Christ In Y'all

Update your link

2009-10-05T13:20:00.004-04:00

In case you still haven't done it, please update your bookmarks and/or links to catch my blog at its new location:

http://christinyall.wordpress.com

Thanks!

New Book Look, New Blog Location

2009-08-18T17:52:00.005-04:00

Two announcements for anyone following what I post these days:

1. New book revision on the way! I've had plenty to think about the last few months, so of course there's lots to write about. The new version of Christ In Y'all is about 40 pages longer, has a new chapter, and represents an updated version of how I'm thinking about things these days. Check out the cover design Brad Thomas came up with for me:

Pretty cool, huh? Looks professional now. A bit less homemade :-)

2. I'm moving my blog to WordPress, so from now on you'll need to access this blog from this site:

ChristInYall.WordPress.com

First Day of School, First Broken Arm

2009-08-08T20:21:00.006-04:00

The three older girls had their first day of school this week. So here's our annual first day of school pic:

We also went to Children's Healthcare of Atlanta to get a for-real cast put on Dorothy's broken arm. We decided Dora needed a cast, too. So now she's got one (you have to look close!) That Dorothy still loves her tongue!

You have to admit, she does look really cute walking around with that tiny little sling. People everywhere involuntarily say "aawwwww" wherever she goes.

Long Evening at the Carter House

2009-08-03T22:22:00.006-04:00

Our toddler, Dorothy, gives me fits these days because she's always on the verge of something dangerous. I'm not even sure how she worked this one out, but she got up on our piano bench when our backs were turned and she fell off, apparently twisting her arm and breaking it.

Her sisters were pretty concerned as we hauled her off to the doctor and then to the emergency room. But thankfully their grandparents had just arrived in town, so we had help with the older three while April and I were at the hospital.

It was a tough evening, but all's well that ends well. Dorothy got some supper (at 9:30pm!) and sat with Grandmama watching her new favorite show, Dora.

I'm going to sleep.

Ohio Trip 12: Four Meetings and an Epiphany

2009-07-31T13:35:00.017-04:00

Day Nine of my trip gave me the opportunity to attend for different meetings of Grace Gathering.

MEETING 1

Corporate worship at Grace Gathering (GG) happens on Sunday morning in a multi-purpose gym/meeting hall with concert-style lighting, commercial grade carpet, and tons of round tables for gathering around during the service. And while the praise band led worship from the stage, the pastor spoke from the middle of the floor, which I thought was great. There's an unspoken message communicated in the arrangement of a room, and having the preacher address the congregation like this really says something.

Chris's message was about using a variety of forms of expression for worship. It was interactive. It began with a call for people to share personalized Psalms they had written the week before, and three people took advantage of the open mic to read theirs to the whole congregation. I loved that. My only disappointment was that he cut it off after only three. I wanted to hear many more. But I guess he had a lot more to say, and only so much time to say it. After he spoke about raising hands or clapping during worship, we sang a song and did what he suggested. After he spoke about laying prostrate before God in worship, we spread out and did just that. I thought that was pretty well done. He encouraged all who were in attendance to go home to their home churches and try putting these forms into practice. Clearly there was fundamental integration between the equipping ministry of the teaching pastor and the work-it-out-in-real-life function of the house church here at GG. As my hosts, the Heckleys, told me, the HC setting "gets trumpeted" from the pulpit (or gym floor) every week. And that's what it takes. The guy up front's gotta believe in it, or it just won't fly.

MEETING 2

After "big church" (as we called it growing up) I had the pleasure of joining one of the small groups for their meeting in one of the rooms at the church building. Because this group specializes in ministering to people with special needs, they use the church's handicap-accessible facilities for their meetings. Today they were having a party, and I had a good time. One new friend wandered in looking for some company and found a room full of accepting folks. Since he had lost his wife several months ago, he was clearly still hurting and looking for some fellowship and encouragement. He seemed to have found it the moment he walked in. I was touched by that.

I was also touched by the warmth and encouragement of the group as prayer concerns and updates were offered. The fellowship and community-knitting was evident to me, an it was like water for my soul. We prayed for one another, ate some pizza, and played Mad Gabs and laughed a lot. It was a good party, with some very sweet people. I'm glad Scott recommended visiting them.

MEETING 3

Immediately after that the leaders of all the HC's at GG got together to talk about their progress in the transition from "attractional" to "incarnational" (those aren't their words, I borrowed them from somewhere else). I was glad to sit in on this meeting as well, because I got to see some of the downside to this task. There was some notable discouragement apparent in the group, as many of them were struggling to transfer ownership of the small group from the leaders to the rest of the Body. This is where the rubber meets the road, and it takes some outstanding ministry to change folks from passive spectators to active participants in the work of the church.

My suspicion is that it takes a heavy dose of high, deep revelation from the gospel to make this transition happen well, and I just didn't hang around long enough to figure out if that has been a part of their experience. Let me digress from the leaders' meeting for a second to explain what I mean:

The Rest of the Gospel

The way I see it, the gospel is not just a short story, with four or five bullet points telling you how to "get saved" and go to heaven. The gospel, as I understand it, is a much larger story that begins with God seeking to establish a family on Earth whom He will inhabit, and through whom He express Himself in visible, tangible ways. This is what Christ came to accomplish, and it doesn't stop when you get saved--it's only just begun.

I think that larger story, when grasped and communicated in all its vast richness, FUELS the mission of the church in such a way that your methodology becomes so much less important then what drives the activity of the church. More to the point, I think a church can major on pragmatic goals, structures, methods, and measurements, and never really hit that "sweet spot" that I'm talking about.

When you hit a golf ball right, it makes this beautiful "click" noise, and you have to feel it to know exactly what I'm talking about. That's what happens when the ball and the club come together the right way. All the golf lessons in the world won't fix your game until you discover what hitting on that "sweet spot" feels like.

It's kind of like that. When a group of people really SEE what it means to be in Christ and for Him to be in them, as a them, it changes everything. It opens up a world of ministry that wouldn't make sense in any other context. Folks have to see what it means to be the Body of Christ. It's like an epiphany. You mind shifts and suddenly you look at the church in a totally new way.

Folks at GG (and Apex and anywhere else) will have to be struck by this realization. Something has to click in place in their minds before the church really "gets it" and becomes what she was meant to be. I've known this for a long time. But what's new to me at the moment is the possibility that our actions may sometimes precede our thinking just as readily as the other way around. I was taught that belief always precedes action, and that you have to change how people think before you can change how they behave. Nowadays I'm not so dogmatic about this. I'm beginning to wonder if it's just as likely that you can initiate new behavior and watch it gradually lead to a changed way of thinking. In other words, belief and behavior are symbiotic, just like the different corners of the triangle from the last post. Sometimes one precedes the other, but sometimes it's the other way around. I dunno. Just something I'm processing these days.

The upshot of all this is that I still think churches need a significant amount of ministry from its leaders in order to equip them to do the work of the church (see Ephesians 4:11-16). I still think that ministry needs to be heavily soaked in the "bigger Christ" and the "bigger cross" that I wrote about in Christ In Y'all. But then, that's why you write a book, isn't it? Because you believe in something?

MEETING 4

My visit with GG ended with a visit to one last HC, this time at the home of Brad and Heather Thomas. This group felt more familiar to me than so many previous ones this week because these were all young families with small kids. Their logistical struggles were similar to ours (what do you do with/for all these kids?!). But this group felt like they are still figuring out what they're about, in a way. The leaders of this group still hold the reins, and they've got a long way to go for that to no longer be the case.

What encouraged me most about this is that they know this is their objective. They discussed that shift in functioning from the leadership to the rest of the Body, and that means they're light years ahead of so many other churches who don't even know that's their goal. There's a significant hurdle to jump when it comes to this transfer of leadership and it remains to be seen whether it can be done on this scale all at once.

Which is easier: Starting small, with a single small group, building in the distributed leadership from the beginning and building outward from the first group, or taking a medium-sized church (with several hundred people) and rolling out a transition plan for all of them en masse? The latter would take some serious patience, humility, and a very slow pace in order to be done well.

And the former? Well not everybody has the luxury of starting from scratch, or the gifting for it. I sure see some benefit to being a part of a larger support network from the beginning. Starting small from scratch means starting with precious few resources. Maybe it's a different story in the midst of a nation-wide revival (e.g. Xenos in the Jesus Movement), but what about right now? What about in the South, where more people trust the validity of an established church than some fly-by-night rogue folks starting their own thing?

Like I said, still processing...

On a personal note, I enjoyed hanging out some with Brad Thomas, who reminds me of me in a lot of ways. Only he's got real design skills, and designs logos for a living. So I asked him to come up with a new cover design for my book (and this blog). I've wanted that since the very beginning, and now it looks like the Lord provided somebody to fill that need. Woohoo! You should see a way cooler book redesign soon, so stay tuned. I'll also be revising the book in order to account for some of the shift in my thinking over the last year or two. I hope to have it ready in time to send to the next House Church conference in Dallas.

There's so much more that can be said upon reflection about this trip. It'll take me a while to unpack and digest all that I saw and heard along the way. But I'll try to tie it all together a little in the final post in this series.

In the meantime, I leave you with a couple of photos I snapped on my way out of Indiana early Monday morning.

