SimpleChurch Journal

What Is the Goal Here?

It seems in recent posts we have been pondering the issue of what it means to live the Jesus-life (with Him and in the world incarnationally) as the priority over getting caught up with the form that church takes.

This reminds me of a recent quote by Frank Viola in theooze.com:

Before we can truly understand anything meaningful about the church, we must first be captured by a consuming revelation of the Person for whom it exists. Therefore, we must always begin with the Lord Jesus. We must always start with Him.

If we start out with the church, instead of with the One for whom it lives, we will end up with something quite distorted. As one writer put it:

"The church is so important! Yet her significance fades away compared to the glory of our Christ Himself. We face grave dangers when we ‘major' on the church and especially on its ‘structure.' We should major on the Lord and minor on the church . . . at most . . . If Christ is not exalted, we are building on sand, using wood, hay, and stubble as materials. All will be burned up. Whenever Christians, throughout the age, have built on a foundation other than Christ, the storms have come and living churches have fallen into spiritual death."

Thus, I ask the question, what is really the goal here?

It sometimes seems that the assumption is that the goal is to plant churches.  We may word it in different ways: start new communities, reproduce organic churches, plant house churches, etc, etc.  In fact, I acknowledge that many, in the "house church movement" that I more-or-less-relate to, assume that this is the goal.  In fact, from my missiological "training," planting churches is pretty much the end-all: "a community of believers within reach of every person in every ethnic group."

But is this really "the goal?"

I, personally, would love to see a community of believers, who are gathering together and expressing kingdom life, within reach of every person on the earth.  I think God would love to see that.  But does that make it "the goal?"  What we focus on ("the goal") often takes on a distorted sense of importance.  Thus, Viola's point: "If we start out with the church [as the goal]... we will end up with something quite distorted.

Is it even proper to think in terms of "a goal?"

I would like to suggest that Jesus did have "goals" in mind, but that they are very different than what we tend to consider.

He clearly had the goal (or at least the intention) to proclaim the reality of Kingdom life (the presence, reign, and life of God is now available) to many, many people within his assigned mission field (Israel).  Furthermore, he had the goal (intention) to touch people's lives: healing, freeing, blessing, etc.

I think the reason we look past these "people-oriented" goals is that they are not functionally measurable--thus they do not really fit into our western method of intentional living.  We want to see a functional end-point and then we can strategize the steps to get there.  Thus we like to start by envisiong a functional-type goal such as the formation of a church community, or the planting of churches.

Despite Jesus' desire (most likely) to see communities of believers supporting and loving one another, I think he was focused on something more basic as His priority: bringing life to people.  I suspect we know that this is the goal, but we (I) tend to default into a way of thinking that says: "the best way to bring life to people is to plant effective, simple communities that will thrive and thus support people's spiritual life."  But, the moment I have done this, I may have turned my eyes off the real goal: loving, healing, freeing people.

Do I think communities are important?  Absolutely!  Jesus assumed that believers would support and love one another in community life.  I just sense (as I talk and listen to many, many people) that we so quickly move our eyes away from loving people into the more functional world that we are comfortable with: set functional goals, make plans, and move toward the objectives that have been set.  Without realizing it, our own goal-oriented agendas become the focus while the objects of God's love and purposes (people) become secondary to our own functional plans and goals.

Can loving God, hearing Him, and loving the people assigned to me really be a sufficient goal?  I think it must be.  I think it's difficult.  For me, it's a challenge.  But I believe if I can remain free of my need-to-be-in-control-of-a-goal-oriented-process, I will be freer to be involved in the work of loving people that I am called to.  I believe the end result of this is that we will see the kingdom's message and power spread to every ethnic group.  He will do it while I learn to stay focused on my part.

Merry Christmas

I just want to take this opportunity to express my gratitude for the community that gathers around these web pages.  The dialogue/discussion/community-life that takes place here has become one of the richest and most important sources in my life from which I draw an immeasurable amount of strength, encouragement, support, challenge, growth, chastisement (in the most positive, biblical sense of the word), and affirmation.  The ongoing conversation provides me with a constant growth-edge because of the diverse perspectives that are shared here with both honesty and love.

I feel a friendship and connection to all who take part, even the occasional readers, that I would not have thought possible in a "cyber" community.

The Holy Spirit, expressing Himself through the diverse Body of Christ as we commune with one another, is the miracle of the incarnation that we get to experience day in and day out--not just on Christmas.

Thanks so much for being a significant part of that expression in my life!

Have a Blessed Christmas, Roger

Living Incarnationally

Eddie Gibbs (Emerging Churches) provides the insight that the "emerging church"  seeks to end the dualism between sacred and secular so that all of life becomes sacred.  Some of what I read in Gibbs' book seems to hang on to the concept of church-as-a-service in which the worship service becomes more connected to the arts, creation, and natural beauty--thus bringing the sacred and secular together within the "church service" context.  However, I also see that Gibbs describes a focus on living authentic Christian lives "out there" within our culture.

Again, as with the last post, I don't want to get into a discussion about the whole "emerging church" thing, I'm simply looking for the themes that I see God stirring in all of His people and moving us toward.  In this case, the theme is that many of us are seeking to live our lives, our whole lives, connected to the Source.  We desire to see Christ's presence incarnated through us in every situation we are in.  We want to see our communities infiltrated with Christ's presence by the way He is living through us.

