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September, 2011

  1. “How Great Thou Art”. . .

    September 28, 2011 by Nate

    So, here’s an old hymn that I’ve always loved. We’ve put a new twist on it though.

    Category Church, Music | Tags: | 1 Comment

  2. Wherever you go. . .

    September 27, 2011 by Nate

    “Every Christian is either a missionary or an impostor.”
    ~ Charles Spurgeon

    In my previous post I mentioned every Christian’s responsibility to follow the mission of Jesus. Sadly, we’ve shifted our focus to the wrong things. We’ve lost the urgency of our calling quite a bit since the Edict of Milan passed in AD 313.

    Since people had to be in church, Christians no longer felt the necessity to go out into the world and make disciples because, well, everyone’s here already. When this happened, the Christian life was no longer about restoring the world and reconciling it back to God (2 Corinthians 5.18-21); rather, it became about sin management and individual spiritual fulfillment. Discipleship was no longer about training to attack the “gates of hell”, but about becoming a person of high moral standards.

    But if you look around, you’ll see that we no longer live in Christendom. Christianity is quickly becoming a fringe practice. I realize that to many, this comes as sad news. But I’m actually very optimistic about this. Why? Because it means that the Church is again given the opportunity to follow Jesus’ mission. We are reentering the pluralistic world with which Paul was so familiar. And in this world, our traditional methodology for leading people into the kingdom of God will rarely, if ever, produce any real fruit. Instead we’ve assimilated people into a church subculture, rather than unleashing them into the world’s culture with the mission of plowing a counterculture.

    These are some examples of the practices of the Christian faith. Internally we devote ourselves to the teaching and study of the Bible. We gather in community to lift each other up, sharpen each other, and keep each other accountable before God. We also share meals together, comfort one another, share communion together, and practice hospitality. Externally we’re supposed to engage in the community, become a blessing to our cities (Jeremiah 29.4-7), and serve those in need (Matthew 25.31-40; Matthew 10.40-42; James 2.14-17).

    In a modern church-centered life, the primary focus of the believer is on his internal life, resulting in questions such as, “How is your personal walk with God?” or, “How’s your church life?” Like I’d mentioned in my previous post, without a mission, the life of a Christian becomes about sin management and the self-actualization of one’s spiritual potential.

    Here’s what happens in our traditional church discipleship model. When the believer follows this course, his effectiveness in the culture is diminished greatly. Why? Because he’s no longer a friend to the people he once associated with. He was pulled from the community and brought into the church culture, where he was nurtured and cared for and raised to look like the people who are inside this Christian bubble.

    This model, when put into practice looks something like this: Bob has been in church for many years. He decides one day, after hearing a sermon on sharing the Gospel, to invite one of his coworkers to a Bible study at his house. After some time, Joe (Bob’s coworker) gives up his Wednesday night poker game and decides to attend the Bible study. Joe eventually gets saved and becomes heavily involved in the church life. He’s at every Bible study class, he hands out bulletins during Sunday services, and he even serves on the outreach committee that’s working on a big free carwash event that will be used to invite people in the community to start attending their church services.

    A year later, the pastor preaches another sermon on sharing the Gospel, and Joe recalls his poker buddies. He hasn’t seen them in almost a year, but he decides to call one of them to invite him to church.

    Basically, what has happened here is this: Bob has extracted Joe from his context by finding something attractive inside his church world and highlighting it for Joe (green arrow underneath the diagram). There’s been an attempt at pushing Joe into the culture, but because Joe hasn’t been properly discipled, it becomes extremely difficult to reenter his previous context. He soon finds that all his friends are Christians, and outside of family responsibilities, work, and church-related activities, he has almost nothing else to do.

    Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad methodology, but is it really that effective? Is it the best method we can come up with?

    What if we were to reverse the model?What if instead we were to move from “external” to “internal”? Here’s what I mean.

    Matt and Steve are believers. On Mondays they hang out at a little pub a few blocks from their neighborhood. They meet there every Monday after work, hanging out with the regulars at the bar, being an encouragement to the men who are trying to numb whatever pain they’re experiencing. They’re comforters and companions to the patrons of the place.

    On Thursdays both of their families have dinner at Steve’s house. After dinner, Matt leads the little group in taking communion.

    On Fridays they go on a group date with their wives and one or two other couples. And on Sundays after the church service Matt, Steve, and their friend Todd get together to pray with each other, talk about what God is teaching each of them, and hold each other accountable to the mission of Jesus.

