Gospel-Centered Community
As humans we desire community. We want to know people and be known. We Tweet to tell others about ourselves and follow others on Twitter to know them. Everywhere in our culture we are creating communities. From social media to coffee shops we have a desire as humans to be living in community with others. We want to have meaningful and lasting relationships with other humans. It is not different in the Christian community. We desire to be in community with one another. There is a lot of talk on what it means to have gospel-centered community. The concept is rooted in Scripture. As pastors, community group leaders, and church members, we need to understand gospel-centered community.
The Example of the Early Church
One of the best places to go to understand gospel-centered community is the book of Acts. Acts has been called the “the Church's missional hand-book.” Acts is the story of what a gospel-centered church looks like. It highlights the Holy Spirit’s empowerment in believers, proclamation of the gospel, conversion stories, persecution of the church, leaders being developed, churches being planted, and missionary journeys of the leaders of the church.
The book of Acts defines gospel-centered community as a community of believers who foster biblical teaching, prayer, worship, equality, generosity, shared experience, and mission. The fountain verses read:
And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. - Acts 2:42-47
1. Gospel-Centered Communities Devote Themselves to Biblical Teaching
The passage begins, “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching.”
A gospel-centered community is one where the inspired writings of the Scriptures are taught clearly, accurately, and continually. The driving force of community is the gospel that is revealed in the Scriptures. Gospel-centered communities continue to grow in their understanding of the Scriptures together.
2. Gospel-Centered Communities Pray Together
As the passage continues, we see the members of early church devoted themselves to “the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”
Gospel-centered communities pray with, and for, one another. They understand that God has the power to change situations and change peoples hearts. They understand that communion with God and one another is a special thing. Prayer doesn’t get the back burner in gospel-centered community. Rather, prayer becomes pivotal for gospel-centered communities.
3. Gospel-centered communities experience the power and awe of God
“And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles.”
Those who are living in gospel-centered community start to experience the power of God and his miracles among them. This might make some people feel skeptical. You might ask “does God still do miracles today?” Answer: YES.
Numerous times in my community group at Vintage 21, we have seen God do awesome things. From saving a family member, to providing a job, and seeing bold prayers answered by our God. Gospel-centered communities become awed by the power of God among his people. They see things happen that only the Holy Spirit can do and in response are in awe of God's power.
4. Gospel-centered communities have everything in common
“And all who believed were together and had all things in common.”
Gospel-centered communities start to have the same God given interests. When a community of people become saturated by God’s gospel and God’s Spirit, they start to have the same common values. This doesn’t mean that everybody in the community group likes a certain food or sport. It means that they have Jesus in common. Jesus is their everything.
5. Gospel-centered communities are generous and sacrificial to one another
“And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.”
This is a beautiful picture of a gospel-centered community. They understand that they have freely been given God’s grace, that they are stewards of his gifts. In response, they are generous to their brothers and sisters in need. They’re not selfish toward one another. Rather, ANY need became met.
6. Gospel-centered communities live life with one another
“And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their home.”
Communities that are saturated by the gospel actually live life together. They love one another, and meet with one another regularly. They eat meals, watch sports events, go on trips, attend church, get coffee, work out, and do other life activities with one another. They enjoy one anothers fellowship and friendship.
7. Gospel-centered communities are missional and reproduce
Finally, we find the early church “praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.”
Gospel-centered communities are not only inward but outward. They meet the needs of the city. They live on mission in their pocket of the city. They proclaim the gospel to there neighbors, co-workers, and friends. They live out the gospel among the city.
The amazing news is that God actually saves people! He starts to add more people to our communities. More people start to meet Jesus as we live on mission together as a community. What a gift that in Christ we receive all the community we desire. Now, ask God how your community can present the image of heavenly fellowship to your city.
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Garrett Ventry is a church planting intern at Vintage 21 Church in Raleigh. He serves under the regional director of the Acts 29 Network's southeast region. He is also a student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He and his wife Megan live in Raleigh. Twitter: @GarrettVentry
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For more free articles on living the gospel in community, read: The Harmony of Community by Greg Willson, Taking the Long View by Bill Streger, and We Need Five Disciplers Not One by JR Woodward.
Should We Prioritize Place or People Groups?
Many start down the road of desiring to be a missional community (MC), but one of the first things they ask is simply… ”Who should we reach?”
Many start down the road of desiring to be a missional community (MC), but one of the first things they ask is simply… ”Who should we reach?” There are two modes of thought in this: People Groups
- This could be certain religious groups (i.e. Muslims), ethnic groups or a local elementary school. The idea is that many can come together, regardless of where they live and be part of the mission in a certain context.
Place
- Where do you live? Where do you work? These are the places you are already at and don’t really get a “choice” of being there.
Now, I am not going to be dogmatic of which one you should choose, because I believe we have examples of each in the Scriptures. Paul definitely prioritized people groups and the local churches in the cities were prioritizing place. I think both are important. I do believe there is a better way to start in your journey of living out the mission of God through missional communities.
Prioritizing Place
I believe that this is the best way to start off missional communities in your current church or as you desire to plant the gospel in an area. Notice I said plant the gospel, as I believe that is what we are called to do, but be expectant that the church will grow out of that seed planted through the power of the Spirit.
Here are some quick bullet points why I believe prioritizing place is a good place to start.
1. Paradigm Shift
For most, missional communities are a complete paradigm shift. They are shifting from going to church to being the church in the everyday. Don’t get all up in arms thinking I am trying to downplay the gathering on a Sunday. The point is that most people only see church as a building that sits empty 6 days and 22 hours a week and then is magically transformed into the “sanctuary” where God dwells when we greet people, drink coffee and sing love ballads to him. (Another article could be written on how we structure the Sunday gathering so it equips the MCs instead of being seemingly a total separate entity all together)
Because of this shift, we need to lead people in the shift and show them the difference instead of merely talking about it. When we talk about MCs not being event driven we need to give that to our people. When you are prioritizing place, it gives the chance for people to live among their neighbors (or co-workers) with the intention of showing and speaking the good news. It is easier for them to grasp what we mean by natural rhythms of life if we allow them to actually live that out where they already are at.
In those that prioritize a people group, this will add something to their life if they are not already involved. As an example. If you decide that the local elementary school is going to be the context in which you focus, then there will be meetings to go to, events to plan and things not in your everyday that will be added to your life.
This will seem like a stretch for many just starting out and will be hard for them to see much of a paradigm shift, but will more than likely seem like a focus shift instead. Many will show up to the events and things scheduled, but will remain hard pressed to live life on life with the MC or those they are called to.
I am not saying this has to happen in a people group focus, but I am saying it is far easier to happen when people are just starting out in this new shift.
2. The Everyday
When you prioritize place, mission happens every day. Events don’t have to take place, schedules can be much less rigid, and you’ll notice life on life just happens.
When you start to see your neighbors as image bearers that need to hear and see Jesus and the effects of His gospel, you’ll get to know your neighbors very easily and purposefully. What you’ll notice is that the mission will happen by just being outside, or hanging out where the neighborhood hangs out. (This largely depends on the neighborhood you live in, whether urban or suburban)
Those just starting out will quickly realize why you can’t have church programs, because their lives will be so intertwined with their neighbors’ lives. Dinners, playdates, or merely hanging out - people quickly realize what the mission looks like when you can actually live it in rhythm instead of in programs. They’ll see that it happens “on accident” when they take out their garbage and the neighbor next door engages them in conversation. They’ll see that if they get angry at a neighbor, they’ll have to ask, “How should I respond as a follower of Jesus?” In a people group context, you can just decide to stop going to that group (many new to the MC understanding will think this anyways). In your neighborhood, you’re stuck unless you pack up and move. It requires some serious thought on holistic living that everyone will see.
So now, instead of only seeing people during events, you see them all the time as your life is full of interruptions, not merely planned meeting times.
Not only this, but if you have neighbors who are in your MC, it makes it far easier to live as family in the everyday. Most of the time, when prioritizing people groups, people are spread out and it makes it very difficult to live as family in the everyday. Most of the time, you only see your MC at meetings or at planned events. To ensure this doesn’t happen, you have to be very purposeful on being family or it will slip into event time as though the MC were distant cousins. Again, this isn’t impossible to do, but we must think through this for those new to the MC understanding.
3. Transferable
I highly recommend that the first thing an MC does when they prioritize place is to simply start having meals with not-yet believers. Make it a goal for everyone to have at least two meals a month (out of 84) with a not-yet believer. When you come back together for the MC meeting, take time to pray and share about the people that you are engaging and living life with and then ask the Spirit what’s next for each of those people you had dinner with. This will show the paradigm shift in full effect.
Not only that, but think through this. If you desire to multiply MCs, how hard is it for someone to multiply when they see the simplicity of merely eating with outsiders of the faith? We’ve noticed how easy it is to have meals with people that are in our neighborhood. They are going to eat, they just have to walk over. That’s a far cry if you decided to prioritize a people group, let’s say an elementary school, and now the group wants to multiply but has to figure out which school, how to lead tutoring groups, lead events, etc. I’m not saying these things shouldn’t happen, or don’t happen, but when starting new MCs, prioritizing place makes it very easy to transfer that to new leaders and new MCs. This is something I’ve been thinking through with my MCs lately as I don’t want to prioritize events in the place that I live. Back to basics.
Not only does it make it very easy to transfer, but also think of those that the Spirit regenerates. Remember that they are being discipled on what it looks like to be a follower of Jesus. So, if they see a group of people, sharing life on life in the everyday, what do you think they think a follower of Jesus does? Does this make it easier for them to not only understand what following Jesus entails, but then also lead others in this?
4. The Power of the Spirit
I almost end all my articles with this: we must believe that this is the Spirit’s work. We plant the good news and the Spirit regenerates souls and grows churches from the seeds we’ve planted. We must continually ask the Spirit who he desires for us to reach and how he’d desire for us to do that.
We must be asking the Spirit what is next for us. Listen to what he says. Then do it. Then we push repeat until we die.
The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us,
Acts 17:24-27
The Spirit has placed us where he wants us to be. I actually think the last part when he states, “yet he is actually not far from each one of us” can be alluding, partly, to his church. The Spirit will direct our steps so that people that are seeking God will find him through the church that is living right next to them. The Spirit usually starts us off small, then keeps pressing. It might start with dinners and it might lead to being on the City Council. I’m not sure. The Spirit might start us with dinners and then move us across the world to do the same thing. He might start us with dinners, and then move us on to the local school, religious group, etc.
The point is that it is the Spirit’s work, not ours. Let’s make it as easy as possible for people to understand this paradigm shift of being the church so the Spirit can take that seed and make it grow in our people.
I have seen amazing things come through missional communities by the power of the Spirit. The problem is that many of us have these big stories of what God is doing and many don’t realize we started off small and basic.
I started off by asking the Spirit, “What’s next?” and he told me to move my BBQ from my back yard to my front yard so that it was easier to have an “open door” for my neighbors to join us and be part of our lives. From that, he has my family leading a group of leaders, seeing things multiply and probably moving to another state to do it all over again. But the Spirit knew me. He knew how to take me along. He didn’t start by having me move to another state, but doing something very simple.
We are called to be a living sacrifice, but notice that we aren’t told how that is to happen for everyone.
I believe what this means is to yield our lives to the Spirit, ask him what’s next, listen, then do it. Whatever it is. He loves us. He knows us. He’ll guide us. He’ll empower us.
Know that I am not trying to say one is better than the other when it comes to prioritizing our context. Plus, the same “busyness” and event-driven life can happen when prioritizing place. What I do believe though is that it is easier to start off simply and holistically when prioritizing place, then, from there allow the Spirit to keep pressing into us to show off who he is.
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Cross-posted from GCM Collective.
What is Missional Culture & Why Does it Matter?
The Church is called to be a provisional demonstration of God’s will for all people. - Presbyterian Book of Order
Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. - Romans 12:2
I was driving in Columbus, ohio, when I came upon a hitchhiker who alternated between holding his thumb out and clasping his hands together as if he were praying. I picked him up.
His name was Mike, and I soon discovered he was a hardcore Aryan (white supremacist), pointing to a passage in Scripture about being “a chosen people” as the reason for his convictions. I asked if he would be willing to reread the passage in context. He agreed. As I reached in the back seat to grab my Bible, he pulled a gun and pointed it at my head. I assured him I was just getting my Bible, so he put his gun away, and my heart started to beat again.
I realized Mike had no place to stay that night, so I invited him to stay with me.
“You mean you would trust me to stay with you after pulling a gun on you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, “because God has given me a love for you that I can’t explain, and he loves you.” As I was saying this, I was saying to myself, Yeah, what am I thinking?
Tears welled in Mike’s eyes.
We got back to the hotel where my roommate Tom and I were staying. I woke up my roommate to ask him if Mike could stay with us, mentioning that he had a gun. He wasn’t favorably disposed to the idea, so I ended up getting Mike another room. Mike didn’t want me to, but I insisted. It gave me the chance to share more of the gospel with him.
We talked until 4 a.m., and I told him about the Jesus the apostles wrote about, this Jesus who had become my hero, my Savior and my example. I told him how Jesus was the liberator of those oppressed, the lover of those rejected and the deliverer of those seduced by consumerism, and Mike responded with tears of surrender.
Later that week he took me to a Chinese restaurant and continued to inquire about Jesus. I told him how Jesus lived his life for the sake of others, how he died so we could live, and how he rose again to show what God was going to do for the world.
