I was recently invited to be a part of the blog tour for Ed Stetzer & Phillip Nation’s new book Compelled By Love. I was honored to join fellow bloggers (the tour has included Alan Hirsch’s blog, Tall Skinny Kiwi, Darryl Dash, Micah Fries, iemissional) in the conversation over this new book. The book is a wonderful exposition about how the church as a people of God can incarnate the love of Christ and by so doing become God’s mission in the world. The book is an apologetic for God’s love being the very core of what missional church and missional living is. This notion may seem elementary, almost obvious, yet Ed and Phillip do a marvelous job of expounding what this looks like in a people caught up in mission. I consider Ed a friend and respect his work very much. So I was anxious to offer them the following questions and hear their answers. So here goes. Feel free to comment on their answers and hopefully they will check in and respond a time or two.

Dave Fitch: Ed and Phillip, people who love like this (the way you describe in Compelled by Love) don’t just grow on trees! They don’t just show up at your church plant all “ready to go!” In fact, most often church plants start out with the people who couldn’t love like this in other churches. How does the discipling of these kind of people happen in the church according to your book? What can we learn about this kind of discipling, and formation by reading your book?

Ed: First, David, let us say thanks for the opportunity to visit with you and the readers of your blog. And, we are so glad you are a part of the blog tour. Reclaiming the Mission is on my Google Reader and The Great Giveaway is on my shelf. It was good to see you in Chicago and I hope to see you more now that I am on the faculty of Trinity.

Anyway, on to the great questions.

First, the type of discipling we advocate is relatively simple while deeply profound. It focused on God’s character and his mission. There is no need to discount other topics such as marriage, apologetics, or character studies; but the primary task of making a disciple of Christ is to lead that person to be on mission with Christ.

It seems to us that too many people who say that they want their discipleship filled with “meat” are really interested in being instructed in “minutia.” They want to have more knowledge, but it often is not applied.

We are convinced that people need more, not less, Biblical knowledge, but what many lack today is Jesus-shaped application. In other words, we know much but live little (at least in the evangelical subculture).

Philip: One of the issues we point to in the book is the need for the church to engage in the mission of Christ together. On face value, this seems elementary. But, we all know that many churches have stress fractures that prevent unity in relationships and purpose. Leading spiritual formation around the biblical ideal of love will bring the type of unity which points to God’s glory.

When Ed and I planted together in Atlanta, we had a pretty theologically driven approach and our discipleship was built around practices. Rather than focus on what we typically refer to as “disciplines” as an end to themselves, we led believers to express love for Christ through spiritual practices. To that end, we have taught worship, missional living, spirituality, and service as practices of Christian living motivated to place Christ’s glory at the center of our lives and buoyed by love.

Another part of spiritual formation has been the emphasis on community. The New Testament’s teaching on the church constantly emphasizes our interconnectedness. Thus, we think that the Christian journey is best taken with friends who, to quote Hebrews 10:24, “stir up one another to love and good works.” So we encourage friends to move through spiritual formation together.

Dave Fitch: Excellent! … and thanks Ed for the encouraging comments! Ed and Phillip, it seems like this kind of love, being embodied in our lives as you discuss, changes the very nature of our corporate existence in the world. How does this love change the way we practice church? Would such a church look any different than say a Seeker Service mega- church, a traditional Baptist church? What does your book mean for ecclesiology?

Philip: Our practice of church is too often tied to self-satisfaction rather than redemptive mission. Love will cause us to abandon personal preferences (which are short-sighted anyway) for a sacrificial life which cares for the lost and hurting in a manner akin to Christ. Some “style” issues (traditional, contemporary, whatever) would have little bearing on whether or not we are loving, but a church that loves will shape itself around the mission of Jesus in the place it finds itself.

Ed: Let me also add something that an old friend of mine once said. He explained, “The way you win people is how you keep people.” So, I think we need to be careful in how we do ministry. If our ministry is built primarily on attracting people to the show, it is hard to get them to then love God and others on a mission.

