But things have been moving along quite nicely, I had recently posted about being caught between two worlds and while I have reduced my extra biblical reading on theological matters in favor of research for www.improvethequality.com I have actually increased my biblical reading.  I am not following my weekly schedule but I have been reading throught I Cor which has been awesome.  Paul was writing to a church with no “church” background, they had a pagan religious background much like our current culture.
Since Heather and I have started attending a church “in the city for the city” I thought it would be good to read this particular book and God has really helped me to see some of my own religious tendencies.

Also since the last time I posted Time magazine has named the “New Calvinism” as one of the top ten ideas changing the world right now.  They do a decent job on the article but if you would like to read more info on one of the major players in the movement see Mark Driscoll’s comments here and here

Other than that I hope to be able to write something more thoughtful in the future.

I have talked a little about minimizing my life and the reasons for doing so but I don’t know if I am ready to take the steps I think are necessary.  A few weeks ago Todd over at Todd Hiestand.com talked a little about how a recent mission trip affected the way he thinks about his life.  In an offline message I told him I could see him down the road that I stand at the head of but I fear taking steps to meet him.

The parable of the sower has recently had great affect on me in various ways.   Jesus describes the thorny soil this way “The one who received the seed that fell among the thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful.”  I really worry that I am that guy.  I worry a great deal about providing for my family and have many life decisions to do so.  It could be that this is one of my greatest issues and the greatest problems in our country.  We have entire groups of the church dedicated to this kind of lifestyle, seeking wealth and making it unfruitful.

I worry about making the wrong decision on what to do with the rest of my life but I realize that most importantly I don’t want to be unfruitful as far as the kingdom is concerned.  Do I spend too much time looking at how to make money instead of looking at how to be fruitful?  Can I cut superfluous expenses from my life to help brothers and sisters around the world who don’t even have water?  Or must I hold on to the “American dream” of gathering as much money as possible to myself?

I shared this story with Heather and we took some of our ‘missions’ money and bought her a gift card to a local grocery store so she could get some food and gas if she needed it. When we brought it before our house church for prayer, people started throwing money at me. Which was not what I had expected but was wonderful because we were able to give her a greater gift. Well Monday we couldn’t get to her house because Heather wasn’t feeling well. So tonight we made a point to go by her house after I got off of work only to find she wasn’t home. We wrote a simple note reminding her who I was and telling her that we lived near by and want her to call us if she needed anything.

Well, we ran a few errands and then went back to see if she was home, we felt a little nervous just leaving a gift card at her house. She had just pulled up and we were actually able to talk to her. She was very thankful and almost ready to cry because of our gesture. We told her to call us and got her phone number to call her. I hope to invite her to house church or at least to our house so we can love her as Christ loves her and tell her the good news of Jesus. I hope I remember how to do that.

“You feel called to Africa but you haven’t gone across the street” — Many Pastors across America.

I have heard the above quote many a times in my life from a preacher who is trying to convince people to witness to their neighbors. Although I have a great numbers of problems with modern evangelism techniques I am beginning to feel the heart of the preachers who have shouted this to their congregation.

If you have been following my blog for any length of time you know that changes in my doctrine have pushed me out of the traditional church and into a more organic house church model. After reading Neil Cole’s Organic Church I have realized a few things about myself that probably apply to more people that may be willing to admit it.
I have never considered myself to be much of an evangelist, but I have been an evangelist for many things in Christianity: Christian music, ministry style, youth groups, churches, books and many other things in my life. I have shouted from the roof tops the benefits of moralism and ministry style but for some reason I have been silenced when it comes from evangelizing Christ and his Gospel.
As Christians we often find ourselves telling someone to come to our church, hoping that our paid ministry staff will do the work of the ministry which all Christians are called to do in Ephesians 4:11-14. We are all called to make disciples of all nations according to the great commission. I have been ignoring these things in order to hold onto my own comfort all the while forgetting that my life is not my own but that I was bought with a price. (I Cor. 6:19-20)
My goal is to become a suburban missionary, by that I mean diving into a culture that isn’t truly Christian. I believe that American culture is becoming post-Christian and although we have many religious and spiritual folks few of them know the Gospel of Christ and the fact that I live near them makes that fact all the more sad.

Photo courtesy of carnotzet in the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Romans 1:25 – They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen

Someone once said “The opposite of Christianity is not atheism but idolatry” and Mark Driscoll has made the point that because we are created to worship we will worship something but what we worship determines if we are Christians or not.