Something in Mike changed that evening; he understood in a profound way who Jesus was and what he had done for him and the world. When I left Columbus, Mike had a heart to share with his Aryan friends what he had learned, hoping they would let go of their racism and be part of a community that included people from every race, tongue, tribe and nation.
As I reflect on my encounter with Mike, it reminds me of two realities: we live in a messed-up world filled with violence, prejudice, racism, poverty, greed, pride, envy, lust and gluttony; and Jesus has invited messed-up people like us to partner with God in the redemption of the world.
The Federal Aviation Administration once developed a cannon-like device to test the strength of windshields of airplanes. They actually shot a dead chicken (I’m serious) into the windshield at the approximate speed of a flying plane to simulate a bird hitting a plane while in flight. Well, a British locomotive company heard about this test. So they asked the FAA if they could borrow the device. They had just developed a high-speed train and they wanted to likewise test their windshield.
They loaded the bird up and shot it at the locomotive at its approximate running speed. The bird went through the windshield, knocked over the engineer’s chair and put a dent in the cab of the locomotive. They couldn’t understand what had happened. So they asked if the FAA would please review all the things that the locomotive company had done. The FAA’s final report said, “You might want to try the test with thawed chicken.”
Why did everyone in the locomotive company conclude that a frozen chicken was used in this experiment? There wasn’t even a debate about whether this should be a frozen chicken or a thawed chicken—regular or crispy? No one asked this most basic question.
We often jump to conclusions about how to make the church work better or how to develop a missional strategy—without asking some of the most basic questions. Questions like What does it mean to be the church today? What does it mean to create a missional culture and why does it matter?
Creating a missional culture is more than just adding some outward programs to the church structure. Creating a missional culture goes to the heart and identity of God, to who we are and who we are becoming.
Missio Dei
One of the most influential theologians of the last century, Karl Barth, was instrumental in the reintroduction of the classic doctrine of Missio Dei. We find missio Dei in Scripture: God the Father sends the Son and the Spirit into the world, and the Father, Son and Spirit send the church into the world for the sake of the world. In other words, mission does not originate with the church but is derived from the very nature of God. As Jürgen Moltmann has said, “It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfill in the world; it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the church.”
When we read the Scriptures, we learn that it is God’s mission to set things right in a broken and messed-up world. God’s mission is to redeem the world and restore it to its intended purpose. The church exists to fulfill God’s mission, and when we participate in God’s mission we become living signs of God’s intended future for the world, bringing glory to God. In other words, mission exists because God is a missionary God. And “a church which is not on mission is either not yet or no longer the church, or only a dead church—itself in need of renewal.”
If we seek to create a missional culture, it is imperative that we understand that God created the church as a sign, foretaste and instrument by which more of his kingdom would be realized here on earth.
Church as Sign, Foretaste, and Instrument
Sign. The church is to be a sign of God’s coming kingdom, pointing people to a reality that is right around the corner. Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.” We are called to be lights that point others toward God, his Son and his future. So what kind of sign are we? What kind of sign do we want to become?
Foretaste. The church is called to be a foretaste of God’s kingdom, a place where people can get a taste of the future in the present. When the church is a foretaste, it demonstrates what life is like when men and women live under the rule and reign of God, when the people of God love one another, exhort one another, encourage one another, forgive one another and live in harmony with one another. In this way the church becomes a concrete, tangible, though not perfect, foretaste of the kingdom that is to come.
Instrument. Creating a missional culture requires not only understanding that the church is called to be a sign and foretaste of God’s kingdom, but also an instrument. When writing to the church in Ephesus the apostle Paul talks about how the church is God’s chosen instrument to show the manifold wisdom and grace of God to both the visible and invisible world. He says, “His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Eph 3:10-11). We see throughout the letter to the Ephesians that the church is to be like a preview or movie trailer of what is to come. The church is an instrument through which God’s will for justice, peace and freedom is done in the world.
Creating a missional culture helps the church live out her calling to be a sign of the kingdom, pointing people to the reality beyond what we can see, a foretaste of the kingdom where we grow to love one another as Christ loves us, and an instrument in the hands of God to bring more of heaven to earth in concrete ways. For the church is to be a credible sign, foretaste and instrument, it needs to be a community rich with the fruit of the spirit.
The Problem
Yet in our most honest moments we recognize that we aren’t the kind of people that God wants us to be. We aren’t even the kind of people that we hope to be. To be honest, sometimes when I look at the worldwide and local church, including churches I have pastored, I think, God, this is just one big mess! And apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks this.
In March 2009 we received the results from the widest religious survey conducted in the United States, the ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) study. There is much to gain from this report, which is based on over 54,000 interviews conducted from February to November 2008. This survey was a continuation of the ARIS surveys in 1990 and 2001, which are part of the landmark series by the Program of Public Affairs at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
The report indicates major shifts in the American landscape in the past eighteen years, including the fact that the percentage of people who call themselves some type of Christian has dropped more than 11 percent in a generation. One of the most widely cited results from this survey is the significant rise in the number of those who claim no religious identification or faith. This group has grown from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008. Ariela Keysar, the associate director of the study, says that the none’s (nonreligious) are the only group to have grown in every state of the union.
So why are more and more people in the United States no longer identifying themselves as Christians? What is turning people off to the church, or at least some forms of the church? And why is the digital generation the least involved?
While there is no simple answer to these questions, I want to suggest that at the heart of the matter is the lack of mature missional disciples, not just as individuals but as communities of God’s people. We need to be more like Jesus.
Neil Cole makes a good point when he says,
Ultimately, each church will be evaluated by only one thing—its disciples. Your church is only as good as her disciples. It does not matter how good your praise, preaching, programs or property are; if your disciples are passive, needy, consumeristic, and not [moving in the direction of radical obedience,] your church is not good.
Stanley Hauerwas says the same thing in another way, “[The most important social task of Christians] is nothing less than to be a community capable of forming people with virtues sufficient to witness to God’s truth in the world. . . . [T]he task of the Church . . . is to become a polity that has the character necessary to survive as a truthful society.”
So why do we lack mature disciples and mature communities of faith? One reason is that we fail to understand the hidden power of culture in life transformation.
Individualism saturates American culture to the point that we no longer notice it. Individualism tells us we can become more like Jesus by ourselves, through a self-help program or more effort. But the gospel tells us transformation happens as we embrace the work of the Spirit in our lives together. Becoming more like Jesus is not a matter of trying but yielding, setting the sails of our lives to catch the wind of the Spirit. It happens when we develop a communal rhythm of life—a collection of thick, bodily practices (liturgies) that engage our senses, grab our hearts, form our identities and reshape our desires toward God and his kingdom. As we collectively engage in grace-filled spiritual practices, we cultivate particular environments that help to create a missional culture, which in turn reshapes us. As coworkers with God, we create culture and culture reshapes us. Understanding the transformative power of culture is vital if we want to have mature communities of faith.
Phillip Kenneson, in his book Life on the Vine, gives a vivid picture of what it means to be a mature community of faith. Using the fruit of the Spirit listed in Galatians, he offers a picture of what Christ is seeking to do in and through us. A mature community cultivates a lifestyle of love in the midst of market-style exchanges: a lifestyle of joy in the midst of manufactured desire, peace in the midst of fragmentation, patience in the midst of productivity, kindness in the midst of self-sufficiency, goodness in the midst of self-help, faithfulness in the midst of impermanence, gentleness in the midst of aggression, and self-control in the midst of addiction.
The Power of Culture
In Theories of Culture, Kathryn Tanner makes this remarkable statement, Although less than one hundred years old, the modern anthropological meaning of “culture” now enjoys a remarkable influence within humanistic disciplines of the academy and within commonsense discussions of daily life. “In explanatory importance and in generality of application it is comparable to such categories as gravity in physics, disease in medicine, evolution in biology.”
In other words, the idea of “culture” shapes everything we do as humans, from our thoughts while alone to how we develop family systems, to our interactions at the workplace, to the ways a specific country does its politics.
Kenneson understands the power of culture in the development of character. Culture has particular narratives, institutions, rituals and ethics that shape us as people. The dominant culture seeks to squeeze us (the church) into its mold of market-style exchanges, manufactured desire, self-sufficiency and addiction. The apostle Paul puts it this way:
Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. - Romans 12:2 (The Message)
Paul tells us that the dominant culture shapes who we become. According to cultural theory, culture is largely made up of artifacts, language, rituals, ethics, institutions and narratives. In other words, the language we live in, the artifacts that we use, the rituals we engage in, our approach to ethics, the institutions we are a part of and the narratives that we listen to have the power to shape our lives profoundly.
As we look at the culture around us, here are some questions to help us understand how we are being shaped:
• What is the guiding narrative of our host culture?
• Which institutions most shape our lives?
• What ethics are we developing in light of the stories and narratives that bombard us from every side?
• What rituals, practices and liturgies are we engaging in that shape our desires, our idea of the “good life” and the kind of people we are becoming?
If we take a quick look at American culture, we can see that an individualistic and consumer narrative shapes much of our culture and thereby socialized us. We are all socialized beings.
Socialization—the process of growing up within a culture—involves internalizing our culture’s way of seeing things. . . . The result is that we do not simply “see” life, but we see it in enculturated ways. . . . We are likely to feel good or not good about ourselves on the basis of how well we live up to the messages and standards of culture internalized within us.
Our narrative of growth and success includes the ability to purchase comfort, security and stability. We are socialized from a young age to believe that fulfillment comes through products. Research indicates that children can identify a brand as young as eighteen months, and youth influence about $600 billion of adult spending.
Some of our strongest institutions are chain stores. We create rituals around product consumption and hold closely to our brand-name artifacts.
If we hope to experience transformation, we need to develop a culture in the congregation that encourages people to live in the world for the sake of the world, without being of the world. Gerhard Lohfink, in Jesus and Community, makes a strong case that it has always been God’s intention to work through a visible, tangible concrete community that lives as a contrast society in the world for the sake of the world.
Tim Keller concurs when he says, “Christians are truly residents of the city, yet not seeking power over or the approval of the dominant culture. Rather, they show the world an alternative way of living and of being a human community.”
When we grasp the power of culture, it gives both perspective and fresh hope for transformation.
Leadership and Culture
Leaders of God’s people uniquely contribute to the cultivation of a culture distinct and different from the dominant culture. For it is the role of Spirit-filled leaders to create a missional culture within the congregation. If we hope to create a missional culture, we must understand the power of culture in shaping the life of the congregation, and learn the basic elements of culture.
In addition, we must examine our very approach to leadership. For an individualistic approach to leadership often leads to an individualistic approach to discipleship, while a shared approach to leadership often leads to a communal approach to discipleship with an appreciation of the life-shaping power of culture. To change the ethos of the church we also need to change our approach to leadership.
(Editor's Note: This article is an excerpt from JR Woodward's new book Creating a Missional Culture: Equipping the Church for the Sake of the World)
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JR Woodward is a church planter, activist, missiologist and author of Creating a Missional Culture: Equipping the Church for the Sake of the World (IVP 2012). He cofounded the Ecclesia Network where he serves as the Director of Leadership and Congregational Formation. He currently resides in Hollywood, California. Starting in 2013, he will be serving with Rhythm Church Miami, Florida as well as pursuing a PhD at the University of Manchester (UK). You can find him blogging here.
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For more resources on authentically living out the mission of the gospel, check out Unbelievable Gospel by Jonathan Dodson.
For more free articles on missional living, read The Neighborhood Mission Start Up by Seth McBee, Street Grace by Jake Chambers, and Living the Mission by Winfield Bevins.
Encouraging Leadership
When it comes to leadership, I can be intimidating. At least, that's what people tell me. My engine runs at high RPMs, and I tend to be on the type A side of the personality spectrum. I approach most issues in a black-and-white fashion and pursue excellence. Most leaders exhibit similar characteristics. That's why we're drawn to leadership. People want to follow because you are confident, strong, and know what you want and how to get it. But these characteristics can ruin your people (and you) if you're not careful.
Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body. - Prov. 16:24
Leaders can give you a list of ways you can improve. They know the areas that need adjustment, correction, or improvement. This is a necessary ability in leading anything well. They will not long tolerate the status quo, or the organization becomes stagnant, and we all know what happens to water when it remains stagnant. It starts to stink.
However, if this is true, how can we lead well without constantly harping on our people? Herein lies the power of encouragement.
The concept of withdrawals and deposits has been helpful for me when it comes to excellence in leadership. You will inevitably have tough conversations with those under your direction - you know, those conversations that start, "Hey Mike, can we chat about something?" You both know that you are about to take a relational withdrawal from him in the form of a suggestion for how Mike needs to grow, change, repent, or whatever. But, following the bank analogy, is there money in the bank from which to draw? Or is your relational/leadership check going to bounce?
Money is deposited into the leadership bank via encouragement. If there is no consistent deposit into the bank of Mike's life, he is going to burn out quickly, grow to hate you, or simply leave the relationship without warning.
Encouraging Leadership
There are three areas in my life that need my continual focus on encouragement: my wife, my kids, and the people under my care at The Vine. Recently, my wife and I have been talking about our oldest child and his need for constant correction. He is having a bit of a bad attitude about school, and it seems to be a persistent thorn in my wife's side as she homeschools. She feels like she has to be "on him" all the time.
We chatted about this concept of deposits and withdrawals and renewed our focus on making deposits of encouragement in our children. If all they hear is correction with no words of encouragement we run the danger of provoking them to anger (Eph. 6:4).
