I’m busy teaching a Doctoral seminar this week at Northern Seminary on “Missional Ecclesiology.” This is keeping me from blogging this week. Below are two ppt. slides we worked on today (Tuesday). We develop these rubrics to understand the assumptions that undergird our practices as “church” and the theology that drives them. Then, by re-examining our cultural and theological assumptions we can reshape the practices  of the church (which we lead from) for Mission. I’ll be back next week.

The SGM scandal (for those of you who need to catch up read this and this ) has been a excessively heated topic. It affords us an occasion to take a look at ourselves and our own church’s leadership. This post  is a brief riff off some reading today in Hauerwas’ The State of the University. The quotes from Yoder and Hauerwas can be found around page 155-157

John Howard Yoder believed that understanding the sinfulness of the church is essential for understanding “the politics of the church.” Yoder believed that the organization of the church must take into full account the sinfulness of the church. By our nature as Christ’s church, we are ever being converted, reformed and transformed. And so the way in which leadership is conducted, organization developed, and authority exercised is a matter of witness before the rest of the world to the work God is doing in Christ to redeem all things. The character of our corporate leadership and the manner in which we lead should point the rest of the world to the life being lived together in Christ, in His death, resurrection and reigning Lordship over our lives. We are ever bearing the death and resurrection of Christ, ever showing the world that sin does not have the final word, but instead when we sin, it is the occasion to turn from and live further into our baptism before the world. This means leaders will not put themselves above others when it comes to sin. We will always be ready to confess our sins and repent, seek reconciliation and renewal as part of God’s new kingdom in Christ. This is part of our witness.

Yoder suggests that “wholesome growth is not so much understood to be like branches from a tree but rather more like a vine.” There is a kind of “looping back” to test ongoing practices by the Lordship of Christ.  The progress of the body of Christ is akin to a “story of constant interruptions of organic growth” where pruning happens and the opportunity is made for new roots to spout.

One of the reasons why we have so much resentment in the church today is the loss of ability of leaders to submit their sinfulness to the church. To have our story interrupted. So many “parishioners” have been hurt or abused by the church. I don’t know what they were expecting from their leaders, but perhaps they were given false expectations. Perhaps they expected leaders to be set above the congregation. But we should not do that. We should always be expecting our story to be interrupted. Instead, in alot of our leadership structures,  the revealing of sin by a leader threatens the entire structure of authority. This to me is a sign we have lost the essence of what it means to be the church (as Yoder described above). It sets the church up for abuse instead of reform, its most charismatic leaders up for moral failure instead of constant growth through humility vulnerability and mutual submission. It prevents any and all interruptions, that which makes us the alive body of Christ.

I think the SGM scandal is one more occasion for all of us Christians to look at ourselves, ask what are we doing? and why the kind of leadership we are perpetrating has created so much abuse and moral failure? What structures and culture are we perpetrating? How long are we going to look the other way every time another mega church pastor has another moral failure? There’s something bigger going on here than just another isolated pastor who fell. We must ask whether our leaders have been set up on a false pedestal (this post makes me seriously wonder about this). We must ask whether we have set up structures and a culture where the leader loses his/her ability to confess sins and listen to one another (again, this post makes me wonder about this). This does NOT mean everybody gets to take his/her best shot – releasing his/her pet peave – against the pastor. No, there should be structures for discerning lies from truth (this takes a living community and time). But we must be alarmed when leaders are impervious to submission to their fellow believers in community and the hearing of their sins. Because when we lose this, we have all lost what it means to be the church, a place that recognizes our sinfulness and the need to be ever open to challenge, recognition of sin, and God’s work to transform.

I encourage us all, not just my Neo-Reformed brothers and sisters, to NOT gloss over the events of  this most recent SGM scandal. But let’s also get beyond pointing the finger at another church scandal. Don’t’ be gleeful you all who have an axe to grind. Instead let’s use this moment to examine ourselves and our churches concerning our own lives, the structure and culture of leadership in our own churches.

