Church Direction, or Admitting to Your Calling

The new church had a meeting to move forward in our start-up. There are a lot of issues that need more frank airing and dealing with (mostly it has to do with money and what having a functioning church would probably require, realistically). It seems obvious to me that we are not going to be an “outreach” church or “seeker sensitive”. We’re moving towards “teaching church”. If you are going to be a teaching church, you will not be focusing on evangelism.

And that statement needs some unpacking.

You see, there are some things that any small religious organization that needs to add to its numbers must do. Spiritual training, developing its people, choosing certain values against other ones, specifying group boundaries, evangelizing, marketing the ideas, keeping the members focused, etc.

An aside: One of the things that Barna reports about his revolutionaries, approvingly, is that they are not part of any tribal local community. Instead, they choose where they will belong and how they will interact. It sounds great, but that’s not how humans were designed to live. These people live off the work that is done by people who do live in communities, who create the cultures that they can then pick and choose from. I don’t think that they are the future of Christianity, simply because it would violate the apparent requirement of over the last 10,000 years of human groups.

These are activities that any small church with no denominational affiliation would have to do. The question is not whether or not the church will evangelize, but this:

What is the story that organizes all of our activities and beliefs?

Most Christians answer this in ridiculously simple terms: “It’s about Jesus” or “The story is the Bible”. Sure, but the fact is that you don’t preach the entire scriptures: you can only teach or preach on certain things at certain times. You have to focus on this or that.

Maybe the problem is that this is really asking us to look at our values (as Warren Kinston defines them) and the simple act of examining them is taboo. It’s clear to me that the people in my church don’t really care about evangelism. Not the way that churches that are passionate about “the lost” care about evangelism. You can tell by the way that no one seems to be passionate about it in their own lives. It’s not that people don’t care: just that they care about teaching people about the Trinity. People who are passionate about evangelism care about just getting as many people as possible in the door. (These people have been dominate in the idea of Evangelicalism.)

So, a story from my own life to illustrate.

When I was at university, I attended a bible study of sorts that involved “words from the Lord”. Which I can guarantee were different from what you think, since almost everyone one of them was essentially bad news. (“The cancer is going to kill you. You need to go and prepare, for I am calling you home, says the Lord” type of thing.) Anyway, while what this guy said to a friend in the Spirit isn’t relevant, what he said later is. He said that while the Lord was speaking through him, he had the image of my pal coming to broken houses, ones built upon bad foundations, and demolishing them, laying down a new, sturdy foundations. He would leave while still the new foundation was still wet. Some he would return to and see them dry and solid. But most he would never see again and would never know if anything good ever came of it. He would have to rely upon others to do that work.

The guy was making two good points:

1. He’s telling him that he is not about what people think of as evangelism. It’s about going to those who already have some idea of God.
2. He’s not responsible for the entire work.

It’s a good metaphor for lots of things. It provides a nice concrete example of a life that can order my world, should I choose to let it.

But it also implies many things. If you are going about breaking up the foundations of people’s lives, you need to be confident that others are there to handle the rest of the rebuilding. Otherwise, you end up with problems:

“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and finding none it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there. And the last state of that person is worse than the first.”

[Luke 11:24-26, ESV]

So there is no shame in saying that your focus as a church is not evangelism but on teaching. Or making disciples of Christ, which means more than having lots of altar calls. It means being a different kind of community than Willow Creek.

I suppose that I was never one who liked the “vision” for the previous church. The idea of reaching a demographic that didn’t actually exist in my town, and in the (borrowed) idea of “Connecting People With God” left me flat, partly because I came from a Calvinist perspective and didn’t see how we could connect anyone to God: only God calls people to himself.

They asked what our vision for a church was. So perhaps I can now say.

My vision is for the lost, but not just anyone. It is for those who have found it hard, for whom the Promised Land has been closed. They are those who are exiled from the Body, by either their own doing or the doing of others. They are broken but not destroyed, not demolished, not incapable of surviving in this world. Many of them though feel that it may not be worth surviving. They have been weighed down by doubts, by questions, by the closing of the conversation by others.

This is my calling, to bring to them the invitation of the Lord: Come and taste, see that I am good.

They bring misconceptions about the Lord, about the Trinity, about how he works and what he requires. Their foundations must be broken apart so that a they may have a good foundation laid, a solid one, built upon the rock and not upon sands that shift in the storms. This is no mean feat. It requires a focus, a shedding of anything that encumbers, for it is a race that is not won quickly but over many years. Restored, these are the next wave in American Christianity. They become the foundation of something bigger than what we are. Even when they leave.

I thought that the PowerPoint Church could be a place for them. And it was, briefly. The pastor somehow for awhile could communicate to them, but I think he would not go after them because it would have forced a break with many things that he or his community (those in the denominations spawning grounds) held dear, taboo topics. We had them, had an impossible collection of them. This could have been incredible.

The problem was one of not being ruthless in pursuing the vision, the one declared in our midst by the people we were attracting. We listened to others who had their own vision, and somehow believed that their vision is the only one. “Connecting People With God” is from a different church: it is their shorthand for what they are about.

And this is the issue.

You cannot take someone else’s formulation, because it has to mean something particular to you. If I take what is called the Great Commission as my theme, I still interpret this particularly. I go to this people and not that; I make disciples in this way and not that; I do these things and not those. For what Jesus said is actually much bigger than we make it:

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

[Matthew 28:16-20, NIV]

And we cannot do everything, for we are part of a body whose head is Christ. Paul differentiates different spiritual callings, saying that each has its purpose.

The American church is no longer something that has its meaning and purpose in tribalism, the ethnic or family connections of believing what your parents believed. It is an a free association of members, complete with the warring factions endemic to such groups. People can leave, people can join. To stay, they require a Purpose, clear and stated, that they can follow. This Purpose is not a mission statement, those confused pieces of idiocy. It is a Vision given to the church, not just one person; a calling of the congregation worked out in conversation with each other and the Lord.

So, what is our calling?

Or, more to the point, what is yours?