Think of people who have led you in the past. Who are those leaders you loved following? I would be willing to bet that for most of you, the leaders you most loved were those who excelled at encouraging you even as they challenged you to grow.
Now think of those people who have lead you in the past who you didn't exactly enjoy following. I would be willing to bet that those leaders were probably not strong in the encouragement department.
Growing as an Encourager
Obviously, this is a simple concept but quite difficult to master. To grow as an encourager, consider three actions points to implement in your rhythms of life and leadership:
- When you walk into a room with your spouse, your kids, or those under your care at church - really, any leadership setting - try and make a discipline out of speaking words of encouragement in short bursts of improvised blessing. Just make a habit out of it. Make the first thing that comes out of your mouth a simple word of encouragement.
- Many years ago at a conference, I remember Bill Hybels saying that every day when he came into the office he would start the day by writing out five hand-written notes of encouragement to five of the hundreds of people who were under his pastoral authority. This stuck with me for a reason. It's powerful.
- Have parties with your people. And when you do, make a habit of publicly blessing those under your care with words of life in the presence of all those gathered. This will set an amazing tone for the whole group and the person being recognized will be immensely blessed.
What other ways could you think of?
As a leader, withdrawals are going to be necessary. Are you making sure there is money in the bank? In what ways could you be a much more effective leader by pursing continual encouragement of the people under your care?
Therefore encourage one another and build one another up. - 1 Thess. 5:11
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Zach Nielsen is one of the pastors at The Vine Church in Madison, Wisconsin, where he serves in the areas of preaching, leadership development and music. He is a graduate of the University of Northern Iowa and Covenant Theological Seminary and blogs at Take Your Vitamin Z. Twitter: @znielsen
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For more resources on leadership, check out Tony Merida's eBook Proclaiming Jesus.
For more free articles on leadership, read: Spiritual Strength Training by David Murray, The Gospel Grid by Jeff Medders, and 5 Ways to Keep Church Discipline from Seeming Weird by Jared Wilson.
The Neighborhood Mission Start Up
People in our age often want to be told what to do so they can follow the directions. The dangerous thing is that if we just tell people what to do, then we not only become their functional savior for mission, we also avoid training them as leaders. This enables followers to stay followers and keeps leaders as their idols. We become the Holy Spirit for them, and when something in their life isn’t working, they don’t go the King. They come to another finite servant for direction. They become our disciple, not a disciple of Jesus. I’ll actually be speaking more on this understanding of leadership development at the GCM National Conference in September. So, what do I tell these people that inquire about how to live Christ's mission in their neighborhood (without making them feel stupid for asking a question that was prodded by the Spirit)?
Jesus tells us to love your neighbor as you love yourself.
He also tells us in Acts 1:8 that he’ll send us power by way of the Spirit to empower us for mission… to be his witnesses. (Notice witness is a noun, not a verb. You are the witness. It’s not something you do, but someone you are by His power.)
If we take these two principles to the neighborhood, what might that look like?
What would you attend if you were invited by a neighbor?
This seems very simple, but most don’t do this easy task. There is a great list given over at Verge by Josh Reeves - good dude by the way - called 25 Simple Ways to Missional to Your Neighborhood. Over at the GCM Collective there is a great document by Jeff Vanderstelt called Contextualization Assessment Starter. These are two great tools to start your mind thinking, but I have a very simple way to start. Simply ask yourself and your family, what would you attend if a neighbor invited you?
Would you attend a church service?
Would you attend a picket line?
Would you attend a “school” during the summer at another place in the city?
Some event where someone is trying to sell you trinkets?
Maybe some of you are thinking…"Yes I would!"
If so, try it out. See if it works. If not, think through other things that you might attend.
A front yard BBQ? A Saturday morning breakfast? An ice cream party? A UFC fight party?
What you will find through this process is the demographics of your neighborhood. When I started, one of the things I tried was inviting over people for a UFC fight. Literally no one showed up. Most of the folks I talked to afterwards said that they just weren’t interested in the UFC. That was the pits for me, because I dig me some ultimate fighting, but that gave me a better understanding of the neighborhood. Also, I got a chance to ask the next question to my neighbor:
What do you enjoy doing?
Now I get ideas, plus some ways to engage my neighbor for their story.
Neighbor: I really enjoy things I can do with my whole family.
Me: Oh, you have kids? How old are they? What are their names, etc.? What do you guys enjoy as a family?
Just with that small question, you're already beginning your contextualized understanding of your neighborhood.
You’ll also notice you'll start to engage your neighbors, whether they are in your “demographic” or not. This doesn’t simply “work” if you are in a neighborhood surrounded by people like you. It will also work in those neighborhoods where you are not like your neighbors. You can try some things you like. They might fail. But that just gives you a chance to engage neighbors to see what they enjoy and what would draw them out to engage the community as a whole.
How would you like to be invited to engage community?
The next question people ask me is this:
I have an idea to engage neighbors. How should I invite them?
I just turn the question back on them:
How would you like to be invited to something from someone you don’t know? What kind of invitation would you ignore? What kind of invitation would cause you to engage?
I don’t know about you, but I would ignore most things sent to me in the mail or something just left on my doorstep. For me, I would respond positively from a face-to-face interaction, with something left behind with the information.
This is exactly what I decided to do three years ago in our neighborhood. I took flyers around to our neighbors, knocked on their doors and introduced myself to them and invited them to our 4th of July party. This created many opportunities for conversation and many have come to our community events because of a simple introduction.
For others, email might work, Facebook (I have a community Facebook group now that we’ve built relationships), evite, etc. Think through different ways to communicate to people, to engage them in the ways that your neighborhood is comfortable with.
Sent by His Power
This is the greatest part. You have the power of the eternal God, the embodiment of wisdom, inside you for his glory.
After thinking through the first two questions of how we can love our neighbors like we love ourselves, we must not forget the first part. The commandment to love your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.
We need to go to our God to simply ask him what he’d like us to do next with his power. When we go through what things we are going to do to engage our neighbors, or any other group, we must first ask our Dad. "Dad, what’s next with this neighborhood to show off your glory?"
Then listen…
Then do what he tells you.
It might be huge, or it might be small. The important thing is to be obedient to him after he tells you what he desires. This doesn’t mean it will “work” in your eyes (such as the UFC thing above), but it means you're allowing your eternal Dad to determine what you NEED to do to make you more like Jesus and for others around you to see his glory and fame.
I fully believe if we think through these three easy steps, we’ll engage our neighborhoods and other groups around us much more often with more power and positive response from those around us.
Yes, you’ll end up sacrificing your time, your money and your possessions, but in the end isn’t this what we are called to do as followers of Jesus?
Love others as you love yourself by the power of the Spirit, and watch the work God will do.
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Seth McBee is the adopted son of God, husband of one wife, and father of three. He’s a graduate of Seattle Pacific University with a finance degree. By trade Seth is an Investment Portfolio Manager, serving as president of McBee Advisors, Inc as well as a missional community leader, preaching elder with Soma Communities in Renton, Washington, and executive team member of the GCM Collective. In his down time, he likes to do CrossFit, cook BBQ, and host pancake ebelskiver breakfasts at his home. Twitter @sdmcbee
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For more information on taking the gospel to the streets, check out Jonathan Dodson's Unbelievable Gospel.
For more free articles on missional living read: Invite & Invest to Make Disciples by Greg Gibson, Theology is for Everyone by David Fairchild, and The Gospel & Our Neighbors by Alvin Reid.
The Harmony of Community
And if you listen closely over the roar of the single chord, you can hear the vibration of other piano strings. As sound waves from the original strings move out into space, other strings respond in kind. The original vibrating strings encourage the previously silent strings. Notes that weren't originally played are now joining in with the beginnings of their own sounds.
There exists no chord that sounds alone‚ every chord sounds together. The original strings, a chord, needed to respond together in order for other strings to join in. In fact, the strings responding together had no other option. Individual notes come together to create a unique voice out of their union.
There is also no chord that only sounds to itself. A chord by its very nature resounds outward and can't help but reverberate sound to the outside. It has to respond to itself, and must move into the silence of the outside world.
Harmony
This musical analogy is instructive for our view of the church. Are we called to equip the saints or preach to the lost? Are we supposed to love Christians or love those who are not yet Christians? Should we primarily be focused on community or on mission? The harmonic vibration of a single chord can instruct for our ear for the community mission of discipleship. That's where these larger theological ideas hit the noise and silence of real life.
At the end of Jesus' high priestly prayer in John 17, the seemingly polar aims of mission and community are brought together. It's really an amazing chapter in the Bible. Christ is praying to the Father on our behalf, and we can listen in. Let's look closely at John 17:20-24. It is here Jesus teaches that we are individually sought out by him, called to his community, and this community is defined as harmonizing in his mission.
Individual Notes
I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. - John 17:20-24
Christ is praying for us as individuals. He is praying on behalf of the disciples ("these only") and for believers today ("those who will believe in me through their word"). He says in v. 22 that the glory which comes from the Father is given to us.
In v. 24, Christ prays that we may be with him where he is. Christ calls us out from worshiping things that will never satisfy, gathering us into the Trinity where we find ourselves made whole.
In these verses, Christ himself is our resounding note. He is actually being recorded here petitioning the Father for us individually. The mission of God isn't merely something designed for the unreached world. More than that, it is what comes to us: we are made the benefactors of his grand mission. Those who are reconciled to the Father through Jesus are the resounding piano strings, now having the freedom to sound in response to our Composer's hands.
Now if this were the end of the story, we would have much to celebrate. But Jesus doesn't stop there. For what purpose is he pursuing us? He pursues us to be part of His new community.
The Chord of the Gospel
The result of Christ's pursuit is that we may all be one, just as God the Father was in Christ, and Christ in the Father, we can find life in the community of our Redeemer. Being pursued individually by Christ, Christians are called to be unified with each other, modeling the closeness found in the Trinity. This seems impossible, but isn't it what our souls long for?
Our communities of faith here on earth, though not perfect, are designed to resound with the perfect chord of the Trinity. Because we're made in the image of the relational God, we ourselves are relational beings. Verse 22 reiterates this when it speaks of the glory that God the Father has given Christ and that Christ has in turn given to us.
There is an intimacy that believers ought to have with each other, but even more than that, we are called to this type of union with God Himself. Those reconciled to God through Christ are found in the Trinity, creating a harmonious chord unified with themselves and with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Is this the end goal of our community? Even this by itself seems too good to be true, but Jesus isn't quite finished. Though perfect union with each other and with the Trinity sounds like completion, Christ keeps on. Being called into His community means we are part of God's mission in the world.
The Chorus
The purpose of our unity in v. 21 is "that the world may believe that you [the Father] have sent me [Christ]." And v. 23 teaches that one of the ends of this community is that the outside world will understand that the Father sent the Son and that the Father loves those who are found in Christ just as he loves Christ.
Being part of God's community means we're part of his mission. God's community is one that is defined as participating in his mission. There is no other. And this isn't some kind of shallow showing, either. Our communities of unity are supposed to illustrate deep Trinitarian truths: the Father sent the Son, and the Father loves us as much as He loves the Son. How can this happen if we don't find ourselves in his community, if we are not also in this mission? Christ leads us away from our version of mission, how the world should work, and places us on the path of submission to the God who makes all things new.
In Christ's high priestly prayer, he calls us out from our own idols, out from the façades of community that we've constructed, out from our own small diverging missions, and into the Trinitarian chorus where our satisfaction, relational needs, and purpose are found. This is the mission of God.
Dis-chord
You might often hear, or have said yourself, that mission inhibits community. Or that community inhibits mission. Each camp has their reasons for digging in. But John 17 says that neither of these camps do either well. Our community is not just for us. Our community is not just for others.
Mission without community can create shallow relationships through individualism (not being saved to God's community), or a trite moralism (you can do it yourself, you just need to be strong), and ultimately a weak faith because we need community to equip and mature us.
Community without mission creates a clique, like stumbling into a dinner with an inhospitable family. Focusing only on mission can create a shallow relationships through institutionalism ("we" have it right, "they" don't). Strict, unbiblical lines are often drawn between who has it and who doesn't. Community without mission can lead down the slippery slope to a trite moralism (God came to us because we did it...whatever "it" might be). And it ultimately creates a weak faith. We need mission to grow us.
Encouraging shallow individualism creates dehumanized factories and encouraging shallow institutionalism creates Christian ghettos. Neither offer the hope found in the gospel.
Sustain
The majority of us are already involved in things that can incorporate believers and those yet to believe into our lives. What do you already like to do? What gifts or passions of yours are you already doing?
Do you enjoy playing basketball? Take a few Christian friends and join up in a local recreational team, or go out together for pick up games. Let people on your team and the opposing team see what Christian community can look like. You'll find out soon enough that you will be challenged to grow as much, if not more, than other people will.
Who doesn't enjoy eating? Invite Christian friends and unbelieving neighbors and give them a chance to see what hospitality and fellowship looks like. When our messy lives intertwine with those of our neighbors, we begin to understand what it means to rely on the Spirit.
Personally, I enjoy creating and talking about making stuff with other artists. I could limit myself to only working with or talking to other artists who are Christians. I could also limit myself to only talking to unbelievers about all things art related. Believe me, either would make things easier at times! But God calls me to more than that. He calls me to involved myself in him, in his community, and in his mission. It is through these ordinary ways of living that God often makes himself known.