Ohio Trip 11: Ft. Wayne, Indiana

2009-07-30T17:38:00.021-04:00

Welcome to Ft. Wayne, Indiana, where the corn is as high as an elephant's eye...

My final church to visit was Grace Gathering, a traditional community church still early in the process of transitioning to the home church model. Unlike the last three churches, who seemed to be "winging it" for the most part, Grace Gathering is following a model borrowed form a famously innovative church called St. Thom's in Sheffield, England. These guys have really done their homework. I spent part of an evening chatting with Scott Jester, the House Church (HC) coordinator for the church, and he caught me up on the story:

While Grace Gathering (GG) has long been into tweaking their organizational structure (previously they divided up into several mini-congregations), their foray into the house church model followed on the heels of a visit to England in order to learn from St. Thom's. Both Scott and Chris Norman, GG's teaching pastor, spent a good bit of time researching models and ideologies in order to find the right fit for their church. Once again, I am reminded that this kind of transition requires that the "up front" people buy into this vision or else it won't fly at all.

And like Apex in Dayton, these folks found that the transitional period unavoidably leads to a thinning out of the congregation. Some folks like just sitting in a pew, thank you, very much! They don't want to be thrown into a living room where they're suddenly expected to function in some way other than taking up space. Perhaps the stories of Apex and GG warn us that churches need lots of "transitional ministry," where the newer, decentralized model gets an extensive introduction, and where fundamental mindsets about church get challenged "from the pulpit" as it were. But again, that throws a good bit of responsibility back on the leaders, who will likely be improvising so much that they wish they had a script or an outline to follow once in a while.

I think both churches (Apex and Grace Gathering) illustrate the importance of getting help from other people (or groups) who have already implemented some of this decentralization themselves. Apex has gleaned some from Xenos and from the previous HC experience of a couple of their elders. Grace Gathering very studiously sought out examples, models, and even consultants who specialize in helping churches do this kind of thing. This transition is NOT EASY. It's messy, and you'll quite certainly lose folks in the process. But counting nickels and noses can't be too important to you if you're going this route, so maybe folks know to expect that already.

When numerical growth necessitated that GG build a new meeting facility, they kept it minimalistic. Their building consists primarily of a single meeting hall (which is actually a gym with indoor/outdoor carpet and a stage) attached to an inviting coffee house-style foyer, plus a few smaller meeting rooms for smaller groups and kids programs. One medium-sized room houses the kids worship meeting, and there's a cool little den with some video games hooked up to an LCD projector.

Grace Gathering borrows heavily form St. Thom's conceptual world, tossing around phrases like "low control, high accountability," plotting their course according to four stages of growth (which I found pretty instructive as well), and perhaps most helpful of all, borrowing Mike Breen's triangular UP, IN, and OUT visual in order to balance out the priorities of the church. As long as nobody sues me for it, I'll be stealing these things myself, thank you!

Each home church that forms within their network is expected to develop a "missional focus"--a ministry to a specific target like troubled teens, or low-income immigrants, or a food bank. And in time most of them do. Following the advice of Kent Hunter (aka The Church Doctor) a while back they decided to group their HC's together according to missional focus. So now there is a cluster of churches ministering to the needs of a sizable local Burmese population, another cluster serving with Angel Food ministry, and another working with a local youth center, etc. This way, the separate groups don't feel quite so isolated in their ministries and they can draw strength from each other's numbers. Pretty cool idea, I think.

As fabulous as all this looks on paper, I still have some reservations about how they're going about it all. I'll need to save that for another post. But for now, I have to compliment my hosts, Todd and Sue Heckley, for their entertaining conversation and their warm hospitality.

And for letting me come stay a couple of nights in their home, which was just a few hundred yards from the church campus (very convenient!).

Ohio Trip 10: Reflecting on Columbus

2009-07-27T19:43:00.023-04:00

One of the things I look for when I visit a group is the effect it has on a person after a decade or more. I'm not particularly interested in how great things look after a year or two. How does a person fare after 10-12 years in a church? That's something worth noting. That's also why my ears perked up when a member of Xenos asked Ajith Fernando about how to maintain lifelong relationships when your home groups reconstruct and reproduce every three to four years (as they do with Xenos).

This commitment to duplication/multiplication is largely responsible for Xenos' enormous size and successfulness (they've got over 4000 members, most of whom are regularly plugged into 270 house churches!). But something is lost when you keep multiplying so many times over again. As this sister admitted to me later, you can only connect at such a deep level so many times before you can't really do it so well anymore. You become close to people over a period of years only to have them redistributed in order to start a new group with a new set of people. And with schedules as busy as they have, there's not really any space left for maintaining relationships outside of your most immediate relational commitments.

Consider, for example, a sample Xenos member's weekly commitments: You and your spouse meet with a house church one night a week, but you also lead a group of college students in their house meeting another night. You attend a "central teaching" once a week at the main campus along with the rest of the house churches in your "sphere" (cluster). Your children attend different central teachings and home groups, though, and since one is a high school student and the other is an elementary student, they keep two different gathering schedules, too.

But that's not all. Since a good "xenoid" also disciples people, you've also got a weekly meeting with at least one younger believer for prayer, counsel, and teaching. You will likely also meet occasionally with others who are discipling folks in what are known as "workers' meetings." Add to that one purely social outreach event a month and a prayer meeting or two and BAM! You're burnt out in a few years. It just seems a bit over the top to me. And since those groups regularly subdivide as a matter of principal, I can see how lifelong relationships would be really hard to maintain. And one of Ajith's main points was that the church should be providing a witness that's counter-cultural, resisting the fragmented, frenzied style of life to which we've all become so accustomed. Needless to say, that sister's question caught my attention and confirmed a lurking suspicion.

To be fair, I should admit that some seem to be managing this kind of busy-ness with grace and competence. My young hosts, Jim and Lisa, seemed quite contented with their commitments and spoke highly of the lifestyle in which they have lived for several years. When I asked them about burn out, they countered that a life of giving yourself over for others tends to be replenished by the Lord so that there's always enough of you to go around. Once again, I found that both encouraging and challenging. I only want to see how families with several kids balance this kind of schedule without losing something in the process.

***************

I believe it was Mike Breen (more on him in a later post) who developed the triangular conceptual framework for church life. You see an adapted version in the image below.

We have three dimensions in which we travel, or three directions: UP, IN, and OUT. UP refers to our worship, IN refers to our fellowship within the Body of Christ, and OUT refers to our outreach and our interaction with the world around us. Apex calls these Gathering (IN), Growing (UP), and Going (OUT). They're both useful frameworks, so I'll be adopting the basic idea for a while.

My contention is that every church seems to choose one of these three dimensions to emphasize. The other two merely serve the third and at least one is bound to suffer as a result. My group has always stressed the UP direction at the expense of the other two, especially the OUT dimension. I believe Xenos stresses the OUT at the expense of the IN. I see the potential for alot of burn-out among members of a church which neglects deep and lasting peer relationships in the interest of always growing, duplicating, expanding the kingdom.

Maybe I'm way off here. I'm significantly open to that possibility at this juncture of my life. But I might as well admit my bias. I suppose time will tell if I'm off or not.

The way I'm thinking about it, those three aspects of the life of the church are symbiotic, and need to be in balance with one another. Without the UP, you lose the motivation for both the IN and the OUT. Without the IN, you burn out chasing the OUT and the UP. And without the OUT, the IN becomes stagnant and the UP weakens, too. They feed one another.

Well, anyway, the conference ended on a good note, with an encouraging message from Gary DeLashmutt, one of the lead pastors of Xenos. He spoke about keeping Joy in your life, which felt like a perfect message for the moment somehow. Maybe I'll write more about that another time. It tracked for me personally because I'm in a place of needing to rediscover the joy of knowing God, perhaps as it so naturally comes in introducing people to Him for the first time (or maybe even re-introducing people who forgot that there's more of Him to know). And it tracks for Xenos because, as I've supposed already, the emotional side of life may be missing from their experience these days. Either way, Gary is highly spoken of among those I spoke with, and he didn't disappoint.

After the last meeting let out (around 10pm!) a group of college students who ordinarily meet with my hosts, Jim and Lisa Long, showed up. Incidentally, Jim and Lisa were very kind and helpful to me during my stay in Columbus, and I hope to keep in touch them over time. It's too bad I didn't get time to visit one of their "ministry houses," which at Xenos is how students are grouped together, like church-organized dorms. College ministry (and student ministry in general) is a big part of the life of this church, so that was on my to-visit list. But I only had so much time...

I had a good time hanging out with them that evening, especially since we spent way too much time engaging in one of my favorite pastimes: quoting movie lines from every conceivable genre until your eyelids get too heavy to keep it up.

If I ever get to come back to Xenos again, I'll be sure to visit at a time when I can sit in on more home church meetings, since that's what I came for. But the conference was challenging, and thought-provoking. Well worth my time.

Ohio Trip 9: Urban Concern

2009-07-27T17:19:00.014-04:00

The second day of the Xenos conference began with a talk from a former teacher of the church, Lee Campbell, on suffering in the book of Job. He did a great job of pointing out how Job's friends didn't have a bad encouragement plan to begin with--they just flubbed it up after they got very far into it, and they had some bad theology in there, too.

