Missio Dei Suburbia

Shoot 'Em or Save 'Em - The Decisions We Face as Missional Churches in the Deep South

Yep...

From Jared Wilson:

To the cultural Christian, there is nothing attractive about a small church that expects relational community, practices regular neighborhood service, highlights the cost of discipleship in every message, has a minimalist menu of programs to partake from, and gives most of its money away (precluding a "nice" facility and assorted bells and whistles). But I want to reach them. All Christians are family. I love the big-C Church dearly.

There are some who would say the missional communities should just write off their attractional brothers and sisters and focus on reaching the lost. I defy false dichotomies. And while I never poach (I've never invited members of other churches to mine before they themselves have first expressed interest in visiting), I pray and preach AND BLOG and try to live a life of witness so that my churched brothers and sisters will begin to crave the gospel and gospel-centrism in their congregations.

The more churched converts gospel-centrism receives -- we're talking about revival here, by the way -- the greater impact for the kingdom among the lost and "least of these" there will be, in the Bible Belt and beyond.

Read the rest here.

Christ Community Church - Tribe or Mission?

The next few months are going to determine the identity and rhythm of life for Christ Community Church - will we embrace and live out our existence as a tribe or a mission?

From Tullian:

There’s a radical difference between tribal and missionary mindsets. The highest value of the tribal-minded is self-protection. Since these people feel safest around those just like them, they ask, “How can I protect myself from those who are different?” They intentionally surround themselves with those who think the way they think, like the things they like, and despise the things they despise.

We all seek out sameness, as John Seel notes: “We cope by settling into our safe intellectual cliques—our favorite blog, cable channel, or e-zine—where our own views are reinforced and applauded. Without really trying, we can easily lose sight of the wider horizon and fail to listen to those who do not think as we do.”

As a result, tribally minded people live with a sense of superiority, looking down on those who are unlike them. This is the “fashionable” posture of our culture.

In contrast, the highest aim of mission-minded people is not self-protection but self-sacrifice. Mission-minded people exist not primarily for themselves but for others. They’re willing to set aside personal preferences in service to those with different preferences. They’re willing to be inconvenienced, discomforted, and spent for the well-being of others.

Matt Chandler - Amen

Doubting Your Doubts

'...it seemed good to me...to write an orderly account...that you may have certainty...' (Luke 1:3-4)

Everyone struggles with doubt. No one should want to stay there. Because of Christ, no one has to stay there.

May that hope make us compassionate and courageous in 2009.

The Middle

Hey y'all - greetings from Room 228 at the Red Roof Inn in The Hill neighborhood of St. Louis. I've been up here for the LEAD Conference hosted by Acts 29 and it's gonna take me awhile to grab hold of the words to describe how good it was for me. I came up here to encourage our A29 planters and to help assess 25 new planters and there's no way they'll get more out of these past few days then I have.

Now that doesn't mean I'm not ready to get home to Lindsey and my boys and to all of you. I did want to check in with you and talk for a minute about something I've noticed over 12 years of ministry.

Something happens somewhere around the end of October and early November that I call 'The Middle' because it usually hits around midterms for students and is kind of a breather for people out of school before the holidays hit full force. Basically, The Middle is kind of a break, a respite, a siesta, a time out from the normal routine of life.

Now The Middle is a good thing - God created us to rest and for many of us, we've burned the candle at both ends long enough to feel like we're getting to the end of our wick. So I'm glad that we get to take a break, get away for a few days, recharge and get ready to finish 2008 on a sprint and not a crawl.

But something else happens during The Middle that jacks people up every year. For lack of a better image, we throw out the baby with the bathwater and in our attempt to take a break end up fracturing our own soul.

Here's how it goes down - you get a few days or a couple of weekends away and in your desire to mix up your routine, you drop everything including your life with God. So it's not uncommon for you to go days without time in the Scriptures and prayer and weeks without being part of a worship gathering. I have yet to meet a single person where that ends well for them.

So I know you need a break - I'm taking a week off from preaching in November to recharge - but I want to encourage and warn you with all the love I've got to not take a break from the rhythm of your life with Jesus. So if you're out of town the next couple of weeks, insist on showing up at a worship gathering on a Sunday morning wherever you're at - I know that's weird and nobody else does that but you're different. You belong to the King and he has a standing appointment to meet with you every week.

And if you think you can replace gathered worship with throwing on your favorite CD or listening to somebody preach on a podcast, I'm telling you that you can't. Personal worship or worship with a couple of friends is a good thing during the week but not on Sunday morning. The God of the Universe has set that day aside as time for you to gather with other believers to renew our vows to each other and to God as he reminds us of his love for us.