Celestial Music
Is mission incompatible with community or vice versa? Just as a chord sounds within and without, mission and community cannot be separated. And through Jesus' teaching we find that they are not opposed to each other, but are integrally connected. We have our community because God has his mission. And now we get to be a part of that same mission that sought and seeks us out. Being "on mission" means being in community, and God's community is one that is participating in his mission to make all things new.
Christ sought us out from our own nasty melodies and gave us a new song. He brought us into his community, the harmony found in his chord, and he conducts us in his mission, a symphony of life being played out over the world, celestial music.
God did this so that he may be glorified in all things. God's mission is for his glory to resound over the entire world, with all its spaces and gaps where we don't believe it can reverberate, with all its dark corridors of emptiness and vacant pits of discord. In all places to all people, God's song of salvation is ringing to those who have ears to hear, to us and to the world.
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Greg Willson is the Church Planting Resident at Riverside Community Church. He likes creating music, and writes about art and the church at gregwillson.com. Follow him on Twitter: @gregoriousdubs.
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For a more in-depth discussion of authentically living out mission and community, check out Jonathan Dodson's Unbelievable Gospel.
For free articles on blending gospel-centered mission and community in the your everyday life, read: Winfield Bevin's Living the Mission, Timothy Keller's The Call to Discipleship, and Seth McBee's A Story of Gospel Community.
Gospel Hospitality
Hospitality is a forgotten art. It also has a lost biblical history. We can recover the art of hospitality by understanding what it is and discerning how the gospel changes our notions of hospitality. In general, hospitality is about treating strangers as equals by creating space for them to be protected, provided for, and taken care of, followed by assisting and guiding them to their next destination. Let's see how this holds up to scripture. The Origin of Hospitality
There is a lot of history to consider in understanding the act or art of hospitality, but it all goes back to the beginning. In Genesis 1-2, we discern God’s first hospitable act. Consider what God did when he created the world and the garden of Eden for humanity to live in it. He gave Adam and Eve all they needed to enjoy life restfully while doing the work He created them for. He gave them space to exist, to enjoy creation, and to enjoy each other and fellowship with Him. They were given both the space and the capability to create, to work, and to exercise authority, with all the resources necessary they needed.
Israel: God's Hospitable People
Consider God’s commands to His people regarding hospitality to strangers (Lev 19:9-10, 33-34; Deut 10:18-19). Through Abraham and Sarah, God created a new nation - a People blessed to be a blessing to all nations. He gave them all the resources and capabilities to exercise hospitality to strangers, orphans, and widows. Similar to the Garden experience, Israel offered His people a place of refuge where others could rest and receive all they needed, enabling them to do what God had created them to do. However, now this rest came in the midst of a broken, sinful world.
On the flip side, think of the number of occasions where Israel found itself as the strangers among a host people. In some cases they found a hospitable reception (Egypt with Joseph in charge; the spies and Rahab). In other cases they found themselves treated like enemies or slaves (Slavery in Egypt; Babylonian Captivity). God had called them to be hospitable, yet they often failed to do so. After, receiving hospitality this must have become clearer to them.
God allows us to experience grace as recipients so that we might be distributors of grace to others.
God allows us to experience grace as recipients so that we might be distributors of grace to others. Hospitality toward Israel was a clear example of God’s gracious gift, once again, and should have motivated generous hospitality. Unfortunately, Israel failed to enter God's rest because of their unbelief and disobedience (Heb 4). So, they not only failed to rest in the work of God, but also failed to offer that rest to other nations. In all their hospitable failures, they needed one who would fully rest in God in order to become an enduring place of refuge for others.
Rethinking Hospitality with Jesus
Jesus entered into a culture shaped by a variety of world views (The Imperial Cult, Jewish Monotheism, and Hellenistic Philosophy to name a few). In this culture, the concept of hospitality was rooted in several different traditions. First, the idea of taking in a hostile stranger or enemy and treating him as you would yourself. Second, the Greek practice of hospitality in which a stranger passing outside a Greek house would be invited inside the house by the family. The host washed the stranger's feet and offered him/her food and wine. Only after the stranger was feeling comfortable, could the host ask his or her name. This practice stemmed from the thought that the gods mingled among men, and if you played a poor host to a deity, you would incur the wrath of a god.
A third shaping force in the concept of hospitality in Jesus’ day was the Hebrew understanding (as briefly considered in the passages above and demonstrated also in the story of Lot and the angels– Genesis 19). Jesus comes into this cultural context and calls the weary to himself, feeds the hungry, mends the broken, eats with sinners and tax collectors, washes his disciples' feet...and ultimately gives his life to cleanse us from sin, deal with our unbelief and provide a way and place for us to rest. Jesus lives, loves, obeys, works, dies, and rises again so that we might find a place of rest, renewal and recreation. He offers us rest in order to send us on our way to be about God's purposes - rescued to offer rest. Jesus saved us to be His Hospitable People!
3 Ways the Church Can be Hospitable
In light of the Gospel, we might define hospitality as the creation of a space that allows people to BE themselves, to BECOME renewed, and to DO the works God has saved them for. When we properly exercise hospitality, we welcome people to be themselves in the warmth of the light of Christ, to become renewed by being changed by the work of Christ, and to do works we have been created for in Christ.
To Be Rested
In a broken world, marred and diseased by the effects of sin, people need the space to rest. This is why Jesus called people who were weary and heavy-laden to come to him. He would give them rest for their weary souls. Jesus calls us to rest in His work on our behalf so we can be a people at rest who provide sanctuaries of rest for others.
Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed. God had created a place and made space for them to be themselves without covering or facades. If we are in Christ, we are clothed with His righteousness. We don’t need to cover up or hide. One of the ways we create space for people to experience and come to understand the gospel is by creating space for people to reveal their true self and see that they are loved regardless of the “wrinkles and scars” of sin. How do we create space for people to be their true self?
To Become Renewed
The gospel isn’t only about loving and forgiving sinners. It is also about restoring broken and marred people into healed and whole people who grow up to become imitators of Jesus Christ – restored image bearers of God. Jesus created space for people to be and to become (Think of Mary, Peter, Thomas, the woman at the well, the blind man, the paralyzed). Gospel hospitality implies creating space for people to be known, to be real, to be loved, and ultimately to be led with the Holy Spirit’s help to healing and wholeness through the work and person of Jesus Christ. How do we create space for people to be led toward healing and wholeness?
To Do Works
The gospel moves from who God is and what Christ has done on our behalf into the works He created us to do (See Ephesians 2:8-10).
This is the result of Jesus’ gospel hospitality. He got on the same level with his enemy – becoming human. He became our servant – to the point of death. He spent all that He had in order to clean us up – by becoming our sin and giving us His righteousness (2 Cor 5:21). Then He sent us His Spirit to empower us to do good works for His sake so others could be welcomed in to the family. When we engage in gospel hospitality, we are regularly asking ourselves this question:
How do we create space for the stranger to be rested, restored, healed, and prepared in Jesus Christ for the work God has called them to?
Will you join God's rich history of providing rest in order to extend rest? Remember, everything he has called you to do he has already done for you in Christ Jesus. You have everything you need to offer gospel hospitality to the strangers, friends, and even enemies around you.
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Jeff Vanderstelt and his wife, Jayne, have three children: Haylee, Caleb and Maggie. He is a pastor at Soma Communities in Tacoma, WA and a trainer for church planters. He blogs here. Twitter @JeffVanderstelt
5 Ways to Keep Church Discipline from Seeming Weird
Recently, the subject of church discipline has hit the radar in many circles due to some high profile controversies and scandals. The way some churches appear to poorly exercise church discipline is as distressing as the way many Christians reacted to the concept. There has been a collective incredulity about church discipline as some kind of “strange fire” in the evangelical world. I can’t help but think that this aversion is partly because, as God has built his church, his church leaders have not always kept up with what makes a church a church. So even to mention the idea of a church disciplining its members strikes tenderhearted and undereducated Christians as weird, mean, and legalistic. How do we work at keeping church discipline from seeming weird? Here are 5 ways:
1. Make disciples.
Many local churches have simply becoming keepers of a fish tank. A surface level of fellowship is often in place, but the central mission of the church - to make disciples - has been neglected. Instead, churches are structured around providing religious goods and services, offering education or even entertainment options for their congregational consumers. People aren’t being trained in the context of ongoing disciple relationships. But this largely what “church discipline” is - training.
If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. Matthew 18:15
In discipling relationships, we are always disciplining one another, not chiefly or only in the fight against sin but largely in our encouragement of each other, edifying one another, teaching one another, and sharing one another’s burdens. In short, disciples know each other. And so Matthew 18:15 might be happening all the time, perhaps weekly within loving relationships where there is no imminent danger of somebody being kicked out of the church but rather a constant iron sharpening of iron.
In churches with healthy discipleship cultures, church discipline is going on all the time in helpful, informal, everyday ways. When the more formal processes of church discipline become necessary, they are much less likely to be carried out too harshly or received strangely. The church will already have a positive training context for knowing that discipleship requires obedience, correction, perseverance, and mutual submission.
2. Create clarity about church membership.
In many churches, there is no church membership structure at all. But even in churches that maintain formal church membership, the expectations and processes are unclear. Prospective church members need to provide more info than merely their profession of faith, previous church membership, and the area of service they are interested in. They need to know what the body is promising to them and what they are promising the body. If church membership is a Christ-centered covenant relationship - and it is - their needs to be a clear, mutual promise between all invested parties that their yes will be yes and their no will be no, so that there can be no surprise when someone’s yes to sin is received with a no from the church.
3. Teach the process.
I remember a church meeting once upon a time where elders were sharing the grounds for dismissal of the lead pastor. The evidence was extensive and serious, and there was plenty of testimony about the elders having for years seeking the pastor’s repentance and his getting counseling to no avail. One woman, visibly upset, shouted, “Where is the grace?!” The whole idea seemed weird and unchristian to her. She did not have the biblical framework to know that the last several years’ of seeking the pastor’s repentance was a tremendous act of grace, and that indeed, even his dismissal was a severe mercy, a last and regrettable resort in seeking to startle him into Godly sorrow over his sin. But churches aren’t accustomed to thinking of discipline that way; they think of grace as comfort and niceness. This is because we don’t teach them well.
For some, church discipline will always be objectionable because it seems outdated and unnecessary. But for many, their objection is a reflection of simply not knowing what the Bible teaches on the matter. If a church never broaches the subject until a church’s response to someone’s unrepentant sin must be made public, church discipline will always seem alien. “What are you doing bringing all this law into a place that should be filled with grace?” And the like. So we have to preach the relevant texts.
One word of caution, however: Some churches love teaching the process of church discipline out of all proportion; they love it too much. In some church environments, church discipline is mainly equated with the nuclear option of excommunication and the leadership of the church is not known for its patience but for its itchy trigger finger. Teaching the process of church discipline is not about filling the church with a sense of dread and covering the floor with eggshells. It’s about providing enough visibility about the guardrails and expectations that people can actually breathe more freely, not less. Church discipline - rightly exercised - is motivated by real, sorrowful love and concern.
4. Follow the process.
Once again, we fail our congregations when we don’t begin church discipline until we feel pressed to remove someone from membership and refuse them the Lord’s Supper. It’s as if there aren’t previous, patient, hopeful steps in Matthew 18. Even the context of Paul’s command in 1 Corinthians 5:13 appears to demonstrate excommunication is the final straw, not the only one. If we will follow the biblical process of church discipline, beginning with confidential and humble rebuke of a brother’s or sister's sin, if unrepentance persists and the circle of visibility widens, expulsion will be seen as a regrettable and sorrowful necessity, and as something intended for a person’s repentance and restoration, not for their punishment.
5. Practice gospel-centeredness.
God will get the glory and our churches will give him glory when church discipline is practiced in the context of a grace-driven culture. You can expect church discipline to seem unnecessary and legalistic in churches where the gospel has not had any noticeable effect on the spirit of the people. But in churches where God’s free grace in Christ is regularly preached and believed, church leaders will be regularly setting aside their egos and narcissistic needs and the laity will be bearing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things, and believing all things (1 Corinthians 13:7), including that while no discipline feels pleasant at the time, in the end it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it (Hebrews 12:11).
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Gospel Centered Leadership - Transparency
There’s a scene in the movie, We Were Soldiers where Mel Gibson’s character assures the men he is leading into battle that he will be the first person off their helicopter and the last man to step back on when they leave the battlefield. He's upfront and transparent with his men. Good leaders are transparent. When leaders aren't transparent, when their behavior doesn't model what they say, people find it very difficult to follow them. Few mistakes shine brighter in an organization than when a leader violates the principles, traditions and ethical standards that shape the culture of that organization.
Gather people to your vision and show them what it looks like to walk through life in pursuit of that vision. This is true in both normative and catalytic seasons within your organization. Change brings uncertainty and resistance. No amount of instruction will pry people away from the golden myth of the past as effectively as a leader who models what it looks like to live out a new rhythm of life.
This goes deeper than the hard work of crystallizing what matters most to you into pithy statements or a set of bullet points that you post on your office wall like an alternate set of ten commandments. For example, it’s one thing to capture a conviction about a life shaped by God’s calling to community and mission. And while we never want to minimize the beauty of a life that’s built around other people as we declare and display the greatness and glory and goodness and grace of God in everyday life, there’s something else at work in the lives of leaders who change the way other people think and live and love.