What struck me most was that they invested a good bit of their time and resources to spend time with Job in his loss, even to the point of sitting with him a whole week without saying a word. Lee explained that rabbinic tradition calls this "sitting shiva" (sitting a week). It's significant because it simply involves moving with the sufferer, being with them and feeling what he/she feels, because that's what is needed more than advice or platitudes (which Job's friends couldn't resist offering later). When C.S. Lewis lost his wife, he said he wanted most to be around lots of people who would just "leave him alone". I think I get that. Anyway, it was a great talk, and you can download it for free here.

The rest of the day took a decidedly urban-missional direction for me. I had signed up to tour Xenos' urban mission over lunch, and it was an encouraging tour to take. Nearly 20 years ago some folks from Xenos took an interest in ministering to a poor urban neighborhood close to the Ohio State University campus. Today there are house churches, after-school programs, and an easily affordable Christian school in that neighborhood. The Harambee School, financed jointly by Xenos and by government grants, serves to educate about 100 kids from K-5th grade. And while other schools in the area can only get about 20% of their kids to pass the state tests, Harambee's kids are passing at a rate of 67%. That's pretty fantastic! They must be doing really good work.

On the tour we heard from James Brown, the director of the larger urban mission, and Alex Steinman, the principal of the school. They explained how the church engages the neighborhood holistically, not merely babysitting kids for a few hours each day, but ministering to entire families, entering into their lives where they live. Families invest huge chunks of time, many of them permanently moving into the neighborhood. Over time they've built lasting relationships with area residents, including the crack dealers on whose turf they're treading. Ironically, they seem to get a warmer reception from the thugs than they do from the local churches, who hardly give them any help in their work (most of those churches are comprised of members who commute from far away). Somehow that's funny and disgusting at the same time.

Back at the conference, I attended a workshop entitled "Untying the Urban Knot." Lisa Gintz told us of her own relocation to a poor urban segment of town, and of the subsequent validation of her ministry that produced in the eyes of the residents. She, too, found that the local criminals warmed to her presence so that now her house is the safest place on the block. The drug lords warn their underlings not to touch her place because they like her, and they trust her. When asked by conference-goers if she felt safe there, she replied, "The safest place in the world to be is in the middle of God's will." Well put. And she's definitely earned the right to speak about urban ministry.

The gist of her presentation was that building incarnational relationships is the only way to truly impact a community. It takes years to earn the trust of people who have learned so much distrust. And it takes years to learn how to relate to people from a culture so different from your own. One helpful bit of advice she gave was to start by reaching out to people within your own culture before you make the leap to people in a significantly different one. We tend to romanticize "ministry to the needy," so there's quite a revolving door in urban ministry. People come dreamy-eyed and last for a year or two then give up. They too often come solo, too, and that's a recipe for burnout as well.

In the end I was encouraged and challenged to see and hear from those who have built their lives around giving to others. None of them struck me as highly religious or legalistic about it, but seemed genuinely and organically compelled to be doing what they're doing.

There were other workshops that day, but I've written enough for now. Next, I'll briefly tell about the conclusion to the summer institute and the home group that gathered afterwards, then I'll move on to the last church I visited: Grace Gathering.

Ohio Trip 8: Xenos' Summer Institute

2009-07-24T20:50:00.011-04:00

I attended two afternoon breakout sessions on the first full day of the Xenos Summer Institute. The talk which one of the session leaders gave confirmed a suspicion of mine: Xenos heavily emphasizes doctrinal education (which is intellectual), personal discipleship, evangelism, and service (those are volitional), but appears to offer little which engages the affective side of the human self. Internally speaking, they resist the more subjective, mystical expressions of devotion which so characterize the fellowship to which I belong. And externally speaking, they don't make much place for emotional expressions of praise or worship, either in big gatherings or in most small group settings.

I suspect this is due in part to a split which happened about 15 years ago. Those who left represented the more emotionally charged element within the group. In the process, Xenos lost their gifted worship leaders, plus a ton of people who followed them out to the local Vineyard. I don't think they've ever found a comfortable way to re-introduce singing into the gatherings of the church. At this point in time, you will likely attend one of their "central teachings" (large gathering) and your home church (small gathering) without ever joining together in song with your fellow believers. That strikes most folks (including myself) as a pretty lopsided way of going about things.

The breakout session leader encouraged us to develop consistent devotional lives, committing to regular times of prayer, reading, and fellowship with God. He reminded us all how helpful songs can be in engaging our hearts to the Lord's presence. I heartily agree ;-) His words about involving the affective side of our selves echoed the very same things that I shared with Dennis over lunch. So that was fun to hear.

The other workshop I attended the first day laid out Xenos' approach to discipleship. It became evident during my stay in Columbus that discipleship is big at Xenos. They do it in pairs or small groups so much that practically everyone is either "discipling" someone or is being discipled by someone (or both at the same time!). One of the college students introduced two guys to me by saying "that guy over there is my disciple, and that other guy over there is my discipler." That's a little weird to me. But then many "xenoids" roll their eyes at talking that way about it. Either way, they're very committed to meeting with each other as mentors, counseling one another on issues of character development, doctrine, and service. To talk to a member of Xenos is to, at some point in the conversation, be counseled and exhorted towards a more committed walk with God. They seem to wear that comfortably.

They're also very Bible-centered as a people. They talk an awful lot about "getting into the Word" like it's, well, central in a way that I'm persuaded it's not supposed to be. I would argue that the Bible itself even warns us against being "bibliocentric." But there's not space left for that talk in today's post.

Perhaps one other talk merits mention here. The main speaker for the plenary sessions was Ajith Fernando, director of Youth for Christ in Sri Lanka. He's an internationally popular writer and a great speaker. He spoke on "Joy and Pain," and how these two things go together when you commit your life to investing in the lives of others. It was good stuff, and I think it was very well received.

I also think he may have thrown in a corrective word or two for either the church immediately before him or else American churches in general. He warned against an overemphasis on results. Americans are pragmatists, and he admitted that this brings certain benefits. But he also reminded us all (many of whom are active in ministries of so many kinds) that we must be faithful to our callings without making the output our chief gauge in that regard. Sometimes a person pours his or her life out for decades only to have someone else reap the harvest later on. But the Lord is getting what he wants, how he wants it.

I think we all need that reminder, although I see such a heavy leaning towards pragmatism at Xenos that it turns me off just a little. The leaders invest scads of time and energy studying other groups to see what works and what doesn't. My host, Jim, told me of how the leaders take a group of young people on church tours around the country in order to see how other groups are doing church. Granted, that's exactly what I'm doing, too, even as I write. But there's a focus on results-- measurements and percentages--and their findings get thrown around a good bit in conversation. All that makes me suspicious that something's off, something I encountered in one or two other groups this week (more on that another time).

That covers everything from the first day of the conference. The second day challenged me perhaps more than the first...

Ohio Trip 7: A Thought-Provoking Lunch

2009-07-24T17:22:00.007-04:00

Every year in July, Xenos Fellowship in Columbus hosts a large Summer Institute. People come from all over the country (with quite a few from other countries) to hear challenging messages from internationally known speakers and to attend workshops on church life in the Xenos style. They've got lots of information to share, both practical and visionary. One of the coolest things about that, besides how incredibly well organized it is, is that they upload all their talks onto their website for free download within days of the conclusion of the conference. They seem quite content to have ideas and resources stolen and used frequently by anyone. That's refreshing.

Also refreshing was the fact that it was so easy to get lunch with Dennis McCallum, the founder of this huge network of churches. During the first day's lunch break he wandered out into the foyer of the main building and stood around, apparently hunting people to share lunch with. Despite the fact that he didn't know me from Adam, when I told him I'd like to chat with him at some point he treated me to lunch right then and there. He took me to Skyline Chili (chili is really big in Ohio, apparently) and we compared notes about a handful of events going back to the founding days of their church, when a band of ex-Campus Crusade leaders helped foment a sizable student movement across the country (all during the dynamic days of the Jesus Movement). Some of the same people who got involved in the earliest days of that group were also responsible for the group which evolved into Xenos in Columbus. All this was relevant to me because the church I'm a part of was patterned after a kind of prototype church which gathered about the same time in Santa Barbara. And both of those groups received ministry from the same band of ex-Campus Crusaders. I believe Dennis said that the founder of my church group spoke at one point to his group waaay back during those early days. Small world, huh?

After that I picked his brain a little about the end game of the church--what's its ultimate purpose? For Dennis, winning the lost clearly occupies first place. The way he sees it, all of the multi-layered aspects of his church network, from the smallest discipleship unit to the house church on up to the central teaching meetings which they put together, the main task of the church is sharing the gospel with people. I believe Dennis would say that "sharing the gospel" applies as naturally to believers as it does to unbelievers (he would agree with me that the gospel is way bigger than just "how to get to heaven when you die"). So in one sense outreach and inreach don't have to be so separated. But Dennis' burden is that churches fail far more on the outreach part than they do on the inreach. Can't say I disagree, I suppose. Now I'd be quick to add that if churches aren't getting the whole gospel then their inward movement (i.e. fellowship, community building) will suffer, and does suffer. But he's right, too. We lose touch with folks "on the outside."

Something dawned on me recently and it's connected to this very idea: When a church never gets new believers, it suffers for lack of the joy which comes from being introduced to the One Who Saves. After enough years go by, we lose touch with what it means to "get saved." We may encounter it some through our children. But there should be more. And I've witnessed this week a certain zest and enthusiasm, even among seasoned old veterans of the church, which seem to have issued from staying engaged in the work of introducing people to the Lord. Among people who are into "organic," simple church life, you are more likely to find people who go about that in more natural ways (when compared with the programmatic methods taught in so many traditional churches and parachurch groups) It feels like I encountered that a good bit this week.