What I'm saying is that in ways we don't entirely get, we need that time together - to be with other Christians and to be with God. This is part of a normal rhythm of life and rhythmic irregularities are never good - especially when they can be avoided.

I've gotta pack and assess church planters from Regina, Saskatchewan and Columbus, Ohio so let's shuck the corn down to the cob - if The Middle takes you out of town this year, take five minutes to find a gospel-saturated church near where you'll wake up on Sunday morning (if you have a hard time deciding on somewhere, let me know and I'll help you out). Coordinate your travel schedule so you'll have time to gather for worship. Show up expecting to bless and be blessed in ways you can't imagine.

Will God love you if you don't show up? Yep - but you'll miss an opportunity he created just for you to hear and see his love for you.

Because I love you more than you'll ever know-
Matt

Sean Lucas on the Popularity of Joel Osteen

Sean Lucas, on why Osteen's Lakewood Church has over 15,000 people in attendance and is far more multi-ethnic than most churches in the United States.

'I think the driving reason that Osteen is hugely popular is that he sells hope. Books like Your Best Life Now and Become a Better You provide a message of hope that my life does not have to be the way it is right now; that God is powerful and able to change my life; that God is profoundly interested in my life and is near to me. And while that message of hope is packaged in the code language of the prosperity Gospel and positive psychology (like the phenomenally successful book by Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier), at the end of the day, people leave Lakewood feeling as though there is a greater meaning and purpose for their lives.

As I thought about all this, though, I couldn't help but think about John Piper's question from God is the Gospel (and other places): do you delight more in the fact that God makes much of you in the Gospel or that the Gospel frees you to make much of God? The fault in Osteen's message is that it overplays and wrongly prioritizes the fact that God makes much of us (and God does make much of us: as I read in my morning worship today, God cried out to a wayward Israel, "How can I give you up, O Ephraim?...My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender" Hosea 11:8).

The biblical priority is that God in the Gospel rescues, delivers, frees and sustains us to make much of God. He is the great good in the Good News--and it truly is amazing: that God would save his wayward children for the fame of his name; would shape worshippers who will find their deepest satisfaction in making much of God; and would gather together a worldwide body of worshippers who hallow his name!

And that is the great hope: not that our material position would be better or our relationships grow stronger. Rather, our great hope is that the steadfast, committed love of our God is transforming us into worshippers who find our hearts satisfied in God himself.'

'A Place Where People Can Finally Stop Rushing Out of Their Sorrow'

That line from a post by BTM (who will be in Watkinsville with Red Mountain Music on March 29-30) got me thinking:

If there's a trend to whatever criticism we get at Christ Church (and thankfully there's not that much of it these days), it's that our message - and particularly my preaching - can feel dark and heavy sometimes.

My knee-jerk response (you might call it the Gammons Syndrome) is to say, 'Fiddlesticks.' Only because I know where we end up every week in our worship gathering, coming to the table and clinging to an infinitely valuable and all-satisfying Jesus and finding a joy that can only be found through allowing life to bubble to the surface - and make of it what you will, but whether you come top-down from the Scriptures or bottom-up from life, what you end up with is rarely as smiley and cleaned up as we try to make it in the suburbs.

Once I work my way through gut reactions and such, my assumption is that there's a breakdown in the message at one of two points (and maybe both). There's the distinct possibility that in my preaching of a biblical text, I've missed the tone and bent of the message - which to be honest, is just as critical as getting your exegesis and interpretation squared away. You shouldn't preach any text indifferently but you should breathe out the emotion that's latent within the text. So even though I've got more than my fair share of junk, I'm generally thankful to be able to see how God is using that slowly in my life to teach me to delight in trusting him in all things. So while I could just be in a funk and end up in a dark place every Sunday, I'm not wired to be that way and I work hard to avoid whatever is there that might move me away from the tone of the text.

So it could be my preaching. But what I keep finding is that the people who are the most fussy about dark and heavy things are the people who have some really dark and heavy things to deal with. Stuff about themselves; stuff they've done or are doing; stuff that's been or is being done to them. I know a lot of people's junk and while those things don't consume me, I'd be a jerk to walk into a room and know what I know and not walk with people through that on the way to Christ and the cross.