Peace, reconciliation and joy of Christ.

Recently Life on the Vine and other churches  gathered as a group of church planters to discuss how we might lead our churches into our surrounding communities. I started the discussion with describing the difference between “Looking for a Project” in the neighborhood  and “Developing a Presence” in the neighborhood. We discovered just how fundamental the question of posture is to incarnational presence in the neighborhood. Here’s some of our takeaways.

The Difference Between “Project” versus “Presence”

Often a church seeks to engage the community by “looking for the Next Project.” We seek a “need” in the community where we can help, bring resources and the love of Christ. What can happen though with this mentality is we A.) come to the project out of a posture of “pretending not to need.” We come with resources from a distance, not listening to the lives of people very well. We come out of a posture of power, control. B.) We thereby unintentionally make the people/issue we are helping into a client/object. These dynamics work against the Kingdom.  C.) We often turn this into a volunteer effort/program where we contribute a few hours a week and it is separated from our everyday lives. D.) Since it is mainly “us” doing something, this approach eventually leads to church burnout. It leads to a continual diet of “projects” and we never get to developing a “presence.”

“Developing a Presence” on the other hand, A.) enters a space out of one’s own needs. We come to be “with” the people in our context. Think of how different the dynamics (to use a suburban example) are when a new parent joins a parents group in need of a place to share the loneliness/ tediousness of caring for a new born child versus a church that sets up a day care center, B.) We come out of a “mutual” relationship sharing in what God is doing, C.) We do not come into a context as “volunteers” offering a few hours a week. Instead, the hours we spend with people, working for justice, come from places we inhabit regularly as part of our everyday life. We hope to spend years together living life in the Kingdom, D.) We become conduits of God’s work, pointing out what God is already doing, or where there are already resources right here to help. We therefore never run out of gas. We are truly energized. Of course we will offer our own resources not as a solution but because we are friends, part of this social reality God is bringing into being.

When “looking for the Next Project” churches will often look for places of need in the local context. But that need will be seen through our eyes. We might even create a project or a program. When “Developing a Presence”  we seek to understand “need” and the dynamics surrounding that need from the eyes of those we are “with.” We look from within for what is happening. We ask a lot of questions, spend hours/days/weeks/years listening. We in essence then attempt to hop on to something already in motion. Development follows justice relationally.

Things we Might Do To Train/Disciple People into Presence in The Neighborhood

In trying to lead a people into developing a presence in the neighborhood, we came up with these ‘tactics.’

1. Individual Life Inventory: We can help each other inventory our lives and ask where we are already intersecting with people’s lives and become more aware of relationships and what God is doing around us. We can look at individual habits and locate where we are doing some things either as isolated individuals or with our church community that we could instead do in more public places, or with people in the neighborhood. The result should be that by adding no additional time or tasks to our lives we become more present in the neighborhood just out of living our everyday lives more intentionally.
2. Third Places: Churches can look at their neighborhoods and locate third places, places where people hang out. We can locate various places where basketball games, parent groups, park district clean-ups are already happening. And we can say, instead of doing these activities ourselves as a church, let us get involved with what others are already doing. We can look for places of need, homeless shelters, domestic abuse counseling centers, etc. where we have already interested people and “send” them there to be present in everyday life. We can in essence organize people to do things in programs already going on instead of starting them ourselves.
3. Bring the practices of the Kingdom: We must train people how to “bring reconciliation,” “proclaim gospel,” use the gifts of the Spirit in healing and renewal, “practice hospitality.” By learning how to embody these practices we are training ourselves to be present in a way that includes are being sent. Being “sent” means we witness to what God is doing and are ready, when the occasion erupts, to become the conduit by which God works to point others into the Kingdom
4. Do it in groups of two or three. We must train people how to invite others to be present with them when God is working in the neighborhood. We need to join with other believers from all churches. We need to invite those who do not yet recognize the Kingdom. We must become skilled into how to lead u=others into the practices of the Kingdom, including reconciliation, hospitality, gospel proclamation, being with those who have less, etc…
5. “Projects” out of our “Presence.” We must develop a mindset that projects develop out of presence and when they do we invite the larger church gathering to join in.  As a result, we must not be afraid of projects, just recognize that it is through developing a presence that projects can keep from becoming about us, and thereby resistant to Kingdom transformation in the community.

