Simply Church

Thoughts from #Verge10

Photograph by Scott Wade

I just had the privilege of attending the Verge conference here in Austin.  (Tony and I shared at one of the workshops.)  There were more than 2,000 who had signed up for the conference and maybe double that number watching live-streaming video.

I was on the social media team and it was amazing to watch the tweets that just kept rolling in (and continue to do so).  If you're interested in some of the comments/highlights, search under #verge10 on Twitter.  You will be amazed at some of the comments made by the main speakers.

There was a great hunger expressed for missional communities.   Many simple/organic church concepts were shared by people such as Neil Cole, David Watson, George Patterson and David Garrison.  Those who shared from mega churches talked about how they recognized the disparity between big church and church as represented by the New Testament, with a humble willingness to count the cost to see a more relational and missional expression of church that will genuinely touch our communities.  

If some of the huge numbers of the on-fire-for-the-Lord young people involved in these vibrant mega churches are trained and released to make disciples and gather them into missional communities/simple, organic churches, we will see greater growth than we have ever imagined. 

Primarily in LA, but also here in Austin, there is increasing relationship between the leaders of mega and micro churches. What could happen in our cities if it doesn't matter who gets the credit?

Amazing Talk by Francis Chan at #Verge10

Here are my notes on what Francis Chan said at Verge this evening:

Exod 33:15 Moses said to God, “If your presence will not go with me we will not go up from here.”  Do we want the presence of God more than anything?  More than a big church?  More than speaking in front of crowds?  We easily lose sight of our original intention of being pleasing to God.

Verge means the outer limit.  This isn’t a “Let’s start a movement” conference.  God is doing something and we’re on the verge of seeing something happen.

Church 3.0 by Neil Cole is about everything the Lord has been putting on our hearts.

You read Scripture and see one thing and go to church and see something else.  Love, unity, etc.—the way the church ought to look.

Missional communities: Its not that we are trying to create a movement. The Holy Spirit has started it, and He is leading us.  It’s not just about breaking down the mega churches.  It’s about seeing it in the Scripture and doing what it says.

When I read the Scriptures, God doesn’t get mad at the people, He gets mad at the leaders!  We have to change.  We can’t quit the process of change because it’s biblically driven.  As we talk to other people, they’re feeling the same thing.

You can take scattered verses to justify your theology but it wouldn’t be the same as what you get through a simple reading of the Scriptures.  Would I ever have come up with doing church the way we do just from Scripture? I wouldn’t even think about the gathering.  I would be on mission.  I would think, “I need to reach as many people as I can and make disciples by teaching them to obey.”  And I would find others doing the same and because we are so different we would need each other.  I need people to stay on mission every day.  I would gather with people who do the same thing, because it’s there in the Scriptures.

The disciples saw Jesus rise from the grave and had to tell everyone.  What wouldn’t make sense would be if the disciples saw someone rise from the dead and just met together every week for some songs and teaching.  If you had seen someone rise from the dead you’d tell everyone you met, especially if he had told you to make disciples.

If we care about what Jesus wants, we will live like family, His body, an extension of one another.  We would be of one heart and one mind.

We’re not strategizing a movement.  You can’t create a movement.  The disciples didn’t plan out the Day of Pentecost.  (You learn Chinese, you learn Spanish!)  It was the Holy Spirit working in a bunch of individuals but creating a unified result.  This is similar.  It’s God doing something.

Jesus is building his church and nothing will stop it.  It’s not forced or pushed.  We’re not here to start a movement.  God has started a wave.  Let’s pray for the believers in our nation to love Him and start making disciples.  Can we pray that He puts a love within us so we become so much family that we are interdependent and share our belongings?  Looking at Scripture we know He wants these things.  Mission, missional lives, loving one another so much that people can see Christ in us.  Make Jesus Lord instead of playing a “Jesus says,” game.  In the book of Acts, the disciples were unstoppable.  A move of God will be unstoppable.  Can we continue the book of Acts?

 

We're at War!

 What else have I learned from the Christians in India?  Why is the Indian church growing so fast?  They know they are in a battle!  They are taught they are born into a world at war.  They know who they are fighting and they are skilled in the use of spiritual weapons. They firmly believe that they can win.  Through prayer they see idols demolished, temples destroyed, and thousands upon thousands of people rescued from the power of the enemy and released into the Kingdom of light. 

In India, the warfare is far more obvious than here in the West.  There are hideous idols everywhere.  Most homes have shrines and demons are invited to inhabit these idols when they are set in place.  Demon possession is a well-recognized phenomenon.  But as they bind the power of the strongman, they see his goods plundered and people set free (Luke 11:21-22).