Everywhere we go, we are His church, His Body, His life with skin on.  We are on holy ground everywhere that we are because He is with us, in us, and working through us.  In this way, there is no sacred verses secular because our whole lives, even as we are out in the cultures we live within, are organically connected to His kingdom life.

Therefore my focus is on how to bring the reality of the sacred into my everyday life and culture and world.  I believe that this is at the heart of what it is to emerge from churchianity into a living, lifestyle of Christianity.

The Lord spoke to Jim Montgomery, from DAWN Ministries, these words: "See to it that I, the Lord, truly become incarnate... in every small group of people on earth."  Jim suggests that what God wants to do is communicate His wonderful message of the Kingdom in a totally contextualized way in every small group of people.  This happens as born again believers exercise the gifts of the Spirit and function as the body of Christ out in the context of their world and culture.  In this way "Jesus Christ becomes incarnate in all his beauty, compassion, power and message in the midst..."

This, for me, is the heart of eliminating sacred/secular split.  Wherever we go as believers, God is present because we are incarnating His presence.  The form of church gathering that we use is simply a support system, an important community-family context, OUT OF WHICH we live incarnationally in the world.

Now, having said all that, I want to confess my shortcomings.  I am still very much wrestling with what this looks like.  Most of us were trained that, in order to "serve Christ" in the world meant that we had to give our testimony or share a gospel tract once a day.  This is NOT contextualized incarnational living.

Then, as we wrestle with what this means, we become servants to those around us.  We do not say much about our faith because we don't want to "do it the old way" so we quietly "share our faith" with our deeds.  Somehow, this also seems to come short of living incarnationally when compared to the powerful impact that Christ had on those around Him.

So...  this post is open-ended.  It's meant to be a discussion-starter.  I believe my heart is the same as every person who is reading this.  We long to see an entire region saturated with the presence of Christ so that, as Montgomery said, His "beauty, compassion, power, and message" touches every person.  We do not want to "do" church we want to be HIS people.

Do we have ANY idea what this looks like or where we begin?

Conversing With the "Emerging Church Conversation"

I have NOT been walking a journey that fully identifies with what has been termed the "Emerging Church."  In fact, I have had a difficult time pinning down just what the term "emerging church" refers to.

However...  I have been reading Eddie Gibbs' book "Emerging Churches" which has brought clearer understanding to me re "Emerging Church" and is allowing me to see that some of the more recent "Emerging Church Dialogue" (according to Gibbs) has many similarities to where God has brought me in my journey.

First the background:  According to Gibbs the emerging church "movement" first focused on developing megachurch type churches that were geared toward the postmodern gen-xers.  Then, there were attempts to develop a church-within-a-church model in which the "postmodern" church existed within the context of a larger "boomer-style" church.  Also, there have been attempts to develop small communities (house churches) as a style of church that would reach out to the postmodern generation.

BUT... says Gibbs... the shift now is AWAY from focusing on the FORM that the church should take and, instead, seeking to understand "what the life of Jesus means."  Gibbs quotes Zander Dieter who planted gen-xer churches in all of the previously-mentioned ways but now has no desire to pursue "church planting."  Instead, his desire is to "form communities of people that produce apprentices of Jesus who live in the gospel and communicate and draw others in a matter of course to the way they live."  He says, "I want to form apprentices in the life of the kingdom."

If this is where the "Emerging Church" dialogue has arrived, then I can readily connect with this aspect.  Gibbs offers an entire chapter called "Identifying with Jesus" in which he claims that this is now the key message of the emerging church.  I want to highlight this aspect with the following quotes from this chapter:

"Our commitment is to be a missionary at all times.  Everything we do in our lifestyle, in what we say, in how we treat people, that's all our witness.  It's all mission...  We are definitely all missionaries and evangelists."

"Emerging churches take up this challenge, creating 24/7 missional communities that seek to express the kingdom in all they do."

"It is not about church form but about the kingdom.  The kingdom transcends all forms...  The answer does not reside in church structure but in the way of life modeled by Jesus and what that life looks like in our context today."

"They do not seek to start churches per se but to foster communities that embody the kingdom.  Whether a community explicitly becomes a church is not the immediate goal.  The priority is that the kingdom is expressed."

I know there are many aspects to what is called "Emerging Church" and I don't even pretend grasp all of it.  Nor am I interested in debating the various aspects of it.  But I, for one, have been "emerging" into the paradigm that has been described by these quotes.  It's not about some church form (not even "house church" form), it's about living a Jesus-life, all day, everyday.  Community life supports the Jesus-life-in-us, not the other way around.  We live with Jesus in the world as our primary calling--each and every day.  We gather with others to support that Jesus-life and to build up one another.  I believe in keeping community life SIMPLE (New Testament style) so that it SUPPORTS our life-with-Jesus-in-the-world rather than hinders it.

The key paradigm shift that I would love to see everyone emerge into is that it is not about living for the church (in any form) but simply living for the Kingdom--with and for Jesus.  Perhaps this is exactly what is happening!