Final Comments

I hope the last point helps us see that we need not polarize Project versus Presence. Instead we see how one flows from the other.

In addition, I just want to suggest, especially for large churches, that it is best to start “developing presence” in the neighborhoods through small groups of 12. One small group of 12 learning how to be present in a neighborhood can change a whole church over time!

Blessings on all our efforts to lead our church to be present in our neighborhoods. Please tell us of your successes. What have been your hurdles? Have you any ways you’ve learned to disciple people into living their lives in the presence of the KIngdom?

Been thinking about the questions my life seeks to answer and I came across these two questions in a little book I’m reading by Jan Johnson, When the Soul Listens: Finding Rest and Direction in Contemplative Prayer. The words jumped off the page and stuck to the inside of my heart – God’s been incubating them in me since: 1. What must I do to be loved? 2. What must I do to be valued? How we answer these two questions will drive our decisions and shape our affections. Our answer to these questions determine the person we are and are becoming.

What must I do to be loved? What must I do to be valued?

Is love something you have, or something you lack? At the core of who you are – the deepest reality of ‘you’ – what is your belief about love? What makes you valuable? Do you have a scarcity or an abundance? Many of us feel chronically deficient in this area – so our fundamental posture is one of “I must find love; I must prove my worth” Others of us (for various reasons) don’t question that we are loved and valued. We live and move out of a deep, full awareness that love is at home in us and we are valued and have worth. We are loved.

Where are you? Below are some questions I ask to get at the core of how I’m living. Am I living from God’s love, or out of a lack of it? Am I trying to prove or assert my worth rather than rest in the reality that I am (and have) value(d):

1. Am I trying to please God and others? Doing things to receive admiration and accolades? Am I a people pleaser?
2.  Do I avoid things that I’m bad at because my value is tied to what I’m good at or produce? Am I a performer?
3. Does being wrong or having to ask forgiveness scare me? Am I avoiding difficult conversations and living with unreconciled relationships because I can’t risk being wrong or a failure? Am I a do-gooder?
4. When I sin, do I beat myself up? Do I tell myself I am someone other than who God says I am? Am I able to be gentle with my faults? Am I a critic?
5. Do I feel “safe” to come out of hiding with God and others and authentically reveal who I am? Am I an escaper?

Love – God’s love in Jesus Christ, the love that pursues us through the pages of scripture in the OT and becomes flesh in the NT – changes everything. Love is so high and deep and wide and long that it completely fills us with all God’s fullness (Eph 3.18-19) Love answers the above questions like this:

1.  Am I trying to please God and others? Doing things to receive admiration and accolades? Am I a people pleaser?“You please me because I love you – I am already pleased with you before you obey or disobey. Will you trust that love today?” (Heb 11.6)
2. Do I avoid things that I’m bad at because I can’t handle failure? Am I a performer? “My love for you isn’t compromised by failure – when you fail I will use it to teach you to trust my love – my success on your behalf – even more.” (1 Cor 12.8-10)
3. Does being wrong or having to ask forgiveness scare me? Am I avoiding difficult conversations and living with unreconciled relationships because I can’t risk being wrong? Am I a do-gooder? “It is now safe for you to be wrong because with me there is forgiveness of sins. In fact, the only way to rest and remain in my love is to give up your prideful pursuit to always be right, to win, and to justify yourself.” (1 John 4.18)
4. When I sin, do I beat myself up? Do I tell myself I am someone other than who God says I am? Am I able to be gentle with my faults? Am I a critic? “I was wounded for your transgressions, my beloved. By my wounds you are healed – why do you treat yourself in a way that denies the reality that I have paid your penalty in full? Your sin is another opportunity to surrender to my love.” (Rom 7.14-8.2) “There is an Accuser who is always pointing out your faults to me – when you beat yourself up and practice self-condemnation you sound a lot like him. And – I went to great pains to defeat his power in your life. Won’t you trust me in this? You will never be able to hate yourself enough to not sin – but if you trust my love, you may be able to love yourself and others enough to not sin.” (Rom 8.31-39)
5. Do I feel “safe” to come out of hiding with God and others and authentically reveal who I am? Am I an escape artist?“My love is only accessible through honest, open, unpretentious living. The more you pretend you’re someone you’re not, the less access you have to the love available to you right in the midst of who you really are.” (1 John 1.8-9; 4.9-10)

How we answer these two questions - What must I do to be loved? What must I do to be valued? - will determine our choices and shape our affections. Friends – in Jesus Christ the good news of God is that we are loved and of infinite worth. Yes, we sin. Yes, we’ve rebelled against God’s good created order. But we are a “splendid ruin” (as Dallas Willard says) that God seeks to save by demonstrating his love for – and redeeming his OWN precious image in – us. Our loveliness and value are relational gifts we receive through surrender and trust in Jesus

How do you know you are loved and of worth? 

Do these above questions help you assess where your heart lies? 

Of the following: People-pleaser, Performer, Critic, Escape Artist, Do-gooder – how do you most often live outside of God’s love and value? 

What sorts of practices demonstrate we believe who God says we are? How do we bear fruit in keeping with repentance in these areas? What’s that look like for you?

Hey all, I’m heading for Cleveland for Cleveland’s first ever Missional Round Table. We’ll be there all day tomorrow. We’ll be talking the nitty gritty of church leadership/church planting in a society that is no longer culturally Christian. Church and Mission!The gathering will be small conversational and free! So, all the good peeps of Cleveland, join us if you can. Here’s a link to all the info.

Geoff Holsclaw and I are pleased our book Prodigal Christianity finally arrived these past few months. Now that there has been enough time for people to read and digest it, we’re launching a blog tour that will feature people’s reflections, engagements, and criticism of all 10 of our Signposts, beginning next Monday. Below is the schedule and then the biographies of those on the tour. If you are reading the book, won’t you join us in the discussion Geoff and I hope to be interacting with with every post!

Tim Stidham is the pastor of NewHope Community Church (NW Indiana). He is the adjunct professor of Homiletics at Olivet Nazarene University. He received his D.Min in Preaching from Association of Chicago Theological Schools (ACTS) and blogs at http://hdnazarene.com.

Robert Martin, by day, is a middle-aged software validation analyst in a small software company in Southeastern Pennsylvania. By night (or rather always), he is the Abnormally Anabaptist, trying his best to humbly follow God, examine life (his own especially), and seek to help others find and follow the King of Kings. He blogs at http://abnormalanabaptist.wordpress.com/.

Fred Liggins is a husband, father, friend, activist, coffee-drinker, beard-promoter, comma-lover, and bi-vocational pastor with Williamsburg Christian Church. He blogs at www.fredsforehead.com.

JR Woodward is the co-founder of Ecclesia Network and Missio Alliance, Director of Church Planting - V3, Author of Creating a Missional Culture, and Phd Student at the University of Manchester.  He blogs at jrwoodward.net.

Wende Lance, after seven years in ministry at a traditional church in Ashland, Ohio, resigned her position to pursue a more missional lifestyle. Currently, she co-leads a missional community, continues her DMin studies at Northern Seminary, works as a realtor, and blogs sporadically at www.wjlance.com.

