Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I worked 75 hours last week. Whew! Thankfully, I got off early today, so I have time to write a blog post, and (more importantly) spend time with my wife and three girls!

In a previous post, Randy Siever made the following comment:

St. Patrick seemed to accomplish this by allowing outsiders to be part of his community life. This was not the usual way the church did evangelism, but he allowed people to belong before they believed. He just went into an area and considered everybody “in”. You had to opt out to not be part of his community (this is where the “parish’ idea got developed into it’s modern understanding, and historically why some areas of the US still refer to geographic areas of their cities as “parishes”…if you live there, you’re part of the parish.)

What would a church look like if that were the strategy? What would evangelism look like if people could actually belong before they believed? I don’t really have many answers here, just questions. But I think we have much to learn from our fathers before us when it comes to this kind of issue.

This is exactly right and where I see myself headed as a pastor church planter carpet cleaner…or whatever.

Belong Before Believe
At a recent Glocalnet church planting conference, Bob Roberts talked about how churches are generally made up of three things: Believing, Belonging, and Blessing. In other words, they focus on doctrine, fellowship, and service. The typical church requires that a person believes the same way they do before they will allow that person to feel accepted in their fellowship or to get involved with service in and through the church. They require belief as a prerequisite to belonging and blessing.

Bob Roberts suggested that the biblical model, and true discipleship, allows people to enter into “church life” through any of the three areas (Note that “church life” is NOT to be equated with “eternal life.”) So in this way, if a person longs to be part of the close-knit fellowship of the church, or join the church in building homes in the community, they can do so without signing a doctrinal statement. Discipleship churches allow people to belong or be a blessing without first believing.

Bounded Sets and Centered Sets
I ran into the same idea in The Shaping of Things to Come by Frost and Hirsch in which they talked about Bounded Sets and Centered Sets. Most churches are Bounded Sets, where there is a set of guidelines and rules (doctrinal, behavioral, political, etc) and everybody who agrees with those guidelines are allowed “in” and those who do not, are kept outside until they conform. A Bounded Set is like a fence which separates tame horses from the wild ones. The fence keeps the tame ones together, controlled, and countable.

Frost and Hirsch go on to recommend moving to a Centered Set. In a Centered Set, there are no boundaries, but only those who are closer to the center than others. Those who are closest to the center are involved and active. The center in “church life” of course, must be Jesus and following Him. Anybody can be part of a Centered Set as long as they want to live like Jesus, love like Jesus, and learn from Jesus. (Again, remember that “church life” is not to be confused with “eternal life.”) They don’t have to believe just like you do, or behave just like you do to belong to your fellowship or join with you in blessing the community. Following the agricultural imagery, think of a Centered Set as a watering hole in an arid wilderness. Ranchers in such areas know that they don’t need fences and barns. All they need is a well or a spring, and the livestock will not wander more than a one day walk from the water.  Some live and remain right on the edge of the water, while others may only visit once a day. In such a set, there is much less control, oversight, and expense.

I really think this paradigm shift could really help many churches become more missional in what they do and how they interact with others who don’t agree with them doctrinally. For more on this topic, here are some links:

Next Reformation 
John W. Morehead

I attended a House Church Conference this past weekend. It didn’t take me long to realize that “house churches” are not the answer to the current problems with Christianity in Western culture. But before my house church friends jump on me, let me say that mega churches are not the answer either. Nor are emerging churches, traditional churches, contemporary churches, family churches, bible churches, denominational churches, independent churches, or any other kind of label you might want to put in front of “churches.”

Though Barna reports that the house church movement in Western Christianity is multiplying rapidly (somewhere between 5-20 million people in the United States attend a house church), the statistics also show that the vast majority of these house church members transferred from an “institutional” church to a house church. For the most part, they are not new believers.

I do not call that success. I do not call that growth.

Certainly, some of these transplanted Christians may find deeper intimacy and fellowship with God and with other believers in their new circle of friends, but unless they are also finding ways to love, serve, and become friends with people who are not Christians, all they have done is substituted one form of Christian consumerism for another.

