DashHouse.com

I'm finding this fascinating. Canadian Christian radio host Drew Marshall has hired two non-Christians to visit five churches and report on their experiences.

I really didn't like the idea at first. To me it seemed like hiring two vegans to go out and rate five steakhouses.

Maybe I was wrong. So far they've visited four churches. I don't agree with everything they've written, of course, but they've made some very perceptive observations.

For instance, they visited one of the fastest growing churches in the Greater Toronto Area that is known as a "the church for people who aren't into church" - in other words, a church for people like these two hired visitors. I'm impressed by the quality of teaching at this church, and I have many friends who attend and some who work on staff.

Were they impressed? Listen to some of their comments. One wrote:

Why should the institution be rich, and the congregation not? If you really believe you should be living the ascetic life led by Christ and his apostles, why aren’t you doing it? If money and possessions aren’t important, why aren’t you meeting to discuss the meaning of Christ’s ideas and life in the local park? Notwithstanding the need to broadcast to your rather large congregation, and obviously you’d have to come up with a solution during the winter months, but really: why the son et lumiere? I found the medium more than a bit out of whack with the message.

Which brings me to another point: all that razzmatazz kind of unsettles me. We live in a culture where distraction is often misdirection - like a magician who gets you to look at his left hand while he’s disappearing something with his right. I found myself wondering why a group that liked its preacher so straightforward felt most at home in a medium of flashing lights and sound. Maybe it’s a generational thing - 30-45s are mostly Gen Xers, after all. But I still felt disconcerted.

And the other:

I had a little problem with their arguments involving material goods and our “media saturated culture” as they make their Sunday services available on your 80Gb video ipod.

It's worth reflecting on some of the things that got in the way of connecting in this church that is built for people like them. Not just reflecting on what this says about this one church, but to many of us as well.

And it's worth thinking about why they've finally found a church they seem to appreciate. The church is Sanctuary, pastored by Greg Paul, author of God in the Alley. The thing that you need to know about Greg is that he is as theologically orthodox as anyone I know. He didn't appeal to these non-Christians because he's abandoned theological moorings or because he doesn't stand for anything. Quite the opposite.

Listen to some of the comments:

My fear had left me, there was a calm sense of wonder now. We met the pastor first, he was wearing an eccentric yellow Hawaiian shirt with the usual brightly colored flowers, he spoke very calmly in a quiet voice that exuded a wisdom only achieved through many years of heart wrenching reality. He introduced us to a fellow who looked like he had seen a hard time too many, as it turns out he used to be homeless and had it not been for the Sanctuary who knows where he would be. I could tell then and there we had found what this experiment was set out to accomplish, a church that saw past the money, power and the heighten sense of moral superiority that we have grown accustomed to...

This place gets it, there was no collection plate that I ever saw and what they gave back to the community could not be measured. There isn’t enough good things to say about this place.

The other:

Amidst all the pomp and circumstance of the Christian world out there, here lies a simple, honest place that really means it.

Even the message - "He talked about the need for Christians to accept that it was an either-or proposition - if you accept that Christ is the Son of God, you must 'die to everything else'" - really connected.

Some are complaining that it's unfair because this church was tipped off before they came. But it's the only church so far in which Drew and his friends would be obvious, and they didn't change a thing. This is Sanctuary every single week.

Drew comments:

This is the only Church where the majority of time, finances and energy is NOT spent on the Sunday service. At Sanctuary, it actually would have been unfair to only score them on their Sunday service, the smallest part of what they do.

I'll be thinking about this for a while.

We spend a lot of time making Sunday mornings what they are, and focusing on the quality of the teaching and the music. But the church that has best embodied and communicated the gospel so far is not slick and would not get noticed for its attendance records. It's not going multisite and pastors don't drool over what they're doing.

There's a lot to think about as I read the reports of Drew and his friends visiting these churches. Reminds me a little of the letters to the churches in Revelation.

The Gospel Coalition site is now live with plenty of media and great resources.

My latest column at Christian Week:

Whenever someone tells me that the emerging church is a fad, I say that I hope so. As much as I appreciate some qualities of the emerging church, I also have my concerns. And, in the end, the whole church matters more than the emerging church.

I believe we can learn from the emerging church without joining its ranks. In fact, some who are opposed to the emerging church are arguing for ministry that has a lot in common with the emerging church.

