an allegiant or faithful (pistis-full) living out of that assent. In other words, yes, Paul and others do say that we must believe or trust, but these metaphors are best adjusted and subsumed within the richer category of allegiance. Consistent trust in situations of duress over a lengthy period of time is allegiance. (p. 90)

He concludes that faith (pistis) has three dimensions.

…mental affirmation that the gospel is true, professed fealty to Jesus alone as the cosmic Lord, and enacted loyalty through obedience to Jesus as the king. This is a deliberate alternative to classic definitions of “faith.” (p. 92)

He argues that mere mental agreement with the facts of the gospel coupled with a profession of loyalty to Christ must be accompanied by a life of obedience to prove the reality of salvation. As Paul wrote, the goal of his gospel was to produce the obedience of faith. (Romans 1:5)

Questions about Allegiance Alone

In this chapter Bates addresses a number of questions related to his thesis. He stresses that though our salvation requires enacted loyalty to Christ, it is always by grace. He insists that grace always comes with strings attached, however.

The matter, I submit, is essentially no different if we understand pistis as allegiance to Jesus, the cosmic king. We are still saved by grace through pistis; salvation comes from outside ourselves as the Christ gift. Yet we must respond to that gift by giving allegiance to Jesus as Lord. The offer of salvation is free, but it absolutely does come with strings attached. Obedient loyalty to the king is required as a condition of acceptance. pp. 103-104)

He states that ancient understandings of grace always included reciprocation.

In short, we cannot say in an unqualified fashion that final salvation is by grace and by faith apart from embodied obedience, for this misunderstands the nature of both charis (“ grace”) and pistis (“ faith”) in antiquity and in Paul’s Letters. (p. 105)

Osminski

The reciprocation of unmerited grace that God is looking for is our unqualified worship and surrender to Christ the king. My friend, Mike Osminski, pastor of Lord of the Harvest Church in the Detroit, Michigan area, offered this additional insight.

 

 

 

 

In "Paul and the Gift," John M. G. Barclay emphasizes the radically new and previously undiscovered nature of grace as revealed in the New Covenant is the reason that is so powerful of a concept in terms of the Gospel. Paul's presentation of the utter giftedness of grace surpasses anything the ancients thought
about gift giving and graciousness. It is one of the main reasons that pure grace can only come from God and it has no perfect analogy in anything the ancients came up with. Barclay saw Six Perfections of Grace in the NT (by perfections he means aspects of grace that help to define both its nature and its
purpose; it is defined by what it accomplishes).

Grace is characterized by its 

Superabundance (its excess, its significance, its permanence). This is seen in Romans 5:12-21 wherein Paul says that "where sin abounded, grace superabounded." 
Singularity (this focuses on the God of grace whose sole and exclusive mode of operation is His benevolence and goodness). This is seen in many verses that speak of God's kindness and goodness (moral excellence) in all that he is and does. His grace is characterized by His singular graciousness (unlike what any other can provide). 
Priority (God's gift of grace takes place always prior to the initiative of the recipient. As the initiating move, the prior gift is not a reaction to a demand or request and thus is spontaneous in its generosity; it is not obliged by a previous gift and is thus absolutely "free"; it signals the superiority of the giver who is not in a subordinate position of returning a gift). This is seen in Ephesians 2:1-10 & II Timothy 1:9. 
Incongruity (a perfect gift is given without condition [contra Bates], that is, without regard to the worth of the recipient; an incongruous gift is supremely excellent precisely because it does NOT take account of prior conditions of worth). This is seen in Titus 3:3-7 and Romans 4:4. 
Efficacy (grace fully achieves what it is designed to do). This is seen in a great number of verses,including I Corinthians 15:10 (in terms of ministry), II Corinthians 4:15 (in terms of God's glory),II Corinthians 12:9 ( in terms of Christian life), Ephesians 1:6,7 (in terms of redemption & incorporation In Christ), II Thessalonians 2:16 (in terms of eternal life), and Titus 2:11 (in terms of sanctification). 
Non-Circularity (is seen by the fact that God's gift of grace escapes reciprocity, the system of exchange or quid pro quo that characterizes a sale, a reward, or a loan; this demonstrates the notion of a truly "pure" gift, no strings attached [contra Bates]; this form of perfection could only be bequeathed by God, who alone needs no return and therefore could give without such expectation). Here he quotes Philo (Jewish theologian at the time of Christ who wrote in Greek):"But God, is no salesman but a giver of everything, pouring out eternal fountains of gifts and seeking no return. For he needs nothing and no created being is capable of giving him back a gift." He does this as an example of Second Temple Judaism which contributed to the thought world in which the NT emerged (similar to Bates's quote of Josephus). Barclay goes into a lengthy discussion of how this aspect of Paul is seen in Romans 9-11 and the fact that the same Israel that rejected Messiah will yet be saved based on God's non-circular grace (Romans 11:5-6)I do not think this disproves Bates's "allegiance" motif but rather shows the incredible greatness of the NT's concept of grace and must be taken together with the allegiance concept as a manifestation of the Gospel.

Bates argues that works of faith are the embodiment of allegiance to Jesus the King.

…it is the allegiance to the king himself that counts rather than performance of the Mosaic law, …since allegiance (pistis) to Jesus as king demands obedience to the deepest intentions of the law of Moses (see Matt. 5: 17– 48) even though this law has now reached its climactic goal (Rom. 10: 4). At the final judgment, we will not be evaluated on the basis of whether we kept a list of rules such as the Ten Commandments, except inasmuch as genuine fidelity to Jesus the king demanded it. (p. 118).

This is his explanation of what it means to live according to the “law of the spirit of life,” of which Paul wrote in Romans 8.

Justification and Allegiance Alone

I do not fully embrace all of Bates’ theology; however, he makes some excellent points worth our consideration. Contrary to Bates, I believe that justification is a once-for-all transaction which seals our eternal destiny, Bates says that our justification is bound up in our remaining “in Christ” through an embodied lifetime of allegiance to him. I do not see where he translates this into a works based approach to salvation. Instead, I think he is merely stating what I think we all believe – that remaining faithful to Christ is an essential part of what it meas to be a disciple. I also agree with Bates that we do not have a righteousness of our own. It is only through being united with Christ by faith and the Spirit that we are righteous. Bates argues that a corporate understanding of justification is warranted, rather than an individual one. Personally I think both are valid.

For Paul, then, the righteousness of God is God’s resurrection-effecting verdict that Jesus the wrath-bearing, sin-atoning, allegiant king is alone righteous— a verdict that all who are united to Jesus the representative king share. This death-unto-resurrection-life verdict is made effective for us as an unmerited gift when we are united by allegiance alone to the death and resurrection of Jesus the king via the Holy Spirit. 26 The result is that “in the Messiah-king” we “become the righteousness of God”; that is, we become the family that has died with the Christ and that has been reconstituted “in him” by God’s declarative (innocence-creating) yet transformative (resurrection-effecting) verdict. Cleared of guilt, final salvation means above all else joining the family that shares the Messiah’s resurrection life. Scripture is clear that this righteousness is properly the king’s righteousness, not our own righteousness, for we receive this resurrection-effecting verdict only “in the Christ”— that is, initially, presently, and finally only through pistis-securing union with Jesus the king, when God declares us righteous “in him.” (pp. 181-182)

According to Bates, we enjoy that righteousness through remaining in an attitude of faith-allegiance to Christ over a lifetime. Nowhere does Bates communicate that this means we “earn” our salvation through obedience. My belief is that faithful obedience over a lifetime is an outcome or “fruit” of the Christ life within every believer. Our fidelity to Christ is also the “proof” of our having this life, which brings glory to God.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4  to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, 5  who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6  In this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials, 7  so that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold which is perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ; 8  and though you have not seen Him, you love Him, and though you do not see Him now, but believe in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, 9  obtaining as the outcome of your faith the salvation of your souls. 1 Peter 1:3-9 (NASB)

I believe that God will keep his people in an attitude of faithfulness through the operation of the gift of faith (pistis). In other words, the same faith that justifies us is the faith will enable us to endure to the end, all through the grace of God. Bates, I think, is viewing things from our side of the equation. We must makes choices to be faithful to God. These choices prove we belong to Christ. Whether or not we view things from the side of God’s faithfulness to us or the side of our responsibility to be faithful to him, I believe that we agree that continuing in faith over a lifetime is essential and proves the reality of our salvation.

