Each One Loved

In the last post, I talked about a dream for the church in which each individual would be known in a real and holy way.  Here are the four parts of that dream together:

Each one known
Each one loved
Each one called
Each one sent

Today, I'll talk a little more about what I mean by "each one loved".

It is one thing to have every person known in a real and holy way within a community of faith.  It is another thing to have each one loved.  Knowledge is a powerful thing.  To know somone and to be known is actually quite awesome.  Intimate and personal information, when it is known, can either be used for good or bad.  Love is the law of the church and it insists that knowledge of a person be used to build that person up in faith.  When we say that each one must be loved for a truly Christian community to exist, this doesn't mean that we have a warm feeling of favor and affection for each person at all times.  Rather, each one loved means that we have as our culture the practice of love and respect for every person in the community.  This love, at its height results in mutual affection and brotherly love as Paul puts it.  This love is the new commandment given by Christ by the example of washing His disciples feet.  Love sometimes means that boundaries and guardrails be placed in someone's life and in their relationships so harm cannot continue to be done to that person or others.  Love does not mean always giving a person what they want or always making sure they are happy, love is seeking the best for each person in the wisdom of God. 
The way that love can be shared among the family of God stems completely from the way we are loved by God first.  If we do not have a strong sense of God's constant, everlasting, and powerful love for us, how can we have any source to love our neighbors?  Only when we are standing on the reality of God's grace can we offer that grace to others without exausting our own emotional resources.  The Christian community should have as its first priority a meditation and singular focus on God's love for each person.  When we know that we are loved and when we know that our brother or sister is loved, it becomes natural and even easy to love others and be loved by them.
The other important emphasis of "each one loved" is that we cannot only love those who are easy to love.  The scriptures are clear that if we only love those who love us, we are no better than the pagans.  But if we love our enemy and those who are most difficult to love, it will be a testament that God's love is true and higher than human love.  If you cannot honestly say that you are able to love your enemy or those whom you do not like, what power does God's mercy, forgiveness and grace have in your life?  In the community of faith there will always be people we do not like who are not easy to love.  These are the ones we focus on loving the most by praying for them, meditating on God's love for them, and remembering God's great love for us in the midst of our struggle with that person.

Each One...

The next four posts will be about a dream I have for Christ's church.  Actually, I don't think its my dream, I believe its God's dream revealed in scripture and put in my heart.  The dream is simple but tremendously challenging:  that EVERY believer who makes up the body of Christ would experience, practice, and embody 4 things...

1. Each one Known
2. Each one Loved
3. Each one Called
4. Each one Sent

1. Each one Known - I believe what sets the church apart from the world is that people are known and seek to know others in a real way.  This begins with our primary relationship - the one with the Lord.  If we were to intentionally focus on how deeply we are known by God each day, it would radically alter our attitudes and behaviors.  God knows us because God made us inside and out.  1 Corinthians 13:12 describes heaven in this way - we will know fully, even as we are fully known.  There will come a day when we will know God as deeply as God knows us!  It is important to be in communication with the God who knows us far better than we know ourselves - this is how we constantly grow in self-awareness of our needs, our gifts, and our short-comings.
Being known doesn't stop with God.  I believe that it is God's intention that we be known by others.  By "being known" I don't mean recognizing an acquaintance,  I mean being known deeply and personally by another human being.  Most will only have a hand full of people who truly know them.  Some people feel like no one ever really knows them.  The community of Christians is built upon the premise that we will actually be known by other people outside our blood relatives and spouses.  This is a scary prospect for many people.  What if someone knows us and violates us?  What if someone knows us and doesn't accept us?  What if someone knows us and shares with others who we are before we want them to?  These are all reasons (among a host of others) why we don't want people to know us.  But I believe we cannot truly experience church the way God intended it until we are in a community where people knows us as we truly are.  We are called to be real, be honest, and be vulnerable about who we are with people we can trust in faith.
Being known means we have to know others.  It means that we have to have actively pursue with patience and compassion a deeper understanding and knowledge of other people with whom we share a faith covenant.  The flip side of being known is knowing someone else.  We often overlook the gravity that comes with truly knowing another person.  When you know someone, their lives become unified with yours.  When you know someone, you are compelled to care and be involved in their lives.  When you know someone, you are entrusted with a part of them that is extremely valuable and fragile.  But God intends us to know one another in the context of Christian community.
In order for the "Each one Known" element to work there must be communities of tremendous trust, care, sensitivity, and compassion that are built on the foundation of God's knowledge of each one of us.  The only way we can be known and know others is by first understanding that we are known by God.
Are you in Christian fellowship in such a way that you truly know others in Christ and are known by them? Do you realize how well God knows you and are you actively seeking to know Him more?