Back at the conference, the first breakout session I attended was on starting spiritual conversations. It was a talk on how to develop the habit of really listening and talking to people in order to build relationships through which the gospel may (one day) be shared. He stressed how unhelpful (and ultimately ineffective) it is to shove verses or the plan of salvation down the throats of people you just met. He encouraged us to cultivate a habit of making ourselves available for relationship building, which of course presupposes that we're even thinking in that direction in the first place! For me, that was the take-away. One way to summarize this whole trip is to say that I was challenged to consider making outreach a part of my life again, finding some way to reclaim it from its more legalistic, guilt-driven modalities that I drop kicked years ago.

Grace-driven, relational, organic evangelism...that's what I'd like to learn more about and see modeled.

More on the first conference day in the next post.

Ohio Trip 6: Fruitful Tensions

2009-07-23T18:58:00.012-04:00

Before visiting my next home group Wednesday, I ate lunch with the teaching pastor and the executive pastor of Apex, along with one of the elders overseeing some of their house churches. They had just come from a meeting in which they were hammering out a strategy for presenting their story at the National House Church Conference hosted in Dallas by House2House about a month from now. Their greatest challenge, as I understand it, is to find a common mind among the two very different mentalities within their "hybrid" fellowship. Some of them feel more at home in the traditional, centralized, top-down model of ministry as seen in the Sunday morning worship service. These folks would like to see a uniform training process implemented for all their house church leaders (like Xenos in Columbus has always used). But others see that as too controlled, not "organic" enough. The "decentralized" camp resists systematized, uniform procedures and wants more freedom for organic development among the house churches. It would seem that these strange bedfellows are cooperating for now, which is an encouragement to me. I heard someone call this a "fruitful tension." It fits.

After lunch I visited with the elder who first called for Apex to transition to the house church model, Rennes Bowers. Everyone should have at least one encouraging, paternal brother like Rennes to talk with. He's an interesting brother with an interesting story. A fireman by trade (Captain of his company), Rennes (rhymes with Guinness) has simple/organic church roots going back to the Jesus Movement. In fact, if I understand correctly, he's the brother who introduced Jon Zens to house church way back in the early 70's. And what a champion of organic church Jon became! Along with Robert Banks, he's one of the most established scholars we have.

Rennes was very encouraging to me about my writing, and boy do I need cheerleaders at this point! My take on things tracks really well with his since we've had so many of the same influences. He also had some really helpful things to offer--some perspective balancing words of wisdom that I needed to hear.

For example, my conceptual model of the Christian life is so lopsidedly mystical at this point that I hardly see outreach or evangelism in the New Testament when I read it. But somehow it struck me right when I heard Rennes talk about how Jesus first gathered people to himself, then sent them out again to share what they had received. Rennes' own heart has always been geared towards others and he has obviously spent most of his adult years sharing Jesus with so many that it comes naturally to him. That was encouraging for me to see and hear.

At dinner time, somewhere between 12-15 college students from Wright State showed up for the home church meeting. We sat at two long tables, lined up end-to-end, and ate some delicious beer-soaked "brats" (which I've never had before). During the meal, as Rennes has taught them to do, they shared "Jesus stories," one by one. Jesus stories are instances of encounter with God during the last week (or month or whatever) in which you get to either share Christ's love with someone who needed it, or otherwise you saw God at work somewhere, maybe even in your own life. I think everyone there shared at least one, with many of them sharing a couple.

I was touched by their sincere openness to God's leading in their daily lives. Here was no theoretical chit-chat about loving God or loving one another. This was experiential. It takes me a few days for anything significant to sink in, and with each day that passes I find myself affected more and more by their example, and by Rennes' modeling of spiritual parenting. I think I'm beginning to see some of what it was I set out to find this week.

When the meal concluded we passed around a loaf of bread and some juice, and Rennes asked me to share some about the symbolism of the one loaf. Another young brother shared about the blood of Jesus. We also prayed for one another and for the people we encountered in our Jesus stories. I liked that. After we cleaned up from dinner, we relocated downstairs to the finished basement for the rest of the meeting. Rennes read out a passage from 1 Corinthians 12 and the group discussed what it meant to be Christ's body, with differing gifts in a community. Students shared about things they understood and experienced as parts of the Body of Christ, and they shared prayer concerns and prayed for one another for a good while.

Another neat thing Rennes does is to place a giant OSU pillow in the middle of the room. When the group wants to pray for a specific need that someone in the group has, he'll get that individual to kneel down on the pillow in the middle of the room while everyone else gathers around and places their hands on him or her. This reminded me of how our group demonstrates its solidarity by standing together when we sing, like a big huddle or group hug. We call it "clumping," or as our British brothers once called it, "coagulating" :-)

I think I enjoyed this meeting the most because it was the most "open" and participatory one of them all. For the record, I'm losing my confidence that leaderless meetings are THE correct way to meet. For instance, when most of the folks in the room are young or maybe new believers (or some of them aren't believers at all), more leadership is needed. But in the end I'm still sold on meetings where most people share at least something during the meeting.

I'm sure I also enjoyed the meeting because I just love being with college students. There's something ideal to me about people in that stage of life, with just the right mix of open, eager receptivity and a developing sense of unique identity. Gotta get back around college students again somehow!

On another personal note, I'm growing in my appreciation for layering of maturity levels in a church. Put another way, I need people ahead of me in the Lord to who I can go for counsel, and I need people for who I can serve that function as well. People ahead of me and people behind me. That's the best way to live.

As I think back to the sweetest phase of church life that I can recall, it was when we had a group of college students regularly driving down (an hour and a half!) to be with us. It's not that we were doing any deliberate "discipling' or anything like what folks in these hybrids are so committed to doing. We just got to spend good quality time with them, and it felt like life was shared--maybe mentoring happened despite our laissez-faire approach to things.

Well, this post is long enough.

Thursday and Friday were conference days. I'll talk about them in the next few posts.

Ohio Trip 5: A Sweet House Church

2009-07-21T10:25:00.012-04:00

On Tuesday I said goodbye to my Cincinnati hosts and drove to Columbus to meet with one of Xenos Fellowship's 270 home churches scattered all over Columbus. This is indeed a unique church -- and they know it. Individuals and churches have been coming to them for years hoping to glean some helpful tips on how to reproduce what these folks have done. Pretty soon they figure out it's not exactly duplicatable.

Basically their story goes like this: In the early days of the Jesus Movement, a couple of pot-smoking hippies at Ohio State University got saved and, with some help from various Campus Crusade guys they began meeting with other pot smokin' hippies and got them saved, too. One house church became two, then four, then a dozen, and so on throughout the 70's. Heavily emphasizing Bible study and evangelism among unbelieving OSU students, they got big enough to need some centralized support structures. That's a pretty organic way of doing it, by the way! Two of the leaders went off to seminary and came back armed with advanced degrees and a passion for research, study, and an unusual mix of non-conformist idealism and no-nonsense pragmatism.

I really could spend all day explaining the intricate, multi-layered structures and practices but that's not really what I came to learn about. I came looking for fruit. And I'd have to say that I found a good bit. The "wineskin" felt strange in places (as it did to many people who were attending a conference this church was putting on), but the wine was recognizable and real. Attending the conference going on that week was far less important to me than visiting house churches which their network had birthed. Which brings me back to Tuesday night.

Scott and Liz Sweet hosted the evening's meeting at their house. Most of this group of maybe 20 adults have been a part of Xenos (pronounced zee-nahs) since the 80's, with one or two going back to the very beginning in the 70's. By now, these seasoned "xenoids" (as some call themselves) have birthed multiple home churches, redistributing leadership several times over. This collection of people resulted most recently from the merging of a couple of groups which had lost people for various reasons (including the creation of a new group somewhere else, I believe).

One of the ladies led the discussion, breaking us up into smaller groups and instructing us to read and discuss various biblical passages which spoke of work and rest. I had to laugh because that was exactly the same thing I talked about in my church group just a couple of weeks earlier. In fact, it felt like she was using my outline for the first 10 minutes of the lesson! Pretty wild. After the lesson was over, we ate and chatted for a good hour and a half. By then it was pretty late and the wine they had passed around was beginning to convince us it was time to go to sleep.

I believe Xenos' home churches follow this same basic meeting format under most circumstances. Half an hour or so of "hanging out" followed by a lesson (led by different teachers in the group at different times), then you eat and drink and hang out some more until everyone's ready to go home.

Upon visiting a Xenos group, you will quickly notice several things. I'll write about some of them later, but for now I'll mention that their general temperament is very casual and non-religious, even a little rough around the edges, and that's no accident. The leaders of Xenos have always stressed fully inhabiting the surrounding culture, avoiding the explicitly immoral behaviors which often go with it. So they have a fair share of smokers, drinkers, cussers, and all-around party folk. That's the way they like it. They exist to be a comfortable place for people in the world to come in contact with the gospel, and they are very successful in winning unbelievers to the faith.