Practicing Allegiance

This chapter exhorts the reader to properly present the gospel and is perhaps the most inspiring part of the book for me. Ever since reading McKnight’s The King Jesus Gospel, I have been excited to share the gospel as it really is, rather than as merely a solution to our sin problem. Instead of presenting Jesus as the crucified Lamb of God ONLY, I now understand that it is essential to present him also as the risen Lord, the ascended Baptizer in the Spirit and Lord of the Harvest, and the coming Son of Man who will judge the nations. As such…

We must stop asking others to invite Jesus into their hearts and start asking them to swear allegiance to Jesus the king. (p. 199)

By improperly presenting the gospel, we have allowed “believers” to sidestep discipleship as an optional feature.

…the gospel in our contemporary church culture stems from a failure to see that “Jesus is the king” is the high point of the good news. In a “salvation culture” it may be eagerly acknowledged that “Jesus is Lord,” but Jesus’s cross is what saves us, not his resurrection or lordship, so that lordship can be freely ignored without risking salvation. This is a dangerous error. A “gospel culture,” on the other hand, recognizes that “Jesus is king” is integral to the good news itself, affirming that we indeed are saved by Jesus’s sacrifice and resurrection, but these are only personally effective when allegiance to Jesus as king forges a union with him. (p. 199)

I believe that we must move toward a Jesus is Lord gospel presentation, whether or not we accept Bates’ theology of union based on continued allegiance. I find that declaring that Jesus is the crucified, risen, ascended, and coming-again Lord of lords is a glorious and inspiring way, the altogether proper way, to present the gospel. Such a presentation invites a response of a lifelong surrender to this glorious One.

A presentation of Jesus as merely the crucified Lamb of God who died for our sins so we can go to heaven actually caters to our consumer mindset, instead of inviting us to abandon selfish pursuits in favor of allegiance to the King.

When the full gospel is presented, the call to action is organically embedded in the story. Jesus the enthroned king has summoned everyone, including you and me, to turn away from all other allegiances and to give him exclusive loyalty. (p. 202)

We act as ambassadors for Christ, inviting people to turn away from their self-directed rebellious living and surrender to the ascended King. In so doing, they will be forgiven of past offenses and hostilities. They will be transformed from enemies to children and friends of God, if they will pledge their allegiance to Jesus the Lord. Becoming committed disciples is the pathway to a lifetime of allegiance.

Although contemporary Christian culture tends to separate personal salvation and discipleship, allegiance is where they finally meet— and they don’t just meet, they embrace. (p. 206)

He concludes by suggesting that a regular corporate recitation of the Apostle’s Creed is a good way for our people to make a public declaration of their allegiance to Christ the King.

Concluding Thoughts

I wholeheartedly recommend this book. I believe it functions to clarify our thinking about the Gospel and the proper way to think about faith. Whether or not one agrees with all of Bates’ conclusions, it is hard to avoid being inspired toward a living with greater allegiance to Christ. I found myself excited to share the glorious gospel with a renewed fervor and clarity. I hope the book does the same for you.

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AND: The Gathered and Scattered Church

AND: The Gathered and Scattered Church

by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay

A tension often exists between the modalic and sodalic elements of the church. This book addresses that tension and suggests ways for the two to work together. The modalic arm of the church is the one with which most of us are more familiar. It is the “gathered” church, which is usually stable, organized, and centralized in a building or some sort. Caring for people is usually the focus of such churches. The sodalic arm of the church is often represented by parachurch organizations and small missional groups which focus on reaching the unreached, making disciples, serving the marginalized, and otherwise engaging in mission outside the walls of the church building.

The modalic version of church can easily develop primarily into a programmatic attractional model which focuses most of its time and resources on presenting well-orchestrated Sunday services. Modalic pulls toward the center.

Sodalic versions of the church are sometimes called “missional” and are often versions of “simple church,” which focus more on relationships, discipleship, and mission. Ideally, sodalic thrusts outward.

Halter and Smay contend that every church is both modalic and sodalic; although, individual churches will tend to be more one than the other.

The thesis of this book is that instead of competing with one another, the modalic and sodalic should embrace and support each other. This will allow both expressions to do what they do best and contribute to the overall health of the church.

Proponents of the sodalic wing of the church argue that the modalic has been overemphasized, has become the cultural “norm,” and hinders God’s mission – the development of disciples who make disciples.

American Christians have been conditioned to expect churches to meet their needs instead of being challenged to be on mission. Because of this, sometimes it feels as if asking people to be missional is like trying to “sell rocks.” [Halter, Hugh; Smay, Matt. AND (Exponential Series) (p. 23). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.]

Many sense that God is moving churches toward more collaboration, but missional leaders may fear losing their missional identity if they venture into partnership with the modalic vortex that pulls people to serve the church instead of thrusting them outwardly into the community. Smay and Halter developed a “hybrid” church in Denver called Adullam that blends both missional and modalic elements. They insist that some elements of the church should be centralized (modalic); whereas, others should be decentralized (sodalic). (p.26) The goal should be to see “fans…turned into followers, disciples…made into apprentices, AND consumers become missionaries.” (p.26) They encourage churches to…

…live a fluid organic Christianity AND … [have] enough structure to provide for any level of growth God wants. (p.26)

We want to create a cohesive balance between the scattered communities and the gathered corporate movement. (p. 64)

Moving toward the AND

AND was written to help churches, whether they began missionally and have grown to the point of needing more structure or started as a modalic structure and now recognize the need for more mission. It also proposes that sometimes the modalic and sodalic will choose to partner, each embracing the other without either losing its identity in the process. The modalic and sodalic are two sides of the same coin.

The authors spend quite of bit of time describing what it means to be missional or sodalic, since that has been their own journey. They emphasize the need for engaging the culture (“context”)  in an “incarnational” way. Developing relationships with people in our community is the only sure way to become a contextual missionary. (p.58)

Halter and Smay suggest that modalic churches can develop the sodalic side of things by identifying, developing, and releasing missional people who will think and act missionally.

If you want your existing church to successfully engage the culture, you don’t begin by telling your people to engage and then bring’em to church. You must start by creating a new environment for them that provides a better witness to the culture and is the best way to see the kingdom lived out in concrete ways. (p. 66)

an existing church must first gather bands of missional people out of the larger body, bring them together, and then begin the process of engagement. All you need is a handful of people who want to pilot an incarnational community. (p. 68)

This can start with what the authors call “pilot communities.”

Addressing Consumerism

The authors call out consumerism for what it is – the enemy of mission. I cannot say it any better than they have.

Consumerism is the self-focused drive to get as much as I can get with the least amount of effort. It coercively shifts the church away from its true call, from valuing giving to getting. It compels us to protect what we already have and only to give away what has become useless to us. It erodes our sense of duty, honor, loyalty, and chivalry to live for the right things and the best things. It gets in the way of leaving a legacy for those behind us because it waters down our present understanding of what it means to follow Christ today. It pushes responsibility and expectations onto others instead of self and exchanges true spiritual growth for ankle-deep personal devotionals and self-help measures. (pp. 73-74)

Consumerism only exists when it is allowed to exist. Like a scavenging raven, it only shows up where the easy food is available. Consumerism can only exist if there’s something to be consumed. (p. 74)

In a sense, they [consumers] give ownership and responsibility to whoever provides for them. They stop growing on their own and no longer dream about the plans God might have for their lives. Hearts that were once growing and alive begin to atrophy; leaders grow weary, and the church shrivels—in numbers and depth of spiritual maturity. (p. 74)

A consumer is not a disciple and a disciple is not a consumer! (p. 75)

AND asks the question that every missional leaders must ask.