For instance, a group of Reformed pastors and leaders met in Chicago in May to form what they call The Gospel Coalition. Many of the organizers have been scathing critics of the emerging movement. Yet they released a document that blends the best of their tradition with some emphases normally associated with the emerging church. This approach makes sense. Instead of becoming emerging, why not learn what we can while holding on to the best of our tradition and theology?

Here, then, are some ideas on how to adopt the best of the emerging movement without actually becoming emerging.

I got in a little trouble last month with a post on a conference I never attended. Here's what I wrote:

Last week, a speaker at our regional convention said, "95% of pastors are losers." I wasn't there, but from what I can pick up he was saying that 95% of pastors are not made of the right stuff to grow churches the way they need to be grown according to this model.

95%? That number could be a little low!

But here's the thing. From what I can tell, God can do some pretty amazing things with losers. At least he can in my Bible. They seem to be the group that he likes working with the most, actually.

I don't doubt that 95% of pastors are losers. To tell you the truth, it's the other 5% I'm worried about.

You can read the discussion that followed if you're interested.

I finally received the CD of the message in which the quote was made. Here, without further comment, is what Paul Borden actually said:

I blame my brother Kevin for this. Last year we were talking about needing to re-shingle our roofs. Kevin is a firefighter but also does roofs on the side. He said, "Why don't we save some money and help each other with our roofs?" Smart idea - but there were times last week when we all (including Kevin) had some regrets.

A couple of weeks ago, we did my brother David's roof. Last week, we tackled my roof, which has an 11/12 slope, almost 45 degrees - not the most fun. That's over five days of roofing in my comparatively sedentary life in just over a week.

Now I'm done, and I'm hoping I can find my way back to a desk. But it's been good. The roof looks amazing. But I'm glad to not be climbing back on a roof today.

I'm not 23. And I don't know what a city man is so I may not be that either.

From the police blotter in Jersey:

SUMMERFIELD AVENUE: City man Darryl Dash, 23, was charged June 5 by Investigator Eddy Raisin with possession of crack cocaine and trespassing.

According to an article in Word from Jerusalem (pages 9-12 of the May/June 2007 issue - PDF), today's church has a lot in common with superstitious Pacific islanders:

At the height of the Second World War the tribal people of Melanesia noticed that where the US forces built wharves and airstrips, ships and airplanes soon arrived delivering the "sacred" shipments of goods and wealth promised by their ancestors centuries before.

As the war ended and the US military bases were dismantled, the islanders reasoned that all they needed to do to keep the ships and airplanes coming was to build their own wharves and airstrips, fully expecting that their own cargo deliveries would swiftly follow suit.

Needless to say, though they constructed runway huts with air-traffic controllers equipped with perfectly crafted wooden headphones and antennas, no planes landed!

They thought that if they put the right technology in place, the planes and ships would arrive. We do the same.

With painstaking effort we investigate the various revival ministries around the world. We research church growth, and try to identify the reason for the success of this mega-church or that ministry. Whole institutions are dedicated to this purpose alone.

All the time we are secretly thinking that if we just build the same "wharves" and "airfields" as this pastor, or imitate the spiritual "technologies" of that teacher, then the heavenly cargo of revival will simply "arrive" in our churches. But all too often no planes land and no ships make port and we are left still waiting for the heavenly blessing. And so it goes, until we hear about a new move of God in another ministry and we try to discover the secret of their success.

When we do this, we are guilty of acting as a cargo cult - imitating "the outward elements of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance." But revival and renewal aren't found by copying processes, systems, by imitating the latest speaker or leader, buying books, or attending conferences:

The truth is simple. No move or visitation of God is dependent on a newly discovered doctrine, practice or strategy. It is a matter of a heart desperately seeking and thirsting for God's presence. It's a matter of a heart, which meets the right landing conditions for God to come and dwell among His people. Wooden "headphones" will do nothing. God looks for people whose hearts are in constant radio contact with His throne room.

What all the world's revivals have in common is this: people who desperately yearn for the presence of God. This is true in Africa, South and North America, China or wherever. God might respond by giving specific strategies that correspond to the individual calling and environment of a minister. But to transfer this strategy to your life and city - could be nothing more than a waste of time.

Real life is not found in copying the externals of programs and techniques, no matter how good these may be. Life never comes from these. Real life comes from a move of God that can't be copied, marketed, or branded.

It's time to get rid of cargo cult Christianity.

I need to read this every once in a while because I forget. It's from Jim Kallam's Risking Church:

We want ministry to be explained in terms that allow us to function as technicians, managers, or building contractors. We want a blueprint to build from and a list to check off as we accomplish each item.