A well-known Baptist seminary professor wrote a book about successful churches and devoted some of his attention to this church, since they boast of something like 40% of their new members as conversions to the faith. Most churches, they are quick to point out, just "win" people who are already Christians. Pretty good point, I have to admit. I don't think a single person in my church group became a Christian through the efforts of the group. And all those megachurches who still experience growth in this era of declining church membership are just getting "transfer" growth themselves.

I've got more to say about my time in Columbus, including a conversation with Xenos' founder, Dennis McCallum. But I used the next day to visit another group from Apex in Dayton. So I'll blog about that next...

In the meantime, here are my gracious young hosts, Jim and Lisa Long, of Xenos.

Ohio Trip 4: An International House Church

2009-07-19T11:33:00.009-04:00

Sunday afternoon I spent some time getting to know another one of the elders from Apex in Dayton. Jim Schindler is a retired business man who was tapped by the young pastor at Apex to be an elder early in the church's history. Jim had been a respected member of the mother church out of which Apex was planted. He also was the brother who traveled overseas and discovered the effectiveness of the house church model in international missions. Now an advocate of house church for American churches, he invests a good deal of time cultivating relationships with international students (online and in person). He and his wife have built relationships with several international students in the Dayton area, resulting in a small regular gathering of them in his home.

When evening came, we met around the dining room table for a Bible study which Jim led, since together with his wife he was their senior by several decades. There were students from India, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines. One international student skyped in from a trip in North Dakota (see the laptop on the table). This meeting was more clearly "led" by an individual than the one I participated in earlier that day in Cincinnati. Given the relative youth and level of maturity in the faith among the students I suppose this makes sense. One of the students is a Hindu and another is a Muslim.

We read through and discussed a chapter of Matthew's gospel and answered questions asked by those present. After a brief prayer our hosts produced a serving tray with a hamburger bun and small dixie cups full of juice. We ate and drank these and then got up and ate dinner together. At the end of the dinner, we shared a going away cake for on of the students who was leaving the next day for India. Her parents had arranged a marriage and she was going to start a new life with a man she barely knows (!). That was bittersweet. I was inspired by the diversity of the group, and by the ability that this group showed in reaching out to unbelievers from other faiths. The host couple shows a genuine calling to minister to this population of their church. That was encouraging.

Pretty exhausted from two days of solid travel and meetings in two different cities, I returned to my futon and slept like a rock. Day three (or four, if you count the first night, too) was a day off from meetings. Time to process and chill out for a while, 'cause the next few days were full indeed.

Ohio Trip 3: Vineyard Central, a Liturgical House Church

2009-07-18T13:50:00.011-04:00

Sunday morning I (along with my hosts Scott and Angela) visited a unique community of house churches who call themselves Vineyard Central. Apparently they originated as a church plant from "The" Vineyard, but that hardly seems to characterize them at this point. This group of believers, like the one which I am a part of, chose to buy houses close together--in the same neighborhood. They are a "neighborhood church" as a friend once called it, like my group. This church, however, chose to inhabit a poor, urban section in the heart of their city. They did this because they felt a calling to establish a presence in that community, and they appear to be doing just that. Amazingly, there are around 80 of them in the neighborhood, with some still moving in!

It's pretty raw, authentic, incarnational living. I could tell from their interactions with their neighbors that they are at work doing what they set out to do: building relationships with those in their neighborhood, maintaining community gardens, helping out people in need, and (formerly) operating a cool coffeehouse as a point of entry for people in the community (sadly, economic times being what they are, the coffeehouse may have gone the way of the do-do). It's messy work, fraught with the costs of giving your lives over for the sake of needy people. But they struck me as a very hospitable, giving, accepting group of people. Their house churches meet weekly while the whole group only assembles together about once a month.

Another unique thing about this group is that they are liturgical. They are "low church" in the sense that they are a clergyless, decentralized and informal assembly who show up in t-shirts and jeans, meeting primarily in their homes. But they read from "the lectionary," pray the creeds, and pray "the hours." After someone reads a portion of the Bible, he or she says "the word of the Lord" and everybody responds in unison with "thanks be to God." Haven't done that since my teen years when I used to visit an Episcopalian youth group.

It's unfortunate for us that we didn't get to be a part of their bigger monthly gathering. On those days, typically coinciding with festivals from the traditional Christian calendar, they all come together in an old catholic church building called Saint Elizabeth's which they purchased and renovated over a decade ago. This morning's meeting, however, happened upstairs in the house across the street. We were greeted warmly, we sang songs recently compiled by one of them on a songsheet, and we read aloud and discussed verses from the lectionary, a standardized grouping of Bible passages used in liturgical churches (Anglican, Catholic, etc). Next someone brought out a plate with a multi-grain bagel and a bowl of wine on it. They passed it around, tearing off a piece of bagel and dipping it in the wine before eating it. Each person passing the communion repeated something like "the body of Christ which was broken for you and blood of Christ shed for your sins" (I couldn't remember the right words so I just passed it on and shrugged). When we finished with that we had a time of prayer, then we ate and chatted with folks for a while.

They were warm, caring people who obviously carry the burden of ministering to their neighborhood in a very incarnational way. The fatigue of some of it showed, as did the resolution to keep giving, keep serving, and to keep meeting and praying for those around them. In the end I found the liturgical worship too foreign to easily enter into. I find it hard to internalize standardized phrases and prayers, no matter how time-tested they may be. But I also think that these folks don't experience those things in the same way I do. For them, it seems living and somehow vibrant. In the end it's all about what's going on inside, isn't it?

For me, reciting rituals easily lends itself to mechanical repetition, disconnected from the heart. But I'm not sure it has to be that way. I suspect some can take those pre-formed prayers and creeds, connecting their hearts to the messages preserved therein, and it becomes living words for them. I bet that works better for first-generation folks than for second or third ones, though. That's my guess, anyway.

Coming out of that meeting I bumped into a completely separate group of people gathered on the front steps of St. Elizabeth's. They were from neighboring cities and were using the neighborhood facilities as a centralized point at which they could all gather for prayer and fellowship. Although they were not really connected with VC, their example seems to have encouraged this group to pursue community in their own way as well. Pretty cool how groups seem to inspire one another along the way. Folks thinking about building deeper community among believers seem to get so much from just seeing other people doing something similar. It's great to steal ideas, too, while you're at it!

When I got done talking with that group, I looked up and saw something growing out of the building above us. Kinda crazy, isn't it? Seemed somehow metaphorical to me of some of the things I've been discovering lately. I'll let you figure it out yourself :-)

Well, that just covers Sunday morning. In my next post, I'll share about the third group that I met that day.

Ohio Trip 2: Apex Community Church in Dayton

2009-07-13T16:36:00.011-04:00

Well, this is really about hunting fruit. It's not about figuring out HOW churches I visit do things. I should explain first about that, since it touches on one of the things I'm learning through this process.

I had some great conversations Saturday with several of the leaders of an exciting, relatively young church called Apex Community Church. In one of those conversations, we discovered that we share the conviction that forms of church are far less important than FRUIT. In other words, how you do church is waaay less of a big deal, and what it produces is what really counts.

Here are some questions I find myself circling around with folks:

1. What is the goal of "doing church"? What's our end? (and don't just say "glorify God," that's way too vague)

2. Can organic, home-based church life coincide harmoniously with a larger, organizationally traditional congregational gathering? Can preachers preach every Sunday (or even less frequently) while still effectively emphasizing that every member is functioning, sharing part of the Body of Christ?

3. Should "mission" be the main thing we're about? Should fellowship with God be the main thing? Or with each other? Or (leading question) is it more likely that these three are meant to be IN BALANCE with one another?

4. My all-time favorite question: What is the church's role in the world? Also, what do we do if it turns out that the New Testament doesn't give us much to go on there? What do we decide then?

On to my report!

Apex was a wonderful experience for me. It was, in fact, the apex of my trip (so far, anyway). I found in this church an attempt at wedding both sides of my own background: organic community based in the house church mixing together with a traditional, congregational worship service every weekend, with a preacher and everything.

Their worship style is familiar to us all by now: contemporary-style praise band cranking out worship tunes under the warm glow of concert lighting--very hip. Only I must say that, while musically very easy to listen to and join in with, this band wasn't as flashy and self-consciously posturing and showy as so many bands like them are. That was refreshing. It probably didn't hurt my experience that so many of the folks that joined us for worship that evening were my age, or even younger. And the people around me were worshiping with passion.

The message delivery by the preacher, Rob, was entertaining and engaging. That by itself doesn't do much for me. But what impressed me was that nothing he said ever rubbed me the wrong way. I can't tell you the last time I was able to sit through a sermon without getting a knot in my stomach over at least something the guy said. But somehow, that never happened. Caught me off guard, in fact. This may be one of those rare instances where a gifted communicator has managed to internalize a theology that's deep, well-thought through, and shaped by grace. There just aren't enough preachers out there that even know what I mean when I say those things.

When Rob spoke about the life of Apex church, it was thoroughly centered in real life, and that life was situated in the context of community. He was speaking to a room full of several hundred people who are, more of them than not, engaged in a house church somewhere around town. That's something not too common at this point in time. I will be eager to see more of how those groups function, because that will make a big difference for me. I visit with one of them tonight (I'll let you know how it goes).

