I was reminded us a few weeks ago that we weren’t in the season of COVID-19. We were in the season of Lent. I believe part of the way God is redeeming the coronavirus is that he has the church on a Lenten fast to help us break our addiction. Our addiction is to a good thing, but the way we have tried to make it more than it can be deactivates the majority of believers and reinforces a clergy laity/divide that has trying to run our race with our ankles hobbled. Can you guess what it is?
Church services.
Just like I might fast from sugar, coffee, or alcohol not because they are wrong but because I may lean on them too hard, of course church services aren’t wrong either, but the way we’ve made them the center of everything is keeping us from the fullness of life available and is keeping us from fulfilling the main thing Jesus asked us to do!
Jesus didn’t make a stage and a microphone the center of the church, he made the table the center of the church. He said to do this in remembrance of me, not when he ministered to the crowds, but when he gathered his family of disciples close to eat his body and drink his new covenant cup, and to share his love and his pain with them.
A church service can make converts, but only opening your life to someone can make disciples.
But we as a culture have forsaken disciple-making for church services.
Even for those of us who are deeply investing in trying to systematize the things that make a healthy spiritual family expression of church (Missional Community etc.) there is a very real danger that we will see the system as something powerful outside of ourselves that God does his thing through, when in fact he has chosen to do his thing through us, each member of his church.
The great thing about systems and structures is that they can help people feel comfortable, help us see where we’re blind. The problem with them is that we will be tempted to trust in them instead of in God moving through his people, including ourselves.
News flash: Only you can make disciples. Your church service NEVER COULD, And even before COVID-19 stopped your meetings.
You were in full time ministry the moment you said yes to Jesus. You don’t need to wait for a promotion or recognition; you’ll grow in maturity still, but you don’t have to be everything to everyone. You can be something to someone.
What do I mean by “convert” vs “disciple?” A convert ascents to a creed, makes a decision. You can become a convert at one point in time. A disciple enters into a lifelong process of becoming like the one they follow.
I became a convert through a Christian meeting, but I became a disciple when imperfect people who were following Jesus opened their lives to me.
Caroline opened her life to me. Ben and Robin opened their lives to me. Doug opened his life to me.
I don’t know how many meals I have eaten, how much I’ve laughed, how many times I’ve cried, how many times I’ve been corrected and how many times I’ve repented, how many times I’ve been given instruction and courage and empowerment at Ben and Robin’s table or Doug and Rita’s table.
Is all that because these people are superhero’s? No, it’s because they made a space for me, cared to know me, dared to speak the truth in love to me.
Anyone can do it. Look, Jesus is perfect but even he nearly managed to show us how to do it imperfectly:
He went to where people were, and invited them to share life together. They became like family (a super dysfunctional family, but still a family, and it should be very encouraging to us that Jesus was about helping the dysfunctional learn the love of his Father). Jesus shared his joy, his pain, his strength, his sorrows and his exhaustion with them. He ate with them, joked with them, corrected and rebuked them, ministered with them, empowered them, rescued them, got exasperated with them, served them, and loved them even when they betrayed him. He even invited a few into his most intimate and private space with God on the mount of transfiguration (also known as tagging along on Jesus’s quiet time–no surprise he went up to the mountain so much), and that’s just off the top of my head. But you see how gritty and glorious and imperfect and awkward it is? That’s disciple making.
Think about that quality of life versus Jesus’s relationship with the crowds. He wanted the crowds to hear the message of the kingdom, and he had compassion on them. He loved the people, but he didn’t cater to the crowds, in fact often went to great lengths to avoid drawing a crowd. It’s impossible to overestimate the value of hearing and believing the good news about the reign of God. And yet Jesus didn’t seem concerned that everyone in his reach immediately become a convert, his plan to save the world focused on making a few disciples. It still does.
Jesus opened his life to people.
That’s why the table is at the center of all our worship. It’s where Jesus shared his life with us and where we share our lives with one another. And even though your table is largely unavailable right now to the people who live outside your home, that’s OK. Sometimes you isolate the muscle to strengthen it. It’s almost like all of our religion just got suddenly stripped away from us and we are naked. A lot of people prophesied about 20-20 vision this year. Can you imagine anything more clarifying? Disciple-making starts with God and you. God in you. For your wife, your husband, your kids, your housemates, a neighbor. That’s all.
To be clear, having systems and structures and God’s government and great meetings are not dangerous, in fact they can be glorious. The danger is that we will believe that those things will accomplish the work of disciple making, but they won’t. Only you will, by God’s grace.
And of course no one of us is sufficient to do that all by ourselves, so it will take the family to complete the work. In our local context we have labored to give up individualism. But to then let the pendulum swing too far by abdicating our personal responsibility to bring our gifts to bear in the work of disciple making is a grave error.
And I’m afraid it’s one that we may have made in our context. However I have contributed to that I repent.
See, we believe in qualified leaders, and I am so glad we have recognized leaders among us, but we just can’t continue to make the mistake of thinking that the work of the ministry is the work of leaders, or the work of the meeting.
Many of us have simply allowed ourselves to be passive. But Christ is not passive.
We are children of God and our call is to grow up in all things into the full stature of Christ Jesus.
When I was single I mostly did what I wanted and I spent my money on the things that I wanted to spend it on. And I was pretty frugal (read: cheap). I shared a room and I bought only the cheapest things and prided myself on my simplicity and not buying frivolous things. Once in a while I would buy something really great for myself, but I was mostly pretty utilitarian.
But then I had a problem. I fell in love. And now when Laurie sees a pair of earrings she likes I just take them up to the counter and I buy them.