    Now, at any point in their schedule, Matt and Steve could engage in mission. As they develop friendships at the pub, opportunities to talk about their faith with someone become more readily available. They could invite someone from that area of their life into their Thursday evenings. Or they could invite someone from their church to join them on Monday afternoons and teach him how to build friendships with people outside of church. But no matter where you look in their lives, you can draw a sense of restoration from their rhythms.

    You see, the Christian life is about so much more than just staying morally pure or sitting still in a church pew or serving on a church committee. It’s about restoring and reconciling to God every aspect of life.

    My girlfriend often talks about a holistic, restorative approach to interacting with creation. Discipleship should be no different. Life shouldn’t be dichotomous for a Christian—church life and “regular” life, or even spiritual life and physical life. No, everything is connected, and wherever you go, you’re a missionary.

    Again, I’d like to know what you think. Am I completely off base? Do we really need to rework our thoughts about church/discipleship (as I’ve posited), or can our current/traditional methodology be tweaked slightly and updated?

    Original diagram taken from The Austin Stone Community Church missional community paradigm.

    Category Christianity, Church, Discipleship, Mission | Tags: | 2 Comments

  3. We’re not in Christendom anymore. . .

    September 27, 2011 by Nate

    One of the problems plaguing the Western Church is her propensity for neglecting to teach Christians that their primary role as followers of a Missionary-God is missionary to the culture in which he has placed them. Because of this neglect, she has failed to train her people to follow Christ’s command to “Go. . . and make disciples.”

    Any global missionary will tell you that in order to effectively reach a new culture, you have to immerse yourself in that culture. You have to become friends with the people you encounter. You have to learn their language. You have to eat their food, wear their fashion, and adopt their pace of life. If you don’t do this, you won’t be an effective missionary.

    The same applies to us here in America. Unfortunately, we live in the aftermath of Christendom, and there are still a great number of Christians who fail to recognize their responsibility to follow Jesus in his mission of restoration and reconciliation in the world.

    Here’s a little history for you. In AD 306, Constantine I became the Emperor of Rome. He’s noted for being the first Roman emperor to have converted to Christianity. Until this point, there was widespread intolerance of Christianity throughout the empire (most notably under the reign of Nero, who earned the title “First Persecutor of the Christians” by the writers Tertullian, Lactantius, and Sulpicius Severus). Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, offering tolerance to Christians and religious freedom to all Roman citizens.

    Despite the religious freedom that he offered, Constantine saw it as his duty to establish religious orthodoxy. He disliked the disputes that came about, so he gave the Church the authority to dictate proper religious practices.

    Gone were the days of Paul, Peter, Timothy, and Apollos. The Gospel of Jesus no longer spread virally underneath a pluralistic society of philosophers and liberal thinkers. Christianity became the religion of the state, a tool in the hands of the government used to maintain religious order throughout the Roman Empire.

    This is the model from which we have adopted our American church. The church closely mirrors the governmental system from which it was birthed. In Europe, the government was largely centralized around an emperor. Thus the Church centralized around a bishop or pope. In America, the government was dispersed among voting representatives, and so we have a church tradition that rests in congregationalism.

    Now we have a culture that is largely governed by our consumeristic impulses. Do you see what this has done to the Church? We’re now adopting cool names, hip media presentation, convenient service structures, and sleek marketing and advertising.

    To the outsider it looks like churches are competing to grab my attention. There’s an underlying assumption that we’re still in Christendom, and since we’re in Christendom, I have to attend a church. Which one will I choose? LifeChurch? They’ve got a great band. Buckhead Church? They’ve got a great band too, but they also have Andy Stanley, and he’s written a lot of books, which means they’re famous. Newspring Church? Their band is great, but they also play songs by Coldplay and Led Zeppelin, so that means they’re really cool. Liquid Church? They’ve also got a great band, and they were just on CNN for giving away $90K, so I guess that means they’re famous and generous.

    Or will I just decide the whole church thing is not for me? I wouldn’t be alone. Only 40% of the American population ever sets foot in a church.

    Guess what? We’re not in Christendom anymore, and nothing says it better than the 60% of Americans who never have—and probably never will—enter a church in their lifetimes.

    Category Christianity, Church | Tags: | No Comments

  4. Non-Christian missionaries. . .

    September 26, 2011 by Nate

    Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about this idea of “inviting a friend to church.” Okay, so I’ll admit it, I was never truly comfortable with the thought of inviting my non-Christian friends to my church. The whole thing just seemed a little weird to me. “Hey, so what are you doing on Sunday? Watching football? Would you be interested in leaving your comfort zone and taking a huge step out of that and into a world where people are nothing like you, you have to listen to a band play songs you don’t know, and a preacher gets up and tells you about all the things that are wrong with your life? How would you like to enter this new culture?”

