Simple Church Journal

A well-meaning pastor-friend recently encouraged me to come to the local pastor’s association meeting which I used to attend regularly (many years ago).  He said, “We need a house church guy.”  (Whatever that is).  And then he commented, “You are still one of us.”

Hmmm… “one of us.”

One of who?  Oh, yeah, the special ones.  The ministry-called ones.  The ones just slightly better than others.

I am not sharing this to slam my pastor-friend, but rather to point out that this subtle religious pride is so deeply engrained in most of us that it’s difficult to wash out.

“I go to such-and-such church.”

“I’m into house church.”

“Organic church is my thing.”

“Christians who are sold out should be living the way I’m trying to live (more prayer-ful, more involved with supernatural encounters, holier, etc, etc).”

It’s so difficult to see that in our human frailty we often seek to exalt ourselves with a subtle self-righteousness and that this is the real issue.  Religious pride.  It does not go away just because I decide to avoid church buildings or become an organic disciplemaker.  The tendency is still there—at least from my own experience.

After all, pride is pride is pride.  And the problem with religious pride is that it’s more difficult to see in ourselves.

Let me just offer a prayer from A.W. Tozer for myself and anyone else willing to step into it:

“Make me ambitious to please Thee even if as a result I must sink into obscurity and my name be forgotten as a dream.”

I think the calling to live as irreligious Jesus-followers is the willingness to be used by God from the place of utmost obscurity.  This, in fact, may be at the heart of the real Jesus-revolution we seek.

This can be a challenging question.  Many people do not want to take responsibility for owning the destiny God has made them for.  I see people often avoid the hard questions and find it so much easier to live in the routine, sleepiness of religion.

These ‘hard’ questions are actually the ones that lead to life and freedom as we release who God has made us to be:

1. What are your core values, those things that truly are most important to you in life (tombstone-type values)?
2. What passions and purposes has God shaped in you through your experiences and His Word in you?
3. How are you best equipped to serve this world with Kingdom purposes?
4. Where is God sending you to serve Him?  (This could refer to geography, but also to what place of influence, or what group of people, or what vocational situation, etc.)

Does answering these questions bring immediate movement in the direction of our destiny?  Not, but it’s a start in hearing His voice speaking uniquely to us.  Then the adventure begins as we daily listen to His leadings (and His truths within us) and walk that out.  Daily allowing Him to direct us into His full destiny.  Can life be any fuller than that?

Comment here!

Last year a dear man wrote me from Romania asking if he could translate The Simple/House Church Revolution book into his language.  I told him to go for it.  Surprisingly, several months later he completed it!  Since then, Ben Taylor, with Newforms Resources in the UK, connected with him and provided training in how to begin making disciples that make disciples and to start simple/organic churches.

This is a fascinating and inspiring video of the impact this training is having there that will stir us all up!

 

Learn more about Newforms Resources here.

(I felt like it was time to pull out an excerpt from my earlier book, The Simple/House Church Revolution.  This is Chapter 3 entitled, "Unleashing the Going Church.")

The church is meant to be the expression of Christ’s life and power on earth. This can only take place as:

• We move out of “comfy Christianity” into the daring adventure of following Jesus.
• We replace our “come-structures” with “go-structures”
• We recapture the “going” lifestyle

Comfy Christianity

Shane Claiborne writes: “Being a Christian is about choosing Jesus and deciding to do something incredibly daring with your life.”

In my former life as a pastor, I was a dispenser of comfortable Christianity. I took on the job of creating a “conducive environment” for worship. What this really meant was making a worship event cushy enough that people would want to come and then come back: comfortable seats, coffee, pleasing worship music, and a sermon that holds attention. Unfortunately, regularly attending a comfortable worship event has become the primary marker of what it means to be a Christian today.

In fact, we often replace the miraculous adventure of following Jesus with religious activity. Did I go to church this week? Check it off the list. Did I read my Bible? Check it. Did I pray? Check it. Done! I have completed my Christian activities and am, therefore, a “good Christian.” Religion itself becomes an easy replacement for a daring life lived in partnership with Jesus.

Ironically, Jesus drew a startling line in the sand in response to someone who wanted to follow him: "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head (Matthew 18:20).” Jesus was not a dispenser of comfortable Christianity. Quite the opposite. He taught that followers would live a lifestyle of stepping outside of comfort zones in order to join him in the adventure of extending the life of the kingdom.

Replacing “Come-Structures” with “Go-Structures”

Part of our comfy Christianity has been to focus most of our Christian activities within the four-walls where our friends and other Christians hang out. The result is that we reach out to others by inviting them to come join us where we are.