If developing people so that they become like Jesus is our grid for evaluating fruitful ministry, then we have to take an honest look at everything else we’ve felt pressure to provide and ask ourselves, “Do these activities, services, processes, staff positions, religious ceremonies, and financial resource allocations actually help us reorient someone’s life direction so they are growing closer to Jesus?” (p. 79)

Making apprentices out of consumers isn’t just a matter of repro-gramming. The problem isn’t behavioral or methodological—or even ecclesial for that matter. The problem is spiritual. (p. 79)

“Nothing good of the Spirit ever comes naturally or easily.” The missional push and the incarnational way of giving your life for others sound really nice, but the reality is that living this way means you don’t get what your flesh wants. You don’t get to keep all the money. You don’t get to do whatever you want with your time. You have to share your house, your stuff, your money, your kids. You have to exchange your ambitions for God’s, your kingdom for his, and you must be available for God to interrupt your nicely scheduled day with needs that will cause you to pull your hair out. (pp. 79-80)

The more missional you want to be, the more incarnational you’re willing to be, the more you release your people out into the world, the more you desire to equip and empower young leaders, the more effective and faithful you want your church to be…the more you’ll have to die to your self. (p. 80)

There’s only one way to overcome the problem of consumerism. Not two or three ways, not a program, not a sermon for you to preach or a class for you to teach. Just one way to break the pattern: You have to remove what they are consuming. (p. 81)

The last quote is the rub. Becoming a simpler version of church will push the consumers away, but it will free up the rest to engage in mission in a greater way. Stripping away the fluff to make room for mission is a painful yet rewarding process.

Halter emphasizes that real discipleship requires spending personal time with people, not just preaching to them on Sundays or even in classroom settings. He states:

We try to live by a simple leadership principle: “Whatever you give your best to will grow.” (p. 86)

They conclude the chapter with this idea.

Pastoring is as much about protecting the flock as it is about growing a flock. It’s about pushing them and challenging them instead of pandering to them. Ultimately, it’s time for leaders to be consumed in a struggle against consumerism. Our collective calling as leaders is to create spiritual pathways for people so they can come out of their old life and find the new life of Christ. (pp. 88-89)

Spiritual Formation for Missional Churches

In some ways, I believe that even the gravity toward consumerism is simply a symptom of how bored our people are with the basic Christian experience. (pp. 91-92)

The above statement should grab our attention. What can churches offer their people that will engage their sense of adventure while being true to Christ’s mission.

Regardless of our specific church form, the process of spiritual formation in our church must help move people out of consumerism and toward the life, actions, and devotion of Jesus. This process must call for change, challenge the status quo, and guide people through the tension of being counter-culture kingdom people. (p. 95)

Missional churches must prioritize equipping their people to be on mission.

This equipping must move people from the classroom and the sanctuary back into homes, the streets, and the natural places of connection with the world. (p. 96)

Many people assume that our primary purpose in coaching our folks to this end is evangelism. Although we do believe that whenever you find people integrating community, communion, and mission, the kingdom becomes tangible and people find Christ, our primary purpose is really spiritual formation, discipleship, or apprenticeship after Christ. We ask people to live this way for themselves! (p. 96)

The authors insist that discipleship must be intentional. It will not just happen on its own. They lay out a model that integrates inclusive community, communion with God, and mission. The outline four steps in the process: observance, preparation, participation, and partnership. (p.102) The authors encourage missional leaders to invite prospective disciples into a deeper level of commitment and preparation.

Calling people to leave their nets, to prioritize God’s mission over their own, to live by faith, to take up their cross, to deny self, and to seek first God’s kingdom and righteous life is what seekers are so desperate to hear. Let me challenge you to take a risk and start inviting people as Jesus did. Begin personally to invite higher-level leaders to your home, give them your best time, and trust that if you’re honest about how hard Christianity is and how their lives will change, God will build his church—the one he’s entrusted to you to lead well. (pp. 110-111)

The disciple making church sets the bar high enough that mere consumers will not choose to go there, but not so high as to discourage people from giving mission a try. The authors give some examples of what a missional lifestyle might look like.

…what does dying look like in real life?” I said, “It’s just living well and being willing to give time, resources, and relationship to people who are looking for what you have. It’s opening your home for dinners, inviting sojourning people into your family time, recreation, and hobbies, and into your spiritual community. It’s not rocket science or martyrdom at a biblical story level, but you do have to die to your natural bent to live exclusively to yourself. You have to let Christ’s mission dictate how you live. It’s really about the direction of your life, not a state of perfection. It’s serious, but it’s also a beautifully whimsical life without legalistic pressure or self-judgment.” (p. 117)

Disciple making requires us to take responsibility for helping others grow.

The Big AND: Gathered and Scattered in Perfect Harmony

In this chapter, the authors more fully address the main theme of the book. They state the challenge as they see it as follows.

When the modalic and sodalic are completely isolated from each other, the church movement as a whole tends to lose its capacity to multiply. (p. 133)

As you can see, God’s church moves forward, reproduces, and survives from generation to generation because of our sodalic calling. Any sodalic work will eventually turn modalic as a result of the need to disciple and nurture the newcomers to faith, but typically, the missional DNA and fervor wanes and static ministry structures set in. There is really nothing wrong with this process…as long as the sodalic continues to push outward. Practically, this can be accomplished by simply forming our church plant teams, pastoral staff, and elder boards with an equal number of both sodalic- and modalic-oriented leaders. Yes, there will be more tension and lively discussions, but it’s all part of the bride working together. (p. 134)

Notice the two sides of the church here in the words of Jesus. There is the sodalic “go” and the modalic “make disciples,” and the sodalic “of all nations” and the modalic “teaching them to obey.” What most people miss is the big AND right in the middle. It’s not surprising! Conjunctions aren’t supposed to get a lot of attention. They just hold a sentence together. But as you can see from our discussion to this point, the AND is huge and it holds the key to grasping God’s bigger design potential for his church. (p. 135)

They make a very powerful statement that should motivate church leaders toward collaboration.

The greater the collaboration, the greater the potential. The more aggressive the partnerships, the more expansive the movement becomes. (p. 136)

Morph: Transitioning from Gathered to Gathered AND Scattered

This chapter shows how the modalic might move toward embracing the sodalic. They encourage leaders to link arms with other leaders and churches in their communities that have the same vision, mission, and heartbeat.

Be part of The Church instead of limiting your focus on your own local church. Be willing to link arms with others who share a common vision and passion for your community. (p. 156)

To Gather or Not to Gather: Is That the Question?

In this chapter the authors encourage leaders to construct mission and ministry so that their people see that they are needed for the mission.

If the vision of the church is not scary, if it doesn’t require everyone to pitch in, if faith is not needed, then folks will stay home and watch the football game. Here’s the bottom line. People get weary of church services when they realize that their participation isn’t necessary for it to continue. On the opposite side, if a person feels that they must be there so that God’s kingdom work can go on, they will give up anything to gather together. This focus on the outside naturally brings excitement and integrity to gathering together on the inside. (p. 172)

He also addresses the “what do we do with the kids?” question by promoting the integrated approach.

I do find it interesting that as Western Christians we so quickly panic when we have to think beyond programmatic ministry models. In other cultural contexts, if you asked a Hindu, Buddhist, or a Christian what they do with their kids during religious services, you’d probably get a weird response like, “You include them.” This really shows how church has dis-integrated our experience to the point where we don’t think we as big people can grow with God if our children are with us.(p. 181)

The last chapter deals with leaving a spiritual legacy.

All parents want the best for their kids, but as we mentioned in the chapter on consumerism, God’s highest goal for our children isn’t to keep them busy and safe. Our role as stewards over the spiritual life and legacy of our kids is to model a holistic life of apprenticeship under Jesus—to invite them and include them in as much as you can and to trust that God will grow them, protect them, and use them to change the world. This certainly can include children’s education during our gathering times, but it must include much more. Children will follow what they’ve seen us do. If they see us go to church and live a typical, normal life, that’s what they’ll think being a Christian is all about. But if they see their parents actually live out the gospel—community, sacrifice, inclusiveness with everyone, and mission to the poor and needy—they will follow suit. The more decentralized and organic your church rhythms, the more creative and intentional your people will need to be with each other and for each other, with and for their children. (pp. 182-183)

Conclusion

I highly recommend this book to anyone who desires to help the church fulfill both its pastoral and sending responsibilities. It can inspire you and give you some practical ways to implement your vision.

