Simple Church Journal

From my book, The Simple House Church Revolution:

Nevertheless, by the time I felt called to pastor a church, I no longer questioned how church was done. We started with a building and a core group of Christians. We invited, and planned, and organized, and put together Sunday events. We built more buildings and started more services to invite people to. We developed programs for young and old, men and women, married and divorced. We hired staff and we organized ministry teams.

Without realizing it, we were following human traditions for church life that were developed over the centuries: cathedrals, pulpit-led services, pews, order-of-service, etc. All of these things may be useful in their place (God can use anything), but they have no place in the basic definition of “church.”

Sadly, as the church has adopted more and more traditions and become more and more institutionalized, it has become largely ineffective in its impact on earth. In the western world, where we have created the best organizational church systems that exist, Christianity is declining. In contrast, in parts of India and China where the expression of church is largely organic, simple, and fluid, the church is flourishing.

Our longing is to see the church restored to its essence of life and vitality so that she becomes the full expression of Christ’s power and love on earth. This is the great hope of God’s kingdom coming to influence, save, and redeem a lost planet. Priscilla Shirer made this comment:

In the first century in Palestine Christianity was a community of believers. Then Christianity moved to Greece and became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome and became an institution. Then it moved to Europe and became a culture. And then it moved to America and became a business. We need to get back to being a healthy, vibrant community of true followers of Jesus.

As I head off to Africa this week, one of the messages on my heart is simply intimacy:  intimacy with God as the heart and soul of all that we are and all that we do. 

Organic expressions of church come out of a truly life-giving, organically connected heart with Jesus.  It is always Jesus first: love, worship, know, follow Him and then allow gatherings to take place from out of that dynamic.

I have been reflecting on the simple, profound truths that many of you are familiar with from Experiencing God, by Henry Blackaby:

1. God is at work around you
2. God pursues a love relationship with you
3. God invites you to join Him
4. God speaks to you
5. Your crisis of belief
6. You must adjust your life
7. You can experience God (as you walk these steps)

I am taken by the fact that, at the end of the day, it’s always about knowing Jesus, hearing from Jesus, adjusting my life by faith to follow Him, and then inviting others to experience the same dynamic.

I want to use this post to invite your input on this subject of intimacy with Christ.  What has God been speaking to you regarding the deepening of your relationship with Him?  What resources have been personally useful you?

Let us know via comments!

Mission Frontiers has some excellent articles, this month, on reproducing disciples in the context of the U.S.  It is exciting to see these principles implemented in Western contexts that have had such an impact throughout the rest of the world.

Curtis Sergeant shares an article entitled Growing U.S. Movements to the Lost and the Unreached:

As of December, 2013 we have multiple streams to the 5th generation or beyond and well over a dozen more to the 4th generation. All told there are about 200 downstream churches in the USA and 162 overseas, including several among previously unengaged people groups.

Read more here.

Fred and Melissa Campbell authored an article called, No Longer “Business as Usual:”

In April of 2013, after mapping the greater Austin area into regions, we sent out our first 40 teams of two to search for potential houses of peace in 12 areas. They found 400!

We formed more than 60 new groups within 60 days of this first search, and additional searches in August and November identified 150 more potential houses of peace. As of December 2013 we had more than 100 groups. Most are reproducing disciples, and one is reproducing churches!

Read more here.

These types of movements will continue to grow as the church is discovering it can take the shape of mission and gather in simple, reproducible ways.  The Holy Spirit is surely at work!

The entire issue is a great read!

Following is a guest post by Felicity Dale, author of the new book "The Black Swan Effect."  Whether we are talking about reproducing churches in our own region or engaging in missions throughout the world, it is vital that women are championed and take their place at the forefront of God's Kingdom work.  Felicity has been doing this for years and this book represents the pinnacle of that effort.

Does our traditional view of the Scriptures about women overlook something powerful?  Could the role of women be crucial to the church’s future? Are we on the edge of a new era in missions history? 

The role of a woman in leadership is often a lonely one. A few years ago, a group of women, all with apostolic or prophetic calling, began meeting via conference call for peer fellowship. As the months went by, a frequent topic of conversation was the role of women in the church and why they are so often marginalized. They longed to change the status quo, but recognized that if they tried to make a difference, they would be perceived as feminists with an agenda. As they sought the Lord, he showed them that they should find men to stand with them. That way, both men and women would be more likely to listen. When the idea came for a book, several of these men agreed to contribute chapters.

