Rebuilding According to Reality not Partiality

/in /by

rebuilding according to reality not partiality

If you read our EFCC Blog regularly (or even semi-regularly), you will know that over the past several months we have been talking about “rebuilding.”  We have talked about the foundation of our rebuilding work, which thankfully has remained unchanged. And several of the posts have challenged us with considerations about “how” to effectively rebuild. But there is one consideration of rebuilding we have not yet talked much about:  Who are you rebuilding for, and with? Certainly, we are working for God’s purposes, yet there remains an important consideration regarding the specific target group our calling embraces.

Allow me to start with this:  We need to rebuild, not refresh. Refresh assumes many things remain the same. Rebuilding assumes many things have changed. So, to rebuild, we must consider well the context we are rebuilding with and for.

Paul had a special calling to the Gentiles (see, for example, Acts 9:15). Peter, on the other hand, spent much time ministering to the Jews. They both understood something of the groups they were called to, and their ministries took into account the culture they were seeking to impact. Even as Paul spoke to the philosophers at Mars Hill in Acts 17, he made certain that he knew something about what they believed, what their worldview was. Without pushing further into these examples, I simply want to say that it is really important that we have an accurate picture of the people God has called us to minister to and with.

Friends, you do not need me to tell you that the world has changed over the past couple of years. And I would say that more change is coming – to our world and thus to the church. What people expect of the church, what people are willing to give to the church (time and resources), what the community expects of the church, what will be effective in engaging the community – in sum, the culture we are ministering within and to, has all changed and will continue to do so. My question for you to ponder is simply this:  are you working to rebuild for a 1999 culture/world, or a 2025 culture/world. We may wish things were the same as they used to be. We may wish that people in our churches were the same, that the people in our communities were the same. But wishing will not make it so.

We cannot rebuild the past. Nor should our rebuilding ignore reality.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said that “He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.” (Life Together, p 27). Stretching Bonhoeffer’s observation into our context here — if you have a picture of the church you are trying to rebuild that is based on your personal dream and not the reality of where people are truly at, the world you want versus the world we have, you will struggle to experience fruitfulness.

So, my plea is simply. Look around. Ask. Listen. Learn. Do your best to understand where people’s hearts are at today. What are their needs? Will you meet them where they are at, not just where you think they should be? Will you rebuild based on where they are at, not where you think they should be? Will you be flexible enough (as Neil talked about last week) to rebuild based on the “new normal” not the comfortable past, or your ideal future? More than ever, we need to be students of the culture, students of the people, students of worldviews different than what we are used to, maybe even different than what we are comfortable with.   Only then we will be able to rebuild with the effectiveness God calls us to.

When rebuilding the right focus and foundation is essential. Wisdom, humility, respect, and a gracious attitude are key. But knowing and understanding the world around you cannot be ignored. We all need to take another, honest, brave look around us, and then begin to rebuild with the context of our world in mind.

Terry Kaufman
EFCC Leadership Catalyst

Rebuild to Generate the Right Product

/in /by

rebuild to generate the right product

Jesus came and told His disciples, “I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

I recently read a great blog post from Carey Nieuwhof entitled, “When the pastor becomes the product.” In it, Nieuwhof reminds us of how easy it is for both mega churches and small churches to mistakenly make the pastor the center of the church. Indeed, the pastor ends up being the “product” a church offers to consumers (and potential customers) inside and outside of the church. Nieuwhof rightly reminds us that the church, not the pastor, is the Body of Christ. He illustrates how making the pastor the center places way too much pressure on the pastor. Lastly, he admits that pastors can enjoy being the center of the church way too much (and resent the pressure that comes from it at the same time).

I quoted Matthew 28:18-20 above. The Great Commission of Jesus reminds me that all authority has been given to Jesus. He is the center of the church (read Colossians 1 on this), not me. The product that He wants us to invest in are disciples who are taught to obey everything Jesus commanded. In Paul’s language from Ephesians 4, that would be mature disciples who are equipped to do “works of service.” Gifted celebrity preachers and omnicompetent parish chaplains are not the product we try to sell to the world and to sheep currently residing in other sheepfolds.

We are not rebuilding post COVID to manufacture the best programs, spiritual packages and personnel so that more sheep will be attracted to our sheepfolds than to the church down the road. The product is a mature disciple.