We don’t grow into a family of missionaries - ultimately - through the collective adoption of best practices. What changes the people God has given us to lead is not merely their observation of our hospitality or incarnational posture. It’s quite possible that they’ll watch you live out this new way of life, provide the occasional word of encouragement, or offer of help - yet never embrace any of it as their own. This can be particularly problematic in established churches or Christianized cultures where the work of community and mission remains the sole work of professional ministers.
If we intend people to become part of a family of missionaries in our cities, we must lead with a transparency that is far more foundational and pervasive than missional convictions and communal methodology. I’ve spent this year meditating on the book of Colossians and this morning I was back at the beginning of the letter, greeted with a reminder that grace has been given and peace has been secured on my behalf. On one hand, this means that I am loved - lavishly - with an affection that is settled and steadfast. There is much that is uncertain in my world, but the love of my heavenly Father is not in question. On the other hand, this love that has rewoven everything that could possibly unravel my relationship with God is a tapestry of grace. It is love that is undeserved, even as it is freely and abundantly given. The very concept of grace is a reminder that while there is nothing that can separate me from the love of God, it is a love given in lieu of the actual content of my life.
Grace creates transparent leaders in two particular ways: it convinces us that we are loved with unbreakable and unyielding affection; and it compels us to own up to the manifold ways we reject such love. Beyond our principles and practices, Gospel-centered leadership models a life of repentance and faith. The call to community and mission protects this from discombobulating into a life of flaccid passivity. Yet in a culture that threatens to careen into a hyper-active obsession with all things communal and missional, here in the simple language of grace and peace is a patient and persistent reminder that the life we are called to is a life that never disconnects from undeserved yet unwavering love.
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Matt Adair is the lead pastor of Christ Community Church in Athens and area director for Acts 29 in the state of Georgia. Twitter @mattadair
Taking the Long View
A few years ago I read A Narrative of Suprising Conversions by Jonathan Edwards, and there is one particular paragraph that God used to shape and change my heart. Edwards is talking about his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, who preceded Edwards as pastor of his church. Listen to how Edwards describes him: “He was eminent and renowned for his gifts and grace; so he was blessed, from the beginning, with extraordinary success in his ministry, in the conversion of many souls.” Edwards explains that this happened in five seasons or “harvests" spread over Stoddard's 60 years in ministry. Edwards tells us exactly when they happened:
Harvest one erupts, and many are saved… Four years pass… Harvest two comes, and a great number of people are converted… Thirteen years pass… Harvest three happens, many come to know Christ… Sixteen years pass… Harvest four comes about, people flock to faith in Jesus… Six years pass… Harvest five errupts, and many are saved.
Years passed - sometimes more than a decade - between the times in which this church saw God bless them with great seasons of numerical growth by conversion. This great man of God pastored in the same place for nearly 60 years, pouring his life out for the sake of Jesus, working hard to make disciples, and was blessed to see amazing things.
We like to talk about those periods when growth is happening. It’s exciting. It’s energizing. We love to tell stories of churches that are seeing many people coming to faith. New services are started. Locations are multiplied. Baptisms are happening. But my question is: what about the seasons in between? What was happening in Stoddard's congregation then?
For every harvest there must be a sowing. When you add up the numbers, for 39 of his 60 years in ministry Solomon Stoddard didn’t see extraordinary growth. To be sure, people came to faith. Undoubtedly, the Spirit of God was at work. But, by most standards today (at least those we use in the American Church), Solomon Stoddard wasn’t much of a success.
At the heart of his ministry is a quality that is unfortunately all but forgotten by many: faithfulness. If Stoddard had been evaluated today, he might have been told to give up. To reevaluate his call. To change things up, try something new, adopt another strategy. Why? Because we are so tempted to trade the call to faithfulness for the allure of success. It is not sexy or glamorous to spend decades faithfully preaching the Word of God, investing your life in the people God has entrusted to you while seeing very little visible fruit.
But for a true harvest to come, there must be seed sown. Cared for. Watered. Tended to. Protected. Nourished. It is only after this hard work of faithful care has been done that a lasting harvest can come.
My prayer today is that God would give us the long view of ministry, and that our desire would be to give our lives in faithful service – trusting God to bring a tremendous harvest!
Bill Streger serves as the Lead Pastor of Kaleo Church, an Acts 29 Network church in Houston, TX. Born and raised in Houston, he attended Houston Baptist University and is currently pursuing his M.Div. from Reformed Baptist Seminary. Bill is a husband to Shannon, daddy to Mirabelle and Levi, and a life-long Houston Rockets fan. Twitter @billstreger
Church Planting, Confessions, and Catechism
What do church planting, confessions, and catechisms have in common? The answer is a lot. Christians have used confessions and catechism to teach the essentials of the faith for centuries. Many of the great confessions and catechism were originally discipleship tools for new churches during the time of the Reformation.
One of the biggest challenges church planters face is teaching new believers the essential doctrines of the Christian faith. Many of the people who come to a new church know little if any about the basic doctrines.
What is a Catechism?
You may be wondering, “What is a catechism?” When I was a new believer, I had no idea what a catechism was. For those of us who were not raised in the church, words like catechism, creed, or confessions sound like something you would learn in a catholic school.
So what is a catechism? A catechism is the process of instructing believers both young and old in the basics of the Christian faith. The Greek word for "instruct" or "teach" is katecheo from which we get our English word "catechize".
Catechisms provide basic summaries of the church’s teachings to ensure that all members of the church understand the essentials of the faith for themselves. Most catechisms generally have questions and answers accompanied by Biblical support and explanations.
Brief History of Catechisms and Confessions
As early as the Middle Ages, the Church required new believers to learn the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Ten Commandments. During the time of the Protestant Reformation, the Reformers compiled many catechisms to help train new believers.
Donald Van Dyken says, “The great leaders of the Reformation, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, attacked the colossal ignorance they met in Germany, Geneva, and Scotland by making catechisms and by catechizing.”[i] Among these Reformed documents were The Augsburg Confession in 1530 and the Heidelberg Catechism written in 1562.
Martin Luther whole-heartedly believed in using them. He said, “In the catechism, we have a very exact, direct, and short way to the whole Christian religion. For God himself gave the ten commandments, Christ himself penned and taught the Lord's Prayer, the Holy Ghost brought together the articles of faith.”[ii]
The Puritans later developed catechisms, including the Westminster Confession and Catechisms in the 1640’s. For many Protestant Christians everywhere, the Westminster Catechisms are the most important and influential of all the catechisms. The Westminster Shorter and Larger Catechisms where written in the 1647 by English and Scottish divines. These documents were written to provide children, new believers, and church members alike a short but comprehensive summary of the Reformed church’s doctrines.
Evangelicals on the Catechism Trail
Today, there is a misconception that only non-evangelical liturgical churches use catechisms and confessions. However, many evangelicals such as Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists have used them for a long time. Some may be surprised to know that the Southern Baptists have a rich confessional history.
Tom Nettles remarks, “Many contemporaries have a deep―seated suspicion of catechisms. In our own Baptist denomination, many would consider the words "Baptist catechism" as mutually exclusive.” However he goes on to say, “Baptists, including Southern Baptists, produced scores of catechisms for use in this variety of ways.”[iii]
Spurgeon on Catechisms
Standing in this tradition, the famous preacher Charles Spurgeon developed his own catechism from the London Baptist Confession of 1689 and the Westminster Shorter Catechism. He believed that a good catechism was essential in training the faithful. He said:
“I am persuaded that the use of a good Catechism in all our families will be a great safeguard against the increasing errors of the times, and therefore I have compiled this little manual from the Westminster Assembly's and Baptist Catechisms, for the use of my own church and congregation. Those who use it in their families or classes must labour to explain the sense; but the words should be carefully learned by heart, for they will be understood better as years pass.”[iv]
Using the Confessions and Catechism
Many evangelicals are rediscovering the benefit of a good catechism. Both new and existing churches can benefit from using catechisms. A catechism can be used as an individual study, times of family worship, or in small groups. Catechisms are not a pass or fail fill-in-the-blank test, but an invitation to learn the doctrines of grace. This invitation involves vital learning, ongoing reflection, and discussion within the community of faith.
They are still as useful and as needed today. Ponder each doctrine and let them speak to your head and your heart. Share them with your children or your spouse.
Here is a sample of the First Catechism for beginners that you can use in your church, with your family, or in times of study.
- Who made you? God.
- What else did God make? God made all things.
- Why did God make you and all things? For his own glory.
- How can you glorify God? By loving him and doing what he commands.
- Why are you to glorify God? Because he made me and takes care of me.
- Is there more than one true God? No. There is only one true God.
- In how many Persons does this one God exist? In three Persons.
- Name these three Persons. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
- What is God? God is a Spirit and does not have a body like men.
- Where is God? God is everywhere.
- Can you see God? No. I cannot see God, but he always sees me.
- Does God know all things? Yes. Nothing can be hidden from God.
- Can God do all things? Yes. God can do all his holy will.
- Where do you learn how to love and obey God? In the Bible alone.
- Who wrote the Bible?
Chosen men who were inspired by the Holy Spirit.[v]
[i] Donald Van Dyken, Rediscovering Catechism. New Jersey: P&R publishing. 2000. 14.
[ii] Martin Luther, Table Talk.
[iii] Tom Nettles, An Encouragement to Use Catechisms. Founders Journal.
[iv] Charles Surgeon, A Puritans Catechism.
[v] First Catechism. Great Commission Publications, Inc. 2003.
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Dr. Winfield Bevins serves as lead pastor of Church of the Outer Banks, which he founded in 2005. His life’s passion in ministry is discipleship and helping start new churches. He lives in the beautiful beach community of the Outer Banks with his wife Kay and two daughters where he loves to surf and spend time at the beach with his family and friends. Twitter: @winfieldbevins
A Story Of Gospel Community
In two weeks, in a suburban town outside of Seattle, we'll celebrate God's grace and the Spirit's work through baptizing a new disciple of Jesus. This is the story of how a neighborhood can look like the book of Acts, where disciples are made and we teach and preach from house-to-house, an example of how to make disciples in our sphere of influence... in today's context. We moved into our housing development 7 1/2 years ago, and for the first 6 years, we didn't know anyone who didn't live next to us. I’m serious. I didn't know the guy across the street. By the way, his name is Trevor, and he's getting baptized in my backyard. But, for the first 6 years, the extent of our reaching-out to our neighbors was leading a youth group and handing out bibles door-to-door and singing Christmas carols in the dark because people shut off their lights on us. Sometime while standing in the cold singing "O Come All Ye Faithful," I started to think, "Maybe we need a different modus operandi for bringing the gospel to my neighbors."
I decided to leave my one church to seek out help from people who have done this before, and I landed with Soma Communities. Truth be known, I am very prideful in the way I do things. Whether it is my orthodoxy or my orthopraxy, I feel like I have it down to some degree, which is a spillover from my success in business. It is wrong thinking, but I know this about myself. When coming to Soma Communities, I purposed to be a learner. What I asked myself was, "If you know so much, how come no one around you is repenting and being baptized?" So, even though I was soon asked to take a lead role in a Missional Community out in my suburban city, I decided to just sit back and learn. As I learned, as I listened, I began to be intrigued, and I finally had to act on it.
I asked a new friend of mine, Caesar, "How should I start? Where should I begin in my community?"
He suggested, "Ask the Spirit, 'What's next?'"
At that time, I rarely asked the Spirit to guide and empower me for mission because I was doing nothing that would require the Spirit. I was insular, hanging around only Christian people, and rarely ever engaging anyone with the Gospel or showing them the effects of the Gospel and how that might look in our community. There was no reason to pray. It would have been like asking God to help me flip the channels on my television.
Well. My wife and I prayed... Spirit, what's next?
If you want to open the power of the Spirit like freeing a hungry lion from its cage, then ask the Spirit what's next with a desire to show others what He's like for the sake of making disciples.
The Spirit answered by simply telling my wife and me this: On July 4th, instead of having your BBQ in the backyard, move it to the front yard.
This isn't earth shattering, but as Luke 16:10 puts it, he who can be trusted with a little, can be trusted with a lot. We agreed with the Spirit and decided that would be a good idea. Then He pressed. We ended up putting together a 4th of July wiffle ball tournament and cook off and going door-to-door handing out flyers. The response was overwhelming. This was the first time I met Trevor, my neighbor from across the street. He entered a wiffle ball team, and they won. Whatever. In the end, we had about 40 people play in the tourney and around 150 people at the 4th of July festivities. People continued to come up to me and tell me it was the best 4th of July party they had ever been to. It reminded us all of the Wonder Years. We didn't want this to only happen once a year. So, we started throwing BBQs all the time and inviting people over to have dinner from the connections we made on the 4th.
As summer was drawing to a close, my wife and I knew one thing: we needed help to build this community to reflect the community of God. We started praying that God would send helpers and had other leaders within Soma praying for us as well. God answered. He ended up moving another couple to our city from a different Soma Expression and then sent us another couple from our old bible study. It was beautiful. We came together with a plan that we felt was from the Spirit. We sought to continue the dialogue with these new couples by hosting Saturday morning breakfasts at our house. We wanted these other couples to be there with us to engage our neighbors and become part of our community. To do this, they had to be willing to lay aside some of the things they might have been more comfortable with to pursue our neighbors. But, our goal was to have these breakfasts with an eye on going through the Story of God at some point with those people with whom we were building relationships. We figured this might take a year or so to build these relationships strong enough to engage them on a deeper spiritual level.