Missional living with love as a motivation should be able to operate in churches of every style and size, if they are willing to not make it about themselves. If, in reaching them, we make it all about them– well, it should not surprise us that they never move beyond a self-centered model. My hope is that churches are seeking to dig in with the truth and contextualize their communication methods – and both require a loving spirit. Loving God supremely will cause us to stand for his truth. Loving our neighbors will help us to speak the truth clearly to them; even when it is inconvenient and with methodology that is not what we necessarily prefer.

Philip: Ecclesiology is touched on within the book from a relational and missional perspective. Our ecclesiology, theology, and missiology should be tied together. After all, how God reveals himself to us (theology) and how we engage others (missiology) should determine how we relate to one another (ecclesiology). And, as you know, he has chosen love as a primary descriptor of himself. So, we have included a section in the book that gives an overview of a basic missional ecclesiology.

Dave Fitch: That is extremely helpful! Last question to both of you: The issue of your book – missional living as compelled by the love of Christ’s love – is such an important issue for church presense in a community. You mention in the book the Lifeway Research about people seeing the church as judgmental and hypocritical. What are the roadblocks, theological and practical, that we pastors have to overcome in order to see God shape us away from this kind of judgemental hypocrisy and into living the gospel as a church in this way?

Philip: For pastors, it often comes down to the simple matter of our own spiritual formation. Congregations take on the form of their leaders. So, as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 11:1, “Be imitators of me, as I also am of Christ.” We as pastors must ensure that our leadership is born from the life of Christ – which is heroically sacrificial. The unnecessary hurdles which we (the church) place in front of the Gospel must be removed first in the lives of its leadership. We are greatly concerned that many pastors show a lack of spiritual formation and that is just naturally passed on to a congregation– which is soon filled with people who know Jesus dies for them but they don’t know how to live for him. They know what they are against and for what they have been forgiven, but they don’t know how to live.

Ed: David, that research was pretty startling. People can find out more about it here (http://www.lifeway.com/lwc/article_main_page/0,1703,A%253D166950%2526M%253D200906,00.html). I tried to explain a little bit about it to the reporter here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wAIpT-5-Jw).

I want people to get three things from it. They are not very profound because I am a simple person!

They are:
1. They don’t see us as very loving.
2. That is probably because we are not often shaped and compelled by love.
3. We ought to do something about that.

It seems to be that unloving Christians must not get what God did for them. Paraphrasing my friend Tim Keller: God is more holy than we can imagine and man is more sinful than we are willing to admit. When our doctrine of God and man are born from the truth of scripture then we are able to move from judgmentalism to redemptive ministry.

I am not a naturally loving person (Philip is probably much more compassionate than I am). However, when I think of the debt Jesus paid for me, how can I then hold something against another person. And, yes, Jesus sure illustrated that in his Parable of the Unmerciful Servant in Matthew 18:21-35.

So, for us it boils down so clearly to 2 Cor. 5:14-15:

2 Corinthians 5:14-15 (HCSB) 14 For Christ’s love compels us, since we have reached this conclusion: if One died for all, then all died. 15 And He died for all so that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for the One who died for them and was raised.

We will be loving when we no longer live for ourselves but for Him.

Dave Fitch: Thanks to both of you for an excellent interview and an excellent book! God bless your labors in this book for Christ and His Mission.

It never ceases to amaze me: the never-ending push to contextualize the gospel to another market niche. Now we have:

The “guy-church,” the church for the real men with no flowers or pastel colors and rustic settings.

We’ve already had

“The Harley-church” (motor-cycle church)

“The Great Sex” church.

The Andy Griffith church (I confess this hit every urge in my body).

The “Church for a better you” (no link necessary) for people who view God as their personal therapist.

The “We’ll give you purpose” (no link necessary) church.

There of course are already “Art churches,” drive-in churches, “gay and lesbian churches,”

My bet? We soon will have:

The “green church” a church for eco-sensitive people. This church promises to show you how God can improve your front lawn.

The “people-with pets church.” – a church to help people in their relationships with their household pets, because after all God loves animals too.

“Ferragamo churches” for people who like shoes, really like shoes.