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Gaining by Losing

Gaining by Losing: Why the Future Belongs to Churches that Send

by J.D. Greear

I read this book on the recommendation of a friend of mine who leads a rather large church in our area. He told me it is the best book he’s ever read. We agreed that I would read it and he would read my most recent book at the time, Letters to the Church by Francis Chan, something he already planned to do. Greear, a pastor of one of the fastest growing megachurches in our area, has tremendous missional insight, something near and dear to my heart. Though he has uses a much different model for doing church than we do at the church I pastor, our hearts travel the same paths, and he is getting an amazing result.

In the first chapter, he addresses what I have always thought is a glaring weakness of the megachurch movement: the attractional model can draw large numbers of people without making disciples.

We measure success by size. In so doing, however, we neglect the one thing that can propel the church forward into the next generation . . . and to the ends of the earth: Spirit-filled, disciple-making disciples. [Greear, J.D.. Gaining By Losing (Exponential Series) (p. 27). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.]

He clearly grasps the implications of making disciples – the possibility for exponential growth. He understands that mission is the reason for the church’s existence. Otherwise we would already be in heaven.

If a church is not pursuing the Great Commission, it really has no point in existing. (p. 50)

Greear believes the key to missional success is giving away our people to God’s mission instead of hoarding them out of insecurity or the desire to build our own “kingdom.”

Missional “Plumb Lines”

A plumb line guarantees that what we build is not out of line. Greear offers some principles that he believes will help us keep our missional focus in line with God’s Word. Below are some of his “plumb lines.”

The Gospel

Fill a heart with passion for the lost, and it develops the skill of sending. No shouting required. What keeps us from proficiency in sending, you see, is not a lack of competency, but a lack of conviction; not a scarcity of skill, but a paucity of passion. (p. 58)

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” What your organization does best grows out of what it loves most. To send effectively, we must love the glory of God and the lost more than we love anything else. Then sending comes naturally. (p. 58)

Motivation for mission grows out of deep, personal experience with the gospel. When we are amazed at the grace God showed in saving us, going to great lengths to save others seems an insignificant thing. We yearn to see the glory of our saving God spread throughout the earth and others find in Christ what we have found. (p. 59)

It is impossible to truly believe the gospel and not become like the gospel. Experiencing grace transforms us into people willing to make great sacrifices to bless others. If we want to grow in our generosity of spirit, we need to feel more deeply the great sacrifice Jesus has made for us. The gospel is the root; eagerness to sacrifice is the fruit. (p. 63)

The gospel alone produces the passion that sustains the mission. Programs and institutions can be useful servants of passion, but never its sustenance. The gospel is its sustenance. (p. 67)

The Myth of Calling

Greear believes, as I do, that every follower of Christ is called by God to be a disciple maker and gospel sharer. The clergy-laity divide is a religious concoction designed to give job security to the clergy. Disciples have different responsibilities in the church under the overall missional call, some of which we call “the ministry,” but all of us are called to fulfill the Great Commission. The “five fold” ministry (apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers) according to Paul are put in the church by Christ to equip the rest of the church to do the work of the ministry. Expecting the ministry staff to do all the work of the gospel is missing the mark completely. When our people embrace their individual calling to mission, they will move from being spectators to ambassadors for Christ.

Each believer is called to leverage his or her life for the spread of the gospel. As we said earlier, the question is no longer whether we are called, only where and how. (p. 70)

Every Christian, you see, has at least two major callings: (A) The call to use your vocation for the glory of God and the blessing of others; and (B) the call to make disciples. (p. 75)

We need to help “ordinary believers” in our churches recover the understanding that they are called to the mission and shaped by God for a specific role in that mission. (p. 78)

When church members understand that, they will move from being spectators of the production to owners of the vision and ambassadors of the mission. (p. 81)

Missional or Attractional? Yes.

Greear strongly believes in the megachurch model, but his commitment to mission prompts him to parlay that into a missional powerhouse. From my perspective, which is the micro-church movement majoring on small groups, the megachurch allows many people to be mere spectators at the attractional gatherings. However, it cannot be denied that his church and those launched out of his church are accomplishing a great deal for the Kingdom of God. He mixes modality with sodality quite well.

He shares his rationale for using the attractional model for Sunday services.

God commanded Israel to create a “court for the Gentiles” so that Gentiles could easily observe the Israelites in worship, would he not also want us to do whatever we can to help unbelievers understand what is going on in our worship services?(p. 88)

He addresses another issue I have with the attractional model, which is that it encourages the average believer to simply invite people to hear the pastor, instead of sharing the gospel themselves.

The congregation’s job is not merely to invite unbelievers to hear me preach, but to be the primary means by which God testifies to their friends. (p. 94)

He states another key principle for missional church life here.

But most of what God wants to do in our society happens outside the church, facilitated by the hands of ordinary people. (p. 95)

It would be very interesting to see what percentage of his people actually buy into these principles of mission and service and how many simply come to consume. I would assume that his churches are like most human institutions, which follow the 20-80 rule. Twenty percent of the people do eighty percent of the work.

His next point is a key issue of mine. How can we actually use our gatherings to equip people to be on mission outside the church meetings? I see far too many people get sucked dry by serving all that the church is doing within the four walls, leaving little or no time or energy to be on mission in the community. This I believe is a fundamental tendency of very large churches, because it takes so much man power and other resources to pull off the attractional meetings.

if we want to reach the next generation, we are going to have to equip our people to reach them outside the church. (p. 96)

Here he makes a great point in support of using the attractional model, however.

Missional advocates love to emphasize the church going (as they should), but they overlook the fact that Jesus and the apostles had a whole lot of people coming to them as well. (p. 99)

How to Transform an Audience into an Army

In this chapter, Greear lays out a huge key to a successful missional movement – leadership development.

“A Church Is Not a Group of People Gathered Around a Leader, But a Leadership Factory.” (p. 101)

Once again he strikes a blow at the clergy-laity division lie.

ordinary people — people with problems and faults and stubborn habits and personal weaknesses — can be used mightily in the mission of God, because it’s not about their abilities to do things for God, but about his ability to work through them. (p. 104)

The church ought therefore to see itself as a leadership factory that stirs up the gifts of God in people, not an auditorium that gathers people behind a leader. (p. 106)

Ordinary people must be challenged to become leaders and empowered to do so.

Shouldn’t pastors see themselves as servants of the movement rather than celebrities of the moment? (p. 108)

Congregants are not to be merely gathered, counted, organized, and assigned volunteer positions as cogs in our ministry machines. They are to be empowered into their own ministries. (p. 109)

great churches will do more than simply recruit volu. Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

Greear then hits on the main theme of his book, saying that we must have the courage to send out our best leaders.

That doesn’t mean giving away leadership talent is not scary. Sacrificial giving of any kind always is. You give up control of something you feel like you need, or at least something you know you would love to keep, and sow it into the fields of God’s harvest. (p. 114)

Faith-based generosity, you see, is about more than having an open hand with money; it’s about having an open hand with every good thing God has put in your life. (p. 114)

A New Metric for Success

This principle is true for every kind of church, mega to micro, but must never eclipse the main focus, which is to make disciples. Disciple making is the means to impact our communities.

The goal should not be the size of our church; it should be the salvation and blessing of our city. (p. 120)

The Church Makes Visible the Invisible Christ

It’s easy to substitute doing good works for sharing the gospel. I hear it said too often that the gospel can be preached through our actions. No, it cannot. Our love is communicated by our actions and sets a stage for us to share the gospel, but for the gospel to be intelligible, words are required.

Let me be clear: The church’s primary objective is to preach the gospel, not to beautify the city, care for the poor, or renovate the ghettos. That’s because the gospel testifies to what God has done to save the world, not what we can do to patch it up. The gospel is an announcement about Christ’s finished work. (p. 122)

However, Greear states that “love on display is our most powerful apologetic.”