A good part of my afternoon was spent talking with some of the guys in leadership of the church, and what they told me was interesting. These guys are holding together two separate models: organic house church and a traditional, congregational church structure. Their goal is that these churches be, not just "cell groups" following the mandates of the church staff, but fully functioning house churches, performing all of the functions of an independent church: baptism, communion, preaching, teaching, discipline, worship, etc. If that's really what they're after, then they're a rare bunch. I hear that others are trying this out, too, but most don't have what these guys have.

Their story goes something like this: Around eight or nine years ago, this large youth group broke off to form a new church plant (Southern Baptist in affiliation). The emphasis at first was on growing the centralized gatherings--the Sunday morning thing. But the pastor of the church turned to some older brothers in the Lord, men with gray hairs (or none at all in one instance!) for guidance. He set up a plurality of elders which grew from three to maybe six or seven. One of those brothers had 17 years of experience in an organic house church setting. That brother recommended that, in order to adequately provide for the discipleship needs of several hundred folks, they needed to get smaller, not larger. Real discipleship, he argued, happens in an intimate fellowship, not in a centralized gathering. Absolutely right, IMHO.

Then another gray-headed brother had some interaction with foreign missions to Muslim countries and discovered as well that small groups are far better for real growth than large ones. He got sold on the house church model, too. So the young preacher said "okay, let's do it."

Fast forward several years and you find a church (or network of churches, depending on whom you ask) with about 3000 attenders, 1700 of which are connected with any one of about 70 house churches all over Dayton. They're broken up in to six regions, with elders providing guidance over each of the regions, and each house church developing its own leadership on the local level. With the right people at the top, this is a really cool set up.

They've had some help from a handful of helpful writers and teachers, along with some interaction with Xenos, the network in Columbus. Long story short, they're currently managing to hold together two very different ways of looking at church: top-down and bottom-up. It remains to be seen whether these two things can harmoniously coincide. I think it takes a particular kind of folks to pull it off. I'm pretty confident there's not a process that will make this work in just any setting. In the meantime, I think a bunch of churches would like to be a fly on the wall throughout what they're doing.

I visited one of their house churches for international students on Sunday, and I'll write about that tomorrow.

Ohio Trip 1: A House Church in Beaver Creek

2009-07-13T08:07:00.015-04:00

Wow, what a full 24 hours!

I'll have to split this up into a couple of posts...there's too much!

My first night in the Cincinnati area brought me to Beaver Creek, a subdivision of the east side of Dayton, where I met with a small group of folks loosely connected with the Xenos Fellowship of Columbus. This group is one of two or three remote satellites of the main network of churches based about an hour to the northeast.

I had a pleasant time with the folks I met there. The host family was out of town, so some folks were missing (that's the downside to traveling in the summer to meet groups like this, but hey, I'm a school teacher--it's the only time I've got!) It's too bad I missed meeting Clem, one of the group's leaders, cause he's a writer, too. Before I left, they swiped me a copy of his book What Does God Want Me to Do? which I intend to read at some point soon, and maybe comment on as I go.

Betty, our facilitator for the evening, led the discussion, which took us through a passage in Galatians 4. She had some thought-provoking insights into what we read, and the comments and discussion which resulted was substantive and seemed to issue from real experience. I didn't really hear any canned answers like you sometimes get in a meeting like this, and the folks in the group seemed to be genuinely walking the path of wrestling with the meaning of the text and its effect on their lives.

I was encouraged and exhorted to consider how both giving to others and allowing others the opportunity to give are marks of maturity. Just like a parent always has an eye towards shaping their children into contributing members of the kingdom of God, so mature believers consider how they can enable and encourage others to give and function--even if that means allowing them to give to you. Graciously receiving can be so much harder than being on the giving end! That takes a bit more presence of mind, doesn't it? Haven't you struggled before with allowing others to do for you--give to you--without giving in to the compulsion to make it up to them (so you can be "even")? Hmmm. Solid stuff.

So in the end I found the discussion helpful and the conversation afterwards challenging (in a good way). They asked me lots of questions about the church group that I meet with, and had some instructive, helpful suggestions to make which I appreciated.

I'll visit the "mother church" of this group next week and I'm sure I'll have plenty to report as that experience unfolds. In my next post, I'll try to capture the visit I had with the next group, Apex. But int he meantime...

O. M. G.

Anyone who has ever traveled between Dayton and Cincinnati knows about the Touchdown Jesus (see below).

This baby is a 60 foot tall, gargantuan monument to religious excess (IMHO) like I've rarely seen. It's HUGE. Makes you almost run off the road trying to take it in. Sheesh.

Bless their hearts ;-)

Hunting Fruit

2009-07-11T09:49:00.006-04:00

Yesterday I embarked on a journey to visit four very different churches, each of them vibrant in different ways. All four of them have a handful of things in common: First of all, they each identify themselves as a network of house churches, a church of churches if you will. These meetings keep to a simple, organic style patterned after the primitive Christianity of two thousand years ago (filtered as it may be for us today through the lenses of the Jesus movement of the late 60s and early 70s). Each of these churches also maintains a larger gathering in which all of its constituent groups come together for regular worship, prayer, teaching, fellowship, and outreach. Finally, each of them actively pursues ways in which it can contribute to its local (or global) community, sharing grace with those around them, particularly with those less fortunate and marginalized. As one church puts it, they juggle inward movement (intimate fellowship), upward movement (corporate worship), and outward movement (mission/outreach). I kinda like that framework.

I am travelling to four cities and meeting with almost a dozen different small groups in order to learn from them. I've got tons of questions and I'm eager to catch their perspective on things. I want to catch a sense of their group personalities, their meeting styles, their quirks, and their passions. I want the kind of information you can only get from visiting in person. In case you didn't know, you can't really tell what a church is like from a website.

I suppose most of all I am hunting fruit. I want to personally sample the outcome of each of these churches' way of life, discovering for myself what it produces in the lives of its members. I know it's hard to do in such a short time, but hey, I'm usin' what I got.

You don't get many opportunities like this, so I intend to make the most of it. I plan on posting pictures and reports about each group I meet along the way, so stay tuned and WATCH THIS SPACE for the next couple of weeks.

Maybe we'll all learn something in the process.

Meantime, thanks to my gracious hosts, the Kurkians, for my stay with them in Cincinnati!

Star Trek for Today

2009-05-18T13:58:00.006-04:00

Watching movies must be my all-time favorite hobby, not least because they help me think. I don't even have to agree with a movie in order to like it. I just want it to ask good questions and attempt to answer them with some intelligence. For attention-deficient people like me, movies do what books and plays did for previous generations.

Don't get me wrong: the medium has its limits. I recently read Twilight before I saw the movie, and the book was way better. Two-hour movies can't always capture everything, like subtle character development or the passage of time. But movies serve as insightful windows into the thoughts and dreams of the cultures that produce them.

Consider the long stream of Star Trek episodes and movies, which saw their latest installment this month, borne out of the prolific minds of J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof (the producers of LOST). Like any franchise that survives a succession of decades, Star Trek tells us a lot about the changes that have taken place since the series began.

Stanley Grenz argued that the replacement of Spock (from the late 60's) with Data (in the early 90's) illustrates the shift in our cultural values from the former generation to the next one. Spock was a purely rational being (even if he was half-human), a cool, objective bystander to the human condition, who judged Kirk's dilemmas from his unaffected left-brain perspective. (Incidentally, some have also noted how the moody Dr. McCoy personified the other half.) Data, on the other hand, is not so purely logical (despite the fact that he is just an android). In fact, he seems preoccupied with becoming human, as if he is on a perpetual search of self. Grenz explains that this mirrors the shift from modernism to post-modernism. Spock represented the fully matured product of the Enlightenment, which taught us to trust Reason and pursue Science as the solution to every problem that life can throw our way.

But then Science failed us. The closer we looked into the make-up of our universe the more our neat categories crumbled and dissolved into uncertainties. Now mystery permeates all we do, just as Data is always mystified by events and by the choices of the strange creatures around him. Data represents the postmodern recasting of Spock, Grenz says, and he represents a sea change in our ideals. I would have to agree.

In fact, Zachary Quinto's 2009 version of Spock does much the same thing, except with perhaps even more boldness. Now we've become so skeptical of Reason that we feel the need to rewrite the canon, making even Spock himself as susceptible to subjective bias as anyone else. In Abram's movie, Spock is romantically involved with Uhura (who could blame him?), something unthinkable in Leonard Nimoy's earlier incarnation. Quinto's Spock is flappable and sensitive to insults (don't talk about my momma!). Therefore he is no more infallible at the helm than any of us would be. Fascinating.

But perhaps most obvious of all (to me) is that James T. Kirk's history has been rewritten. Previously, as the story goes, Kirk became captain of the Enterprise with his own father proudly looking on. But this 2009 retelling of the story goes back and writes the father out of our hero's life. A Romulan bad guy goes back in time and kills Kirk's father just as the young Jim is being born. Now Kirk grows up unruly, undisciplined, thrill-seeking his way through Iowa with no father to tell him which way is up. This is the kind of protagonist that the child of today can identify with. He's brash, irreverent, impulsive, sex-crazed, and yes, fatherless. Makes perfect sense, really.

The new Star Trek brilliantly goes where no prequel has gone before: It alters the space-time continuum, creating an alternate reality in which characters' stories can now be rewritten at the complete discretion of the producers. That's a masterful stroke, really. I trust the newer incarnation of Star Trek will thrill fanboys as much as the new Batman movies do the comic book crowd. I wish all reboots were in their league, but alas.