It’s not that the pastor and the programs aren’t important. In fact, pastors need to be at the center of helping a local church discern what a mature, fruit of the Spirit disciple looks like. The pastor also needs to help a local church design disciple-making pathways that help disciples become “conformed to the image of His Son.” This actually necessitates that pastors think through carefully what the Sunday morning worship service can accomplish as part of the disciple-making pathway. Then we need to ascertain what other parts of the church program help a disciple mature and produce “fruit of the Spirit” “works of service.” Simply telling folks what they are doing wrong and what more they need to do on Sunday morning is not enough. Jesus didn’t intend us to “teach them to obey everything He commanded” exclusively from behind a pulpit (from a safe distance). Jesus walked with disciples for the better part of three years, and His teaching was mostly informal and situational – in the context of whatever was going on in life at the time. Yes, Jesus occasionally had a more formal “sermon” (on a mount), but most of His “Word-working” (as Lee Eclov calls it), was in informal everyday life contexts.

Steve Sharpe and Neil B have insightfully highlighted that there is a great difference between accountability to law and accountability/discipling by grace. Discipling by law means I tell disciples what they should or should not do – but I don’t walk alongside them to help them succeed (or restore them and encourage them to try again once they have failed.) Discipling by grace means someone commits to walking alongside me and helping me succeed. It’s like two people who want to lose weight and agree to be accountability partners. Accountability by law means we will check in once a week and share how we ate junk food and didn’t exercise and we will promise to do better next week (but we know deep down that we will fail again because we are on our own). Accountability by grace means that we will agree to go grocery shopping together to make sure we don’t buy junk food. One of us will pick the other up on our way to the gym and we will exercise together. If we want to rebuild the right product, we need accountability partners who will help each other succeed. We need to build systems where disciples are accountability partners of grace. Sunday morning services will be important for some things, but if the product we are trying to build is a mature disciple, then we will need to “teach them to obey everything I have commanded” not only in sermons, but in incarnational pathways of grace.

Bill Taylor
EFCC Executive Director

Flexible like Water

/in /by

flexible like water

The infamous Ross Geller “pivot” scene from the TV show Friends resurfaced in Covid. Ross is trying to direct people moving a sofa up a stairway. All he can do is stand and yell “PIVOT.” Covid felt like that.

The flexibility we learned during Covid may bode well for our future. But let’s try a different metaphor. Water is highly adaptable. Just ask seven-year-old me. The walk home from school during the spring thaw was a blast. I got to race popsicle sticks down the sidewalk gutters with my friends. Strange kid, right? It was great fun! We would run ahead and build snow blockades and channels for the sticks to navigate. The amazing thing was the running water almost never got stopped. It always found a way past the obstacles. Water does that.

Let’s take that metaphor and apply it to church and ministry. In our rebuilding, I hope we aren’t simply rushing back to “normal”. I hope we are reflecting on what adapting to a new ministry context means.

We witnessed a fair amount of isolation and loneliness during the pandemic. I’m not sure that was isolated to the pandemic, it seems to be on-going.

Should we be thinking about strengthening “church as family” in this context? What would we need to do to make church feel more like family? In what ways do we need to shift how we function to ensure that people and relationships trump programs and structure? This is only one of the ways we could and probably should adapt. But adapting is hard.

One of the things that I love about my job is that I hear quite a bit from church planters. Church planters are typically highly adaptable. They must be like water, always finding ways around obstacles. Here are a few ideas from their world that might help us be more flexible:

Conduct short-term experiments

When church planters start, everything is a short-term experiment. However, established church have a harder time doing experiments. Most churches try to implement change with a vote on something that no one has tried. What if you could test drive a change? Try out a change for three months, or six months to see how it fits? Would that help us become more adaptable?

Foster an R&D environment

Church planters don’t stop experimenting. It’s pretty much their life. It’s necessary. Research and development are crucial to the process. While that kind of change is clearly uncomfortable for most people, how could your ministry or church be more like an R&D environment? How would this help you move ahead in ministry?

Make space for small failures

We almost always learn more from failure than from success. Church planters certainly do. I believe our churches and ministries could too. Now there is a huge difference between small failures and colossal ones. A culture of short-term experiments will result in some small failures. However, if we can’t make space for small failures so we can learn, a much larger failure may be waiting for us down the road.

Always evaluate

Experimenting, R&D, and space for small failure, don’t matter if there is no evaluation. A handful of questions should be asked after every experiment. What did we learn? How did this help us make disciples of Jesus? How has this helped or hindered our mission? Is there a better way to accomplish what we set out to do? What failure do we not want to repeat? What success do we want to celebrate? I suspect you could think of a few more.

Being flexible like water sounds a little bit scary, but it just might be one of the skills we need to move forward.