This whole time, my wife and I kept asking the Spirit, "What’s next?" Now, we were able to put names to these prayers. We started the breakfasts in October and by the end of the month the Spirit was opening doors for the Gospel like I've never seen. People were asking us, "Why do you do all these things for the community? (We had also arranged a Halloween party, game nights, etc.) Do you sell Avon? Are you Christians? What church do you go to? etc."
We answered those questions, and then asked, "Would you be interested in walking through the story of what the Bible says about God and why we feel compelled to bring about this type of community? We can do it our house and have fun and eat like we always do anyways and then have this story time with dialogue among friends.”
We ended up asking about 6 couples from our neighborhood and 4 said yes, including Trevor and his wife. After 10 weeks of engaging in story and having a lot of fun, summer was back. We told those who went through the story that if they wanted to continue with us to dig into the Scriptures to see what the Gospel says about making disciples, we'd be happy to have them. Trevor and his wife agreed and really started to delve in. We again threw a huge 4th of July party with wiffle ball, cook off, and fireworks, and kept following up with BBQs and studied the word together as a Missional Community.
Now, this entire time, we had, as a group, been praying that God would put on our hearts those people in our lives who seemed to be pushing into the kingdom. We'd been praying (and are still praying), because we were going to once again be doing the Story of God coming up in January. We then had a study on baptism, and two things came out of Trevor's mouth: 1) I want to be baptized 2) I've been praying and talking to my brother and his fiancé and they desire to not only come to the BBQs but also to the Story of God when we start it.
Praise God!
In two weeks we'll be having Trevor's whole family, some friends, and our Missional Community in our backyard for a BBQ and a baptism. He's being commissioned to make disciples, but because he’s been watching me, and I've been walking this out with him day-to-day in normal everyday life for a year and a half, he's already doing it. To him, a disciple of Jesus naturally makes more disciples.
Our Missional Community started the day I put aside my own comforts and moved my BBQ from my backyard to my front yard. We went 6 years without knowing anyone. Now, if we throw a BBQ, we have 70 people show up. We have 6 couples in our Missional Community. We are doing pre-engagement for one couple and trying to save another couple from going through a divorce. We think we might have to multiply coming up in January because we could have close to 40 people that desire to go through the Story of God with us.
I'm no saint. I'm nothing special. I'm not paid by the church. I'm not paid by the community. God pays me money through my business - not to hoard it, but so I can be making disciples who make disciples in the neighborhood where I live.
This story isn't crazy. This story isn't outlandish. It's pretty normal. My family is pretty normal. That's the beauty of it. This is a small taste of what has been happening in our neighborhood and also in our own spiritual development. You’ll notice as you live this out, life, as usual, isn’t perfect. There are times of much difficulty. As a dude in our Missional Community put it, “You only get really irritated with people if you actually get to know them. It’s hard to get irritated at others if you merely wave at them when putting your garbage at the curb.”
If you're reading this, what’s holding you back from going to your knees tonight and just asking God, "What's next?" Be careful. Once you’ve let this Lion of Judah out of the cage, He'll take over the neighborhood.
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Seth McBee is the adopted son of God, husband of one wife, and father of three. He’s a graduate of Seattle Pacific University with a finance degree. By trade Seth is an Investment Portfolio Manager, serving as president of McBee Advisors, Inc. Today, he’s a missional community leader, preaching elder with Soma Communities in Renton, Washington, and executive team member of the GCM Collective. In his down time, he likes to do CrossFit, cook BBQ, host pancake ebelskiver breakfasts at his home and many other neighborhood events in his hometown of Maple Valley, Washington. You can find him on twitter @sdmcbee or at www.gcmcollective.com.
Messy Discipleship
In our house, we used to have a beautiful set of drinking glasses that were made of translucent artsy green glass. Notice I said we “used to"... A few weeks ago our house was full of the life, laughter, and mess of sharing our home and table with our community; after everyone left and my wife and I were cleaning up, we noticed one of our beautiful green glasses had a huge chip off the top. We now officially have only three of these nice glasses. They've moved from the threatened dishes list to the full-fledged endangered dishes list. I don’t have much hope for their survival either as they have yet to breed.
Just the other day a neighbor broke another one of our glasses, and as I was cleaning up the glittery shards, it hit me - if you have a complete set of dishes you just might not be on mission.
God’s mission is messy and costly. Think about it. In order for us to be a part of God’s family, to be his disciples, to get to live in eternity with him in his home, it cost him his comfort to the point of a dirty, torturous execution on a cross. Yet I often want to be his follower and have a life of comfort.
I want to do hospitality my way, on my time, around my schedule, with the people that are easy for me to be around, and I want to have a complete set of dishes when I am done. But this just isn’t the life God has called us to. God calls us to not just have hospitable events but to have an open door and hospitable life. Jesus was available for the sick. He fed the hungry crowds when it was inconvenient. He hung out with the drunks, tax collectors, lepers, and sinners. His way of discipleship was dirty and probably smelly.
I have a friend that has modeled this hospitality well and as a result often has men in his home that are so drunk and out of it they sometimes foul their pants. He and his wife have literally cleaned man-poop off their floor. This grosses me out and makes me want to think twice about the people I let into my house, but oddly enough it also inspires me. It looks so much like Jesus. A couple of weeks ago my neighbor’s daughter had a little present slip out of her diaper while they were visiting. We saw the log on the floor, and all of us wondered where it came from. I immediately checked my son's diaper, and people were diaper checking all around until we found the culprit. I instinctively cleaned up the poop, de-sanitized the floor, and went on with what turned out to be a wonderful evening.
Sometimes discipleship means people are going to poop on your floor. If we are servants like Jesus, we get to clean it up. Jesus modeled this when he washed his disciples feet. At the time, everyone traveled on dirty, smelly roads in sandals and often were hopscotching around camel dung. Washing smelly feet was reserved for slaves, yet Jesus, the master, took the lowliest task and washed his disciples' feet.
I like my things to stay nice, and I don’t like doing disgusting jobs. But I do want to follow Jesus, and I do want to be his disciple and make disciples. To do this all the time means I am going to have to do some things I don’t like and lose some things I do like.
So again, if you have a full set of dishes and nobody has ever pooped on your floor, you might want to stop and examine if you are really on God’s mission.
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Jake Chambers: A member of Jesus’ bride - the church, husband to his beautiful bride Lindsey, and a daddy to his boy Ezra. Jake is passionate about seeing the gospel both transform lives and create communities that love Jesus, the city, and the lost. He currently serves Red Door Church through leading, preaching, equipping, and pastoring. You can read more of his writing at reddoorlife.tv.
Forgiveness Is Not Semantics
The world often claims that authentic, unhindered friendship is not only unrealistic but not that important. I have come across very Godly and mature believers who are also confused on this important matter of community. We must get back to making authentic friendships essential as we disciple others—teaching and living-out this truth. Christ tells us to forgive others just as our heavenly Father forgives us (Mt. 6:14-15):
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
Let's look at how this concept plays out in our society and if it helps relationships or not. When we sin against someone, we'd much rather free ourselves from that wrongdoing so we say things such as "My bad," or "I didn't mean to do it." We’re trying to say what we've done is really a cosmic whoops versus Sin. The person who was wronged often responds by saying, "No problem, everyone makes mistakes," or "Don't worry about it." The wronged party returns the favor by passively retracting any ownership that they might have in the process of reconciliation.
Alarmingly, this interaction becomes the norm for our relationships. The result is that trust is never truly built, safety is never restored, and we are able to throw past problems back at each other. This is why bitterness creeps in, and we begin to paint a false picture of each other. This is also why people are pegged as harsh and unloving when they call a sin, a Sin. It’s simply not the norm in our culture. Is it unloving? Or is it redemptive?
We like to think that forgiveness is dispensed by a super-gracious God with no strings attached. This is not altogether true. Although forgiveness is free and God is super-gracious, Christ has said it must be given to be received. I propose that by the definition of the cross, forgiveness is always available but only instituted when we realize we have wronged a Holy God and ask God for His forgiveness. God forgives, but we have to admit we need forgiveness and forgive others in turn. God doesn't take the "no big deal" route, nor does he let us say "Oops, my fault." In the same way, as we follow Jesus' model and obey his command, we must concede that there are two people in the relationship. Both people are needed for the relationship to be brought from brokenness to wholeness.
So what does it look like to practically take our cues from Jesus in the area of receiving and forgiving people?
When we wrong someone we do the following:
- We don't make excuses or justification.
- We clearly admit the sin and name the sin.
- We ask for the other person to forgive us (modeling that they are an important part of the reconciliation process).
The person who has been wronged now has the opportunity to do two things:
- Take the person off the hook by extending forgiveness (Mt. 6:14-15).
- Encourage the person being forgiven that their wrong doing will not be connected to them during the rest of the relationship (1Cor. 13:5).
I must warn you, people like to hear this theologically, but when you hold them accountable they might not be so appreciative. To enact this gospel-centered principle as we disciple others, we must first build conviction from Christ’s instruction and then plead with the Holy Spirit to strengthen us as we build authentic friendships. In fact, this negotiation of true repentance and forgiveness is a critical key to authentic friendships. In modeling Christ’s instruction for forgiveness, we are fighting for a major truth of genuine gospel-centered fellowship.
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Eric Russ is compelled by gospel-transformation in the city and author of Discipleship Defined. He and his wife Sara along with a dedicated team of friends moved to Detroit's east side and founded Mack Avenue Community Church, where he serves as lead pastor. Discipleship is the heartbeat of their ministry. Twitter: @EricRuss76
The Gospel & The Great Commandment
In the commissioning of his followers to make disciples, Jesus made it clear that an integral part of discipleship is “teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you.” If you’re going to teach someone to obey all that Jesus commanded, you might as well start with the most important commandment.
In Matthew 22:36-40, Jesus is engaged in a conversation with a Pharisee who asked:
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?"
And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets."
How much of our disciple-making effort revolves around this simple (but difficult) command to love God? Do we begin with this command? Do we emphasize it enough? In the lives of those whom we are discipling, do we ask questions concerning love for God?
As with every command in scripture, the gospel should be the ultimate motivator compelling us to obedience. Clearly the gospel encompasses much more than the doctrine of the love of God, but for the purposes of this discussion, I’ll encapsulate the meaning of “the gospel” with the phrase “he loved us” from 1 John 4:10.
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
God…loves…us. The very thought should take our breath away.
God loves us, and that love has ultimately resulted in Jesus exchanging our sin for his righteousness. “But God demonstrates his love for us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
“But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ.”
“In love he predestined us for adoption as sons.”
In a nutshell, the gospel is “he loved us.”
God loves us. God loves us. He loves us!
The initial (and inevitable) response to this love is love for God.
The recent increased focus on gospel-centrality has been extremely instructive in helping us correct our wrong actions. We’ve discovered that our wrong actions are driven by wrong beliefs. When we sin, we understand that we are “not believing the gospel.” We’ve become familiar with Luther’s observation about the ten commandments: If you break #2 through #10, it’s because you broke #1 first. This is true and helpful.
However, those of us who swim in the waters of gospel-centrality have not always done a great job of pointing out the positive effects of believing the gospel. I know when I sin I’m not believing the gospel, but what should it look like when I am? At the risk of sounding ridiculously simple, I believe the answer is…love God.
When I believe the gospel, I will love God. I will be filled with gratitude and joy, but that gratitude will have a direction (God-ward) and that joy will have an object (the Father). The gospel propels me to say, “God, I love you!”
On the heels of that declaration will come the express desire to obey. “If you love me, you will keep my commands.” Being awash in the love of God elicits a pledge of devotion, a glad desire to obey the Father. “God, I love you and want to do whatever you say!”
Is there a clearer example of this than Jesus himself? Everything Jesus did was motivated by his love for the Father. Disciples walk in the ways of Jesus. This involves not only right actions, but right motives as well. It was love for God that drove Jesus to pray, “Not my will, but yours be done.” God, I love you and want to do whatever you say!
And his first marching order for us has already been issued. Love others, the second most important command according to Jesus. In some ways (and again, at the risk of sounding ridiculously simple), this command encompasses the rest of life. Shouldn’t everything we do be motivated by love for God primarily and love for people secondarily? Can you think of anything you would do, prompted by the Spirit, that would not somehow benefit another person?
Whether you are teaching or counseling or sending email or cooking dinner or returning phone calls or doing laundry or running errands or pursuing a girl or writing a blog post, your motive should be love for God. “God, in response to what you have done for me, I declare my love for you. I engage in this activity for you. I love you, and want to obey you!”
So when the single men in our community want to pursue a girl, I remind them to do it primarily because they love God and want to obey him. This keeps the whole endeavor about God and not about the girl, which more than likely is really another way of saying “not about the single guy’s ego." I’ll ask, “Do you believe the Father is leading you to do this? Is your motive to love and obey him? Is your motive to bless her as a sister regardless of her response?”
Or when a young leader is discouraged because the people in his missional community are not responding, I’ll remind him that he leads because he loves God, not because he expects a particular response from the people he’s leading. Obviously, we pray and hope for a response, but we don’t lead only so people will respond. We lead because we love (and we love because he loves us). “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”
If our motivation in any area of life-work, marriage, parenting, or leadership is connected to an expected outcome, then we are actually serving ourselves and not other people. We are using them to get something we want (power, position, acceptance, love, etc.). Only when we serve out of love for God can we truly love people.
Perhaps this is why Jesus said that love for God and love for people were the most important commandments. What more important commandments could we encourage a disciple to obey? And what a better way to live a life in response to the gospel than to love God and love others!
