EL’s Dribble

I have a lot to catch up on… a lot to share. It’s been a full few months [including just returning from India] – God is teaching me a lot. But here’s a mini-quote from Neil Cole that feeds a lot into why we do what we do. It seems at times like we are “under-structured.” Though to be frank, we can use more of in some areas [though always less than most people think].

But the point is this… there’s this delicate balance with connecting people to the organization and connecting people directly with God. The organization as a family is needed and important. But so often people’s experience of “God” is their experience with the organization. And when life takes them out of the organization, they wonder whether they actually saw God at all.

So the goal is to always help people experience God for themselves… redirect them to Jesus in all cases. Not shield hardship, have them practice what they have learned immediately. It’s hard, but if it’s about making disciples and not growing the amount of church attendees, then it has to be done.

A short telling quote from Neil Cole:

“We want people to imprint on Christ from day one. Imprinting is a term from ornithology, the study of birds. When a baby gosling hatches, it imprints on the first moving object it sees. That object becomes its mother, and the gosling expects to be fed and protected by it.

When a person comes to faith in Christ, most churches tell them to just sit back and receive. They’re spoon fed by the church. And what happens? They imprint on the church or the pastor. They expect the church to do everything. And we wonder why there are so many passive Christians.

There is an alternative. Christ immediately deployed people. Matthew was back with his friends. The Samaritan woman went back to her village. When a brand new Christian is thrust into a hostile environment with a mission, they’re going to pray like crazy. That makes them imprint on Christ immediately.”

Before we get too far into this – I don’t think theres’s a magic “method” that does it right. There’s a reason why the Bible says very little about church models. Frankly it’s so we wouldn’t rely on structure and hunger and depend on Jesus. With that being said, there is a problem when our structures get in the way of seeing Jesus.

I’m email convo-ing with my friend Carl and we were talking about the shift in opinions on the need for regular Sunday worship. We both agreed there’s nothing inherently wrong with meeting Sundays – it’s not so much the structure, but nurturing communities where we live our faith tangibly among those who have yet to know Jesus. So it doesn’t matter what you do. Sort of.

But my problem with stopping the conversation there is that we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing and not ponder whether our structures are communicating a different message. I contended with C-dog that the predominant structures in our present season of history are keeping us from really seeing Jesus. And even though structures are morally neutral, we also have to plant alternative forms in order break us out of a myopia and begin seeing Jesus clearly.

I’ll just throw out a few reasons and then follow up with a few more in another post. In a previous post, I said that the organizing principle needs to be “making disciples.” Making disciples means developing followers of Jesus and followers of Jesus can be broken down to be lovers of God and the world. And our development as disciples is measured by 2 things… LOVE and OBEDIENCE.

But the predominant structure of a weekly Sunday worship and small group accessories communicates the following:

1. The primary expectation of being a Christian is going to church, behaving well and tithing. Why is that? Because nothing dictates the actions of the church more than Sunday attendance. When there is little Sunday attendance, we need to hire a better preacher, provide better coffee and send out more flyers. When it’s high, we need to find ways to keep people going on Sundays by doing BBQs, having a better children’s ministry or a larger worship production. We can talk about “living out” what we believe, but our structure and how we implement it tells us that being a Christian means going consistently to church and doing the Christian-ish things that keep a Sunday worship going.

When I speak with my parent’s generation of Christians, it’s almost impossible for them to define their faith outside of going to church. When I say we don’t meet every Sunday, the first thing they say is, “Where do they go on Sundays then?” And I say, no where… and the look comes on the face of 97% of them… disgust, confusion, shock. It’s like I started wearing my underwear on my head. I even had someone say, “How will they know they’re Christian then?”

When we started NOT meeting every Sunday [we were meeting every Sunday at one point], people said it took a while to get used to it. They’d say, “When I’d wake up on Sunday morning and realized that I didn’t need to go to church… I’d feel… a little… guilty.” They didn’t miss community/worship, they felt guilty. Most people felt like sub-par Christians for not going to church. And their faith was defined more by what they did then by what Jesus has done.

In summary, the Gospel says one thing, our structures say another.

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As I talk to more people about our community I realize that the disconnect most often begins at this point: that church is not something you build/create, but the church is who you are.

Now this isn’t new news. It has been long talked about among many of this generation’s church planters and failed mega-church dreamers. I can hear them now, “We need to BE the church! Not DO church!” But in the end, most people still do church. I see this because many still see church as this thing you build.

It’s not necessarily all wrong in that there is an environment/ethos that each person of a church community contributes to. And that “thing” then becomes the driving force to do/build/create “church” as we know it.

Though some of that isn’t wrong, we miss something very crucial… that if church is something outside of you then that thing can easily become the “product” – the thing we produce. Whether it be the physical aspect of the building or an expansion of the organizational entity [more groups/worship services, etc.]… that becomes the thing we produce. And we miss out on why Jesus does what he does.

Jesus didn’t die on the cross for more buildings or even more worship services. He died so that the world [you, me and the person you hate] would be reunited with the one who loves and discover for themselves their need to love him back. And it’s this love relationship that begins a transformation in us that we can’t do ourselves. And that transformation within us that spurs on a transformation in others. In the end, Jesus died for you and me.

Which means that we’re the goal… we’re the destination… we’re the reason Jesus bore our shame and guilt so that we would live and live freely, fully and purposefully. You see, goals are never expendable. They’re your goals. You don’t give those up. But the means by which you get them are expendable… you use the ones that work and ditch the ones that don’t.

When the entity of church becomes the goal, the people are expendable. But if people are the goal, the entity of the church [methods/structure] is expendable. It becomes about developing people and just finding the means to get there. It’s not building the church and finding the people to get there.

Now we can go 100 ways with this from here on out… questions come up like, “Is it wrong to build buildings?” or “Why do we always veer towards putting out a product?” or “Why is this post so darn long?”

But we’ll go with one short example…

We do a Sunday worship thing once a month. That requires another post all together I know. But in anycase, lately I have had some of my leaders take turns doing the corporate teaching time. They learn how to prepare, listen for the Holy Spirit, practice their public speaking and learn how to shepherd people from that vantage point. It’s overall been very good. No outright heresy as of yet. They’ve all had very powerful things to say… and have helped people understand Jesus better. It’s not perfect and they have plenty of room to grow… but they’re doing great. I’m proud of them.

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As the primary instigator of Haven, I’m often asked why we do what we do. Those who have gone to church for any significant length of time always have the most difficulty understanding. And I don’t necessarily blame them as reflected in this post. When you’ve done something for so long and have understood it to be true, it’s hard not to have extreme reactions.

But the dialogue on why we do what we do always begins with the organizing question [principle] of “How do we make disciples?” And “disciples” would then need to be defined as being “wholly devoted followers of Jesus.” And even this could be broken down to being genuine and passionate lovers of God and people.

I realize that the mistake most make is that they always begin the conversation with form. I heard a prominent pastor share about how he started his church and he said that he didn’t really know where to start except that he needed a Sunday worship and Sunday school. A few years down the line, he had an epiphany that his forms [structure] were the things that were hindering him from doing what he really wanted but he never saw it.

This isn’t to say that churches need to abandon weekly Sunday worship services… but that we should evaluate what we do by what we want to accomplish. The church has borrowed too much from the business world, but asking this simple management question seems necessary.

A lot of things also play into this with regards to my own leadership style, my spiritual giftings/bent, etc. So I’ll start a few string of posts explaining why we do what we do and I’m sure that’ll help our people and help me articulate what has been ruminating in my head for these past few years.

More to come.