The Black Swan Effect presents a vision for what can happen as men and women work together in the Kingdom of God.  The authors, including people involved in the house church world like Neil Cole, Katie Driver and Frank Viola, encourage men to champion women as equal co-laborers and partners in the harvest. They give women permission and inspiration to follow the Lord—to reach their own full potential and encourage others to fulfill God’s call. The Black Swan Effect equips both men and women to bring a Scriptural and positive contribution to the increasingly crucial conversation on gender in the church.

The Black Swan Effect will:

• Bring a male perspective to the fore on the value of women and working alongside them in ministry
• Go deeper in understanding certain troublesome scriptures • Offer insight into the status of women/girls worldwide
• Show personal examples of the challenges women face in leadership/ministry
• Feed your hope on God’s original intent for women
• Edify and equip those who want to champion the whole body of Christ

The Black Swan Effect will not:

• Be helpful if you are looking for feminist ammunition against men.
• Encourage an unrighteous response on this critical kingdom issue.
• Let you off the hook if you are using gender as a rationale for not engaging at your fullest leadership gifting and capacity.
• Excuse you if you are using gender to sidebar the females in your life from their fullest expression of God’s calling.

Change is coming to the body of Christ. Let’s get ready!

Luke 10 provides the clearest steps for initiating new churches and, even, starting new movements.

Here are some key comments from this passage:

1. Go where Jesus sends you.  Jesus sent the disciples out, instructed them where to go, and told them he would be following up in those places personally.  This pre-supposes that we have an intimate, listening relationship with Jesus and we are seeking to go and work where He is working.  Persons of peace are people that God is already working within.  He has prepared them.  By listening and going where He sends, we join God in something He is already doing rather than needing to force something to happen.  I have spent much time hoping I can get something to work where God wasn’t working rather than tuning in to where He is already sowing life.

2. Pray to the Lord of harvest.  Specifically, pray that God will send out workers.  This means that we are asking God to send us to people who will become workers in the harvest.  We are asking, not just for receptive people, but for those who will turn around and attract others by their influence and become effective at drawing others.  By praying this way, we are engaging the principle of reproduction from the very beginning.  We are asking God to bring us to those who will not be barren but fruitful.

3. Acts of kindness, miracles, and relationship-building precede the proclamation of the Kingdom of God.  Clear, spoken explanation of the Kingdom does take place in this passage.  But prior to that, the disciples are told to display compassion, pray for needs, and build relationship through eating together.

If you want to move forward in planting simple/house/organic churches, reaching others, living incarnationally, and becoming fruitful, praying over this passage and asking God for next steps might be a great place to start.

What are some other principals from this passage that you have found to be key?

My friends over at Newforms Resources have put together a wonderful video that uses a game format to describe the simple, powerful principles of disciple making movements.  This is a wonderfully precise and informative vid:

 

(Re-posted from 2005):

The Christian world, the entire Christian world, is permeated with a religious spirit.  It's in me, in others, in traditional churches, in house churches.  It is such a pervasive dysfunction that it's no wonder Jesus addressed it so forcefully.

The religious spirit is not just "them," it's also "us."  We think, oh so subtly, that we are somehow better than "them."  We look at externals of some kind: how we worship, how we do liturgy or don't do liturgy, how we view Scripture, our pet theological perspectives and we hold tightly to these things because on some level we believe them to be "right."  We lose our humility and our "rightness" becomes a judgment of others.  We are better than them.  We "do it" more correctly.  And there it is–a religious spirit.

We take on a religious spirit when we get focused on the way to live the Christian life rather than the Person that we live the Christian life with.  We turn relationship with God into rules.  A relationship is an ongoing, everyday, living thing.  When we are not living out of that living relationship, we begin to retreat into the rules of Christian living as a substitute.  We do, after all, know the "right" way to live.  It doesn't take long before we are judging others because they are not living the "right" way like we are.  We quickly lose sight of the fact that the reason we are in this place of judging others is because we ourselves are unsettled.  We have lost our peace because we are no longer fully embracing the Person.  We try to repair our sense of unrest by setting up the rules, the structure, in order to live right and thus feel right.  We project that onto others.  We quickly become the pharisees who encourage others to live for God based on the letter of the law and in so doing we lead people away from vibrant relationship with God.