When you fall in love what your beloved wants starts to get more important than what you want.
I in my flesh might want to be passive, and experience spiritual power from other people who minister. And in the church culture I grew up in we’ve built ministries and budgets and careers on that.
But we have a problem. Jesus didn’t tell us to build ministries and budgets and careers. He commissioned us to make disciples.
So let me ask you, do you want to have your prayers answered, or do you want to be an answer to one of Jesus’s prayers? Do you want what you want or have you fallen too hard for Jesus?
“Pray the Lord of the harvest to send workers into the fields.”
What we are experiencing is a diaspora. A scattering. Like God scattered the members of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem out into the ripe fields of Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth after the stoning of Stephen in Acts chapter 7, God will redeem tragedy to accomplish his purposes. We the church of the West are now cut off from the Jerusalem of our comfort, not by persecution but by what love and honor of our authorities requires in the face of a global pandemic. We in Kindred (and many churches) might have had a different, slower, less disorienting plan for the multiplication of our households of faith, but is it any surprise that God has a redemptive plan in this adversity through which the enemy means harm, but God means it for good to save many lives? I believe this for the global church and our local church: we had better get ready to form new wineskins around what God’s doing instead of clinging to our structures and missing what God’s doing.
As we find new paths will we be like Phillip in Samaria then Ethiopia? In his day the church spontaneously expanded in an incredible way.
Let’s talk about the spontaneous expansion of the church.
In the chapters following Acts 7 the work wasn’t primarily done by leaders. It was done by the natural inclinations of people who likely didn’t feel any more like heroes than you and I do, but were so in love with Jesus that even as they fled persecution for the gospel, they shared the gospel and opened their lives to the people they met along the way! And it was a huge glorious messy bonanza that turned the world upside down. The leaders didn’t hold back the fire. They couldn’t if they tried! They chased the wildfire of evangelism and gave their lives to teach and strengthen and form the disciples into families who would send forth more fire!
Friends, the coronavirus has changed our world in a matter of weeks. The worst thing we could do is ride this out and return to our old “normal”. This could be our greatest hour. Like the eunuch that Phillip ministered to in Ethiopia, people are opening up to God right now. They might thumbing through Isaiah wondering if this all makes sense to anyone, figuratively or literally. One of our neighbors piped up the other day about praying and believing in God for the first time in YEARS of casual conversation. There’s nothing like a global pandemic to get us in touch with our lack of control and your need for God. The fields are white and ready for harvest.
Like David in Psalm 42 I’m looking forward to gathering with the throng to worship again sometime soon. My dream is that when we get back together it will be a wildfire throng of messy imperfect activated disciples who would rather be wrong in faith than right in fear.
My friend Leah had a word years ago about awakening the sleeping giant. I believe this is that moment. The moment for the passive churchgoing majority to wake up and be activated to her true purpose and destiny by this forced fast. If the church in our place and time, which is probably 90 percent passive, wakes up from its slumber and starts imperfectly making disciples in a newly humbled and hungry culture, how could it not usher in a next Great Awakening?
Like the beloved in Song of Songs, we are all cozy and in bed already but his hand is on the latch. Will our hearts thrill and awaken to pursue him?
This is it friends. You may tell your grandchildren what you did with this hour. We can’t pretend a system, tradition, or meeting will accomplish what only we, through the grace of the living and active God can do.
Can you hear the great cloud of witnesses shouting “Come on?”
Consider the following quote from THE SPONTANEOUS EXPANSION OF THE CHURCH And the Causes Which Hinder It, by Roland Allen and written in 1927.
“The spontaneous expansion of the Church reduced to its elements is a very simple thing. It asks for no elaborate organization, no large finances, no great numbers of paid missionaries. In its beginning it may be the work of one man, and that a man neither learned in the things of this world, nor rich in the wealth of this world. The organization of a little Church on the Apostolic model is also extremely simple, and the most illiterate converts can use it, and the poorest are sufficiently wealthy to maintain it. Only as it grows and spreads through large provinces and countries do any complex questions arise, and they arise only as a Church composed of many little Churches is able to produce leaders prepared to handle them by experience learned in the smaller things. There is no need at the beginning to talk of preparing leaders to face great national issues. By the time the issues have become great and complex the leaders of the little Churches of to-day will have learned their lesson, as they cannot possibly be taught it beforehand.
No one, then, who feels within himself the call of Christ to embark on such a path as this need say, I am too ignorant, I am too inexperienced, I have too little influence, or I have not sufficient resources. The first apostles of Christ were in the eyes of the world “unlearned and ignorant” men: it was not until the Church had endured a persecution and had grown largely in numbers that Christ called a learned man to be His Apostle. The missionaries who spread the Gospel and established the Church throughout the lands round the Mediterranean are not known to us as men of great learning or ability. Most of them are not known by name at all. Only when the Church had been established and had spread widely did Christ call the great doctors whose names are familiar to us by their writings, or by their great powers of organization and government.
What is necessary is faith. What is needed is the kind of faith which uniting a man to Christ, sets him on fire. Such a man can believe that others finding Christ will be set on fire also. Such a man can see that there is no need of money to fill a continent with the knowledge of Christ.”
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Reflection/Discussion:
As a worker sent in answer to Jesus’s prayer, who can you currently name that makes up your field?
What passivity, abdication of responsibility, or perceived limitations do you need to repent of and leave behind in order to adopt a lifestyle of disciple-making ?
Who are the necessary imperfect examples whom you currently look to for instruction and care in your walk as a disciple and a disciple-maker?