Understanding our Mission

There is a worn out cliché whose message really illumines the problem of the modern mainstream church:  “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything”.   If we do not prayerfully focus on hearing what it is God is calling us to do and to be, we will invest our resources in efforts that may have little lasting significance.  The “falling for anything” part I name as the self-preserving and self-promoting gene that dominates our individual and corporate sprits.  Without intentional focus on an alternative (i.e. holy) mission, this will be our default mission – to survive and thrive.  I worry that this is happening in the mainstream church by both clergy and lay leadership. Almost by default, people who are concerned with their churches adopt a mission to "preserve and/or expand" the ministry and reach of the church. In my own church the underlying concern and priority is "how can we continue to grow while preserving the good that we've enjoyed up to this point?" 

This sentiment isn’t in and of itself bad.  It’s when it takes center stage and becomes the defining assumption and paradigm for the church’s activity and attitude that we have a problem.   My argument is that this mission, this purpose should not be taken for granted as it is. This self-preserving and self-promoting spirit is neither directly biblical or Christ-like and should not be the core motivation of life or ministry.   Why?  Because, the preservation of the church and the promotion of the church are prerogatives of the Holy Spirit, not the people of God. The prerogative of the people of God is to follow their leader, Jesus Christ.   When we take on the wrong yoke, we may very well head in a different direction from our Lord.  

The basis for the church's mission is obedience to Christ and faith in the power of God. This may mean that we are called to things that seem to threaten our preservation or seem counter to promotion. It may mean that our numbers dwindle rather than swell.  Following Jesus may mean we become less popular in the eyes of mainstream society rather than regaining a top spot in the status of our culture.  Following our mission may mean we die before we live.  It may mean we have the cross before Easter.  The promise is that if we are obedient and we follow Christ as the church, the preservation and promotion of the Church will result according to God's timing and manner.   So why don’t we leave God to God’s work and focus on our work?  Put simply, we don’t have enough faith.

Conversion and Discipleship

For the last 200 years or so, the evangelical church has been primarily concerned with converting souls. When Europe was a Christian civilization, this was expressed through missionaries sent to parts of the world where the western version of the gospel had not been adopted. In the American colonies and then in the United States this took place through first and second great awakenings that produced a slew of denominational churches across the nation. The primary idea that demands this priority of conversion has been that thousands of people live in perilous danger of eternal damnation and it is the church’s task to offer them the good news of salvation from such a terrible end. The goal is mostly achieved once a person puts their faith in Jesus because they are now "saved" from hell. Conversion can be roughly described as the moment when an individual comes to believe in Jesus Christ as Savior and puts his or her trust in Him as Lord.

While this primary thrust of evangelism created a nation full of people who call themselves Christians, it has not maintained a church or a society that is Christ centered and Kingdom building. Rather, what we observe is a great quantity of people who have converted to Christianity (or been born to people who converted) that still function in ways in their daily lives that are completely inconsistent with a Christ-like life.

Furthermore, conversion is not the task of the church biblically speaking. The great commission is to “Go and make disciples” not to “convert and save souls”. I challange someone to make a biblical case that our mission as the church is to save the world from eternal damnation. And while “making disciples” certainly includes a conversion of heart and life, such an experience is at best the very beginning of the Christian life.

To elaborate further, let me use the analogy of baseball. For centuries our goal and aim has been to recruit people to be on the right baseball team. We've done all we can to get them in the right dugout and put the right uniform on their backs. But this is not what God commands us to do. God commands us to train and develop persons into hardworking and effective baseball players. In fact, God is more concerned that we play the game well and play it right than that we have the right uniform and are in the right dugout. To put things another way, we have prioritized orthodoxy (right belief) over orthopraxy (right practice). As the church we are charged not only to rescue souls from eternal death but to utterly recast their worldview, behavior, and attitudes so that they may become world-changing agents for the Kingdom of God.

If the modern church is to shift its mission from converting souls to making disciples, we will have to make some major changes in the way we approach worship, Christian formation, youth and children's ministries, and even our outreach to the greater community.

The Church Transforming: Attractional and Missional

Can you believe that only a couple hundred years ago (equivalent of 5-6 generations) if you were born in Western Europe you were automatically considered a member of some institutional/national church?  For example, during the American Revolution, if you were born in England, you were Anglican. Today, only a tiny number of those people’s great, great grandchildren consider themselves Christian. That’s because the church in Europe really didn’t change after the enlightenment.  Unfortunately the church we know today in the US was also largely built upon the premise of Christendom (Christian Civilization). The primary place to do any evangelical mission work was to those civilizations that had not yet been Christianized. Even the great growth of the church going westward during the 1800s was due in large part to a Christian culture that was imbedded into the imagination of the pioneers. 

This kind of church is the one that the mainstream institution still basically follows today. We stand on the assumption that if we put up a sign and build a structure, people will naturally come. In some sub-cultures, people will. If you are more traditional and carry on the practices of your grandparents, church may inherently be a part of your life. But if you're the majority of the people in our western context, you won't. We've responded to a culture that is post-Christian by ramping up our attractional efforts (better programs, more publicity, free coffee and donuts) rather than adapting our whole paradigm. In fact, the mainstream church in America is several decades behind the culture in this awareness of Christianity’s diminishing role in society. Folks in church lament the fact that society is no longer centered on "Christian values" and the obligation/duty of church attendance. But rather than adapt we complain and pray that things would return to the way they were. Even worse, we cling to a way of doing church that is comfortable to us but is no longer relevant or applicable to the majority of people (who by the way are disproportionately young).