Here in the West, outwardly things are very different.  The enemy is far more subtle.  We are like the soldier sitting relaxed at a cafe who became a target for a sniper because he didn't realize he was in a war zone.  Our warfare is mostly against things like drugs and immorality, or invisible things such as materialism.  Second Corinthians 10 is perhaps more applicable here: We are human, but we don’t wage war as humans do. We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments. We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God (verses 3-5).

I remember when we had problems in our business a few years ago.  Our major client decided to take his  work in house.  We had a building and employees.  We eventually realized (sometimes we are really slow!) that this happened the month we started House2House, and so we decided to fight the battle spiritually.  We started praying and fighting the enemy.  We employed every spiritual weapon we could think of.  We praised and prayed;  we used the Word; we marched up and down our office shouting and quoting Scripture at the enemy.  Anyone looking at us would have thought we were crazy. Slowly our business turned around.  From being within a month of bankruptcy, it has now become a business that provides for us in such a way that Tony can take plenty of time away from it so we are able to do anything the Lord asks of us.

What will cause us to take spiritual warfare more seriously?  What results would we see if we did?

Please Can We Start Over with a Discipleship and Missional Emphasis?

    Frank Doiron made some great comments that again I would like to respond to in the main blog.  He said:

"I keep wondering if the house church in North America hasn’t made a fundamental mistake. It has gotten excited about home churches and not discipleship and training/equipping. On top of this it has focused on what we do when we meet instead of how we are trained to go into the world. It is my belief and it has been my experience that when we start with the meeting and what we will do when at that meeting…..its over. It is as hard to bring that house church back to a missional conversation as it is in the traditional church. After reading Floyd McClung’s article “Developing a culture of discipleship in your community” and hearing your words about India, “Their training is all geared towards this truth” and Neil Cole saying that his LTG groups are essential to the growth of organic churches, I am beginning to believe that we need that place where we are being equipped to “go.” I am quoting from memory Gordon Cosby of the Church of the Saviour in Washington DC. We thought that if we went to small groups we would become missional. Well that never happened. Not that it sometimes happened. It never happened. It was only when we put in place our discipleship night did things begin to happen. I have a lot more to say about this but if we have a chance to reboot this whole thing we call simple/house/organic church I think we need to start with creating a culture of discipleship instead of what we do when we meet. Finally, the only way to have organic missional churches is to have missional people in those house churches…………… Don't get me wrong, I am not against meeting simply asking the question "Have we put the cart before the horse and are unable to switch it back.?"

Frank, I totally agree with you!  This is our heart cry too.  However, there is just one problem.  It appears to be God who is engineering this movement.  It's not as if there is some location you can go to or some dynamic, gifted speaker that everyone is following.  The commonest communication we get through House2House is this.  "God less us to meet in our home/Starbucks/work.  We thought we were the only ones doing it, but now we've found your website, we realize we are not alone."  According to the latest research, there are now millions of people involved.  Estimates vary on everything from 5 million to 20 million depending on your definition of house church.  The latest Pew Forum research suggest around 7% of the population.  We reckon that between House2House and all our friends who might have extensive contacts around the country, we may be touching 3% to 5% of those involved.  Although we have come across some of these that have started with a missional DNA, I'm sure the majority of them, like you suggest, are more focused on the meeting.

If this is God's doing, He must have the answer to the dilemma.  Is the Holy Spirit going to somehow shift these churches to have a more discipleship and missional emphasis?  What part do any of us play in that?

Here's one story.  We have friends who have a network of house churches in a city about an hour away from us.  The network has been going for a number of years and so the men in the various churches had been meeting for several years for prayer on Monday evenings.  Several months ago, maybe as much as a year now, the Lord challenged them to move this meeting into the harvest, so they started meeting at their local Starbucks.  The very first week, someone saw that they were praying and asked them to pray for him.  He became a Christian that night.  Since then, more than 50 people have become believers and they are now involved in 3 churches that have resulted from that change in location.

One of the questions that Tony and I spend much time deliberating on is how to reach what we call, "Barna's 5 million" with the message of discipleship and mission.  Does anyone have ideas?