Kevin Scott is co-pastor of a sustainable church plant in Noblesville, Indiana, acquisitions editor for Wesleyan Publishing House, and a frequent speaker on how God brings redemption and healing in pockets of the kingdom. Kevin writes about sustainable Christianity at kevinscottwrites.com and is author of the forthcoming book, ReCreatable: How God Heals the Brokenness of Life (Kregel, March 2014).

Seth Richardson is an Anglican with anabaptist proclivities. His home base is St. Andrew’s Church in Little Rock, Arkansas where he oversees discipleship-related things. Seth has also been an adjunct instructor of hermeneutics at Ouachita Baptist University, and sometimes he explores lived theology on his blog, This Place.

Joshua Lee Henry is a missional leadership coach and also leads several ministries with Pathway Community Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He blogs at joshualeehenry.com.

Kevin Williams is the Minister of Evangelism at The Branch Church in Farmers Branch, Texas. He has two degrees from Abilene Christian University, a BA and MA in Christian Ministry, and most recently an MRE in Missional Leadership from Rochester College. Kevin and his wife, Jill, live in Dallas, TX and he blogs at www.hipstianity.wordpress.com.

Josh Rowley is a pastor (teaching elder) in the Presbyterian Church (USA). For the past nine and a half years he has been serving with a church in San Carlos, California, and in June he will begin a new call in Vancouver, Washington (First Presbyterian). He have degrees from the University of Colorado, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and Fuller Theological Seminary (where he studied missional leadership under Al Roxburgh and Mark Lau Branson). I blog atwww.postyesterday.com.

Scott is an avid reader of both theology and culture who has been taught more by his special needs students than he is aware. He has been attempting to cultivate communities of Jesus-followers in his hometown of Syracuse alongside his wife and three daughters. Blog: https://scottemery.wordpress.com/

This is an old post from 2008 I was recently revisiting. 5 years later, I think the logic has been proven. The way to begin something new in a given context is start with (at least ) 3 leaders living, praying operating in relation to each other out of their gifts. Then comes 12 who come alongside to learn and live out what God is doing. Then each of these 12 join with 10 or so people in their neighborhood. This group becomes a powderkeg for Kingdom activity in the neighborhood. At which point we start all over again. Send out 3, and the 12, all over again. Read this old post (slightly revised) and see if it makes sense to you? What questions do you have. Have these principles been proven in your experience of church planting?

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We are inclined to think that the way to impact the world for Christ is to do something “big.” It’s the American way: Do Something Big! In American church life, the churches that have the most influence are the largest churches in attendance on Sunday mornings – 10,000 or more. These are the churches that get the most attention – whether it be the front page of the newspaper, CNN or the denominational conferences. I do not wish to deny the “successes” of these churches. Something has clicked, a “wave has been caught,” the tipping point has tipped and some work for God’s Kingdom has gone forth. But often what happens is people seek to “model” the success evident here at the exact time the movement has already peaked. I am not trying to do a sociological analysis of church strategists (I hate the very idea of church strategist). I just wish to offer some observations from my own sight lines. From my point of view, once a church hits what many perceive as “success,” what has already happened is that this same church has lost its ability to critique and engage culture. Specifically, it cannot even see how it has itself become a reflection of the culture. Worse yet, this church now has to maintain itself and in some cases go into survival mode. The large successful churches therefore lose their maneuverability in and among a culture. They lose their ability to be incarnational in the sense of actively engaging and being present in the newly evolving context they find themselves in.

All this to say, the church best suited to make the most impact for Christ and His Kingdom both in terms of individual peoples’ lives and culturally for justice, is the smaller incarnational community embedded in the surrounding geographical community. Here there is cultural maneuverability sufficient to engage one’s surrounding cultural issues. Here, most of all, there is relationality. There is the wherewithal of a community to understand the social issues and get traction and do some “culture-making” – culture redeeming.

I believe there is a social logic to this way of incarnating Christ culturally as a church in the surrounding community. It is no where better displayed than in Andy Crouch’s description of the 3,the 12 and the 120 in his book Culture-Making. Let me briefly summarize it.