I want something different.

I want the leadership of our church to be about creating an atmosphere, an environment where people can fall in love with Jesus. I don’t want technicians who can run a program. I want agents of love who will spread the life of the Spirit through the church.

This desire drives my engineers and accountants nuts! They want plans; I want an atmosphere, an environment, a community where people can live a new way. Fish can’t swim in the desert of programs. I want living water to create an ocean where beauty thrives.

A few months back I heard Serena Ryder interviewed on an AM radio station. She sang only one song, but it was enough for me to check her out on iTunes and then to get hooked.

She's from Millbrook, Ontario and is 24, but her voice has a power far beyond her years. She has a three octave range, and uses it to cover folk, country, roots and adult contemporary. I'm a fan.

Check out this review of a recent concert (which you can listen to here):

It takes ten seconds for a boxer to be counted out in the ring. It took less than that for Serena Ryder to completely stun this reporter at the start of her a cappella rendition of Melancholy Blue; and about three minutes, or the length of a round, to announce herself as a once-in-a-generation, Dylanesque visionary who quite literally has no ceiling.

I heard her tonight at the Danforth Music Hall and loved every minute. She's got a growing fan base and it's cool to discover her on her way up.

More: SerenaRyder.com

A church that is growing and written up in a book called Comeback Churches is likely to be asked, "What's the secret?"

Here's how one church answered:

Its hard to point to our wisdom and virtue that built the church. We have walked through some doors simply because all the others ones were closed; we have made mistakes that turned out to be strokes of genius...

We do not hope people will copy our strategies. Just because one strategy works one place doesn't mean it will work somewhere else. Our hope is not in the brilliantly-conceived plans of men.

Read the whole article for how they explain their church's growth. It doesn't answer every question, but it's a refreshing change from seeing growth as a marketable and transferable principles coming soon in a book and conference near you.

C.S. Lewis on repentance:

What was the sort of "hole" man had got himself into? He had tried to set up on his own, to behave as if he belonged to himself. In other words, fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realizing that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor - that is the only way out of our "hole".

This process of surrender - this movement full speed astern - is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. Only a bad person needs to repent; only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person - and he would not need it.

Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like.

What do you like? What's not clear? What would you change?

Eventually all of us run into our limitations. It's here that we face a choice: do we hide and mask our weaknesses, or do we let those weaknesses drive us to the cross and back to God?

There's a myth out there right now that's fairly common. It's the myth of the omni-competent leader. It's a myth that is partially true because there are truly outstanding leaders out there. But in the end it isn't true or helpful for a number of reasons:

• There aren't enough extraordinary leaders to go around.
• Where they exist, a personality cult develops.
• As Jim Collins points out, these extraordinary leaders aren't good long-term for an organization. "The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse."
• Within the church, the extraordinary leader receives undue attention and the other necessary parts of the body don't get to play their roles.

But still the myth of the extraordinary leader persists, even (especially?) in the church.

This came to mind lately because although I believe all of this, at a certain level I don't. I resonate with this post by David Wayne:

Our church is on a journey right now that is somewhere between very exciting and terribly frightening. In all of this I have never felt less competent as a leader than I have recently. Because of that this whole "preach the gospel to yourself every day" thing that a lot of us talk about has become more real to me than ever.

David then quotes Dan Allender's book Leading with a Limp, a book that has also meant a lot to me. (I've posted on it here and here). He then refers to an excellent post at Common Grounds Online. Don't miss the last paragraph:

The Church, as a corporate body, is to do daily life like this scene of confession. Why? Because the Church is filled with people who are, in Luther's words, simul iustus et peccador. In English, this means simultaneously sinning and justified. If we regularly enacted this scene from Phone Booth, we would honestly and brokenly proclaim our peccador-ness. If we confessed our sinfulness to our spouses, children, parents, friends, colleagues, neighbors, then others around us wouldn't feel the pressure to display only their iustus-ness.

Besides, any (and thus all) justification we have is alien to us. Our true, actual justification before God and others is alien in that it comes from outside of us. Not one smidgen of the righteousness that pleases God comes from us; rather, it is wholly a gift of grace that we are covered in Jesus' blood and righteousness. So, why are we wasting so much time and energy on displaying our self-righteousness. Why not just live according to Scripture...and boast in weakness?