Let the gospel (he loves us) be the motive (love God) for all that we do (love others).
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Abe Meysenburg serves as a pastor and elder with Soma Communities in Tacoma, WA. After living in the Midwest for most of their lives, he and his wife, Jennifer, moved to Tacoma in the summer of 1999. In 2001, after working as a Starbucks manager for a few years, Abe helped start The Sound Community Church, which then became a part of Soma Communities in May 2007.
Gospel Centered Leadership - Ambition
My wife, Lindsey, is an incredible baker. Her apple cake tastes like fall and her sugar cookies are the stuff of legend, particularly because her creative and detailed decorations show up in various designs during holidays and birthday parties. I am amazed by how she takes a squeeze bottle of icing and creates a masterpiece. I hesitate to bite into it. It's art. While her skill is considerable, her ability to create would be severely hampered without tools. It’s one thing for her to have talent but when her sense of space and attention to detail are combined with something as simple as the plastic tip on the lid of a squeeze bottle, then what was once merely an idea or the stuff of possibility becomes a gift for family and friends.
Artistic Leadership
The idea of leadership as art is not a new concept. More than a few books have been written to articulate how leadership cannot be reduced to science, shrunk down into a series of paint-by-number steps that applies universally to anyone who wakes up with the opportunity to lead. Art takes many different forms - sculpture, music, cuisine - and each form requires a specific medium - stone, a Gibson SG guitar, my wife's royal icing. Similarly, leadership works in different environments using a particular medium that puts one’s leadership on display.
While much of leadership is contextual - a mother doesn’t lead her 18-month old twins the same way that a football coach leads 87 high school boys - there are some elements that show up wherever leadership is needed. Consider this the icing that brings color and shape to a family or to a football team.
Ambitious Leaders
Ambition is one type of icing that shows up in leadership, the medium that brings leading to life. So much of what I do in developing leaders begins with the basic question, ‘Do you want to lead?’ It is unsettling to encounter someone whose capacity to lead is uncoupled from a sense of ambition. As a pastor in a university town, capturing and unleashing ambition is one of my most significant challenges. The University of Georgia is a world-class institution and the students who arrive on campus are bright and possess a breathtaking capacity for leading others but it is rare to find a student with a sense of ambition - and even more rare to find a student with ambitions bigger than the size and scope of their life.
When I think about how the gospel influences leadership and, in particular, the ambition needed to lead, I have in mind the plastic tips on the end of the squeeze bottle that my wife uses to turn a tube of icing into an intricate design. It’s not enough to have ambition - every tyrant in the history of the world possessed a strong sense of ambition. No, the gospel takes ambition and funnels it with great precision into ordinary and everyday life.
The Context for Ambition
Gospel-centered leaders are ambitious - passionate about the glory of God shining brightly in the everyday places where providence has landed them. In Romans 15, Paul articulates his apostolic calling as an ambition to preach the gospel where it had not yet been proclaimed. While the particularities of our life and calling differ from a first-century Jewish missionary, what we do share in common with him is a God-given desire to see the glory, greatness, goodness and grace of God declared and displayed in our context.
When such ambition is applied to leadership, it shapes the passion needed to turn what’s possible into a vision that inspires people into action. And while one only needs to look at churches across the Western world to see the unique and particular visions God gives to different groups of people, it should not surprise us that underneath our vision statements is a deeply theological foundation. It is not too much to say that our desire for community and mission - however that desire is communicated - is under-girded by a radically God-centered view of life in this world. As Paul reminds the Corinthian church, everything we do ultimately takes place in an effort to glorify God as we show and tell the world that He is all-satisfying and infinitely valuable.
The Ambition of the Gospel
Our vision for ambitious, gospel-centered leadership is far bigger than leadership within the church. This is kingdom work that shapes leadership in every sphere of life - business, medicine, education, service industries, politics, homemaking. Because of the grace we have in common, given to us as broken image-bearers of God, it should not surprise us to find places in the life of our organization where kingdom values are already on display. It is here that the task of ambitious leadership begins, rallying people around a shared vision for a better future that in time can only be explained by and accomplished through the regenerating, renewing, reviving work of the Holy Spirit expressed in the gospel for the fame of King Jesus.
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Matt Adair is the lead pastor of Christ Community Church in Athens, GA, area director for Acts 29 in the state of Georgia, and the U.S. Director for The Porterbrook Network.
Discipling the Disillusioned
They are lingering around the margins of our ministries. Some of them have been shoved from the pews to the periphery, but most of them have withdrawn on their own. Cynics.
Disillusioned with the people of God and often with God himself, these jaded souls are licking their ecclesial wounds while lobbing criticisms from a safe distance. Haunting the fringes and taunting those in the center, their audacity in asking the hard questions threatens to spread skepticism. It would be easier if the cynics would just step back into line and slip back into the pew. It would be easier if they would just repent of the gloomy naysaying and try some cheery optimism. Maybe it would be even easier if they just fled the fringes and left the church altogether.
But we need them. Desperately.
The church is in dire need of the disillusioned. Pop-theology and idealistic slogans are rife among God’s people today. But as a society committed to truth, the church can harbor no illusory notions about God or itself. Dis-illusionment is the dispersal of illusions. Those whose rose-colored glasses have been crushed under the foot of grim realities are powerful resources in an age of spin and empty promises. Cynics have powerful insights the church needs.
What we do not need, of course, is their cynicism.
So how do we embrace the cynics and not their disposition? How do we disciple the disillusioned? Reports abound that disenfranchised young people are leaving the church en masse. The future of the church hinges on whether or not we can engage and minister to the cynics hovering dangerously close to the edges of the church. Here are some suggestions.
Show Compassion The dispersal of illusions is often painful. Truth hurts. The caricature of cynics above may capture our perspective toward them, but it fails to comprehend that a great deal of jarring pain may have landed cynics on the church fringes in the first place. Legions of us are harboring deep wounds from severe disappointments in regard to our faith. The pastor had an affair. The church split. The small group leaked our confession. Even more painful are the wounds that seem to be inflicted by God himself. The miracle never came. He refused to heal our loved one. He seemed content to permit tragedy. He hid himself in our grief. Some cynics delight in being ornery irritants in the church. But so many of them—so many of us—have had our hopes brutally dashed and we are simply wounded souls. When the spiritual wounds begin to fester, the brokenness turns to bitterness.
For healing to come, cynics need compassion more than they need ostracism that reinforces their assumptions about church-folk. Not the drippy sort of compassion that looks more like self-righteous pity—cynics can smell this from a long way off. The sort of compassion required is a sincere concern seeped in the sobering awareness of another’s pain.
Debunk Idealism The reason many of us are disillusioned is because we espouse happy ideals about our faith which are simply incompatible with ex-Eden reality. We make all sorts of promises and platitudes that are not only unsustainable in a fallen world but contrary to the worldview found in Scripture. Powerful hopes are certainly found in those holy pages, astonishing hopes that seem too good to be true. But there is an eschatological sensibility to the bold promises of the Bible. God is certainly working wonders in the here and now. He rips open seas for the deliverance of his people. He heals and restores to life. But the prophets, Evangelists and apostles encourage us to orient our hopes toward the future. That future has been displaced a bit, parts of it taking place in the present through the work of Christ (see below), but the grim realities of a sin-wrecked realm still abound. To ignore those realities is to promote a faith on sand which will eventually shift and sink.
Lament Worship befitting a holy people amidst a sinful world includes lament. Injured souls cannot sing in a major key. So when we ask with a big smile that the congregation stand to sing some cheerful tune, we instantly marginalize the hurting among us. When the worship selections are upbeat and full of merry optimism, the inadvertent messages are that the church cannot accommodate pain, that the church is the last place you turn if you have problems. Even worse—when worship is always happy, the messages are that God himself wants nothing to do with our suffering, that God is the last person we turn to in distress.
Lament poetry makes up roughly a third of the Psalter. Right in the middle of our Bibles are the gut-wrenching pleas, the bellowing cries, and the haunting groans of the disillusioned. These laments make up the largest genre of psalms in the worship book of Israel.
Weeping can be worship.
The lament songs give voice to the jaded and disenchanted, conveying that God is indeed the one to whom we turn when our souls are shredded to pieces. The wounds of a cynic cannot heal on the margins. But the cynic will not march back into the pews to a soundtrack of perky praise music. When we recover the worship of lament, we will offer downcast souls biblically sanctioned language suitable for addressing God in their frustration and misery.
Preach a God of Biblical Proportions “God will never give you more than you can handle.” This theological sentiment has almost become sloganized. But say it to Job while you pat him on the back and see what he says in response. Tell it to Paul and his companions while they endured that mysterious affliction in Asia and felt “so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself” (2 Cor 1:8).
Cynics have been failed by shallow, sentimentalized pop-theology. When God does not live up to our expectations, we feel betrayed. But maybe the betrayal is sourced in the church’s proclamation of false expectations.
An idealized God is an idolized god.
But when we are presented with the mystifying God of Scripture, all the theological categories are rocked. The theological boxes are exploded. In a theology of biblical proportions we encounter a God dense enough and high enough to mystify and astound, but also to comfort and console. Such a theology presents a King both lowly and exalted, a Deity both tender and terrifying, a cosmic Lord in whom nails were found. No other vision of God will do for those who have faced harsh realities for which their limited theology failed to suffice.
Proclaim Resurrection Rather than idealism or cynicism, our call is to “hopeful realism.” This is a perspective that acknowledges and grieves ex-Eden miseries while recognizing and awaiting Eden’s restoration. As we have noted, God will make all things new and restore paradise (Rev 21-22). But the Resurrection of Jesus signifies that new creation has already begun. When Jesus climbed out of his tomb, a cosmic interruption took place. New life from the Age to Come leapt into the present sphere. And that Resurrection power infuses our own existence (Rom 6:4). The empty tomb of Jesus is a hole in the system, the system of Death, the system of all that makes us cynical. Hopeful realism groans in the suffering of this present age, but rejoices in the inevitable collapse of sin’s power. Resurrection makes cynicism obsolete.
Truth hurts…but it also heals. Disillusionment is actually a gift that leads to new life. Can our churches and ministries accommodate the dispersal of illusions and the resulting new life? Can we welcome redeemed cynics into our midst and gladly heed their insights? The future of the church in the Western world may indeed depend on whether or not we can answer such questions in the affirmative. An exodus is underway, and it is leading in the wrong direction…
This article is adapted from Andrew Byers's book, Faith Without Illusions: Following Jesus as a Cynic-Saint.
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After a decade of pastoral ministry, Andrew Byers is working on a PhD in New Testament at Durham University (England). He is the author of Faith Without Illusions: Following Jesus as a Cynic-Saint (IVP) and his blog is Hopeful Realism.
8 Ways to Fight Consumerism
Whether you are part of a new church plant or an existing church, here are a few things to bear in mind as you make disciples in the midst of consumerism: 1. Consumerism only exists where it’s allowed to exist. So, to change people’s orientation from going to church to consume a presentation or program to becoming a part of a people who give their lives for the gospel, you must begin by removing things they don’t need. It’s actually a theological impossibility to “go to Church,” so begin changing the paradigm with language and stop referring to your Sunday gathering as “Church.” Start by only using the word “church” for the people, or activities that take place during the week. Change your weekend lingo to reflect what you actually do on Sunday. Maybe call it “Teaching time/The gathering/seminar.” Of course, the best way to root out consumerism is at the heart level, to replace our consumer identity with a servant identity. Acting as rescued servants of Christ, not demanding consumers, comes by turning away from self-centered demands and turning to Christ-centered, church-blessing service.
2. Begin the non-consumer paradigm by changing your own role from doer of ministry to equipper of the saints to do ministry. The only reason anyone should get paid for ministry is if they equip others to do the actual work. So if your role right now is teaching on Sunday, start pulling together your best potential teachers either of small groups or missional communities and start a monthly “teaching training.” If your role is shepherd or pastor, start a monthly shepherding training. There’s always more bang for the buck when you spend your time developing leaders instead of developing messages or programs.
3. Deliberately spend 50% less time on your own sermon as a starting point. That should immediately give you an extra 10 hours a week to work with leaders.
4. Move from nebulous ministry time coaching ministry relationships. View every appointment as a means to an end. The end is that they will do the work of ministry. Have a plan of basic coaching questions for each meeting. For example: What is on your heart to do? What is hindering you from doing this work of ministry? How can I help you overcome these obstacles? What is the one thing you can do this week to move forward? As you view your role as a coach/consultant/ and connector of people, you’ll immediately begin decentralizing ministry to people who are desperate to find their place in God’s kingdom calling.
5. Move from maintaining present ministries to modeling new forms of missional leadership. There’s no easy way to say it; missional leaders must lead by example. You don’t have to be the best at cultural engagement, evangelistic relationship, service to the poor, but you must be in the fight so that your life can inspire others. Just as your people have to work a full-time job and then learn to give an evening a week or a few hours on the weekend to missional community, you must do the same. If you have to, begin redrafting your own job description to free up space.
6. Consider part-time salaries instead of full time pay. Most of the jobs we traditionally pay full time salaries for can easily be done in half the time. So only pay for equippers. This includes you!
7. Consider outsourcing basic functions like “set up/tear down/nursery/financial services.” We often spend more than we need to on services that don’t directly relate to ministry.