Those things we make priority, those things we give our money to, those things we spend our time doing are our idols and it seems to me that it has become far to easy to put things in front of and in place of God in our lives.

Talking to people I have been told that my attraction to theology and my desire to read the Bible are a result of my calling as a pastor or my training in Bible College but I have been thinking a great deal about it recently and I do not think that is the case. It seems to me that we have lowered the bar of what it means to be a disciple of Christ from the biblical definition. Biblically it meant to give up everything family, business, hopes, dreams when necessary and to make Christ and his Gospel the center of your life.

In our new Christian culture however it is far too easy to become a Christian; we only speak of “taking up our cross” later in the process as if we are using some sort of spiritual bait and switch. We speak of all the good things that come from Christ without bothering to mention those things which we would consider negative such as discipline and sacrifice, albeit trivial in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps it is due to the fact that we don’t face persecution in our western culture but that exclude us from our responsibility to make Christ the centrality of our lives.

By lowering this discipleship bar, I believe it is possible we have abandoned our great commission which is to create disciples, a word that has the same root as discipline, but what discipline is required outside of getting up on Sunday morning and attending a meeting where you are required to do nothing but listen.

My hope with this thought process is not simply to bash the institutions that exist because I believe they do a great deal of good, but as I do believe good to be the enemy of great, my hope it do perhaps point out some places where idolatry may exist as I have recently realized it exists in my own life.

Consider the idea “I didn’t have time to pray, or read the Bible today,” this inherently means that everything you did that day took priority over God in your life and hence became and idol, this can be TV, games, even your family. If these are the things you serve and spend your time and money on you are effectively worshiping them over the God of the universe even if you are not bowing down to a candle lit alter around your TV.

Muslims stop what they are doing several times a day to pray and we may write them off because they are just “being religious” and we have relationship but what kind of relationship do you have if you aren’t spending any time with one another, perhaps we need to be a little more “religious” without dedication to God until a relationship has the change to flourish, I know I need to do something.

Jesus Christ and His Gospel is meant to be the tie that binds us all together as a family, no the family of God.  But all too often in this age of distraction we are focused on all of the wrong things.  Shouldn’t seeking to know God better be our number one concern?  Yet we talk about the struggle of being able to make a few moments for the God of all creation.  We have our jobs, our kids, our families, our friends, our TV shows, our games, our books and a myriad of other little items that complicate our lives to the point that can no longer see that which we are meant to focus on.
I have been looking at this particularly in regard to our house church, (the following is simply one mans opinion) although I am greatly enjoying it I sometimes feel that we do not even focus on Jesus enough in our gatherings, it is probably simply because we don’t do it as individuals.  If I am not focused on Christ in my own life then how can our relationship be centered on Christ and what he has done?
I look at it like God is the power strip that we all plug into, but if we are not plugged into him then we are not connected to each other in any real sense, we can act as if we are; we can spout pleasantries and ask “How are you?” all the while praying they don’t really tell you because you don’t really care.  But if we begin to focus on Christ and really strive to have his heart for our brothers and sisters and for this world everything else should fall into place.  Shouldn’t it?

If you don’t know what those findings are please check out my previous post.

One thing that was covered in Willow Creeks Key findings page was that the people whose lives are most centered on Christ are those who are most dissatisfied with the church as a whole. I can’t help but hear this echo within my own experiences.

I actually started my walk with Christ in something that would have been considered a house church or organic church it was me and the guy who discipled me and his family. I was over at their house ever weekend learning about God. As I have grown in my life in Christ and have moved to more and more center my life around God I have myself become more dissatisfied with church in general. I felt that church was simply a social outlet for me because in many cases the Sunday morning service, which is the center of church life, was less than exciting for me. I am not a huge fan of ‘worship’, for one most of the current trend in music is what Mark Driscoll calls “Jesus is my boyfriend” music, it lacks the depth of some of the foregone hymns, and sounds like something you would hear on prom night. The sermon which is the other typical focus of Sunday morning, in my opinion, is often preached to the lowest common denominator in churches which makes it all but boring to me.

I know I am not the only person who feels this way, as I have heard more than one person describe their dissatisfaction with what is going on, but normally their social connections or responsibilities to a particular ministry within the church. (They need me in the nursery) But as with me I think there will more and more come a time when people will not sacrifice what it means to be a Christian and live in real community as followers of “The Way”.