Contextualization extracts the gospel message (like a concept), reduces it to a narrow point of contact and seeks to attract people via this appeal to this contact. Contextualization by its very nature is attractional in the Frost/Hirsch sense. I would suggest then that contextualization makes it almost impossible for the church to be transformational.

Incarnation on the other hand seeks to incarnate the gospel over long periods of time culturally within a context. It enters into a culture as a communal presence whereby it is able to discern its surrounding contact points. It will accept some things in the surrounding culture and bring them into captivity for the gospel. It will flat out reject others. In the process it becomes a display of a redeemed form of that culture.

Contextualization is possible only within a modern milieu: the milieu that stresses the gospel as a translatable trans cultural (as opposed to intra cultural) concept. Contextualization like this makes the church susceptible to the territorialization of the market, where everything becomes splintered into market niches inevitably separating us from one another. The church thereby becomes bi-furcated ever repeating the modern move to identify and separate. We break up and divide: contemporary churches from traditional churches, black churches from white churches, Republican churches from Democrat. Motorcycle culture churches from suburban churches who drive sedans. “Real men” churches from woman churches from sensitive guy churches. The church becomes another form of “identity politics.”

Evangelicals, uncritical of their modernist bias, are addicted to contextualization.

Comments? Questions? Push backs?

The pastors group at Life on the Vine spent this early morning talking about church planting, spawning communities of mission. We resolved that we would first seek to seed missional communities in places where a.) the gospel is sorely missing (either because churches have closed, left or not yet come), b.) we could live more affordably (so we could all live beneath our means), and c.) where we could live in closer proximity to one another.

Ironically the last two criteria would eliminate the very place Life on the Vine exists. Life on the Vine has faced significant challenges in the NW suburbs regarding the issues of affordability and proximity. We have had to be inventive. The struggle in each of these challenges has just begun. Yet the suburbs cannot be abandoned. We have seen smaller churches (300 and less) close up. The mega churches grow larger. And yet there is little left for those outside the gospel who would never consider darkening the doors of a mega church (which for me includes most post Christendom peoples).

Having said all this, I think we see ourselves as sending people off in groups of ten, as missional orders into places that a.) need the gospel, b.) more affordable, and c.) allow for proximal living. We want to send especially the people who cannot afford to live here.

This gets me to the point of this entire post. In several conversations I have had with missional church planters in the past three weeks, I have discussed what is happening in their towns. They all live in towns of 100,000 or so. In each of these towns the middle to upper classes economically have moved to the outer circle of these cities. Mega churches, in some cases huge mega churches, have sprung up on the outer edges of these towns (we’d call them suburbs in a big city like Chicago.) Meanwhile, from the middle of these little cities in, churches have shrunk, died, been whittled to nothing (many times by these mega churches) left and/or closed up. The outer circle of these towns has plenty of churches and money. Yet in all three of these contexts, “the middle in” is decidedly less middle-to upper class and lacks churches relative to the population. This “middle-in” is struggling with poverty, job loss, gangs, under-education and other things. Here in the “middle-in” parts of these towns are “the poor,” the ones most ready and desperate for the gospel. Here lies fertile ground for the gospel.

All this to say, “the middle in” is also a.) very affordable, b.) allows for proximity, and c.) is in need of the gospel. These are the fertile places for the missional orders we are seeking to form at Life on the Vine. We seek to send groups of 10, gifted people for ministry who can get jobs and flourish in these new places for mission. I was stunned to visit one of these places this week and find many young professional Christians, who have good jobs, tired of mega church living, doing this kind of missional living. Wow, it blew my mind.

What do you think about the “middle in” hypothesis? Are you interested? Are you already doing this?

A couple weeks ago I posted on the “missional” synchroblog that the missional church needed to differentiated from the mega-church. In response, my friend Craig Carter ( blog) asks, in a comment to the post, whether we could not view mega-churches as cathedrals. He says:

My point, to be up front, is that the Church as a whole takes different forms in different situations. Overall, the Church must be missional, but can the Church include both cathedrals and also monastic orders? And can contemplative orders co-exist peacefully alongside missionary orders? Can all recognize themselves as part of God’s one Church? I ask because in Roman Catholicism they do, while in Protestantism it is as if the Franciscans think the bishops and the parish structure are of the devil and the Jesuits think the cloistered orders are suspect as the genuineness of their faith. And as for the mystics, well they are just beyond the pale for everyone else. Shouldn’t this discussion be conducted more along the lines of “calling” rather than which structures are “right” and which are “wrong?”