I won't pretend to know a lot. I do know that dark and heavy things are alive and well in Watkinsville and Athens and on the UGA campus. I know that darkness isn't a strategy - we don't make junk up just to make things feel weighty. That would be both cruel and stupid - tying an anchor to someone's ankle and tossing them into an ocean of hopelessness is sadistic; painting in unnecessary strokes of dark and doubt is pretty foolish in our sunshiney-obsessed suburban world...unless underneath our thin veneer of 'got it all together' is more doubt and disappointment and confusion and rage than we'd ever want anyone to know.

So whatever we are - and I love how someone described our church recently as a people and a place of brokenhearted joy - hopefully the cross and a deepening experience of Christ creates a place of risky authenticity and radical hope.

Discipleship and the Old Testament

Yesterday, I preached on discipleship from Matthew 28:18-20 as a reminder that discipleship is the holistic mission of the local church (pulled from the words 'all', 'baptize' and 'go' - which summarize the teaching of the entire Scriptures about what it looks like to follow Jesus or to 'walk in the way of the Lord').

My main point was this - God's mission in the world is to set things right...to put broken things back together. Created in his image for his glory, that mission must become our mission as the Church. Discipleship is teaching and equipping people to join God in his mission of fixing the broken things in their world.

From an Old Testament perspective, discipleship is learning 'the way of the Lord' (ex. Deuteronomy 10:12-19) - doing righteousness and justice for the sake of the oppressed and against the oppressor. This means that in the context of our particular communities, we must do what needs to be done in a given situation ('justice') if people and circumstances are to be restored to conformity with righteousness. That might help us understand how we shape our discipleship in the suburban church - we must teach actions (there is something we must do) because there is something God intends to achieve.

From the perspective of Reformed theology and our penchant to do cognitive discipleship that struggles to connect to affections and behavior, this biblical focus on action-driven discipleship is a needed counterbalance. Theology is critically important - but it has little value apart from its connection to our mission of righteousness and justice in the world around us.

So let's be about a discipleship that weaves together doctrine, ethics and mission. God has chosen and created a community of people who live in such a way that God's purposes to bless the nations actually happens. Mission shapes what we believe about the church - we exist to put broken things together. Mission shapes what we believe about election and predestination - 'God's choosing is not an end in itself but a means to the greater end of the ingathering of the nations. Election must be missiological, not merely soteriological.' (Wright, 369).

So What Do We Do About Santa?

A couple of years ago, after hearing that Lindsey and I aren't making Santa Claus a big deal in our house, one of the mothers in our church emailed me to let me know it would not be appreciated if I encouraged that kind of thinking when I was preaching.

Since I'm not in the anti-Santa business, that wasn't really a problem. But because I'm in the pro-Jesus business, I'll post this from Thabiti Anyabwile:

I'm not arguing a dogmatic causality here. I'm simply asking the question, "Why include Santa Claus at all?" Is the imagined upside of following the culture here worth what we think it's worth? And are our justifications helping us to point our children to Christ or masking the reality that we may be pointing our children away from Him? Personally, I doubt Santa Claus is worth it, and pointing our kids away from Jesus at Christmas may be the worst form of child neglect I can imagine.

Anthony Bradley - Bringing Some Old School Funk

I've really liked Anthony Bradley since I heard him speak at the Reform and Resurge Conference in Seattle in '06. I liked him even more after hanging out in the back of a hotel ballroom in Atlanta during the 2006 PCA General Assembly.

I've thought Anthony is an important voice in the continuing conversation called the Gospel - particularly because of his concern about what the church has done and is doing to men - the image in your head should be Jackie Sherrill castrating a bull.

If you don't think this is a serious issue in the church, check out what Anthony has to say about why more than a few guys in their 20s and 30s want to die - literally. And then read this as just a reminder that more than a few men have grown up completely smothered by their mothers.

Oh, and then for grins and giggles, read what Anthony posted over at the World Magazine blog about the role that growing up in a conservative suburban evangelical church may have played in leading Matthew Murray to go on a shooting spree in Colorado recently. I'm not going to lie to you - I spend alot of time with students at UGA who haven't gotten to where Murray was, but they're pissed off and confused because what they got growing up in church was something other than or in addition to Jesus and it's done nothing but jack up their world. And like Murray, more than a few guys that I know who don't fit the 'influential, extroverted, key guy' stereotype that many churches and ministries target live with a lot of  bitterness and flat-out anger that they don't know what to do with.  Massive problem.

And here's one last post from Anthony - his net worth is somewhere in the neighborhood of $-50,000. I post that only because I'm swimming in the same financially choppy water - $40,000 of student loans will do that to you. For me and Lindsey, that means we're starting our own Total Money Makeover thanks to Dave Ramsey - we'll keep you posted.