The Point of Everything Is to Make Disciples

Greear simplifies the definition of disciple making into something every follower of Christ can do, no matter where we are on our spiritual journey.

Effective discipleship is not about a curriculum; it’s about one person learning from another person what it looks like to follow Jesus. (p. 138)

If you know how to love and walk with Jesus, you can disciple someone else. (p. 138)

The focal point of spiritual reproduction is the individual believer. Reproduction does not happen through programs, books, or experiences, he says, but when individual Christians accept their role in the Great Commission. (p. 142)

The author acknowledges that real discipleship only happens in the context of relationship, which has to happen outside an attractional gathering. The small group setting and one-on-one encounters are best suited for this.

Greear counters the multitude of excuses people make for not making disciples. These next quotes will resonate in the heart of every missional leader.

The next great missional expansion will occur when the church refocuses itself on making disciples who make disciples. (p. 148)

the goal is not to disinfect Christians and separate them from the world but to disciple them and send them back into the world: p. 150)

To follow Jesus means to become a fisherman. (p. 150)

The author strikes a blow against the idea that the Great Commission is only for the apostles.

Furthermore, Jesus commanded his first disciples to teach others “everything” that he had commanded (Matt. 28: 20). Everything would include the command to make disciples of all nations. Jesus did not say, “Teach them all that I have commanded, except this command to make disciples internationally . . . that’s only for you.” (p. 151)

Scripture is an announcement about a rescue mission God has come on for us, and an invitation to join that rescue mission (2 Cor. 5: 14 – 20). God formed the church for mission, Wright says. He didn’t come up with a mission for his church as much as he formed a church for his mission. 3 Thus, to separate any teaching of Scripture from its context of global mission is to misinterpret it. In other words, you can’t teach any text of Scripture properly if you don’t teach global missions out of it. (pp. 151-152)

We should not confine “missions education” to a single program; it must saturate every facet of every ministry, just as it saturates every chapter of the Bible. (p. 154)

Greear also provides an antidote for churchgoer boredom.

Joiner says, “When there is nothing challenging or adventurous about your style of faith, you begin to drift toward other things that seem more interesting and meaningful. Mission helps your faith.” (p. 155)

Small Groups

Greear offers some sound advice for guiding small groups.

We encourage each small group to adopt both a city service-evangelism project and an international missionary. (p. 155)

Sometimes small groups are even formed for that purpose — that is, rather than being a group that goes on mission, they come together for mission and form a group. Sometimes it’s better to send people and group them rather than group them and send them. (p. 155)

Small groups should be taught to understand, by their very design, that they are born to reproduce. (p. 156)

Baptism into Mission

I absolutely love this concept!

We build sending into our baptismal confession. We ask each person before they are baptized: “Are you willing to go wherever he sends you, and do whatever he asks you?” (p. 157)

Multiculturalism

Greear addresses the importance of overcoming racial barriers in order to best express Christ to a divided world. The following quotes show his thinking.

When our third race becomes our weightiest identity, unity becomes a possibility. (p. 165)

Evidently, Paul no longer saw his ethnicity as primary to his identity. (p. 166)

“Do you want to know how you know you are in a multicultural church?” a friend of mine asks. “Frequently you feel uncomfortable.”(p. 168)

Second, in order to achieve multicultural unity, churches and individual believers are going to have to learn to live “sent” to the other cultures right in their own cities, (p. 176)

Taking Risks

Risk taking is fundamental to following Christ. The author gives some good insights to help us become more risk embracing.

Jesus gave us what he gave us so that we could create greater return for his kingdom, not so we could have more to sit on for ourselves. (p. 182)

What is more: Not taking those risks ensures our decline. The servant who refused to risk had even the one talent he held onto taken away from him. (p. 183)

“The Christian life is a call to risk. You either live with risk or waste your life.” (p. 185)

C. S. Lewis said that the way to know you are living by faith is that what you are doing for God scares you… So get comfortable with being scared. (pp. 187-188)

This is a great read for every church leader.

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Letters to the Church

Letters to the Church

by Francis Chan

God used this book to rekindle my missional flame. Francis Chan is a unique person who experienced immense “success” at the megachurch and international speaker level, but chose to leave that behind in order to embrace something quite different in terms of structure and externals.  Among the reasons he gave for making this move that most struck me was that he did not want the church to be so dependent upon him as the leader. He felt that he was holding back the development of other people by the way they were doing church. He wrote:

When I looked at what went on in Cornerstone, I saw a few other people and me using our gifts, while thousands just came and sat in the sanctuary for an hour and a half and then went home. The way we had structured the church was stunting people’s growth, and the whole body was weaker for it. (Chan, Francis. Letters to the Church p. 19), David C. Cook. Kindle Edition)

He eventually walked away from the church he planted and pastored, with the leadership’s blessing, to pursue something different overseas. Eventually God called him back to the United States to live as “biblically as knew how” and to “walk around the city [of San Francisco] sharing the gospel,” eventually meeting the people God would give him to disciple. (p.24) Over time those disciples became what is now know as We Are Church, a small group based disciple making church. This book contains insights and principles that Chan has learned and feels are worth sharing.

Chan deeply loves the church and this book is not meant to be a criticism, but he does speak forthrightly about things that need to be addressed. I have included some salient quotes from the book below.

It is imperative that we differentiate between what we want and what God commands. Not that our desires are all bad, but they must take a back seat to what He emphasizes. (p.61)

He addresses the unfortunate state of affairs created by the adoption of the attractional church model that uses superfluous, sometimes gimmicky techniques to draw people to meetings. Even if we allow that people who would otherwise not attend at least get to hear the gospel, we must admit that sometimes people attend as consumers without ever becoming disciples.

By catering our worship to the worshippers and not to the Object of our worship, I fear we have created human-centered churches. (p. 67)

Below are some of his quotes about the current state of affairs.

There’s a keyword in this passage that separates the attempts of our modern church from the first church: devoted. In our impatient culture, we want to experience biblical awe without biblical devotion. At the core of our dysfunction is not necessarily style or structure but lack of devotion. (p. 71)

We should be asking why Christians are willing to give only ninety minutes a week (if that!) to the only thing that really matters in their lives! So leaders work tirelessly to squeeze prayer, teaching, fellowship, and Communion into a ninety-minute service because they believe that’s all they have to work with. (p. 71)

“Most of us have become quite good at the church thing. And yet, disciples are the only thing that Jesus cares about, and it’s the only number that Jesus is counting. Not our attendance or budget or buildings.” (p. 83)

The Church as Family

Chan insists that a sense of family is core to New Testament church life. Pursuing this sort of relational life takes an enormous amount of time and effort.

Meanwhile, in many churches, you have about as much of a connection to the people who are supposedly your spiritual family as you would to someone who visited the same movie theater as you. (p. 91)

Have you ever even considered loving a fellow Christian as sacrificially and selflessly as Christ loved you? (p. 94)

Jesus pursued those people from heaven to earth to bring them into His family; what barriers could hold you back from pursuing a deep familial relationship with them? (pp. 94-95)

Chan calls the church to the practice of sacrificial love in the pursuit of unity.