At any rate, there's my observation for the day. The new Captain Kirk fits our generation as well as the new Spock does. We no longer worship rationality as we once did, and we no longer identify with well-adjusted heroes. But then again, what comic book hero didn't lose his parents at some point in his childhood?

Like I said, fascinating.

Family Resemblance

2009-05-12T14:04:00.009-04:00

My good buddy Bill Heroman, a dedicated biblioblogger, forwarded me an insightful article written by Ken Schenck, a New Testament professor at Indiana Wesleyan University. In it, Schenck argues against seeking to establish, recover, or reinvent The Ideal Church. He does an excellent job.

He begins by explaining how Plato taught that, behind every real-life occurrence of anything, there is an ideal "form" (or Idea) of that thing. For Plato, that required an alternative world underneath this one in which reside all the ideal forms of everything (horses, buildings, people, love, etc). From that worldview, it was an easy step for many philosophers-turned-Christian to equate Plato's forms with the apostle Paul's "spiritual realm." In fact, the two are synonymous for many thinkers even today. Somehow this notion leads us to search for the IDEAL New Testament church, and it leads us to imitate it as best as we can.

But Schenck warns that this is a misguided quest, because even the New Testament provides us with no such example of THE ideal church. There are only actual churches, varied and flawed in many diverse ways. I'll contend that they had some similar characteristics which we are to emulate. But we are not to imitate them in every particular. Schenck illustrates it this way:

Over the centuries, thinkers have improved on Plato's theory of ideas, I believe. For example, how do you recognize a member of my family, the Schenck family? Certainly there is DNA for those in my family who are not spouses or adopted. But is there some essence of a Schenck, an ideal Schenck?

Certainly a number of us Schencks (not me of course) are quite free to share their opinions on things rather outspokenly--and not always with enough prior thought. Certainly many of us like to eat. A good number of Schencks have, shall we say, robust figures that perhaps betray a Dutch heritage filled with lots of bread and mashed potatoes. Some of us have biggish noses and others big ears. Some of my cousins at least seem rather tall to me.

But there is no ideal Schenck. Apart from DNA, there is no common set of characteristics we all share--particularly those who have married into this assortment of Schencks. There is no Platonic Schenck, just a loose set of Schencky characteristics and family resemblances. [2] Some of us have some of them, and some of us have others. But none of us have all of them. [emphasis added]

Well put. In the same way, there is no ideal New Testament church to imitate. Just some "New Testamenty" characteristics which bind together churches birthed by the same Spirit of God. They are infinitely diverse and complex in their particular expression.

Much like the human face. People often tell me that three of my daughters look just like me (the fourth takes after my wife's family). They meet the first one and say, "She looks just like you." Then they meet the second, who looks different, and say "Wait, that one looks like you, too, but in a different way." Then they meet the third, who looks plenty different from the first two, and they exclaim, "Now that one really DOES look like you!" All three different, yet somehow each looks like me in different ways.

That's what being the church is like. We are a family that expresses the life of our Father, but we are diverse in how we do it. And that's okay. We may not be okay with it, but I'm growing more and more suspicious that the Father sees it differently. Oh, sure, there are things that clearly don't express who He is, and we should steer clear of those things: Self-interest, self-preservation, spite, pride, etc. None of those things look like Him. If we allow those things to grow unchecked within ourselves, we end up looking like we aren't even His.

But showing ourselves to be His involves showing His love, His mercy, and His compassion more than it involves meeting a certain way, structuring our leadership in a certain way, or even understanding the Bible in a certain way. These kinds of things usually occupy our search for the IDEAL church, but have little to do with really living out who we are called to be.

God is highly creative, and His work in this world is appropriately fresh and creative as well. So don't be too stuck on the HOW part. If you want to see the church lived out "as it should be," then look around and see how He's actually doing it today, in our midst. Where do you witness those tell-tale traits of His presence? Where do you see the fruit of the Spirit showing up? What's going on there? Maybe that's what He's up to right now. And isn't that always where we meet Him? In the real-life "now"?

It was 19 years ago today that the Father called me into His family, and I'd have to say that this notion represents the newest discovery that I've made over these (almost) two decades. Right now I'm learning what it looks like to follow Him in the messiness of reality (instead of in the pristine perfection of my own theology). I hope it all makes sense in print.

New Endorsement for Christ In Y'all

2009-05-11T15:05:00.001-04:00

Hey, if the Jedi Master himself liked it, shouldn't you pick up your copy today?

Learning to Move On

2009-05-08T10:58:00.014-04:00

Most of the students I teach are black. Incidentally, they never refer to themselves as "African-American," so I'll dispense with the political correctness for the time being (even if they are really more brown than black). Working with them has given me a new perspective on why the students I work with act the way they do. I'll illustrate with two stories.

This morning during class an administrator brought one of my students a disciplinary form, asking her to sign it (indicating that the reasons for her suspension had been clearly expressed in her hearing). The student responded by crumpling up the paper and tossing it behind her before the administrator had even turned to leave the room. This is pretty typical behavior where I work. After the administrator left, the student announced to all who would listen: "My momma told me don't never sign nothin' the school give you!" Several of her friends voiced their agreement. "That's the same thing my momma told me," another girl offered. With parents harboring such deep distrust of our teachers and administrators, it's no wonder we witness so much disrespect for our school's policies.

A couple of years ago I was teaching a group of students who were all labeled with "behavior disorders." One day I asked them: Which is worse, robbing a store at gunpoint, or telling the cops who did it? They unanimously asserted that the snitch was the real criminal. I told them that was pretty messed up but they just shrugged their shoulders and said "that's just how it is." Evidently these kids, who were constantly having run-ins with both school officials and law enforcement, were taught that siding with authority is the cardinal sin. And what's even crazier, they apparently learned this from the adults who raised them.

One day it finally occurred to me: Multiple generations of blacks in the U.S., particularly in the South, grew up with racially unjust laws and corrupt law enforcement. When your local law enforcement is run by white supremacist segregationalists, you learn not the trust your authority figures. And you pass that distrust down to your progeny, and they pass it down to theirs. Now that equal opportunity is the rule of law, we've still got generations of convention to reverse, and it's not happening quickly enough.

I'm watching black men and women try to discipline black students who were taught to distrust all authority, and it's only reinforcing their social inequity. These kids are throwing away a free education and turning to crime so that yet another generation will grow up disadvantaged. If only their parents could acknowledge that the world has changed, or at least that they can no longer blame all their troubles on other people, things would change for them.

Maybe that's why black churches are turning out most of the successful (law abiding) folks. They are preaching an alternative message. They are preaching personal empowerment. They are preaching prosperity through optimism and faith in God. And of course, in the best circumstances they are also investing in their communities, mentoring, and modeling responsibility to their young men and women.

I will occasionally make a crack about the prosperity gospel. I believe it misrepresents the message of pretty much every New Testament author, and it ignores the daily impact of the cross of Christ in the life of a believer. But I can see the benefit of all this optimism, too. I see great value in turning away from blame, racial defeatism, and of course violence and crime. These churches are teaching their members to MOVE ON. Look upward. Trust Him from whom your help comes. More power to them.

Leadership, Part Two

2009-05-03T16:46:00.009-04:00

In the last post, I asserted that leadership in the body of Christ is organically grown, and that the authority it wields is spiritual rather than official. Perhaps the simplest way to restate my point is to say that local leadership roles in a church should be home-grown, and should mirror the ongoing spiritual vitality of the people in question. Leadership is not a static thing, and it changes according to the needs of a group. For example, a person who leads in one group may not find he or she has the same role in the next. It's a fluid thing.

But today I'm thinking about how leadership is still totally necessary for a group of people, however they come upon it. I find this needs to be stated out loud because those of us who are into "organic leadership" tend to entertain the notion that a church can get by without leaders at all. Or perhaps some of us like to believe that leadership happens so fluidly that it never rests on any one or two or three individuals in a church for more than a few seconds at a time.

Poppycock. I've been in an organic, simple, home church now for nine years and I can tell you that churches need leaders. They need brothers (and sisters!) to whom they can look when things get really nasty. They need stable folks who can redirect things onto a healthy path when things get sidetracked. A church needs men and women who don't freak out about everything, who don't twist the truth to fit their own preferences, and who genuinely look out for the needs of other people rather than merely their own. In other words, there really are characteristics of a followable leader, and we should know what they are.

If each person in the church carries the same weight in every discussion, then the group will too easily be swayed by those who don't know what they're talking about. Yet somehow we entertain this romantic notion that everyone leads equally. Perhaps we do this because we love democracy so much in this country. We don't like anyone telling us what we should do, and we don't like the idea that someone might know better than we do. Hurts our pride. But there really are people who should be listened to more than others. These are called leaders. And we need them in a fellowship of fallen people.

What happens if a group of people never recognizes leadership? Then people who should not be followed will determine the direction of the group. Somehow, in the end, people without those qualities which describe a leader will have their way, and the group will suffer. Churches which are suspicious of authority and leadership eventually must learn what it looks like for God's kind of leadership to show up.

Side note: Did you know it's hard to write a well-thought-through blog post while your 18 month old is fussing at you? Turns out it is. I hope this is all still making sense.

So what counts most in leadership? What kind of person should a church be looking for amongst themselves?

My answer is: A person of character.