We are scared to death to boast in our weakness because it violates culture (best foot forward, turn your good side to the camera), but if all of us in the Church would boast in our weakness together, we would become a Gospel-suffused community of honesty, brokenness, repentance, grace, forgiveness and restoration. In short, we would be a community of joyful intimacy.

I believe all of this...and yet I don't. The real challenge is to let this belief become the dominant way we think and act. It's only then that we'll stop taking our cues from culture and we'll really begin to live as a counter-cultural community shaped by the gospel - and maybe even see God's power show up in new ways.

Ron Martoia on repentance:

Clearly, if we want to understand the deep, rich, and full dimensions of the word repentance (and any number of other key biblical words and concepts), we must consider all three streams flowing together: the New Testament context, the first-century secular and historical context, and the first-century religious context outside the Bible. When we do this with repentance, we find that the word has to do with the orientation, directional heading, and trajectory of an entire community, culture, or nation, not just the front end of a private, personal conversional experience that results in a guaranteed seat in heaven. So, when we hear an evangelist on the corner of Michigan Avenue and Ohio Street saying, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand," he is saying something entirely different from what John the Baptist was saying.

Perhaps the best way to bring all this together is to realize that "repentance" or "reorientation," from the lips of Jesus and John the Baptist, was not a summons to a moralistic reform. It wasn't a timeless call to get your life together. It wasn't about cleaning up some personal foibles. It was a call for Israel to prepare for the end of her exile as a nation and to change agendas, specifically in the way she was not being the nation that God intended for her to be. It was a call to re-engage with God's original purpose for Israel, which was to be a blessing to the whole world. Did individual Jews have to respond to this? Of course, but the call to repent wasn't made to individuals. Jesus was calling an entire nation, not as a collection of individuals but as a collective organism. God had called Israel to be his people. He had called her and rescued her from Egypt. He had led her across the Red Sea. Now he was calling her to reorient her life as a nation back to his original purpose and agenda.

A further twist in the story helps to flesh out this idea. The reorientation that Jesus intended to bring about included offering the kingdom of heaven to lots of people who were outside the camp of ethnic Israel...When we read the New Testament narratives carefully, we see that many people reoriented their lives to a new compass heading without ever being invited to do so, without ever reciting a sinner's prayer, and without ever hearing the word repent...[There are] individual stories in the Bible where full-scale reorientation occurred but with no sense of any formal invitation, or even discussion about it.

What do you like? What's not clear? What would you change?

Michael Spencer argues that church planting must take precedence over church renewal:

I’m convinced that the greatest answer evangelicals have within their power is the determination to start new churches. Renewal and revival of existing churches is a worthy cause, but I don’t think you are going to reverse the downward, deteriorating direction in most existing churches. The hope for evangelicalism lies in becoming a massive church planting movement, and in encouraging as many churches as possible to make the creation of networks of new churches a priority in their 5-25 year goals.

The resources evangelicals are pouring into facilities and staff for megachurches need to be directed towards new churches. It’s a decision for every church, but it may be the single most important decision a church can make. We don’t need bigger churches; we need more and more diverse churches.

Tim Keller has said some similar things. Church plants not only reach people that existing churches don't, but they help to revitalize existing churches.

No doubt there's a role for both renewal and planting, but I am wondering if we need to shift more of our energy to planting.

N.T. Wright says this about repentance in The Challenge of Jesus:

Jesus' opening challenge as reported in the Gospels was that people should "repent and believe." This is a classic example...of a phrase whose meaning has changed over the years. If I were to go out on the street in my local town and proclaim that people should "repent and believe," what they would hear would be a summons to give up their private sins...and to "get religion" in some shape or form; either experiencing a new inner sense of God's presence, or believing a body of dogma, or joining the church or some sub-branch of it. But that is by no means exactly what the phrase "repent and believe" meant in first-century Galilee.

...Consider, for example, the Jewish aristocrat and historian, Josephus, who was born a few years after Jesus' crucifixion and who was sent in A.D. 66 as a young army commander to sort out some rebel movements in Galilee. His task...was to persuade the hot-headed Galileans to stop their mad rush into revolt against Rome and to trust him and the other Jerusalem aristocrats to work out a better modus vivendi. So when he confronted the rebel leader, he says that he told him to give up his own agenda and to trust him, Josephus, instead. And the word [sic] he uses are remarkably familiar to readers of the Gospels: he told the brigand leader to "repent and believe in me". . . (p. 44)

Thanks to Marc for this quote.

What do you like? What's not clear? What would you change?