Perhaps this is another reason why the house church movement is growing more and more in the US as people are becoming more dissatisfied with ‘church’ today.

For those of you who haven’t had a chance to read it yet, I suggest you start with this article. And if you have time watch the video’s the one with Greg Hawkins almost had me jumping out of my chair and screaming “YES, thank you!!!” but I was at work.

Basically, Willowcreek has discovered that the popular model of church which says “participation in church activities produces disciples” just ain’t so, that simply being part of churchianity doesn’t make you any more of a disciple (defined by WC as one who is characterized by their love of God and love of people). They have done surveys of 31 congregations including their own and have found 5 segments of the church population — Exploring, growing, close, centered and stalled. Their discover it that the church is really only doing well meeting the needs of the ‘early’ explorers and growers but as people grow enough in their relation ship to ‘centered’ on Christ they are more dissatisfied with church and they either leave or ‘stall’. Oddly enough they also discovered that those people who have their lives centered on Christ are the most likely to be dissatisfied with church and looking to leave.

I couldn’t help but screaming “Duh!” it is the way I have felt about the local church for quite some time, but perhaps when one of the worlds most influential churches says it someone will listen. This probably has been one of the best things I have read in quite some time, and it may very well change the face of many local churches.

Please make time to watch the videos linked in the article or here because I believe this may be world changing.

Greg Hawkins short version (3 minutes)

Greg Hawkins Long version (13 mintes)

Bill Hybels Video

Key finding of WillowCreek Study — If you can’t watch the videos.

Present Testimony Ministry- Reflections on the Modern House Church Movement

But I wanted to be clear then, as I do now that I am not talking a traditional church that is too small to rent or buy a building so it meets in a home with the hope of “growing up” someday to being a real traditional church. I am talking about what something more like a cell based church, for those not familiar with that, a cell based church may have one central campus where they keep their offices but the focus of ministry is done in smaller cells. Additionally while there may be a weekly meeting for all cells to meet up, if you had to miss once meeting each week you would be told to miss the large group meeting and attend your smaller group meeting because that is where they understand the most important facets of ministry to occur.

The fellow ship I am a part of is normally 6-10 of us who meet together, share our lives, share a meal and all contribute to the process. Frank Viola who has been planting house churches for a number of years talks in his article “Participatory House Church meetings” about some vocabulary changes that need to take place with people who are more familiar with traditional church environments:

First, ‘services’ belong to institutions. They are ritualistic, performance-based ceremonies. The early Christians never had ‘services’ in which an active few performed for a passive audience. Instead, they had ‘meetings’ that were spontaneous, interactive, participatory and Spirit-led. ‘Meeting is the word that is employed throughout the New Testament when the early Christians came together to display Christ.[1] Second, we are no longer ‘going to church’. The church or ekklesia is the Body of Christ which assembles together. It is not a place to go. It is not an edifice. We are going to a meeting but we are part of the church.

Although it may just seem like semantics I believe controlling the vocabulary really changes the way you think about something, most believers would say that they are the body of Christ and that they are the church but it isn’t they way they normally define themselves.

This particular article is about the house church concept of all members of the body being involved in some way, which I freely admit scared me more than a little, but that is part pride, and part control freak. I also admit that is seems more backed by scripture than not. 1 Cor 14:26-28 says this:

What then shall we say, brothers? When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church. If anyone speaks in a tongue, two–or at the most three–should speak, one at a time, and someone must interpret. If there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep quiet in the church and speak to himself and God.

I checked the Bible Knowledge Commentary to verify that this was not merely a descriptive passage, it confirms that is was the custom that anyone was able to participate in an orderly fashion in the first century church. How we moved into a more performance based model with a passive congregation is up for debate although it seems to have happened around the time of the Edict of Milan which changed Christianity from an organic fringe religion to the official religion of the Roman Empire, putting the government in charge of the Church, including ordination and licensing of the priesthood[2]

The organic church movement is about changing the way things have been done for the past 1700 years and getting back on what is believed to be a more biblical track.

[1] Also called “Assembling” or “coming together” (Acts 4:31; 1 Cor 14:23,26; Heb 10:25)

[2] Simson, Wolfgang. Houses That Change the World. Neuhausen, Switzerland, 1998. 48.