My fellow-blogger, Hamo, comments on this:

If Jesus were alive today and his mission was still to seek out and save the lost what might he do?

Would he hire a building, set up a sound system, develop a music team, drama team, and then do local letterbox drops advising people that they could come and be part of his church on Sunday?

Was it ever Jesus’ intention that non Christians should seek us and desire to attend our worship events? Or didn’t he say quite clearly that it was his calling, and now ours to seek out and save the lost; to go to their world and enculturate the gospel there. Little Bo Peep evangelism (leave ‘em alone and they’ll come home) is fast running out of steam…

Recapturing the “Going” Church

The church’s true nature is best seen by the life that Jesus modeled: he took the life of the kingdom everywhere that he went—out into the world that he was ministering to. In the process of going, he healed, loved, delivered, and shared good news.

God’s heart is missional at the core as he seeks to recover his children who are lost to him. Jesus came to “seek and to save the lost.” This is not a sidebar. God, because of his love, is a caring, reaching God.

The church is becoming unleashed as Christians are re-discovering the daring adventure of “going” and taking the presence (love, life, and power) of God everywhere that they are going. Jesus called us to a lifestyle that would take us out of our comfort zone and into the adventure of miraculous living as we extend ourselves to extend his kingdom.

As Jim Rutz wrote, “The bleachers are beginning to empty as 707 million action-oriented Christians start to pour out onto the playing field and discover the joy and challenge of every-member ministry.”

But What About the Gathering?

In conferences and conversations all over the world about simple/house church, it seems that people usually want to learn first about “how to gather.” This is natural since we have thought about “church” as being mostly about events and gatherings. The problem is that though we can replace larger events and gatherings with smaller ones, our motivation may still be to hang out with our Christian friends and, again, seek to reach others by inviting them to join us.

By focusing first on the gathering, we miss the point that Jesus’ focus was first on the going way of life. If gatherings develop that support a dynamic, outward, supernatural lifestyle, then the gatherings will be powerful and relevant. However, if gatherings become a replacement for the true adventure of Jesus-following (which can easily happen), then we will again regress into a comfortable Christianity with little life in it.

Stepping Out Makes Life Worth Living

Most of the truly defining moments of our lives take place because we are willing to step out and trust that God has more for us. Rarely do we find new life by holding back or retreating into our familiar, comfort zones. If this entire book accomplishes nothing else, I hope it will inspire someone to listen and follow a very adventurous God into some new horizons.

Pete Greig wrote:

Christ is not a passive Savior sitting in some cosmic comfy chair. Our God is dynamic; He is a creative force, the ultimate visionary, always on the move, and if we want to know Him and be with Him, we will have to follow Him wherever he is going next.

I propose that the greatest loss in the average Christian’s life is the absence of the adventure that following Jesus naturally entails.

Where has the adventure gone?

Have we become so enamored, as a society, with comfort, safety, and predictability that we have lost the ability to live life fully the way God intended?

• I eat at McDonald’s (sometimes) because I know exactly what I will get regardless of where in the world I am.  It’s predictable.
• I follow many set routines largely out of a sense of comfort.
• I expect the garbage man, the landscaper, the shop next door, the dry cleaner all to run on a consistent schedule so that my day runs as expected.

And, doesn’t this spill over into our spiritual life as well?  Our religious and church-gathering habits are often defined by what is most comfortable.  Even if we are forced out of one setting by pain or ideology, we quickly create a new setting that ‘meets our needs’ and that has some predictability to it.

I’m not suggesting that we throw out all schedules and routines as the answer, but I’m challenging us to re-think what it means to follow Jesus fully.

The fact that we define our spiritual life by our gatherings—who we gather with, where we gather, and when we gather—rather than by our ‘going’ indicates that we may be substituting comfort for the excitement of Jesus-following living.

We teach ‘grace’ which is the foundational element of Gospel freedom, but somehow that message leads many to a freedom to live in comfort zones rather than the freedom to live a radical adventure.  This creates a great loss in the lives of many!  In fact, I would say that if people don’t learn the art of adventuring with Jesus, they will find themselves falling back into some form of legalism or religious-comfort as a substitute.

John Eldredge said, “Eternal life is not primarily duration but quality of life, ‘life to the limit.’”  Are we leaning into that eternal life now or just making do with a limited existence, spiritually and otherwise, content with getting by?

Perhaps the enemy’s greatest victory is that God’s people are robbed of the faith and courage to live ‘life to the limit’ as radical followers.

Note: This is a continuation of chapter two of my Irrelgious Follower book which I am writing here as posts in order to incorporate your comments and thoughts.  The first parts of this chapter are found here and here.