Being Missional and Apples

Marty Nickel made a great comment on the last blog about being missional that is worth quoting in full.  He says,  "This is a great post Felicity and really focuses on our failing. You nailed it with your quotes: 'Apostolic teaching is the teaching to go.' and 'All the commands of Jesus lead to the fulfillment of the Great Commission.' Pastoral teaching, by contrast, is to stay and focus on spiritual growth so "some day" a believer will actually be able to do some undefined thing in the church. The fruit of the Spirit *is* a changed life, but fruit isn't intended for the other trees in the grove. The seed is in the fruit (Genesis 1:11)! It isn't an end to itself but is the means of propagating the gospel. We've been coring our apples - delivering fruit with no seed - because we don't understand Kingdom agriculture."

I would like to emphasize two things that Marty says here.

1. Fruit has a purpose, and ultimately that is to bear more fruit.  If all we do is become more mature believers, that doesn't produce more fruit, it just makes us bigger, (or maybe more tasty) fruit.  Disciples are meant to bear fruit.  (John 15:1-8) Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the number of apples in a seed. (Robert H Schuller)
2. One of the "deadly sins" of church planting, according to David Garrison in his book, "Church Planting Movements" is that of sequentialism.  We think we need to become mature first, and then we can go out and evangelize.  If we wait until we are ready before we reach out to others, it will never happen.  Jesus said, "You say there are still four months until harvest, but I say the harvest is ready now."

Some teach that Jesus was only speaking to the disciples when he gave the Great Commission, that we need some kind of special calling before we share our faith with others. The New Testament does not bear this out.  For example, in Acts 8, all the believers except the apostles were scattered because of persecution, and those who were scattered preached the Good News about Jesus wherever they went.

How can we become more missional?

The question I have been asking since we came home from the House Church Summit in India is, "Which of the factors that have produced the incredible results in India are transferable to a Western culture?" 

Perhaps the biggest contrast I saw between what happens there and the typical church (whether legacy or simple church) in the West is their emphasis on reaching out and the Great Commission.  They genuinely believe that being a disciple is all about going and sharing the good news with others.  Their training is all geared towards this truth; I did not hear a teaching that did not include some aspect of it. ("Apostolic teaching is the teaching to go."  "All the commands of Jesus lead to the fulfillment of the Great Commission.")  Disciples bear fruit, and the assumption (unlike here in the West where we tend to think "fruit of the Spirit") is that this fruit is new disciples, who of course, in turn are trained to make more disciples.

The effect of this emphasis over there is that people are becoming disciples in incredible numbers in a situation where persecution of Christians is common.  Curtis Sergeant, who has extensive experience with both countries, reckons that what is going on in India could be even more amazing than the China story.

So what do we do here in the West where everyone has at least had a chance to hear the Good News?  I sometimes wonder if the gospel we preach is a "Santa Claus" gospel (come to Jesus and he will give you a wonderful and problem-free life) that enables us to live a passive life of being blessed.  However the gospel of the Kingdom (a new covenant experience where our side is obedience--not done out of legalism but out of love for the One who has rescued us from our old lives) leads to an intentional intersecting of the Kingdom with the world through our lives.

Huge numbers of people are moving into house/simple/organic churches all over this country.  It is clearly something God is doing.  There is no central organization or some charismatic guru who is propagating these ideas.  It is the Holy Spirit himself who is whispering the same thing to people all over the country, and as they obey him by moving into their homes, they are finding each other.  I believe this is a movement orchestrated by the Lord.

Some of these new churches are very outward looking.  However, there is a tendency for them to be more focused on community and going deeper with God.  Don't get me wrong.  Both of these are vital.  But there may be too great an emphasis on our lives together (John 13:35--Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples) and not enough on telling others (Romans 10:14-16--But how can they call on him to save them unless they believe in him?  And how can they believe in him if they have never heard about him?  And how can they hear unless someone tells them?).  It costs something in terms of convenience and comfort to deliberately go out of one's way to reach out to others.

What will it take for us to become a Kingdom focused and outward reaching movement.  Clearly it is something that ultimately only God can do--and there are many stories of individual simple churches where He is doing this.  But we have a part to play in cooperating with God.

What will it take for us to have a missional DNA?

How can we become a people for whom the Great Commission is an over-riding passion?

So what did I learn from India?

India is seeing a remarkable move of God.  We met several people from India at the World House Church Summit who have more than 100,000 new believers in their networks.  I interviewed a middle-aged housewife who is responsible for seeing more than 6,000 churches.  I know that numbers are the world's way of judging success, and that God is more interested in our faithfulness and obedience than anything else.  I also know that you cannot manufacture a move of God. But are there principles that they are applying that translate across cultures that help to produce such a movement?  

