I want to share an entry from another organic church leader’s that simply says what I think most church practitioners don’t really get. It’s a continuation of my entry “the people are the product“. It’s the fact that we’re out to make disciples and not plant churches. When I was working my way through the church planting training mechanism of our denomination, I constantly heard, “The only way to evangelize the United States is through saturation church planting.” Which means, we need to plant as many churches as possible [specifically institutional style churches with a hip makeover]. Because new churches always are geared towards evangelism and old churches are geared towards taking care of their own. So the only way is to just keep planting as many as financially possible.

But that misses the point all together – because: first, new churches of that stripe aren’t necessarily evangelizing/disciplemaking more so than they are working to get more people in the building; and secondly it’s then wrongly assuming that building more institutions leads to more disciples. That is a lie of the devil – the same as having a nice home leads to whole and healthy families. Maybe sorta… but really, no.

Roger Thoman’s post is simply reminding us that our goal and heart and passion should be making disciples… helping them fall deeply in love with Jesus, follow him with reckless abandon and then help them help others… and continuing the viral nature of the Gospel through the world. Check it out.

Discipling Viral Disciplers
By Roger Thoman
Originally Posted HERE

I no longer try to start simple/house churches.  I think house churches are great.  They provide a place for people to experience participatory, everyone-matters church life.  They provide a way for people to really connect into authentic, one-another community.  They often provide a place for people to recover from some of the pains caused by institutional church life.  But house churches are no longer the end game for me.

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.”

Next door to the place we rent for our monthly worship are these boarding homes for many formerly homeless and persons with mental illness. And we’ve sporadically gone over and tried to find ways to love them. Honestly it’s been hard. We’re just beginning to understand [after 4+ years] what the issues are. We’ve tried different things – some things worked well and other things failed royally: clothes drives, small Bible studies, simple worship services, etc. What we’ve learned is that so many of them live very lonely existences, suffering from all of sorts of problems [some self-imposed and others just by consequence]. They live lonely existences because many of their families have rejected them, people generally don’t talk to them and they are a “forgotten” people in the system.

So what we’ve been doing [until God tells us otherwise] is that we go over, bring lunch for all of us and just hang out. We’ve been doing this off and on over the course of the last year. We ask them how they are doing, what their story is, where they are from, etc. And we ask them if they need any prayer and we pray. And that’s about it – there’s nothing fancy, we don’t stay terribly long. We just share a meal and be friends.

And what it’s done is remind us that there’s no reason to be afraid – these are people most wouldn’t talk to on the street. But they’re people just like us – who have experienced some hard moments, who are working through their struggles and are just needing a reminder that they matter in this world. The truth is that we’re all the same.

We went yesterday and had a great time in the sun, eating Chinese food and talking life. We’ve been doing it for a while, but I think we are just beginning to get why we need to be there [for both our good] and we’re slowly understanding Jesus’ heart to love the least. I got a hug from James Taylor yesterday… he said, “You guys are good people… you’re our buddies.” This is after 4+ years of knowing each other. Things don’t happen overnight. And God has used our time there to birth something in them and in us.

We got this letter today from Michelle who is a resident there:

Dear Elton and family,their friends,and their church community;

THANK-YOU!!!,very much for the fun get-together and lunch that was put on by you guys yesterday here at the Victorians Independant living community.Everybody that I talked to said that they had a good time,and to tell you “Thank-you!!!We feel very honored to have you and the prescence of GOD here every time you come and fellowship with us.Through the love of Christ,you show consideration and compassion for us-we really do appreciate this.May god bless you always,in the great work you guys(and gals) do for us and everyone your hearts “Touch”.We are truly blessed.

With love,through God, The residents of the Victorians.
ps- Great food!!! )))))))

Also posted @ ihaven.org.

The past five years for Sarah and I have been the toughest of our lives. We’ve had to endure some tragic moments, work through the realities of marriage and struggle to learn on the job as we lead our church. We’ve had every range of emotion – from elation to frustration; from awe-filled to awful. That last one doesn’t really work, but oh-well.

And God seems to keep coming back to one question, “Do you love Me more than everything else?” And there are moments I feel like I answer well and yet life puts it to the test again – whether it’s frustration with our church or working through the pains of having children [or not having children]. Life finds a way to put what you believe in the crucible.

I find myself needing to choose over and over… is it God that I love and follow? Or is it success? Or respect? Or fame? Or security? It’s always the simple truths that I have to come back to.