We have come up with countless strategies to reach the lost when God promises that unity is the method that will work. (p. 101)

While we design strategies to slowly ease people into Christian commitment and grow attendance at our services, Jesus called people to count the cost from the very start (Luke 14: 25– 35). He didn’t expect His followers to be perfect, but He did demand that they be committed. (p. 105)

 Servants

At the core of our faith lies this belief that almighty God humbled Himself to serve us and die for us. At the root of our calling is a command to imitate Him by serving one another. (p. 108)

The church doesn’t have to remain a group of needy people complaining that they haven’t been fed well enough. It really can become a group of servants who thrive in serving. (p. 111)

We have to stop viewing church leaders as people who minister to us. God clearly explained their role. It was not to coddle you but to equip you. Think personal trainer, not massage therapist. (p. 114)

A church grows to maturity only when each part is “working.” If we give up on the goal of having all members exercise their spiritual gifts, we are destined for perpetual immaturity. (p. 117)

No team puts up with players who refuse to contribute. No army puts up with soldiers who don’t carry their own weight. Why do churches continue to put up with Christians who refuse to serve? (pp. 122-123)

Good Shepherds

Contrary to popular belief, we are all called to pastor (a word that simply means “shepherd”). Older women are to shepherd the younger (Titus 2: 3– 5). Parents are to shepherd their children (Eph. 6: 4). Timothy was told to teach others what he himself had been taught (2 Tim. 2: 2). We’re all called to be making disciples (Matt. 28: 19– 20). If you can’t find a single person who looks to you as a mentor, something is wrong with you. (p. 133)

Too many pastors are aspiring to be great writers, speakers, and leaders. There are not enough who are known as great moms and dads. And those who serve well as moms and dads never become known because this isn’t highly valued. You won’t be celebrated on a large scale for humbly caring for a group of people. (pp. 146-147)

One of the most debilitating issues facing the Church is the lack of maturing her members. Churches are filled with children who never grow up to become parents. And they’re not expected to. (p. 149)

While many pastors boast of how many children sit under their care, doesn’t it make more sense to boast of how many have graduated from their care? Isn’t it more a sign of failure when children are unable to leave the house? Raising thousands of consumers is not success. (p. 152)

Crucified

There are millions of people in our country who call themselves Christians because they believe the Christian life is about admiring Christ’s example, not realizing it is a call to follow it. If they really understood this, the numbers would drop drastically. The New Testament could not be clearer: we are not just to believe in His crucifixion; we are to be crucified with Christ. (pp. 159-160

According to Jesus, far from having no cost, following Him will cost you everything. Far from promising a better life, He warned of intense suffering…Run from any teacher who promises wealth and prosperity in this life. (p. 163)

We may never have to run from physical suffering like our brothers and sisters around the world, but many have chosen to run from the suffering of rejection. More and more often, people are starting to water down their convictions because they don’t want to offend anyone. Instead of embracing the persecution that comes with standing out from and against the world, we have begun to embrace the world to try to convince it to tolerate us. (pp. 172-173)

Jesus and the apostles were persecuted because what they said and taught was so countercultural. The culture of our world is just as ugly, if not more so, than it was in Jesus’ time. The teaching of the church should be radically different from that of the world. There will be backlash, and church attendance might decline, but the church will be purified. (pp. 174-175)

Part of the reason we have created a culture of noncommittal Christianity that avoids suffering is that we don’t treasure Him enough. (pp. 175-176)

Unleashed

All anyone wanted was a Jesus and a church that served their needs and kept them comfortable. What started as a movement became a bunch of people sitting safely in services. (p. 191)

After all, how can a Christian possibly survive outside a… cage with weekly feedings? We’re busy reassuring one another that God wants us to do what’s safest for our families and to pursue God in a way that looks suspiciously similar to what we’d naturally do if our only concern was our own comfort and happiness. Church, the answer is not to build bigger and nicer cages. Nor is it to renovate the cages so they look more like the wild. It’s time to open the cages, remind the animals of their God-given instincts and capabilities, and release them into the wild. Alan Hirsch said, “In so many churches the mission of the church has actually become the maintenance of the institution itself.”  The way to destroy the victim mentality is not by giving them more but by sending them out. (pp. 193-194)

I honestly believe we in the American Church need to get on our knees and repent of our condescending attitudes toward God’s Holy Spirit. (p. 206)

Should we consider that placing people in comfortable classrooms and auditoriums for years may not be the best way to train fearless leaders? (p. 207)

Church Again

We might all benefit from a simpler experience of Church. It would lead to deeper relationships and a stronger dependence on God. We might find that the things we added to improve our churches are the very things that crowd God out. (p. 223)

As I said earlier, structure matters. It’s easy to say these are our values, but unless we structure in weekly practices to achieve these goals and structure out anything that distracts, we will never become the church we want to be. (p. 223)

I believe God is leading a movement in this country toward simple, smaller gatherings. (p. 223)

My hope is simply to convince you that there are compelling ways of living as the Church that look nothing like our traditional models. My goal is to get you dreaming, to keep you from settling, to affirm that nagging sense you can’t shake that God wants something more for His Church than what you’re experiencing.(p. 223)

Conclusion

Whether or not you embrace a simpler version of church life that majors on small groups or not, this book will both challenge and encourage you. It is written by a man who is passionate for Jesus, something we should all aspire to be.

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Organic Church

Organic Church: Growing Faith where Life Happens

by Neil Cole

Introduction

“It amazes me to consider how much effort and how many resources (time, money, and people) are expended for a single hour once a week. We have made church nothing more than a religious show that takes place on Sunday, and after it’s done we all go home…The Great Commission says that we are to “go into all the world,” but we’ve turned the whole thing around and made it “come to us and hear our message.” pp. xxv-xxvi

“I believe it (the church) is a contagious movement that will connect with the many people who are disengaged with the old conventional church but seeking Christ. We must take Christ into people’s lives, and it must be in the context of relationships.” p. xxvii

Chapter One: Ride Out with Me

Cole begins by challenging the church to abandon its defensive posture and aggressively pursue the Great Commission.

“Everything about church begins and ends with a single question: Who is Jesus to you?… Even if we get everything else right but skip this important question, we are not truly the church. Church begins with Jesus; who He is and what He has done. It is all about Jesus, and if it begins to be about something else, then it stops being the church as Jesus meant it to be.” pp. 6-7

Cole points out that if we are building the church, it is not the church, because only Jesus can build the church. Only the Father via the Holy Spirit can open someone’s eyes to know who Jesus is and surrender to him as Lord and Savior.

Chapter Two: Awakening to a New Kind of Church

“We believe that church should happen wherever life happens. You shouldn’t have to leave life to go to church… Most Christians today are trying to figure out how to bring lost people to Jesus. The key to starting churches that reproduce spontaneously is to bring Jesus to lost people.” p. 24

Neil found that small groups were the best vehicle to multiply disciples, churches, and a movement. He worked at coming up with a simple definition of church which captures the essence of such a life-giving community.

“The organic or simple church, more than any other, is best prepared to saturate a region because it is informal, relational, and mobile. Because it is not financially encumbered with overhead costs and is easily planted in a variety of settings, it also reproduces faster and spreads further.” p. 27

Chapter Three: The Zombie Bride Lives!

The gospel says, “Go,” but our church buildings say, “Stay.” The gospel says, “Seek the lost,” but our churches say, “Let the lost seek the church.” Howard Snyder, The Problem of Wineskins

The Church is so much more than a building.

Someone once that that we shape our buildings and then they shape us. It is not just the fact that buildings hold back our growth; they also hold back our understanding of the Kingdom of God. Our minds can be held captive behind four walls as easily as our actions are.. we can have institutional minds even without walls, offices, and staff… Our problem is not in bricks and mortar; it is in our minds.” pp.35-38

The Church is much more than a one-hour service held one day a week.

Cole points out that the normal Christian life is more about relating throughout the week as a family of God on mission together, rather than simply attending a public worship service. The missional church is a 24/7 undertaking. This is a huge challenge for busy American Christians.

The Kingdom of God is meant to be decentralized, but people tend to centralize.

“God has always intended for humankind to spread out and fill the earth with His glory… The church has been given a command to spread out and fill the earth as well.” (p. 41-42)

The Great Commission requires the church to go to the ends of earth with the Gospel making disciples in every corner of the globe. The very least we can do is begin in our own neighborhood. Thanks to the indwelling Holy Spirit, every follower of Christ is a mobile Temple, which allows us to spread out without becoming detached from the source.

We are each God’s Temple and together we are also His Temple.

“The world is not very impressed with our sacred houses of worship; in fact, other religions have built more beautiful ones. We must let them see something they cannot reproduce: a new life in Christ… (pp. 44-45)

Chapter Four: A Dangerous Question

“Christendom has done away with Christianity without quite being aware of it.” Soren Kierkegaard

Cole writes that we often ask how we can make the church bigger, better, or start more of them without ever asking just what is a church.