As I have meditated on what we have seen in India over several visits, the first thing that strikes me is their commitment to prayer and prayer walking.  We have an Indian friend who tried an experiment.  He picked two villages.  The first he prayer walked regularly before trying to reach out to the people who lived there.  The second he did not.  Forty-five families became believers in the first village.  He was thrown out of the second one. 

A similar experiment was tried in Phoenix, AZ, as documented in the book, The Praying Church Idea Book by Douglas A. Kamstra.  The church randomly selected 160 names from the phone book and divided then into two groups.  For 90 days they prayed for one group while they ignored the other.  At the end of 90 days they called all 160 homes, identified themselves and offered to stop by and pray for the family and any needs they might have. Of the 80 homes that were not prayed for, only one person invited them in.  From the 80 homes that were prayed for, 69 people invited them to come over and of those people, 45 invited them into their homes.

David Watson, who has seen more than 40,000 churches start in North India and more than 5,000 in Africa, surveyed his top 100 church planters to see if he could identify any common characteristics in the methods they used.  The only one he found was a commitment to prayer.  Even though these people mostly had jobs, they prayed 3 hours per day on their own and then 3 hours per day with their teams. Fasting was also important to them.

How does this translate into a Western culture where we are so busy and so preoccupied with many things?  The last thing we want is some kind of legalistic "ought to" duty praying that somehow seeks to earn God's favor. 

I remember when our business was seriously struggling a few years back. There was no sense of compulsion about praying for it.  We wanted to pray for hours every day, initially out of desperation because we knew it was the only hope our business had of surviving, but it became an adventure and delight as we watched as the prayer produced results.

What will produce that kind of desire to pray for this nation and the nations?

Gems from India

 

The following are some thought-provoking one liners from the pre-conference sessions at the World House Church Conference in India.  They are from talks given by the leader of a church planting movement that baptized more than 300,000 on the Day of Pentecost in 2009.  Worth taking note!

Jesus never said, "Be baptized."  He said, "You baptize." 

You disciple--you baptize.

Jesus baptized Peter--but only his feet.

You will not see a movement without signs and wonders.  Ninety five percent of our house churches have signs and wonders.

Apostolic teaching is the teaching to GO.

There are 19 commands of Jesus to be found in the New Testament.  All lead to the fulfillment of the Great Commission.

Hospitality is the secret to precipitating a movement.

Sit and soak, and you stagnate.  Eat and chat and you will multiply.

Goat prayers are "meeee" prayers.  They focus on me and my needs, my family and my situation.

Use the newspaper headlines as your prayer list.

Theologians think, not from Genesis to Revelation but from genetics to evolution.

We need a problem-based theology.  In our house churches we solve problems--finances, sickness etc.

A Declaration of War

Teachings from India (13)

Matthew 16:18 is a declaration of war:  "Upon this rock I will build my church, and all the powers of hell will not conquer it."  Building the church is a declaration of war because it involves a transfer of power.  The responsibility for this transfer of power belongs to the church, and she has been given the keys of the Kingdom to effect it.

It is the business of the chuch to destroy the gates of hell and to bring about the Kingdom.  When Jesus cast out demons, he could say that  the Kingdom of God had come among them (Matthew 12:28-30).   There are different levels of hierarchy among the powers of darkness (Ephesians 6:10).  According to 1 John 5:19, the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.  The strongman is territorial, and we are to bind him and plunder his goods (the people and the land).

The primary battleground is in our minds.  According to 2 Corinthians 10:3-5, there are strongholds of human reasoning and false arguments, proud obstacles that keep people from knowing God.  These strongholds in the mind are our mindset, ideologies and traditions, logic and worldview.  We fight these things with spiritual weopons that include the Word, the armor mentioned in Ephesians 6, and truth and righteousness. 

In a nation like India, there are many idols.  Demons are invited to inhabit the idols when they are installed. It takes binding the spirit behind the idol to loose the people who are in bondage to that idol.

Jeremiah 10:11 says "Say this to those who worship other gods: “Your so-called gods, who did not make the heavens and earth, will vanish from the earth and from under the heavens.”  This is a powerful verse to use in dealing with idols.

Why Did Jesus Come?

Teachings from India (12)

There are four statements in the New Testament that specifically describe why Jesus came.

1. John 10:10  The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.
2. Luke 4:18-19  The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free, and that the time of the Lord’s favor has come.
3. Luke 19:10  For the Son of Man came to seek and save those who are lost.
4. 1 John 3:8  But the Son of God came to destroy the works of the devil.

Can we say the same?  For this reason I have come...

Jesus said, "As the Father sent me, so I am sending you (John 20:21)"

Know your vision and write it down (Habakkuk 2:1-3).