Yes, you say, but what is character? What does that mean? First of all, it does NOT mean simply that they can speak well, or convincingly. Being articulate is nice, and it's useful for a group to have people that can talk, but how central is that, really? I suppose your leaders should be able to unify a group of people, and being able to think clearly, objectively, and being able to articulate what you're thinking is useful for that end. But the character of that person is crucial. Useful things like intelligence and charisma must never eclipse character.

Most people like to be led by people who are smart. They like to follow someone who can write a good book, or deliver stirring speeches in front of crowds of people (e.g. megachurch pastors). But these are not the real reasons to follow a person. Successful preachers, writers, and entertainers (think of actors, musicians, artists) often have really crummy character under the hood. And in the end they will make decisions that are not good for a group. They wow us with their elocution, or their charm, but that's not what we really need. So what DOES character mean, then?

Character is comprised of un-sexy things like commitment, stability, perseverance, and humility. People of character take genuine interest in the needs of other people, not merely their own needs. They take responsibilities seriously, and they follow through with what they say they will do. They have integrity--they do not say one thing but do another. In fact, as it turns out, what they say matters far less than WHAT THEY DO. At long last, I think this is what I'm getting at. We tend to watch people's mouths. But we should be looking somewhere else.

When I played football, my coaches taught us that you should never watch the ball carrier's shoulder pads. If you want to know which way they're going next, you watch their hips. The hips don't lie. A good ball carrier will juke and jive and fake you out. But a good tackler watches the hips. They tell you what's up.

Same thing here. Watch one another's actions. Pay attention to how each other lives. Notice those people who make wise decisions, who cultivate healthy relationships, and who do what they say. Follow those people. That's what leadership is about, and we need it dearly.

Leadership, Part One

2009-04-30T10:36:00.013-04:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about leadership. What does good leadership look like in a simple/organic/home church? The best thinking that I have heard on that subject always stresses the need for organically developed leadership. What does that mean, and what keeps it from happening more often?

First of all, the vast majority of churches have a "program" mentality. I recently read a really good article about developing house churches, and it does a good job of showing what organic growth of house churches could look like, in this case if approached from a traditional church starting point. Towards the end, the article illustrates how growth in the Kingdom of God happens relationally, not programmatically. You don't start with a plan, then execute it in the same way that you would execute a business plan or a teacher's lesson plan. Growth in the church has to happen along lines you can't predict ahead of time. Your plans have to flex constantly, adapting to the changing relationships as they develop.

Individuals develop organically, too, which is why leadership must be as Watchman Nee called spiritual and not official. According to Nee, spiritual authority in the church waxes and wanes according to the activity of the Holy Spirit in the lives of individuals in the church. Official authority sits on a person for life, or at least for a predetermined length of time, regardless of the Lord's activity in the heart of that individual. Ideally of course, you would like the two kinds of authority to coincide. But it doesn't always.

Men (or women) with official authority must be followed simply because they have that office, that title, that role. You follow them because they are over you, like in a chain of command. Jesus said leadership would not be like that in his kingdom. That's how "the Gentiles" do it. They lord it over people. But it's not to be so among us.

A person exhibiting spiritual authority is followed to the extent that he or she is expressing the will of God at any given moment. To the extent that he/she is speaking by the Spirit, his or her word has weight. But spiritual authority can fade, because people are not that consistent. We stumble sometimes, and the Lord provides other voices to take up the slack. A community that is learning to hear and recognize the voice of the Lord knows this to be true, and they know how to listen out for that voice.

Granted, I believe that mature individuals in the church learn to listen for that voice and respond to it quickly, so that this kind of leadership/influence comes to characterize their lives. That is how it should be. Churches should learn to recognize those individuals and listen to what they have to say (more on that in the next post). But they aren't always right, and no one should be afforded so much power that they must be always followed, no matter what.

Ironically, Watchman Nee himself went back on this notion from time to time. In direct contradiction to his own words, he had a habit of encouraging believers to submit to older believers as unto the Lord, even if they are wrong. In the Normal Christian Life he told a story in which an older brother was clearly in the wrong, but Nee's mentor (Sister Barber) told him to submit to the older brother anyway. Under the circumstances, Nee says, submitting to erroneous leadership is justified. The older brother can be wrong, but you are right in submitting to him, so it's all good.

Dennis McCallum over at Xenos Fellowship suggests that Nee may have picked up this quirk from his own Chinese cultural background:

Confucius taught that parents were never wrong, and that even when they were, one should obey them.

I think he's right. I would add that the Plymouth Brethren influence on him probably reinforced a "top heavy" view of authority, in direct contradiction to his notion of spiritual vs. official authority. I think maybe his gut told him one thing but his environment told him the opposite. I don't know.

But this only illustrates my point. Is Watchman Nee an authority on simple/organic/house church leadership? Yes, to whatever extent he is articulating dependence upon the Spirit for that leadership. If his upbringing nudged him away from that notion from time to time, we can overlook it. The idea still rings true, IMHO.

More on this soon...

Error by Overstatement

2009-04-24T11:27:00.005-04:00

"Lighten up, Francis."
--Sergeant Hulka, in Stripes

Some people are just wound up really tight. Whenever they come to believe something, they clutch it with both hands and never let go. I guess some people are just hardwired with the temperament of a zealot. Do you know anyone like that? They dive headlong into what they do, consequences be damned, with fervor growing upon each encounter of resistance.

Passion is good of course. But this carries with it a kind of oblivion, a single-minded insensitivity to extenuating factors. I also readily observe that we men are the ones who suffer from this problem the most. I read once that men have fewer connectors between their left and right brain hemispheres. Maybe that makes us more tunnel-visioned. I don't know. But I do know that the following imbalance happens most among groups that don't value the input of women:

I keep bumping into folks who believe in house church, like I do, but they are dogmatic about it. They don't merely believe house church is biblical, or that it is an effective way to do church in our contemporary society. No, they believe it is commanded by God. They don't merely argue that home-based communities are ideal. They go five steps further to say that no other way of being church is valid.

Now, I'm someone who left behind my own denominational tradition to pursue meeting with other Christians in homes. In my case, that required a significant social risk. In a way, this simple/organic/home church thing is my life. I'd even call it a calling. But I've got enough education to question my own biases. And when I read the passages that validate our way of meeting, I don't see the same things that some other people see. I don't see prescription. I clearly see description.

Why am I making this point? Well, it's not because I just want to nitpick. I think something important is lost when we overstate a biblical notion. There's such a thing as error by overemphasis, and some of us are swimming in it.

First Corinthians 14 does not command that we meet in an open, participatory style. On the contrary, it chastens a group for being overly participatory, overly chaotic. If you really look at the surrounding text, you'll see that Paul was trying to correct them because they were all talking on top of each other. It's like everybody had to be heard, regardless of what really edified the whole fellowship. That's a pretty selfish way to function in a meeting. Some people talk because they don't know how to stop. Paul was giving them some guidelines about how to express all that they had to say in an orderly way.

This passage impresses us today because we have the opposite problem to the Corinthians. In our (traditional) churches, only one guy does just about all the talking! That's the only way traditional churches know how to do it. And I consider that a problem. But I also consider it a problem that we house church folks don't acknowledge that the first century church had variety in how they met, too. More to the point, I believe there is validity to a multitude of ways of meeting today. Let's not be so one-sided.

We're reacting against entrenched tradition. So I get the impetus to be extreme. But we undermine our own credibility when we teach that open, participatory meetings are the only New Testament way to do church. So give it a rest, will ya?

Lighten up.

Loving the Church

2009-03-31T11:17:00.007-04:00

Scot McKnight's blog directed my attention to this post by Tim Keel yesterday. In it he quotes a passage written by Carlo Carretto:

How baffling you are, oh Church, and yet how I love you!
You have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you!
I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence.
You have given me so much scandal and yet you have made me understand sanctity.

I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false, and I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful. How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face, and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms.

No, I cannot free myself from you, because I am you, although not completely.
And where should I go?

Keel says:

Anyone who has sought to live out their life of faith in the midst of a particular community, who has sought to be a Jesus-person with other Jesus-people, knows both the highs and the lows of true, as opposed to idealized, community.

True that. Those of us who pursue the ideal Christian community, especially out of a reconstruction of the New Testament story, tend to build up an ideal image in our heads. Then when we live out the reality of our dreams, we discover that real life is much messier, much less "glorious" than we had hoped. And it's not just because of all those fallen people you have to deal with, either. Part of the problem is you.

Thus we find ourselves pursuing the life of the church and failing at it left and right. But you know what? That's the way it is all over. Just ask around. Nobody's getting it all right. Most of us can only get one part or another down at a time. Maybe the best we can do is to be faithful to that facet of God's purpose that we know we've been called to, and to be as open as possible to His work in others who follow a slightly different mission, but all by the same grace and the same Spirit.

I'm becoming more and more aware that we need one another. Not only within the local community, but within the larger community of the whole Body of Christ.

I need the input and challenge that comes from rubbing shoulders with Christians outside of my own little group.

I need the input of Christians from other parts of the country, and from other countries of the world.

I even need the input of Christians from other points in time. Those whose time passed centuries ago still have things to teach me, and I intend to hear what they have to say..

I think growth in Christ over time should make you more open to the larger Body of Christ, not less. That, I think, is part of loving the Church, too.