I agree with the general sense of what Craig says here. I have some theological/ecclesiological reservations about the shape of many mega churches, yet I hesitate to write them off. And so I argued in that same post (admittedly in a reserved fashion) that megachurches have their place within the landscape of N American Christianity. I said: “I believe the work of the mega churches is valid and has its place in the Kingdom: the ministry to the dormant unchurched of Christendom..” As Christendom wanes however, that work will become smaller and smaller.

It is for this reason that I like what Craig Carter is saying above. In some ways we might compare the place of mega-churches today with the place of cathedrals in medieval Europe. Cathedrals were at the center of Christendom. To this day, in each town in old Italy, you will see the vestiges of the town square in front of the Cathedral like church, the steeple being the highest point in the village, and all the roads leading to the church. In this pre-modern time, the church bells kept time, the daily office, and the festivals were all holy festivals that were conducted to and from the church. These Cathedrals represented a society where the language was Christian and the church was at the pinnacle of power in society. It made sense that cathedrals were “attractional.” I believe many of the same conditions necessary for Cathedrals are indeed necessary for mega churches. I believe mega churches are dependent upon the sociological conditions of Christendom. Although Craig Carter’s teacher, John Yoder, would wince at the integrity of such a structure for God’s people, for these times and places, I want to grant at least some legitimacy to this historic way of being church.

Alongside these cathedrals however, monastic orders of various types arose. During particular times of church history when the church fell into decline, when society was taken over by “the barbarians, it was the missional orders that carried on the faith. Mission was best conducted by these missional orders and some of them were even commissioned by the Cathedral churches (Rome). These missional orders were not attractional. They almost always had flexibility and movability to their structure. Of course these orders often got in trouble with the Cathedral (Rome) church when they called the Cathedral church back to holiness and faithfulness.

Today, I can see the missional church movement as having this same kind of flexibility and movability necessary to do mission in North America whereas the mega church does not. I see the Cathedrals/mega churches as too often seduced by power. I claim it is inherent in the structure. I see that Cathedrals often fell into “servicing” a Christianity that was lowest common denominator. I see mega churches as prone to the same. I see Cathedrals/mega churches as prone to all the problems of institutionalization including inflexibility and immovability. The missional communities can do grass roots community like mega church/Cathedrals never could and never can. All of these weaknesses however do not delegitimate the Cathedral church’s role in Christendom society, sometimes powerful in every way.

The question is, is Christendom good? And are we at that same point in the decline of the Cathedral Christendom church (evangelical mega church) where it needs to be called back to faithfulness? I think Christendom has its big problems. I think it’s on the decline anyways. I also think today that many of the mega churches have fallen into the same bad habits as the Christendom Cathedrals of the past. I therefore see the missional church movement as being a renewal ecclesiological movement in relation to the mega church movement, much like the monastic orders were to the Cathedral church.

I love what Leonardo Boff, the Latin American theologian, says about the base communities of Latin America and their relationship to the Roman Catholic established church. I think a similar relationship can be seen in the missional communities/monastic orders relationship to the Cathedrals/mega churches. In Boff’s words,

… the problem of church does not reside in the counterpoint of institution and community. These poles abide forever. The real problem resides in the manner in which both are lived, the one as well as the other: whether one pole seeks to absorb the other, cripple it, liquidate it, or each respects the other and opens itself to the other in constant willingness to be put to the question. p.7 Ecclesiogenesis

This post has been much too simplified. But thanks to Craig Carter for his idea so germane to the missional discussion. He knows much more about pre-Reformation history than I. And he knows John Howard Yoder better than I. So I’d be interested in his take on this analogy.

What do you think? In what ways do you see this analogy as fruitful for the missional church/mega church discussion? How do you see missional communities/ mega churches, emerging churches/denominations working together?