8. If you’re going to pay staff, only pay and staff to your greatest need. Most churches can actually find people who have a passion and gifting to teach or lead worship, or work with kids without any financial remuneration at all. If you don’t pay for these roles, it may open up financial space for people and ministry ventures outside the church. Many missional churches now staff “community developers,” “business for mission” ventures, and other outside the box roles. Ask yourself, "What would be good news to my community and if we were to be good news," and "What types of people and roles do we really need?" Have the courage to put money into speculative ventures that bless the culture around you instead of just propping up the same ol’ roles that haven’t been producing fruit for years.
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Hugh Halter is the national director of Missio and pastor of Adullam in Denver Colorado. You can find out more about Hugh at his blog or follow his thoughts on Twitter. His previous writings includeThe Tangible Kingdom, And: The Gathered and Scattered Church, and The Tangible Kingdom Primer (Workbook).
Confession is the New Innocence
Men have died, countries have gone to war, and marriages have been destroyed because of the human aversion to admitting our own error and sin. The act of confessing is humiliating. It threatens self, exposing it to the one who hears the confession, and makes agreement with the “enemy” that the unfavorable ideas about us are actually true. This tears at the very walls of self, threatening to shake it to the foundation. How many times have you seen a politician avoid confession for fear of losing a position, or a parent resist confession for fear of looking weak in a child’s eyes? The resistance to confession promises to protect us, to keep up the charade, to help us maintain our power and our image.
Confession is a dangerous thing to a life built on the goodness, rightness, and excellence of self. Without confession of guilt there is no innocence for the sinner. That means confession is a requirement for us all.
Confession Precedes Forgiveness First John 1:9 clearly states that “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” The two things go together. Confession precedes forgiveness, just as our first confession precedes our salvation. As it says in Romans 10:10, “For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.” So our confession leads to our salvation. Confession is of ultimate importance in the life of faith. In fact, without it there is no faith. Only those who fail to confess their sin miss out on the grace and forgiveness of God.
Our resistance to confession does two things: it keeps us from the forgiveness our sins need, and it also calls God a liar because to fail to confess is to say “I have not sinned.” And “if we say we have not sinned, we make him [God] a liar, and his word is not in us” (1 John 1:10). He says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23).
If this is the case, then how is confession not a daily part of our lives, from sunup to sundown? Surely if our sin requires confession, then each day must have its own time of confession.
But confession isn’t much talked about in the modern church, meaning the body of believers, beyond the confession of salvation and confession of crimes prosecutable in a court of law. Why do you suppose that is? What is our fear in the area of confession? Could it be all that it requires of man? Of the confessor it requires certain humility, embarrassment, and shame, especially when sin is confessed to or in the presence of another human being. The pain of failure and shame can be overwhelming. Just getting the words out can feel like death. So is it any wonder that we all avoid the act of confession as much as we do?
The Anatomy of Confession What is confession, exactly? Is it simply saying, “I’m sorry”? Confession of the biblical sort is the act of verbalizing not only error and remorse but also truth. When we confess our sin we admit that we were wrong and that God was right. We admit our weakness and his strength, and we admit that we agree with God.
Confession isn’t a general statement like, “I’m sorry I was a jerk,” or “I’m sorry if I hurt you.” Confession gets specific. Thomas Watson puts this idea more poetically when he says, “A child of God will confess sin in particular; an unsound Christian will confess sin by wholesale—he will acknowledge that he is a sinner in general.” So proper confession calls out the sins we committed and not just the pain we inflicted. When we are honest and specific about sin, then we make agreement with God and confession is made.
Confession is best done instantly. Why wouldn’t it be? The sooner you can confess, the sooner you find your innocence.
As Thomas à Kempis didst say, “Spit out the poison with all speed, hasten to take the remedy, and thou shalt feel thyself better than if thou didst long defer it.”
Confession, like submission, is best done immediately.
In the life of the Christian there are two kinds of confession. There is the confession that we make to God regarding our guilt and need for his forgiveness. This is the saving kind of confession, the kind that saves us from our guilt and makes us innocent. And then there is the confession that we make to man regarding our guilt and our need for healing. In James 5:16 this kind of confession is explained: “Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.” So confession both provides for our forgiveness and our healing.
Confess to God First, let’s look at the confession we make to God for the forgiveness of our sins. The Bible is filled with God’s words about confession and forgiveness. In fact, the entire book exists for this purpose, to provide the sinner the forgiveness through Christ that is needed for eternal life. It’s no wonder that confession is talked about so much throughout the Bible.
And certainly our confession, when heard by man, reveals not only a fellow sinner who understands our own struggles, but God’s redeeming power in the life of that sinner. Your confession, when made and then redeemed by the forgiving power of the blood of Jesus, allows onlookers to see God at work and to get firsthand proof that he does heal our diseases and take away our sins (Ps. 103:3).
Another beauty of confession is the power that gets behind it. 1 John 2:1–2 reveals that when you confess, you don’t do it alone, but Christ confesses with you as an advocate for you and your forgiveness. We are promised that “if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” So our confession is not done alone or in our own strength, but with the power of Christ himself.
Confession leads to peace. There is nothing more nagging than our feelings of guilt. Guilt can haunt. But unconfessed guilt can also lead to turmoil of a more physical kind. Family problems, enemies, interpersonal relationships are greatly strained by the presence of unconfessed sin.
God wants your confession; he wants you to acknowledge your guilt and in the words of Hosea 5:15 to earnestly seek his face. Confession breeds earnestness. It reminds us not only of our rejection of God, but also of our need for him and his amazing grace.
God’s grace takes away the guilt of man in exchange for the innocence of Christ. It’s his exchanging his death for our life, and our willingness to offer up our death for the life that he lives in us. Those who die young confess this truth eagerly, “I am nothing and you are everything.” This confession repeats the words of Ephesians 2:8–9 and allows us to breathe a sigh of relief. “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” In this kind of economy of faith, confession is the new innocence because of the grace that rewards it.
Confess to Man Now let’s look at the confession we make to man that leads to healing. Isn’t it interesting that God provides confession not only as an avenue for the protection of our humility, but also as an avenue for healing? And this healing isn’t only the healing of physical and emotional pain, but of spiritual pain as well. God’s best exists for the believers in community in relationship to one another (Gen. 2:18).
Community is a part of who God is as seen in the Trinity. So life for believers is best lived in community, and one of the blessings of community is the gift of confession and prayer that we can share with one another. As we confess our sins to each other, we share God’s forgiveness with each other in a tangible, audible, maybe even tactile way that reminds our souls how true it is. God allows for our need for human interaction and assurance that God is who he says he is, and that forgiveness is available for all, in spite of what the world might say about our sinfulness.
But in our failure to confess to one another, many of us retreat to the comfort of confessing to a God we cannot see.
As much as we don’t like admitting we were wrong, it is somehow easier to say that to God than to man. Many times our confessions to God might be more statements we make to ourselves about being better next time and thankfulness that God is forgiving. They might never get to the heart of a confession that states the sin and accepts the responsibility for it. But in the presence of another human being we are less likely to be unsure of our confession. As we confess to another we are forced to come face-to-face with the ugliness of our sin and to voice our guilt as a semipublic testimony of our imperfectness and his perfect trustworthiness.
On the heels of confession comes the prayer of those believers who heard it. They are standing in the gap, praying for our healing from the crippling pain of sin and its effects on our bodies. Not that all suffering is caused by sin in our lives, but God promises to relieve our suffering as we confess our sin. It might not be the sin that we confess that caused our pain, but our feelings about the pain, our resentment, bitterness, unforgiveness, worry, or doubt need confession.
No matter the case, confession of our sins and the transparency and authenticity that it brings is healthy for the soul and for the community. Your confession allows another person not only to have insight into their own sin but also to have the grace of God on that sin as well.
This is an excerpt adapted from Hayley and Michael DiMarco's book, Die Young: Burying Yourself in Christ.
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Hayley and Michael DiMarco are the best-selling authors of a combined total of over 30 books, including God Girl, God Guy, Dateable, Cupidity, and B4UD8. Their Nashville-based company, Hungry Planet, is focused on producing books that combine hard-hitting biblical truth with cutting-edge design.
We Need Five Disciplers Not One
Why do you think more and more people in the United States no longer identify themselves as Christians (see this ARIS Study)? What is turning people off to the church, or at least some forms of the church? And why is the digital generation the least involved in the church? While there are no simple answers to these questions, I want to suggest that at the heart of the matter is the lack of mature missional disciples, not just as individuals, but also as communities of God’s people. We need to be more like Jesus as a body. More and more people are beginning to recognize that the most significant measurement of success needs to move beyond how many people come to a church service to how many mature missional disciples are living in the world for the sake of the world.
So how can the church become a faithful sign, a rich foretaste and powerful instrument bringing more of heaven to earth?
A passage that I have been reflecting on for the last 12 years has much to offer us. The Apostle Paul when writing to the church at Ephesus says, “So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4:11-13).
For Paul, the maturity of the body is directly linked to the five different equippers living out their ministry in the body. Under the inspiration of the Spirit, Paul is letting us know that if we hope to have mature disciples we must be willing to recognize, receive and nourish each of the five equippers that Christ has given the church. For as the equippers incarnate their lives and ministries within the body, the whole body will be aroused and awakened to live out their sacred potential, and the body will grow in faith, hope and love.
Part of what this means is that our approach to discipleship must involve a communal dimension. We must include, but also go beyond the individualistic one-on-one approach to discipleship if we hope to develop mature missional disciples and communities. We need to let Paul’s wisdom guide us as we think about how to approach discipleship in such a way that the community become mature disciples.
This means we need to understand how each of the equippers uniquely disciple the congregation, so that we can identify and cultivate equippers in both our missional communities and congregation as a whole.
So what are the distinct ways that each of the equippers disciple missional communities and the church? What kinds of practices might they encourage the congregation to engage in, so that the community will reflect the full character and ministry of Christ?
Apostles as Dream Awakeners The apostles, who I have nicknamed dream awakeners, equip people to discover and live out their calling, in the world for the sake of the world. They help to cultivate a discipleship ethos and call people to participate in advancing God’s kingdom. They help individuals and communities live out the answer to Jesus’ prayer, “May your kingdom come, and your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:10). Dream awakeners disciple people by helping them discover their primal passions, skills and gifts, and match them to needs in the church and the neighborhood. Apostles encourage people to engage in the thick practices of disciple-making and Sabbath. Sabbath is key because as we take time to be still, we are more likely to hear the call of God on our lives, amidst the many other voices that compete for our attention.
Prophets as Heart Revealers Prophets, who I have nicknamed heart revealers, seek to help people walk with God. Through their actions and words they reveal the heart of God and the heart of the congregation. They help the community live out God’s new social order and stand with the poor and oppressed. They train disciples to grow in sensitivity to the Spirit as well as develop hearts for those that the society and/or the church have branded as outcasts. Heart revealers help people become conscious of God through silence, solitude, prayer and fasting, and they help people to be devoted to the breaking of bread where the community remembers Christ’s death, celebrates his resurrection and lives as a resurrected community.
Evangelists as Story Tellers Evangelists, or whom I call story tellers, equip the congregation to incarnate the good news in the neighborhood. They equip the congregation to proclaim the good news by being witnesses and being redemptive agents, redeeming the various spheres of society. Evangelists disciple people by helping them turn their “secular” jobs into sacred callings. They encourage and equip people to practice hospitality in all its depth. They also help people engage in sharing the good news of God’s grace in such a way that the focus is more on transformation than decision; to share the good news in a way that not only talks about the after-life, but the missional life; and in a way that people see the individual, communal and cosmic implications of the gospel.
Pastors as Soul Healers Pastors, or whom I call soul healers, equip the congregation to pursue wholeness in the context of community. They help the congregation embody reconciliation and live emotionally healthy lives. Soul healers create a healing environment where people can take off their masks and be real. They help to create a family environment where people not only pray together, but play together. They disciple people by helping them engage in habits that refresh them physically, recharge them emotionally and renew them spiritually. They encourage people to engage in the thick practices of confession and peacemaking. They help people practice confessing both their failures and victories.
Teachers as Light Givers Teachers, or whom I call light givers, equip the congregation to inhabit the sacred text. They encourage people to immerse themselves in Scripture as well as live faithfully to the story of God and the God of the story. They disciple people by helping them approach the word of God as a voice to be heard and not just a book to be read. They equip people to approach the scripture for transformation, not just information. They encourage people to regularly participate in sacred assemblies, including weekly gatherings, regional gatherings, national conferences and international assemblies. They help people engage in future-oriented living, where they partner with God to bring his future into the present.
As we examine some of the ways that the equippers uniquely equip and disciple the body, we better understand why Paul strongly links the five equippers to the maturity of the church.
Until we understand, identify and nourish the various equippers that Christ has given the church, we are likely to have immature churches that are tossed back and forth by the latest spiritual craze.
But when we release the equippers to incarnate their lives and ministries in the church together, then the entire church will awaken to use their gifts in such a way that the whole body builds itself up in love and the church rises to her sacred potential, living as if Christ were living in them.
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JR Woodward is a dream awakener and co-founder of Kairos Los Angeles, a network of neighborhood churches in the Los Angeles area. He serves on the board for the Ecclesia Network and GCM. He has a Master of Arts in Global Leadership from Fuller Theological Seminary and will be pursuing a PhD in Europe. JR enjoys coaching and consulting with a number of churches and church planters. He blogs @jrwoodward.net and tweets @dreamawakener. He recently finished writing Creating a Missional Culture: Equipping the Church for the Sake of the World, with InterVarsity Press, which is due to be released this summer (2012).