Are Rules & Comfort Zones Robbing Us of the Adventure?

I confess it openly.  I often just want someone to spell out what the rules are around here.  For example, I adore my wife.  But sometimes I long to reduce our relationship to a set of fixed routines and actions: “Just tell me what the rules are so that I can keep the peace and keep you happy,” is part of what my lazy inner-self is saying.  But, it’s a relationship.  Those things that cause us to connect at a deeper level today, will not provide the exact same result tomorrow.

Arrggg!  The unpredictability, and thus the adventure, of relationships.

Yet it is this very movement and fluidity within real relationships that make them so dynamic, alive, real, heart-filling or heart-crying, fulfilling and/or frustrating all at the same time.  Let’s get real here.  Who would exchange a relationship with a person for a robot?

Yet how often we do that very thing with God.  Part of us wants Him to be a mechanical dispensing machine, a vendor in heaven, One who hands out predictable answers in response to our specific actions or prayers.  “If I do this, I expect God to do that.”

This is precisely the problem religious people had with Jesus.  He did not fit the predictable box they wanted to keep God in.  Since God established the Sabbath as ‘law’ there is no way that this same God would tell His disciples to harvest grain to eat or heal a sick man on a Sabbath day.  No way.  It could not happen!  But it did.

I believe that God Himself is initiating a new breakout from the mores and traditions of religion today.  It’s time.  The church has become passive, sleepy, and bland while sustaining itself by keeping up the predictable routines and rules that define their Christian righteousness.

More importantly, Jesus surely longs to express Himself in new, fresh, and powerful ways as His followers are willing to actively engage in relationship with Him regardless of the cost.

A friend of mine recently showed me a book on rock climbing where he was listed as one of the first adventurers who climbed a particular difficult route on a particular mountain. “Wow,” I said.  “I had no idea that you were such an avid and accomplished rock climber.” 

“Well actually,” he replied, “I haven’t climbed now for almost thirty-five years.  When I married my wife I felt that it was not right for me to continue to risk my life in that way.”

I appreciated this and I’m sure his wife did as well.  In fact, it was probably very prudent.

But in the spiritual realm, do we give up the very adventure Jesus called us to with excuses that are not prudent, but lazy and comfort-driven?

Note: This is a continution of chapter two of my Irreligious Followers book.  The first part of this chapter is found here.

Free From Guilt and Shame–a Starting Point

My favorite story from when I preached endless sermons to endless groups of listeners (poor things) was this one:

A little boy visiting his grandparents on their farm was given a slingshot to play with in the woods. He would aim at berries, and shoot them down. He tried aiming at the wood pigeons. However, they were too quick for him. He spent a whole morning in the woods, mastering his new-found skill.

On his way back to the cottage for lunch, he saw grandma's pet duck. On impulse, he shot it in its head and killed it. In panic, he hid the dead duck in a pile of wwood,but his sister was watching. Susan saw everything, but said nothing.

After lunch that day, grandma said, "Susan, let's wash the dishes." Susan replied, "Grandma, Jack told me he wanted to help in the kitchen. Didn't you Jack?" Then she whispered into Jack's ear, "Remember the duck?" So, Jack helped with the dishes.

Later that afternoon, Grandpa asked if the children wanted to go fishing."Oh, no. Susan has to stay back to help me clean the cottage, “Grandma intervened. "It's all right, grandma. Jack will stay to help you. I can accompany grandpa," Susan was fast to retort, and again she whispered into Jack's ear, "Remember the duck?" So Jack stayed behind to clean the cottage.

These 'remember the duck' went on for many days, until Jack could not take it any longer. Susan was always threatening, and Jack out of guilt, succumbed to her threats. He finally took courage and went to Grandma to confess to her that he had killed her pet duck.

Grandma patted Jack on the head, gave him a hug and said, "My dear boy, I know. You see, I was by the window the other day and saw the whole thing. Because I love you, I forgave you. I just wanted to see how long you would let Susan make a slave out of you.”

When we allow the voices of our past, of our mistakes, and of our own shame make a slave of us, we fail to fully embrace the power and wonder of the cross of Jesus Christ and walk in the freedom that has been purchased for us.

When we place ourselves under the dominion of institutions or religious human leadership, it is so easy to retreat back into those familiar places of guilt/shame and allow others to control us even if it’s unintended.

‘Freer still,’ is the watchword of today’s awakening, irreligious followers.  It must begin with our own heart’s freedom to walk in innocence before God and man.  There is no other foundation to follow Jesus other than one He has provided: ‘no condemnation.’