Neil Bassignthwaighte
ServeCanada Director & Interim Prayer Catalyst

Building and Rebuilding the Foundation of Mission

/in /by

building and rebuilding the foundation of mission

Japan is located in the world’s most active earthquake zone. Because of the many seismic activities that happen every year, constructing a skyscraper in Japan is a work of engineering. It is said that the foundation is the most critical aspect of building a skyscraper in Japan. The building foundation is very deep and made of cylinders of concrete, steel, or both that penetrate the earth until they reach a stable bedrock layer to prevent the building from sinking or toppling in an earthquake. The higher the building, the deeper the foundation.

The Lord has given the Body of Christ, a mandate for mission. It is essential to have a good foundation if we were to accomplish the task the Lord has commissioned us to do. There are critically important foundations the Church needs to recapture to build and rebuild. To do mission successfully, there are four essential foundations that we need to consider:

1. Biblical Foundation

The actual word mission is not found in the Bible. Neither are familiar words like trinity or rapture. These are all terms that represent concepts that are present in the Bible. However, we cannot study mission in the Scripture by looking at a concordance, though all Christians would agree that the concept of mission is in the Bible.

If mission is not in the concordance, are there direct ways to trace it? Are there other words that we can study? Is mission merely a minor theme in Scripture, or is it of major significance? Many Christians assume that mission begins with Jesus in Matthew 28:19-20: 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. Jesus gave these clear marching orders to His followers before returning to His father. Yet, if we seriously examine the Bible, God gave these marching orders from the very beginning – in Genesis, all the way to Revelation.

Therefore, if the global mission is a topic of serious biblical concern, it should appear before Jesus’ last moments on earth. The Old Testament contains 75% of the Scriptures. Is mission found in the Old Testament? On the other hand, if mission is God’s “big idea” throughout the Bible, why don’t we preach and teach about it and talk about it more often? In our study of the Word, wouldn’t we have noticed such an important topic? Only very few theologians actually expound on such an idea.

Mission is more than just a minor addendum to God’s overall intent. Nor an optional ministry department in the Church. Mission is the very reason written Scripture needed to be given to us in the first place.

We need a missional reading of the Scripture using missional hermeneutics as our tools in developing a Biblical foundation for mission.

2. Historical Foundation

The presence of a mission mandate throughout Scripture becomes visible once we know what to look for. When this is understood, the mission theme connects Scripture into a meaningful whole. The Bible emerges as a singularly focused book instead of a seemingly scattered collection of laws, stories, poetry and chronologies. God’s goal is to reveal Himself not only to Israel but also to the nations. When His intention to reach all nations becomes clear, the Bible fits together sensibly and purposely.

If mission is the focus of all Scripture, then it must also become our focus. By studying biblical history with this understanding, we see these principles worked out in real time and human space. Looking at history in light of God’s global objectives transforms our view of what happened and why. A study of events that formerly seemed dry, dull, and tedious is now filled with relevant lessons.

3. Strategic Foundation

God is accomplishing His worldwide mission and instructing His kingdom people to join Him. His desire to reconcile nations to His loving rule is the primary moving force behind all history. Each of us has a part to play until His mission is completed. Having comprehended His plan in Scripture, we now move to the next step: finding our part and carrying it out in obedience to Him.

With a daring and dangerous charge before us, we need clear and well-thought-out plans and strategies. Some people think that having a strategy might prevent them from being led by the Lord or that it might put them in the position of “running ahead” of God’s will. But God is a strategic God. Made in His image, we are called to be strategic people. Rightly understood, strategies can come from Him and be used by Him. We must determine where the least-evangelized peoples are and then begin to strategize to reach them.

4. Cultural Foundation

Our mission foundations received light from many insights. First, God desires to reach all nations of the world with His truth. Next, He is working through the ages toward that end. Then He desires that His people connect with the remaining unreached peoples. Now we come to the challenge of culture.

Each of the people group who needs to receive God’s message has their unique way of life, its own distinct mode of operating, and its own ideas and stories. From their history, circumstances, and experiences, they have developed their particular culture. Simply reciting John 3:16 in their language will not suffice.

Missionaries shared John 3:16 in many animistic cultures, but people from these cultures were not concerned about love. They were concerned about protection from the spirit world, and until their needs were addressed, the gospel message was not of interest. When people from animistic cultures learned that Jesus had power over the spirit world, the message had value.

To successfully reach people from all nations in Canada and beyond, we must build or rebuild these four critical foundations for mission. Together as a Church, we can finish the global mission task in our generation!

Ike Agawin
ServeBeyond Director