“The temptation is to define church according to our own experience… By defining church this way, we are assured that we are always right.” p. 49

Cole gives what many seminaries teach are the five minimum characteristics of a true church.

  • It is group of believers who gather together regularly.
  • It considers itself to be a church.
  • It has qualified elders present.
  • It regularly practices the ordinances of water baptism and communion and enforces church discipline.
  • It has an agreed upon set of doctrinal beliefs.

Cole points out how ludicrous it is to require the presence of qualified elders without even mentioning the necessity of God’s Spirit being present. A. W. Tozer once said that if the Holy Spirit were removed from most American churches on Saturday, nothing would be any different on Sunday. What an indictment! The early disciples were commanded not to begin their pursuit of the Great Commission until they received the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Cole writes:

“If Jesus is missing in our understanding of church, He will likely be missing in our expression of church as well.” p. 53

“In our organic church movement we have come to understand church as this: the presence of Jesus among his people called out as a spiritual family to pursue his mission on this planet.” p. 53

“In one of the only two places where Jesus mentions church in the Gospels, He says, “For where two or three have gathered together in my name, there I am in their midst. (Mat.18:20) His presence must be an important element of the church.” pp. 53-54

Chapter Five: You Reap What you Sow… And You Eat What You Reap

You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilization to pieces, turn the world upside down, and bring peace to battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of good literature. Mohandas Gandhi

Cole points out that the Kingdom of God always starts with planting seed, the Gospel. Two things are absolutely necessary: good seed and good soil. After studying the parable of the sower, Cole expects no more than one-third of those who respond to the Gospel to bear fruit. The rest are a waste of time and resources.

“I am convinced that we have made a serious mistake by accommodating bad soil in our churches… we do everything we can to keep people… We compromise the life of the church to keep bad soil in our membership. We make church a show that requires the audience to make little or no effort… Life is too short and the potential yields are too great to spend our lives babysitting fruitless people… We might consider such a thing unloving, but this is what Jesus did. Perhaps it is indeed the most loving thing we can do. People must be confronted by the consequences of their choices if they are to get to the heart of their need for Christ.” pp. 69-71

Chapter Six: An Enchanted Kingdom

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you sow. Robert Louis Stevenson

Cole writes that understanding our role in God’s process releases us from trying to do what only God can do. We plant the seeds: God causes the growth.

If we “skip the important step of planting seeds and spend all (our) time expecting things to grow, (we) will have few results to show in the end… I am confident that if churches spent more time, energy, and money in planting seeds, they would not have to work at growing, and the harvest would be much more abundant.” p. 87

Chapter Seven: We All Began as Zygotes

When the solution is simple, God is answering. Albert Einstein

“…we are only one generation away from extinction if we do not have babies.” p. 92

“Many of our churches do not even want to multiply. For many in Christian leadership, church plaiting is a scary term. It connotes pain, hardship, and loss. The separation of relationships, the cost in resources, and the expenses of starting churches like their own is too intimidating.” p. 92

Cole points out that according to one Southern Baptist report, only four percent of churches will multiply. Imagine if we suddenly learned that 96% of humans are infertile. What a scary proposition! It is for the church as well. Cole says that the way many churches are taught to multiply seems more like a divorce, sort of like cutting off an arm and planting it in the ground to reproduce. In nature, however, reproduction, though costly in the long run, is also pleasurable and quite natural. Cole writes:

“Even among churches, reproduction is the product of intimacy – with Christ, His mission, His spiritual family, and the lost world.” p. 93

The author spends some time considering what is behind the modern phenomenon of “church shopping” whereby consumer Christians look for the “best bargain for their tithing buck,” which often means attending some version of a mega-church, a kind of one-stop mall of church resources staffed by very talented professionals. Cole argues that we can never outdo the world, play their game, and win. Cole asks what if we went family shopping as many do church shopping.

“The reason shopping for churches seems more sensible than shopping for families is because church has been reduced to a once-a-week event that is aimed entirely at attracting people. Because we position people to be consumers, they respond like consumers. Advertising may work for business, but if we need to advertise to start a family, we are really screwed up. Family is not a choice: we are born into it. Church is meant to be a family that we are born into as well.” p. 96

Cole suggests that Jesus intends the church to grow by making disciples, not by “planting churches.” It is through the multiplication of disciples that churches are birthed, grow, and reproduce. The basic unit of the Kingdom of God is a follower of Christ in relationship with another follower of Christ. The micro form of church life is a unit of two or three believers in relationship. This is where we must begin to see multiplication occur. (p. 99) Cole points out that there is indeed a cost to multiplication and to discipleship itself. We must die to ourselves in order to fully pursue God’s will. Unless we surrender to Jesus the Lord, no multiplication will ever happen. It is all a matter of our deciding what really matters and devoting ourselves to it in cooperation with God’s Spirit.

Chapter 8: Mapping the DNA of Christ’s Body

In this chapter, Cole examines what are the essential irreducible elements of a spontaneous Gospel movement. Taking Roland Allen’s ideas, which were published under the title Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?, Cole asserts that a movement must contain meet three criteria to spread epidemically.

  • It must be received personally. It must be internalized and transform the life of the follower.
  • It must be repeated easily. It must be able to be passed on after a brief encounter.
  • It must be reproduced strategically. It must be able to be transmitted despite cultural and other barriers to achieve a global impact.

George Patterson suggests that there must be what he calls “obedience-oriented education” for a movement to become spontaneously reproduced. Cole devised an acronym based on DNA that he believes captures the three irreducible elements of viral Christianity that is able to reproduce authentic disciples and churches using a decentralized framework.

D- Divine Truth of the Gospel.

As long as we adhere to God’s Word and internalize it, we will be able to pass the same on to others. The Bible is the standard by which all truth is measured, but the Spirit must make it real as we put it into practice.

N – Nurturing Relationships.

The church is a family, God’s family, which is built upon the new birth, which every authentic follower of Christ has experienced. As such, our relationships are based on the truth that we have actual unity which must be maintained through love with God’s help. We cannot function properly as loners. We were designed by God to be in relationship. As long as we relate lovingly to one another, we will maintain the proper spiritual DNA.

A – Apostolic Mission.

We have been sent into the world with the gospel of reconciliation even as Christ was sent by his Father. (John 20:21) Unless we embrace and obey this commission, we lose an essential ingredient of the true church.

Jesus embodies each element of the DNA. He is the Truth. He is the One who loves others through his body, the church. He is also the Great Apostle, the ultimate Sent One, whose Spirit sends us. The Gospel contains each element of the DNA. Jesus left heaven to become incarnate Truth and bring us back into relationship with his Father and one another. Now he sends us with this Gospel in order to add more people to his family. Cole emphasizes the importance of not tampering with the DNA.

Chapter 9: Epidemic Expansion Starts in the Genes

In this chapter, Cole examines the concept of the term “chaordic,” which describes the fundamental organizing principles of nature. He draws from the work of Dee Hock, the founder of the VISA Corporation, wrote The Birth of the Chaordic Age. Cole sets out to answer this question: how do we organize a decentralized, rapidly expanding, spontaneous multiplication movement without killing it in the process? Citing reproduction in nature, he states that the key is found in the DNA. He then compares exoskeletons with endoskeletons, concluding that the exoskeleton is protective but limiting; whereas, the endoskeleton allows for growth, support, and movement. In the church, an endoskeleton would be what the author calls “distributed” leadership, which enables each person to be directly accountable to the Head, Jesus Christ, without having to go through multiple layers of hierarchical leadership.

Cole points out that there is a vast difference between delegated and distributed authority. Delegated authority is temporarily given to a subordinate but ultimately resides with the superior; whereas, distributed authority resides in the person who is “on the job.”

Cole makes the case that people can only fully mature when they are placed under the headship of Christ to “sink or swim” depending on how Jesus helps them. Cole asserts that, rather than leading to chaos, this kind of “flat structure” authority is actually the strongest because those who have influence (leadership) in the group have it based on gifting, calling, and spiritual and relational authority. What holds such a group together is the commonality of vision, mission, and relationships, rather than hierarchy and structure. Cole argues that such a church is capable of being self-organized, self-governing, and self-perpetuating, all under the guidance and oversight of the Holy Spirit.