I was flipping channels and I came across some random TBN-ish station where they were interviewing Nick Vujicic. He was born without arms and legs, radically received Jesus and is now traveling the world as an evangelist. And I caught the interview right when he said, “God asked me, ‘Nick, would you rather have me or arms and legs?’” Nick shared how he was whining to God about not being like everyone else… and in his moment of despair, God asked him that question and told him that he’ll do things he’ll never imagine doing. But it doesn’t include arms and legs.

And I started thinking – most of us [including most Christians] will think that’s just down right cruel. That God would pit himself against something like arms and legs. It’s borderline abusive. But the reality of our world is this – we will never be free if God isn’t the one we desire most. We will worship, build our worth or grow co-dependent on anything we can put our hands on. And I’m realizing that I’m never really free if Jesus isn’t the one I love most – if his opinion, his approval, his embrace isn’t the most important one.

I’m finding that everything I do puts that to the test… when I talk to people I’ve never met, lead with ideas that I “think” are from God or endure failure in things I try, it always comes up… “Is pleasing me, obeying me, following me… reason enough?” He has to ask me that… he has to… for my own good. Most of the time, I hate it.

And I have to choose every day… and often multiple times a day [or I won't make it]… “Alright Jesus… it’s you that I want. It’s your opinion that matters, it’s your truth that I believe, it’s your love that I bank on. I choose you.” Over the fleeting affection of fame, attention, respect, success. And yes, maybe even arms and legs. And the freedom that he promises begins to pour into my soul… sometimes just little droplets… but other times in great outpourings. And it can’t be found anywhere else. God pitting himself against my desires/dreams/idols is what I need whether I like it or not.

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.

2. We create co-dependent relationships with the church and not dependent relationships with God. Since we’re doing all we can to get people to go/commit to Sundays – we must continually provide them a reason to go… and almost without any cost to them [except for missing football]. First this inadvertently communicates that church is the primary spiritual service provider [ala Comcast Cable] and we depend on it to provide our spiritual nourishment. Without it we’ll die. Even though we tell people to read the Bible, pray, etc., we wouldn’t dare have them miss a Sunday to do any of those things. And our structures affirm that and therefore a co-dependency on the church is formed.

You see this when college students leave a very lively church/campus ministry and move away after college. Their involvement in church dwindles, they experience God less, etc. And you ask many of them and they blame it on church – “I can’t find a church that I like,” or “There’s nothing like what I was a part of in college.” What’s revealed is that they’re more connected to the church than God. The church does the “work” for them, so what they see is the church and not God.

Henri Nouwen prophetically said in “The Wounded Healer” that he’s afraid the church in coming years will have failed it’s most important task… and that’s to help people connect directly to God. This was in 1972. And I’m afraid he was right.

Secondly, the structure enables a very consumeristic approach to community. I run into too many people who are “church hopping,” looking for the place that’s just right for them [and they say it too, "I'm church hopping!"]. You see people who move churches every 2 or 3 years – it’s a reflection of all our relationships. Consumers will sacrifice the relationship for their own personal benefit. But the Gospel says that God sacrificed his personal benefit for our relationship. When our structures enable consumeristic approaches to our faith, we are not communicating the Gospel. Plain and simple.

To wrap up a long post:

I’m not saying we should stop meeting on Sundays. But all our structures should help form disciples of Jesus. And preaching alone does NOT disciple people the way we think it does. It’s not that the message is bad, it’s that there’s no accountability for actually living what is preached. It’s too easy for someone to come in and be “pricked” by a compelling message and leave without any need to live it out. Is there a way to redeem that part of our structure?

One example – I was speaking at a retreat about identifying lies that Satan uses to cripple us [ie. "I'm not good enough," "I can't do it," "I'm a failure"]. And after preaching, we had time to meditate and write down the lies. And then I said something like this, “I want you to practice living out one truth and keeping one command – that because of Jesus we should have no fear of other people’s opinions. Because Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross defines our worth, not other people’s opinions. Secondly, James commands us to confess our sins to one another. So what I want you to do is to share the lies you’ve written down with the person next to you. And I want the person who is listening to affirm it by saying, ‘That’s a lie.’”