But, this freedom, starting from there, goes so much further:

• Free to depend on the living Holy Spirit rather than institutional doctrine or mediated leadership.
• Free to live the Jesus-following adventure ourselves every day, rather than waiting until we obtain the ‘qualifications’ that others prescribe.
• Free to put Jesus at the very center of our life; not our religion, and not our church affiliation.
• Free to be ourselves, even outlandish and controversial at times, not conforming to the expectations of other people, even religious ones.
• Free to not control others nor be controlled by others, but to take part in the dynamic movements of the Kingdom of God.
• Free to give up our posturing and false ego that are associated with our religious affiliations and live as a simple, childlike follower of our Magnificent God.
• Free to live out of the passion that God has put into us, rather than by the guilt or expectations of others.
• Free to find the destiny God has shaped us for, rather than the one that fits into the vision of another.

God is unleashing a freed-up Body—free to love and serve only Him with abandon and passion.  Let’s break this down and see if we can throw off all the religious ‘ligatures’ that try to keep us from the full freedom we are called to.

I am continuing the writing of "Irreligious Followers" online so that I can get feedback and comments which I will use, when possible, in the final book.  Chapter one can be found here. 

(Note: I am, in fact, traveling in Africa but scheduled these posts in advance).

This is the introduction to Chapter 2: Freer Still.

The English word ‘religion’ has its roots from the latin root ‘lig’ which denotes ‘binds’ and ‘binding’ as in ‘ligature.’  Adding the prefix ‘re’ indicates the meaning: ‘to bind again.’

Edmond Dantes is the main character in the novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, who is imprisoned unjustly and placed on a small island sentenced to life imprisonment.  After many years, he did manage to escape by ingeniously placing himself in the coffin of a deceased prisoner in place of the body.  By imitating death, his coffin his thrown into the sea thus allowing him to find freedom from his captivity.  Sadly, however, Edmond is not ready to be truly free and he binds himself in a new prison, one of his own making.  He takes on the new identity of the Count of Monte Cristo, He wraps his new life up in the hatred of his enemies and determination to seek revenge.  He leaves one prison only to bind himself up in another.

Unfortunately, this story is repeated again and again by those who find freedom in Christ from past lives of degradation, poor choices, and internal conflict.  Yet these same people so often do what I have done and re-bind ourselves with re-ligion.  We place ourselves in another captivity, a man-made one, one of our own making.

Fortunately, this is not the end of our story.  Those whom Jesus sets free become, not just free, but ‘free indeed.’  God will not rest until we find freedom from all binds, including the religious ones.

Erin McCrum has written an excellent article published over at CMA Resources.  Since Erin quotes me (among others), why wouldn't I like it?  No, seriously, it's an excellent piece:

The term Jesus-follower (or follower of Jesus or follower of Christ) is on the rise in the United States.  More and more Christians are calling themselves Jesus-followers instead of or in addition to Christians.

Read more.

(Note: this is the last part of chapter 1 of the Irreligious Followers book I am working on.  You can now download all of chapter one its entirety here–though it will still go through several more edits.)

In all cases, though taking many different shapes, the living church-as-a-movement will lead to an outbreak of followers begetting followers.  Discipleship movements—disciples reproducing disciples—will become the new norm.

This will be the heart of part two of this book.

For now, I just want to say that we have viewed ‘making disciples’ as far too difficult.  It’s not.

Followers of Jesus naturally do several things that lead to more followers of Jesus:

• We tell faith stories because we are living them daily.
• We do radical, compassionate things because we are following the most radical lover of all.
• We listen attentively to His voice and walk, however unsteadily, in His footsteps.
• We invite others to join the most amazing adventure on earth by becoming followers and doing the above three things with us.

In this way, followers of Jesus naturally birthing more followers of Jesus, will create an explosion of Kingdom life more than we have yet seen.  God is awakening His church in ways we have not yet conceived.  As this continues to take place, we will be amazed at how the power and wonder of His body is expressed and reproduced on earth.  I am reminded of Eugene Peterson’s translation of Ephesians 1:15-23:

I ask—ask the God of our Master, Jesus Christ, the God of glory—to make you intelligent and discerning in knowing him personally, your eyes focused and clear, so that you can see exactly what it is he is calling you to do, grasp the immensity of this glorious way of life he has for his followers, oh, the utter extravagance of his work in us who trust him—endless energy, boundless strength!

… At the center of all this, Christ rules the church…  The church is Christ's body, in which he speaks and acts, by which he fills everything with his presence.

But First…

Before moving on to the amazing topic of ‘follower movements’ we will look at becoming… freer still.