Cole argues that it is extremely important to help new disciples quickly “imprint” upon the Lord, rather than upon human mentors, if we are going produce true disciples who are capable of making new disciples. We do this by refusing to act as intermediaries between them and God. We get out of the way and force them to find their answers from God.

My belief is that if it is anything other than common commitment to truth, common familial relationship, and common sense of mission, it is a weak organization that will eventually die a slow and painful death. p. 138

The core issue, where all this becomes most difficult, is in giving up control. We are afraid of all hell breaking loose, but our insecurities and resulting control have often kept all heaven from breaking loose. p. 140

Chapter 10: It Takes Guts to Care for People

In this chapter, Cole examines the necessity of compassion if our faith is ever going to become epidemic. He quotes Matthew 9:36 which describes Jesus feeling compassion for the multitudes. Cole notes that the Greek word means “bowels.” In other words, Jesus was “hit in the gut” with compassion when he saw the harassed and helpless multitudes. He states that the Greek words “harassed and helpless” used here connote the idea of a brute pinning down a helpless victim and molesting her. Compassion is supposed to be more than a mental exercise. It should grip our emotions to the point of causing a physical response. When we have this level of compassion, we will be able to see past people’s presenting issues and problems to see them as Jesus does – as sheep without a shepherd. Jesus came not to judge the world, but to save it. (John 3:17)

Next Cole makes the point that new converts should be immediately thrust into the work. It is how Jesus did it and it makes perfect sense. New converts are passionate about their newfound relationship with Christ and they have a whole set of unsaved friends to share the Good News with. It is also a great way for them to grow up quickly as they encounter the challenges of ministry right off the bat. Jesus sent the Gadarene demoniac to the Decapolis to testify immediately after delivering him from a legion of demons. The Spirit removed Philip the Evangelist from the Ethiopian eunuch right after the latter came to Christ. Obviously God felt he could rely on the Spirit to handle things. Can we do any less? We can give these new followers of Christ on the job training, which is the very best way to learn.

Chapter 11: Me and Osama Are Close

Cole, in this chapter, emphasizes the relational aspect of our witness for Christ. We can only disciple people with whom we are in relationship. Witnessing may be done in drive by style, but not discipleship, and the Great Commission enjoins all followers of Christ to go and make disciples.

He mentions five keys to an effective witness.

  • Time and availability. Relationships require large time investments. If we are not willing to make that “sacrifice,” we will not be effective.
  • A transformed life. People are more impacted by how we live than merely by our words. When the two are in agreement, we have the maximum effect for God’s kingdom. Nothing is more offensive than a mouthy Christian who is an obvious hypocrite. I like what one of our leaders often says; “I am a Christian, but I am not very good at it.” Let’s admit up front that we are “in process,” instead of pretending to be something we are not.
  • Hospitality. Nothing beats having people over. It says that we want them to be part of our lives and we are open to them. The impact is perhaps even greater when we go into their homes and become a guest.
  • Spiritual intuition. We need the Holy Spirit to show us what to say, when to say it, and what to do. Only He knows the deep things in people and how to bypass intellectual arguments and go straight for the heart.
  • Generosity. Nothing betrays the gospel more than stinginess. There is nothing stingy in God, and God’s people should reflect His heart with their openhanded generosity. People are drawn to those who give freely and joyfully.

Being a light in our neighborhoods is both a fun and fulfilling journey, while at the same time being extremely costly. Disciples are those who are willing to pay the price to share the joy of the Lord at seeing lost sheep come to the Shepherd and discipling them to become fishers of men, too.

Chapter 12: The How-To of Spreading the Epidemic

This chapter delineates some core principles to increase our effectiveness as disciple makers.

  • Prayer. Enough said.
  • Pockets of People – Taking Advantage of People Networks. Encourage new converts to reach their natural network of friend. Why reinvent the wheel?
  • Power of Presence – Half the battle is just showing up. We need to be regular in showing up in people’s lives, whether it’s at the coffeehouse or going next door to visit. You never know what God may do if you are there. It is sure he will not be able to use you, if you are not present.
  • Person of Peace. Those influential people whom God uses to affect large numbers of people have three characteristics. They are receptive. They have relational connections, and they have good reputations. God wants us to bring these people alongside us as co-laborers. They deserve our utmost attention and time investment because their potential is so great.
  • People of Purpose. Find people who are willing to fully immerse themselves into God’s missional purpose. Start a church in their homes, rather than simply settling for starting it in your own.

Chapter 13: Falling with Style

In this chapter Cole explains the importance of working to produce churches that are not “leader dependent.” He advocates avoiding the “pitfall” of going the route of the church “franchise,” which is built according to a tried and true model, but might not need to depend on the Spirit. Instead he believes in the following steps.

  • Begin by working in the harvest and start small. Cole advises against starting with a team of already-saved people. He believes that having a larger team of people who are already followers of Christ can actually impede the progress of the work. “Churches birthed out of transformed lives are healthier, reproductive, and grow faster.” (p. 205)
  • Allow God to build around others. Avoid launching out of your own home. Find a person of peace and make his or her home the base of operations.
  • Empower others from the start. Avoid doing too much of the leading. Get new believers quickly involved. Let the excitement of new life carry the momentum instead of your own giftedness.
  • Let Scriptures, not our pet beliefs or traditions, have priority.
  • Rethink leadership. Do not set artificial barriers to leadership opportunities. The goal of maturity is not the accumulation of knowledge but a life of obedience.
  • Create immediate obedience through water baptism.
  • Settle your issues with ownership. Jesus owns the church. We are his servants. Success or failure are in his hands. Ours is to fearlessly obey.

Chapter 14: Tales that Really Mattered

Many of us settle for lesser lives, for stories not worth telling. We are being called to a higher story, a bigger tale that will be told in future generations. (p. 208)

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The King Jesus Gospel

The King Jesus Gospel

The Original Good News Revisited
by Scot McKnight

Every now and then a book comes along that is both easy to read extremely seminal. This is one of those books. I could not put it down. For a good while now I have been pondering two questions:

  • Are we doing an adequate job of presenting the gospel?
  • Why are we not seeing more disciples step forward in abandoned submission to Jesus?

Scot McKnight shows how these two questions are connected. One big reason we do not see more committed followers of Christ who become fishers of men is because our hearers have not been impacted by the gospel as it was preached by the early church. Instead we have substituted what McKnight calls “salvationism.”

Instead of preaching the gospel, we have been pitching the plan of salvation.

As a result, we have been asking people to make “decisions for Christ,” which are profoundly self-centered responses to a “personal Savior,” instead of calling people to surrender to the Jesus of the gospels who is the Messiah of Israel and the Lord of all creation who died for our sins, rose again, appeared to his disciples, ascended into heaven, sent the Holy Spirit, rules over his church, and will someday come again to judge the living and the dead.

The gospel is the story of how Jesus came to fulfill God’s purposes on earth which began, in earnest, with Abraham and will be culminated when Jesus returns as King of Kings. The gospel is contained in the four books of the New Testament which are called by that name. The gospel is not merely a plan of salvation extracted from Paul’s Letter to the Romans. It is much grander than that.

Whereas, the plan of salvation asks people to make decisions to accept Christ as Savior; the gospel calls people to absolute repentance and surrender to him as Lord.

Forgiveness of sins is included in the gospel, but the gospel cannot be condensed merely knowing Christ  as the Lamb of God. He is also the risen Lord, the seated Baptizer in the Spirit, and coming glorious Son of Man. McKnight points out that the early church would not have been persecuted by the Romans for proclaiming a “personal Savior.” They were thrown to the lions for preaching that Jesus is Lord over all. We can do no less.

McKnight is a Bible scholar who writes in a style that is easily digested by the average student of the Bible. He goes into great depth to dissect and explain what I summarized above. I found myself being energized to be more bold in my proclamation of the gospel, the “full” gospel, not merely the plan of salvation. May God raise up a generation of gospel announcers who are true to the original message, and may he raise up an army of disciples who will go make more disciples! Get this book and read it.

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