All of a sudden half the crowd gave me this stunned look. As if to say, “Are you serious? How am I supposed to share my deepest insecurity with the person next to me?” But slowly they started to share and slowly tears began to fall. And the pastor of the church went so far as to say, “Now rotate! Do it again with someone else!” And right then the Holy Spirit honored their willingness to obey Jesus’ simple commands and actually believe in the Gospel… and people began to experience God. It’s a simple example of how we can value the proclaimed word and yet have an expectation of obedience and aid the process of discipleship.

Though, in my opinion what the church needs to do is really study our culture and society and really listen to the voice of God. And then begin with the organizing principle of making disciples and be willing to sacrifice form for the sake of making disciples, especially the prideful need to maintain Sunday worship. For many the only way to help people really see Jesus is to take away the thing that obscures their view.

I have more to say and I can imagine there are points needing clarification… but I’ll save it for another post or in the responses. Thanks Carl for the topic.

From my friend David – it’s so short, I’ll just repost the whole thing… his quote and commentary. It’s very true. David’s last statement reminds me of the response the Pharisees had when this heretical Jesus guy started threatening the “institution”; they were very aware of what was at stake – per John 11:48.

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.

In this case, the entity of the church serves to develop people [disciples/leaders specifically]. It provides them with space to practice their giftings, room to make mistakes and opportunities to grow as both a leader and a child of God. The goal is people and we’ll structure our community in anyway that works at developing people.

But when the goal is the entity of the church – the thing we’re producing – I can’t have my untrained rookies publicly teaching. Because the moment they make a mistake, it negatively affects the product. I need to have ordained, seminary trained people in there or the product will not be “up to par”. And the moment they are not able to produce, we need to replace them. Because the goal is the “church” and goals are not expendable… the means to them are.

In the end… after all this fancy [or not-so-fancy] explaining of goals and expendability and “being” the church… in the end, the people are the product. And that’s just another way of saying that the church is not the building or the organization but the people. As McManus says, “We are the church and we’re here for the world.”

And if so, then what do our churches look like when our passion is about developing people, loving those that aren’t high achievers, learning to heal/fuel relationship, not just use it to get what we want… and just helping people walk in simple obedience to Jesus? It means that sometimes things go really slow… and other times things go really fast. You change a lot of diapers, but you rejoice when you see life truly emerge. And you don’t worry too much about what you’ve created as an entity… or the lifespan of what you’ve created… but you rejoice in the fact that what you’ve “helped” create [God does it in the end mind you] will go way beyond just “Haven” or the next church plant or the next thing we build. People transformed, passionate about Jesus and what he’s done for the world. And moving out all over the world, finding no other way but to share Jesus with others and follow Him with a lovesick reckless abandon. When we see that… who cares about Haven… or whatever it is that we’ve “built”.

The people are the product.

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.

Originally taken from here. An excerpt from Seth Godin’s book Tribes.

Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead. The scarcity makes leadership valuable. If everyone tries to lead all the time, not much happens. It’s discomfort that creates the leverage that makes leadership worthwhile. In other words, if everyone could do it, they would, and it wouldn’t be worth much.

It’s uncomfortable to stand up in front of strangers.
It’s uncomfortable to propose an idea that might fail.
It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.
It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.

When you identify the discomfort, you’ve found the place where a leader is needed. If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader.

A quote from comedian John Cleese from Monty Python fame :

“I think that the real religion is about the understanding that if we can only still our egos for a few seconds, we might have a chance of experiencing something that is divine in nature. But in order to do that, we have to slice away at our egos and try to get them down to a manageable size, and then still work some practiced light meditation. So real religion is about reducing our egos, whereas all the churches are interested in is egotistical activities, like getting as many members and raising as much money and becoming as important and high-profile and influential as possible. All of which are egotistical attitudes. So how can you have an egotistical organization trying to teach a non-egotistical ideal? It makes no sense, unless you regard religion as crowd control. What I think most organized religion—simply crowd control.”

I rarely do a lot of ranting via the blog – and God has slowly worked down a lot of bitterness in me. So this is not so much a rant against the church, but an acknowledgment that the world sees the disconnect between the message and the method [medium]. We think we can use whatever means to communicate the Gospel… as long as it goes out. But our method is contradicting our message and everyone knows it.

It’s in line with what John says in his Gospel that the Word was God… the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us [1:1,14]. Jesus wasn’t just communicating a message – he was the message. He embodied the message – how he lived, who he was, his identity, his purpose, his being was as much the message as the words that came out of his mouth.

We need to recognize how our method is contradicting our message… and begin to repent and reform.