The bottom line is this: I don’t care what kind of church you attend, when you meet, how often you meet, what kind of songs you sing, how long your prayers are, what the building looks like, what kind of teaching there is, who teaches, or (to a certain extent) what your theological framework is. If you and your church are not loving, serving, spending time, and developing friendships with people who do not attend your church (and who may never come!), you are not acting as the Body of Christ.

I want to make another post about some of the things my pastor, Stephen Hammond, said in his message on Sunday. If you want to listen to all of it, you can do so through his podcast here. The section I am quoting below begins at 13:00 from the July 20 message.

What would our community look like if we began to really understand where God was wanting to take us?

Could you imagine a community where everyone was accepted?

Could you imagine a community where everyone got a chance to participate in what God was doing? Even our friends who haven’t yet trusted Jesus? There’s a starting point for them too. Even for our atheist friends, or for whatever friends you may have. Even for people who have been Christians for a long time. What would it look like if everyone got a chance to play, and service wasn’t just for the paid staff?

Imagine a community where everyone was forgiven, and if you hurt somebody, they would just say, “You know what? I forgive you as God has forgiven me.”

Imagine a community where everyone is accepted. Democrats hung out with our Republicans, and our Librarians hung out there too.  I mean, Libertarians. Librarians are welcome also.

…We are a community that wants to help take care of the world’s problems. Imagine a community where AIDS is taken care of in our lifetime. Imagine a community where no one in El Salvador has to drink dirty water again.

Imagine a community where whatever your race, whether black, or white, or Hispanic, or Asian, when people looked at you, they just saw a heart, a soul, and a spirit.

I really like Stephen’s thinking here (which is part of the reason we attend Mosaic). I think all of us must continually imagine and reimagine the church, what we could do, what we could look like, and what we could accomplish, if we simply changed a few things.

I have a blog post I’ve been working on for over a year now called “What if?” It contains all my musings about how the church could function differently and more effectively than it does today. Someday, I’ll get around to posting it, though right now, in it’s present state, it is so long it would take over 20 posts.

On a related note, I just received an advance copy of Frank Viola’s Reimagining Church in the mail today. I am pretty excited to read it. As I was browsing the book, I found a short section on p. 27 called “I Have a Dream” which is where he lays out his dream for the church. If a get a chance later this week, I will post his dream.

I was recently talking to a pastor who was telling me about the amazing things God was doing in his church. The church is 150 years old, and had gone into steep decline. Up until a few months ago, they were averaging only 8-10 adults on a Sunday, all of whom were over 65 years old.

The pastor shared with me that recently, in response to many years of prayer, God had brought “revival” to the church, and they were now averaging about 150 people!

I was amazed and impressed. The church went from 10 to 150 in a few months! And while I believe in the power of prayer, I was amazed when the pastor said that, aside from praying a lot and building a brand new building (how did they fund that with only 10 people?), they hadn’t really done anything different with outreach or their worship service.

But as I talked longer, it came out that the 140 people had come from a big church across town that split.

My heart sank at the news. This pastor was thrilled at the “health” of his church, and the “revival” that God was bringing in response to years of prayer, but really, not a single new person in the community had come to faith in Jesus. Instead, a church across town experienced a messy split, and 140 people came over to the church in town with a new building. Is that really a “work of God”?

As I sat there fuming, trying to decide if I should burst the pastor’s bubble by telling him what I thought, and that it was probably just a matter of time before his church split also, God reminded me that in my first pastorate, I was actually praying for other churches in town to split or fold, and for other pastors to have moral failures, so that my church could possibly receive some of the people in those other churches. It saddens me to even think about it!

But this is what the American church has come to…feeding off each other as we try to survive a nose dive into oblivion and cultural irrelevance. If we want to not only survive but thrive, we need to change. I think I am beginning to see and envision what some of these changes will mean for me. The question now is whether or not I have the faith and courage to follow through on them.