    And in reality, I myself would rather be in his shoes. Sleeping in and watching football just seems like a much better way to spend my hard-earned weekend.

    What’s weird about this is that the whole thing is backwards. My pastor and I were talking about this last week, and he said that the “invite a friend to church” mentality actually forces the role of missionary onto the person you’re inviting.

    Think about it, a missionary (which, if you take Christ’s words in John 20.21 seriously, would include every follower of Jesus) is someone who leaves the environment that’s comfortable to him and sets foot into a culture that is not his own. He has to learn how that culture thinks, what they like, what they believe, etc. When we invite our non-believing friends to church, we’ve given them half the tasks of missionaries.

    And then we invite them into our small groups, which, contrary to popular belief, aren’t doing any true holistic discipleship. Our small groups are really nothing more than therapy and discussion groups.

    And we wonder why our churches look nothing like the explosive movements of the first century.

    There’s nothing wrong with having those kinds of groups. Just don’t call it something that it’s not. Small groups are not discipleship groups.

    Think about it this way. We invite someone to come to our church’s Sunday service. After she’s been attending for a few weeks, she “gets saved” and joins a small group. In the small group meetings, they sit in a circle, eat some crumb cake, maybe sing a few songs, talk about how a particular passage in the Bible makes them feel (or how they feel about the passage), and then they pray together and ask God for things.

    And then what? Does she go back into her former world somehow and try to invite some of her friends to attend her church? She was plucked out of her culture, nurtured in a completely different culture that didn’t really prepare her to return to her former culture, and then expected to reach that culture again?

    What we’ve done to her is not discipleship, it’s assimilation.

    In my next post, I’m going to talk about what I think could be a much more effective discipleship methodology. But for now, I’m going to ask this question: am I wrong here? If I’ve made a mistake, please let me know. I realize my cynicism is showing a little bit in this post, but I’m making an observation. I could be way off.

    Leave a comment if you think I’m mistaken in my observation.

    Category Church, Discipleship | Tags: | 4 Comments

  5. It’s been a while. . .

    September 22, 2011 by Nate

    First off, let me apologize for being pretty much nonexistent on my blog for a while. It’s been an insanely busy and hectic year (and it’s about to get even busier and crazier).

    I want to update you on a few things. First off, a lot has changed in me over the last year. Let me take you on a very short version of the journey I’ve been on this past year.

    A little over a year ago I started a new job at a church called Emergence. At first glance, I thought it was more of what I was familiar with. Rock music: check. Teaching pastor in jeans and plaid: check. Lots of twenty-something people: check.

    But little did I realize that God had brought me to a place that would change me, shape me, and in so many ways mold my vision and understanding of the Church and the mission he has called her to.

    It’s been an odd period in my life, to be sure. I grew up in a fundamentalist church (yes, the type of church that was the topic of a 20/20 report. I left that church and found myself bouncing from one church to another, finally finding a place to rest at a place called Liquid Church.

    If you’ve been reading my entries over the years, you’ve seen me discover this new church culture. You’ve seen me learn to embrace a “progressive” church and find the strengths in its style.

    It’s often said that change is the only constant in life. And once again, my life is changing. My thoughts are changing. My beliefs are changing.

    I won’t presume to have all the answers, but I will say this much—I’ve learned far more this past year than I could’ve ever thought possible.

    I’ll leave you with this today: I love Liquid Church. I’m thankful for the grace that I received there, for the friendships I built there, and for the message of hope that God has proclaimed through the leaders there. Yet I can’t help but ask these questions.

    1. Are we actually making disciples? Not converts. Christ’s commission was “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” Discipleship is a lifelong pursuit, not a one-time prayer.

    2. What are we empowering people to do? How high is our bar? Handing out bulletins or planting a church? Changing slides in a media presentation or developing intentional, mission-driven relationships with the people they rub shoulders with?

    3. Is Sunday our “game day,” or are we engaged in mission all week long, stopping only to rest, refuel, and reflect on Sunday?

    These questions make me think. I realize that I’m asking them of you, my readers, but as I read them, I find myself guilty of taking the easy options in regards to my church life. But if I understand the mission of Christ and his kingdom, and if I think about how the church existed in the first century, then there’s no way my “church life” should be truncated to making converts, handing out bulletins, or “going to church.”

    Category Church, Direction | Tags: | No Comments