The primary shift that must be made in our local churches is our strategies for growth. Most churches are almost entirely attractional in the way they gain new people. In other words, the non-churched have the burden of coming to us. We must move to a greatly increased focus on missional outreach, where we have the burden of going to them. This burden is not simply going outside the walls of the church to invite people back into the walls where we are comfortable. It is learning to do church in a new way that speaks the language of the people who otherwise will never come to Sunday morning worship.

The Church Transforming: Part 4

Since I began this series "The Church Transforming" at the beginning of the year, I've begun reading a book that was recommended by a friend. This book has shed tremendous insight on my adventure. The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch is a book committed to discussing the church in the western world (Europe, USA, and Australia) as one of the most crucial mission fields on earth. Without going into detail about this book I want to make sure and give it credit for many of the ideas that are swirling around in my head concerning the need to transform the mainstream institutional church into a new kind of body.

One of my major questions is "can the mainstream church as it is co-exist and function alongside a new kind of church, one that is more missional and organic?" The longer I contemplate this question, the more I believe it IS possible for an institutional church and a missional one to work together side-by-side. Let me paint a picture of the kind of scenario I'm imagining. For this post, I will simply try and point out some primary assumptions that the church will have to transform if they have a chance at reaching new people.

Think of a larger mainstream church (between 2500-3000 members) that is steeped in institutional norms (large physical campus, large full and part-time staff, countless programs and ministries) that is trying to reach a largely "unchurched" population. This "unchurched" population is defined more by the church's imagination than by its true form. In other words, the church doesn't really know who they are trying to reach. By and large, there is an assumption that the people who are not involved in the church are like those who are, but they just haven't found the right invitation or opportunity by which to come. I would argue that the fundamental problem is that most of the people who are not coming to church (more than half) actually have much different worldviews, cultural assumptions, and attitudes about life than the people who are at church. More invitations and opportunities to engage will not be enough to cross the many chasms that exist between those "inside" and those "outside" the church. This mainstream church has a choice to make. It either needs to be honest about the modest percentage of "church-friendly" folks that are out there who are potential attendees (this does not include the "church-shoppers" and "church-hoppers" who are not "unchurched" but are looking for a church), or they need to be honest that something fundamentally different must be offered to a much larger group of people who are currently "out-of-touch" with the church's very heart. The deeper truth here is that the mainstream church needs to forsake the assumption that the way they are presenting the gospel is the best or only way for all people. This church either needs to stop acting like they have "something for everybody" or start finding out what that "something" actually is.
  

Invitational AND Expectational

"Now when Jesus saw great crowds around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side. A scribe then approached and said, 'Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.' And Jesus said to him, 'Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.' Another of his disciples said to him, 'Lord, first let me go and bury my father.' But Jesus said to him, 'Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.' (Matthew 8:18-22)

It is disastrous to develop a recruitment process that is invitational without being expectational. To invite someone on a life changing journey without giving them some idea of what that journey will do to them and require of them is not only a set-up for horrible retention, it's cruel. And yet that is exactly what many mainstream churches have opted to be: invitational but not expectational. Perhaps because of an overall decline in attendance, membership, and general participation in our local churches we feel that we will scare people off if we have high standards. So we choose instead to invite everyone (which is very Biblical) and only express the positive possibilities of being a disciple without being honest about any aspects of Christ's calling that are very difficult (which is unbiblical). Perhaps we figure that if we can get new people to keep coming to our churches and get involved in our ministries and programs, they will naturally become disciplined, faithful, and trustworthy servants of the Kingdom of God. Unfortunately we see that this is not at all the case. In most of our congregations the back door that lets people out of engagement in the church is wider than the invitational one that people enter into at the front. We experience high turnover, a lack of committed leaders, and slipping sense of responsibility among most members.

I believe a big part of our problem happens at the moment of invitation. Jesus did not use marketing strategies or persuasive techniques to gain disciples. He invited them to a full commitment to his own person and if they asked what the conditions were, he was clear that the relationship with Him must be primary to all other concerns. He did not compete with the folks who had major allegiance elsewhere. Instead his market was those who had nowhere to go at all, or those who were desperately seeking for a new way of life. There simply was not a group that was invited to be moderately engaged in the life of discipleship, to have Jesus as one of many Lords. That is not to say that there were not moderately engaged people. As the opening of this passage in Matthew points out, there were crowds that followed Jesus and he would accommodate their relationship to himself. But these crowds are distinguished from disciples. As far as we can tell there is little difference between the crowd that listened intently to Jesus' teachings and the crowd that shouted "Crucify Him!"

It is time that our local churches are more honest about what Christ calls his disciples to be and become. To do this we must first seek an earnest understanding of what that is. What does it mean to be a disciple? What are we really inviting people to? Moderate participation in a religious organization? Or life changing commitment to a savior and community that was designed by God to transform the world?