We take on a religious spirit when our theology becomes more important than the Person behind our belief systems.  We believe we know the truth; we often believe we know MOST of the truth even though Scripture affirms that we "see through a glass darkly."  Yet we base much of our personal security on knowing "the truth" and we leave little room for humility, for paradoxical theological positions, and for learning deeper truths.  Because our "truth" makes us feel secure, we judge the theological positions of others as being "less than."  We become the scribes and we miss the heart of the One from whom all truth flows.

We take on a religious spirit when we believe we are part of a "movement" of God that others have not yet experienced but "should."  Perhaps what we are involved in is NOT what God is calling someone else to be involved in.  Yet we take whatever God has done for us and judge others by whether or not God has done it for them or in them or to them.

We take on a religious spirit when we have been hurt or disappointed by other Christians.  Rather than heal, forgive, let go, set boundaries and move on, we become bitter.  We find reason to judge them and their "hypocritical" brand of Christianity.  We hold up a standard of "righteousness" that we judge others by (because we have been hurt).  We become standard-bearers of righteousness seeking to hold people accountable to what's "right."  In the process we become the legalists.  We forget that we are all just humans deeply in need of the washing of the blood of Jesus Christ and His eternal mercy.

We take on a religious spirit when we fail to recognize God in each and every person that He has created and redeemed.  When we believe that we have something to teach others but fail to see what they have to teach us.  When we take something from our spiritual life or experience and imagine that we are, in some way, better than those who do not share exactly what we are "into."

A religious spirit robs us of our real spirituality.  We do not live out of the vitality of union with Christ, we live out of the push,the guilt, and the shoulds of duty.  We live out of a subtle pride; we lose the joy of first love.  We may feel good about "being good," but we lack the passion of a lover's life.

Worse, we pass on this spirit into others.  We model a Christianity that lacks the zest and peace that comes from relationship.  We exemplify a dour, sober, lifeless Christianity.  We sometimes even heap the guilt and shoulds on others and, in doing this, keep them from finding the joy of the Person.  We take the religious burdens that we have put on ourselves, and we wrap them around others in a way that stifles their openness to a God of relational, creative, beautiful love.  No wonder Jesus said, woe unto you!

So, I say, woe unto me.  Woe unto us all.  To repent and break free of religion in order to experience the power of relationship with Creator-God… isn't that the call of the hour?

(Note this post is a rewrite of one I wrote in 2005).

A friend passed along a sermon by Greg Boyd who was on an indefinite leave of absence from pastoring a large church.  He expresses his crisis of faith:

My present crisis was precipitated precisely because the clearer I¹ve gotten about the profound significance of the kingdom, the foggier I¹ve gotten about the relationship that exists between it and the church.

To be more specific, I¹ve discovered it¹s not terribly hard to build and run a mega church. Anyone with the right set of skills can do it. But it¹s not clear that building a church in and of itself has any kingdom value. One could just be constructing another religious carnival to entertain American religious thrill seekers. One could be feeding the beast of the American consumer mindset that wants more than anything else to use Jesus as a means of improving our already overly-privileged lives.  The question I am presently wrestling with, therefore, is how can we 'do church' in a way that cuts through all this American religious excrement and actually advances the kingdom of God. That is a much more difficult question to answer than how to build and run a church!

Greg hits the nail on the head here.  He goes on to say that we must be very clear about what the kingdom of God is lest we confuse it with our own cultural conditioning.  "We then delude ourselves into thinking we¹re advancing the kingdom of God when, in fact, we¹re only advancing ourselves."

So how do we become clear about what the Kingdom actually is?  Greg says it well: "Jesus is depicted as the perfect embodiment, the incarnation of the kingdom of God."

Only to the extent that we act as Jesus acted, dying for those who despised him, are we authentically his body. Only to the extent that we sacrifice our lives for others, whether they be enemies or friends, can we claim that the kingdom is present in us. Only to the extent that we replicate the sacrificial love of Calvary for the homeless, the sick, the rejected, the oppressed and for prisoners, do we belong to the kingdom of God, as Jesus taught (Mt 25).