Andy says all “culture-making” is local. Certainly there are many cultural goods that have made a global impact. Think McDonalds, Facebook, even Ford Motor Company at the turn of the last century. Nonetheless, Crouch makes the argument that all of these global culturally transforming organizations began with 3 people, who then had 12 around them , who then had 120 people as the third layer of concentric circles where the impact is spread deeply into nooks and crannies of the surrounding cultural geography. Andy shows how many of the biggest cultural innovations of the century started with the logic of 3 core people committed together to a vision, purpose, idea or understanding of how to engage a problem, need or innovation. They then gathered 12 people who could explain it, understand it and carry it out further. They then gathered 120 more – these people I suggest are a sufficient mass of people who can know the 3 and the 12, build sufficient trust and coordination to coalese around the idea, vision or mission and birth it as a reality among themselves – make it visible in a community large enough so the world can see, taste and understand the revolution being brought forth.

Andy Crouch says:

The essential insight of the 3: 12: 120 is that every cultural innovation, no matter how far reaching its consequences, is based on personal relationships and personal commitment. Culture making is hard. It simply doesn’t happen without the deep investment of absolutely and relatively small groups of people. In culture making, size matters – in reverse. Only a small group can sustain the attention, energy and perseverance to create something that genuinely moves the horizons of possibility – because to create the good requires an ability to suspend, at least for a time, the very horizons within which everyone is operating. Such “suspension of impossibility” is tiring and taxing. The only thing strong enough to sustain it is a community of people… p.243

This above paragraph describes something of what must happen in the founding of a missional community which seeks to make an impact in its immediate surrounding culture for the gospel. This also resonates with my own experience of planting missional communities. It was NOT until we arrived at enough co-inherence between myself and (at least) two other leaders that we could then go further. Then we needed twelve more. Now we must learn how to find trust and share the vision/understanding with one hundred and twenty Christians (or people becoming Christians invited into the Mission) so that together – under the Holy Spirit – a living breathing manifestation of God’s salvation in Christ breaks forth authentically and in real terms AMONG US. Then the church as a force for God’s salvation becomes unstoppable in our surrounding geography, as in Acts 2:42-47 unstoppable. This is the social logic of the 3,12,120.

From there, it might be that, every one of the twelve, if God so gifts, finds and develops their own triad of leaders from which another twelve are gathered .. and the next one hundred and twenty. We send out, and send out, and send out more and more communities. Of course none of this brilliant exposition by Andy Crouch would mean anything to me if the 3,12,120 was not in fact modeled by Jesus himself in the beginning of His church (as Andy points out), Jesus called his 3, Peter, James and John. They became his closest confidents and sharers of the vision. Then was the rest of the 12 that surrounded them from which came the 120 up in that upper room that day. This is what we see in essence gathered that day in that room (Acts 1:13-15): the 3, the 12 (er 11), and the 120. And of course God used this to change the world.

Following this 3:12:120 pattern in planting communities requires adjustments to the way we think about church. It will require multiple bi-vocational leadership using the APEPT model (the 3 or it could be 4 or 5) not a single senior entrepreneurial leader. These 3,4 or maybe 5 leaders are in mutual submission to the one Christ and Lord of the church. This is where I suggest all missional planters start. From here, we will all be challenged continually to “suspend the impossible” so that God can work in profound and miraculous ways. Cultivating this first among the 12 and then the 120 will take much nurturing and significant community. It will be organic and take time over many years. Growth will not be linear. It will require that we think success differently for it will be cultural success not just numeric success. Above all, we must understand that this has been the way God has in such profound ways changed the world and He can do it again, through starting small, the 3, 12, 120.

I think we have just begun to see what is possible in this way of thinking about the church at Life on the Vine and our various communities. What about you? Has anyone else seen the logic of the 3,12 and 120 at work in your churches?