From the distinct perspective of the kingdom of God, all the profound knowledge we might ever acquire and dispense to others is nothing more than a 'clanging cymbal' if it isn¹t motivated by and doesn¹t result in communicating Calvary-quality love (I Cor. 13:1-4). All the 'true doctrines' we might believe, all the pious talk and religious activity we might ever engage in, all the theological debates we might ever win and all the great revivals we might ever hold are altogether worthless, devoid of any kingdom significance, if they aren¹t motivated by and don¹t result in love defined as Jesus Christ dying on the cross.

Only to the extent that we bleed out of love for others in what we do does anything we do manifest the dome in which God is king. This is as simple as it is challenging. It is as obvious as it is obviously absent from the Church.

In short, the true kingdom life is one that lives and breathes "Calvary-like love."

Sadly, Greg points out, that although this kind of love is the litmus test of our Christian life, few Christians exemplify this.  HOWEVER, his own personal challenge is to NOT look at others but simply determine to personally live that Calvary-quality love moment by moment.  In other words, the kingdom life begins by pointing at ourself, not others.

Will I live in love, as Christ loved me and gave himself for me? Am I willing to bleed for others? Will I wash the feet of prostitutes  and even more challenging for me personally, the feet of Pharisees?

Awesome thoughts…

How do we live this out and how do we continue to explore expressions of 'church' that really model and help us express this true Kingdom love?

I have likely done Donald a mis-service by only sharing my favorite quotes from a long post he wrote here which is all good and worth reading in its entirety.

Nevertheless, here are a few of those 'sound bites' that stood out to me from "Why I Don't Go To Church Very Often:"

I’d say half of the most impactful people I know, who love Jesus and tear up at the mention of His name, who reach out to the poor and lonely and are fundamentally sound in their theology, who create institutions that feed hundreds of thousands, do not attend a traditional church service. Many of them even speak at churches, but they have no home church and don’t long for one. They aren’t wired to be intimate with God by attending a lecture and hearing singing (which there is NOTHING wrong with) they are wired to experience God by working with Him…

The point, though, is this: Jesus engages people inside and outside the church. It’s almost as though He sees the church as one, without walls, denominations or tribes. I’m starting to see the church that way, too…

Today, many churches look like night clubs complete with pastors being piped in on video. It’s quite brilliant and I’ve no problem with it, it’s just not my thing. I don’t like night clubs. And I don’t like lectures and I don’t emote to worship music. And I still love Jesus. It’s shocking, but it’s true. That said, let’s stop using the word “Biblical” as some sort of ace card when it comes to how church should be done…

I do think church can evolve beyond a lecture/worship/performance institution, but the current leadership is unlikely to make that happen. When and if the church evolves, it will evolve from outside the current leadership and that evolution will pose a threat to existing tribal values as well as financial systems that are sustained by the current model…

… I’d argue that by making the church smaller, less formal, less organized, less institutionalized and more like the chaos of a family structure, the church would be moving MORE toward the historical church in ACTS and less like a culture-formed institution by deconstructing itself. Though I hardly consider that a God-given decree.

"Between the traditional and the new, or between order and adventure, there is no real opposition; and what we call tradition today is a knit work of centuries of adventure." – Jorge Luis Borges quoted at ProdigalKiwi.

Interesting quote.  It helps put some things into perspective.  If you are reading this blog you are probably on a wonderful, current-day adventure in your spiritual and ministry life.  You are an adventurer.

It's an interesting perspective to consider that so many who have gone before us, whom we describe as "traditional," were adventurers in their day.  The masses tend to follow the adventurers and, within time, that which was new becomes a routine, a liturgy, a program, or just something to do that was once exciting.  Taking an adventurous experience and reducing it to something repeatable for others turns it into a tradition.  The adventure of listening to and following THE Adventurer gets lost.

However, this quote reminds us to reflect on the many adventurers that are sprinkled throughout our traditional heritage.  Remembering that our "traditional" heritage is also made up of extreme-sports type rock climbers can remind us to honor them for the courage they had and encourage us to press on in the adventure we are having in our day.

Why waste time worrying about those who don't understand adventure and look for safety by turning all-out-life-with-God into something routine, predictable, religious, and un-relationship-like.  Instead, let's keep our eyes on the top of Everest– where we are headed– and enjoy the company of the Adventurers– past and present.